In 2009, Schell left her job and began teaching at Parsons and taking philosophy classes. Last year, she entered a master’s program in political philosophy. Examining the intersection of aesthetics and philosophy has been a way for her to reassert control over what she creates. “It was about trying to have meaning and autonomy in my own work,” she says.

Age: 29
Designer/illustrator
From: Rochester, New York
Lives in: Brooklyn, New York
Website: helloerinschell.com 

Schell’s interests have converged in the Occupy movement (she has contributed illustrations to the literary journal n+1’s Occupy! gazette and recently went on a tour of Italy discussing the protests) and in the New York Times’ philosophy blog, the Stone. Her collages for the latter ― Socrates in the clouds contemplating earthly delights; carnivorous animals dangling over a moral abyss ― use graphics as a means for critical inquiry. “It’s not just empty decoration,” says Aviva Michaelov, the art director of the Times’ opinion pages and Sunday Review.

Illustrations for The New York Times blog the Stone, 2010

The depth of Schell’s work is apparent in an installation she created for a public library in Washington, D.C. In “Illuminated Memories of Tenleytown,” she gives a visual history of the changing D.C. neighborhood, drawing on three months of research and reporting. Old newspaper stories and halftone images come together in a rich assemblage of overlapping memories and histories. Mixing sharp politics with evident empathy for the people of the community, it’s exactly the kind of work Schell wants to do more of. “It’s the idea of storytelling,” she says.

“The question of: How do you foster a sense of community to shake people out of modern alienation?”

Above and below: "Illuminated Memories of Tenleytown," installation at Washington, D.C., Public LIbrary, 2011

"Illuminated Memories of Tenleytown"

Illustration for Guernica, 2011

See the other 2012 NVA winners:

• Sang Mun
• Erin Schell
• Berton Hasebe
• Drea Zlanabitnig
• Casper Heijkenskjöld
• Kelsey Dake
• Jerome Corgier
• Tracy Ma
• Olimpia Zagnoli
• Ryan Thacker
• John Passafiume
• Lisa Hedge
• Jungyeon Roh
• Dafi Kühne
• Jing Wei
• Caleb Bennett
• Naz Sahin
• Serifcan Ozcan
• Brendan Griffiths
• George Michael Brower

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

Damien Ortega poster, color inkjet print, 2011

Mun is driven by an interest in language — its limitations, its fluidity and how it shapes design. Not coincidentally, he speaks a few of them. Born in South Korea, he grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia, before moving back to Seoul. After studying in Chicago in 2006, he returned to South Korea to serve his two-year mandatory term in the Korean Army. There, working with U.S. troops under the NSA, he learned yet another language: code. “It was intense,” he says. “I cannot really talk about the details of what I did there.”

Calling three countries home changed Mun. “There was this triple consciousness in what I did and what I wanted to do.” His work is characterized both by alienation and an ability to adapt. A piece called “Cultural Camouflage” layers torn bits of national imagery into digital banners. In another, he created a set of passports that open to reveal treatises on national identity.

"On View," black-and-white laser print with stickers, 2011

Autobiography creeps into his work in other ways. Lancet Wounded, a typeface with bladelike details, was inspired by botched childhood surgeries to mend a broken arm. Yet Mun’s work is never self-indulgent. Phil Lubliner, for whom Mun interned in 2010 at Fogelson-Lubliner (since folded into Other Means), credits this to confidence.

“He’s able to take something that’s a little bit raw and unusual and leave it really simple,” Lubliner says. “It takes a really confident designer to be able to do that.”

Though he has one semester left in school, Mun speaks like a veteran, quoting Rem Koolhaas to describe his approach: “Our work is a battle against architecture with the tools of architecture.” Mun says, “I don’t want to restrict graphic design to creating commodities. I want to expand what it could be or what the word could mean.”

Spring film festival, color inkjet print, 2011

Tri-X Open Type font, produced during an internship at Fogelson-Lubiner, 2011

"Replica," color inkjet print, 2011

Lancet Wounded, OpenType font, 2011

See the other 2012 NVA winners:

• Sang Mun
• Erin Schell
• Berton Hasebe
• Drea Zlanabitnig
• Casper Heijkenskjöld
• Kelsey Dake
• Jerome Corgier
• Tracy Ma
• Olimpia Zagnoli
• Ryan Thacker
• John Passafiume
• Lisa Hedge
• Jungyeon Roh
• Dafi Kühne
• Jing Wei
• Caleb Bennett
• Naz Sahin
• Serifcan Ozcan
• Brendan Griffiths
• George Michael Brower

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

Although opponents point to this case and others as evidence that “one size fits all” punishments are ineffective, anxiety about weapons and violence in schools remains high among Americans. In the wake of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, high schools in the United States rushed to adopt strict policies and filled schools with armed guards, metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs. These are now hallmarks of the modern American school. Yet for all these extreme measures, public fears over student safety remain high.

