UChiBLOGo

If you know one thing about Chicago elections, you know "vote early—and often." The phrase is variously attributed to such masters of clout as Al Capone and the first Mayor Daley, but whoever said it, it stuck. As Langdon D. Neal, chair of the city's Board of Election Commissioners, told the Know Your Chicago group visiting the commission's West Washington Street headquarters last Wednesday, "We have quite a history with voting in Chicago—but that's been a long, long time ago."

Today, Neal said, Chicago is "a model jurisdiction," consulting to election boards around the country. A three-hour look behind the scenes—including a visit to the Pershing Road warehouse where the city's state-of-the-art voting machines are stored, tested, and readied for each election—showed why.

• It's big. The city (the rest of Cook County is its own jurisdiction) has 2,575 precincts and some 1,700 polling places.
• It's trilingual. Chicago is one of two jurisdictions in the nation (Los Angeles County is the other) whose ballots are printed in three languages: English, Spanish, and Mandarin [See comment below—Ed]. After the 2010 national census, it's expected that ballots will also be printed in Korean.
• It's organized. Beginning two weeks to ten days before Election Day, a blue Election Supply Carrier (ESC in board lingo) is delivered to each polling place. About the size of an armoire, the locked ESC contains a touchscreen voting unit, ballot scanner, and vote-card activator; shrink-wrapped ballots; collapsible voting booths; supply boxes; and an American flag. The ESC also doubles as a locked box where ballots can be inserted if the scanner goes down.
• It still believes in voting early. Early voting for the November 4 election begins October 13 and runs through October 30, Mondays through Fridays, 9 to 5, at 51 sites around the city. The board hopes 160,000 citizens will vote early, easing pressure at the polling places in what they expect to be a record turnout.

M.R.Y.

Wednesday's Div School lunch, the first of the new school year, added some locally produced items to its standard vegetarian menu. The tomato-and-spinach quiche, roasted potatoes, and apple crisp were the same—but the bread, usually store-bought, was baked in the kitchen attached to the Swift Common Room, and the Disciples Divinity House residents grew the herbs used to season the dishes.

After the meal Dean Richard Rosengarten, AM'88, PhD'94, introduced another local: his former classmate Phil Blackwell, DMN'86, pastor of the Loop-based Chicago Temple, First United Methodist Church, who talked about the nature of an urban ministry—accommodating thousands of visitors of diverse faiths while staying true to his Methodist worldview. The oldest church in the city with more than 1,000 members, the Chicago Temple shares a multiuse building with more than 15 floors of lawyers and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which moved a little less than a year ago from its previous spot at 60th and Kimbark. The basement houses an organization independent of the church but with similar missions of dialogue and tolerance: the Silk Road Theatre Project. Founded in 2002 by GSB-student-turned-producer Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury, AM'92, the company showcases playwrights of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean backgrounds. Said Khoury, who spoke after Blackwell: "[Phil] is in the business of storytelling; we are in the business of storytelling—it's a great complement."

Some things at the lunch were imported—one of the guests, for example: a first-year MDiv student who commutes weekly from Rochester, NY (yes, you read correctly—that's New York), where he used to work for Bausch & Lomb. Flying to Chicago every Monday for classes, he returns home Thursdays to spend the weekend with his wife and two children.

R.E.K

When it becomes fully operational in 2011, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River will generate the same amount of power as 15 nuclear power plants, making it the largest hydroelectric project in human history. But the human cost of the dam—including about 1.3 million people displaced by its 410-mile-long artificial lake and thousands of years of archaeological sites and contemporary buildings destroyed by its flooding—is also great.

The Smart Museum exhibit Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art opened Thursday and features four artists whose work addresses the dam's effects. Curator and art-history professor Wu Hung gave an opening lecture to a crowd packed into the Cochrane-Woods Art Center.

For the artists he selected, Hung said, the exhibit was “not something external” but rather an opportunity to “respond and think about the issue” of the dam and how it affected them and their subjects. Zuang Hui, for example, was “thinking of the future in the future past tense,” said Hung. In 1997 the experimental artist traveled by boat down the Yangtze River and drilled patterns of holes in the rock near the dam construction. He photographed each hole, abstracting the circular shape in the rock. In 2005, after the government flooded the area to create an artificial lake, Hui sent a photographer back to the sites for new pictures. In Hung’s words, the images are now “only water, water, water.”

The exhibit's three other artists all work in different media. Chen Qiulin, a video artist born in a town displaced by the dam, made a series of mournful films, the first of which Hung said represents “the death of a place and the death of a woman.” Painter Yun-fei Ji used traditional Chinese scroll-painting techniques to depict and fragment contemporary subjects into the linear image shown on the scroll. And a massive 20-foot oil painting by realist Liu Xiaodong looms across the largest gallery wall, showing construction workers playing a card game. Using a long brush and “skilled determination,” Xiodong painted the canvas in three weeks at one of the construction sites. The “site-specific work,” Hung said, conveys how “the artist cannot remain inactive” when presented with such an overwhelming subject.

