Jeanie Chung

Gooooaaaallll!

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:52:52 +0000

admin Wed, 02/08/2023 - 08:52

Julianne Sitch, head coach of the men’s soccer program. (UChicago Athletics and Recreation)

Winter/23

A former Maroon assistant wins a title her first year in charge.

In December Julianne Sitch finished her first season as head coach of the men’s soccer program. Before working with the Chicago Red Stars in the National Women’s Soccer League, she was an assistant to longtime UChicago women’s coach Amy Reifert. A star midfielder/forward at DePaul University, Sitch switched to defense during her professional playing career in the United States and abroad.

When the Maroons won the NCAA championship, ending the season 22–0–1, was she expecting the international news coverage that focused on her as a woman coach? “Not at all,” says Sitch. “I am excited, but I wish the media were all for the guys. They’ve been phenomenal. They’ve worked extremely hard. They’ve been in the Final Four several times in the last few years, and I am very, very proud of them.”

“The relationships and memories that you create with your teammates,” Sitch says, “are something you may not experience again—and a lot of people don’t experience in their lifetime.” (UChicago Athletics and Recreation)

Who were the soccer players you admired growing up? Did you have a poster of US National Team star Mia Hamm?

Mia Hamm was always one of my favorites, for the obvious reason of who Mia Hamm was.

I look really strongly at the 1999 World Cup champions and what they’ve done for women in general. For so long, I watched and idolized men’s soccer players, because it was the only thing I could relate to at the time I was growing up—until that 1999 team.

What made you want to come back to UChicago?

I loved my time here on the women’s side. I loved the athletic department. I loved working with the student-athletes—and the type of student-athletes you get here.

[Previous men’s coach] Pat Flinn and I knew each other from when I was an assistant on the women’s side and he was on the men’s side. Knowing him and what he’s done with the program, when he asked if I’d be interested in the opportunity, I said, “Oh, yeah!”

Amy Reifert had a lot of great things to say about you. She said she was thrilled when she found out you were interested in the job.

Amy’s been a huge part of the women’s program for 30-plus years, right? She’s created this environment where the players have absolutely, truly loved their time here. Being able to grow a true community and culture in athletics at a university is really cool.

Amy’s been a big influence throughout my coaching career.

Was there a moment where you felt like, OK, this season has been a success regardless of how it ends?

A lot of moments. All along in the season, after conference play, being undefeated in nonconference games, then conference season and playoffs. The way the team culture continued to grow every day, the relationships among the staff, and watching the players develop this unbelievable brotherhood—that is success.

Apparently there were a lot of soccer team alumni at the championship game?

Yeah. Without them, this moment doesn’t happen. They paved the way for us to be in a situation to win a championship.

Were you expecting the amount of media attention you got?

Not at all. I am excited, but I wish the media was for all the guys. They’ve been phenomenal. They deserve all the attention in the world. They’ve worked extremely hard. They’ve been in the Final Four several times in the last few years, and I am very, very proud of them.

You got asked a lot about being a woman coaching men.

A lot of people ask, and to me, I’m just coaching athletes. I hope this is not a headline in the future. I hope the headline is “Men’s soccer wins national championship.”

Like all UChicago students, your players are also academically ambitious. Have you learned anything interesting from them?

Absolutely. They inspire me.

If I’m being very honest and transparent, I went to college because I wanted to play soccer and I wanted to be a professional athlete. Now I look back on it, I’m like, man, this is so cool: all the things they get to study and do, and play soccer, and study abroad.

University News

Soccer

College students

The rite stuff

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:52:52 +0000

admin Wed, 02/08/2023 - 08:52

Men’s tennis has been on the rise since 2015, when the team made it to the NCAA semifinals for the first time. Since then, the Maroons have reached the semifinals three times in four years—but the 2022 season proved to be the breakthrough. (Photos courtesy UChicago Athletics and Recreation)

Jeanie Chung

The Core

Winter/23

Hard work plus talent plus … elaborate handshakes?

In May 2022, the Maroon men’s tennis team finished a 22–1 season by beating Case Western Reserve University’s Spartans 5–2 in the national title match in Orlando, Florida. It was the first NCAA Division III championship team sports win—in any sport—in UChicago history.

Winning a championship takes hard work, dedication, talent, and healthy habits. But does it also come down to music and wardrobe choices? Coach Jay Tee and the players share some secret rituals from their record-setting season.

Everyone was really superstitious about their pre-match warm-up partners. Doubles partners always warmed up together on the same court.—Marek Michulka, Class of 2023

During tournaments we made sure to have a full and healthy breakfast every morning. We found a breakfast place before the tournament began and ordered breakfast from there every day during the tournament.—Bailey Forgus, Class of 2023

Before matches the team would always have the same Jimmy John’s sandwiches. However, post-match meals consisted of either Chipotle or [coach] Jay [Tee]’s personal favorite, a Chinese buffet.—Biren Reddy, Class of 2023

My personal superstition occurred on changeovers. I would always sip Gatorade first, then water. I’d wipe my face with a towel, then go back to Gatorade, then water. I’d set the towel to the right of me and water on the ground in a specific place, much like Rafael Nadal.—Derek Hsieh, Class of 2024

Every time we played doubles, we did an elaborate handshake—and if there were any mistakes in the handshake, we would continue to do it until it was perfect. It helped us get in the right mindset for the match.—Jacob Lowen, Class of 2025

Whenever traveling to and from the match, everyone would make sure to sit in the same seats in the van.—Shramay Dhawan, AB’22

Connecting with our location on the South Side, we would exclusively listen to old-school Kanye [West] before every match in the spring, focusing on [albums] Graduation and The College Dropout. I was always in charge of the music.—Alex Guzhva, AB’22

I don’t like the word “superstition” because it unnecessarily increases fear of the unknown and reliance on luck. “Routine” is a better word. My favorite routine was our pre-match team chant [which remains classified] because we drastically improved it for that season.—Christian Alshon, Class of 2023

We had very specific uniform combinations that we thought were lucky. When we were playing tournaments, we carefully planned out our uniforms for the week. We would also do a lot of laundry on trips so that we could re-wear our favorite uniforms match after match, even if we had other clean uniforms.—Arjun Asokumar, LAB’20, Class of 2024

We would have a brief team meeting at the hotel the night before every match, sitting in the same spot each time. It helped us get in the zone and visualize what we wanted to accomplish the next day.—Sachin Das, Class of 2023

My superstition was telling the guys that their superstitions had nothing to do with us winning or losing. I also wore the same shirt for the entire week at NCAAs because it was good luck.—Head coach Jay Tee

Teach a kid to fish …

rsmith — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:10:35 +0000

rsmith Wed, 08/10/2022 - 19:10

While working as an intern at Lincoln Park Zoo, Sativa Volbrecht rescued a juvenile black-crowned night heron (see this issue’s UChicago Creature) that had fallen out of its nest. (Photo courtesy Sativa Volbrecht, AB’20, SM’22)

Jeanie Chung

The Core

Summer/22

Sativa Volbrecht, AB’20, SM’22, wants to get young people hooked on a hobby.

