Kitsch Magazine: Fall 2015

vol. 14 no. 1
pop culture, politics, college, etc.
BINARIES
INSIDE:
STEM or Humanities, Women Can’t Win
Inside Ithaca’s Planned Parenthood
The Museum of the American Other
The Politics of Black Hair

MEET THE EDITORS
KATIE O’BRIEN NATHANIEL CODERRE YANA MAKUWA
editor in chief
managing editor
editor in chief
THELONIA SAUNDERS
YANA LYSENKO
MICHELLE SAVRAN
art editor
watch & listen editor
art editor
TIA LEWIS
NATHAN POWELL
MAURA THOMAS
bite size/copy editor
design editor
copy editor

managing editor
bite size
zooming in
zooming out
watch and listen
kitsch
nathaniel coderre
tia lewis
yana makuwa
katie o’brien
nathaniel coderre
yana lysenko
writers zoe ferguson
melvin li
alejandra alvarez
jael goldfine
kira roybal
sarah chekfa
susie plotkin
jagravi dave
simi best
felicia kuhnreich
barbara esuoso
riley henderson
vol 14 no 1 || fall 2015
editors in chief katie o’brien + yana makuwa
copy editors
art editors
design editor
tia lewis
maura thomas
thelonia saunders
michelle savran
nathan powell
fiction writers ariella reidenberg
naroé palacios cruz
spencer holm
artists thelonia saunders
michelle savran
maura thomas
julia pearson
jin yoo
riley henderson
daniel toretsky
advisors michael koch
english, cornell university
catherine taylor
writing, ithaca college
cover art thelonia saunders

in this issue
4 Letter from the Editors
5 On the Plaza
6 Connoisseurs: Beer or Wine?
7 VHS vs DVD: The Face Off
9 Office Space: Mukoma Wa Ngugi
11 Inside Ithaca’s Planned Parenthood
15 Dependence: Coffee in College
17 Compulsively Joining Clubs in College
19 STEM or Humanities, Women Can’t Win
21 A Meditation on Double Majoring
23 Dear White People with Dreads
27 The Museum of the American Other
30 Photography of Agony and the Western Gaze
33 Lawrence Lessig: A New Kind of Candidate
35 Twitter: The New Nest of Campaign Donations
37 French Girl Syndrome
39 Tavi Gevinson and New Creativity
41 The False Dichotomy of Disney’s Female Characters
43 Mulder and Scully: Meant to Be
45 The Cathartic Absurdity of Mel Brooks
47 The Olivia Popes & Jess Days of TV
49 Feminism 101 with Nicki Minaj
51 The Lingering Era of the Male Talk Show Host
53 “Post-Colonial” Punk with The Kominas
55 From Breath to Brain
56 Erosion: Part 1 & Part 2
57 Hell Is Real, Fake Leather
58 That Was My Name
59 Judgment Day
kitsch magazine, an independent student organization located at Cornell
University and Ithaca College, produced and is responsible for the content of
this publication. This publication was not reviewed or approved by, nor does it
necessarily express or reflect the policies or opinions of Cornell University, Ithaca
College, or their designated representatives.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
There’s a theory in philosophical circles that says if you only consider
two sides of an argument you’re committing a fallacy. The False Dilemma fallacy
lurks behind dichotomies between man and woman, white and black, East and
West, gay and straight. These are all categories that we ascribe assuming they
are based on inherent traits rather than arbitrary social constructions. Underlying
many of the tensions in today’s pop culture and political debates is the tendency
to oversimplify issues into these long-established, false dichotomies. Many fields
of modern critical thinking, like third-wave feminism, postcolonial studies, and
critical race theory, work to deconstruct these cultural binaries. This semester,
kitsch sought to do the same.
Complicating the narrative around common feminist issues, several
writers address different ways women are pigeonholed into particular roles. Zoe
Ferguson argues that the push for women to enter STEM fields is not enough—
we have to also address the sexism that devalues their work in the humanities.
Susie Plotkin examines how the media positions Nicki Minaj as a villain, while
white pop queens ignore other spheres of privilege at play in favor of the easy
men vs. women division. Maura Thomas profiles Tavi Gevinson, writer, fashion
entrepreneur, and champion of the under-estimated teenage girl, showing what
women and girls can achieve when they reject society’s rigid expectations.
Many of our writers were concerned with the dangers of an “us” vs. “them”
mentality when it comes to “The West” and the rest of the world. Yana Lysenko
pulls back the curtain on the imperialist implications of America’s obsession
with white French fashion. Jael Goldfine and Kira Roybal examine the role of
museums and photojournalism in creating a cultural “other,” and the importance
of questioning these institutions. Jagravi Dave introduces The Kominas, a punk
band that rejects the idea that “muslim” and “punk” are mutually exclusive, and
explores questions of identity in America.
Other high profile dichotomies come from America’s two-party political
system. Nate Coderre details the life-cycle of a politician who attempted to
transcend the Republican/Democrat divide to battle the corrupting influence of
big money in politics, while Sarah Chekfa critiques Twitter’s new feature that
encourages users to rashly donate to campaigns, prioritizing emotion over reason.
And seeking expertise beyond our kitsch writers staff, we spoke with
Mukoma Wa Ngugi about the dangers of perceiving a stable binary between
Africans and African-Americans, and the staff at our local Planned Parenthood
about the effects of the single- and narrow-minded agenda to defund the
organization.
In the end, we all have a predisposition to conflate complicated issues
with simplified dichotomies. Can we help from living in a world of analog vs.
digital, beer vs. wine, caffeinated vs. decaf, audience vs. writer? But when this
inclination to over-simplify and divide carries over from the mundane into
the elusive complexities of identity and society, it becomes crucial to critically
examine these binaries.
Yana Makuwa
Katie O’Brien
4

