Sean Carr, AB’90

Once upon a time at Doc

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

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

Seen and not heard: Doc has screened plenty of silent films over the years, including this pair from 1927. Fritz Lang’s visionary sci-fi epic has been shown 16 times compared to five Doc appearances by the lesser-known Seventh Heaven. (Documentary Film Group Records, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; photography by Nathan Keay)

Sean Carr, AB’90

The Core

Winter/23

Doc Films turns 90. An alum hits middle age (and then some). The shared memories are timeless.

What was your first movie at Doc?

I can’t remember mine. It would be great to say I dove right into the international and auteurist fare that has been the Documentary Film Group’s signature for 90 years. The offerings during my first quarter in the College (Autumn 1985, if you want to check your old calendar) included “Wim Wenders and His Influences” on Wednesdays, alternating Thursdays of John Cassavetes and Robert Altman, and a Raoul Walsh night. But given my intense homesickness those first ten weeks in Hyde Park, I’m sure I stuck with the comfort cinema screened each weekend: The Breakfast Club and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock leap to mind. Watching them again, even if it was on 16mm in the echoing linoleum cavern of Cobb Hall’s Quantrell Auditorium, I could imagine I was back in Minneapolis at the Skyway or the Uptown.

Fridays and Saturdays ruled in winter, as I curled up with Ghostbusters and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, but I also dipped my toes into weeknights via a Brian De Palma series, catching Obsession and Dressed to Kill (I’m 18 now, baby!). The big event of the quarter was the triple feature of Star Wars (no “Episode IV” nonsense for the Doc calendar), The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Half our house went, and all of us had seen the movies countless times; but watching them again with an older, wiser, nerdier cohort was worth the permanent spinal damage inflicted by seven hours in Quantrell’s unyielding seats.

Stone alone: Eight years before casting David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Nicolas Roeg co-directed Mick Jagger in this 1970 trip of a crime thriller. Filmed in 1968, Performance was held back for two years because of concerns about its violence. The movie made its Doc debut in 1972. By 1999 the British Film Institute had ranked it No. 48 on its list of Top 100 British films. (Documentary Film Group Records, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; photography by Nathan Keay)

By Spring Quarter, I was often at Doc several times a week. A group of us went to see Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre. A friend dragged me to Jules et Jim, which he’d fallen for in high school. Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man, with Peter O’Toole’s crane-riding director swooping in and out of the frame, was like nothing I’d ever seen. (It would be a few more years before I caught up with Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2.)

Weekend movies that quarter screened under the series banner “Last Tango at Cobb,” a nod to the Bertolucci movie on the schedule and the bittersweet fact that it was Doc’s last full quarter on Cobb Hall’s second floor. The following October, the Max Palevsky Cinema in Ida Noyes opened with a premiere of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. The god of cool after working with Talking Heads on Stop Making Sense, Demme was at the early gala-ish screening with then-president Hanna Holborn Gray and Palevsky, PhB’48, SB’48 (who, after helping bankroll Intel, had produced several Hollywood Films starting in the 1970s). On a whim, some friends and I cut short a Tuesday night at the Reg to attend the later showing—not a bad way to stumble onto what remains my favorite movie. (Mi scusi, Don Corleone.)

The 35mm projectors and improved sound in Palevsky made it the ideal place to revisit Aliens, Platoon, and Die Hard. (Where else is Alan Rickman’s “Benefits of a classical education” line going to get the biggest response of the night?) The new home also reinvigorated the weekend wordplay on Doc’s calendars, which could now run with “Gorillas in the Max,” “Dances with Maxes,” and “The Last Temptation of Max.” But nothing can top the epic name for Winter 1990. Someone saw “Doc the Right Thing” just sitting there, but they went for the brass ring instead: “It’s the Coldest Night of the Weekend, You Can Do Nothing, You Can Do Something, or You Can Do the Doc Thing!”

Over the decades, how many post-Doc conversations at the Pub or the Med did cinema-changing directors like John Cassavetes and Michelangelo Antonioni inspire? Doc has also spotlighted the work of craftsmen like Budd Boetticher and Gerd Oswald, who were equally comfortable in movies and television. (Documentary Film Group Records, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; photography by Nathan Keay)

No weekend at Doc was complete, however, without the next-day rehashes at our house table in Burton-Judson. Teasing out the Kafka references in Scorsese’s After Hours. How did a friend’s strategic mistake of a first date at Blue Velvet go? (Better than expected: 35 years later, they’re still married.) The stunned, sheepish, that’s-not-my-Playboy averted glances the morning after many of us saw 9 1/2 Weeks. The first-year sitting down to breakfast with no eyebrows, as if answering the prompt Tell us you just saw Pink Floyd: The Wall without saying a word. Mercilessly razzing our RA when he told us, “You guys don’t get St. Elmo’s Fire because you’re not about to graduate and leave all this behind.”

Today, much of my DVD and Blu-ray collection is a catalog of movies I first saw at Doc: Quadrophenia. Klute. Paris, Texas. My Beautiful Laundrette. Kurosawa’s Ran. True Stories. Bill Duke’s Deep Cover. Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy. Way too much Jim Jarmusch and Mike Leigh. Call it mildly pretentious in a Eurocentric way if you want (you’ll also find Animal House, plenty of Schwarzenegger, and a near-complete set of Tony Scott’s work mixed in there); it’s half-art, half-nostalgia for me.

I can’t remember the first movie I saw at Doc. I do remember the last thing I saw there, because I wouldn’t be in a movie theater again for more than two years. On February 22, 2020, I drove down to Hyde Park from the North Side to see Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table. I’d meant to see it for years, and Doc showing a nifty new print seemed the perfect opportunity.

Doc has survived the ongoing pandemic and the onslaught of streaming. (Who’s going to say it’s more fun to watch Dazed and Confused on a laptop in their dorm room than to sink into Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” and Matthew McConaughey’s drawl with 300 fellow moviegoers?) All the other theaters I trekked to from Hyde Park back in the day—the Fine Arts on South Michigan Avenue; the United Artists in the Loop; the Esquire, Water Tower Place, McClurg Court, and Chestnut Station north of the river; the Biograph in Lincoln Park—are gone. The Doc abides.

