Features

The Meaning of Emptiness

August 3, 2016 by Mark Wood Comments Off

WHEN ASKED WHAT she would save if the building were on fire, Professor of Religious Studies Zhiru Ng looks around for a moment at her office in Pearsons Hall. Like most academic offices, it is full of accumulated objects, big and small. There are two large, beautifully carved Buddhas, a hanging scroll with calligraphed

Chinese characters saying, in loose translation, “Serenity illuminates,” and a long wall of bookshelves packed with volumes and small religious items, including a painted statuette of Dizang, a figure in Buddhist mythology about whom she has written a scholarly book.

Finally she points to her bookshelf. “I think my books are very much a part of me,” she says, “because to me, meditation is learning.” But then she shrugs and smiles. “Although if there is a fire, there is a fire.”

Sentimental attachments are not a part of Ng’s world. Her world is one of transience and acceptance. Or as she would say, emptiness. Not a very heartwarming word in English, and she says it’s pretty much the same in Chinese. But for Ng, emptiness isn’t something to be avoided. It’s something to be understood and embraced, even if it takes a lifetime of meditation and study.

As an example of what she means by the word, she points to the larger of the two Buddhas, inherited along with the office from her predecessor, Professor Emerita of Religion Margaret Dornish. “Like this Buddha,” she says. “Every day it is aging and it is undergoing change, right? But we don’t see that. We see it as a fixed form. … So emptiness is not saying there is nothing, but rather that the essence of things and of our lives themselves and the events in our lives are like this Buddha. They seem to have a fixed nature, but the nature is really never, ever fixed. It is in constant change, even though the naked eye can’t see it.”

And blind faith in permanence, she believes, has serious consequences for the human condition. “I think all human beings—the way we function in life is that we assume a permanence about everything, and that is the cause and root of a lot of our suffering.”

It was these concepts—all encapsulated by the word “emptiness”—that propelled Ng from simple curiosity about Buddhist traditions to a lifetime devoted to study and contemplation. “The first dharma talk I attended was by the person who would become my religious teacher,” she recalls. “And he was talking about emptiness, which was at that time totally over and beyond my head. But I w remember, after the lecture, the friend who brought me there asked me, ‘So how was it?’ And I said, ‘I don’t quite understand it, but I’m very sure this is it, and this is something that I am going to pursue in life, and that someday, I’m going to understand this emptiness, and that will change my life.’”

GROWING UP IN SINGAPORE as a child of Chinese immigrants, Ng thought of Christianity as the religion of the educated, but personally, she found it too harsh and too culturally strange to be attractive. Her mother and grandmother, on the other hand, practiced a form of popular Chinese Buddhism known as Pure Land Buddhism that the skeptical young Ng dismissed as naïve and superstitious.

At school, she started off in the sciences, and then won a competitive government scholarship for a special program designed to produce English teachers. There, in classes of two to five students taught by British expatriates with doctorates, she fell in love with English literature. “Literature really made me explore life,” she explains, “because in English literature, or any kind of literature, I think, you’re going to raise the question of suffering. You’re going to raise the question of the meaning of life. You also raise the question of death, and the impermanence of life always runs through all their writing. And I was struck by that, but I also felt deeply that there was never really an answer.”

Then, during her last year of high school, her grandmother died, and Ng’s life changed. “When I attended the funeral, I became enthralled by the death-and-dying rituals,” she says, “because they talk about how you will be born into what is considered a pure land, and in that pure land, you have as your parents the lotus flowers.”

That peculiar image intrigued her, partly because it seemed to signal a release from the burden of filial piety, a Chinese tradition emphasizing the deep respect and devotion children owe their parents. “Filial piety is very, very much something I was raised with,” she says. “But I always felt guilt that I never really loved my parents as much as they loved me. And so, when I participated in those rituals, my grandmother’s death rituals, and I came across those verses, I was fascinated. Because how could my parents then be lotuses? And that actually started me off on my journey.”

As she continued her English studies at the National University of Singapore, she tried to learn more about Buddhism outside the academic setting. She signed up for classes with a Buddhist monk from Taiwan and was drawn deeper and deeper into Buddhist philosophy, which spoke to her as nothing ever had before.

She says: “I found, actually, in my study of Buddhism, that this is something that holds some answers for my existential questioning as to: What is the meaning of life? Why do people suffer? And how do we respond to people suffering? … I found that teaching to be very useful, but also very hard to realize. I wanted to dedicate my life to the study of Buddhism, whatever that means. So I decided after I finished my undergraduate studies that I would become a Buddhist nun.”

Since then, she’s never looked back. “Sometimes students ask me why do I become a monastic,” she says, “because in the modern world monasticism really means you are tying yourself down. We have lots of rules and regulations. … But in early Buddhism, the idea of monasticism really means to go forth. It’s a path of liberation, in the sense that you put down things that are unnecessary baggage, and that allows you then to pursue this path. So it’s really a renunciation of certain patterns of thought. For some people like me, I guess, the monastic life is the perfect path to do that. Ideally in Buddhism, the monastic life should be an environment that really nurtures that kind of inner liberation.”

As a monastic, Ng continued on a spiritual journey that carried her from Singapore to Taiwan for her religious training, and then, unexpectedly, to the United States. “Originally I imagined that I would be going to maybe India or to Sri Lanka to study after my religious training, but my teacher actually was very specific. He really wanted me to come to the States.”

At the University of Michigan, she studied Indian Buddhism in the canonical languages of Sanskrit and Tibetan. Then she completed her doctoral studies at the University of Arizona, focusing on Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. In 2000, she joined Pomona’s religious studies faculty to replace the retiring Professor Dornish.

TODAY, STRIDING ACROSS the Quad or standing in front of a seminar class, Ng cuts a striking figure. With her tightly cropped hair and purple-gray monastic robes, she has become a familiar if somewhat singular presence on campus. Her classes—such as Worlds of Buddhism, Life Story of the Buddha, Religious Traditions of China, and the Lotus Sutra in East Asia—attract a wide range of students, from religious studies majors connecting the dots between world religions to Asian Americans hoping to get a better grasp of their cultural heritage to religious seekers searching for spiritual clues in Eastern thought.

“My colleagues say that they probably have fewer seekers than I do,” she says, “and I think that has to do with the way Buddhism is portrayed and understood in American culture, in the sense that Buddhism is often seen as a religion that’s less institutionalized, a personal religion, something that you could actually pick and choose from.”

But despite her evident dedication to her religious order, Ng isn’t trying to convert anyone. Buddhism, she says, is not that kind of religion. “Buddhism is really about epistemology,” she explains, “in the sense that you’re trying to unlearn how you know the world and coming up with a different way of experiencing knowing the world that involves internal transformation. I always tell my students that we wear contact lenses, but we don’t see the contact lenses, so we already have preconceived constructions of things. So it’s always very good to expose yourself to something new.”

For most of the students in her classes, those “contact lenses” are shaped by the assumptions of Western culture—assumptions about life and death, time and change that are very different from those in Buddhist thought. “Much of what I do in my courses is about unpacking these kinds of assumptions with my students so that they are aware. And I think it fits very nicely into the liberal arts setting because you are really questioning culture and questioning the way you construct knowledge, including religious knowledge.”

Indeed, at a time when many religions—from Christianity to Hinduism—are dealing with a clash between the dogmatic teachings of churches, temples and seminaries and the more irreverent, scholarly approach of religious studies programs, Ng finds that Buddhism is something of an exception. The first stage of meditation, she says, is described in Buddhist texts as “hearing”—as in hearing the teachings of the Buddhist masters—but that word was part of an oral tradition. “Now for us hearing really means reading, right?” she says. “So it means studying, in other words.”

For most of her students, this first stage of meditation—study and learning—will be as far as they go, but she believes that just wrestling with the concept of emptiness for a semester is enough to open a lot of eyes to a wider view of the world.

“When they first come across this, especially if they have never had any exposure to Asian thought, they might be a little bit perplexed,” she says. “It’s very difficult to get to the crux of it. But I think you’ll be surprised at how many of them feel that this is such a wonderful, different way of looking at things. And they enjoy the new lenses that it gives them.”

However, that is only the first step in what is, for Ng herself, a lifelong process. In Buddhist meditation, beyond hearing is contemplation, and beyond contemplation is internal transformation. That process, she says, may take a lifetime or—if you factor in the concept of rebirth—lifetimes. But Ng has no doubt that it’s worth it, not just in the end, but at every step along the way.

“It means not grasping onto anything in your life,” she says, “but accepting the fact that it is part of the impermanence, and rejoicing in the fact that there’s always that change. It’s a rejoicing that is not like happiness that brings you up and down, but it’s a rejoicing in the sense that this is life, and life itself is already enough as it is, and that it has all its miracles. And if you just open your eyes and look at this and accept the changes, you will find a lot of things that are joyous about it, and you will be much more at peace in your life.”

—Photos by Carrie Rosema

The Calling

August 3, 2016 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

DONALD ABRAM ’16 grew up on the South Side of Chicago with a single mother and a grandmother who took him to church every Sunday, no excuses—and he tried using them all, down to not having clean socks.

Every week he would see church members joyfully worship. He never really understood what that was about even though he was an active member of the congregation. Then, on a cold December day when he was 14 years old, Abram says he heard a distinct call from God.

After coming home from school and warming himself by his space heater, Abram dozed off. In a dream, he saw himself walking down the center aisle at church, but as a celestial being, not a physical one. He looked up to the pulpit expecting to see his pastor standing there, but instead he saw himself preaching. Abram says he woke up shocked and shaken.

His father was a minister, and though Abram never lived with him, he knew the Sunday morning routine and what a preacher’s life entailed—and he wasn’t having any of it. Throughout his childhood, people had told him, “I see the call in your life,” but he says he ran from it.

Abram wanted to be a force for good—but in the form of an FBI agent, not a minister. Still, he talked to family, seeking advice and interpretation about the dream, which was now recurring. Ultimately, he had to come to grips with the vision on his own: He decided that God was in fact telling him to preach. So he went to his pastor, who decided to test him with a trial sermon. Abram preached his first sermon, and the pastor and elders confirmed that this call was a real one.

He vividly remembers one moment in the sermon when he thought: “This is what I saw in the dream. This is what I’m supposed to be doing, and I know that.”

You’ve heard of the preacher’s kid. But this was a preacher kid. All throughout high school, Abram delivered sermons at Greater New Mount Eagle Missionary Baptist Church, a black congregation. At first he mimicked his pastor, but soon he found his own rhythm and style, earning the nicknames “Fireball” and “Firecracker” for his blazing energy. Abram says he feels communion with both God and the audience when he’s in the pulpit.

“There are things that I will say and things that I will do that are not on my manuscript, and the Holy Spirit drops that down in my spirit and it comes out,” says Abram. “I am just so in tune with that moment that I know this is what I’m supposed to do—this is what I’ve been called to do.”