Rose Schapiro, ‘09

There’s a certain symmetry in the numbers: Tuesday the number of University of Chicago Nobel laureates rose to 82, the number in physics to 28.

Symmetry has long been a cornerstone of physics theory, as Yoichiro Nambu told an attentive audience yesterday morning, “but sometimes symmetry looks like it’s broken.” He offered a real-life example: “When you have a large crowd of people like here”—a Reynolds Club lounge filled with reporters, cameramen, colleagues, and well-wishers—“and they’re all facing toward me, not the other way around, there’s no physical reason they should all look the same way at the same time. That’s symmetry breaking.”

There was, of course, a reason to face toward Nambu, who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics with two Japanese researchers. Asked to explain “for a general audience” the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) that won him the prize, the 87-year-old Chicago professor emeritus offered this caveat: “It’s rather difficult because it’s a concept, not an application, something concrete.”

But, as 1980 Nobelist James Cronin, SM’53, PhD’55—an experimental physicist who has known Nambu since the Japanese-born theoretician came to campus in 1954—told the Reynolds Club crowd, SSB is a concept with solid applications “in superconductivity, in condensed matter, in magnetism.” He also emphasized the work’s larger meaning: “These basic ideas were really the foundation of beginning to understand the [Standard] model that works so beautifully in particle physics.”

Nambu's Nobel, Cronin said, brought its own symmetry: “It's just a thrill from the bottom of my heart to see that the guy who started these ideas is recognized."

M.R.Y.

"Great Book Sale This Way," screamed the neon-orange sign taped to International House’s front door. A large arrow pointed the way to I-House’s Assembly Hall. A smaller, handwritten sign hailed, “Buy 1 Get 1 Free. Today Only!” The occasion: University of Chicago Press’s first book sale in more than 20 years—an opportunity for the press to get rid of some overstock—and for readers to purchase titles ranging from natural history to legal scholarship to critical theory.

Inside Assembly Hall, 20-odd tables held books nestled in brown boxes. In the background a live Johnny Cash album played. Around noon on the sale's second (and last) day, thousands of titles remained, and the room seemed more like a library—browsers quietly combed through the boxes of books—than a store with a fire sale. Although the selection was what one undergraduate repeatedly called "esoteric" as she peered into the cardboard boxes and mumbled to herself and her companions, the opportunity to strike upon true treasures did present itself—though of course, for every customer such a treasure was a different book. Some cooed over Lee Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language, while others pounced on Richard Posner’s Aging and Old Age.

As they scanned the titles, customers studiously avoided eye contact. Some filled up their own boxes with dozens of volumes, eager to cart home volumes upon volumes of critical texts. I picked up, among others, a book on 1960s psychedelics and rock and roll (Tomorrow Never Knows by Nick Bromell), which I found discarded in the natural-science section—it belonged in popular culture. I seriously considered but eschewed, for space concerns, a large art-and-architecture book on how hotels influenced the Cold War (Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture by Annabel Jane Wharton). I was more selective than most of the crowd, picking up only a half-dozen books—with the sale, it was difficult to leave with fewer. The only challenge came when the most eager customers, after purchasing a box filled with texts, had to figure out how to carry them home on the back of a bicycle.

R.S.

When I first met Nate Silver for a July–Aug Magazine article, he asserted strong opinions about Barack Obama’s ability to transform the red-state/blue-state divide in the general election. “If you look at the electoral map,” he said back in April, “Obama’s coalition could help him pick up Colorado and Virginia.”

One month earlier, under the pseudonym Poblano, Silver had started the political blog FiveThirtyEight.com, named for the 538 Electoral College members. The site features a forecasting system that weights polls based on a pollster’s track record, the survey’s sample size, and the poll’s age. But Silver wasn’t yet “out” to the public as a political forecaster. To the people who knew his name, he was the stats nerd who created PECOTA—a system that projects baseball players’ career arcs by comparing them to similar players from the past—and the man in charge of Baseball Prospectus, the Rolls-Royce of the sport’s numbers analysis.

But since unmasking himself in the June 1 New York Post, Silver's techniques have challenged the way pundits parse political polls. He’s been hailed as the “rookie of the year in this year's presidential campaign coverage” by Time’s Joe Klein and called "indispensable" by the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne. And it looks as though his April prediction is holding up—he suggests Obama holds 10 and 8 percent leads in Colorado and Virginia, respectively. But he hadn’t truly arrived until last week, when he was grilled by Stephen Colbert, the purveyor of “truthiness” and leader of the Colbert Nation. After hearing Silver compare Obama’s emergence to the startlingly successful Tampa Bay Rays, I'll stay tuned to see where Silver appears next.

Z.S.

Video courtesy Comedy Central.

Last Wednesday the first blast of cold air started to turn the quads’ leaves yellow, and around 5:30 p.m the Class of 2009 gathered in Hutchinson Courtyard. Open grills around two of Hutch’s entrances emitted the familiar smells of cooking hot dogs and hamburgers. As students trickled in from their afternoon classes, the grassy slopes lining the stone courtyard filled with crowds. Students perched on the side of the drained fountain and waited to hail their friends.