Arts & Humanities

Film

Doc Films

The right cuts

rsmith — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 23:37:05 +0000

rsmith Wed, 11/02/2022 - 18:37

John Glenn (Ed Harris) in orbit around Earth in Philip Kaufman’s (AB’58) The Right Stuff—a memorable sequence edited by Fruchtman. (© Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection)

Sean Carr, AB’90

The University of Chicago Magazine

Fall/22

Academy Award–winning editor Lisa Fruchtman’s (AB’70) life in film.

“I wasn’t a real movie person or television person,” Lisa Fruchtman says of her high school self. “I was really a book person.”

Yet during her career as a film editor, she has helped shape some of the most significant and popular American movies of the past 50 years: Apocalypse Now. The Right Stuff (for which she won an Oscar). Children of a Lesser God. The Godfather, Part III. My Best Friend’s Wedding.

It wasn’t a path Fruchtman, AB’70, saw laid out before her; it’s one she discovered, step by intuitive step.

While a student at Manhattan’s High School of Music & Art, studying viola, Fruchtman favored character-driven and mostly foreign films—she names A Thousand Clowns and Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy—the kind she could catch at the Thalia on the Upper West Side, “but I never thought of making films. I was very academic.”

She found the College a perfect fit, as well as the recently launched New Collegiate Division, where she could design her own concentration in the history and philosophy of science. She created a phenomenology course with a professor at the Divinity School. When she wanted a literature course, she fashioned one on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus, and William Faulkner with the late Edward Wasiolek of Slavic languages and literatures and comparative literature. “I was very into the life of the mind,” she says, but—with the Vietnam War raging and the University’s relationship with the Black community in Woodlawn at a nadir—also “politicized.”

As graduation approached, Fruchtman was conflicted: Science or the law? She remained politically engaged while working as a lab assistant—her lab was run by a professor active in Science for the People, which had grown out of the antiwar movement—and inevitably got to know the members of Kartemquin Films, a collective focused on making documentaries about social issues, such as labor unions and the treatment of the elderly. (Kartemquin, which included Gordon Quinn, AB’65 [Class of 1964]; Stan Karter, EX’66; Jerry Temaner, AB’57; and the late Jerry Blumenthal, AB’58, AM’59, hit the national scene in 1994 with Hoop Dreams.)

Kartemquin is where Fruchtman discovered film editing. “I saw this craft that I never even knew existed, which was a … combination of analytical thinking, cerebral thinking, and creative thinking,” she says. Kartemquin took her on as an unpaid apprentice and eventually, “because they were great guys,” as a paid assistant. By the time her then boyfriend—now husband, Norman Postone, MD’72—headed to Montreal for his medical internship, Fruchtman had learned enough to land a job at the National Film Board of Canada.

“I still didn’t think I was going to do it as a career,” she says. “I thought that I was just stalling, honestly, until I could decide what to go to graduate school in. But working [at Kartemquin] was really the beginning of my great film education.”

Lisa Fruchtman, AB’70, credits Kartemquin Films with introducing her to the craft of editing. (Photography by Jane Wattenberg)

After Montreal, Postone accepted a residency in San Francisco. It wasn’t the best time for Fruchtman to relocate to the Bay Area: the public TV station had just closed, putting a lot of documentary editors out of work. But it was also home to director Francis Ford Coppola’s production company, American Zoetrope, and Fruchtman “lucked into” a short-term opportunity on the film he was shooting, The Godfather, Part II.

At 22, Fruchtman had never heard the term “lined script.” It turned out to be a copy of the script that includes detailed notes—taken during shooting by a script supervisor—on the different angles and shot types (long shots, close-ups on different characters, number of takes) for every scene in the movie. That way an editor knows what footage he—not often she, in those days—has to work with. Fruchtman was brought onto the film to review the footage and redo the lined script for a complicated and crucial sequence: up-and-coming gangster Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) stalking the neighborhood enforcer, Don Fanucci, from the rooftops of the Lower East Side.

After completing the assignment, Fruchtman interviewed to work as an assistant to Richard Marks, one of the film’s editors. “I did not think that I was interested in feature films,” Fruchtman says. “I actually had not ever seen The Godfather part one.” But she got the job—and a crash course in big-time moviemaking.

In those days, the assistant’s job was to keep track of every piece of film—the reels and reels of shot footage and all the small bits, called trims, created when the editor started cutting. And the assistant had to be right there next to the editor, handing them what they needed when they needed it. Fruchtman compares it to a nurse assisting a surgeon. It was grueling work, she says, but essential to learning the literal, physical craft of editing. “You put this scene, this shot, together with that scene, with that shot, and it works or it doesn’t work. You take it apart, try a different take.”

Marks recruited Fruchtman to be his assistant on Coppola’s next venture, Apocalypse Now. This time she had a request: Could she have some scenes to edit herself? He gave her a few he figured wouldn’t be in the final film. Fruchtman worked on them at night, after assisting Marks all day.

Some of her scenes made it into the final cut, including a USO visit from a trio of Playboy Playmates, who helicopter into the heart of the jungle and unleash pandemonium before being whisked away—the fall of Saigon foreshadowed as unnerving frat party farce. Coppola had shot the sequence with eight separate cameras, which Fruchtman shaped into just over five indelible minutes. “I did make the scene sexier than it had been before,” she says with pride. As the only woman on the team and the youngest, “I wasn’t afraid to do that.” Coppola liked it too. When another editor left during the film’s grinding two-and-a-half-year production, Fruchtman asked to interview and was hired to replace him—“very much still the junior editor,” but an editor nonetheless.

Apocalypse Now shared the top prize at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, but its critical reception in the States was mixed—“an adventure yarn with delusions of grandeur,” wrote the New York Times. The film has only grown in stature over the years and now sits at number 30 on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest American movies. (You’ll also find it at number three in the Motion Picture Editors Guild’s CineMontage Magazine list of the best-edited films of all time.) Like many of her colleagues, including Coppola, Fruchtman recalls her experience on the movie as both “wonderful” and “excruciatingly difficult.” She also realizes her luck at being part of it in the first place, knowing that it would have been harder to climb the rungs in the LA studio system. Apocalypse Now was a Hollywood movie, but the postproduction work, including editing, was done in San Francisco—a different, less hierarchical environment. “It wasn’t that I was determined to be in the movie business,” Fruchtman says. “It’s that I just had remarkable opportunities very early on.”

