http://eye.columbiaspectator.com/index.php/site/index/ en mch2115@columbia.edu Copyright 2008 2008-10-02T06:01:00-05:00 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/letter-from-the-editor-10-02-08/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/letter-from-the-editor-10-02-08/#When:06:01:00Z {summary} There’s a quotation about film auteur theory that goes something like: “The existence of auteur theory precludes the possibility of new auteurs.” The sentiment is that once the discipline of studying directors’ oeuvres has been established, no future director will ever be able to escape consciousness of it, and the organic directorial trademarks that gave rise to the theory in the first place will be made artificial. I wondered this week whether a similar argument could be made for feminism. To call Charlotte Brontë a feminist, for example, is to apply the term retroactively, and I think that might be the best use of it. Because so-called “early feminists” existed before the term did. They also lived before all its attendant social baggage, before the stress of self-identification. It’s that social baggage that has given rise to several generations of feminism-conscious women. It has necessitated substrata—second- and third-wave feminism. It is also at least indirectly responsible for one of my least favorite phrases in the world: “I’m not a feminist, but...” When, in the culture at large, feminism is equated with feminazism, to identify with the former is unnecessarily dangerous. When I talked about this with Hayley, our features managing editor, she posited that belief in the central tenet of feminism—that women are entitled to all the same opportunities, obligations, rights, and responsibilities as men—should by this point be so widespread that it should go without saying. To believe in this single principle should, in 2008, be the norm, not the exception, and nobody should have to clarify that he or she is a feminist in order for it to be understood that he or she believes in equal rights. While I’m interested in the topic, I’m probably not qualified to discuss it at any great length. Someone who is, though, is Oriana Magnera, a senior in the Gender Studies program who wrote this week’s lead story on women in science. It’s a great article, and also an important one—and I’m not just saying that as a proud (full disclosure) Space Camp alumna. And as for feminism and all its complications, I think Tess, one of our copy editors, puts it most succinctly: “Feminism. That’s important!” -Alexandria Symonds 20081002, From Editor 2008-10-02T06:01:00-05:00 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/the-open-seas/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/the-open-seas/#When:05:56:01Z {summary}O ver the summer, Tufts University premiered a provocative video on newsweek.com starring the Nerd Girls—several of its female grad students clad in short skirts, high heels, and big, nerdy glasses doing cartwheels, posing for pictures, and talking about how hot science is. Sure, there have been plenty of feminist concerns that these beautiful grad students, engineers, and tech professionals reinforce “babe” beauty standards rather than break down stereotypes of geeky science whizzes—the Nerd Girls look a little more Playboy than Madame Curie. But they also raise an important point. The scientific community is increasingly concerned that girls who express interests in math and science begin to lose their interests or hide their abilities as they age. The problems continue in universities, where departmental gender disparities are still alive and well. The attempt to close the gap has three aspects: encouraging girls gifted in math and science not to give up on their interests, addressing gender inequity in academia, and recruiting, hiring, and providing sufficient benefits for women in scientific and technological fields. In 2004, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), in the process of reauthorizing a bill for the National Science Foundation, studied gender disparities in the sciences. Their research covered a wide range of issues, from elementary school education to equity in academic faculties. The study found that women earn 55 percent of all advanced degrees in science and engineering—but on average, women make up only 10 percent of total science and engineering faculty members. The problem might not be that girls aren’t interested in science but that women are not encouraged to pursue careers in academia. Michelle Hall, a graduate student in the chemistry department and the co-chair of Women in Science at Columbia, felt confident in her decision to pursue an advanced degree, but describes “the climb up the academic ladder” as “a lonely one for the female scientist.” “I sit in my graduate Quantum Chemistry class and repeatedly have to endure the professor saying, ‘So when a quantum chemist says that ... he’s saying that his...’ Am I not a quantum chemist because I’m a she?” The NSF’s Study of Gender in Science and Engineering resulted in the creation of the ADVANCE program for the purpose of “increasing the participation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers.” Working on the university level, ADVANCE, under the purview of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, conducts yearly reviews of the hiring practices and climates of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics departments. Over the past decade, Columbia has shown small but marked improvement in hiring practices. In 2000, women represented 10 percent of tenured faculty members in natural sciences but 18 percent of tenure-eligible faculty. In 2006, women represented 15 percent of total faculty and 18 percent in 2007. While ADVANCE is primarily concerned with promoting change on a faculty level, the number of women pursuing science and engineering degrees at the University has steadily increased. The Fu Foundation and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences class of 2009 is 27 percent women, and the class of 2011 is 31 percent women. But gender equity in the sciences has not occurred uniformly. The NSF found that women were closing the gap more quickly in life science departments such as biology and psychology than in physical science or engineering departments. At Columbia, electrical and mechanical engineering are largely male—95 and 86 percent respectively—while the biomedical, chemical, and civil engineering departments are 30 percent to 40 percent women. In contrast, earth and environmental engineering is 70 percent women, and outside SEAS, women are well-represented in psychology, neuroscience, and biology. It might be more accurate to suggest that women and men have equal levels of interest in science generally, but different sciences specifically. Lauren Fong, SEAS ’09 and the president of the Society of Women Engineers, attended Space Camp three times when she was younger and entered Santa Clara University hoping to study mechanical engineering in order to become an astronaut. However, when she transferred to Columbia as a sophomore, she explored new options in the engineering field. She explains that when she “spoke to some people in the department during