Transporting 25 fishing rods and reels—plus bait, tackle, and promotional posters—is cumbersome. For Sativa Volbrecht, AB’20, SM’22, who doesn’t have a car and so took everything via CTA, it was a true mark of commitment.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” she says, “but it did lead to some interesting conversations.” (Sadly, there are no pictures.)

A double major in biology and creative writing, Volbrecht was looking for a conservation-related job for the summer of 2021 when she saw a posting from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (DNR): its Urban Fishing Program in Chicago needed a clinic instructor. Targeted toward children 16 and under, the program aims to increase interest in fishing and encourage more people to develop it as a lifelong hobby.

Volbrecht was instantly drawn to the idea. Before her family moved to the Chicago suburbs when she was 12, Volbrecht lived in Idaho, “literally in a valley with mountains on all sides.” They went camping every summer, and she’d fished both there and in Chicago.

The communication and education aspect appealed to her writer side. While at UChicago she cultivated an interest in science education through internships at the Lincoln Park Zoo and the Woods Hole Science Aquarium.

Volbrecht says that since scientific terminology can be intimidating, “it’s useful to be able to know how to break it down, particularly when you’re talking to children.”

Volbrecht’s job involved both “dry clinics”—presentations on the ecosystem held at a park, where students might learn to cast a rod but didn’t put a line in the water—and actual fishing clinics. Most of the children were elementary school–aged; only a few had been fishing before.

First, Volbrecht taught her students to bait a hook. “We have little worm strips for them to attach. Some kids don’t want to touch it, but I always try to give the kids the opportunity first.”

Next, they learned to cast the line, and if and when they caught a fish, they learned to hold it and release it—Volbrecht usually helped them take the hook out gently and place the fish back in the water.

She visited parks all over the South and West Sides, taking kids fishing at Jackson Park Lagoon, Sherman Park, Wolf Lake, on the Chicago River at Ping Tom Park, and other spots around the city. They caught bluegill and catfish, both stocked by the DNR. Often the younger children fished more successfully than the older ones.

“One of the things we teach them is, you have to keep your line in the water,” Volbrecht says. “They can’t catch if they’re not in the water.” Younger children “just wandering around” tended to comply, but older ones would get impatient and pull their lines out to see if anything had happened.

She says the biggest catch of the summer was “a pretty large bluegill.” Memories of fish size are notoriously unreliable, bluegills tend to be small—but active—fish, and any fish looks bigger in small hands. Still, Volbrecht confirms it was a fairly big fish. She adds, “They were very excited.”

She incorporated last summer’s experience into her master’s thesis at the Graham School, towards a degree in emergency threat response management for environmental security, and is working for the Urban Fishing Program again this summer. Ultimately Volbrecht hopes to work on environmental policy issues in the public sector. And while she misses the mountains, she hopes to stay in Chicago; strolls through the Burnham Wildlife Corridor tide her over between trips back West.

Science & Medicine

Teaching

College alumni

The birds who joined the zoo

rsmith — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:10:35 +0000

rsmith Wed, 08/10/2022 - 19:10

A black-crowned night heron. (iStock/BirdImages)

Jeanie Chung

The Core

Summer/22

Black-crowned night herons know a good habitat when they see one.

Having worked with the Urban Fishing Program and interned at the Lincoln Park Zoo, Sativa Volbrecht, AB’20, SM’22, has come across her share of urban wildlife (read more about Volbrecht in “Teach a Kid to Fish … ”). Here’s why the black-crowned night heron is a favorite. Her comments have been edited and condensed.

“The black-crowned night heron is endangered in Illinois. There used to be a lot of nesting populations, but then we got rid of all the marshlands, so there were zero in Illinois. Then, about 10 to 12 years ago, a population from Wisconsin moved to the Lincoln Park Zoo. No one really knows why.

“Around the same time, the zoo, in partnership with the city, was renovating their boardwalk area. It was mostly recreational; they had swan boats and things. They decided to renovate it to be more natural, so they reintroduced native grasses and native species. Their wildlife institute is doing a long-term study to see the effect that change had.

“The herons decided to stick around, their population grew, and they’ve essentially been there ever since, nesting every spring in and around the zoo.

“It’s particularly interesting because before, this species was very human-shy and didn’t like noise. They would essentially avoid cities. Then, for no apparent reason, they decided to nest in the middle of the city. Now you have these chicks growing up in the city, displaying completely different behaviors than the other populations of the species. They’re really no longer noise-averse. You’ll find them downtown, hanging out near humans, just vibing.

“They’re super interesting. They’re actually my favorite example of birds being related to dinosaurs, because they look like little dinosaurs.”

If you’re not near Lincoln Park Zoo, you might see the herons at other Chicago locations—including Jackson Park Lagoon—where they’ve been spotted.

Recipe for success

rsmith — Wed, 11 May 2022 15:50:07 +0000

rsmith Wed, 05/11/2022 - 10:50

Jeanie Chung

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/22

Mealtime conversation with the Korean Vegan.

In September 2020, Joanne Lee Molinaro, JD’04, jokingly told her followers, “You have to stop crying at my TikToks. Like, seriously, it’s just a cooking video.”

On TikTok for less than two months, she’d already become a viral sensation, largely because her posts are more than “just” cooking videos. In eloquent voiceovers, Molinaro invites viewers into her kitchen, her home, and her life. Whether she’s talking about her parents’ experiences emigrating from North Korea to South Korea, her own upbringing in America, or her personal philosophy, she is open, compassionate, and unapologetically opinionated—all while preparing vegan dishes, most of them updating the Korean cuisine she grew up with.

In one post that has 2.5 million views to date, she tells a story about her mother defending her from a fat-shaming woman in a store, while on video she makes a noodle dish called japchae. In another, she recounts her dad’s support of her divorce as she prepares a spicy tofu dish: nine million views. (She has since remarried; her husband, pianist Anthony Molinaro, is another frequent topic and occasional guest, and his music often accompanies the videos.)

Soon Molinaro was more than a partner in a law firm with a fun side hustle. As the Korean Vegan, she introduced staples like gochujang, a spicy chili paste, and tteokbokki, chewy rice cakes, to both vegans and nonvegans whose knowledge of Korean food ended at kimchi and barbecue. Viewers familiar with the cuisine learned from her that jjajangmyun, a noodle dish with black bean sauce that happens to be Molinaro’s favorite, could be made without pork, and that gamjatang—literally, “potato stew”—could focus on the potatoes instead of the meat.