Aaron Kupchik’s “Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear” is an attempt to explain that paradox and suggest an alternative to this battle-zone mentality. The product of two years of research, “Homeroom” examines four public high schools comprising different race and class demographics. Kupchik compiled more than a hundred hours of interviews with students, administrators, teachers and police officers assigned to each school. Kupchik’s writing is meticulous and even-handed, even praising the officers whose methods he strongly disagrees with.

Salon talked with Kupchik about the lessons of Columbine, his willingness to appear naive, and hopeful signs for the future.

How did these zero-tolerance policies get started and what do they mean?

They started in the ’90s, and they were spurred by the federal government’s Safe and Drug Free Schools Act, which required schools to implement zero tolerance for certain things like weapons. What schools have done across the country in the last 15 years is to expand greatly what falls under zero-tolerance policies. So they extend to not just deadly weapons and drugs but sometimes fighting and prescription drugs and other types of substances. What they mean is that if you’re caught violating this broad rule, there’s no discussion and no elaboration of why you did this. No investigation. We just punish you with the one-size-fits-all punishment.

Why are they so detrimental?

We’re teaching kids what it means to be a citizen in our country. And what I fear we’re doing is teaching them that what it means to be an American is that you accept authority without question and that you have absolutely no rights to question punishment. It’s very Big Brother-ish in a way. Kids are being taught that you should expect to be drug tested if you want to participate in an organization, that walking past a police officer every day and being constantly under the gaze of a security camera is normal. And my concern is that these children are going to grow up and be less critical and thoughtful of these sorts of mechanisms. And so the types of political discussions we have now, like for example, whether or not wiretapping is OK, these might not happen in 10 years.

So these policies are giving the kids a civics lesson.

Exactly. As part of my research, I interviewed students, and one of the questions that seemed like a good idea at the start was asking them whether they liked having the SROs [school resource officers] in their schools. For me, having gone to public schools without cops, this really seemed odd to me, to put police officers in peaceful schools. And the students were puzzled by this question, and I quickly realized that it makes no sense to them because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s completely normal. It makes about as much sense as if you asked them, “Should your school have a principal?”

You spent a lot of time in each of the four schools. What are the police officers like who patrol these schools?

They were great. I really enjoyed the time that I spent with them. These are people who care about kids and who work hard for little money to do the right thing. I might disagree with what they do and how they do it, but not with their motives. But their role is an odd one for schools. They don’t have a counseling background, and they are just not able to deal with kids’ problems the way that some of these problems need. Their day-to-day experience trains them and socializes them to deal with kids in not the most productive manner. And their presence in schools creates a law-and-order mindset to govern schools rather than the type of counseling and democratic mindset that we know prevents crime.

There’s still very much a public perception that crime, violence and drugs are on the rise in schools. Has the addition of school resource officers been effective at all?

The jury’s still out on whether they’ve led to a decrease in crime. There have been big decreases in crime, but it’s unlikely that the SROs have had an effect on that. There have been only a few studies that have tried to look at effectiveness, and they’ve been totally mixed. What we do know about preventing crime in schools is that when you have a more democratic and inclusive school, you tend to have less crime. A democratic and inclusive school is one where students feel respected, they feel like they’re a part of a school, and where a school deals with students’ problems rather than just dismissing them. It’s one where the students feel empowered. SROs and zero-tolerance policies do the opposite of this; they erode what we know works.

The Columbine shooting is often invoked as a justification for zero-tolerance policies. But what kinds of changes did Columbine High adopt in the wake of the shootings?

Columbine is central to the way we think about school security. It redefined the tragedy of school crime in a very dramatic way. In the wake of it, what Columbine High did was quite sensible. They invested in counselors. They recognized that kids who do bad things in school are usually kids who have very serious troubles, and so rather than simply kicking them out of school for a week, they tried to reach out to kids who are dealing with difficult issues — to solve problems rather than just delaying them for a week while the kid’s out of school. They turned away from the more zero-tolerance type of policies and toward what I think is a much more effective way of trying to deal with things.