While growing up, Abram’s interactions were mostly with black people. His original plan was to attend the historically black Morehouse College, which Martin Luther King Jr. and Spike Lee attended—that’s where successful African American men went to school where he was from, Abram says. But when he received a Posse Foundation scholarship to Pomona, he began to rethink those plans. After researching the College, he decided to go west. Another big change was on the way.

THE DECISION TO come to Pomona was another turning point for Abram and the beginning of a four-year transformation. In the classroom, he was challenged to think of his faith more critically through courses like Professor Erin Runions’ Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Runions’ goal is for students to approach the Scriptures as literature, from a scholarly perspective rather than a particular religious tradition. Looking at the Bible through this new lens created an inner struggle, he says.

“It was incredibly difficult for me to take on a class that removed the sanctity of spirituality from the text.” says Abram. “Initially it felt really disrespectful to me. I didn’t feel like we were giving the due deference and respect.”

But the no-holds-barred questioning of the Bible gave him permission to reexamine his belief system. “There were a lot of questions that came up that I didn’t have the space to bring up on the South Side, with my pastor or my father,” Abram says.

The perspectives and points that Abram thought were great in the classroom ran counter to what he was taught in the church. He grappled hard with his faith, controversial texts and the ways he saw the Bible used to perpetuate injustice. In conversations, family members and his pastor noticed his worldview shifting.

As Abram’s advisor and teacher, Pomona College Politics Professor Lorn Foster witnessed that shift as well. Over time, Foster says, he saw an evolution in Abram and “a willingness to be more open about things than when he entered Pomona College. … His faith was more dogma when he entered the door.”

Abram would agree. Whereas before, he says, his spiritual practice revolved around a God that had a strict code of rules and regulations, at Pomona his perspective has widened and deepened into a recognition that the core of his belief is about relationship with Christ, not religion, he says. This ongoing faith journey is one of both reclamation and tension.

It is also a journey of relationships. On campus, he says, he encountered types of people he never had before—students from marginalized backgrounds that were markedly different from his black Chicago experience. He met undocumented students, gay students, students with mental illnesses—identities and stories that were new to him and that he felt the church he was raised in either ignored or was blind to. Over time, Abram became concerned not just about God but also about God’s politics, as he understood them. Another call began to stir in his heart.

Through his analysis of biblical texts, readings on black liberation theology, and his relationships with other students, Abram says he began to see Jesus not only as a spiritual savior but also as a revolutionary figure—an advocate for the poor and those on the fringes, who upended traditional religious institutions and whose central message was one of unconditional love. Religious leaders in that day were also government figures, and Jesus pushed back, Abram says. He points to the story of Jesus turning over tables in the temple in anger as a profoundly political act. “You could call it a protest. You could call it a sit-in. You can really call it an act of rebellion in many ways to a system that keeps [down] those in society who are viewed as less than or who are viewed as different or not as valued. And he is saying, ‘This system has to come down. This system has to stop. Because what you’re doing now on a very micro level is taking advantage of people.’”

NOW RELIGION AND POLITICS have become one and the same for Abram. Yes, his call was a personal transformation, but he was also called to transform institutions and systems of injustice, the politics major says.

Whenever he returns to his home church sanctuary, he preaches a message on how life in the pew and life in the public square are inextricably intertwined. In his sermons he is subtle, but intentional and strategic in weaving in his politicization, Abram says, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive as he offers critiques of materialism and urges congregants to fight for the most vulnerable in society. “I think the church is not able to see those connections because we focus on abortion, gay marriage or passing out Thanksgiving dinners,” says Abram. “We’re not focused on structural change.”

Abram points to inequities in the criminal justice system, massive wealth disparities and the behavior of Wall Street investors—and he believes the most effective ways to combat those inequities are through policy and government as well as a mobilized church. “Christ has called you to condemn that which is wrong,” and Abram believes the church writ large has missed some of what he sees now as obvious sins.

Along the way, Abram has become a fierce advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement, which he believes is “an indictment of the black church.” Of course, he says, the black church has held a key role in the civil rights struggles of the past. But on other issues the church has been silent at best.

“Black Lives Matter is actually doing what Jesus did. Not only are they saying, ‘We’re combating white supremacy.’ They are combating misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, discrimination against those who are differently abled,” says Abram. “I think Black Lives Matter has hit at the root of what it is Christ has called us to fight against but also the root of what the church has failed to address.”

Abram has held two internships in Washington, D.C.—one at the Center for American Progress and another with Joshua DuBois, formerly the head of the Obama administration’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He remains hopeful that change will happen both in the church and in public policy.

In the fall, he will attend Harvard Divinity School for a master’s of divinity degree. He may also pursue a master’s in public policy. Inspired by DuBois’s work, Abram wants to start a faith-based consulting firm, advising government, businesses and political campaigns. He says he may even run for public office someday.

“Jesus came as a liberator. Therefore in all that we do, we should do it in the name of liberation. And we should do that with conviction, with power and with strategy. … I want to be in a position where my faith is central to policies or advice that I give so that it can be impactful and beneficial for those that are most marginalized in our society.”

And preaching?

“I will continue to preach. I will always be a preacher.”

From Abram’s view, his call hasn’t changed—it has only grown.

—Photos by Drew Reynolds

Spiritual Journeys

August 3, 2016 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Meghana Rao ’16

“My experience with Hinduism has a lot to do with community, and the stories within that community. So one way that I express and experience my faith is through dance. I started learning kathak, an Indian classical dance, when I was about 7. It used to be a temple dance, and you would dance it to devotional songs. I don’t know if most people think of dance as a religious experience, but a lot of those devotional songs are very personal for me, so dance has been a very helpful tool to keep me connected to my faith. It’s my way of sharing my culture and my faith with other people.

“Back at home, my religious experience was very community-related. My family would tell the old stories. That community has been a little harder to find here. There is a Hindu community, but it’s such a varied and diverse community that those aspects don’t necessarily come up as much. That’s not to say I don’t connect with people here—I just connect with them in other ways, and my faith has been more of an internal, personal experience. I imagine it’s similar for a lot of people who come here. You meet all these different people, and the ways that you connect are not necessarily through your faith.

“At home, every morning my sister and I would just sit and say this chant called the Gayatri Mantra, which you’re supposed to say nine times every morning. It’s about greeting the sun and accepting the knowledge that it gives you. Here, it just didn’t seem like the space to do that. If you have a roommate, for example, she may sleep late and you don’t want to wake her up. So that’s become an internal thing for me. When I see the sun, I think about it, but I don’t physically chant every morning. That’s an example of how it was more of a communal activity for me at home, whereas here it’s an individual thing that I say to myself. I don’t want to impose my faith on other people. It is a personal thing, and I’m OK with that.

“A lot of Hindusim is kind of a philosophy about life. It’s an outlook on how life should be lived. It’s not necessarily tied to a higher power. There’s freedom for you to shape your own philosophy and views on life within the culture and within the faith. The creation myths and things like that, I take as myths. I don’t necessarily take them as true, and that’s a personal choice. So for me there hasn’t really been that conflict between faith and academics, because I think of it in more of a symbolic sense.

“Every night before I go to bed I say prayers. In some ways, it’s more like a habit than something intentional, but I just can’t go to sleep until I’ve said them, even if it’s just kind of whispering them to myself. I think it’s kind of a connection to home.”

Jose Ruiz ’16

“My parents are from Mexico and they grew up Catholic. It’s ingrained in the culture. So just picking that up as I grew up at home, it became a part of me as well. In high school I really got curious about the religion itself, and the morals it teaches and the lessons that Catholicism has to offer. So I spent a lot of my free time just kind of exploring the Bible, exploring religious texts, spending time with youth groups at church.

“I think just coming to campus, you get this perception that there’s no presence of religion here, or that it’s kind of uncomfortable to talk openly about your religious beliefs. But as you spend more and more time here and talk to more and more people, you do find a sense of community, people who will relate to you on a religious basis. At the same time, you also end up talking to students who challenge your beliefs in terms of what your particular church has done in the past—different scandals, different wars, different administrative events that reflect badly on your religion. But I think at the end of it all, it’s definitely very constructive to be able to listen to some of those concerns but still to be able to practice your religion, so that you can help to prevent those things from happening again in the future.

“I’ve met a lot of students here who are Jewish, a couple who are Hindu, and a lot of students who are of the Protestant or evangelical faiths. So they’re always very interesting, in that a lot of our beliefs are very similar—like when you’re talking about straight-up morals or how you act with other people. Obviously there are nuances in how different religious ceremonies are held—all the history that goes behind it—but I’ve definitely been able to talk to people of different faith backgrounds and help my faith grow because of that.

“Religion evolves over time, just depending on the experiences that you go through in your life, so I guess coming to college in itself can be a way for you to strengthen your religious beliefs and anchor yourself to the beliefs and the morals that are important to you. A lot of students come here and they take whatever opportunity they can get to let go of their religion—because it was imposed on them by their parents or it just didn’t feel right or they want to experiment with other types of belief systems—and so I think in a sense that’s a good way for us to mature and kind of figure ourselves out better.

“Just being challenged about my beliefs and being able to talk to other people about their beliefs and religious experiences, I was able to learn from those and strengthen my own belief in the Catholic Church and how it helps me get through life.”

Andrew Nguy ’19

“It’s a story that a lot of young Buddhists share. Someone dies, and because of the funeral rites, there is some sort of religion involved, and Buddhism happened to be the one for my grandma, so her funeral was really where things started for me, and it’s just grown from there.

“My daily routine has shifted over the course of the school year. The first semester I was pretty good, waking up early. I have an 8 a.m. class almost every day, so I would wake up at 6, brush my teeth, get some homework done if I needed to and spend about a half hour chanting the Universal Gate chapter of the Lotus Sutra for its emphasis on compassion and meditating before anybody else was up. Since then, it’s gone from a morning routine to more of a nightly routine. Since now I have more time in the evening, I started doing that—same routine, half an hour or so, but more in the evening than in the morning. And then of course, these past few weeks, with finals coming up, it’s gone from half an hour to 15 minutes to 10 minutes, to ‘Oops, I forgot today. I’ll try again tomorrow.’ That’s the life of a student.

“You won’t see me meditating in class, but the things in Buddhism show up almost everywhere in life, and I can spot it now after being Buddhist for a few years. I can see how conflicts come about. And how, if I get angry as a response to that conflict, it usually only gets worse from there. Realizing that and being able to stop myself before impulse takes over, I’m able to keep the situation a bit calmer and more conducive to actually resolving an issue.

“Being a student, it’s hard to have time in general, and time for what most people think is sitting around doing nothing is even harder. So my compromise is I do a lot of walking meditation when I’m on my way to class and in between classes. Instead of walking to class with a friend, having a nice chat about who-knows-what, I can walk and just kind of focus on my breath, focus on my footsteps as I’m walking, and just be mindful about what I’m doing. Another method I use is recitation. I use the name of Avalokite´svara Bodhisattva, the main figure in the Universal Gate chapter, as a point of focus. Concentrating on the syllables of the name and the compassion it’s associated with, I can use it as my meditation anywhere, even when I’m waiting in line for lunch.

