Category Archives: Featured

FEATURED
The Trustees Are Coming, The Trustees Are Coming

Here’s how to contact them to talk about your feelings or whatever.

Pictured: Joshua S. Boger ’73, chairman of Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees.

Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees will be arriving on campus tomorrow for their annual three-day Buffy marathon Senior Week meeting, which traditionally takes place in the days leading up to Reunion & Commencement. Got a concern that you’d like the Board to address? Want to talk to them about your feelings? Just curious who is on that committee that makes all those decisions about campus in the first place? You can access a full list of the names, class years (nearly all are alumni), home states, and job titles of the Board members here, but unfortunately no contact information is provided, which is kind of weird when you really think about it. We’ve taken the liberty of amassing the Board members’ names and email addresses so you can contact them with thoughts or requests in advance of their meeting, which begins tomorrow:

Continue reading →

FEATURED
Guest Post: Wesleyan Needs To Be On The Correct Side of the Climate Change Fight

“For almost 40 years I have been so proud of Wesleyan students and alumni. But I am not seeing the level of activism that is necessary for this existential fight.”

Pictured: Lauren Steiner '79 speaks at the Los Angeles Tar Sands Blockade Solidarity Action in March, 2013.

Pictured: Lauren Steiner ’79 speaks at the Los Angeles Tar Sands Blockade Solidarity Action in March, 2013.

Several weeks ago, members of a student group calling themselves Wes, Divest! put together a petition calling on President Roth and the Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels. The petition has since amassed more than 250 signatures, many with accompanying messages of support. President Roth hasn’t yet publicly responded. When asked about the possibility of divestment at a WSA meeting in March, he suggested that it was highly unlikely—and argued that Wesleyan’s endowment shouldn’t be a “vehicle for social change.”

As the push for divestment first starts to heat up at Wesleyan (as it already has at Tufts, Amherst, and much of the ‘Cac), we’re presenting a guest perspective by Lauren Steiner ’79, an environmental activist and Wes alum who urges all Wesleyan students to take up the fight now, before it’s too late:

“Plant trees, create recycled art, tour a chestnut orchard, work on an organic garden and much more during Earth Month at Wesleyan!” So reads the first sentence of an article in the latest edition of The Wesleyan Connection emailed to me in April. As an environmental activist who attended the first Earth Day celebration 33 years ago at age 12 and who planned an LA solidarity rally to the D.C. Forward on Climate Rally this past February, I found this quite dismaying. When I was at Wesleyan between 1975 and 1979, when we hadn’t even heard of climate change, we were actively protesting threats to the environment and human health. In 1976 and 1977, activists from Wesleyan joined the Clamshell Alliance protesting the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. Where is that activism now when environmental threats are so much worse?

Continue reading →

FEATURED
More Chalking Drama: Mystical 7 Members Chalked on Church Street, Scribbled Out by Mystical 7 Members

Because we haven’t posted enough chalking-related updates from the past few weeks, an anonymous tipster writes in to let you know about an amusing (or frightening, depending on who you are) happening on Church Street late last week:

I have a tip for Wesleying but would like to remain anonymous.  Earlier today someone wrote the names of the Mystical 7 — a Wesleyan student secret society — out in chalk on the sidewalk on Church St near Olin.  Later in the day, a bunch of the people whose names had been written were seen standing over the writing, looking fairly panicked, and then after that someone crossed the names out with more chalk.  Here’s a photo of the names crossed out.  FUCK SOCIAL HIERARCHY!!!!

According to one Wesleying staffer, “It’s intact in at least two places right now (beginning of CFA path and College Row near Zelnick).”

Continue reading →

FEATURED
Group of Huge Nerds Holds Slumber Party in Exley 137: Meet the Senior Week Hackathon

Breaking: Wes has Computer Science majors, and sometimes they stay up all night, making friends for life.

P1100353

The tables and floor of Exley 137 are piled high with gluttonous food remnants—pretzel bags, sandwich displays, Dunkin Donuts bags, half-eaten pizza, chips and salsa, dozens of condiments and wrappers and sauces—but the eleven occupants of the room are far too busy staring at computer screens, coding feverishly behind glazed eyes, to take much notice. Tensions are high. Every once in a while someone grunts or high fives or messes something up and swears at a teammate. Evan Carmi ’13 is pacing furiously, staring at scripts and barking orders at his teammates, who remain surprisingly calm. I take a look at the screen, but it may as well be in Korean. (I don’t speak Korean.)