There’s no telling where Molinaro will venture with each new post. Her childhood, family, and running are frequent subjects, but she’s caused a stir with episodes about politics, racism, and disordered eating. The one (near) constant—whether she’s speaking as herself or in character as Gomoh, a Korean auntie—is food.

In her parents’ home, eating “was a serious business that demanded undivided attention,” writes Joanne Lee Molinaro, JD’04, in her book’s introduction. (Photo from Korean Vegan Copyright © 2021 by Joanne Lee Molinaro)

Molinaro’s three million TikTok followers helped make her 2021 cookbook—a collection of recipes and personal essays—a best seller. Both the New York Times and the New Yorker picked The Korean Vegan Cookbook: Reflections and Recipes from Omma’s Kitchen (Avery) as one of the year’s best cookbooks, with the latter calling the recipes “simultaneously personal and rooted in the practice of generations.”

These days being the Korean Vegan is a full-time job. Molinaro has a weekly newsletter, an online meal planner, and a second book in the works, and she promotes all three on social media and her website (thekoreanvegan.com). Alongside all of that, she remains of counsel at Foley & Lardner LLP and teaches the occasional continuing legal education course.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Why law school

“I’m an adult and I don’t know what to do. Might as well go to law school.” But once I got to the University of Chicago I felt I had really made a great decision. I loved my professors. Loved my classmates. I loved everything about it.

Although my career choice of lawyer was not made with a great deal of intention, everything I did thereafter was very purposeful.

Eat hate love

I have this love-hate relationship with food where I love to eat; it makes me happy. I love eating jjajangmyun and French fries and all those things, but eating those things is at odds with the body that I have been conditioned to seek. And that conditioning is probably something I can no longer erase.

That’s one aspect of my relationship with food. We can also talk about how I hated Korean food until I went to college. I think that’s very common among second-generation Korean Americans and Asian Americans.

We never ate anything other than Korean food growing up, except for maybe birthdays. So I hated it. Then when I got to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all the kids were eating Korean food.

Korean Vegan isn’t an oxymoron

Korea’s culinary evolution is as complicated and nuanced as every other country’s. It’s not straightforward.

One of the dangers of the popularity of Korea, as represented by BTS, by Parasite, and by Korean barbecue and gochujang, is there’s this risk—almost an inevitability—of flattening. All our music is BTS. All Korean food is barbecue and gochujang and bibimbap. And unfortunately, a lot of people assume, incorrectly, that Korean people don’t know how to do vegan.

There’s an argument that Korean food is the best for vegans. It’s delicious, and so much of it is already vegetable-centric.

What her parents think

When my parents went on the book tour with me and they saw the kind of impact I was having on my community, my father in particular was agog.

The art of conversation

When I started posting these TikToks, we had all been stuck in quarantine for a few months, and I felt like the world was blowing up. The irony is my husband and I had just moved into this beautiful home, and the whole purpose was to entertain. We had two dinner parties before we had to shut it all down.

The thinking was, I can’t do real-life dinner parties, so I’ll put these videos up. And when you go to a dinner party, yes, you enjoy the food. But your host isn’t regaling you with the details of how she created the food. You’re talking about what you did that day, an interesting thing I read in the news, or, oh, let me tell you this incredible story my mom told me.

Life in the comments section

In some respects, the avalanche of attention I started getting on TikTok was a blessing in disguise. If you’ve got 20,000 comments, you’re not going to be able to read the bad ones. Even if I did see the occasional negative comment, it just didn’t hit me in the way I expected it would.

That started to change once my content became more political. During the election fraud accusations of November 2020, when I started posting more about my thoughts, it became much harder to ignore some of the negativity. Sometimes I would try my best and would be successful. Sometimes I would be totally unsuccessful, and it would ruin my day. And sometimes I would use it to create more content that went viral. [Molinaro’s November 8 video explaining the rules of civil procedure regarding fraud claims in the presidential election ultimately turned into a piece for the Atlantic.]

Vegan philosophy

The reason people have this notion of veganism as being elitist is because part of it is true. I’m very privileged that I get to make these ethical calls on my food, as opposed to having no money and just eating whatever I can get into my stomach, like my parents did.

When I went to Korea to do research for the book, I met with Jeong Kwan Sunim, a Korean Buddhist nun who does not eat animal products as part of her philosophy. She said, “I don’t call myself vegan. What the hell does vegan even mean?”

There’s a lot embedded in that word, for good or for bad. Part of what I’m trying to do is take that word and use it in a way that’s empowering as opposed to gatekeeping.

From The Korean Vegan Cookbook

by Joanne Lee Molinaro, JD’04

For Joanne Lee Molinaro, food and family are inseparably tangled up together. So in The Korean Vegan Cookbook: Reflections and Recipes from Omma’s Kitchen, the reflections loom as large as the recipes. In two short essays excerpted from the book, Molinaro recounts stories about her Omma (mother) and Appa (father).

When Molinaro went vegan, she didn’t want to lose the connection to her Korean heritage, so she found herself once again in her Omma’s kitchen learning family recipes. (Photo from Korean Vegan Copyright © 2021 by Joanne Lee Molinaro)

Omma and sweet potatoes

After my mother’s family crossed the 38th parallel when my mother was about a year old, they landed in a small valley along the southern fringe of South Korea called Suk Bong Rhee, Chun La Namdo. They were referred to as “Korean War refugees.”

They were homeless. My grandparents traveled from house to house, begging for scraps of food and a place to sleep for the night. When they were lucky, they dug up leftover vegetables from recently harvested fields to supplement their daily meal of watery porridge.

Eventually, my grandfather was able to find a job as a janitor at a local middle school. He was good with his hands—he made kites for my mom and whittled toys for the neighborhood children. They were always poor, though.

Still, my mother remembers her childhood with great fondness. Poverty and war are powerful, yes. But so is the taste of fresh berries picked by your own hand along the ridge of a mountain lumbering over the hot months of summer like a drowsy silverback. Or the smell of barley heads snipped off their willowy bodies and roasted over an open flame beneath a blanket of preening stars. Her favorite, though, has always been sweet potatoes.

“You know, when I eat these sweet potatoes ...” My mother has a way of saying her words in English as if they are too big for her mouth. She cuts them up into small pieces—“poe-tae-toes.”

“... when I eat these sweet potatoes, it always makes me remember when I was a little girl,” she recounts one day while slicing up the bright orange yam I had just taken out of the toaster oven. My mother rarely comes by my house, but I am sick and she insisted on bringing me a vat of radish soup. To this day, my mother’s soup is my cure-all. As a nurse, it’s her way of showing affection and care (the word she often used instead of the awkward-sounding “love”).