On the Plaza
Who would you like to see
run for president in 2020?
“Elizabeth Warren”
—Jagravi D., ‘15
—Conner P., ‘17
“I want Donald Trump to run forever”
“Noam Chomsky”
—Thomas K., Law Student
“Not Kanye” (x3)
“An anarchist revolutionary”
—Nathalie L., ‘15
“I’m more focused on Rand Paul 2016”
—Karann P., ‘16
“Kanye”
—Maitland Jr., ‘18
—Nate C., ‘16
“Hilary....Duff”
“Casper the Friendly Ghost”
—Christine A., ‘17
“Clay Aiken ran for Congress, I see no reason
why Matt Damon wouldn’t run for President”
“That would be Hillary Clinton’s second term”
“Michael Luzmore”
—Emma L., ‘16
“Bernie Sanders’ second term!”
Some registered voters preferred to remain anonymous
5

CONNOISSEURS
wine or beer, you’re probably still a douchebag
by Thelonia Saunders
art by Thelonia Saunders
You may meet one at a party, standing around, looking
deeply into their glass as if to absorb the oh-so-alluring alcohol
percentage through eye contact alone. Your heart may begin
to beat faster, and you may begin to mumble low threats of
bodily harm as they tell you about the “bouquet” or the “body”
of whatever fills their glass, calling it “cheeky” or “robust,” and
inevitably, disgustingly, gargling it in front of you for what feels
like decades. In this way, the connoisseur is a special breed.
But how might the substance in their glass change
how you think of them?
The wine drinkers, you presume, would be the artsy
people in black turtlenecks, speaking French or Italian, or
simply maintaining a silent yet profoundly disdainful stare in
the corner of the room. They are lounging on the couch with
a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. One
may sigh and shake their head as another espouses the virtues
and shortcomings of the newest 12-hour experimental film.
The beer drinkers, on the other hand, would be by the organic
fair trade dips, comparing the relative authenticity of their own
local micro-brews, wearing near-identical slouchy beanies and
flannels. Eventually one might pull out a ukulele and play
an ironic cover of a rap song, as the others chortle into their
glasses and laugh at anyone who could be seen drinking a Bud
Light.
These people embody the beer-versus-wine debate.
It is one of time immemorial, dating back centuries, from the
Roman Empire to the Middle Ages, when beer was a common
everyday beverage and wine was reserved for special occasions
(especially for Catholics—transubstantiation had to start
somewhere). Both beverages go back about 7,000 years, so
there’s no “first,” just as there is no clear “best.” And yet, because
of these age-old differences in the style of their consumption,
the two alcohols themselves seem to have vastly different
reputations. Wine is classy, beer is casual. Wine is exotic, beer
is local. Wine is expensive, beer is cheap.
However, these reputation discrepancies seem to
be based more on surrounding culture than actual scientific
fact. Wine is seen as more expensive, and while this can be
true, expensive wines are only more common than expensive
beers, and there is a wide price range for both. Perhaps the
other differences come from the longstanding tradition of a
US/Europe dichotomy, in which we are a country of frat boys
chugging beer and TPing the dean’s house, and they are a
continent of artists, constantly smoking, drinking, and maybe
eating some cheese. Combined with the relative age of
beer—most being very “young” at the time of consumption—
versus the “aging like fine wine” phenomenon, you have two
beverages that are quite literally the alcoholic version of “blue
bloods” and “nouveau riche.” (Which means that there is a
possibility that someone could write a version of Marx’s Das
Kapital with beer and wine as stand-ins for the bourgeoisie
and aristocrats... Would that make the proletariat moonshine?
Get on it, academia.)
