Blog Articles

On the Fringe

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

On the first day of her Devising Theatre class last spring, when Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance Jessie Mills proposed the idea of developing a student-produced play as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival, five of her students leapt at the opportunity. The festival—an open-access celebration of theatre in L.A.—brings hundreds of new plays to professional theatres each summer. And so, for one week in June at the Broadwater Black Box theatre, Ally Center ’21, Roei Cohen ’21, Alex Collado ’20, Noah Plasse ’21 and Abdullah Shahid ’19 brought to life onstage their own serio-comedy, titled How to Adult. Recent graduates Rachel Tils ’19 and Jonathan Wilson ’19 were also involved as directors.

The students not only had to create their own play; they also had to produce it, including negotiating a contract with a venue for dates and times and setting up and breaking down their own sets. “Creating and producing this work is truly at the center of the liberal arts,” says Mills. “These students pulled from a myriad of sources, experiences and materials to collaboratively synthesize their ideas into one cohesive vision.”

Award-Winning Food

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Try not to drool when you read the menu that won Pomona College chefs Amanda Castillo, John Hames, Marvin Love and Angel Villa a silver medal in a recent national cooking competition.

First course: branzino with kohlrabi slaw, ginger-scented maitake fish broth and tempura snap peas.

Second course: pork belly and shrimp with herb-roasted mashed potatoes, tomato purée and roasted corn.

Third course: vegan almond cake with caramelized peaches, bionda ganache, raspberry sauce and cashew and popcorn brittle.

Buffet course: Korean spiced tri-tip with moong bean pancakes, pickled cauliflower and jasmine rice.

The event was the team competition sponsored by the American Culinary Federation during its 25th Annual Chef Culinary Conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, last June.

Smart Summer Reads From 12 Pomona College Professors

October 14, 2019 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

These books written and edited by 11 Pomona College faculty members this year aren’t the lightest summer reads… but they could definitely land on the shortlist of the smartest.

Read the Smart Summer Reads From 12 Pomona College Professors story on the Pomona’s website.

Last of the Yellow Journalists

October 14, 2019 by Mark Wood Comments Off

There was a time when editorial cartooning was a job a young artist could aspire to. In 1900, there were an estimated 2,000 editorial cartoonists at work in the United States. They still numbered in the hundreds by the late ’70s, when—at the start of my career—I briefly became one of them.

It’s probably just as well that I moved on to other things. Since then, the American editorial cartoonist has become an endangered species, right up there with the pygmy elephant. The total in the U.S. is reportedly below 25 now, and falling. Just in the last two years, two Pulitzer Prize-winners—Nick Anderson at the Houston Chronicle and Steve Benson at the Arizona Republic—were dumped. In June, following an uproar about a cartoon full of anti-Semitic tropes, the international edition of The New York Times followed the example of its national counterpart and fired its last two cartoonists—neither of whom, by the way, had drawn the offending cartoon.

Here’s how bad it’s gotten: Iran now boasts more editorial cartoonists than the U.S.

I thought for a while that editorial cartooning would be my life’s work. Old-timers like Herblock and Conrad were giving way to subtle, innovative artists like Pat Oliphant and Jeff MacNelly. Strip cartoonists like Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau were blurring the line between the Sunday comics and the editorial page. These young guns were transforming the medium—putting irony and satire, artistic style and sly visual humor ahead of blunt-force commentary. It was an exciting time to be an editorial cartoonist.

And I loved the actual process of creating a cartoon—the immersion in the news, the joyous flash of inspiration, the inner howls of laughter as I did my preliminary sketches, the knowledge of famous faces that allowed me to draw Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton without conscious thought and the feeling of working without a net each time I wielded my ink brush to create the final product.

Over the years, I must have done hundreds of drawings of Clinton, then governor of the state where I lived, including one, shown here, that was completed shortly after he was first elected governor at the tender age of 32. It’s without a doubt the most prescient thing I’ve ever produced.

Part of the fun of it was the pure joy of poking fun at powerful people. I used to joke that we editorial cartoonists were the last of the yellow journalists—the only purveyors of the news who still had license to use caricature and exaggeration to distill complicated situations down to a single, simplistic metaphor. Our work was full of open mockery —an artform that intentionally stretched the limits of polite discourse.

And that was probably a big part of its undoing. In a time of heightened sensitivities and social media mobs, caricature has become a dangerous sport. As Australian cartoonist Mark Knight (whose caricatures are uniformly brutal) learned when tennis player Serena Williams’s husband accused him of a racist depiction of her, there’s a fine line between the kind of harsh visual exaggeration that caricatures depend upon and the perpetuation of cruel stereotypes. Add in the decline of newspapers as a profitable industry, and it’s not surprising, I suppose, that cartoonists have become, at best, expendable and, at worst, potential liabilities.