That’s pretty surprising. If there’s any school where you thought things might become more draconian, it would be that one.

It’s also interesting that one of the ways that people try to prevent a “Columbine-like incident,” a phrase I heard frequently, is to put up surveillance cameras and put in SROs. But they had both of those at Columbine. We can watch the surveillance footage of the police officers. Now perhaps it would have been even more devastating if they had not been there; we’ll never know that. But it certainly didn’t prevent things from happening.

One of your proposed reforms is to place non-school-affiliated counselors in schools. Why?

There are good features of having cops in schools. On the balance sheet, I think it is more harmful than beneficial, but one of the good things is that there is somebody outside the school’s authority that kids can talk to. But why does that person have to be a police officer? Why can’t that person be someone who’s trained in adolescent development? Someone who has a good eye for what makes adolescents tick and can deal with their problems as they arise? Why can’t be they be someone who can better hold their confidence unless their life or safety is at stake? This could be kind of the best of both worlds.

Some would say these ideas are too naive for the harsh realities of the modern high school.

That might be true. But they’ve tried their policies, and there are very clear disadvantages. What I’m arguing against is near-universal in American public high schools. There are harmful consequences which I try to detail throughout the book. I acknowledge I don’t have to deal with 30 unruly kids as I teach in front of a class. So I have great sympathy for teachers who have to struggle with that misbehavior. That’s not their fault. But what I’m saying is that we have evidence-based ways of dealing with that misbehavior that are much more likely to stop it, and we don’t use them. So I might be naive, but I’m willing to be, because I see a lot of harm with the current policies.

With a new school year starting, do you see any hope for a shift away from these methods?

In my own state of Delaware, I recently took part in a task force in the state Legislature that led to new legislation that was passed to reduce suspensions and arrests in schools — to curb zero-tolerance polices. So I do see movement in the positive direction. Another encouraging sign is that I’m talking to you and that people are interested in this. We need to be firm. There needs to be discipline in schools, but we must be much more sensible about how we do it. It seems to me that more and more people are catching on to that, so I am hopeful that things will change.

Justin Sullivan is an editorial intern at Salon.

In the context of this current debate, Scott Christianson’s newest book, “Last Gasp: the Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber,” is especially interesting. Christianson, an author, reporter and historian, gives a detailed history of the creation of the gas chamber, explains how it came into use as a seemingly more humane way to execute people and traces the use of poison gas from its American origins to the battlefields of WWI to its use in the Holocaust. The book is both captivating and disturbing — and despite its strong anti-death penalty stance, remarkably evenhanded. 

Salon talked with Christianson about what stories the 21st century might tell, sustained American support for capital punishment, and how to effectively argue at a dinner party.

How did the gas chamber first come about?

Everyone knows the horrors of the Holocaust but most Americans are not aware that the gas chamber was invented in the United States, and was first used in the ’20s, to execute criminals. After WWI, which saw the first widespread use of poison gases, it became a method of execution that was actively promoted by Americans who were part of the eugenics movement. They advocated the use of the gas chamber to kill not only criminals but other classes of individuals who were deemed to be unfit or undesirable. There were industrial forces at work as well — businesspeople who wanted to use some of these poisons for fumigation and other purposes — which helped increase interest in the idea of death by gas.

But perceptions of the gas chamber changed over time …

It was thought to kill people very quickly and painlessly. But, belatedly, it was discovered that death by gas was not nearly as fast or as painless as had been assumed. So much so that in 1994, after studying the relevant evidence, a federal judge concluded that it presented a substantial risk of causing extreme pain in prisoners for several minutes before their death and therefore did not pass muster constitutionally. It was  deemed to be cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th Amendment. The decision was upheld by a federal appeals court and the gas chamber was effectively abandoned as a method of execution. But as I point out in the book, this did not happen till decades after its horrific use in Europe and long after most people had become really disenchanted with the gas chamber and realized what a horrible thing it had been.

So it hasn’t been technically banned, just effectively abandoned?

It’s been a little unclear but it is effectively considered to be cruel and unusual punishment in all states.  

There’s recently been a lot of litigation surrounding lethal injection, which similarly invokes the 8th Amendment. What do you think the future will be for lethal injection? 