orientation, I changed my major to earth and environmental engineering. At the time I believed that studying earth and environmental engineering would be a good way to combine two of my main interests: politics and engineering.” Fong isn’t a girl who lost interest in science or felt out of place at Space Camp, even though it was mostly boys. Her interests simply evolved. Neuroscience research tied to studies on early hormone exposure seeks to determine why men and women process information and stress differently, and why women are supposedly more interested in working with people. Barnard professor Rebecca Young has done work to challenge such studies on “sex-typed interests,” describing them as “quasi-experiments.” Conclusive patterns cannot be determined because the effects of hormone exposure on the brain cannot be experimentally tested. Young is also skeptical that an interest in life science or physical science can be defined as a sex-typed difference. “The idea that women are interested in the ‘life sciences’ while men are interested in the ‘physical sciences’ is a very new idea, created to explain the explosion of female biologists and physicians during this period. Prior to that, the preferred story was simply that women ‘don’t like’ or ‘aren’t good at’ science,” she says. If it is true that scientific fields come in “his” and “hers” categories, then this fact stands in conflict with the driving force behind equality in the sciences: Title IX, a piece of legislation best known for its effects on college and secondary-school athletics. The law’s actual language is open-ended: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The use of Title IX to promote gender equality in university science departments was first proposed in 2000 by Debra Rolison, the head of the Advanced Electrochemical Materials Section at the Naval Research Laboratory. Writing a guest editorial in Chemical & Engineering News, the house organ of the American Chemical Society, she addressed arguments that women only represented 10 percent of chemistry department faculties because they only represented 10 percent of total applicants, suggesting that departments were not recruiting female applicants aggressively enough—a full one third of chemistry Ph.D. students were women. The recent improvements in gender equity in Columbia science departments may be the result of steady change as the old guard gives way to a more progressive crop of students and professors. By Rolison’s standard—that at the very least, female professors should be proportional to female Ph.D. students—Columbia has done admirably. Between 2001 and 2005 Columbia awarded 438 Ph.Ds to women—36 percent of all doctoral degrees in the sciences and engineering—and in 2007 women represented 38 percent and 56 percent of new hires in both the engineering and the natural science departments, respectively. Arguments against the Title IX approach suggest that it might make women feel tokenized. Patricia Culligan, the only woman who holds a full faculty position in Columbia’s civil engineering and engineering mechanics department and a member of the executive committee at Earth Institute ADVANCE, affirms her support and strong beliefs in the program but still voices concerns. “In a nutshell, I don’t think the problem is the women. Hence, programs that try to ‘fix’ the women by encouraging them to become engineers or scientists, are ignoring the problems in the academic system that lead to underrepresentation of women faculty and scientists.” The Nerd Girls, both stunning and brilliant, represent one of these pervasive problems: an unattainable pressure on women to be everything. While women are expected to have both beautiful children and successful careers, they may not want the pressure of academic research because it makes it more difficult to balance the two goals. An article in the August 2006 issue of Nature hypothesized that women patent and publish less often than men because they view such intensive processes as interfering with life outside work. Millie Smith, GSAS and a current research fellow at the University of Colorado, declares that she does not intend to stay in academia because of the pressures of such a position. “One of the things I’ve thought about is that although working as a professor in a university setting would no doubt be very stimulating, doing it well would necessitate a less balanced life than I would like to have,” she says. However, she would consider teaching at a community college or taking a position that would only involve teaching. Women may shy away from careers that don’t allow them to “have it all,” but as students they may also desire curricula that give them a breadth of knowledge in multiple subjects because they have varied interests. Culligan suggests that women prefer a more full-spectrum approach to academics: “I personally have no evidence that men and women are naturally interested in different types of science or engineering. However, a study of women and engineering education, published in the European Journal of Engineering Education, found that interdisciplinary engineering degrees appear to be more attractive to female students than single, traditional, classical engineering degrees.” Evidence from Columbia bears this theory out. CC and SEAS sell their curricula based on their broad scopes: SEAS students are required to take Major Cultures and Lit Hum or CC, and College students must take two semesters of science, as well as Frontiers of Science. The increase of female students in SEAS may be due to the full spectrum of opportunities it provides. But women may also feel pressure to continue to be well-rounded, particularly when they have plenty of options at their disposal. Students can pursue the 3-2 program in order to complete both the CC and SEAS curricula and graduate with a B.A. and a B.S. Maritza Harper, CC ’08 and SEAS ’09, felt out of place in CC and decided to graduate with two degrees: “I didn’t really feel that I fit in with either school. I became a 3-2 student when I realized I wanted to do biomedical engineering and I was in the College. It seemed like a better alternative than transferring.” The NSF study found that women were more likely to drop out of math and science courses after getting B’s while men with C’s continued their study. Grade inflation in the humanities might lead some young women to believe that they are better at English than chemistry, or at least that they want to avoid the possibility of receiving lower grades. Adriana Klompus, CC ’09, intended to major in chemistry and anthropology at Columbia and then attend medical school. She elected to drop chemistry so that she could enjoy college and focus on science in a two-year premed program. “For me the decision to switch from a chemistry major to a major in socio-cultural anthropology was based on a desire to get the most well-rounded college education possible. ... I felt that a major in a social science was not only more humanistic, but would also add more variety to my curriculum,” Klompus says. The NSF study found that in addition to inequalities in academic science departments, women with degrees in science and engineering were less likely to go into jobs