“The purpose of it is more to be able to observe and understand the mind—which might have something to do with my being a psych major—but understanding the mind in a different context. I think the benefits of meditation show up in a lot of ways. If you were to have met me four or five years ago, before I really learned much about Buddhism, I was really impulsive and—I’m not going to lie—I still am sometimes. But meditation has helped me recognize the patterns and my habits. When I’m about to make a rash decision, it kind of pulls me back and says, ‘Stop and think about that first.’”

Ilana Cohen ’16

“This is not unique to Judaism, but the time and the cycle are very important. So for us, it’s Friday night through the day of Saturday and observing that as Shabbat in some way. Here, that has meant being at Hillel on Friday nights, pretty regularly. A lot of times, that experience would start for me at about 11 o’clock on Friday when we would pick up the food from the dining halls and bring it over here to the McAlister Center and start cooking for the people who were coming to Shabbat dinner that night. Then we would get the space ready, and often—not every week, but often—I would lead services here in the library. That, for me, was a process of recapturing the Shabbat experience of my synagogue, growing up. Then we would all do dinner together.

“There are many prayers in Judaism that you can’t say unless you have a minyan of people. You wouldn’t say them unless you have that quorum, and there are lots of different reasons why that might be true, but my favorite that I’ve heard is that it’s not that you need 10 voices so that God can hear you—it’s because then somebody does hear you. There are people around you to make the prayer work, because now there are people who know that you’ve said that prayer and support you in doing that. So any time that I’m questioning—well, why am I doing this in a language I don’t really understand?—I know that this is the way to build a community that will be supportive to me.

“So community is very important to me, and the music is also very important, and the fact that it is my history, and it almost wasn’t. My grandmother came out of Austria on the Kindertransport. It’s never why I’ve started a new Jewish practice, but there are always moments where I think, ‘This is just my family’s history.’

“Personally, I almost never use the word ‘faith.’ So when I was thinking about coming here, I was thinking, ‘How am I going to answer these questions?’ I see how it’s a word that broadly allows for anybody’s religious experience, but I think of its association with ‘blind faith,’ and believing or trusting. For me, the religious experience is much more about practice and about learning. Most importantly, from the time I was very little, any participation in Jewish practice was my choice.

Ideologically, nothing I’ve learned or been taught in college is in conflict with my understanding of Judaism, and I didn’t expect it to be. I took a Religious Studies class my first semester, and that was the opposite of a conflict. And I would have done more, but I think I prefer studying it in the religious context, and knowing that I don’t have to get that while I’m in college, because Torah study will be as large a part of my future participation in the Jewish community as religious services.”

Jordan Shaheen ’17

“I’m a big proponent of the war-room theory, which is that you fight all your battles in prayer, not in person. So I kind of get everything I need to get out in the morning in prayer, and then I know I’ve got something there that will get me through the day, until I recharge the next morning.

“I had a church back home that I still go to occasionally. I knew I wanted faith in my life and I wanted a relationship with God, but I’d never really figured out a way to do it. I struggled for years, always reading, always learning about it. There were times when I had atheistic tendencies, times when I wanted to be all-in but didn’t know how to be all-in. Here at school, I finally found a place in the church and was able to really blossom in that role. Now I’m looking at going to divinity school and getting a doctorate of theology and going into the ministry. The thing I love about the Presbyterian Church most is that most ministers have doctorates, so it’s more of an academic denomination, which I’ve come to really appreciate.

“I don’t go out evangelizing—I don’t talk about it at all unless people come to me with questions. It’s something that’s very important to me, and I’m more than happy to talk about it, but I think it’s one of those things where people have to come to you with questions, or else it’s not going to be a meaningful conversation. So I kind of keep to myself, but I think there are a lot more people here for whom religion is important than will say so. It’s kind of an underground group. I know that sounds funny, but there are a lot of people here who are very religious—and not just people who will admit they’re Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or whatever, but people to whom it’s very important but who don’t talk about it much. So you just have to find a way to reach out to those people and you’ll find a pretty cool community that you didn’t know was there.

“I’ve never found that my religion clashes with my work here. A lot of what I do in my major is investigating the early forms of Abrahamic texts, looking at the Socratic traditions and the pagan traditions and their influence or lack thereof on the blossoming of Abrahamic traditions throughout the Mediterranean. So a lot of the texts I get to read are foundational Christian texts, foundational Hebrew texts, foundational Islamic texts. And I get a really good sense of how that all plays together. Are there questions that arise, or inconsistencies that I notice and look into? Absolutely. But as Reverend Tharpe, who used to be the Protestant chaplain here, always says, ‘Any true Christian is agnostic three days a week.’ If you’re not questioning, you’re not learning and growing.”

Molly Keller ’19

“I was raised Catholic, baptized, had my first communion, and went to an Episcopalian school from age 3 through fifth grade. Then I transferred to a very liberal private school where my friends were mostly Jewish. But even when I was going to church and Sunday school and at Episcopalian school and being taught religious knowledge, I never felt that invested in it. I remember in fourth grade we had to draw a picture of God, and I was very stubborn, so my compromise with the teacher was drawing a church with little squiggly lines around the steeple to represent a spirit. That was at age 9.

“I didn’t really think about religion very much in high school. It just wasn’t very relevant to my life. But interestingly enough, since coming to college, unexpectedly, I’ve been exposed to a lot of things that have forced me to reconsider. I definitely am not a devout Christian now or anything like that, but for example, my ID1 class was Cult and Culture with Professor Jordan Kirk, and a lot of the questions we focused on were around the manifestation of a God. And I think one of the things that really changed things for me was—we were reading Stories from Jonestown, and there was a passage about how, for some people, God can just be a warm meal and a job or a roof over their heads.

“And so, shifting from God as this man up in the sky to thinking of it as a word that fills in for certain significances—that kind of changed things for me. And then, I’ve been in Religious Ethics class with Professor Oona Eisenstadt, so being exposed to that, and the way different people have their own Tao in their lives, has changed my thinking.

“Religious Ethics, as she presents it to us, is a class that deals with how to live a good life and how different religions and different thinkers grapple with that question. So actually, a lot of the philosophies that came out of that class—whether they be from religious texts or not—kind of helped me think about how I live my life and how I interact with others. I really liked the Bhagavad-Gita but I also really liked Emmanuel Levinas and the way he talked about our intrinsic obligation to the “Other.” And I think that you see that in religion, but it doesn’t necessarily have to go hand in hand. So there are bits and pieces of philosophy that I use to guide my moral and ethical life.

“Again, I’m not a devout anything, and I don’t know if I believe in a God or many gods, but I’m a little more open to the notion that there may be something out there worth believing in. I just haven’t totally figured out what. But I’m not necessarily looking for anything. When religion was a big part of my life, I just sort of took it as it was. Since it hasn’t been a part of my life, I haven’t felt that anything was missing. But I’m open to things that come my way.”

Vian Zada ’16

“I go up on the roof of Pomona Hall often. Being in this quiet place—surrounded by birds and looking up at the clouds—reminds me of creation. It’s a really nice way to clear my mind and remind myself of what matters to me. That’s what praying does for me. It’s really therapeutic because it dissolves whatever stresses I’m going through. It feels purifying. This may sound cheesy, but part of my faith is just looking at all the marvels around me. My love for life and science and how I see that every day just reinforces my wonder for a greater being.

“I grew up with strict but caring parents who tried to maintain the balance between their culture and sending their kids to American schools. I had a lot of rules at home. So being separated from my parents, it’s been interesting to see how, in my lifestyle, I go about following the tenets of my religion without my parents watching me. No one tells me to pray. My parents are never there when I’m at a party and abstain from drinking. Those are things I do for myself.

“I’m not able to pray five times a day, but I do think about God every day. I do fast, for a lot of other reasons besides the reasons that are given to me. I trust my own judgment, and I make my own decisions. It’s not like I look to the Quran as the only source of how to live my life. I’m in a religious studies class right now called Nourishing Life, and we look at a lot of ancient Chinese texts and a lot of Buddhist and Taoist primary sources, and I find myself agreeing with a lot of what I read. I just believe in taking what appeals to you from different religions and different ideas.

“In Islam there’s a lot of emphasis on being compassionate and respectful toward all others—toward life itself. I think I developed my sense of compassion going to Arabic school every Saturday and learning from my mom—just the Golden Rule, basically. I think all religions are beautiful. Religion in itself is, I think, a wonderful tool for helping one shape one’s moral compass.

“My religion also encourages education. Educating yourself is a duty that you’re supposed to carry throughout your whole life. It’s nice to know that I’m supposed to be here.”

—Photos by Carrie Rosema

Face to Face

April 7, 2016 by Staff Comments Off

Jaureese Gaines ’16 and Maxine Solange Garcia ’16

As members of the 10-student Posse cohort that came to Pomona from Chicago high schools in 2012, Maxine and Jaureese say they feel more like brother and sister than mere friends.

“Simply put, when I use the word ‘Posse’ to describe my relationship with these nine amazing individuals, I’m actually describing my second family,” says Jaureese. “We’re not just a Posse; we are family. I love my four sisters and five brothers.”

As the group nears graduation, Maxine, a neuroscience major, is preparing for medical school, while Jaureese, a politics major with three summer internships in Washington, D.C., under his belt, is planning to return to Chicago to work on educational access. But they expect to stay close in the years ahead.

“We know we’ll all be invited to whatever engagement party, wedding, award ceremony or baby shower either one of us has,” Maxine says. “I also told Reese he’ll have to help me out during med school because of med school debt. Maybe I’ll move into his garage. But in all seriousness, I know that Reese, and all of Posse, will be there for me 20 years down the line, just like they were there for me these past four years.”

Stephen Glass ’57 and Sandra Dunkin Glass ’57

Steve and Sandy Glass don’t recall how they met. “Pomona was much smaller when we were there—like 700 or 800 students—and everybody knew everybody,” Sandy says. “So it wasn’t a question of meeting.”

However, they do remember very clearly their first two dates, during their sophomore year. “I asked him out first, to the Associated Women’s Formal,” Sandy says with a laugh.

“That’s right,” Steve agrees. “She asked me out and we had a very nice time. Then I asked her out—took her to the Academy Awards.”

As it happened, Steve’s father, who was in the movie business, didn’t need his Oscar tickets that year. Steve and Sandy double-dated with another Pomona student, Frank Capra Jr. ’55, who was then dating a young starlet named Anna Maria Alberghetti.

“Is that classy or what?” Steve asks.

“I came from Oregon,” Sandy retorts, “so the Academy Awards didn’t mean that much to me.”