Given all of that, the number of young American artists who now aspire to become the next great editorial cartoonist is probably on a par with the number who plan to repair steam engines. But while the bell is clearly tolling for American editorial cartooning, I have to admit that I was wrong when I said we were the last of the yellow journalists. Yellow journalism, I’m afraid, is viciously alive and well on social media and talk radio—minus, of course, the redeeming humor.

Letter Box

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Social Media: Not the Answer

In your cartoon in the spring/summer 2019 PCM titled “Depression and Social Media,” fictional “Dr. Kay” (sadly not so fictional) provides some sort of “therapy” (using the word loosely) to fictional “Josie,” recommending she use an app to analyze her “depression-related patterns in her Twitter usage.”

Now wait a minute! My view from 35 years of actual clinical practice as a clinical psychologist is quite different. I wouldn’t say it quite so harshly, but my advice to young Josie:

“Josie, research is getting pretty clear, and the title of the cartoon you are in says it all: ‘Depression and Social Media.’ The increase in depression in your age group seems to be related, in part, to the proliferation of social media. I recommend you get off of Twitter! Also, fire Dr. Kay as he is incompetent and doesn’t know the literature about what helps people.

“It is other people.

“Perhaps Dr. Kay fears this assertion is not ‘scientific.’ He is wrong, the scientific data is actually very clear in this regard. Dr. Kay seems most thoughtful as he looks at his computer screen, where he (along with the surveillance capitalists at Twitter) renders your behavioral data. When you are, ironically, lying on the Freudian couch, he’s not looking at you, but at the ‘report’ that the app has rendered, and reminding you that your dog was seriously ill.

“Josie, do you really not remember that your furry friend was seriously ill?

“Maybe you have been conditioned to believe, as some of my clients have, that such an experience shouldn’t upset you, but clearly it does, and that makes a lot of sense. If you really don’t remember he was ill, we need to explore your rather severe dissociative disorder, perhaps caused in part by your overuse of social media.”

I make what is called a “right livelihood” working directly, face to face, with a broad range of people, including those in Josie’s generation. Many, on their own, without my saying anything, have realized they need to decrease their use of social media, and all would seem to prefer and benefit from relating to me, not an app, as we, together, uncover and explore their joys, sorrows, hopes and fears. It is profoundly rewarding work.

—Jon Maaske ’72
Albuquerque, NM

In Defense of the Federalist Society

The article “History & the Court” in the winter 2019 PCM, about Professor Hollis-Brusky’s analysis of a recent Supreme Court decision on guns, references the way federal courts may inadvertently, but sometimes intentionally, intrude on Congress’s plenary power to enact substantive law under Article I of the Constitution.

Professor Hollis-Brusky’s apparent call to view the courts as a vehicle to “throw out all the rules about what we ought to expect, [which] opens up a lot of possibilities for people who want to reimagine the way we are” is essentially a call to judicial activism. Jurists answering that call would be acting in a way irreconcilable with the Constitution’s foundational tenet of separation of powers, which vests in Congress, not the courts, the authority to create the law.

In contrast to Professor Hollis-Brusky’s call to judicial activism, the Federalist Society advocates that “the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.” The Federalist Society’s solution for judicial activism is a judicial approach focusing first on the Constitution’s express words, and then, if any ambiguity exists, determining the Framers’ actual intent by focusing on what reasonable persons living at the time of its adoption would have understood the ordinary meaning of the text to be. This approach was followed in the Heller decision referenced by Professor Hollis-Brusky. The Heller decision reflects a proper judicial analysis of the Founders’ original intent and meaning of the Second Amendment at the time of ratification.

Although Professor Hollis-Brusky asserts that such an analysis had been made many times over the 150 years preceding Heller, resulting in an answer contrary to the Heller majority’s approach and conclusion, the judicial record indicates otherwise. As the 8th Circuit held in U.S. v. Seay, “Prior to 2009, the Supreme Court had not examined [the Second Amendment right] in depth. This changed with the Court’s landmark decision in Heller.” Similarly, in People v. Aguilar, the Illinois Supreme Court (none of whose judges were, at the time of the opinion, members of the Federalist Society) unanimously noted that the U.S. Supreme Court in Heller “undertook its first-ever ‘in-depth examination’ of the Second Amendment’s meaning.”A consistent application of original intent thereby decreases the danger posed by the temptation for jurists to impose their own policy preferences into decisions and/or exercise judicial activism to change the law independently of the legislature.

—Grant Frazier ’16
Phoenix, AZ

Real VR Therapy

I am writing with regard to the article in the spring/summer 2019 PCM about the potential research of Cynthia Nyongesa ’19 on virtual reality and individuals with ASD.

While we do not use VR as a therapeutic intervention, per se, we at AHRC Middle/High School in Brooklyn, NY (schools.ahrcnyc.org) have been using this technology with our students since 2017.

We have used VR to help our students simulate community experiences such as traveling via subway, making purchases and having social interactions, as well as using it a tool for “virtual field trips” and curriculum extensions. In our experience, VR is an easy-to-use, cost-effective tool for introducing more “real-life” situations to our students with ASD so that they are better prepared to handle these encounters in the real world.