in science and engineering. So where do they go? Do they marry their graduate and doctoral peers? One young woman pursuing an advanced degree in chemistry recounted an uncomfortable experience in which a professor asked her if she had any intention of “becoming a Swiss housewife,” as he was also hiring a male graduate student from Switzerland. Clearly, despite the seemingly progressive climate surrounding science in academia, disparaging attitudes about young women who wish to pursue advanced degrees still persist. This anecdote also raises the question of whether women are truly turned off from science or simply choose to pursue careers in related industries. The increased emphasis on technology creates a demand for business and legal professionals who understand the science behind their clients’ projects. Chelsea Durgan, GSAS, describes her decision to forgo academia or medical school, saying that she wants “to stay abreast of new technologies, and that also provides the opportunity to advocate for the people developing these technologies.” Women may avoid careers in science and engineering for more disconcerting reasons as well. Teresa Jacques and Michelle Hall, graduate students in the chemistry department and the co-chairs of Women in Science at Columbia, both had unsettling stories to share about their internship experiences. Jacques worked at a government lab in an environment that was overwhelmingly male. She was pursued romantically by a younger security guard and an older, married scientist. “All of this was unwelcome and annoying. I just wanted to do my job,” she says. “I liked my project and didn’t want to cause any trouble, because my internship was temporary, and his job was not.” Hall worked at a large pharmaceutical company in the computer-assisted drug design department. Her boss also made unwelcome advances. When she approached Human Resources, she was moved to a different department and her superior was promoted. “My project was very exciting and my boss promised me the opportunity to present at various meetings and co-author many publications. Seeking guidance only resulted in stripping me of my project and its advantages,” she says. Sexual harassment is an issue common to many industries, but it is particularly problematic when women face reassignment to a less rewarding project as the solution. A company or an academic department that is equally divided between men and women still does no good if women do not feel comfortable and supported by their institution. The 2005 Earth Institute ADVANCE review specifically addressed departmental climates and found that roughly 50 percent of women had heard disparaging remarks about gender and family responsibilities—roughly 20 percent of men responded similarly. Jennifer Walz, a doctoral student in Columbia’s biomedical engineering department, was encouraged by her undergraduate adviser to use engineering school as an opportunity to meet a husband. While research is certainly a demanding process, women are repeatedly told that they should pursue theoretical work instead because it can be completed more easily from home. Even if universities improve their child care programs and make it easier for women—and men—to balance work and family, much greater changes must be made to the attitudes and nature of academia. In her call for the implementation of Title IX, Rolison proposed a more positive climate with a decreased focus on the monetary emphasis on research and an increased significance of teaching—a suggestion that might also be an antidote for undergraduate concerns with oversized classes and distant professors. Jacques found that her study of organic chemistry at Smith College was well-supported—as a college rather than a research institution, Smith likely has more of an emphasis on encouragement and instruction than publishing and patenting. Female environments like a women’s college can also provide women with a more supportive environment and the confidence to pursue a variety of career options. Additionally, Barnard has a Science Advisory Council comprised of alumnae who review the Barnard curricula and provide mentorship and outreach to the college. Women in Science at Columbia serves the needs of graduate and post-doctoral students through discussion series, regular breakfasts with women professors, and an annual Girl’s Science Day. The Society of Women Engineers is a Columbia chapter of a national organization that seeks to “stimulate women to achieve their full potential” in engineering through networking and community outreach. As part of its mission, the group is open to anyone regardless of gender or major. “Sometimes I get questions and funny looks when I say that everyone, including men, non-SEAS students, and non-scientists/engineers, is invited to join SWE, but considering the past and where SWE stemmed from, why would we want to exclude anyone?” Fong says. Outreach is perhaps the most important aspect of both WISC and SWE, particularly for Jennifer Walz. “I don’t think enough kids are exposed to the career options in science. All they know is what they see in school. Science and engineering are still thought of as male fields, so girls don’t even think of them as career options. I was lucky enough to have an engineer as a father, so I had at least heard of the field,” she says. The Tufts Nerd Girls approach science in a curious, performative way. They embody hyper-feminine girls in a hyper-masculine environment. The girls don’t just conduct experiments, they build cars, fix mechanical problems, and break down the pink and blue barriers between mechanical and biomedical. Their bios mimic “the popular girl” persona, name-dropping Jimmy Choos, and detailing career aspirations to apply chemistry to developing make-up, but the heart of their project is no different than the outreach of WISC and SWE. At the very least, they present girls—and boys—with a new array of dream career options. While none of the Nerd Girls expresses a desire to be college professors, they may inspire one or two girls to start climbing the academic ladder.  20081002, In Focus 2008-10-02T05:56:01-05:00 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/person-of-the-week-dj-am/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/person-of-the-week-dj-am/#When:05:09:00Z {summary}This week, we celebrate the post-plane-crash hospital release of DJ AM, alias of disk jockey extraordinaire Adam Goldstein. A reluctant icon, he is perhaps best known for his tabloid relationships with Nicole Richie, Mandy Moore, and Jessica Stam. AM can easily be brushed off as just another skeezy Hollywood playboy, but it would be unjust to marginalize Goldstein’s talent. Paid $10,000 to $25,000 per event, AM’s ridiculous musical repertoire makes him worth every penny. His life wasn’t always easy, though. Goldstein suffered through years of depression and drug abuse, and even an attempted suicide, before finally cleaning up his act. In 2003, AM underwent gastric bypass surgery as the final sign of the end of his days of glutton and excess. These days, DJ AM channels his addictions toward a different object—shoes. A self-professed “sneakerhead,” he once waited three hours for a pair of Nike Air Max 95s. Now, AM owns over 600 pairs of sneakers, including a pair of $7,500 Eminem Jordans. That’s a collection any self-respecting shoeaholic has to envy. So here’s to your speedy recovery, DJ AM—maybe we will see you spin sometime, and we’ll be sure to check out your kicks. 