The couple graduated from Pomona at about 4 p.m., June 16, 1957, and they were married in Little Bridges, in a traditional Jewish ceremony, three hours later. “After all, the whole family was already there, so why waste it?” Steve says.

The secret of their 58 years together? “I like what she likes, and she likes what I like,” Steve explains. “We had a good education at Pomona, and we always have a lot to talk about.”

Neuroscience Professor Nicole Weekes and Vivian Carrillo ’16

“I met Nicole Weekes when I took Neuropsychology my sophomore year,” Vivian remembers. “She has this contagious excitement when she lectures that makes you interested in whatever she is talking about.”

Their relationship progressed from teacher-student to mentor-mentee when Vivian asked Nicole to be her thesis advisor. “I knew her work and was pulled in by her commitment to students,” Vivian explains. “One of the best things about her, and sort of an inside joke between us, is that when I get too ambitious about my work, she says, ‘Save that for your dissertation.’ And while it seems like a joking way to tell me to slow down, it’s reassuring. Hearing her say that reminds me that I can have a future in this field and that I am capable.”

For her part, Nicole says the benefits of mentoring flow both ways. “I love to see my students grow intellectually, personally, socially. It is such an honor for me to get to mentor them in any and all of these arenas. As so many people say about mentoring, I know that I get at least as much back from these relationships as my students do. So, how could I ever say no? It is one of the most important and fulfilling parts of my job. I am honored to watch students like Vivian just continue to rise.”

Viraj Singh ’19 and Jonathan Wilson ’19

Pomona puts a lot of work into pairing first-year roommates, but as we all know, it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes, however, the result is golden. Viraj values Jonathan’s fun-loving spontanaeity, and Jonathan appreciates Viraj’s sense of humor. “He’s a go-to funny guy in our hall,” Jonathan says, “and has been known to drop unexpected comments that make everyone in a room keel over in laughter.”

But it’s not just laughter. “In October, my best friend from high school passed away from neuroblastoma,” Jonathan says. “Viraj never pressured me into talking about it or made it about him, but was willing to listen when I wanted to talk. That’s the best I could have asked for in a friend.”

“When you are put in a room with someone else,” Viraj says, “it’s rewarding to be able to talk about anything and truly feel comfortable around him.” Before they go to bed at night, he says, they will often debrief, talking through the significant parts of the day. “It serves as a mini-therapy,” he says.

Ed Tessier ’91 and Professor Emeritus of Sociology Bob Herman ’51

Bob likes to say he learned more from students like Ed than they learned from him. Ed’s response: “He changed my life.”

An activist since his Pomona days, Ed uses his role as a city planner and developer to make neighborhoods more livable, downtowns livelier, the arts more visible and public places more accessible. “He’s taken the things I was teaching and used them,” Bob says.”He’s a practitioner. He’s doing things. I was just talking in front of a class.”

“We had lunch last week to debate this,” Ed says. “I didn’t know it at the time, but a lot of what Bob was preaching was actually very edgy in the field. When I went out as an activist and was quoting Jane Jacobs and siding with the new urbanists, the development community around here marked me as a real rabble-rousing radical. Now they’ve all changed their tune. This is the new orthodox. So Bob gave me a good 25-year head start on the rest of the field.”

Cesar Meza ’16 and Draper Center Director Maria Tucker

Cesar was 14 years old when he first met Maria as a student in the Pomona College Academy for Youth Success (PAYS). “We were in the Wig lobby when I first introduced myself to her,” he recalls. “Before I could even finish saying my name she told me what city I was from and what high school I went to.”

Years later, when he was accepted as a Pomona College first-year, he already knew he wanted to work at the Draper Center. Since then, the Center—and Maria—have continued to play a huge role in his education. “I would not be the active student I am today without her guidance and support,” he says. “She has helped me navigate through difficult situations and given me the motivation to overcome any obstacles.”

For her part, Maria says the chance to mentor smart, caring students like Cesar is one of the biggest perks of the job. “For me, these relationships keep alive the notion that education transforms lives as well as communities,” she says.

Jamila Espinosa ’16 and Lucia Ruan ’16

Jamila and Lucia met at Women’s Union during their first year, but their friendship didn’t really blossom until the following summer, when they began to exchange thoughts and experiences over Facebook, a habit they continue to this day.

“Lucia is one of the most thoughtful people I know.” Jamila says. “Whether it be finals week, or Christmas, or Valentine’s Day, or your birthday, you can count on some type of recognition from her. She is the master of planning surprise parties. She also knows where to find the funniest memes on the Internet, and I especially admire her fashion sense. In short, she is fabulous on the inside and out.”

Lucia describes Jamila as “a huge support in my life and someone I share almost everything with. Even this past weekend, I was feeling incredibly down, and she came into my room and kept me company, waiting for the moment I was ready to share what was bothering me and offering suggestions that push me in the right direction towards taking care of myself.”

Richard Bookwalter ’82 and Galen Leung ’82

Richard and Galen recall meeting as first-year students who had been elected as members of the Freshman Dorm Council, representing Walker (Galen) and Oldenborg (Richard). Early in the second semester, the group threw a Survivors’ Party for students who had made it through the first half of the year, and afterwards, Richard says, “we were the only two who showed up on the cleaning committee.”

Over the next couple of years, they mostly went their separate ways—different dorms, different majors, different groups of friends. But after Galen returned from a junior year semester in Washington, D.C., and Richard returned from a semester abroad in Geneva, Switzerland, the two met again at a Gay Student Union meeting, and by the end of their senior year, the two knew they wanted to be together.

Three decades later, they’re still together, and on August 30, 2008, they were married.

“I think our relationship has lasted over 34 years because we are able to communicate with each other,” Galen says. “I love Richard because he’s the best—intelligent, feeling and concerned about the world, himself and others. His perspective and empathy help me relax and enjoy the moment and the world around me.”

Shadiah Sigala ’06 and Kaneisha Grayson ’06

Shadiah and Kaneisha now live almost 2,000 miles apart, but at heart, they’re always closer. “Kaneisha is one of my life partners,” Shadiah says. “There are a handful of those people in my life—including my husband, mom and daughter—and Kaneisha makes it on the short list.”

The two met during a first-year seminar class, but it wasn’t until the following semester that they became close. During a trip to Washington, D.C., Kaneisha came up to Shadiah and said, with her usual directness, “You’re going to be my friend.”

“I thought, ‘Who is this bold, confident woman?’” Shadiah remembers. They soon discovered that they were much alike, though Shadiah thought of Kaneisha as “a more advanced version of me.” She adds: “Truthfully, she showed me all that I was capable of doing, simply by being herself.”

Now, Kaneisha says, the shoe is on the other foot as she learns from her friend’s experiences in life and work. “I love how Shadiah can tackle very difficult things,” she says, “planning a wedding, being married, working a demanding job, being a mom, even looking for a startup job during a brutal recession, while staying very positive and still engaging in self-care. Having a close friend go through many life events just a bit before you do—and report back the truth of how it’s simultaneously not as bad and way harder than others make it seem—is very encouraging and uplifting.”

Dan Stoebel ’00 and Biology Professor Daniel Martínez

Daniel Martínez joined the Pomona faculty in 1997, and Dan was one of his first student researchers. “His project was very hard,” Daniel recalls. “I can’t believe we did manual gene sequencing using radiation, but at the time, it was the only way.”

“What made Daniel unique was that he treated us like colleagues,” says Dan, who went on to follow in Daniel’s footsteps, earning his Ph.D. at the same institution, SUNY Stony Brook, and becoming a professor of biology at neighboring Harvey Mudd College.

“Daniel told us quite honestly that much of the material was not his field of expertise, and this turned out to be valuable. Daniel was not an authority, but rather modeled how those who know how to learn go about doing it. As he struggled with us to understand a poorly explained experiment, or a seemingly contradictory result, we got to watch a professional scientist in the process of intellectual exploration. In putting himself on the line for us, in making himself vulnerable to failure with us, Daniel was a role model for the type of learning that we all have to do after we graduate. I am profoundly grateful for his willingness to do so.”

Michelle Chan ’17 and Sophia Sun ’18

When Sophia was trying to decide between Pomona and two big universities, she introduced herself in a post on the Facebook page for each institution. The warm and welcoming response from Pomona students, including Michelle, convinced her that Pomona was where she belonged. “Even through Facebook,” she says, “I could tell that Michelle was incredibly warm, passionate, and curious—an initial impression that has been wholly confirmed by all my interactions with her.”

“We’re both perpetually awestruck with gratitude in our landing at Pomona,” Michelle says. “and we feed off each other’s energy in our passion for more. Sophia has taught me how to embrace life head-on and not waste a single opportunity to learn and reflect.”

Face Time

April 7, 2016 by Julie Scharper Comments Off

Spirits of Saturn was a fine, white powder that 17th-century women smoothed into their skin. Also known as Venetian ceruse, it hid smallpox scars, spots and blemishes, transforming faces into a fashionable pallor. It also slowly poisoned the wearer—it was made of powdered lead.

Over time, the powder caused teeth to rot, hairlines to recede and, in a particularly cruel twist of irony, the skin to shrivel and turn gray. Yet, for hundreds of years, European and Asian women dabbed lead on their faces. It’s not even the most unsavory preparation that women have used to whiten their skin. Ancient Roman women used crocodile dung; Japanese women preferred nightingale droppings.

Women have been powdering their cheeks, lining their eyes and rouging their lips for nearly all of recorded history. The story of makeup may begin even earlier—stores of red ochre found in Paleolithic caves suggest humans have been painting their skin for 100,000 years.

While ideals of beauty change over time and across cultures, some elements are nearly universal: fair, unblemished skin, ruby lips, alluring eyes. Psychologist Richard Russell ’97, who studies the biological underpinnings of beauty, believes he has figured out why.

Through a series of elegantly-designed experiments, Russell has proved that women’s faces have greater contrast than men’s. It’s as if Mother Nature applied an Instagram filter to the female face to make the eyes and mouth pop out from the rest of the features. And this contrast, Russell discovered, appears at puberty and ebbs at menopause, making it a marker of fertility.

In other words, Russell solved a riddle nearly as old as humanity. Why do women wear makeup? To look more feminine and more fertile. “There’s a lot of information we get from a face—age, health, sex, race, trustworthiness,” he says. “There are judgments that we make, even though we’re taught not to make them.”

Russell is not what you might picture when you think of a makeup scholar. The 40-year-old Gettysburg College professor is partial to plaid shirts and wire-rimmed glasses. He spends his free time hiking with his kids, not perusing the counters at Sephora. Even his wife, Carrie Russell, an attorney and novelist, doesn’t wear much makeup, Russell says. “Part of how I study this is I have an outsider’s viewpoint,” he says. “I don’t put that much work into my appearance.”

Russell’s interest in perception began during his undergrad days at Pomona, where he majored in neuroscience. Working on a student mural project sparked an interest in art, and Russell decided he wanted to study how the mind perceives beauty.