“Why?”

“Because,” she starts, while holding out a gooey orange morsel. “Because,” she reiterates, “these were the best food.”

“What do you mean, the ‘best food’?” In my mind, the list of “best foods” included French fries, Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, donuts. It did not include sweet potatoes.

“When we were refugees ...” she answers between mouthfuls, expertly peeling the skin off another stringy piece, before popping it into her mouth.

“Wait. When you guys got to South Korea?” I ask. I realize that I actually know very little about my mother’s childhood. Other than the few snatches of conversation I managed to overhear over the years, most of what I “know” is nestled between Wikipedia and myth. This was the first I’d ever heard her talk about what it was like shortly after escaping North Korea.

“Mm-hmmm,” she says from inside another mouthful. “We had nothing. Nothing. So, the people in that village, they would harvest these,” holding up what remains of her potato in my face, “and then give us what they had left over. And we would eat them just like this,” she finishes, while sucking her fingers. And I believe her, more than I’ve ever believed anything else she’s ever said to me, because she isn’t looking at me when she explains these things. My 4-foot 11-inch, 90-pound mother is too busy cleaning her plate.

“And then, afterwards, I would run over to the field and dig up whatever I could find, you know, just a small piece,” then she shows me the underside of her hand, which has been her sign for “tiny” for as long as I can remember. “That was the way we lived back then.”

She pauses to look up at me.

“That’s why, when I retire, I want to serve. I want to serve that village. They were so good to us.”

Appa’s daughter

My father and I haven’t always had the easiest relationship. He is naturally aloof, and therefore affection—verbal or otherwise—is a bit like a foreign language to him. For most of my life, we got along by tacitly agreeing to stay out of each other’s way. It got to the point that just the sound of my father’s footsteps or his voice could cause me anxiety.

Being the first child of an immigrant also created a weird dynamic between us. As I began to speak English fluently, I quickly assumed the role of “translator.” At nine years old, I was the one calling and asking to speak with customer service, interacting with the store clerk at the cash register, or signing permission slips from school. At some point, before I was even a teenager, I witnessed how helpless my father seemed in the big American world, and as a result, I became the adult.

As my father grew older, I began to worry about how much time I had left to spend with him. I tried harder to find ways to hurdle the gap that had developed between us over the years. I never dreamed that running would be the thing that helped bring us together.

Despite a lifetime of hating running, in 2017, I signed up for my first marathon—the Chicago Marathon. My mother was in Korea, so she wasn’t able to cheer me on from the sidelines. My father, though, insisted on taking the 5:30 a.m. bus with a group of people he didn’t even know from a local Korean community organization, just so he could cheer for me at Mile 20. To be honest, I didn’t want him there. Without my mom there to take care of him, it would be up to me to make sure he was where he needed to be at the right time, and I already had twenty-six miles to worry about. I chatted with him on the phone the night before, hoping to dissuade him from coming.

“Daddy, are you sure you want to come? You really don’t need to ... I mean, it’s so early in the morning and it might get cold ...”

“Yah, I see you at Mile 20! Oh sure sure sure, I will be there! How long you think you going to take?”

I remember a lot of things from my first marathon: the fireflies stomping around my stomach while I waited for the starting pistol to pop off, my husband jogging with me through a bit of Chinatown before I waved him off in overheated delirium, and the handful of aspirins I downed at Mile 18 when the smooth Chicago pavement started to feel like shattered glass. But, my most memorable moment during the Chicago Marathon was at Mile 20. When I heard “Jo-ENNE!!” and saw my father’s face split into a smile that struck my ribs open with a gong. My seventy-two-year-old father with prostate cancer and a bad back tried his best to jog next to me, handed me the water bottle he had been holding in his hands since the crack of dawn, for nearly six hours, so that he wouldn’t miss this five-second window to pass it to me while asking, “Do you want me to run with you? Can I run with you?”

I left my father behind at Mile 20, wiping tears and sweat from my face, because in that moment, my dad, the one I’d spent my entire life protecting with my English-speaking shield, wanted to be and was stronger than his American daughter.

Three years later, I finally ceded to my father’s yearly invitations to join him for a family trip to Korea. We spent ten days trying to cram in two decades’ worth of visits I’d neglected to make. One day we decided to head to one of the nearby national parks, home to one of the most famous Buddhist temples and Buddhist monks.

We had driven hours to get to Naejangsan National Park and finally pulled into a large parking lot next to what appeared to be a sizable pond at the foot of a long and winding path that led up to the temple. We had packed some kimbap (Korean rolls) and tteok (rice cakes) left over from the feast we had had the night before, and we decided to refuel before climbing to the top of the sprawling hill.

Though my sister-in-law warned me that the kimbap we’d packed would no longer be tasty, they looked too inviting to pass up. I took one bite and instantly recalled that my sister-in-law is rarely wrong when it comes to food. Not wanting to waste it, though, I canvassed our little troupe to see who might eat my leftovers. Daddy stood at the edge of the pond, his left hand entwined in the strap of the camcorder I had bought him for this trip. A collar of happy trees, their boughs bright green and heavy with summer’s promise, supplied a shaded spot from which he could consider the dark reflections that shimmered on the surface.

Clutching the half-eaten kimbap, I skipped over to him. Giggling, and before he could say anything, I fit the small kimbap in his empty hand and skipped away, leaving a ribbon of pink laughter in my wake. He called after me, “What? I don’t want this!” But I just laughed harder, reveling in how perfectly the uneaten piece of food fit inside my father’s curved fingers, how colorful it looked against his walnut skin and beneath the cool eaves of the shifting trees, how I was spending the entire day with my dad in a place that made me feel more like his little girl than any place on Earth.

Text and photos excerpted from Korean Vegan Copyright © 2021 by Joanne Lee Molinaro. Published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Law, Policy & Society

Frönen by the numbers

rsmith — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 16:29:03 +0000

rsmith Thu, 12/23/2021 - 10:29

Erik Nadeau, AB’18, and Jessy Gartenstein, AB’17, enjoy Frönen at their Chicago coworking space. (Photography by Anne Ryan)

Jeanie Chung

The Core

Winter/22

The cold, hard figures behind an alumni dessert company.

4

Ingredients in a pint of Frönen’s Madagascar vanilla: coconut cream, water, honey, and vanilla extract. The nondairy ice cream company, run by Jessy Gartenstein, AB’17, and Erik Nadeau, AB’18, prides itself on having minimal, simple ingredients. Most Frönen flavors have four or five; mint chip is the outlier at seven.