We appreciate that these novel and safe interventions are being investigated at Pomona College these days.

—John Goodson ’02
Cambridge, MA

Corrections

I’m at a point in life where one is inclined to be somewhat forgetful. Personally, I am a good example of that some of the time, but thankfully not all of the time. So when I saw my class note in the spring/summer 2019 PCM with the Class of 1950, I had to think twice: Am I Class of ’50 or Class of ’51? The ’50ers are a great group, but I really am a loyal ’51er and always will be. Thus I felt compelled to bring this little editorial glitch to your attention.

—Pat Newton ’51
Pomona, CA

The spring/summer issue is a splendid piece of work in all ways, but unfortunately, it contains an error on page 52, line 7 of the Class of ’49 notes. I am a member of the Nature PRINTING Society, not the Nature PAINTING Society. If you will access the Nature Printing Society website, you will see that while our society is fairly young, the art of printing from nature is centuries old. I mostly print botanicals [see right] but have also printed fish (does gyotaku ring a bell?), feathers, squid, octopi, fossils, shells, snakeskins and really flat roadkill, and I even got to assist at the printing of an orca that washed up down-coast and was assigned to the museum for a necropsy. NPS also appears on Facebook, but since I’m a technological Luddite, I have no idea how to find it.

—Lila Anne Bartha (AKA “Hebe”)
Santa Barbara, CA

Concerning an error in “Smoke in the Wine” in the winter 2019 PCM, Sonoma and Santa Rosa were not “Spanish settlements” in what is today Sonoma County, Calif., as the article says. They were Mexican.

—Hal Beck ’64
Forestville, CA

Bowling for Atoms

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Professor of Physics and Astronomy David Tanenbaum keeps this broken pink bowling ball in his office as a reminder of a project that he considers to be one of the most important responsibilities of his career—playing the lead role in providing faculty oversight for the design, planning and construction of the new Millikan Laboratory for Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. The last step in that long and arduous process was the grand opening of the new facility on Founders’ Day 2015. In planning for that special event, the question arose: How should they christen the new building? The answer to that question involved some showmanship, some real physics and, incidentally, the destruction of a bowling ball.

Built in the 1950s, the original Millikan Laboratory had become badly out-of-date, so in 2013 it was torn down to make room for a new, state-of-the-art Millikan, built upon the footprint of the original.

To dedicate this new building for physics, math and astronomy in 2015, the faculty didn’t want anything trite, like cutting a ribbon. They wanted nothing less than to smash an atom.

Not a real atom, of course. An atom made of papier-maché. The Math Department took on the job of creating the atom, using as a model the sculpture above the building’s front door.

Created for the original Millikan by artist Albert Stewart, that bronze sculpture, a striking but not-very-accurate representation of a lithium atom, is the only remaining feature from the original structure.

The next question was how to smash this make-believe atom. After some consideration, the faculty settled on two bowling balls, suspended by ropes from the ceiling, swinging down simultaneously from two sides to smash together in the middle.

Knowing that it would take some experimentation to create a safe and reliable way of smashing the atom, Tanenbaum and his colleagues bought several bowling balls and fitted them with hooks.

They then hung two bowling balls from the ceiling and devised a clever mechanism to pull them apart and release them at the same instant by the pull of a cord, so that they would swing down and collide.

Since there was only one papier-maché atom and it couldn’t be destroyed more than once, they concentrated on making the two bowling balls collide at the midpoint where the atom would be hung on the day of the opening.

In one test, the balls collided so violently that the resin covering of one ball shattered. After that, Tanenbaum used a cardboard box as a stand-in for the atom to cushion the blow.

For the event, then-President David Oxtoby was recruited to do the honors. Standing in a lift and wearing a hard-hat, he pulled the cord, and all of that hard work ended in a crash, with a thoroughly smashed atom.

How to Become a Concert Pianist

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Genevieve Lee

AT AGE 4, although neither of your parents is a musician, decide on your own that you want to play the piano. Study with a neighborhood teacher in Racine, Wisconsin, and discover that you love it so much that your parents never have to make you practice.

WHILE ASPIRING to become an architect or a brain surgeon, show so much promise as a young pianist that, when you’re 8 years old, your piano teacher tells your parents that you need to move on to a more advanced instructor.

AFTER MOVING to York, Pennsylvania, apply to study piano with a well-known teacher in Baltimore, an hour’s drive away. Get accepted and work with her for five years, as she gently nudges you to abandon brain surgery for a career in music.

AT 12, PERFORM as a soloist in your very first concert with an actual orchestra. Play a Mozart concerto with the York Symphony Orchestra and discover the thrill of performing before an audience that isn’t made up of relatives and friends.

AS A HIGH school senior at the age of 15, decide to apply only to music schools. Choose Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where you feel both intimidated and inspired by the talented people around you. Decide that this is the right path for you.