He received a doctorate in cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then joined a post-doc program at Harvard. It was there that Russell made his first major contribution to the understanding of facial perception.

Russell was studying prosopagnosics, people who are exceptionally bad at recognizing faces (the term comes from the Greek words for “face” and “ignorance.” Prosopagnosics are unable to identify co-workers, friends, and, in the most extreme cases, their own spouses.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote extensively about prosopagnosia, a condition with which he himself was afflicted. In an essay, he recounted being unable to recognize his own psychoanalyst when passing him in the lobby after a session. On another occasion, a woman he had been sharing a waiting room with informed him that she was his longtime assistant. She had been waiting to see if he could recognize her without prompting.

While some prosopagnosics, such as Sacks, apparently suffer from a hereditary condition, others lose the ability to recognize faces after an accident or illness. Scientists believe that a portion of the right side of the visual cortex, known as the fusiform face area, is primarily responsible for facial recognition.

As Russell studied people who had problems recognizing faces, he began to wonder if there were others who were exceptionally good at recognizing them. While researchers had traditionally thought facial recognition was a skill that people either possessed or lacked, Russell had a hunch that it was an ability that lay on a spectrum.

One of Russell’s subjects had told him of a friend who had an extraordinary talent for remembering faces. This young man recognized people he had glimpsed at a concert years ago. He had a mental library of extras from TV shows and movies. Russell devised a test to spot exceptional facial recognition ability. He administered it to his subject’s friend, and others, and discovered that there were indeed people who had an innate talent for identifying faces. In a 2009 paper, Russell announced the existence of such people and coined a term for them: super-recognizers.

Just as prosopagnosics often describe faking recognition to avoid embarrassment, super-recognizers admit to hiding their talents, Russell says. They learn, over time, that acquaintances can be creeped out when they say they remember passing them on the street years earlier.

Russell’s discovery has led him to question what other cognitive abilities exist on a spectrum.

“There’s an assumption in experimental psychology that we’re all the same,” he says. With the exception of personality and intelligence, most characteristics are assumed to be either-or. You have them, or you don’t. But if there is a spectrum for facial recognition, perhaps one exists for other abilities as well.

Harvard psychologist Nancy Etcoff, who also studies the biological basis of beauty, says Russell’s work challenges the field’s established notions. “He’ll take a known finding and make you think about it in a different way,” she says. Russell is a “creative, thoughtful and rigorous researcher,” whose research has inspired some of her own recent work, she says.

Richard Russell and a student at a computer

Richard Russell ’97 works with a student in his lab at Gettysburg College.

While many think of beauty as a subjective construct, Etcoff argues in her book, Survival of the Prettiest, that we are primed to find certain evolutionarily adaptive traits attractive.

Studies show that attractive faces meet certain criteria. They’re symmetrical. They’re youthful. They’re sexually dimorphic—males are manly and females are womanly. And, they’re—well—average.

The first three criteria aren’t really surprising; all signal fertility. But what does the fourth mean? When scientists blend together images of many faces, people find the composite much more attractive than any of the other faces. These “average” faces mimic our own mental images of the archetypal male and female face.

That female face, it’s important to mention, is lighter than the male face—women are, quite literally, the fairer sex. Regardless of ethnic group or skin color, women’s faces reflect 3 percent more light than their male counterparts. The contrast is most noticeable during young adulthood, and fades with age.

According to one hypothesis, women have paler skin during their fertile years so that they can more easily synthesize vitamin D3, which helps absorb the calcium a developing fetus needs.

To test his theory on facial contrast, Russell showed a series of male and female composite faces to subjects. He decreased the contrast for some of them. When subjects saw female faces with less contrast, they ranked them as less attractive. But the opposite was true for male faces—subjects thought the men grew more attractive when their eyes and lips stood out less.

For other photos, Russell increased the contrast between the eyes and lips and surrounding skin. Subjects said that this made the female faces more attractive, while the male faces became less so.

Russell then morphed together images of men and women, creating an androgynous face. Again, he tweaked the level of contrast. When subjects saw the androgynous face with a high level of contrast, they said it appeared to be a woman. But when they saw the same face with a low level of contrast, they said it appeared to be a man. Russell then conducted follow-up experiments that showed that reducing the level of contrast in a woman’s face made her look older.

So how does all of this relate to the cosmetics counter? Women use makeup to darken their eyelids and brows, to hide skin imperfections and to add color to their lips and cheeks. In other words, as Russell also demonstrated in a 2009 paper, makeup increases facial contrast. By making their eyes and lips pop, women make themselves look younger and more feminine, and, therefore, more attractive.

Etcoff made headlines a few years ago with a study that showed people perceive women wearing makeup as not only more attractive, but more competent and trustworthy. What we tend to think of as a “natural look,” is actually a face that has been subtly embellished with makeup.

“Women use makeup similarly across time and cultures,” Russell says. “I’m trying to marry the knowledge of perceptions of human attractiveness with what people have been doing for thousands of years to enhance their faces. We could learn a lot about makeup by applying this psychological research.” Chanel, the century-old French cosmetics company, seems to think so too, since it’s currently funding some of Russell’s research.

In the future, Russell is interested in delving into other aspects of appearance. After all, people have been styling their hair and covering their bodies for at least as long as they have been painting their skin. What do we reveal—and hide—about our evolutionary fitness through clothing and hair?

“Some people think a core aspect of what makes us human is altering our appearance,” Russell says.

Famous

April 7, 2016 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

Eddie Murphy (times three)

If the surreality of being on a plane with Elizabeth Taylor en route to Paris for the Cannes Film Festival and then being whisked away in a limo with her upon landing isn’t memorable enough, picture this: Elizabeth Taylor making the limo driver pull over on the tarmac so she could let her little Maltese out to do its business. This is a celebrity photographer’s eye view—and one moment you really wish you had on film, according to Michael Larsen ’89.

But Larsen has snapped a million other moments and more photos of famous faces than you can count. Name a Hollywood star and he’s probably captured them on his camera. Brad Pitt. Halle Berry. Clint Eastwood. Cate Blanchett. Since 1997, the celebrity portraiture and lifestyle photography of husband and wife team Larsen and Tracy Talbert—they met in high school when he was the yearbook photographer and she was the school newspaper photographer—have appeared worldwide in magazines like People, Esquire, InStyle, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, and for commercial clients like NBC, Fox, Bravo and Warner Brothers.

Michael Douglas

Keira Knightley

Larsen’s childhood dream was to be a filmmaker—he adored “Star Wars”—and he learned the principles of filmmaking through still photography. He was 14 when he got his first camera, an Olympus OM1 35mm, and he went on to work as a photographer for the yearbook throughout high school and The Student Life while at Pomona. He was never without his camera and was always in the darkroom, he says. “It was a constant, daily practice for me.”

After graduation he set out on his pursuit of a film career but realized after a grueling two years that this wasn’t what he wanted to do after all, he says.

Tom Hanks

“I looked around at the career paths of the crew and camera people and it looked pretty depressing in terms of their personal lives,” he says, thanks to long brutal hours that he saw taxed families.

A photography workshop Larsen attended in upstate New York led to a conversation, which led to an invitation, which led to a pivot. He talked to Douglas Kirkland, one of the first modern celebrity portrait photographers, who told him about the role of photo assistants. Larsen remembers thinking, “Wait a minute, what is that? That’s a job?”

Kirkland invited him to a shoot with Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” and Larsen, after seeing how professional celebrity shoots happen, was hooked and decided then this was the path for him. “I was just completely taken. It was kind of like filmmaking in that you’re building sets and creating worlds, but you’re doing it in a five-hour period, instead of months and days,” says Larsen.

Tilda Swinton

His first gig was a teddy bears shoot for a toy catalog but over the course of seven years his experience expanded to assisting the biggest names in the field like Annie Leibovitz, Nigel Parry, Kirkland and Firooz Zahedi (Larsen helped him with the now iconic movie poster for “Pulp Fiction”).

Larsen says Leibovitz influenced him greatly with the artistic style she would bring to her shoots: whether putting Demi Moore in body paint, dumping Whoopi Goldberg in a tub of milk, or asking John Lennon to be naked and hug Yoko Ono on the floor. (To this day Larsen wonders about Lennon and Ono’s initial reactions to that request.)

Larsen and Talbert have spent two decades building that kind of creative trust with celebrities and, now more than in bygone eras, also with stars’ publicists, who do the initial vetting and then often give the final yay or nay. From his very first shoot Larsen says he realized that celebrity photography isn’t just about taking a nice picture; it’s about psychology and politics as well.

Matthew McConaughey

Jane Lynch

As soon as a subject arrives on set, the face is the first place his eyes go. Lighting changes are made accordingly and wardrobes are assessed based on body types.

“Celebrities are actually very vulnerable at this point,” says Larsen. “A bad photographer or a magazine with an agenda could make them look bad intentionally if they wanted. We made a decision a long time ago that we were in the business for the long run, and so it’s incredibly important that we treat our subjects with respect and not violate the trust they put in us.”

Ben Affleck

(“Every once in awhile you get a subject who is so stunningly beautiful they look great no matter what. Halle Berry was one of those,” he says.)

If all goes well there is that magic click, when the shutter release button meets “a moment, a pose, the light, where you think to yourself, ‘That’s it!’ Anything you get after that is just gravy,” he explains.

Ray Charles

But often, he says, you don’t see the magic until after the fact. “Sometimes during the shoot I think, ‘Wow, this person is really a dud, nothing going on at all,’ and then you start looking through the pictures and realize they were doing something very subtle and intense and they actually gave you a gift,” he says. “That’s the fun of photography: discovering what you really captured later, after all the rigmarole of the shoot has passed and you’re just sitting with the images in front of you. Sometimes that same discovery can come years later when you’re looking back through the shoots.”

And then there are the shoots that go awry. They had 10 minutes with Jodie Foster when Larsen realized he had accidentally shot in multiple exposure and all the photos were on one frame. He threw his back out completely on a shoot with Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon and was unable to stand, so Talbert put the camera on a tripod, focused, and Larsen just pushed the button. Both times they still got the money shot.

Hugh Jackman

Cameron Diaz

Then of course, there are the difficult, er, quirky celebrities. The hardest session he recalls was with Christopher Walken. “As we were shooting, if we wanted him to look at the camera, we had to say ‘look.’ I said ‘look.’ He’d look at the camera for one frame, and then look away. He insisted that we say ‘look’ for every frame that we wanted him to look at the camera. Eventually, we got into a rhythm, but it threw me off at first.”

LeBron James

The smoothest shoot? Brad Pitt. “I had worked with him back in the early ’90s on a movie called Cool World. He hadn’t quite exploded yet and liked to hang out with the crew instead of hiding in his RV like the other big actors. When we did the shoot, he was the same laid-back guy. No fuss. But when he left the studio after our shoot, his car got attacked by paparazzi as it was pulling away. It was hard to watch that. We had a lot of sympathy for him and the price he pays for fame.”