13

Age at which Gartenstein was diagnosed with celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder in which gluten damages the small intestine. She met Nadeau, a fellow public policy major, during his first year and her second at UChicago.

17

Ingredients in Halo Top’s vanilla bean ice cream, including milk and erythritol, a low-calorie sweetener that can cause digestive upset. In the summer of 2016, Gartenstein and Nadeau were eating Halo Top weekly—“We thought it was healthier,” she says—when both became ill. It turned out Nadeau had trouble digesting erythritol, and Gartenstein’s dairy sensitivity had flared up.

Going without a frozen treat was not an option since they are, as Gartenstein says, “kind of addicted to ice cream.” But many nondairy ice creams have gluten—in the form of malt or in the catchall “natural flavors”—or other additives. Nadeau proposed his family’s recipe: blended frozen bananas to make a creamy base for “nice cream.”

Soon they were eating it every night, making different flavors by mixing in peanut butter, honey, berries, whatever struck their fancy. They started sharing with friends. Though neither had ever considered a career in food or entrepreneurship, Gartenstein said they, along with their friend Grant Kushner, AB’17, MBA’21, decided to enter the College New Venture Challenge (CNVC) as “a fun experience that we wanted to try before we graduated.”

50

Pages in the business plan required for the CNVC, along with a feasibility study and two pitches to the judges. The business plan was due on Nadeau’s birthday. In true UChicago fashion, the three pulled an all-nighter in the Reg.

20,000

Dollars won in the 2017 CNVC. Since Frönen’s main ingredients were honey and bananas, the company was known at the time as BeeNana. Most of the money, which went quickly, covered various legal start-up fees, ingredients for the first research and development run, and commercial production.

0

Food scientists who thought their recipe was actually scalable. It’s one thing to make a dessert for a small group of people who will eat it immediately and another to make a product that will survive processing, shipping, and sitting in a freezer for weeks.

Nadeau described an early effort’s texture as “almost like frozen sand.”

Meanwhile, Gartenstein said customers found the banana base “just a bit polarizing.”

So they started tinkering. They had already changed the company name from BeeNana to Frönen: German for “to indulge.” With a name that no longer mentioned specific ingredients, they gradually phased in coconut cream and phased out bananas, creating a creamier product. They staked out a market niche of ice cream with simple ingredients.

Countless

Unexpected challenges, such as the time Frönen was preparing to launch to Mariano’s and a shipment of bananas didn’t clear customs. Or the time a truck full of product blew a tire and flipped over. The driver was fine, says Nadeau, “but all of our ice cream melted on the side of the road somewhere up in Wisconsin.”

1,300

Grocery stores carrying Frönen today—mostly in the Midwest, but also on the East and West Coasts—including Whole Foods, Walmart, Mariano’s/Kroger, Jewel-Osco/Albertsons, Fresh Thyme, ShopRite, and Wegmans. Pints are also available directly through the Frönen website.

2

Full-time employees: Gartenstein and Nadeau. Kushner left to work in pharmaceutical consulting before enrolling at Chicago Booth. Gartenstein oversees sales and marketing while Nadeau handles operations and finance, though they make big decisions together. But with expansion on their minds—more flavors, possibly branching out into other desserts and beyond—they are adding at least one employee.

7

Days a week Gartenstein and Nadeau live and work together. They still eat ice cream most days. Their favorite Frönen flavor is salted caramel swirl.

Elevate your Frönen ice cream game with a recipe for “Nice Cream” cups.

Out Loud

rsmith — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 23:16:30 +0000

rsmith Thu, 07/29/2021 - 18:16

Marina Fang, AB’15, oversaw HuffPost’s series Asian Americans Out Loud. (Photography by Damon Dahlen/HuffPost)

Jeanie Chung

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/21

A Chicago Maroon veteran finds her voice.

Growing up in Pittsburgh as the daughter of immigrants from China, Marina Fang had always liked writing but hadn’t considered a journalism career, because “I didn’t know anyone who looked like me who was doing it.”

Today, as a national reporter covering the intersection of politics and culture for HuffPost, Fang, AB’15, has a platform to shape the ways Asian American people see themselves—and the ways others see them. Never was that opportunity bigger than when it came time to plan the publication’s features highlighting Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May. Fang, who took the lead, knew what she wanted.

She has written about anti-Asian racism and is well aware of the struggles of Asian Americans now and in the past, but as she thought about it, “the ideas I kept coming back to were just things like joy and celebration and empowerment and resilience,” Fang says. “I really did not want to do a series that was directly about the fear and the trauma of these times.”

Like any underrepresented group, Asian Americans have experienced violence throughout US history, which increased with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The issue drew heightened national attention when six women of Asian descent were among eight people killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta this March. In response, Fang and her fellow HuffPost writers leaned further into the idea of celebration.

What emerged was Asian Americans Out Loud, a collection of nine stories and an introductory essay about individuals “leading the way forward in art and activism.” There’s a story about Celine Song and her play Endlings, which depicts Korean women who make a living diving for seafood. Another features the creators of Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, a Dungeons and Dragons–like board game where players battle racism, economic hardship, and vampires. There are also stories on Asian American intersectional activists working for Black reparations and disability rights.

The stories don’t shy away from challenges facing the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, especially since the onset of the pandemic. But Fang also describes the stories and the work of the artists and activists they feature as “evergreen.”

“We should be allowed to be our whole selves and express our whole selves,” Fang says, “whether it’s the subjects in these stories or the writer.”

In some ways the series, for which Fang wrote one story plus the introductory essay, is a milestone she’s been working toward since her days at the Chicago Maroon. Starting out as a reporter and eventually becoming news editor, Fang estimates she spent 40 hours a week in the newsroom in the basement of Ida Noyes: “Basically, all I did was go to class”—she majored in public policy and international studies—“and go to the Maroon.” She called the experience “a fantastic way to learn how to be a journalist.”

An Institute of Politics–sponsored internship at HuffPost the summer before her fourth year resulted in a job there after graduation. Fang started out covering breaking political news—a wild ride in the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.

“Every hour there’s a new thing to cover,” she says. “And every hour, it was like the thing you covered the previous hour was no longer relevant or had completely changed.”

Fang longed for a role that would allow her to contextualize events rather than just react to them. She continued to cover breaking news but worked on some stories that took a longer view, combining her interests in politics and culture to look at each through the lens of the other. When one of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s accusers attended the 2020 State of the Union address as a guest of a Massachusetts congresswoman sponsoring a bill limiting the use of employee nondisclosure agreements, Fang was the obvious choice to write the story.