To make (what has the potential to be) a long story
short: this beer vs. wine debate holds its roots in a classism
that dates back to the Roman Empire, and it is not going away
any time soon. So while you may roll your eyes at the wine
snobs and think that the beer enthusiasts are just way too
invested in hops to be anywhere close to normal, I think we
can all agree that connoisseurs of both beer and wine can be
equally annoying when you are just trying to get alcohol in
your body at a party.
“They tell you about the ‘bouquet’ or the ‘body’ of whatever fills their
glass, calling it ‘cheeky’ or ‘robust’, and inevitably, disgustingly,
gargling it in front of you for what feels like decades
6

VHS versus
which is the greatest obsolete viewing experience??
by Yana Makuwa
Price: At their prime, VHSs were a very reasonably priced
product. You could buy a blockbuster film and have it in the
comfort of your home for a mere $15-$20 (Nate’s Dad, 2015).
And now with a particularly good quality and rare first edition
VHS, you have an anthropological artifact worth TENS of
dollars!
Availability: While DVDs may surpass VHS tapes in
availability in stores, the trusty analog antecedent has a leg
up when it comes to availability of content. During the years
when VHS was the only (or most popular) distribution method
for home video, Hollywood produced such gems as the first
Star Wars trilogy and The Shining (which actually did better in
VHS sales and rentals than at the box office). VHS gave people
access to the best of the best in the comfort of their home. And
now it both provides us with a piece of our cultural history, and
holds the repsonbility of being the final format for many great
films that were never transferred (see Listverse.com’s article
“Top 15 Movies You Can’t Find on DVD” for more!).
Video Quality: This may be an instance where one would
expect the VHS to fall short. The image quality that comes from
the process of magnetic tape recording is simply incapable of
the aggressively crisp high definition that we get from our
newest video technology. However, there is something to be
said for the texture and ethereal quality that comes from the
rich grain of an analog video experience. Being able to see
Richard Gere’s pores and eye-wrinkles on a digitally remastered
HD version of Pretty Woman cannot compare to the angelic
glow that the slightly blurred image gives his face on VHS.
The Middle Earth of The Return of The King on DVD practically
shouts fake CGI and set-design when compared with the
dreamlike quality of a distantly magical memory that it has in
The Fellowship of the Ring on VHS (The Lord of the Rings series
straddles the years when DVD overtook VHS, which explains
why I have the first on VHS and the last on DVD).
“Being able to see Richard
Gere’s pores and eye-wrinkles
on a digitally remastered HD
version of Pretty Woman
cannot compare to the angelic
glow that the slightly blurred
”
image gives his face on VHS.
User Interface: The popularization of DVD ruined
and cast into the realm of memory
the true home-video viewing
experience. Watching a VHS tape
is a physical experience with an
incredibly satisfying arc. First,
there’s the gratifying click when
you open the case (or swoosh if
you have the cheaper, cardboard
version). As you slide the tape
into the player the machinery
accepts it like a gift, and whirs
to life to bring you the film you
hand-picked. Where DVDs have
cold and distant digital dings
and jarring bright blue menu
screens, VHSs have warm colors
and comforting static. And at the
end of your movie, when all is said
and done, you get up and hit the
rewind button—a magical moment
of returning everything to the way
it was before. (BONUS: You get to
watch the movie twice! Once going
forward, and then again in reverse!)
7