20081002, Style 2008-10-02T05:09:00-05:00 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/strong-shapes/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/strong-shapes/#When:05:08:00Z {summary}This fall, structured silhouettes creating a clean, polished look stood out amid more showy trends. Peplum waists ruled the runways, and the strong shoulders seen in many collections both continue the superhero trend started by the Met exhibit and add to the ’80s trend. A long-and-lean shape also dominated this Fashion Week, with minimalist column dresses, floor-length skirts, and flowing pants standing out. Fall 2008 is all about looks that let the tailoring do the talking. Feminine curves are celebrated this fall in the form of peplum waists, a happy move away from clothing that suits only the extremely thin. Seen at Balenciaga, Prada, and Yves Saint Laurent, the flared waist is a prevailing silhouette that flatters. It originates partly from a desire to return to a more refined time, as the peplum-suiting look shown at Dior is a nod to its iconic hourglass silhouettes of 1940s and ’50s. Some of the looks, however, make reference to futurism, and most of the peplum waists shown were rendered in strikingly modern fabrics—in particular, an acetate dress with a silk peplum by J. Mendel screamed Space Age. The widespread peplum shape is a combination of old and new that creates an elegant-yet-modern look. The strong shoulders evident at Fendi, Burberry Prorsum, and Giorgio Armani were luckily less “’80s Working Girl” and more “Working Girl of the Future.” Designers took an outmoded trend and managed to make it cool and exciting again. A dress with quilted, puffed shoulders at Gareth Pugh showed that looking to the future through fashion can be chic yet novel. One can imagine donning jackets and dresses with exaggerated shoulders as a kind of armor. Through uncertainty and turmoil, we can at least dress confidently and demonstrate our power through a self-assured silhouette. Simple column shapes, while not as exaggerated as peplum waists or shoulder pads, can certainly be as assertive and bold. L’Wren Scott’s floor-length slim coat is straightforward and unquestionably requires a woman in possession of a certain amount of confidence to wear it, as such an uncomplicated shape can’t hide anything. Thanks to smart detailing, the column silhouette, though grounded in reality, does not come off as tiresome and quotidian. A navy metallic column skirt by Carlos Miele, paired with a sweater and a jacket, exudes a feeling of dignity and stability, much like the architectural form it references.  This fall, striking impressions will best be made in structured silhouettes. These shapes are versatile and sophisticated, and will remain modern-looking for decades. Although making reference to the past, designers have created a new look that leans towards a futuristic style. The Fall 2008 collections, and chain stores like H&M and Zara which follow their lead, have women wearing strong shapes that are polished and modern. 20081002, Style 2008-10-02T05:08:00-05:00 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/dr-doggie-style/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/dr-doggie-style/#When:05:05:00Z {summary}Every dog has his day—or, in some cases, his third album and a national tour. Fate, released in July by Park The Van Records, is the latest installment from Dr. Dog—a band that describes itself on its Web site as interested in “three-part harmonies, the out-of-doors, hoagies, vegetables and diminished chords.” Dr. Dog is a product of Scott McMicken and Toby Leaman’s pipe dreams. They consider each other “musical brothers” and began writing music together old-school style as eighth graders in West Philadelphia. “It’s been a slow-burning thing,” McMicken says of the band’s formation. “We’ve been friends since we were in the eighth grade, and ... it clicked really quickly after that ... to the point to where we’d never consider making music without one another.” Over the past six years, the band has condensed from a loose-knit group, ranging in size from ten members at its largest to one member at its smallest. Its current configuration is McMicken on vocals and guitar, Leaman on vocals and bass, Zach Miller on keys, Juston Stens on trapset, and Frank McElroy also doo-wopping away on vocals. While it may have reduced in size, Dr. Dog has done a lot of growing in its transition from basement brotherhood to full-blown musicianship. After its first album Easy Beat debuted in 2005, the band released the critically acclaimed We All Belong in 2007, and toured with contemporary indie giants, including My Morning Jacket, M. Ward, and The Black Keys. With increased time on the road and the attention of a burgeoning fan base, Dr. Dog’s entrance into the public consciousness provoked a sea change in the band members’ lives. “There’s such a weird shift that happens in your head when you’re living your life to make music in your basement for no audience to realize that it’s becoming this career,” explains McMicken of the transition that occurred between touring and recording in the past few years. “You’re still the musician you always were, doing it for the reasons you always were, but everything changes. Being on tour I’ve gained a real sense of how to accept being a musician and really make it what you do—not just what you like to do, but what you have to do,” McMicken says of his songwriting process. “Songwriting has always been a therapeutic thing. Have a conversation with yourself and explore some ideas a little bit further than the surface so that you can kind of maintain a grasp on how you’re thinking or feeling.” Dr. Dog has undoubtedly remained consistent in the quality and emotionality of its work throughout its development as a band—and this consistency is what makes Dr. Dog stand out like a well-groomed Irish Setter at Westminster. The band’s honeyed harmonies and lyrics impart a refreshingly simple thread of universal wisdom; this doctor is always in. “For me to do these things is to get that personal relationship with the song, but also to make sure there’s an open-endedness about it, an entry way for anybody—even myself,” McMicken asserts. “I can put myself down into a song one night but two weeks later, I’m not the same person. And I still want to be able to find a way into that song and relate to it even though I’ve moved past it.” This same impulse encapsulates the band’s efforts in its latest release, a concept album about fate. As with its earlier work, Dr. Dog presents this formidable concept in lighthearted but loaded analogies, blending harmonic exercises on the complexity of day-to-day life into “a philosophical family, like one big stew.” So what is fate to Dr. Dog? “We focus on work and work ethic and honesty and your own past and your own present and your own ideas about your future and your ability to accept all these things in your