Tracy Talbert and MIchael Larsen (photo by Luke & Ada Larsen)

Celebrities are just normal people who happen to have really interesting jobs, says Larsen. And they make his work interesting as well. “We’re very lucky to be able to get to spend some time with these folks and get a glimpse into their world, which is creative and at the leading edge of our culture. I think that’s the most rewarding part: a front row seat to American culture —the transcendent and the infamous, but distinctly American. It’s a privilege,” he says.

“The fact that I get paid to do this makes me feel very grateful and a little guilty.”

(Photos Copyright Larsen&Talbert)

Jumping the Shark

April 7, 2016 by Adam Conner-Simons ’08 Comments Off

Justin Fenchel with a BeatBox cocktail box

Photo by Michael Larsen ’89 and Tracy Talbert

How do you look a man in the eye and ask him for a million dollars on national television?

“You have to just go for it and not think about it,” Justin Fenchel ’06 says. “As soon as anyone in the room senses weakness, you’re doomed.”

It was June of 2014, and Fenchel was talking shop with Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and one of the judges on the ABC reality show “Shark Tank.” Cuban had just bid $600,000 to buy a third of Fenchel’s company, and eight million TV viewers were waiting for an answer.

Running the numbers in his head, the Pomona economics major was hesitant to say yes. His team had agreed beforehand that they wouldn’t give up more than 20 percent of the business unless they received a particularly hefty bid.

The room was suddenly eerily quiet. The show’s dramatic background music wouldn’t be added for several more months, and the bright studio lights were making Fenchel feel like he was about to black out. (Looking at the transcript afterwards, he says, “I don’t remember half of the comments I appear to have made.”)

One thing he did recall saying, though, was his reply to Cuban: “Would you do a million?”

Cuban paused a beat.

“Sure.”

With those four letters, Fenchel’s life changed in a very big way.

BeatBox Beverages, his line of wine-based cocktails that come in blindingly bright 5-liter boxes, had just been valued at three million dollars, and was about to experience the unique joy that is “the Shark Tank effect.”

After not being stocked in a single store 18 months earlier, BeatBox soon expanded to nearly 900 locations in 13 states, all while grabbing celebrity endorsements and positioning itself to take on the biggest players in the wine world.

Reflecting on BeatBox’s rapid rise, Fenchel shakes his head and grins sheepishly.

“To think,” he says. “It all basically started with a game of ‘slap-the-bag.’”

Boxed-Wine Beginnings

Like Facebook and Napster before it, the origin story for BeatBox quite literally begins in a dorm room.

One of Fenchel’s fondest Pomona memories was living in the North Campus trailers and hosting “boxed-wine Tuesdays,” where his roommates would buy a case of Franzia wine and invite friends over to watch movies. His Pomona years coincided nicely with the rise of “slap-the-bag,” a drinking tradition that involves removing a bag of wine from its box, slapping the side of the bag, and taking a swig right from the nozzle.

Fenchel enjoyed the communal nature of “slap-the-bag,” and found Franzia convenient, affordable—and completely boring.

“The only reason I bought it was because there wasn’t a more appealing option,” he says. “It made me wonder if I could take the idea of a boxed wine, and recreate it so people my age would actually be excited to bring it to a party.”

After college he and his childhood friend Brad Schultz collaborated on a few iPhone apps, while still kicking around drink ideas.

In 2011 they dreamt up “Wine-ergy,” a caffeinated beverage coming in flavors like “Call-A-Cab” and “ZinFUNdel”; they promptly nixed the concept after the caffeine-infused Four Loko courted controversy on college campuses. A few months later they mulled over a vodka-based drink, before learning that regulations on spirits would limit their “party in a box” to a decidedly un-party-like 12 servings.

What finally kick-started BeatBox was, of all things, a glass of OJ. Specifically, Fenchel stumbled across a special wine made of oranges that drinks more like a spirit and pairs deliciously with fruit juice. By 2012 he had built a team of co-founders and developed flavors that were directly inspired by his days making Crystal Light and vodka mixers at Pomona.

On a bootstrap budget, Fenchel’s team crowd-sourced a logo and package design. To focus-group their product, they would plaster BeatBox stickers onto cardboard boxes, put test batches into empty wine-bags (“Thanks, Franzia!”), and walk around local events giving out free samples.

“We’d go to festivals and ask for brutally honest feedback on which flavors tasted best,” Fenchel recalls. “We knew we were onto something when people were literally throwing 20 dollar bills at us and asking where they could buy it.”

BeatBox’s first production run was just in time for the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in March of 2013. Slowly but steadily, the company grew—from 20 cases a month, to 50, to 100, with Fenchel and his three colleagues still packaging and pressing every box.

“By 2014 we had increased our distribution 800 percent, but realized that we were still spending all our time in the warehouse and none of it expanding,” he says. “We needed money.”

Getting in the Tank

Justin Fenchel and his Beatbox partners on the stage on SharkTank

Justin Fenchel ’06 and his Beatbox partners on ABC’s SharkTank

Customers had been constantly telling Fenchel that his company seemed ripe for “Shark Tank.” When producers announced an open casting call at SXSW 2014, he stood in line for two hours to give his 30-second pitch. Three months later, BeatBox was one of 108 teams to be selected for the show, out of 70,000 annual submissions. (“You’d have a better chance getting into Harvard, or even Pomona,” Fenchel says.)

The team feverishly prepared in the ensuing weeks, painstakingly researching the show’s five judges and enlisting business faculty from the University of Texas to serve as “mock sharks.” They learned about the sharks’ every move—what they invested in, what they looked for in companies, and even what they ate for breakfast each morning.

“We acted like it was the biggest job interview of our life,” Fenchel says. “Which it was.”

The work paid off: in the months after BeatBox’s episode aired in October 2014, sales doubled and the team expanded from 150 stores to nearly 900. In 2015 they hit a million dollars in sales and rung up endorsements from the likes of electronic musician Skrillex and rapper Waka Flocka Flame, who enthusiastically describes the Blue Razzberry flavor as his “Turnt Up Juice.”

“Shark Tank” also impacted BeatBox in more intangible ways. “It certainly helps when your email to Walmart’s Texas distribution team includes a CC to the most powerful businessman in the state,” says Fenchel, who connects with Cuban at least once a week via email or text. “People who wouldn’t return our calls before were taking meetings with us now.”

As Fenchel zips around the country hobnobbing with potential distributors and investors, one of the most common questions he gets is a simple one: why boxed wine?

As any casual oenophile knows, boxed wine has what Fenchel generously describes as a “perception problem.” The practice of putting wine in boxes first emerged in Australia in the mid-60s, and the cheapness of the approach made it attractive to low-end jug-wine sellers in America.

While companies targeting upscale customers may view the box as a barrier, BeatBox treats it as a key differentiator and marketing tool for millennials who are more interested in having fun than seeming sophisticated.

The box also helps the bottom line, since boxed wine is cheaper to produce, longer-lasting, more convenient and more environmentally-friendly than traditional methods. BeatBox’s sales last year translated to a savings of 530,000 wine bottles that weren’t being produced or trashed.

Justin Fenchel and his partners meeting at a table with Mark Cuban

Justin Fenchel ’06 and his
partners meet with investor
Mark Cuban.

Moving forward, Fenchel’s five-year plan is simple: “More stores, lower costs.” He’s hoping to get big-chain authorizations from the likes of Publix and Kroger, and hopes to soon stock single-serving sizes so that they can sell it at bars and convenience stores.

He also has built a network of more than 250 “brand ambassadors” who organize promotional events and happy hours around the country. It’s all part of his loftier goal to grow BeatBox into a global company on par with Red Bull, with sponsored concerts and sports competitions.

“If anyone can turn BeatBox into a lifestyle brand, it’s the guy who’s embodying that lifestyle,” says Schultz. “The fun-loving, outgoing, celebratory spirit of BeatBox—that’s more or less a direct reflection of Justin and who he is as a person.”

Before I Die

April 7, 2016 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Most of the people gathered around the card tables at the Senior Center in Longmont, Colo., this morning seem to be my age or older—in their 60s or 70s. They sit three or four to a table and peek at their cards, as I do at mine.

Unlike most card games, GoWish gives each player a full deck—cards bearing no diamonds or spades, no aces or deuces. Just words. Words like: “To be mentally aware.” And “Not to be connected to machines.” And “To be at peace with God.”

The object here isn’t winning—it’s understanding. By organizing our cards into numbered priorities, we’re all seeking to come to grips with the nitty-gritty of our own mortality—that is, to decide how we would prefer to die.

As I shuffle through my cards and grapple with my own priorities (Do I want to be free from pain more than I want the chance to see my close friends one last time? Should I rank having my financial affairs in order above having a doctor I trust?), my host, Peggy Arnold ’65 wanders from table to table, asking probing questions and offering nuggets of information about the world of modern death. Just starting the process of talking about the subject, she says, is therapeutic—taking us back to a day when death was a visible part of life.

“Death in our culture has become a medical event, not a personal experience,” she says. “It used to be that children would run in and out of the parlor when the body was lying there. Or people grew up on farms, where life and death were always present.” Modern death, she says, is often hidden away behind hospital curtains, and most people have no clue what awaits them there.

At my table, one person picks as her top priority “To be free from anxiety.” Another chooses “To have an advocate who knows my values and priorities.” I settle on “To have my family with me.”

In each case, it soon becomes clear that there are personal experiences behind the choice. The person who wants to be free from anxiety explains that her mother spent weeks before her death in a terrible state of fear. The person who hopes for an advocate worries about having no one she can trust. It only occurs to me afterward that my own choice might have something to do with the fact that both my parents died suddenly, without a chance to say goodbye.

“What’s really interesting about that game,” Arnold says, “is what happens when people have a discussion about why they chose what they chose. Really, it’s a values clarification game.”

Taking Back Dying

For Arnold, the program coordinator for Longmont United Hospital’s AgeWell program, this game, and the reflections and conversations it prompts, are also part of a larger movement—a grass-roots crusade that has been spreading across the country for the past few years. The goal: to reclaim death from the medical establishment and empower people to make choices about how they wish to spend their final days.

“To me, what’s exciting is that people are starting to take back their own death and dying process,” she says. “Look at everything that goes on around birth—all the joy and the care, the respect and the dignity that goes on. But on the other end of the conveyor belt, this hasn’t been happening.”

Today, medical technology can prolong life almost indefinitely, but as Arnold points out, in too many cases that has simply prolonged suffering and turned the end of life into a horror show. “Most people—there are always exceptions, but most people—are not going to want to go out of this life hooked to beeping machines, with tubes everywhere,” she says.

Like the Advanced Directives class she teaches at the Senior Center, this game of GoWish is intended to help participants think clearly about their options while there’s still time. Arnold likes to quote Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ellen Goodman, the founder of The Conversation Project, who said: “It’s always too soon, until it’s too late.”