She has written about Hollywood’s perpetuation of Asian stereotypes, and, for the Asian Americans Out Loud series, about Welcome to Chinatown, a nonprofit founded in March 2020 to support small businesses in the New York City neighborhood. And while she writes frequently for HuffPost’s Asian Voices section, there is no expectation that everything she writes fits there. For example, in a rumination on the limited HBO series Mare of Easttown she grappled with her feelings about watching police shows in today’s world—even as she really wanted to find out how Mare would solve the crime.

“I’m figuring out a way to assert myself as an Asian American journalist and use that as an asset in my reporting,” Fang says, “but also not be defined by that.”

A watershed moment in that process was a story she wrote in 2019 about the movie The Farewell. She interviewed director Lulu Wang, but since the movie was about a US-raised daughter of Chinese immigrants, Fang also talked about the film’s resonances with her own life. After praising the story, her editor offered some advice: “You don’t have to just write about movies by Asian American filmmakers or TV by Asian American filmmakers. You should be able to write about anything.”

As a result, Fang felt emboldened to pursue any story that interested her, but also to keep her own perspective and voice.

“I don’t really believe in the idea of objectivity and being unbiased,” she says. “I think more about: Are you being fair? Are you being accurate? Are you being authentic? Are you telling somebody’s story with care?”

Sam Levine, AB’14, a former editor of Fang’s at the Maroon, then a colleague at HuffPost before moving on to the Guardian, notes Fang’s curiosity, composure on deadline, and command of Twitter, among other skills. He was surprised when Fang once told him that a journalism career never occurred to her until well into college. “She was so natural, I had just assumed she had lots and lots of experience,” he says.

Fang wants to help younger writers see themselves as professionals, which is why she tries to help Maroon staffers following in her footsteps and volunteers with Girls Write Now, where she currently mentors an Asian American high school student interested in writing. She wants her mentee “to understand that people who look like us, we can be journalists or writers or do creative things.”

Law, Policy & Society

Journalism

Race

Racism

The value of the individual

rsmith — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 20:30:19 +0000

rsmith Wed, 07/28/2021 - 15:30

Andy Kim, AB’04, cites a moment in Karl Weintraub’s Western Civilization course as one of his most enduring memories of UChicago. (Photo courtesy Andy Kim, AB’04)

Jeanie Chung

The Core

Summer/21

An interview with Class Day speaker and US Rep. Andy Kim, AB’04.

Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ), AB’04, spoke at the College’s Class Day ceremony in June. A political science major at UChicago, he studied international relations as a Rhodes and then a Truman Scholar at Oxford. He worked for the US Agency for International Development, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the White House National Security Council before being elected to the House in 2018.

The Class Day tradition began in 2017. Previous speakers, all with ties to the University, have included cancer researcher Otis W. Brawley, SB’81, MD’85; journalist Rebecca Jarvis, AB’03; Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and distinguished senior fellow at the Law School; and New York Times columnist and University trustee David Brooks, AB’83.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

What are your memories from your own convocation?

I remember having a deep level of excitement. There was a lot of uncertainty about the future, but I felt prepared. The hardest part was saying goodbye to friends without knowing when we would see each other again.

What drew you to UChicago from Deep Springs College? (Deep Springs is a two-year college in the California desert, all male at the time Kim attended, where its 24–30 students also work on a cattle ranch.)

Deep Springs is an extraordinarily unique two-year education. I was looking for another unique place to finish off my undergraduate experience. Coming from the rural ranch environment, I found the urban dynamics of UChicago to be incredibly complementary to provide a new perspective.

I wanted a place where I could find a balance between the life of the mind and tangible hands-on work. I also deeply respected the approach to education of UChicago that embraced the pursuit of depth. The main goal was to learn how to ask good questions, and UChicago helped me hone that kind of critical thinking.

What’s your most enduring memory of UChicago?

The first class meeting of Western Civilization, taught by Professor Karl Weintraub [AB’49, AM’52, PhD’57]. He was a legendary teacher who had taught at UChicago for nearly 50 years. He was unwell at the time, though, and struggled to always articulate the brilliant thoughts he had in his mind.

He paused the class and mentioned that he had people suggest to him that he stop teaching and retire. I started to choke up as he talked about how much meaning teaching provided for his life and how he wasn’t sure what life would be like without teaching. I remember looking around the room and seeing 20 other students who all were internalizing the power of that moment and the ability to be a part of something so special and inspiring. Professor Weintraub passed away shortly after. I feel blessed to have had the time as one of his students.

Was there one class or one book that’s been relevant in your career in public service?

I did an independent study with Professor Nathan Tarcov [the Karl J. Weintraub Professor in the College and the Division of the Social Sciences] on Plato’s Republic. That was the first book I read as an undergrad [at Deep Springs]. I wanted to read it again as the last book to get a sense of how much my thoughts had grown in four years. I keep that same copy of the Republic with me at my office at the Capitol, and I still return to those passages that I highlighted. There is an eternalness to many of the struggles we face.

Kim with his wife, Kammy, and their sons at a polling place in New Jersey. (AP Photo/Mel Evans).

What aspects of serving in Congress have surprised you—and what parts did you feel prepared for?

My time in Congress has been anything but ordinary. I started during a shutdown, voted on two impeachments, and spent half of it during a pandemic. The thing that prepared me most was my time as a diplomat. A lot of people in Congress are great at talking, but as a diplomat, you learn to listen. It doesn’t matter if it’s a member of the other party in Congress or someone who may not agree with you on a lot of things back home, finding that middle ground starts with listening. It’s something that’s lacking in Washington. It’s something I work every day to be better at.

You’ve talked a lot about how your second son’s birth inspired you to run for public office. How is it balancing family and your demanding job?

It’s tough. My wife and I are lucky—we both work, we have parents who live nearby and can help, and we’ve got a healthy family. Watching my two sons grow up every day is a blessing, but it is difficult to raise a family in America. There aren’t a lot of working parents in Congress. I wish that were different.

You’ve also been very vocal about anti-Asian hate crimes. What was it like for you as an Asian American student at UChicago?

When I was at UChicago, I was at a difficult place in understanding my Asian American identity. At times I tried to downplay or ignore my heritage. I wanted to be seen as just American without any qualifiers.

I studied Hannah Arendt and thought that talking about universal aspects of the human condition meant to focus on that which we share rather than what makes us different. But her book Eichmann in Jerusalem and other writings showed the clash within plurality.

These experiences, in addition to my work at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, pushed me to visit all 77 Chicago neighborhoods and see the range of life experiences in the city I called home. My understanding of my own identity shifted considerably during my time in Chicago.

After the Capitol insurrection of January 6, a photo of you helping to clean up trash—the only lawmaker alongside the building staff—went viral.