Meet the participants of the first ever Senior Week Hackathon, a heated, unimaginably sexy 36-hour coding competition organized by Carmi, Julian Applebaum ’13, and Anastasios Germanidis ’13. The participants, most of them Comp Sci majors, have been awake for the better part of 36 hours, camped out in this single, sweat-stained classroom on the main floor of Exley, and in a little less than an hour they will emerge into the world with the shiny, digital results of their tech-savvy soil. Basically, it is a slumber party for nerds. Naturally, they have been tweeting up a storm every step of the way (and enjoying free “swag” from their various sponsors). 

Continue reading →

FEATURED
“Forces Greater Than Ourselves”: An Interview with Sheila Tobias, Wesleyan’s First Female Provost

“What we were doing at Wesleyan was taking place in the context of a much larger sweep of change in American history and culture.”

Sheila Tobias with NOW Founder Betty Friedan in the 1970s while Tobias was Associate Provost for Coeducation at Wesleyan. Image courtesy of Ms. Tobias.

In September of 1970, the same month Colin Campbell became Wesleyan’s youngest ever president, Sheila Tobias arrived at Wesleyan as associate provost. A noted author, scholar, and feminist activist, Tobias’ task at Wesleyan was different than that of any previous administrator—and different than any provost since then. Wesleyan had only just begun admitting women, and for the next eight years, Tobias was to oversee the inclusion of women in student life and assist the University in hiring and retaining female faculty. She was also instrumental in bringing the first women’s studies courses to Wes.

“It wasn’t a party school, but it was a school that catered to young men in all their glory,” Tobias says of the Wesleyan of the 1960s. “That was the place that I was invited to help change.”

While Tobias says that Wesleyan transitioned into coeducation more swiftly than many of its peers (“Wesleyan did it right”), she insists that the changes on campus were part of a much larger movement. “What we were doing at Wesleyan—namely, integrating a formerly men’s college—was taking place in the context of a much larger sweep of change in American history and culture,” Tobias says.

Wesleying is psyched to present an interview with Sheila Tobias, whose published books include Overcoming Math Anxiety, They’re not Dumb, They’re Different, Breaking the Science Barrier, Rethinking Science as a Career, and Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflections on the Women’s Movement. For more on Sheila Tobias and her career at Wesleyan, see her website or this Special Collections blog post by Cordelia Hyland ’13. 

Continue reading →

FEATURED
Procrastination Destination: Siblings or Dating and Steak House or Gay Bar

Screen shot 2013-05-17 at 12.54.42 PM

For the last procrastination destination of the year, we bring you two rather similar and, again, rather self-explanatory websites: Siblings or Dating and Steak House or Gay Bar.

Siblings or Dating features pictures of people, generally who look alike, and asks you to vote on whether you think they are siblings or a couple. Frustratingly, it does not actually tell you what the answer is, but does tell you how many other people selected the ones that you chose.

Steak House or Gay Bar (see image above) is equally self-explanatory: the website gives you a name and you have to use your deductive reasoning to determine whether it is a steak house or a gay bar. It will tell you where the (steak house | gay bar) happens to be, and also what percentage of people also got the answer right or wrong. The website keeps a running tally so that you know what percentage of your guesses have been correct. It… is surprisingly difficult. I will tell you, however, that Loading Zone is indeed a gay bar.

FEATURED
An Interview Six Months Late: WesKids Saving the World in Doha, Qatar

Awesome WesKids doing awesome stuff about an awesome cause in an awesome place. Six months ago.

Pictured: a desert.

In late November 2012, three WesKids, Samantha Santaniello ’13, Sophie Duncan ’13. and Chloe Holden ’15 went with Professor Michael Dorsey to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) in Doha, Qatar (that’s in the Persian Gulf, which is in the Middle East, for the geographically challenged). There they helped Professor Dorsey with his research, kept a pretty informative blog for the College of the Environment, witnessed firsthand the wrangling of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as part of the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18), learned a bunch of acronyms, and generally did “a lot of typing.”