GRADUATE FROM Peabody in three years and attend a summer program for musicians in Fontainebleau, France, where you win a one-year scholarship to the École Supérieure de Musique in Paris. Take first prize in the school’s annual competition.

GO ON TO graduate school at Yale University, where you find a mentor, the pianist Boris Berman, who challenges you to think independently and find your own special voice as a musician. Eventually earn your doctor of musical arts degree there.

TEACH FOR TWO years as a visiting professor at Bucknell University and fall in love with the liberal arts setting. Apply for a job at Pomona College and get it. Enjoy working with the students so much that you’re still at it 25 years later.

IN ADDITION to your solo work, play with various chamber music ensembles, including the Mojave Trio and the Garth Newel Piano Quartet, even though the latter means flying across the country to Virginia for each rehearsal.

PERFORM AT venues around the globe, including Carnegie Hall in New York and Disney Hall in L.A. Play both classical works and experimental pieces and earn a Grammy nomination for a CD in which you play a toy grand piano.

Wig Winners 2019

October 14, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

The 2019 recipients of the Wig Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor bestowed on Pomona faculty, were (from left):

Stephan Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and professor of mathematics,
Guadalupe Bacio, assistant professor of psychology and Chicana/o Latina/o studies,
Valorie Thomas, professor of English and Africana studies,
Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics,
Pey-Yi Chu, associate professor of history, and
Carolyn Ratteray, assistant professor of theatre and dance.

In anonymously-written nomination comments, students offered high praise for the six professors who were honored at Commencement on May 19.

Stephan Garcia

W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Mathematics Stephan Garcia is the author of more than 80 research articles, many of them with Pomona students as coauthors. In 2018 he was recognized by the American Mathematics Society for his excellence in research in operator theory, complex analysis, matrix theory and number theory. This is his second Wig Award.

“Professor Garcia is the best lecturer I have had at Pomona. He is incredibly organized and manages to ensure that all of his students get the most out of every lecture. There has not been a lecture period where I felt that a minute is wasted. Moreover, he cares about bridging disciplines using math. He has a unique ability to put whatever we are learning in terms of contexts that students in other disciplines care about.
“Professor Garcia is an amazing math professor. I am thoroughly impressed and grateful for his ability to synthesize different fields of mathematics to portray linear algebra topics from a variety of viewpoints. His Advanced Linear Algebra course is unique in that it caters to majors not only in mathematics but also in physics, economics and computer science.”

Guadalupe Bacio

Bacio joined Pomona in 2016 with a double appointment to the departments of psychology and Chicana/o Latina/o studies. A clinical psychologist and researcher, she explores disparities in alcohol and drug use among young people of ethnic minorities. Bacio directs the CENTRO research lab where she and her students combine several research methods including community-participatory research, laboratory-based tasks and large-scale surveys. This is her first Wig Award.

“Professor Bacio is a professor like no other. She does double the work in her classes as she not only provides the learning content, but also a learning community. Students are driven not only to be invested in their own learning but in the learning of everyone around them. She has very high standards for her students, but her drive, passion and energy gives you every reason to want to impress her.”
“She teaches from a rich background working on the frontline with the people who are the subjects of our readings. Probably the most ‘real world’ informed professor I’ve had here, which was really refreshing at a point in my time here when ‘the bubble’ was really getting to me.”

Valorie Thomas

Professor of English and Africana Studies Valorie Thomas has taught at Pomona since 1998 and specializes in Afrofuturism, Native American literature, African Diaspora theory and decolonizing theory. Thomas also studies film and visual art, has an ongoing interest in the connections between writing, art and social justice and is a screenwriter. This is her second Wig Award.

“I’ve had the chance to take two courses with Val Thomas over the course of my college career. Both have been two of the most impactful classes of my entire four years. Val is communicative, encouraging and articulate without sacrificing accessibility. She’s confirmed to me that I made the right decision when I became an English major. Plus, she’s funny. She knows how to gauge the classroom’s level of attention and emotional state, so that the space is always welcoming even when in the midst of heavy discussions. I have the feeling she’ll be one of the professors I reference in my 30s and 40s when responding to the question: Who influenced you?”
“Professor Thomas is the single most compassionate professor I have ever had the honor of knowing. What she teaches students reaches far beyond any academic instruction; the nurturing learning space that she cultivates enlightens students’ minds and spirits in a way that is unparalleled at Pomona College.”

Susan McWilliams Barndt

A third time Wig Award winner, Professor of Politics Susan McWilliams Barndt currently serves as chair of the Politics Department, where she has taught since 2006. Among her areas of expertise are political theory, American political thought, politics and literature and civic education. She is the author, most recently, of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (2018).