DVD: the face-off
by Nathaniel Coderre
Price(LESS): Only $1 for Kelly Clarkson: Behind Blue Eyes,
Beverly Hillbillies, or Best of Luke’s Peep Show Season 1 at your
local video store!!! Have a cousin with more modern tastes???
You could get her critically acclaimed Netflix show Orange is
the New Black for only $11! DVD really has convenience and
versatility unmatched by any other video watching experience.
Availability: Let me drop some choice DVDs on you: X-Men:
The Last Stand, V for Vendetta and The Dark Knight. The DVD
era was the Golden Age of comic book movies! Besides, since I
wasn’t really allowed to see movies with nonsexual uses of the
F word and middling amounts of violence, PG-13 movies were
where it was at. Sure, my brother scratched the hell out of my
copy of The Dark Knight TWO WEEKS after
I got it, but getting DVDs for Christmas
was AWESOME way back when. Midaughts
nostalgia is a thing guys! I
know for a fact that the majority
of your movie-watching days have
been in the DVD era (beginning
June 2003, if you were curious).
90s era Disney was amazing, no
doubt. I’m just willing to bet that
a lot of you have DVD re-releases.
In fact, let’s make an actual bet. If
more than half of our childhood
homes still have VCRs, I will only
watch VHS tapes for the rest of my
life.
Video Quality: Are you kidding
me? Shiny laser-optical discs
beat whatever the hell cassettes
are every day of the week. People
who reminisce about VHS quality
are conflating their current viewing
experience with childhood nostalgia. I
Let’s make an actual bet. If
more than half of our
childhood homes still have
VCRs, I will only watch VHS
“tapes for the rest of my life.
”
loved watching The Lion King on VHS with my siblings as much
as the next guy, but that doesn’t mean I’d prefer that over the
digitally remastered version.
User Interface: The PS3 that I used to watch DVDs back in
2006 was sleek as hell. They also had that cool thing where
you could turn on the video game system from your controller!
So as long as you already had the remote, the controller, and
the DVD remote (maybe? I can’t remember), you wouldn’t even
have to get up off of the couch. And DVD menus are the best!
Rotating pictures, the trailer (so convenient), scene selections,
and DVD extras. Let’s not forget about the DVD extras! Best
example: the over 3 minutes of Uncle Joey impressions on the
Season 3 Full House DVD. You’d have to watch the entire season
to figure out which episode he does his Joe Pesci impression in
if you were watching the VHS.
Who’s the WINNER?? It’s up to you! Email
kitschmag.eds@gmail.com to vote!
art by Michelle Savran
8