Shortly after they returned to Wes, just in time for Fall finals week, I sat down with them to talk about their thoughts on the conference, the future of climate changed, and generally speaking exactly how screwed we all are. Enjoy!

***

pyrotechnics: I’ve been reading your blog. How successful do you think the conference was?

Sam: It was completely unsuccessful. The only thing that is really being discussed further is loss and damage which is really important for small island states and less developed countries. Loss of coastlines and stuff in Africa. That will hopefully be negotiated at the next conference. But yeah, everything is pretty bleak.

Sophie: It’s hard to say whether such as big conference with so many different goals is successful or unsuccessful. I would say they failed to meet the very low expectations that were set or the achievements they wanted. They failed to create any sort of significant agreement that would be legally binding or include really high-polluting countries like the US or Canada.

Chloe: It wasn’t the goal of this conference to create a legally binding agreement but you could talk to people who walked away from it with very specific agendas, like people who are involved in accountability measures; there was progress in that, in little areas. Overall, in the negotiations as a whole, across recent years, doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

Sam: Obviously the small island states and less developed countries were very important and with their agenda they called for a five-year second commitment period and they ended up with eight because the EU and a lot of the negotiation coalitions with more political clout were able to get what they wanted as opposed to the small island states who really needed it, because this is a huge threat to them.

Continue reading →

FEATURED
Tonsil Hockey Drops Debut Video, Fails To Make It Onto Morning Show

Maybe you thought local funnyman and “College of Moving Image” expert Will Feinstein ’13 would finally give up on combining aural and visual stimuli to generate “lighthearted,” “viral” “content” after achieving his lifelong goal of becoming a WesCeleb. You thought wrong.

Nearly a year to the date after debuting viral sensation “Ain’t Tryna Say Goodnight,” Feinstein has directed the music video debut for Tonsil Hockey, a pop-punk band Jason Katzenstein ’13, Adrien DeFontaine ’13, and Zak Malik ’14 formed presumably after they got tired of playing Blink-182 songs to bleeding naked men. Please note that none of the aforementioned characters have had their work “viral” “content” promoted on this blog in any form previously.

Continue reading →

FEATURED
Procrastination Destination Du Jour: Not Your Average Cat Photo

If you have ever been on the Internet, you’re probably familiar with the phenomenon of cat photos. Whether you frequent Buzzfeed on the daily or had a middle school aged tryst with icanhascheezburger (or your stepmother shaved your cat last summer so it wouldn’t shed on everything you own), you know that funny cat photos are everywhere.

You might not be as familiar with the world of non-lolcat photography, or what some people call Professional Cat Photography. Emily Moody ’15 showed me this article while we were studying in an empty classroom in Fisk, so you know it’s a bona fide procrastination destination. At first I thought it was some comedic genius on par with one of the funniest movies of all time, Best In Show. I was mistaken. This is the real deal, folks. There is a company called Chanan (less fun than Chana, but perhaps more absurd), comprised of a husband and wife team who professionally photograph cats.

Continue reading →

FEATURED
Procrastination Destination du Jour: Magicicada Brood II — The Locusts are Coming!

tumblr_mm76vrhFg31r6e21po1_1280

Yaaaaaaawn. Just another boring day in Middletown, Connecticut. Parents pull their cars up to WestCo, packing up mini-fridges and bedding as frosh frantically try to hide their drug paraphernalia. A chalked message is half washed away; only the word “bourgeois” is still legible. Red solo cups litter the sidewalk like insect corpses. But…  suddenly…  a noise breaks the silence on Andrus Field. bzzz. It grows louder. BZZZ. And that’s when… Brood II arrives.

What is Brood II, you ask? Brood II is the 17-year periodical magicicada clutch that will emerge this spring. Every 17 years, once the soil temperature at eight inches deep hits 64 degrees, the cicadas that have been gestating underground crawl to earth’s surface to reproduce. And then they die. And there are a lot of them. Billions of cicadas!

Nobody is exactly sure when this extremely disgusting and thrilling plague will hit — experts are estimating late May to early June in the Middletown area. With any luck, Brood II will seek fresh air in the days leading up to Reunion & Commencement (May 26th).

Continue reading →