Fruchtman was an assistant editor and new to the profession when she worked on Apocalypse Now, but several scenes she edited—including this one, of a USO visit from three Playboy Playmates—made it into the film. (United Artists/Courtesy Everett Collection)

That Bay Area film community also included writer/director Philip Kaufman, AB’58, who in the early 1980s was prepping an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979). Fruchtman had read the book—“fantastic”—and went in for an interview with Kaufman.

“Phil felt like a friend and colleague right from the beginning, I think, because of our shared background at Chicago,” Fruchtman says. Despite the decade-plus that separated their time at the University, she feels the connection tipped him off about her thinking process and what interests she would bring to the movie.

Fruchtman and the other editors divvied up the scenes based on what subject matter each of them would have to master. The test pilot sequences? Time to learn about airplanes. The astronauts? Welcome to rocket school. One of Fruchtman’s sequences was John Glenn’s three orbits around Earth. She had two requirements: the scene must stick to Glenn’s real flight transcripts and, per Kaufman’s brief, “it has to be about wonder. It has to be about being out in space for the first time, looking down at Earth for the first time.” How to do that was up to her. The sequence required weeks of creative trial and error with an array of raw materials, including a model of the Friendship 7 capsule manipulated on strings, matte paintings, NASA footage of Earth, a moonrise animation by the late experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson, and Ed Harris’s awestruck performance.

Creating big feelings was the prime directive on The Right Stuff, Fruchtman says. “It appears to be a story about all of these incredible achievements. What it really is is a story about a kind of ephemeral thing called ‘the right stuff,’ … which is an emotion, which is a kind of quality, a quality that’s based on courage.”

The film earned Fruchtman’s team the Oscar for best editing. Still, she had to lobby director Randa Haines (and her own agent) for her next feature, because it was such a change of pace from the big films Fruchtman had worked on previously. But she wanted to stretch herself.

Children of a Lesser God—Fruchtman’s first time editing solo—is a romance between a teacher for the deaf (William Hurt) and a deaf woman who works at the same school (Marlee Matlin). The film offered unique challenges. To make sure hearing audiences could understand the film, Hurt had to speak aloud what he and Matlin signed. The filmmakers had also decided that a deaf person should be able to watch the film and see every moment of signing. That essentially meant that Fruchtman had to edit in two languages simultaneously. “I thought of it as cutting with three different combs, you know,” Fruchtman says. “Cutting for clarity, cutting for rhythm, and then cutting for emotion.” The movie received several Oscar nominations including for best picture, best actress (Matlin won), and best screenplay—but not for editing.

As proud as Fruchtman is of her work on the film, she understands why it didn’t draw the attention of some of the other, bigger movies she’s worked on. The Right Stuff and Apocalypse Now pack a lot of sound and action into every frame. She compares Children of a Lesser God to a solo violin performance; so it’s appropriate, Fruchtman says, that it’s “invisible to people, what actually had to be done to achieve that movie.”

Cut to 2005. Fruchtman had continued building her feature editing credits—The Godfather, Part III; The Doctor (a reunion with William Hurt and director Randa Haines); and My Best Friend’s Wedding, to name just three—and she was busy editing different projects for HBO Films. But ever since participating in an American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women, she’d kept her eyes open for a project to direct. She felt she’d found it in Ursula Hegi’s novel Stones from the River (Poseidon Press, 1994). Fruchtman appreciated how the book asked big questions—“How did the Holocaust come about? How did ordinary, decent people go in this direction?”—by focusing on a small town in Germany between the two world wars. HBO had funded a screenplay, but after changes in the division, the project stalled. Fruchtman spent several years working to get the project moving elsewhere, with no success.

In 2010, during that frustrating process, Fruchtman happened upon another story. She heard about Kiki Katese, a theater director from Rwanda who had started that country’s first all-female drumming troupe, made up of women from both sides of the 1994 genocide. Katese now wanted to help the women open Rwanda’s first ice cream shop.

Fruchtman, trying to make a fictional movie about how individuals made the Holocaust possible, saw this true story as its mirror image: “How do people come back from a genocide with their humanity intact?” At the same time, Fruchtman thought a small documentary would be a good move after working so long to make a big, ambitious feature. “Of course,” she says, “there are no small movies. There are no easy movies.”

With her brother Rob, a documentary filmmaker, Fruchtman spent a year and a half in 2010 and 2011 traveling back and forth to Rwanda. They documented the stories of different women involved in the troupe and the launch of the ice cream shop, Inzozi Nziza, which translates as “Sweet Dreams”—the name Lisa and Rob would give to their film.

Surprisingly, Fruchtman says, the editing was one of the hardest parts of the project. “It had the genocide and it had ice cream. It has a lot of joy and a lot of sadness. Finding the right rhythm and the right weave of those stories was really quite difficult.” Sweet Dreams premiered at the United Nations headquarters in New York in 2012 as part of the 18th commemoration of the Rwandan genocide and has screened at film festivals around the world, bringing broader attention to Katese’s initiatives.

Fruchtman has ideas for other documentaries she hopes to direct or produce. Dramatic films too, even a limited series—“a whole new world for me,” she says. As an editor, she’s no longer looking for two-and-a-half-year tours of duty, so she’s sharing her expertise as a consultant on films that have gotten, she says, “just a little bit lost.”

After almost half a century cutting and shaping films, Fruchtman helps remind other filmmakers that editing is about going through “a process of play and discovery without getting too lost. And it’s a very, very fine, very fine line.”

Opening words

rsmith — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 01:28:58 +0000

rsmith Fri, 02/04/2022 - 19:28

Rockefeller Memorial Chapel during the 535th Convocation on October 29, 2021. (Photography by Jean Lachat)

Sean Carr, AB’90

The University of Chicago Magazine

Winter/22

Scenes and voices from the inauguration of President Paul Alivisatos, AB’81.