“One of the most brilliant, funny and compassionate professors I’ve ever had. Not only was Professor McWilliams one of the main reasons I chose to major in politics, she’s also one of the people that I trust most on Pomona’s campus. She’s always willing to support students in their academic and personal development, and she provides this support while quoting Plato and James Baldwin.”
“Professor McWilliams has taught me how to ask questions. It seems so simple to say, but in this, she has changed my life. Skepticism is not easy to come by anymore; it is hard to remain uncertain in a world as fraught as ours today. I would prefer to make simple choice and think simple thoughts. Professor McWilliams shows how inadequate this is, and how incredibly choosing complexity instead can be.”

Pey-Yi Chu

Associate Professor of History Pey-Yi Chu teaches European history focusing on Russia and the Soviet Union. Through her research, she aims to understand the environment and environmental change through the history of science and technology as well as environmental history. Her first book, The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science, explores the history of the study of frozen earth and the creation of permafrost science in the Soviet Union. This is her first Wig Award.

“ID1 [Critical Inquiry Seminar] is more of a distant memory at this point, but Professor Chu’s Cold Places seminar was a wicked introduction to the writing and creative learning process Pomona so adores.”
“Professor Chu is committed to empowering her students through the learning process. She has provided pages (single-spaced!) of feedback for every paper draft I’ve submitted and put in hours of work to make sure that I was producing the best work I possibly could. She treats her students as collaborators, considering their ideas with the utmost respect. She is kind, approachable and dedicated to teaching for teaching’s sake.”

Carolyn Ratteray

Actor and director Carolyn Ratteray is a Daytime Emmy-nominated actress who joined Pomona College in 2016 as a tenure-track faculty member. A first-time Wig Award winner, Ratteray has worked in off-Broadway and regional theatres as well as in television and commercials. She’s served as moderator for on-campus speakers such as Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander and has directed numerous student plays during her time at Pomona such as Midsummer Night’s Dreamand In Love and Warcraft.

“Carolyn has meant more to me than I can say. Her presence makes me feel like being an artist, is attainable, worth it and powerful. And more than any other professor here she has been concerned with helping me find my voice not just the directors. Not to mention her commitment to bringing in relevant guest speakers who have ignited my passions all the more!”
“Professor Ratteray creates spaces of healing, which is to me, one of the most radical productions of space in an academic setting. In her work as a director for theatre productions housed on Pomona’s stages, and in her classrooms, Professor Ratteray’s pedagogy revolves around centering the voices of people of color, queer and trans folks, and focusing on the imbricated experiences of intersectional bodies. Plainly, she allows us to speak, to move, and to emote in places where the emotional is seen as removed from the work that we must do.”

Hablas Baseball?

October 14, 2019 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

Emily Glass ’15 with Miami Marlins pitcher Jose Quijada

Walk through the Miami Marlins clubhouse and there’s a chance you’ll hear a Spanish phrase common in the Dominican Republic: “¿Qué lo que?”

Thanks to an innovative education program led by Emily Glass ’15, that might be an English-speaking player engaging in Spanish banter that roughly translates as “What’s up?” And you’re just as likely to hear a Latin player greeting his U.S.-born teammates in English.

With Glass’s help, the Marlins are trying to become the first bilingual organization in Major League Baseball (MLB). “We’re teaching English to our international players and Spanish to our domestic players, but then also life skills, from financial planning to cooking classes,” says Glass, whose work as the Marlins’ first education coordinator has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post. “The philosophy behind that is that we live in a globalized world, and Miami is at the center of that,” Glass says.

More than a quarter of the players on major league rosters at the beginning of this season were born outside the U.S., with a record 102 from the Dominican Republic, 68 from Venezuela and 19 from Cuba. In Miami and some other cities, the fans are increasingly Spanish-speaking too.

“Our new stadium is in Little Havana, so it’s in a neighborhood where everybody speaks Spanish,” Glass says. “So we want to give our players and all of our front-office employees the ability to interact with our fans that come to the ballpark and with the community, in both Spanish and English.”

Working for an MLB team seems glamorous when you see Glass bumping fists with a major leaguer on the field before a game. But the former Pomona-Pitzer softball player also spends at least a month each winter in the Dominican and much of the season on the road visiting Marlins minor- league players on teams like the Batavia Muckdogs, the New Orleans Baby Cakes and the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp.

Though her path to the big leagues has been winding, she has been preparing for this work even before she stepped on the Pomona College campus. She played baseball with her brother on youth teams until she was a teenager and then switched to softball for high school and college. She started every game for the Sagehens her first season, batting .386. But Glass would play only one more season of softball because competing campus interests and a love for hardball led her to recreational baseball with the guys in what she euphemistically calls a “carbonated-beverage league.”

Her first-year Critical Inquiry class at Pomona, or ID1 as it’s known, was Baseball in America with Lorn Foster, now an emeritus professor, who became such a close mentor that the two still have a standing phone call each Sunday at 3 p.m.

“She was a very gifted writer—that’s first and foremost,” Foster says. “But her interest in baseball was abiding.”

Glass later served as a teaching assistant for the class, and honed her high school and college Spanish while studying abroad in Salamanca, Spain. When it came time to write her senior thesis for a degree in public policy analysis, she again chose baseball as her topic, delving into a renowned program for disadvantaged youth called Reviving Baseball in the Inner City (RBI), founded by former major-league player John Young in Los Angeles in 1989.