life and take responsibility for the person you are,” McMicken explains. “The constant taking-inventory of your life and either feeling like you’ve got everything or you don’t. It’s a very human impulse and it can easily get out of control.” Dr. Dog will continue its “Fate” tour through the winter, stopping in New York in December for a show at Webster Hall. McMicken also leaked the band’s plans to re-release their first concept album, Psychedelic Swamp—which is reputedly their favorite—as a double album within the next year. “Today,” off their album Easy Beat, includes the line, “A song is made with sugar and lemonade.” But Dr. Dog’s work ethic and musical methods are entirely different. As the members of Dr. Dog say, “Part of enjoying [art] means suffering for it.” 20081002, Music 2008-10-02T05:05:00-05:00 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/not-exactly-by-the-book/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/not-exactly-by-the-book/#When:05:00:00Z {summary}Rivka Galchen is definitely not lying when she slips an underhanded jab at the quality of the coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop into her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances. Galchen’s comment that the brew at the famed Amsterdam Avenue cafe is “a terrible coffee that pleases only for bearing the name coffee and being hot” is dead-on, quick, and bold, like much of her fiction. While most Hungarian faithfuls would never dare admit the mediocrity of the bottomless cup of coffee, I’m glad I’ve found someone who will. Galchen, a debut novelist and newly minted Creative Writing instructor at Columbia University, knows that an astute observation about Hungarian’s cup of joe offers a subtle-yet-penetrating look into the nature of the kooky goings-on of one of Morningside Heights’ most fascinating minds. While Dr. Galchen’s comments on coffee are perhaps a sign of her affection for the Morningside Heights locale that has yielded much of the fodder for her most recent creative projects, they also reveal her intense dedication to detail and underscore her wry appreciation for even the smallest of quirks. But Galchen refuses to limit herself to minutiae—she treats the microscopic and macroscopic with equal importance—or to limit what she considers, pondering the sciences and the arts with the greatest of care. Indeed, in a casual conversation, she is quick to posit the existence of multiple universes, suggest plans for cooling the planet by shooting sulfates into the atmosphere, and even come up with her own solutions for treating psychiatric conditions. So what is she doing writing novels? Critically acclaimed as one of the summer’s best debuts, Atmospheric Disturbances is a witty novel, set in Morningside Heights (Koronet even has a cameo) and Buenos Aires, about a middle-aged psychiatrist who is losing his mind and wakes up one morning to find that he is living with an “ersatz” doppelganger of his wife. Based on Galchen’s historical readings, the novel attempts to bridge the gaps between perceived psychological disorders, fantasy, and reality. Reminiscent of Borges and Proust, and with hints of her recent favorite, Ishiguro, Atmospheric Disturbances offers a sophisticated and proud balance of humor and seriousness, all suggesting that the psychological novel is back. Rivka Galchen’s playful route to a back table at Hungarian is perhaps among the least likely of stories. It is a fascinating journey that gives us a glimpse into a wildly creative mind, concerned with the peaceful coexistence of science and the arts. Prior to drinking Hungarian’s mud on a regular basis, Galchen attended Princeton, writing a thesis under the tutelage of Joyce Carol Oates, and later the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where she specialized in psychiatric studies. But medical school didn’t quite cut it for Galchen, who knew from the start that she wanted to become a fiction writer, which is how she quickly found herself in Morningside Heights as an MFA candidate in Creative Writing. “Once I was in college, I knew that I wanted to be a fiction writer, but I don’t come from that kind of family,” Galchen says. “My mom wanted me to go to medical school, and I told her that I was going to major in Spanish Literature.” When her family called in a panic, Galchen had no choice but to strike a deal. “They thought I wouldn’t get a job, but they were wrong. You can still get a job. I didn’t want to stress out my mom because I am a really good, boring kid. So, I got into a program called Humanities and Medicine at Mt. Sinai, where you could sort of study whatever you wanted. I did that as a sort of compromise.” While working on her medical studies at Mt. Sinai, Galchen took a year off to do public-health research in South America, where she did a substantial amount of writing. “I went back to medical school, and I thought I might have a decision when I got there whether to stay or not,” she says. “Medical school at the end of the day is really interesting. It’s a weird language. It’s a weird setting. The real challenge for me was to have the courage to do writing. It took me five years to get the courage to do writing full-time. Well, now I am safe, I can always go back and be a doctor, but I never wanted to be a half-ass doctor. It’s a terrible profession to do with half your heart.” Today, Galchen finds herself quite busy, holed up on Wednesday evenings in Lewisohn Hall, where she teaches students in her Beginning Fiction Workshop. “You have to force yourself to be a bad writer. You have to be comfortable throwing away a hundred pages and still show up the next day,” she says. She’s even returned to what she calls a life of “boredom and order” to commence work on a second novel. Who knows what to expect next from this humble gem of Morningside? One thing, though, is for certain: at least someone I know will continue to drink some pretty bad coffee from Hungarian. 20081002, Arts 2008-10-02T05:00:00-05:00 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/vegetables-in-the-sky/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/vegetables-in-the-sky/#When:04:51:00Z {summary} If you were told to think of a Columbia professor who’s become famous for his efforts to prevent hunger and to change the way food is grown, is Jeffrey Sachs the first name to automatically come to mind? Sachs has undoubtedly earned a certain celebrity status for his promotion of better subsistence farming methods to combat poverty in Africa (not to mention his MTV documentary co-starring Angelina Jolie), but Sachs may have a competitor in the stardom department. Dickson Despommier, a professor specializing in Environmental Health Science at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, is gaining international attention for an agriculture project that will put crops inside skyscrapers and, if he has his way, radically change the way people approach food. The Vertical Farm Project is Despommier’s proposal to grow certain food crops inside multistory buildings in order to meet the dietary needs of growing urban populations. Widespread use of vertical farms would potentially allow for year-round crop production in an environment free of