Since 2010, The Conversation Project has been focusing on encouraging people to have a conversation with their loved ones about their end-of-life wishes. That, however, is only one of the visible prongs of this burgeoning movement. Another is the Death Cafés, which sprang up in the United Kingdom, also in 2010, and have now spread across the United States, offering people a forum for freewheeling discussions of death and dying over cookies or a slice of cake. Then there’s the Green Burial movement, which seeks to reclaim the long-lost right of natural burial, without embalming or caskets or concrete vaults to inhibit the natural recycling process. And at the heart of it all, there’s an increasing number of activist physicians like Dr. Angelo Volandes, author of The Conversation, and Dr. Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal, who are seeking to change the ethos of end-of-life care by pulling back the curtain on hospital death and challenging both their fellow doctors and the public to look at the subject differently.

Peggy Arnold ’65 adds her wish to the “Before I Die” Wall at the Art Museum of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In the area around Longmont and Boulder, Arnold is at the center of a small but determined community of end-of-life reformers whom she dubs, with affection and “M*A*S*H”-style humor, “the Deathies.” There’s Kim Mooney, an experienced end-of-life counselor and certified thanatologist (death scholar) who recently started her own company, called Practically Dying. There’s Bart Windrum, who, following the disastrous hospital experiences of his two dying parents, was moved to write Notes from the Waiting Room, a guide book for families of the terminally ill. There’s retired emergency room physician Jean Abbott, who is urging her fellow doctors to get over their squeamishness about removing patients from life-prolonging equipment when the outcome is no longer in doubt.

What the Deathies all have in common is that they’re passionate about returning control over the end of life to the dying and their families.

One Death

For her part, Arnold says death has always seemed an integral part of her life. Her mother’s father died two months before she was born, and she suspects that her mother’s grief may have affected her in the womb. One of her first playgrounds in her hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, was a cemetery where she played among the tombstones of runaway slaves. Then there was her grandfather’s suicide by walking in front of a train here in Claremont. “I could go on and on with all these experiences of death,” she says. “So it’s really no surprise that it’s been a theme for me. Maybe not THE theme, but it’s definitely been part of the story.”

Having worked as a hospice volunteer before taking her current job 15 years ago, she says the part of her work that relates to “the death trade” just evolved naturally. “You could call it ‘unbidden,’” she says. “It just appeared, and I was the one who was asked to do it.”

First she was designated as the hospital representative to a short-lived organization called the Front Range End of Life, which focused on creating resources for the terminally ill. Then the hospital decided to do a video about planning for the end of life, and guess who got the job? Then they needed someone to teach a class on advanced directives… “It’s like the underground of aspen groves,” she says. “Their root systems go on for acres and keep shooting up new stems. The time for this had come, and I happened to be in the middle of the grove.”

Then, five years ago, her focus on death and dying took a turn for the personal. An old friend, Mogens Baungaard Thomsen—a Danish exchange student in her high school who had become a vascular surgeon in Sweden—revealed that he was living with a death sentence—kidney cancer that had metastasized to his lungs.

“We just started Skyping a lot and had the most fascinating conversations,” Arnold says. “At some point, I said, ‘Mo, I’d love to record what you’re saying. I think it is so wise.’ He was a physician. He was a widower. Now he was facing his own end.”

So they made a video together about his experience of dying. “He talked about all the adventures he’d had in his life, like being with headhunters in New Guinea, and how everything he did was just a new adventure,” she says. “Sometimes it was scary, but he knew that was part of who he was. He loved all those adventures. And so, he was looking at death as the next adventure.”

Peggy Arnold writes at her desk with a photo of Mogens Thomsen and his granddaughter

Peggy Arnold ’65 at her desk with a photo of Mogens Thomsen and his granddaughter.

At the time, Thomsen didn’t expect to live long enough to see his new grandchild, but he outlived his own prognosis. “There’s a picture of them together,” Arnold says, pointing to a photo pinned above her desk of Thomsen holding his granddaughter. “And he actually lived almost two years longer.”

During that time, they made two more videos together. The first, prompted by Thomsen’s terrible experiences with the Swedish healthcare system, is aimed at his fellow doctors, giving them heart-felt advice on how to relate to people who are dying.

The second, made shortly before his death, is less philosophical, more practical and more emotionally raw—what he wants for his last meal (a cheeseburger or maybe fish and chips); what music he would like to hear on his deathbed (a piece by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy that he listened to with his wife while she was dying); what he wants on his epitaph (“I don’t want one”).

The exchanges between Thomsen and Arnold sound at times like an interview, at times like old friends chatting, at times like therapy. “Although I’ve seen so many people die, I still don’t know what goes on at the end,” Thomsen reflects at one point. “As long as I’m aware of what’s going on, I would probably want to cling to my relatives and have them with me, but that’s a very egoistic way of thinking. I don’t think it’s a pleasure for them to see me die.”

“You could ask,” Arnold gently suggests. “It may not be a pleasure, but it may be important.”

“You’re right,” Thomsen says. “I hadn’t even thought of asking. Thank you.”

Four months later, when Thomsen finally reached what he called his “expiration date,” both of his sons were at his side.

“As it turned out, he had a medical emergency, went to the hospital, and though he would never have wanted to die there, that’s exactly what happened,” Arnold recalls. “And it was probably the best thing, as it turned out, because a really good friend who was a doctor was able to be there to make sure everything was going to happen the way Mo would want it. And it meant that his two sons could actually be there.”

It’s About Life

In the end, Arnold says, her experience with Thomsen taught her something important—not about death, but about life.

“What we learned from him is that, first of all, we do need to be looking at death face to face. No one should tell anybody else how to do this, but I think there’s a lot to gain from looking at it—not just at the end, but in relation to the end. What is life about? What is today about? Tomorrow isn’t here yet, so what do I want my life to be about today? That, to me, is the goal of doing this work.”

In the end, as much as we may avoid the subject, we all have our own expiration dates—we just don’t know what they are yet. Arnold sometimes wonders how she would respond to a terminal diagnosis herself. Would her work still have meaning? Would she find joy in little things, as her friend Mo did at the end?

In the meantime, she continues to teach her classes and organize events and counsel seniors who come to her for advice. And she continues to let her involvement with death inform her thinking about life.

“Advanced directives are just documents,” she says. “The medical people need them. But what’s interesting to me is the thought that has to go into them. So that means people have to look at what their values are, what their beliefs are, what their goals in life are, what quality of life means to them, all of these things. If they’re really thinking about it and taking it seriously, they’ve got to look death in the face and figure out what their relationship is to it. And that means, ‘What’s your relationship to life?’”

Joe’s Big Idea

December 2, 2015 by Andrea Appleton Comments Off

Joe Palca’s cubicle in NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters is strewn with bicycle gear from his daily commute, assorted piles of books about science, and random objects: a can of mackerel, a leaf-shaped bottle of maple syrup. From this cluttered perch, the longtime science correspondent has the power to shape what becomes news. If Joe Palca ’74 decides a story is worth putting on the air, roughly a million listeners hear it. And if he misses a story, well, some of those listeners may never hear about it.

In 1996, Science magazine published a study on a novel approach to treating cancer. Immunologist James Allison and his co-authors reported that they had successfully treated malignant tumors in mice by blocking molecules on immune system cells that act as a brake on immune response. Palca didn’t cover the study. “Nobody covered that paper,” he shrugs. “Everybody has cured cancer in mice.”

Two decades later, Allison’s immunotherapy methods have led to the first effective treatment for advanced melanoma. Patients used to die in less than a year; with treatment based on Allison’s research, some now live more than a decade. Allison has won dozens of prestigious awards for this work in recent years, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, often a precursor to the Nobel.

Someone, it seems, ought to have reported on that initial study. “If news is to tell you about the things that are important,” Palca says, “that’s the paper I should have been telling you about.” But out of all the promising studies published that week, Palca could not have known which one would make history. Reporters rarely do. “None of us in science journalism is smart enough to know which are the really important papers,” he says. “No one is.”

Nevertheless, the media generally presents scientific findings as if they were breaking news. As a result, Palca says, studies that will later prove inconsequential get the limelight, sometimes simply because they lend themselves to sexy headlines. Meanwhile, reporters inadvertently ignore research that, in hindsight, they ought to have covered (like that 1996 immunotherapy study). So a few years ago, after two decades as an NPR science correspondent, Palca had an idea. A big idea. What if he stopped trying to identify the important science stories and focused exclusively on the interesting ones?

Three years later, Joe’s Big Idea is going strong. The series tells the stories behind innovations: what drives scientists and inventors, how they come up with their ideas, and how they implement them (or try to). Palca has produced pieces on soccer-playing robots, ant traffic patterns, and a phone app that checks photos for eye disease. He’s followed efforts to end dengue fever, the search for life on Mars and the passionate quest for the perfect toothbrush. He hopes that by focusing on what’s intriguing about the scientific process, listeners will come to share his fascination. As he recently told an audience, “I want people to know there’s a joy and a delight and a beauty in science.”

The key to conveying that beauty is often the researcher. “You can’t tell a really moving story about a nanoparticle,” Palca says. “But the person studying the nanoparticle can be pretty interesting.”

Pediatric oncologist James Olson is a case in point. Olson developed a paint that makes brain tumors glow, helping surgeons to locate and remove them. While the story of the paint itself is fascinating—it’s derived from scorpion venom—the profile of the man behind it got the most emotional response of Palca’s career. It turns out Olson is a practicing physician. This is what drives his tumor research: He’s tired of telling parents their children are going to die. He’s “sick of seeing the devastation on people’s faces,” Palca says in the piece, “sick of feeling helpless.” Yet Olson has the rare ability to cast a child’s cancer prognosis in a bearable light. One parent tells him her 7-year-old’s death to cancer “was as beautiful as her birth” because he helped the family see it that way. Here’s a man who is not only trying to cure pediatric brain cancer; he’s helping parents part with children who’ve succumbed to it. A hundred listeners left grateful comments about the story online. “I had colleagues coming up and hugging me, telling me they were sitting there sobbing,” Palca says. ”And I understand it because it still makes me tear up.”

Of course, not all subjects have such inherent drama. Still, Palca says, scientists are not the cold-blooded, calculating creatures they are often presumed to be. “I’m sick of the caricature, of the white lab coat. The lab coat says ‘I’m an expert, not a person.’”

Palca’s irritation on this subject is personal. An animated guy with a mischievous streak and a penchant for tangents, he is himself a trained scientist. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied human sleep physiology. Remember Jim Allison, the immunologist? Palca worked for him as a lab technician, his first full-time job out of Pomona College. (He also happens to be married to a molecular biologist, a deputy director at the National Institutes of Health.) Palca decamped for journalism immediately after earning his degree. Research was tedious to him. “You have to have a long attention span to be a scientist,” he says.