The College Programming Office, which hosted the welcome-back barbecue for fourth-years, advertised complimentary Class of 2009 water bottles for the first 500 attendees. Helpful CPO members gestured to permanent markers next to the bottles: “Don’t forget to put your name on it!” Printed on each bottle was a cartoon gargoyle perched atop a tower and reading a book—perhaps a timely prophecy for how many in the senior class have already been spending fall quarter: overstuffed schoolbags were as common a sight as overstuffed students.

After queuing up for bratwurst, chicken, hamburgers, and veggie burgers, some seniors jostled to fill their new water bottles with iced tea from bright-orange coolers set up on tables. The whole courtyard was awash with returning students munching on food while comparing summer adventures and plans for the new school year—presumably their last as undergraduates. The festivities spread into the Reynolds Club, where seniors lounged on the stairs that lead to the second floor. Even as the sun set and the quad lights turned on, scores of students returned for seconds and thirds before heading back to their residences or the library. By 7:30 p.m., although the garbage cans were stuffed with paper plates and empty condiment packages, the courtyard itself was almost empty.

Rose Schapiro, ’09

The first Faculty Senate meeting in more than a decade ignited the Hyde Park campus Wednesday, as students rallied on the quads and big-name professors gathered to debate the University's new Milton Friedman Institute. While backers say the institute will be a place for path-breaking research in economics, business, law, and public policy, some faculty members worry an institute named after Nobel laureate Friedman, AM'33, would tie the University to the free-market economist's politics. The controversy has heightened as some academics blame Friedman's ideas for the current financial crisis.

The media weren't invited to the two-hour meeting, which more than 200 faculty members (out of 1,200 faculty with senate membership) attended, but some spoke with the Chronicle of Higher Education afterward. “It was calm and collected,” said social-sciences dean Mark Hansen. “It was the kind of discussion that one expects from mature adults who are very smart.” History of religions professor Bruce Lincoln, a leader of the anti-institute faculty group CORES (Committee for Open Research on Economy and Society), estimated the room was about evenly split for and against. Most supporters were from economics, statistics, business, or law, while those opposed, the Chronicle reported, "represented a much broader range of disciplines."

The meeting, and the intense feelings its topic provoked, brought together heavyweights from several academic areas. Afterward the debate continued in the hallway: Lincoln traded concerns with economics Nobelists Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55, and James Heckman; economist Lars Hansen; anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and John Kelly; historian Moishe Postone, SB'63, AM'67; and public-policy professor Bruce Meyer.

Before the meeting, about 70 students convened on the rain-soaked quads to protest the institute. They marched from the center circle to Ida Noyes, where they passed out flowers to entering faculty members, sucked pacifiers to signify the University saw but didn't really hear them, and held signs saying, "Will we all become 'Chicago boys'?" and "Students for Ideological Stubbornness." The CORES group meets Friday to discuss its next steps.

A.B.P.

"Many American and British non-Muslims believe that Islam and democracy are incompatible," said Amédée Turner, a former member of the European Parliament for Britain and the Queen’s Counsel. Turner, who also advised the Macedonian Parliament in 2001 on democratic procedures, presented to a dozen Divinity students the results of his recent study “Muslim Grassroots in the West Discuss Democracy,” which he carried out in 2005-06 while sitting on the Advisory Council of the Anglican Observer to the United Nations. Turner's talk in Swift Hall last Thursday was one stop on a tour including the World Affairs Council of America in St. Louis, the Middle East Institute in DC, and the London Houses of Parliament.

The study gathered 400 Muslims from different U.S. and British communities into 38 anonymous round-table discussions to consider whether democracy and Islam are compatible. The groups, set up by local Anglican and Episcopalian clerics, included "business and professional people, school teachers, their spouses, and students." For his study Turner defined democracy as one person, one vote; secret ballots; and government that follows the electorate. The groups were not asked to come to an agreement or to vote but only to discuss. “On the question of democracy,” Turner found, “they spoke with a unified voice,” agreeing that there is no clash between their religion and democracy. Their statements, compiled in a 90-page report recommended by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, echo Winston Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

Democracy is compatible with Islam, said the participants, as long as the government doesn't contradict the Qur'an. In the Islamic text, "most punishment is in hell,” Turner pointed out, “so it’s not a problem for a democratic parliament.” Certain rules about modesty for women, he noted, and the requirement to cut off a thief’s hand could come into conflict with a democratic government.

After Turner spoke, Graham School Asian-classics instructor Omer Mozaffar addressed those two potential conflicts of women and thieves. Less than 10 percent of the text of the Qur'an deals with legal matters, Mozaffar said. “The majority is focused on what we would call worldview, not law or governance. There’s a body of law that developed after the text, so the text may say, ‘Cut off the hand of a thief,’ but can that mean imprison them? What is literal and what is metaphorical?” There is no legal or scholarly consensus on these questions, he added; applying Qur'anic laws to the modern day “is a community project" that is "democratic in spirit.”

Shira Tevah, ’09