(Photography by Jason Smith)

Yes, a celebration in a half full Rockefeller Memorial Chapel amid a pandemic can feel joyful. That was undeniably the case on October 29, when Paul Alivisatos, AB’81, was inaugurated as the University of Chicago’s 14th president.

It helped, especially on a drizzly morning, to have faculty in a kaleidoscope of academic regalia gathered outside the chapel as bagpipers played at full squall. Inside Rockefeller, a socially distanced assembly stood facing the main doors, eager for the arrival of the presidential party.

As the 10 a.m. hour approached, trumpets blared, the organ (percolating all morning) swelled, and the procession flowed into the chapel, down the center aisle, and up to the transept, where University marshal Victoria E. Prince, professor of organismal biology and anatomy, awaited to “declare open the 535th Convocation of the University of Chicago.”

It was also Prince’s duty to introduce the day’s speakers, beginning with the representatives of the faculty, students, staff, alumni, and South Side community who had been invited to welcome Alivisatos back to UChicago and into his new role.

In addition to the faculty, student, staff, alumni, and community representaives who welcomed Paul Alivisatos, AB’81, as president, the audience at his inauguration ceremony heard from two of his Berkeley colleagues and from poet and faculty member Srikanth Reddy, who read from his serial prose poem Underworld Lit. (Photography by Jean Lachat, Jason Smith)

Eve L. Ewing, AB’08, assistant professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, spoke for the faculty. She urged Alivisatos to view UChicago’s intellectual rigor from a different angle. “When we use our aptitude for critical questioning to face inward and demand better of ourselves and one another,” Ewing said, “the University of Chicago—not the abstract institution, but the people who comprise it—we are capable of tremendous collective good.”

Integrative biology graduate student Vishruth Venkataraman likened the University to a symphony “composed of thousands of voices—some harmonious, some dissonant,” with Alivisatos as their listener. He quoted Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar, who wrote that the greatest wealth is that obtained by listening. “And for your wisdom, insight, and the wealth of listening that you bring, President Alivisatos, we bid you welcome.”

Speaking for staff, Jennifer Kennedy, AB’02, director of Student Centers, recalled her time in the College and the employees who helped her see “that there was a place for me at the University of Chicago.” Today’s staff, she told Alivisatos, is “poised to work with you to realize the full potential of this University.”

Alumni Board president Margaret M. Mueller, AM’97, echoed the sentiment on behalf of UChicago’s almost 200,000 alumni: “I call on you to consider the role alumni play in moving us forward. And we will be ready for your call.”

The ceremony, the University’s 535th Convocation, began with “Crescat Scientia; Vita Excolatur,” an original composition for carillon by University Professor Augusta Read Thomas. (Photography by Jason Smith)

Community representative Rev. Julian DeShazier, MDiv’10, senior pastor of the University Church of Chicago, said, “A relationship only buds when those involved view each other as equals, which means not only will the University change and make life better for Woodlawn and South Shore … but the University must be willing to be transformed by the South Side.”

A gray sky didn’t dim the morning’s jubilance. (Photography by Jason Smith)

After the welcomes, two of the new president’s past mentors spoke: University of California, Berkeley, chancellor Carol T. Christ, who appointed Alivisatos as the school’s provost in 2017, and Steven Chu, former US Secretary of Energy, Nobel laureate in physics, and Alivisatos’s onetime boss at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The ceremony culminated with the formal induction of Alivisatos as president, performed by chair of the Board of Trustees Joseph Neubauer, MBA’65, and the inaugural address. The address revealed that not only had Alivisatos been listening; he had heard.

Performing the induction of President Alivisatos was chair of the Board of Trustees Joseph Neubauer, MBA’65, whose remarks stressed the importance of “a leader skilled at looking beyond the immediate and obvious.” (Photography by Jason Smith)

The University’s distinctive culture and set of core values, Alivisatos said, constitute its capital and unify “some of the world’s best thinkers, scholars, researchers, educators, analysts, advocates, artists, entrepreneurs, and creators.” He called on all listening to engage that capital and “connect it to the world at large.”

The great challenges and opportunities of the moment make it imperative, he said, to now embark on this “journey of reconnection” with the community, the city, and the wider world. Only by doing so can the University community “reach higher levels of achievement than ever before, and we will bring entirely new benefits to humanity.” (Read President Alivisatos’s
entire address.)

Outside Rockefeller following the ceremony, the crowd dispersed in the rain—to cars, lunch, offices, and class. Alivisatos, however, remained behind, beaming as he accepted handshakes, fist bumps, even a hug.

Inauguration “is a time to reflect on the arc of a common journey,” Alivisatos said. (Photography by Jason Smith)

University News

Office of the President

Convocation

Connected by curiosity

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 02:20:32 +0000

admin Tue, 11/03/2020 - 20:20

The new Alumni & Friends website allows you to more easily find other alumni, career and job resources, University faculty research, and more.

Sean Carr, AB’90

The University of Chicago Magazine

Fall/20

A new Alumni & Friends website launched this fall. Designed for alumni, parents, and friends, it’s distinctively UChicago.

Personal touch

Get the most out of the site, including a personalized experience, by signing in. Create an account or log in with Amazon, Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Top of mind

News and learning are at the site’s core, and UChicago Review: Inquiry + Insight gathers faculty research, news, and opinions from across campus—including lectures, podcasts, and (toot, toot) articles from the Magazine.

Changing news and views

Stories, podcasts, and other features are added regularly, and it’s easy to save anything to read, watch, or listen to later. Or sign up for newsletters on science, the College, parenting, and general interest UChicago news.

Lifelong learning meets machine learning

If you’ve signed in, the site learns what you’re interested in and brings relevant stories to your attention.

Directory assistance

Share as much or as little personal info as you want in the alumni directory. Email addresses are never public, but old friends and roommates are only a few clicks away with the new messaging function.