Palca’s attention span may not have served for years of lab work, but he has covered some impressively arcane research as a reporter. A giant hand-painted bowl in his office is proof. He received the bowl for delivering the 24th annual Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture to the Chemical Heritage Foundation. It was titled “Covering Complex Science, or How I Explained a Frank-Kasper Phase in Sphere-Forming Block Copolymer Melts to a Radio Audience.” Palca really did produce a story on a study by that name. In fact, he chose it precisely because it was so daunting. “I said I’m going to pick the most obscure thing I can find and do a thoughtful, serious story about it just to prove I can,” Palca says. (One charming detail from the piece: the researchers used marshmallows and coffee stirrers to model the molecules they studied.)

Palca claims no research is too obscure to make for an engaging story. He travels around the country giving lectures to scientists about how to couch their research in compelling terms. The trick, he says, is knowing what to leave out. Sometimes it’s the very detail the researcher is most fixated upon. Scientists tend to focus on what is new in their fields, he says, a habit that only perpetuates the media’s tendency to do the same. “A lot of the time scientists think that the ‘news’ is the new thing, which of course it is,” Palca says. “But in fact, the new thing may be pretty tedious.”

Take adaptive optics. This technology has been used in astronomical telescopes for several decades. It unblurs the blurring caused by the atmosphere. “So if you say you want to do a story about adaptive optics, well, the scientist will tell you about how they’ve tuned the laser and how the signal’s getting better and the interferometry,” Palca says. “And you say, ‘Wait a minute! You can do that? You can unblur the atmosphere?’ That’s where scientists get lost. They know about adaptive optics. It doesn’t occur to them that nobody else does.”

That’s because it’s easy to get lost in the details as a researcher, Palca says. The work can be monotonous. Palca recalls reporting on the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep in the mid-1990s, an event that spawned headlines the world over. Scientific findings too often overshadow the work it took to get to them, Palca says. So his reporting focused on the tremendous effort it took to clone just one sheep. Palca did. “It took months of failure, months and months and months of boring, tedious, awful, discouraging failure to get one successful birth,” he says.

By interesting the public in the fits and starts that characterize scientific research and the personal drive that keeps researchers forging ahead, Palca hopes to convey a truer picture of how science really works. He says that the alternative, focusing on dazzling findings and reporting them as breaking news, gives the public the wrong idea. “I think it contributes to a sense of science lurching from breakthrough to breakthrough,” rather than as a continuum with incremental steps along the way, he says. It may also engender mistrust. “I wonder if the need to do more and more and more big science stories, the really exciting stories, has set science up for a fall,” Palca says. “Water on Mars? Wait a minute, I thought you figured that out already. Why are we still hearing about it?”

In the end, Palca hopes his own enthusiasm for science, and that of the people he talks to, is contagious. “The passion that people have and the desire to make a difference, it’s fun to listen to that,” he says. As he told an audience recently: “Not every study is going to lead to Teflon or Tang, but we’re going to learn something about the natural world. That’s got to be worth something in our culture.”

Discovery Cubed

December 2, 2015 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

Photos by Carrie Rosema

The stretch of Foothill Boulevard near the corner of Osborne Street in the northeast San Fernando Valley has been infamous for nearly 25 years. It was there in 1991 that Rodney King was brutally beaten by Los Angeles Police officers after a high-speed chase that ended with the unemployed 25-year-old parolee being kicked, tasered and battered with batons, all captured on videotape by a nearby resident. One year later, the officers’ acquittal sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots that left 53 dead, 2,300 injured and caused $1 billion in property damage.

Today near that spot, children roam the striking, angular modern building that houses the new Discovery Cube Los Angeles, a hands-on museum aimed at teaching young people about science, technology, engineering and math, often referred to by the acronym ‘STEM.’

Inside, Kafi Blumenfield ’93, executive director of the year-old museum, kneels to join a small child sweeping his hands through the sand of an interactive exhibit that displays the resulting changes in topography on a digital map.

To Blumenfield, this is about more than science. She sees the museum as a catalyst for change in the community, a way to build a better Los Angeles by starting near the place known for the traffic stop that changed the history of a city.

“We are in a neighborhood that is full of kids with potential but lacking in resources,” Blumenfield says. “So many of our kids go jobless. They’re strong, eager, talented kids, but they’re jobless. Overlay that with the fact that we have a gap in our pipeline of young people who are ready and willing and able to enter the STEM jobs. So this is a natural fit. If we can provide these kids with additional educational support to encourage them to enter these types of jobs, it will not only make their lives and their households better, but this whole region better.”

Running a children’s science museum might seem an unlikely role for a vibrant, well-connected civic leader whose first job after majoring in politics at Pomona was as a White House intern. (She served in the Clinton Administration two years before the most famous intern in history arrived in Washington.) After earning a law degree from UCLA and working at various jobs related to such issues as housing and the environment, Blumenfield’s most recent role was president and CEO of the Liberty Hill Foundation, an L.A. nonprofit that gives about $5 million a year in grants to grass-roots organizations promoting social causes.

She has strong political ties, both professionally and personally: Her husband is Los Angeles Councilman Bob Blumenfield, a former member of the California State Assembly whose West Valley council district includes Woodland Hills, where the couple lives with their two elementary-aged children.

It was one of Blumenfield’s personal/political connections that led her to Discovery Cube LA. She was having lunch last fall with Wendy Greuel, the former Los Angeles City Controller who ran for mayor against Eric Garcetti in 2013. Greuel, then a consultant for Discovery Cube LA and now vice chair of the board, suddenly envisioned a match between the museum and Blumenfield, who had planned to take a year off to reflect on the next step in her career after leaving Liberty Hill.

“As we were talking about life transitions and things to do in the future,” Greuel says, “I heard how she cared about kids and about how to make a difference in their lives at this age, around elementary school. So I said, ‘Would you ever think about this?’ Because it was outside the box.

“But as she met with the team, you saw that she saw it as more than a building and more than a children’s science museum. She saw it as a way to train teachers to teach science, and a way to excite young girls about science. She sees it as part of a way to seek social justice. She frequently talks about this being the corner where Rodney King was beaten. I’m inspired by her when she gives those tours.

“She gets it. She gets that it’s transformative, not only for the kids who come in, but for the neighborhood. This is a community that wants to be known for something more than where Rodney King was beaten. This is something that’s a spark.”

Among the sparks for Blumenfield were conversations with her daughter, now 9, and her 6-year-old son.

“I was shocked when last year my daughter told me that she was not good at math and science,” Blumenfield says, even though the family had a tradition of outings they called Science Saturdays. “I said, ‘Why do you say that?’ She said, ‘Well, there are not a lot of girls in my class that like math and science.’ We hear that all too often. She was a big part of this project because we really want to see more young girls engaged in science, as we do with young boys.”

Her son, though, “sealed the deal,” Blumenfield says, when the family visited Santa Ana’s Discovery Cube Orange County, the well-established older sister of the two museums. (Together, the museums drew 631,045 visitors in the last fiscal year. About 220,000 have visited Discovery Cube LA since it opened last November, including 34,500 students on field trips.)

“He was 5 at the time, and I couldn’t get him out of the building,” Blumenfield says. When she cautiously broached the topic of going back to work sooner than planned to head Discovery Cube LA, her son’s response was emphatic. “‘We are in!’ he said,” she remembers with a laugh. “So they’re here a lot.”

Despite the STEM focus, Discovery Cube LA is about more than academics and career-related science. It has an additional emphasis on environmental stewardship and healthy living issues of particular importance in the San Fernando Valley, where air quality and aquifer contamination are significant concerns.

The “Aquavator” is an exhibit that simulates descending deep into the earth’s crust in a special elevator to view geological layers while learning about underground water aquifers.

In “Race to Zero Waste,” visitors stand alongside a moving conveyor belt, trying to correctly sort recyclables from other waste to divert trash from landfills. “Look, it’s the trash game,” a woman says as a child runs up to it.

Elsewhere in the museum, a faux market offers healthy local produce, green cleaning products and an opportunity for children to “shop” and check out with their selections.

Another exhibit features a portion of a built-to-scale California home, complete with solar panels. Visitors can go on a sort of scavenger hunt using handheld devices, seeking out opportunities to save energy and water. They find home computer monitors left on when not in use, becoming “energy vampires” that waste power. A kitchen faucet is programmed to intermittently drip, and observant visitors can hear the sound of the bathroom toilet running too long. (Eventually, museum staff found it necessary to screw down the lid. “You can imagine, with a bunch of potty-trainers,” Blumenfield says with a laugh.)

Playfulness aside, “we’re trying to address some of the problems of the day but do it in a very affirming way that allows people to see how they can actually effect change,” Blumenfield says. “I think that’s really important because some of the problems we’re faced with, particularly from the kids’ vantage point, it can all seem so overwhelming. They really don’t know what they can do in their little lives to make a difference. So here, they get to see it in some very practical ways.”

On the job since last August, only a few months before the November opening of a museum that earlier had stalled because of financial issues, Blumenfield is clearly in her element. She oversees a budget of about $5.3 million as well as a staff of 67 full-time and part-time workers, plus a large group of volunteers who range from teenagers to retirees. Walking the museum, she greets visitors brightly and calls workers by name.

Touted as the first major museum in the San Fernando Valley, an area with a population of more than 1.75 million, Discovery Cube LA is a new anchor in the Lake View Terrace neighborhood, a demographically diverse community with large Latino and black populations. The most visible landmark has long been the Hansen Dam Recreation Area, with its large sandy-beach manmade pool.

“It’s both very urban in ways you would expect an urban community to be, and at the same time, there’s some—I don’t know—country living, right outside our doors,” Blumenfield said. “Summer camps are tending to come here for half a day, and then they go to the pool for half a day, so it’s a great combination of science and nature.”

The community has moved on from the notoriety of the Rodney King incident, though it will be the subject of retrospectives as the 25th anniversary approaches in March. Two of the acquitted officers later served prison time after being convicted of violating King’s civil rights in a subsequent federal trial. King himself died in a backyard pool in 2012 at the age of 47.

Almost a quarter-century later, children inside the Discovery Cube museum learn about the solar system or earthquakes or how the ice on a hockey rink is made. For Blumenfield, instead of putting the funding into social change, now she is putting the fun into it.

“For me, it’s all the same thing,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if I’ve been in a legal organization, a social services organization or here, an education center, or a foundation. My career has been dedicated to providing opportunities to those who don’t have the same resources as those who have more. And to try to help people succeed, no matter if they live in downtown L.A. or here in the beautiful northeast San Fernando Valley. I think every child deserves the absolute best education, and there are many ways to go about that.

“So I don’t see the different stations that I’ve been in life, I don’t see them being that different. The beautiful thing about this place that is different, though, is I get to walk the halls, and I get to see the people that we are trying to serve. That lights me up. It gives tremendous meaning to see, every day, people who want to succeed.”

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