pests and disease, protect crops from natural disasters, allow land currently used for crops to return to its natural ecosystem, provide employment opportunities within the farms, and prevent the waste of fossil fuels burned when food is shipped over long distances. “We’re still stuck in a 19th-century infrastructure,” says Despommier. “You can’t do it much longer.” The official Vertical Farm Project Web site (verticalfarm.com) dubs the plan “Agriculture for the 21st Century and Beyond.” Local and organic food have gained traction in recent years, but, according to Despommier, neither trend goes far enough in controlling the conditions in which plants are grown, guaranteeing the quality of food, or providing enough food for the ten billion people who will occupy the planet by the year 2050. “If you say that food is going to be raised on chemically defined diets so that nothing else is put into the diet except what the plant and us need in order to carry on our lives”—as would be the case on a vertical farm—“then that raises the stakes. You can’t do that in a soil-based agriculture because the soil is composed of lots of complex things, including contaminants that we put there,” says Despommier. Despommier is a fast-talking, infectiously enthusiastic man who, when asked why vertical farms are necessary, says, “I have to give you some background,” and then begins with human migration out of Africa 25,000 years ago. He speaks with equal authority about the conversion of human waste into electricity, the analysis of Antarctic ice cores, and the use of the dangerous compound melamine as a food additive. But one is struck as much by his optimism as by his scientific prowess. Even though not a single vertical farm has been constructed to date, the project has no government funding at the moment, and growing all food inside would require an extraordinary shift in the human diet away from meat and processed foods, Despommier betrays no hint of doubt about his plan to feed a swelling global population. And if the attention the Vertical Farms Project has attracted over the past year or so is a portent of success, Despommier has no reason to worry. Many potential international investors—including, most recently, the mayor of Surrey, British Columbia, and the owner of the Gramercy raw foods restaurant Pure Food and Wine—have approached Despommier about the possibility of making his brainchild a reality. Furthermore, the Vertical Farm Project has been the subject of features in New York Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, BBC News, The New York Times, and the Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung. Despommier also appeared in an interview on the Colbert Report, during which host Stephen Colbert said that the idea seemed “crazy like the ramblings of a syphilitic brain.” But as crazy as it may seem to Colbert, the project is the product of a decade’s worth of analysis by Columbia faculty and staff. After several students in Despommier’s Medical Ecology class researched rooftop gardening and discovered that it wouldn’t make much of a dent in New Yorkers’ energy needs, Despommier said (per his recollection), “Why don’t we just put the whole damn thing inside buildings and get it over with?” The next year, Despommier made the idea an assignment for his Public Health students, and each year new students have contributed to the enterprise. “While I would have probably stopped working on this,” merely saying, “‘Okay, fine, that’s what a vertical farm would look like; let’s move on’—the students would not let me move on,” Despommier says. To date, 82 Columbia students (in addition to scholars and architects from other academic institutions) have contributed to the project. “What you’re really looking at is the Columbia student brain trust of datum that has been accumulated over the last ten years,” says Despommier. And for this Public Health professor in the limelight, those years of hard work seem to be paying off. “I love teaching this subject, because as it grew and grew into a possibility, it looked as though some theoretical thing that happened in a classroom is about to become reality,” says Despommier. “And how many times have you ever had that happen?” 20081002, Arts 2008-10-02T04:51:00-05:00 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/the-cold-hard-fraud-of-cinema/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/the-cold-hard-fraud-of-cinema/#When:04:43:00Z {summary}“We have to do our jobs and it’s very simple—we pick the best movies we see.” So says Kent Jones, one of the five members of the selection committee for this year’s New York Film Festival. The 46th New York Film Festival began last week after what has been a varied year at other film festivals across the world. Yet because of its design, NYFF promises more consistency than these other festivals, with a focus on great cinema and the ideas of its filmmakers. “There’s no market. Unlike Venice, Toronto, and Sundance for sure,” Jones explains. “There’s also no award. There are no separate sections. It is all about the movies ... New York Film Festival has always been about what are the 24 to 26 best movies decided by a group.” In this way, NYFF becomes less of an event about stars, glamour, and business, and more about the state of pure cinema. Jones, who has been an editor-at-large for Film Comment and an associate director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, has been working on the selection committee for NYFF since 2000. He sat down with The Eye last week to discuss the importance of the festival, and the curious slate of films for this year. Jones and the other four members, including Columbia film professor Richard Peña, begin their search for their films as early as April. They often select from other film festivals, and then re-screen them in early August, debating which films merit a spot at the festival. Last year, American films like the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men dominated the scene, but this year has a different tone. Although filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky and Clint Eastwood are present, the festival has many more foreign entries on the slate. However, the American films tend to be quite unapologetic in both ideas and theme. Perhaps one of the best examples of this attitude is Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy. Jones found the film, which centers on a woman (played by Michelle Williams) searching for her lost dog, unrepentant yet rewarding. “Reichardt’s movie is something else—the way in which the society she’s working in is structured, there is no forgiveness. It comes from individuals, and it comes pathologically, and there is no forgiveness from the top. It’s the harshness of the world she inhabits, which is the world we inhabit,” he says. Like Reichardt, many of the other American filmmakers are responsive filmmakers, and the bleak outlook of their films reflects the disastrous world many Americans feel like they live in every day. Another American filmmaker has decided to move outside state limits for a film that, with its potentially polarizing views, might just be the festival’s most popular. Steven Soderbergh, the