Self-help

The tax-time scramble is so 2019. On the new site, you can sift through your recent UChicago giving and download gift receipts and year-end tax letters.

Social butterfly

The new Alumni & Friends helps you connect with UChicago people— whether it’s your local club, fellow degree holders, or other alumni with whom you share something in common. Besides a tendency to ask questions.

Bookmark the URL (or check in often enough that your browser takes over): alumniandfriends.uchicago.edu

University News

Alumni Relations & Development

College alumni

Graduate alumni

Crash course

admin — Sat, 23 May 2020 02:44:40 +0000

admin Fri, 05/22/2020 - 21:44

In twice-weekly lectures for Literature and the Financial Crisis of 2008, Warren could be found mashing up disquisitions on poststructuralism and median home prices. (Jaap Buitendijk/©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection)

Sean Carr, AB’90

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/20

College students examine ideas and stories of the 2008 Great Recession.

On a Sunday evening in late January, students in Cobb 301 are pushing tables around, transforming the standard conversation-promoting square into rows angled to face a flat-screen TV in the corner of the classroom. Just before 5:30, Kenneth Warren, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in English, arrives with a helper and a dozen or so Giordano’s pizza boxes, salad containers, Pepsi and ginger ale two liters, and a Blu-ray of director Adam McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short.

It’s movie night for English 26249: Literature and the Financial Crisis of 2008.

Once the 30 or so students are settled in with pizza and pop, Warren, leaning against a wall, provides some food for thought as they watch the movie. He asks the class to think back to the texts on neoliberalism that comprise most of the readings thus far. (They also have Aravind Adiga’s 2008 The White Tiger [Free Press] under their belts, the first of four novels they’ll discuss this quarter.) Specifically, Warren prompts, “Are there heroes, are there villains within the system whose actions either could be more timely or more insightful”—thus preventing or ameliorating what happened in 2008—“or are we looking at something systemic, and what view that has on how we might see the film?” With that, it’s Warren’s turn to grab some pizza. And roll film.

(Illustration by Daniel Hertzberg)

For those who missed it or need a refresher, The Big Short follows four people—a doctor turned investment fund manager (Christian Bale), an angry-at-the-world Wall Streeter (Steve Carell), and two guys (non-marquee actors) running a hedge fund out of their garage—who each anticipated the subprime mortgage collapse and bet against, or shorted, the US housing market. This potentially dry procedural is juiced up with a restless camera and staccato editing, every scene crammed with cutaways to hip-hop videos, infomercials, news footage (stock tickers, foreclosure signs), even The Wealth of Nations—like a 50-browser-tabs-open “what caused housing crisis” Google search. Characters address the audience directly and celebrities are deployed to clarify complicated financial instruments, as when singer-actress Selena Gomez shows up playing blackjack and talking synthetic collateralized debt obligations with the “father of behavioral economics,” Chicago Booth’s Richard Thaler.

So it’s no surprise, after the movie ends, that Warren wants to spend a little time discussing “the narrative decisions that the film makes,” noting, “I get to talk to you all the time”—during the week, it’s a maxed-out 40-person lecture class—“I don’t get to hear you talk as much as I might like.”

A guy in the back is the first to chime in: “There’s a lot of visual juxtaposition, as the financial language starts to become too convoluted and specialized, with images of what’s happening to people who are getting their homes foreclosed upon.” It’s a reminder, he says, “that the thing they’re explaining trickles down to that.”

“Juxtaposition in some sense has to be a kind of strategy for the film altogether, in part because you have multiple stories,” Warren agrees, while noting that the technique isn’t new.

A young woman in a gray sweater—one of many students opting for that shade this chilly evening—suggests that when the characters break the fourth wall to comment on whether a particular incident happened the way it’s depicted, it’s to “remind you that this is a real story,” even though “there’s a lot of it that seems really absurd and hard to believe.”

“I was intrigued by the way it plays with the fantasy of wealth,” a Philip Seymour Hoffman doppelgänger says about the celebrity cameos. “It’s Anthony Bourdain in this luxury restaurant, … Margot Robbie in her luxury apartment. … It feels like there’s a set of stakes to what they’re talking about in this fantasy that is achievable if you play this game of money.”

Warren wants to make sure the class doesn’t miss a particular bit of “heavy imagery,” when Carell’s character and one of his partners go to Standard & Poor’s to ask why they’re still giving mortgage bonds solid ratings while the mortgages within them are defaulting en masse. The woman they talk to, apparently fresh from an appointment with her eye doctor, is wearing huge dark glasses—the “film obviously playing with blindness, over the refusal of the system to see what it’s doing,” Warren says. Yet, “at a crucial moment when they’re getting self-righteous with her, she takes off the glasses. What does she say at that moment?”

“She says that they’re hypocrites,” answers a woman in a (gray) UChicago sweatshirt. Warren prods: “Why is that?”

“It’s because even though they’re betting against, sort of, the corruption in the system, they’re still going to profit based on how the system works,” she explains.

“To win in this instance depends ultimately on these mortgages failing,” Warren says, asking how viewers are supposed to feel about their emotional investment in the movie’s main characters—who, after all, are just “trying to make money.” Are there heroes? Are there villains?

A woman, breaking the tacit dress code in a maroon sweatshirt, brings up the moments in which the film creates sympathy for its characters. She points to Carell’s stick-it-to-the-stock-market character at the end of the film, when the economy is in freefall, “looking like he’s about to have a breakdown instead of cheering that he’s just made a billion. The actual outcome is still the same,” she says, “it’s just how he feels about it that’s different.”

Warren, looking to sum things up, asks the class how much the investment fund of Christian Bale’s footwear-averse Dr. Michael Burry made from its shorts. The class tosses several figures back and forth before arriving at the correct amount: $2.69 billion.

“I just made a lot of money for a lot of very wealthy people,” Warren says from inside Bale’s head. “I don’t feel good about it. I want to tell everybody. I want to tell the government afterward what went wrong.” Then, as himself, “He did make a lot of money. But is making a lot of money a bad thing?”