She also won a coveted Watson Fellowship, which provides a stipend of more than $30,000 for a new graduate to engage in a year of independent research abroad. Glass studied international baseball while traveling to seven countries, including the Dominican, Japan and Australia. In Japan, she coached Little League on a field onto which she believes only one other woman had ever stepped. There she faced language and cultural barriers and “just baffled confusion from some people of ‘Why are you here?’”

On her return, she reached the final round of interviews for a position as an assistant of baseball operations with the New York Yankees but didn’t get the job. She then worked as the chief sales officer for a company called Acme Smoked Fish in Brooklyn for a year and a half before realizing, “I want to work in baseball. I don’t want to work in smoked fish.”

Mayu Fielding, the education coordinator for the Pittsburgh Pirates, became a mentor and referred her to multiple teams. Glass made it to the final round for a job with the New York Mets and interviewed with the Toronto Blue Jays and the Cincinnati Reds.

“My dad had always said to me that it takes six months to get the job that you want,” she says. “But if you try for six months and you put in the time and you trust the process, it will work out.”

Finally, the Marlins called, and Gary Denbo, the organization’s vice president of player development and scouting, gave her the only chance she needed.

The shared language of baseball often starts with pitches. Recta for straight fastball, curva for curveball, cambio for changeup. For catchers and pitchers in particular, it’s important nothing gets lost in translation.

“Baseball is a game of inches,” Glass says, “whether something is a ball or a strike or fair or foul, and our players see that by being able to communicate and be on the same page as some of their teammates, everything works better.”

Her mission might be most crucial with the Latin teenagers at the Dominican academy or just starting minor-league careers, many of them trying to break free of poverty and provide for their families. Landing in the hinterlands of the American minor leagues with no English is difficult.

“A lot of our players we sign at 18 or 20 years old; they’ve never cooked meals for themselves,” says Glass, who hires teachers to work with various Marlins teams in classes limited to 12 students—a hat tip to her small-class experiences at Pomona. She also shapes the curriculum, part of which is delivered by mobile phone or online.

“All of it truly is encompassed in service in the highest sense of the word—the skills they are going to need when they’re in a rookie league making very little money and trying to support themselves,” she says. “So we really tailor things toward interview skills and toward the off-field and money management skills—how to send money to your family abroad and how to communicate professionally at the field and away from the field.”

Jarlin Garcia, a 26-year-old Dominican pitcher now in the majors, remembers how challenging it was when the amount of English he spoke was nada.

“It’s a little bit hard, because you want to talk with the people, with the fans, and like when you’re out to eat,” he says in English, sitting in the visitors’ dugout at Dodger Stadium. “That’s why we need to learn.”

Beside him was Luis Dorante, a player relations and Spanish media relations liaison who works closely with Glass and travels with the major-league team to translate when necessary.

Like Glass, he is cognizant of the importance of life skills. “Some of these guys come from very humble places,” he says. “They have no idea what is a debit card, what is a credit card. Credit is difficult to explain. I say, ‘Son, be careful, you have to pay that later on.’”

Of course, only one in 200 minor leaguers ever reaches the big leagues. And even for those who do, the money may not last forever. “What we tell them is that many of these players won’t make it. Unfortunately, it’s a statistical fact,” Dorante says. “They need to enjoy this period in their life where they’re learning many skills and also gaining friends that might last for life.”

Jose Quijada, a 23-year-old pitcher from Venezuela, echoes Garcia, once again in English. “I think it’s important for me because, like, you play here in America, you need to talk with your friends from America who speak English. When you go to the bank, you need to talk English.”

It’s Glass’s job to make that happen—even if players’ Spanglish is sometimes charmingly imperfect. “Emily’s my friend,” Quijada says. “She’s a good guy.”

The Many Faces of James Davis

October 14, 2019 by Zan Romanoff Comments Off

Photos By David Zaitz

JAMES DAVIS HAS been sitting at our table at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles in L.A. for no more than five minutes when his phone lights up with a call. He hasn’t even had time to order yet, and already, his attention is being diverted in another direction.

It’s a girl. Davis answers and tells her playfully: “I’m mid-interview, but I was, like, ‘I have to pick this up.’”

If she’s not used to hearing it from him yet, she will be soon: Davis’s work as a comedian, actor and writer is more in demand than ever these days. Since leaving Pomona to pursue a career in entertainment, Davis has appeared on shows like Kevin Hart’s Real Husbands of Hollywood, created and starred in Hood Adjacent with James Davis, which aired on Comedy Central for a season in 2017, and, most recently, acted as the host for a game show called Awake: The Million Dollar Game, which premiered on Netflix in June. He’s got 50,000 Instagram followers and a newly released stand-up special. He’s not all the way on top of the world yet, but he is definitely making a rapid ascent.