director of Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven, has a new four-and-a-half-hour film titled Che, with Benicio Del Toro as the revolutionary leader. Jones shed some light on the strange reaction from the Cannes crowd last May, and why he found the film intriguing: “People saw a movie called Che starring Benicio Del Toro with Che Guevara, and discovered that it was not one but two movies, and those two movies were not really about Che Guevara. It’s really in the first movie about the circumstances of how a successful revolution is conducted, and in the second movie, the circumstances in which a failed revolution is conducted ... It reminded me of the fact that revolutionary campaigns have luck.” While Cannes audiences tensed up with concerns of distribution rights, causing every film to be labeled as either a masterpiece or failure, NYFF audiences seem to take a little more reflective and contemplative stance, which will potentially allow for Soderbergh’s film to truly be understood. For those who prefer classic cinema, NYFF has an exciting line up of restorations this year. Restoration has always been a huge part of the film festival—classic films illuminate modern cinema, showing the differences from and similarities to a film industry of the past. Columbia professor Andrew Sarris will introduce a restoration of Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes, a favorite film of his, on his 80th birthday. And Martin Scorsese will introduce a new Technicolor version of the eloquent Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. “This film is a particular favorite of his. There is no other film quite like it,” Jones says. “It has a special charge and it’s beautifully shot.” Although some films like Pandora and Che are already sold out, Jones mentioned some of the smaller films that he would recommend to Columbia students, including an interesting film from Kazakhstan called Chouga from director Darezhan Omirbaev: “Chouga is 85 minutes long, and it’s an adaptation of Anna Karenina ... He [Omirbaev] uses the story as a way of looking at modern Kazakhstan, because it’s a country in a state of transition with all this oil money flooding the country. It’s kind of converting it from a quiet place to a busy one. And I have no reason to argue with him in a country where pretty basic ideas of civility and tradition are being thrown out the window.” Chouga is one of many films dealing with modernity and its brutal transition of society, a common thread in the international film roster. Another one of these films is the Korean film Night and Day from Hong Sang-soo, which follows a Korean exile attempting to adapt to life in Paris: “Like most of his [Hong’s] movies, it is devilishly intelligent, working out moral quandaries, or moral delusions I should say. The hero thinks he’s being nice and fair and imagines himself as looking out for the best in everyone. But as he’s doing that he’s actually doing damage.” Much like the current slate of American films, the foreign films have a sense of despair and uncertainty. Filmmakers across the globe are worried about the future, and the films represented clearly give a glimpse of the greater world. Yet not all the films are grand tragedies of countries or reflections of an entire culture. One of these films, and a personal favorite of Jones, is Olivier Assayas’ family drama Summer Hours. Because of his work for Film Comment, Jones has become a close friend of the director, and read the film very differently from some other critics: “I know how much the death of his mother affected him. I’m not sure he could have made the film before the death of his mother ... The way it addresses the mortality of a parent, the way that it looks at the question of what happens to the house of a parent after they die, and it becomes no longer a house, but a property.” He also found that the film reflected the real sense of a true director behind the camera who cared about his story, instead of a Hollywood production that forces sentimentality: “Most of the time when a question like that shows up in an American movie like that it’s kind of the crocodile tears of the person who’s gone, the spirit. But this is about the cold hard reality of what happens when the house becomes a property. At times I found it unbearably moving.” Although many of the films may sound intolerably bleak, Jones argued that there is something special in each of these films, making them worth watching: “I think Stanley Kubrick once said, ‘If a work of art is a masterpiece, then it can’t be depressing.’ And he’s right. I’m not saying these films are masterpieces, but they are great works of art, and not just depressing.” The 46th New York Film Festival presents a challenging body of work, but a rewarding one for those who are daring enough to see these films. In an ironic twist, most of the films this year are being shown at the Ziegfeld Theatre in Midtown, due to construction at the Walter Reade Theatre in Lincoln Center, the traditional site for NYFF. The Ziegfeld has the intricate beauty of an old-school movie house, which contrasts deeply with the stark reality of the films. Yet Jean-Luc Godard once said that cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world, and the festival atmosphere this year at the Ziegfeld serves as a potent testament to that truth. a Read Peter Labuza’s festival diary online at The Spectacle for continuing updates. 20081002, Film 2008-10-02T04:43:00-05:00 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/why-so-serious/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/why-so-serious/#When:04:33:00Z {summary}While studying journalism at Columbia in 1939, Jerry Robinson took a side job lettering and inking a comic serial that ran in Detective Comics—his employer there was Bob Kane, and the comic was the original Batman. Robinson was instrumental in the development of the Batman universe and helped to create his most infamous villain, the Joker. After leaving comics, he worked as a historian, curator, activist, and author, and in 1978 he founded the Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate, whose subsidiary CartoonArts International features an online archive of international political cartoons. Hillary Ford and Melanie Jones asked the Comic Book Hall of Fame inductee about working with legends, what he thinks of The Dark Knight, and the method of crafting the Joker’s madness. How did you get the idea to have this (originally) very dark character, a mass murderer, tied to something like a jester? I felt what we needed was a villain that was worthy of Batman. I wanted to create a villain worthy of testing him. There was always this dichotomy, where [many believed] if the villain was too strong he would overpower the hero. I was not of that school. The stronger the villain, the more the hero has to win at the end. Besides, I was always intrigued by villains ... and I wanted to have a character that had a contradiction in terms. A villain with a sense of humor would be different. And the name “the Joker”? My family was all expert card players. My brother was a master bridge player, and while I wasn’t in that league, I usually had a deck of cards around. I