That’s a question that will have to wait for that week’s lectures. In the meantime, as they begin moving tables back into a square, one of the course assistants notes that half a dozen unopened pizza boxes remain up for grabs. There’s little question that the students who seize this opportunity will return to their dorms or apartments as heroes.

Syllabus

An undergraduate course, English 26249 had several goals: “to understand the challenges that representing the 2008 crisis posed to novelists; to try to understand the social and ideological location of literature in relation to that crisis; and more generally to try to understand neoliberalism as a theory and a politics.”

Readings started with David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005) and a selection of critical and historical essays, including “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière, and the Form of the Photograph” (2011) by Walter Benn Michaels.

The three novels that took up the bulk of the course, along with Adiga’s The White Tiger, were Kudos (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018) by Rachel Cusk, Capital (W. W. Norton, 2012) by John Lanchester, and 10:04 (Faber and Faber, 2014) by Ben Lerner.

In addition to watching The Big Short, students were asked to listen to a 2008 episode of This American Life dedicated to the financial crisis, “The Giant Pool of Money,” which was co-reported by Adam Davidson, AB’92.

Arts & Humanities

Course Work

Are you afraid of the semicolon?

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admin Fri, 08/09/2019 - 17:17

(Illustration by John Jay Cabuay)

Sean Carr, AB’90

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/19

Cecelia Watson, AMʼ05, examines the history—and occasional hatred—of punctuation’s most daunting mark.

“The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops of ink,” writes Cecelia Watson, AM’05, PhD’11. That’s a lot of baggage for a half-comma, half-colon, but in Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark (Ecco, 2019), Watson shows it’s more than up to the task.

Tracing the hybrid mark from its origins among 15th-century Italian humanists, her story describes early attempts to “scientize” language through grammar rules and raises questions about who made—and didn’t make—those rules. And with examples drawn from literature, legal history, and her own life as a “reformed grammar fetishist,” Watson seeks to persuade readers to learn to love the semicolon. Her comments have been edited and condensed.

Why a book on the semicolon?

What really surprised me when I was working on this as an academic topic was the emotional investment people had in the semicolon. Usually when you’re giving an academic talk, everybody does the super professional, very objective, I’m-detached-from-this-topic type of performance. But when I would talk about the semicolon, people would tell me all of these personal stories, even about falling in love because of conversations about the semicolon—not the usual thing you hear when you’re an academic. That clued me in that maybe there was a way to reach out to a broader audience. When we pitched it to publishers, I think we ended up with seven houses in the auction.

Why do some people have such strong negative feelings about this punctuation mark?

Distaste for the semicolon comes from a lot of different angles. Some people have a sheer aesthetic distrust of it. They just like short sentences, for instance. They think that’s more direct or more pleasing in some way, or more clear. The semicolon, of course, can facilitate very long sentences. Other people think it’s elitist, and a reader is going to roll their eyes or feel alienated, and in some ways belittled, by the author’s advertisement of his or her own education level. Others have bad childhood memories associated with trying to use the semicolon and failing and being embarrassed.

Is there a way we could be using semicolons that we aren’t currently?

One use that has fallen out of practice is using the semicolon as a colon or sometimes a comma. You see this a lot in the late 19th or early 20th century. Nobody liked the colon at the time, and everybody loved the semicolon, so they wanted to stick it wherever they could. I think less about particular styles of semicolon usage and more about how easy it is to be lazy and use catch-all punctuation marks. I’ll just put dashes and ellipses for everything. Those are all points at which we could say, Would a semicolon actually provide some interest here? Would it help create some new rhythms on the page? Would it make anything a little easier to read?

Your book ranges into broader questions about who gets to dictate the rules of language. How did that happen?

Initially I was focused on where rules come from. A lot of the people who influenced me when I was at UChicago taught me to see that even things we wouldn’t think of as having a history have a history, like a set of punctuation rules. My discipline, history and philosophy of science, had a huge role in the history of the semicolon. A lot of the history of grammar rules is a direct function of this mid- to late-1800s obsession with being scientific and objective. Grammar was not excepted from that.

One thing that I hope the book’s readers notice is that every single person in the section about the founding of grammar is an elite white male. That’s no accident. It’s also no accident that when grammar rules were invented, women, and to some extent people of color and poor people, were gaining unprecedented access to education. Grammar is, and has always been, an incredibly effective way to enforce the status quo.

In these animated movies for kids, peanuts are the stars

admin — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 20:44:04 +0000

admin Tue, 04/30/2019 - 15:44

The stop-animation short Hank the Cave Peanut (1974) by Ron McAdow, AB’71, follows the adventures of an adolescent legume. (Photo courtesy Ron McAdow, AB’71)

Sean Carr, AB’90

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/19

The work of Ron McAdow, AB’71, who found levity in legumes, had a recent screening at the Museum of Modern Art.

“Are the peanuts going to eat the fork?”

That possibility weighed heavily for one little girl at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on a Saturday afternoon in February. She (presumably accompanied by a primary caregiver or two) was there for Family Films: Not-So-Ordinary Objects, a bill of four shorts that, along with early Pixar effort Luxo Jr. (1986), included Hank the Cave Peanut (1974), in which a pith-helmeted legume leads a successful hunt for an untamed fork.

This empathy for flatware was new—and “very comical”—to Hank’s director, Ron McAdow, AB’71, who was on hand at MOMA for a post-screening Q&A. He was on firmer ground with more technical questions: Did he use a green screen? No, and in his day they used a blue screen.

McAdow didn’t enter the College planning on a career in animation. It was more by a process of elimination that he arrived there. He liked to write but didn’t want to major in English or study writing. “I thought I might become an academic of some kind, in anthropology or some other social science field,” he says, but a student job in the sociology department convinced him otherwise.

Hank tames a wild fork. (Photo courtesy Ron McAdow, AB’71)

Then McAdow spent a summer back home in Champaign, Illinois, filling potholes—a “fun” job, he claims—with a high school friend, Kevin Brown, who had recently gotten into object animation using a Super 8 camera. When the two were laid off with plenty of summer left to fill, they got serious about messing around with Brown’s new toy. McAdow returned to the College that fall with his own used camera. Soon the Super 8 movies he was making in his Hyde Park Boulevard apartment were a hit on the student party circuit. By the time McAdow graduated, he and Brown had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and been “invited to hang out our shingle as filmmakers for children,” creating short segments for the television show Jabberwocky.