In 1973, there was a moratorium on executions in the U.S. and a majority of Americans were opposed to capital punishment. It was Ronald Reagan who suggested that, in place of the gas chamber and other methods of execution, lethal injection be tried because, as he put it, “it’s been used on horses and it seems to be a good way to put horses to sleep.”  This came at a fortuitous time for conservatives who were beginning to make capital punishment one of their main political issues. They realized that a lot of people were still squeamish about capital punishment based on the experience of the gas chamber and other methods. So lethal injection helped to placate that uneasiness on the part of the American public. But it is increasingly being shown that many complicating factors can make execution by lethal injection much more difficult and problematic than many would assume.

The focus on the 8th Amendment almost allows the pro-death penalty camp to keep finding ways to find more “humane” ways of punishment.

The reality has been that for the last several decades, the majority of the American public has been supportive of capital punishment. There really has not been a strong grass-roots movement in favor of abolishing it. It has been left to a small group of very talented lawyers to try to prevent executions and slow down the progress of the death penalty in America and they’ve been extremely effective in doing so. But in the process they’ve had few tools to work with and one of them has been the 8th Amendment; so from time and time you’ll see, and I think we will see again, conservatives suggesting that we try another method that is supposedly more humane and skirts the problems of the current method. 

This raises one of the paradoxes of the anti-death penalty movement:  I would think that for most anti-death penalty advocates, there is no “humane” solution.  But it’s a practical tactic to use the 8th Amendment and target particular forms as “cruel and unusual.”

Yes, and it’s worth noting that many of people who favor capital punishment don’t want a method that is completely painless and easy because they really believe that the person being executed has to be aware that he or she is dying and that it can’t be done in a way that removes any element of pain and suffering from the punishment. There are many notions swirling about in this debate that occasionally come into play, and the notion of pain and suffering is certainly one of them.

Speaking of support for capital punishment, approximately 60 percent of Americans still support the death penalty.  Why does it persist in this country when the majority of developed nations have abandoned it? 

It’s becoming clear to many people in this country that we have a very high number of people in prison and that we are using capital punishment more than many Western nations. When you add it all up, the United States is really quite a punitive nation. And yet, many of the people who created the foundation for this country were sent as slaves, convicts and indentured servants. Our society was built on that — like Australia, it’s very much a part of our DNA.  But we don’t want to acknowledge that. We want to put our prisons out of sight, out of mind, and  have executions that seem to not be causing any pain and are carried out out of the public gaze because it doesn’t square with our notion of who we are.

What changes do you think the 21st century will bring for capital punishment in this country?

That’s a very difficult thing to imagine.  We still have not retreated from this renewed use of torture. I think we have to be very vigilant in regard to capital punishment and make sure that it’s something that people take very seriously. In recent months, we are hearing the drums of the ultra-right beating and working people up into a frenzy and the fires of racism once again being stoked in this country.

You’re at a dinner party and become engaged with a strong-willed advocate for capital punishment. How would you convince them that they’re wrong?

You have to be aware that the government makes mistakes, that the criminal justice system makes mistakes and that it’s possible that an innocent person could be wrongfully accused and subjected to capital punishment. So, you’d have to ask the person at the party: Do you think that is acceptable? 

Most of that work, however, took place before his spectacular and bloody fall from grace. After decades of isolation and several incidents involving brandished firearms, Spector was charged (and convicted in 2009) for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson. Vikram Jayanti’s new documentary, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector,” however, focuses less on his downfall than on the man’s charms and his position in the musical pantheon. 

Salon sat down with Jayanti and spoke about Spector’s guilt and the reasons for his spectacular decline. 

It’s been over a year since Phil Spector went to prison. How do you think people perceive him? 

Unfortunately, the general sense out there is that he’s kind of a freak. Stories of him and guns have been running for 30 years. I don’t think in the general public’s mind he’s a big factor; it’s not like Paul McCartney went to jail. But if you stack up his 21 hits in a row, everyone of every age group has been hearing this their whole life and I wanted to remind people what an incredible artistic achievement it was. 

Mick Brown’s “Tearing Down the Wall of Sound” discusses that paradox: those sweet pop songs coming from such a damaged soul.

When you’re listening to “River Deep, Mountain High” with that swirling chaos in the background, you begin hearing madness. When I hear “Be My Baby,” I hear the Wall of Sound trying to push away the void. The yearning is not innocent, teenage yearning, it’s existential chaos. The man who ended up in the courtroom is the same man who made this hits and that’s sort of an abstract mystery to me.

I think that what a lot of artists do are acts of self-medication, in the chaos, disorder and anguish of the world, the moment you have some control, that you can make something beautiful, for a moment: You’re free. The problem is that if you have pathologies of various sorts, you also use it as an instrument of revenge.