It was a traumatic moment—for me, for my colleagues, for our nation. In traumatic moments, people process things differently; I started cleaning up. There’s always something you can do, there’s always a way you can help or make things better. It doesn’t have to be a big act; it can be something as small as picking up the garbage.

What gives you hope for the future?

My two baby boys. My oldest son is five, and I just watched him ride a two-wheel bike for the very first time. It was a humbling feeling to watch him seek out these milestones in the human experience. Seeing them grow up and enter the world—it drives me to do better every day and gives me hope about the great things they’ll accomplish one day.

Law, Policy & Society

Politics

College alumni

Mountain time

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 17:11:52 +0000

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(Photo courtesy Lydia Lo, Class of 2024)

Jeanie Chung

The Core

Winter/21

First-year cross-country runners start the academic year off with an altitude adjustment.

Lydia Lo and Catherine Wimmer were excited for their first year at UChicago, eager to take classes and run for the Maroons’ cross-country and track teams. But as the summer of 2020 wore on and COVID-19 showed no signs of letting up, they got worried.

Schools across the country started switching to remote learning. Fearing the same thing would happen in Hyde Park, they wondered: Why not get a group of first-year runners together to live, study, and run at altitude for Autumn Quarter and what would have been cross-country season?

“We thought it would be a good way to train,” Wimmer says, “and it might be nice to go somewhere secluded.”

They scoured the web for rentals, looking in Colorado, Wyoming, even Hawaii. They finally found an affordable four-bedroom, four-bath townhouse in Park City, Utah (population 8,500)—not quite secluded, but certainly less crowded than Chicago and offering necessary amenities like Wi-Fi, nearby grocery shopping, and abundant open trails for running. With a destination in mind, they reached out to as many of their first-year teammates as they could.

Although some people took a little bit of convincing, and their parents took even more, “everyone was pretty down,” Wimmer says.

And so the weekend before classes started, six runners from the Class of 2024 arrived in Utah: Lo from Texas, Wimmer and Evelyn Battleson-Gunkel from New Jersey, Cara Chittenden from California, Karis Ertel from western New York, and Lucy Groothuis from Michigan. All had received negative COVID-19 tests and were careful about masks and social distancing before and after their stay.

From left: Karis Ertel, Lydia Lo, Evelyn Battleson-Gunkel, Cara Chittenden, and Catherine Wimmer, all Class of 2024, on a hike in Deer Valley. (Photo courtesy Lucy Groothuis, Class of 2024)

None had ever been to Utah or trained at altitude. That alone, Lo says, was “very different from anything we’ve ever experienced.” They were also getting used to college classes, Zoom—most of their high school classes in the spring involved only asynchronous assignments—and living with people they’d just met.

They learned to give each other space and share chores. They didn’t draw up a chore chart, though Lo admits, “that might’ve been a good idea.”

Focusing on academics was a challenge at times, Wimmer says, especially with the temptations of a “runner’s paradise” like the Park City area. “It’s hard to not think I have an obligation to go outside and see something cool.” Eventually their days settled into a routine: classes and schoolwork in the morning, a run in the afternoon, grocery shopping or other errands, more schoolwork, dinner, often a movie at home. They had more time to explore on the weekends; a trip to the Bonneville Salt Flats was a highlight.

They took turns cooking. Wimmer made brussels sprouts and salads, Lo made chicken, Chittenden whipped up pancakes and smoothies, Battleson-Gunkel made macaroni and cheese. “We all have our specialties,” Lo says.

As the group bonded, they kept in regular contact with their teammates and coach Chris Hall, who helped them adjust their workouts and expectations to account for the altitude. “It’s more a matter of knowing you’re breathing heavy because it’s high altitude,” Wimmer says, “rather than being worried you’re out of shape.”

They also discovered students from other schools—Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, more—living nearby and spending their fall the same way. COVID-19 restrictions meant they couldn’t meet up, but Lo says they connected on social media, establishing “a unique sense of community.”

Although they were looking forward to seeing their families for the holidays and then being on campus in January, the runners were a little sad to leave when their rental ended before Thanksgiving. “Everyone is happy we made this decision in the end,” Wimmer says, “not only for our athletic and academic sides, but for our mental state.”

Learn more about what these student-athletes cooked in “First-Year Cusine.”

Travelogue

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 17:11:52 +0000

admin Tue, 02/16/2021 - 11:11

Trained in English literature, W. J. T. Mitchell became interested in visual culture early in his career when he studied the Romantic-era poet and artist William Blake. (Photography by John Zich)

Jeanie Chung

The University of Chicago Magazine

Winter/21

W. J. T. Mitchell looks at endings and beginnings.

The year 2020 marked two milestones for W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in English Language and Literature, Art History, and the College: he ended his 42-year tenure as editor of the interdisciplinary arts and humanities journal Critical Inquiry and published his first nonacademic book. That work, Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia (University of Chicago Press, 2020), is a memoir of his son Gabrielʼs 20-year battle with schizophrenia and subsequent death by suicide in 2012.

Mitchell was the second person to lead Critical Inquiry, taking over in 1978 upon the death of founding editor Sheldon Sacks, PhDʼ60, professor of English and linguistics. The journalʼs influence grew steadily under his watch; 25 years later, the New York Times called it “academeʼs most prestigious theory journal.”

As a scholar, Mitchell has ranged freely over English literature, the visual arts, and popular culture. Two of his books, both on visual culture and theory, were awarded the University of Chicago Pressʼs Gordon J. Laing Prize for the faculty book published during the previous three years that “brings the Press the greatest distinction”: Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994) and What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2005). Other works examine William Blake, English landscape painting, and the dinosaur as a cultural icon.

Mitchell spoke to the Magazine in November about editing Critical Inquiry, writing about Gabriel, and more.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You really shaped Critical Inquiry from what it started as—focused on the Chicago school of literary criticism—to what it became.

Shelly Sacks handed the journal off to me, basically. In a way, he empowered me. He said, “We have bigger ambitions. We want to be the journal of record for advanced theory in the humanities and the social sciences.”

It was an easy transition, to aim higher and more broadly. One policy I initiated was to try to be sure that we were always bringing on the younger generation as coeditors. I wanted the journal to reflect the new and the fresh at all times.

Within the first two years, Elizabeth Abel, an untenured assistant professor [now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley], said to me, “I want to edit the first issue of the new feminist criticism.” Iʼll never forget our editorial meetings. I was still young, but [professors of English] Wayne Booth, AMʼ47, PhDʼ50, and Bob Streeter were not. We had these wonderful discussions saying, “This is a new kind of criticism. It has a politics that goes with it. We canʼt think about it in the same way we thought about old-
fashioned articles on Samuel Johnson and rhetoric.”