Over the next several years, as they plugged away on the show, McAdow made two longer shorts, Hank—which led to a gig on the math-oriented program Infinity Factory—and Captain Silas (1977). (Both can be found on YouTube.) Peanuts were the anthropomorph of choice because they come in different “skin tones” and sizes and—most important—have a natural bump of a nose, so “you didn’t have to paint any eyes because people just project a face onto them.” (McAdow learned only later that rounded shapes work better in animation. “Mickey Mouse,” he notes, “is just a bunch of spheres.”)

In the late ’70s, McAdow began “working directly with children instead of through films,” including several years teaching English, math, science, and history to elementary and middle schoolers. He kept the creative fires stoked through writing: a newspaper column, canoeing guides to the Sudbury and Charles Rivers in Massachusetts—Hank includes a nod to McAdow’s lifelong passion for paddling—and two novels.

A subsequent career in educational software helped him keep abreast of the latest digital tools. He now applies those to creating animated backdrops to the stories he tells each fall at a wildlife sanctuary near his home—an alternative for “families that want to do something besides go to the mall the day after Thanksgiving.” His latest tale, “The Sky Worm,” is peanut-free, and no forks are harmed.

The hours

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admin Fri, 11/09/2018 - 12:43

“Unstable work schedules make it difficult for employees to do their job well and to plan their life outside of work,” Susan Lambert says. (Illustration by Michael Morgenstern/theispot)

Sean Carr, AB’90

The University of Chicago Magazine

Fall/18

A study from the School of Social Service Administration points the way toward better lives for hourly workers—and a stronger corporate bottom line.

It should be an easy question: What are you doing tomorrow?

If you’re an hourly worker in a field such as food service, health care, or retail, answering gets tricky. Standard scheduling practices in those industries can mean shifts changing on a weekly basis, little advance notice of when you’ll be working, and having almost no say in when or how much you work.

So good luck arranging childcare, attending school, or juggling your other jobs. And with managers incentivized to boost profits by limiting staff hours, your income can vary wildly from week to week, adding household budgeting to the struggle.

“We can document the carnage of these things,” says Susan Lambert, associate professor at UChicago’s School of Social Service Administration, who has spent 30 years studying the impact of job quality on workers’ lives. “But what do we do about it?”

In 2015 Lambert and colleagues from the University of California Hastings College of the Law and the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School decided to find out. With input from senior management at Gap, they conducted a trial of several interventions that, Lambert says, “would be feasible for managers to implement and that would make a difference to workers.” The first results from the Stable Scheduling Study, published earlier this year, provide evidence that scheduling instability isn’t just bad for workers—it’s bad for business.

The researchers randomly assigned 28 Gap stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Gap is headquartered, and around Chicago to either treatment or control status. At the latter, it was business as usual. (Workers in San Francisco already had more protection than many retail workers, thanks to a city ordinance that requires managers to provide employees their schedules two weeks in advance.)

At the treatment stores, managers were encouraged to put several new practices into effect. As much as possible, employees were to be scheduled consistently—the same days and start and stop times—from week to week. Some managers had the flexibility to give a core group of employees 20 or more hours a week and to add additional staff when it was likely to increase sales. The study team also introduced a mobile app that made it easy to swap shifts, giving employees more say in when they worked.

From November 2015 to August 2016, the researchers gathered data from surveys, interviews, and focus groups with store managers and sales associates, and from transactions within the shift-swapping app. Gap also shared weekly schedules, sales and traffic records in 15-minute increments, and other store metrics.

Once crunched, Lambert says, the numbers showed that they had “moved the needle” on consistency in scheduling. The hard data on consistent schedules, employee input, and other measures didn’t show a huge difference between treatment and control stores in the overall structure of the job or scheduling, but in surveys, employees in the treatment stores felt there was greater consistency and that they had more of a voice in when they worked. What did change—dramatically—were sales. In treatment stores, they went up by 7 percent, a huge number in an industry where 1 or 2 percent increases are hard won.

The researchers have some theories about what happened. One is that, given the opportunity to promise some employees more hours, managers tended to favor their most productive workers. Second, more stable scheduling appeared to increase how long people worked for a store, and that extended tenure made them into better sellers.

Still, Lambert is “surprised that such modest differences could reap such a big result.” And, she adds, “There’s still a lot of instability that could be tamed.”

In retail, it’s widely assumed that unpredictable customer patterns make stable schedules impossible. But the study showed that only a fraction of the variability—30 percent—stems from changes in customer traffic. The rest results from moving in-store promotion dates, changes in shipment sizes, and unexpected senior leadership visits. Managers scramble to cover for such surprises by pulling staff off the floor and into the stockroom, leaving fewer employees to shelve merchandise and help customers.

Lambert can’t say how Gap and other retailers will act on this information. But the report, like Lambert’s previous work, provides “an empirical basis for making policy decisions” around the country—in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York City, where stable scheduling laws are already in action, and in Chicago, where the city council is considering a similar ordinance. “Is two weeks’ advance notice too much for employers to do?” Lambert asks. “Is it too little for employees? Those are the kinds of thing our data help inform.”

Economics & Business

Work

School of Social Service Administration

Let’s do the time warp again

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 17:22:27 +0000

Anonymous Fri, 10/05/2018 - 12:22

(UChicago Photographic Archive, apf7-02633r, University of Chicago Library)

Sean Carr, AB’90

Inquiry

10.08.2018

Science and emotion in A Wrinkle in Time.

Last spring Madeline L’Engle’s classic novel A Wrinkle in Time was timely again, thanks to Disney’s Oprah-starring film adaptation. Published in 1962, the book tells the story of Meg Murry, the gifted but troubled child of two scientists who travels (or, in the language of the novel, “tessers”) through space-time to rescue her physicist father from an alien intelligence known as IT. The novel provided a leaping-off point for a May panel discussion at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore about women in science, feminist physics, and multiple other topics.