Davis is balanced on a precipice: He’s already achieved what many people would consider a lifetime’s worth of career milestones; on the other hand, he’s only 32, and he has “very big” goals he’s still aiming to achieve, he says.

On the day we meet, however, he’s just back from a weekend trip to Las Vegas for a friend’s birthday, where he learned he loves to gamble (“like, too much”). So for the moment, he’s less comedy superstar in the making, and more relatable hungover 30-something. For today, his goals are a little smaller: He wants to reassure his girl he’s still into her, eat some fried chicken, and then take a well-deserved nap.

Despite the fact that he didn’t end up graduating, Davis says that he loved his time at Pomona. He enrolled expecting to become a lawyer, but instead, he got distracted by studying English and taking acting classes. He liked the acting part so much that he started doing some work as an extra in L.A., and that was it for him, he says: “I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’”

“I chose the school; I chose my major,” he continues. “But that bug, when it hits you, it really hits you. And when that passion is so strong, everything else really starts to feel like a distraction.”

He quickly discovered that passion would only take him so far: “That was way more daunting than I’d assume it was going to be, coming from the Pomona bubble,” Davis says now, laughing at his youthful hubris. “Like, Hollywood. I’ll conquer that next!”

Luckily he’d grown up in L.A., so Davis had a place to crash while he was making a name for himself: His mom took him in while he went to auditions and started pulling together material for a stand-up routine. He doesn’t take that for granted, he says: “I didn’t have to sleep on any couches. I didn’t have that desperation with my comedy where I was like, ‘If this joke doesn’t land, or I don’t book this one gig, I’ll have to fly back home.’” Davis looks around the restaurant, which has been a touchstone in his life since he and his friends hung out here on weekend nights in high school, and smiles. “I’m already back home.”

Still, the climb from being a nameless nobody to the top-billed star of a Comedy Central show was a grind. Davis started out at the very bottom, doing what he describes as “bring a room” shows, which anyone can perform at as long as they have a friend who’s willing to accompany them (and buy a couple of drinks). From there, he befriended other comedians and persuaded them to watch his tapes; they, in turn, spoke to Ens Mitchell, who owns a mid-city LA club called The Comedy Union, on his behalf.

The Comedy Union was the perfect place for Davis to hone his craft, he says, in part because it tends to draw racially diverse audiences. Davis grew up toggling between black and white spaces: he was born and raised in Baldwin Hills, a historically black neighborhood, but as a teenager he would travel crosstown to Santa Monica to attend a majority-white private school, Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences.

So The Comedy Union immediately felt like home because “it’s predominantly black, but not all black. For someone who’s self-proclaimed hood-adjacent, it was important for me to have jokes that appealed to everybody. I didn’t just want to do rooms that were all black, and I didn’t want to be the comedian that only does all-white rooms either. When my friends come to the show, I want them to laugh, both white and non-white,” Davis says.

Davis credits his education with helping him craft the kinds of jokes that caught Mitchell’s eye and made him popular with those diverse audiences. “Those classes,” he says, talking about the time he spent in college, “are what I think make my jokes different from the majority of my peers’. Those classes are what gave me a certain awareness about the world, to then use comedy as a platform.”

When Davis is writing a joke, he says, he’s not just trying to be funny (though he acknowledges that getting a laugh is a critical part of his job description). “I’m writing with multiple motivations,” he says. “I want it to catch you off guard, shock you a little bit. Under all of my jokes I feel like there is a message, some kind of actual statement.”

Davis sees himself as an activist for “my own causes, whatever I feel is important to me.” These concerns range from jokes about the absurdity of the NCAA’s rules about compensating student athletes to taking on police violence in black communities. One of his favorite bits from his stand-up routine, he says, is about the murder of one of his uncles by a police officer. There’s a joke in there, a standard laugh line: Davis riffing on how he never got to know what kind of uncle stereotype his uncle would have inhabited—the cheap one, the drunk one, etc.

But also, “I’m using this moment to say, ‘Hey, me too,’” Davis explains. “This person performing for you—I am one of those people who’s had a family member killed by a police officer. So if you think you’ve never seen somebody who’s been affected by this—here’s someone who has.”

He cites studying with ex–Black Panther Phyllis Jackson while at Pomona as an experience that helped him realize how important it was to share his perspective. “You realize that the rest of the world didn’t take this class; the rest of the world doesn’t see that particular point of view,” Davis says. “People say that I’m a smart comedian, that I’m clever. To me, I’m a product of the education I’ve been put in.”

He also recognizes that he’s lucky to have an audience to share with. “Not everybody is blessed with the opportunity to walk on a stage and be guaranteed a listening audience even for a split second,” he says. “I feel called to, in some way, use that platform for more than just self-gain.”