immediately related my villain to the jester playing card, and that night I drew out a first conception sketch of the Joker. My idea was that the card would be his “calling card.” The Joker has been completely psychotic, a harmless prankster, and everything in between. How do you feel about different interpretations of your character throughout the years? Comics are a living art form. It changes with new authors and with the new audience. That’s what makes it vital and gives it longevity. It has to be reinvented [because] so much material is eaten up. You have to give it a fresh look now and then. There are very few characters that remain the same over time, or have that longevity altogether. But didn’t some of the changes to the Joker come from the Comics Code Authority (a censorship board that regulates comics’ content and emerged during the early 1950s)? Did your ideas often get rejected in favor of “milder” fare? A lot of magazines did have to tread a fine line during the ’50s. ... We brought in many ideas that were rejected, but they were very happy to let us pitch them. The censorship was later, after I left comics, and it was mostly about the vivid crime stories. Some of them did get rather gruesome, and maybe they weren’t so appropriate for younger readers. But literature has been abounding with such characters, like Tales from the Crypt by Edgar Allan Poe and Little Red Riding Hood. To make it seem that juvenile delinquency was born at that time, to pin it on the comics is a bit unfair. Originally, you went to Columbia intending to pursue a career in journalism. How did you get involved in Batman? Did you want a creative outlet, or were you hoping to use your artistic skills to earn some extra cash? It was a little bit of both, actually. I started working on Batman in 1939, a couple of months after the feature started. I saw it as a way to fund my way through college. I never thought it would become a career. It ended up being the perfect referral for me because I had ambitions in both directions, art and writing, and after a few years I became immersed in the whole genre of comics and narrative storytelling. The 1930s have been called the “Golden Age of Comics,” and you worked alongside artists like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (Superman) and Jack Kirby (The Hulk, X-Men). Did you have any idea, when you were working, that comic books would come to have the impact and the legacy that they did? We knew it was a new form of storytelling, so it was exciting. We were pioneering, and everything was being done for the first time. There was no past, we couldn’t see the future, so there was only the present. And there was a certain realization, but we didn’t think of it in grandiose terms. It was an exciting time and a new medium, and we were very young. I was only 17 years old, and most of us were in our mid-20s. The editors were somewhat older. They came from the pulp magazines, which were the immediate predecessors of comics. They were mostly in literary publication, but the stories were inspired by the early pulps. DC Comics recruited you as a “creative consultant” for The Dark Knight. Did Heath Ledger’s Joker go back more to your original interpretation? I went to the recent Hollywood premiere of The Dark Knight, and I attended the shooting when I went over to London. The new film was based on the original concept of the character. They gave it a new interpretation with Heath Ledger, but the character itself was darker, more sinister, and had the same motivations. So I was pleased that they used that as inspiration. What do you think of the recent “rebirth” of comic characters in film over the past 10 years? It’s exciting to see Hollywood finally turning to superheroes because those heroes were well-grounded, the stories were exciting, the characters were good, and the success of them attests to their enduring values that were largely ignored. Comics were once looked down on as literature, and people turned to the classics for film. This [rebirth] is an affirmation of what we were doing. 20081002, Eye to Eye 2008-10-02T04:33:00-05:00 http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/a-career-fair-to-remember/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/eye/index.php/site/article/a-career-fair-to-remember/#When:04:32:01Z {summary}I walked in with sweaty palms, gripping my credentials firmly. To be honest, I was really unprepared and had only realized that day that I would need to wear a jacket and tie. Luckily, my roommate let me borrow his. I had heard that Morgan S. would be there. I’d heard some crazy stories about that one. Supposedly, she had been screwed the week before pretty bad, and I was a little surprised she even had the gall to show. I entered the auditorium and thought back to advice from home. Mother had always told me that real men were assertive. “Mother,” I quietly whispered to myself, “today I prove to you what a man I really am.” After taking a deep breath, I stepped into the Career Fair. I straightened my jacket and slicked my hair back before sidling up to the Google table. A large group of very attractive candidates were gathered around the table, all trying to score. “You know, I can help organize the world’s information. I can do that—and so much more,” one of them said. I snuck a peek at the guy’s resumé. It was massive. Not wanting to embarrass myself further, I shyly backed away. I wanted to try my luck with Bloomberg next—they were hot at the moment. I saw that their table was crowded with candidates. They had found a way to use their charms to their advantage after all. As the business world was crashing, they were busy flirting their way to the top by picking up and spreading all the gossip there was. Apparently everyone wanted to know who was or wasn’t getting screwed in business these days. On the way to Bloomberg, I passed the Morgan Stanley table. It was unusually lonely for such a formerly hot company. A wave of glee came over me at seeing that floozy so lonely, followed by one of guilt from my insensitivity. I quickly dismissed my guilt—last year, that recruiter would hardly give me the time of day. I nodded at her with a pity smile. She seemed embarrassed, yet grateful for my greeting. I grabbed some swag from the table, then jetted to Bloomberg’s table. They wouldn’t even let me hand in my resumé. Dejected, I walked through the crowds, eyeing various unpopular companies sitting alone on the side lines. Their desperation was palpable. For freebies, all they had were chocolates and information brochures, and I was disgusted. The event was clearly turning into a disaster. Finally I saw her, the one small software company who had avoided the crash and wasn’t too flashy. I began pitching myself as my confidence returned. We shared a laugh over a few smart comments I made about Java and the Internet. Finally, the recruiter asked for my resumé and number. “You can expect to hear back from us within a month,” she said. “Really?” I cried. “I mean, yeah, that’s cool.” I couldn’t wait. I smiled, knowing that the day had ended in success. I walked away humming some slow-dance tunes. Mother would be so proud.  20081002, Eyesites 2008-10-02T04:32:01-05:00