The panelists were Chloe Lindeman and Joohee Bang, both finishing their first years as graduate students in the Physical Sciences Division; Sophia Vojta, AB’18, then a fourth-year majoring in physics and Fundamentals: Issues and Texts; and Tamara Vardomskaya, PhD’18, a linguist who writes science fiction and fantasy. “I did do a math degree when I was an undergrad,” she noted.

The following, which barely scratches the surface of their wide-ranging conversation, has been edited and condensed.

Reading and rereading

Bang: I first read A Wrinkle in Time when I was 11, in Korean.

Vojta: I also first read this novel when I was quite young, probably about eight or nine. I’ve read it in English and German. I tried to read it in French once. That was a mistake. But this was a very formative novel for me.

Lindeman: I have only read this novel in English. I must have read it as a kid—I remember a couple of scenes—but I just read it in these past couple of weeks, so it’s still very fresh in my mind.

Vardomskaya: I actually read the other two volumes, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, when I was about 11 or 12, and I only read this book a couple of years ago. I just reread it a couple of days ago.

Women in science

Lindeman: There are so many prominent female science-related figures in the novel. Mrs. Murry is the most obvious one. She’s actually my favorite character because certainly in that time and even today, the idea of having a career and also having a family can be really difficult. And she combines these two things in an interesting way. She has her lab in her home, in her garage. She makes it work. Even as her partner is gone for several years, she’s able to create this life where she has a family and also is doing her work as a scientist. They’re not distinct for her. Her family is also her science life.

Vojta: I wanted to know more about her: Tell me about your bacteria. I want to know about your work. While I agree that this character encapsulates something powerful about the necessary relationship between family and work, I wish that we had seen more of the work.

Science and emotion

Lindeman: Meg breaks down into tears a lot. She’s a child, but some people have seen this as the author’s bias—that women tend to react this way more than men. One of the very few female physics professors at Haverford College, where I did my undergrad, posted an article on her door about a woman who cried at her thesis defense. It was an extremely stressful experience, and that’s OK. That doesn’t make you any less of a scientist. Everyone has emotional responses to things. That’s not something we can get rid of.

Bang: I was a history major before I transitioned to chemistry and then physics. When my friends and family heard that I’d made that decision, they felt I didn’t really fit in this realm because I was really emotional, and that meant I wasn’t the type of person who could study things that require reason and logic. But I don’t think emotions and thinking about things in a rational way are the opposite of one another.

Vojta: We have this idea that science is objective and that we’re in pursuit of a beautiful, pristine truth, and that perception and personal investment has nothing to do with what we see in a scientific experiment. I think that’s a faulty idea both in terms of what you choose to study—science is often about studying that weird thing you’re obsessed with—but also in terms of what you see when you look at an experiment. I think there’s an intrinsic connection between our emotions and our way of perceiving. Whether that’s a problem for science or not is a different question. But I don’t think they’re separable from one another.

Vardomskaya: There was a study of a person who had suffered a type of brain damage that shut down his emotions. He was completely rational. You would expect he was like Mr. Spock. But it turned out that it took him three hours to decide what he was going to have for lunch. You need your emotions to make decisions. You need emotions to figure out what to focus on. “I feel good about having a sandwich, therefore I’m going to have a sandwich.”

Reading list

We asked you what stories inspired your interest in science. Here are some of your answers.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Snowball Earth: The Story of a Maverick Scientist and His Theory of the Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know It by Gabrielle Walker
"The Comet" in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. DuBois
The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

For more recently written recommendations, check out the following books:

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Stephen Pinker
Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance by UChicago historian Ada Palmer

Science & Medicine

Physics

Physical Sciences Division

Iʼll have what heʼs shooting

admin — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 20:03:56 +0000

admin Tue, 07/31/2018 - 15:03

The eight-minute documentary Kosher Style digs into the histories and menus of three New York delicatessens. (All video stills courtesy Max Teplitz)

Sean Carr, AB’90

The Core

Summer/18

Max Teplitz, Class of 2020, puts his movie where his mouth is.

Like nearly a quarter of students in the College, rising third-year Max Teplitz is an econ major. But he’s minoring in modern Hebrew. “My Jewish identity has always been pretty important to me,” he says.

Last summer, with a research grant from the University’s Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, Teplitz got the chance to explore that identity by making a short video about an essential slice of Jewish (and New York) culture: delis.

Teplitz grew up in Manhattan making comedy shorts with friends. For his first foray into the documentary genre, he used a simple Canon point-and-shoot camera with video capabilities. He borrowed a friend’s microphone to record the voiceover. A good chunk of the Greenberg Center funding went toward purchasing Final Cut Pro, he says, “because I’ve kind of exhausted my iMovie knowledge.”

The resulting eight-minute video, Kosher Style, digs into the histories and menus of three New York eateries: Katz’s Delicatessen (on the Lower East Side), Pastrami Queen (Upper East), and Barney Greengrass, aka “The Sturgeon King” (Upper West).

A pastrami man, Teplitz has more to say about the first two. He picked Katz’s, he says, “because it’s become a culturally important restaurant. Everyone who goes to New York, people ask, ‘Did you go to Katz’s?’ It’s been in movies.” Indeed, the restaurant has all the tourist trappings, including a sign, glimpsed in Teplitz’s video, that reads “Where Harry Met Sally.” (Harper Quad might quibble with that.) The choice of Pastrami Queen was more personal: It’s right down the street from Teplitz’s old high school, he knows the manager—the baseball-capped Jack Turner featured in the video—and, Teplitz says, “My friends and I would eat there all the time.”

He judges the sandwiches at both restaurants “delicious” but gives Pastrami Queen bonus points for keeping it kosher. Among other steps, the meat has to be “salted to dry out all the blood, so you have to consider that while you’re cooking it,” he says. “I view it as more of a preservation of authenticity.”

This summer Teplitz is leaning more on his major for a finance fellowship in Tel Aviv. His long-term goal, he says, is to start his own company—“not necessarily deli related.”

Watch Teplitz’s Kosher Style.

Economics & Business

College students