But putting so much into his comedy can be emotionally draining, and some days he’s not really in the mood to give his experiences a punch line. “I care about a lot of serious issues, but I’m a comedian,” Davis says. “I’m going through a lot of serious things in my personal life right now, but I’m a comedian. Right now, comedy is a little more challenging.” He pauses and considers. He also writes and acts; he could focus on those pursuits instead, and to some extent, he’s doing so. But he can’t bring himself to give up on comedy, because, he says, when he’s doing it well, it feels better than anything else on Earth.

When Davis first got into comedy, having his own show was the dream. “I remember watching Chapelle’s Show and being like, ‘This is what I want to do,’” he says. He was so focused on getting there that he regularly turned down gigs guest-starring in other people’s projects, which “would make people look at me weird, like I’m crazy.”

But his focus paid off: Hood Adjacent premiered on Comedy Central in June 2017. The show is formally similar to Chappelle’s: It features Davis doing stand-up bits for a live audience before introducing prerecorded segments where he does things like gather a bunch of minority students from a local college campus to interview them about what it’s like to be the token in their friend groups, or takes his bougiest friends to try to earn their “hood passes” from a Compton native.

The show is extremely personal, and extremely specific to Davis: It’s his attempt to translate to a larger audience his experiences of blackness, of growing up in Los Angeles, of simultaneously belonging and not belonging in various communities. It was thrilling to get it made, but also “so stressful,” Davis says. At the time, it was hard to appreciate the full extent of what he’d accomplished, and even now, “I’ll sit back and realize, ‘I did it,’” he says, shaking his head, still amazed.

To be fair, he didn’t have very long to get used to the idea: Hood Adajcent lasted just eight episodes. “It didn’t stay on like Chapelle’s Show,” Davis says. So, on to the next one: “Then I was like, ‘I gotta create another show.’”

That next show is still gestating; in the meantime, he has to earn a living, which is how he ended up on a Burbank backlot shooting Awake, a show that feels like a hard left turn for a comedian whose work is usually fairly personal and political. There’s no discussion of the nuances of the black American experience on Awake; instead, Davis is responsible for shepherding a group of contestants through a series of goofy challenges made harder by the fact that they haven’t slept in 24 hours: They chug Slushies, thread needles, and turn off alarm clocks with bleary, sometimes daffy determination.

Davis recalls a Netflix executive calling to offer him the job and asking, essentially, Are you all in on this? Is this show the biggest thing in your life right now?

“I remember saying, ‘Listen, when I left college, it was not to be a game show host,’” Davis reports, laughing. “‘But I think this is gonna be a great show. I love the premise. I’m gonna take it seriously and do my best.’”

He saw Awake as an opportunity, and he’s been in Hollywood long enough to know that you should never turn down one of those. “Unless you’re a superstar, and you have that skyrocketing trajectory of a career, every appearance moves you a little bit closer, gives you more eyes,” he says. “Hood Adjacent opened up a lot of people to me. I did a Facebook game show with charities, and that helped me get Awake. Awake is going to open me up to more hosting opportunities. Which is not what I was trying to do, but if that’s what I do in between my passion projects, that’s super cool with me.”

Davis is at an interesting juncture in his career, and his life. He’s successful enough that friends are starting to ask him for favors. (He tells them, “Appearances versus payment are very different. I’m not Tom Cruise; I’m not Will Smith. I’m not anything close to that. I can get a couple of bills—like, dinner bills.”). And Twitter haters are popping up regularly. (“If they’re tweeting at you, they know about you. I remember when I had no haters because no one knew of me. There’s just too many people on the Internet to worry about whether it’s all positive.”) But he also still feels like he has a lot left that he wants to accomplish—getting another show of his own being just one of them.

“I shot a pilot for TruTV; TruTV went through some internal issues and didn’t pick up a bunch of pilots, including mine,” he says. “But I feel really good about what we shot, so I feel like it’s going to land somewhere. I feel like there’s going to be me hosting some other stuff—I’ve had a couple of meetings and some tests.”

“Right now,” he continues, “I’m really an open slate; it’s about what I choose to do. I know for a fact that I’m going to be doing short films, maybe put some stuff in some festivals. Just elevating, and continuing to use whatever craft to speak my mind.”

He’s particularly excited about doing more writing in every format: “Writing is always my favorite, because writing is at the base of everything,” Davis says. “My favorite part is receiving a blessing of an idea, and then just capturing it and executing it, no matter what the genre is.”

And maybe he’ll help some of those friends get ahead too: His rise has given him the opportunity to open doors for old pals, a position he says he both relishes and resents. It comes with a lot of pressure: “I’ve got friends who, the plan was always, I get on, and I help them get on,” he says. Which means he has to succeed for their sake as well as for his own: “If I can’t get on, I can’t help them get on.”

Davis feels the weight of his community on his shoulders, as well as his own high expectations for himself. But most days, the challenge excites him.

“I embraced that I’m the star of the team,” he says. “I’m Kobe. Comes with the territory. Heavy lies the crown, but I still like how the crown fits.” He tilts his head back and forth and smiles knowingly. “Even though it’s heavy and it hurts, I like how it looks on me.”

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