Elizabeth set the pattern for both new and young ideas coming in and for adjusting our criteria accordingly—really thinking about our own methods of assessment.

It seems like everybody was published there. You had Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jacques Derrida, Elaine Showalter, obviously people from UChicago. Anyone you wanted to get but didnʼt?

We had a chance to get Michel de Certeau, a French theorist who was studying space. Iʼve taught his work often. I loved his work. Early on, somebody had translated a piece of his. At that time, in the late ʼ70s, I didnʼt know who de Certeau was. The translation was a mess. It was not in English yet. If Iʼd been a little more hip, a little more alert, I wouldʼve said yes. But we didnʼt have anybody who was reading firsthand French theory and criticism. So we turned it down. And within months—“What? You turned down de Certeau? Why?” I said, “Because weʼre stupid.”

What made you decide to step down as editor?

It was time to let the younger people on the journal run it—particularly my English department colleagues Bill Brown and Frances Ferguson, whoʼve taken over as a duo.

Iʼm on leave this year. I have so many writing projects, and at my age you donʼt have forever. The minute I said Iʼm going to take at least a year away from being in the editorial meetings, like I take a year away from teaching, it just felt so right.

Tell us about your writing projects.

The one thatʼs on the front burner is a history of the present called “Present Tense 2020.” It started in 2016 with an essay I wrote entitled “American Psychosis: Trump and the Nightmare of History.” In 2018 I added another segment to it around the election of that year—all the anxieties leading up to it, because how could you trust polls anymore?

Then when the pandemic hit, this added another layer that I have to take account of. Then the murder of George Floyd. So this condensation of political insanity, embodied by Trumpism, the pandemic, and then the eruption of enormous mass demonstrations all over the world in response to George Floyd struck me as, I have to do something to tell this story I had already begun in 2016. Now Iʼm trying to pull it all together.

And then thereʼs Mental Traveler, which is quite different from Critical Inquiry and your other writing: you couldnʼt have any analytical distance here, even if you wanted to.

No. Just to decide to write it, to divulge all of these intimate things, I had to first overcome my own sense of self-censorship. Do I want to really expose myself? My son? Our family? I can tell you thereʼs a lot that had to be deleted from the book.

How did you settle on the structure, which is roughly chronological but also thematic, with chapters on Gabeʼs treatment, his art, and the misconception that mental illness can be overcome by force of will?

With numerous rewritings. I hate to think what the first draft looked like. It was completely chaotic. All I did was pour out scenes, episodes, anecdotes. One of the things that I think was consistent in all these stories was how, when youʼre dealing with somebody who is suffering from schizophrenia or other mental illnesses, itʼs not all one thing. All these episodes tried to show that. You could go through a cycle of humor, tears, laughter, surprise, disappointment—in a half hour.

Then I had a whole series of great readers. My wife, of course, and my daughter both read it numerous times and gave me great feedback. A crucial intervention was made by [lecturer] Bill Ayers, who was part of the story. He was like Gabeʼs favorite uncle and our next-door neighbor. So he read it, and Bill is quite a gifted writer. He said, “I love these stories youʼre telling about Gabe. They really bring him alive. But I think you need to think of yourself more like a storyteller and give it some color, fill it in with detail.”

Part of the initial motive for it was just to try to figure out what this all meant. Bill was one reader who made clear to me that was not going to happen. He said, “Tell this story. Thatʼs all.”

My next reader was Rachel DeWoskin in Creative Writing, who is Billʼs daughter-in-law. She said, “Itʼs all here. I just think you need to change the order of things, to get your reader prepared. You have to think of yourself like a novelist.”

This was a whole retraining. Iʼm a literary scholar and theorist. I havenʼt been a storyteller very much. It was like moving pieces around on a chessboard.

[English professor] Lauren Berlant inspired the last chapter, “On the Case of Gabriel Mitchell.” Lauren has a way of asking crucial, simple questions that you canʼt stop thinking about. She said, “Why do you want to make a case of Gabriel?” And I said, “Is that what Iʼm doing? I guess I do. Why am I treating him as a case thatʼs worth pondering? Is a case a way of diminishing him, or getting control of it?” It was very important for me to think about that. So I wrote it with a lot of help from my friends.

What has been the response to the book? This is a different audience than for the other books youʼve written.

More people who read fiction, nonfiction, memoirs. One of my best readings was with NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. It was an audience with a lot of parents of kids, siblings, relatives who have a mental illness.

I focused on the chapter “The Immoral Career of the Caregiver.” Because thatʼs where the NAMI people will recognize their own stories: the impossible contradictions when youʼre dealing with a loved one who is mentally ill. How to talk to them. How to get them help. How to take care of them, but also not have them feel smothered by you—or abandoned. Itʼs a knife edge.

Why did you decide to publish it now?

It was going to be the introduction to a longer, more scholarly book called Seeing through Madness. I had submitted the introductory memoir and a 300-page manuscript of chapters about film, history, literature. UChicago Press had accepted it. But then I began tinkering with the introduction, the biographical part, and it just took over.

At some point my editor at the press, Alan Thomas, said, “You realize your preface is a different book? Itʼs really about Gabe,” whom Alan knew. I said, “Can I split the two?” He said, “Yes, and I think itʼd be better for both.”

Seeing through Madness is a project Gabe launched me on. He wanted to make a film called Histoire de la folie, the history of madness. It was going to be based on Jean-Luc Godardʼs eight-part Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989–99). Gabriel wanted to go to every part of the globe and gather up all the figures of madness. He said, “Dad, youʼre going to be my image researcher, because thatʼs what you do.”

He wanted to turn madness from an affliction into a critical perspective. He said the idea that man is a rational animal—weʼve clearly disproven that zillions of times. So letʼs think about man as the crazy animal and see what we can make of that. This is the way he approached his own illness. He said, “I want to make schizophrenia into a learning experience.” Tough job. But he was serious about it, and I think he made progress. Who knows where he couldʼve gone with it?

Has your experience with Gabe changed the way you relate to College students?

Absolutely. Itʼs made me feel as a teacher, even more than I ever did before, how important it is just to listen to students. Be emotionally present, intellectually present.

Mental illness is very widespread as an issue. And this school puts a lot of mental pressure on the students. Itʼs crucial to find out where they are in their intellectual, emotional development.

Of course you have to make demands. Thereʼs got to be some homework. You have to actually read the material. Iʼve never found much of a problem with that. The big thing is when they feel like theyʼve got to produce something out of it, what sorts of possibilities do you open for them so they donʼt feel totally blocked, intimidated?

One of the nice things about the University of Chicago from a teacherʼs standpoint is that our students are intellectually competitive. They really want to become smarter, but it can be stressful on them too.