Do you think he lost that ability to get to that moment of creative bliss — and that contributed to his decline?

I think the music moved on. What’s amazing to me is that the Beatles put him out of business in 1965 and yet four years later he’s producing “Let It Be,” so I think it’s incredible that he even had a second act. And it’s a fantastic second act. But I think the world moved on and that’s hard for people who have been fantastically successful. I think he retreated into his castle and stopped drinking.

Stopped?

He had been sober for 10 years before the night of the death. As far as I understand it, that was the first day he had fallen off the wagon in 10 years.

What do you think happened that night?

I have to hedge my bets on that. Phil kept saying she killed herself. Leonard Cohen told a friend of mine a story of Phil pulling a gun on him and Leonard said: “Oh, Phil, you pull guns on everyone, you haven’t shot anyone yet. You’re not gonna start now.” I can’t see that Phil pulled the trigger, even though he’s pulled a gun on people all over the place.

It would seem that he introduced the gun in the proceedings that night.

He told me that whenever he had a date come to the house he let them know that there was a loaded gun in the drawer of every room and if they weren’t comfortable, the chauffeur would take them home. It’s a perfect “Hollywood Babylon” story. Old, past his prime, legend producer takes home 40-year-old aging starlet. He popped a Viagra while she was in the bathroom taking off her false eyelashes and underskirt, and then she was dead. None of us were surprised. It was something we all assumed would happen one day. Which is why it was so easy for the court of public opinion to convict him. It just seemed another piece of how he lived.

Have you been in touch with him since he’s been in prison?

No, I’m gearing up to try to see him. I want to go pay my respects. Part of him is bound to hate the film because he’s naked on-screen and he’s weird. Part of him really ought to love the film. If he’s feeling rational, he’s got to see that in many ways, however complicated the film is in its view of him, it’s also a love song to his legacy, and that it’s probably the best thing that will ever be out there about him in terms of humanizing him and celebrating his genius, and also, frankly, the film leaves the impression that I believe there’s a reasonable doubt. And I can’t exonerate him, but I would like it to be 100 percent clear he killed her before I’m willing to believe he’s guilty.

How do you feel about creating a “love song” to the legacy of someone many people think is a murderer?

I am going to be criticized for seeming to roll over and let him say anything, but I was interested in finding out what it felt like to be Phil, so to that extent, I let him be Phil. It wasn’t my interest to evaluate him; it was literally an act of empathy. That’s something you can do with film that’s hard to do with another medium. You cannot discount the amazing soundtrack he gave a generation. I don’t want his legacy to be completely obscured, so I’m just trying to add to the stuff that’s out there, and add a little balance. It doesn’t excuse what he’s done or not done, but people are complicated, and life is complicated, I’m interested in the complexity.

Do you think there are still any Phil Spector-like mercurial genius characters working now?

James Cameron has that kind of control freak genius on a vast scale. And a lot of people come out of working with him hating him. But you have to hand it to him. “Avatar” is an act of megalomania, which happens to enrich our culture. And the same thing happened with Phil; he’s in the studio, he’s a megalomaniac and it enriches our culture. And I don’t know Cameron, but why do you have to be a nice guy if after you’re dead, people are going to talk about “Avatar” in 100 years? The question is: What’s the difference between the art and the artist, what’s the difference between dancer and dance. And Phil is the most extreme example of that.

Besides offering the songs, what do you think Phil Spector’s legacy is?

He elevated the idea of production. He created the idea that there’s more than just recording a song and putting it out. It’s about how you record it. That’s stayed with the business. He pushed pop music to where it could be argued that it was art. And obviously the Beatles took it further, and a whole slew of brilliant people have taken it further. But it was a big shift: It wasn’t disposable anymore.

And the Beatles only pushed it further when they began to utilize the recording studio.

He calls himself a revolutionary, and we do think of the music between Elvis and at least the end of the Beatles as a revolutionary movement, and he was one of the big warriors.

Do you think that sort of revolutionary aspect can exist now? Or that things can still be pushed forward?

I think things come in waves. I believe in music, I look for new artists who give me a sense that my life depends on listening to it. The stuff that picks you up by the neck and swings you around the room. Like the way that there’s nothing so profoundly truthful as that moment when you know your lover’s “lost that loving feeling.” It’s so horribly raw and true. I believe that popular music is the achievement of the human experiment. We’ve found something  that’s not possible for anyone else to make. It goes somewhere that humans can’t articulate without music.

And Phil Spector is central to that?

Yeah, for his own contorted reasons.