OFFICE SPACE:
mukoma wa ngugi
by Yana Makuwa
the african literature english professor talks books and binaries
kitsch: So I was wondering if you could start by introducing
yourself—what you teach, and what you study.
MwN: My name is Mukoma Wa Ngugi. I’m an assistant
professor of English at Cornell University, the co-director of
the Cornell Global South Project, and also co-founder of the
Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature.
kitsch: Could you describe what it’s like balancing being a
successful fiction writer and a full-time professor?
MwN: Well, they complement each other. For example I’m very
interested in the question of Africans and African-Americans,
questions of identity, questions of race and class, and so on
and so forth. And part of my research is on that. But then
my novels end up being on the same topics. For example,
Nairobi Heat is about an African-American detective who’s
investigating a murder case that takes him all the way to
Kenya. So he becomes an African-American in Africa, right?
And so all sorts of questions of identity will arise from that.
Even my next book Mrs. Shaw takes place half in the US and
half in Kenya as well. It’s about an exiled pro-democracy
activist. So in that one it’s more an exploration of nationalism,
of how nations, countries like Kenya, use nationalism to hide
the real history. And some of the post-independent betrayals
of workers and so on and so forth—the betrayal of the dream
of independence.
But that’s something I also explore in other [non-fiction]
writing. So I’m saying eventually they complement each
other. Even where it doesn’t seem for that to be the case—
for example I just finished a novel on the tizita, which is a
form of Ethiopian music. It’s all about music but it’s also an
exploration of how people relate to each other. So I don’t
know, I would say eventually then it’s all interrelated.”
kitsch: Our theme for this issue is binaries. Could you talk
about some of your favorite binaries to think about, maybe
particularly the African/African-American binary, and how
that shapes or doesn’t shape your work?
MwN: I mean, myself, I’m very wary and scared of binaries.
So, for example, if you take Africans and African-Americans,
certainly there are ways in which their relationship is formed
by racism. In an article called “Somewhere between African
and Black” on The Guardian, I talk about how both groups
see each other through the eyes of racism, to the extent that
Africans grow up seeing very negative images of African-
Americans, and African-Americans also grow up seeing very
very negative images of Africa, you know we have war and so
forth.
But at the same time there has been a lot of solidarity between
the two. For example you have Nelson Mandela, who said
that it would have taken longer for South Africa to free itself
of apartheid if it hadn’t been for the involvement of African-
Americans. And you have people like W.E.B. DuBois who is
credited as one of the originators of the concept of Pan-
Africanism, who ends up dying in Ghana. You have Malcom
X and his tour. You have African-American organizations like
Africa Action and TransAfrica Forum that agitate for African
issues. And one of my favorite examples is Martin Luther King
being one of the first people to call for sanctions against
South Africa. And vice-versa, you have Black Panthers that
ended up in exile in Tanzania and Algeria. So there has been
that solidarity.
So there is the angst, because we’re seeing each other
through the veil of racism. But at the same time there is great
solidarity. But behind that—and this is where the question
of binaries becomes important—if you just look at the two
9

of them then you end up with this stable either solidarity
or tension between the two. There’s this recent book called
Disintegration by Eugene Robinson, and it’s interesting to the
extent that it shows essentially the many black Americas in
the US. And it also talks about what he calls the imagined
blackness, which is mostly bi-racial and first generation
Africans. So if you’re just thinking about African-Americans
you end up with this stable view of blackness in the US, but
to the contrary it’s very very complicated. And the same thing
on the African side. You have, well first, different levels of
blackness. You certainly have thousands of cultures, thousands
of languages, 54 countries. So again, to speak of Africans and
African-Americans as a binary, then you’re missing all those
complexities that end up influencing how the two relate.
kitsch: Now for some lighter questions: if you could take one
course here at Cornell what would it be?
MwN: Well now this is where ego is very dangerous. I really
would love to take one of my own classes. No, no. Certainly I
would love to take a poetry class from Ishion Hutchinson who
is my colleague here. I would like to take some fiction classes.
I would love to take theory classes from Jonathan Cueller, who
is a senior colleague, and a major literary theorist. Certainly
I would take a bunch of courses at Africana. I would like to
take one on current African politics, for example. I would like
to take a course on Africans and African-Americans, or the
black diaspora for example. Yeah... And physics. I would love
to take a physics course.
kitsch: Could you
pick out one object
that’s your favorite
object here in your
office?
MwN: Umm, hm.
Well I guess it’s
[he gestures to a
photograph of his
daughter behind
him] sort of cheesy
but… and I guess
it’s not really an
object. Let me
think of a book that
I really… Ah! There’s a book called The Black Count. Oh, or
maybe the carvings. They come from a house where I grew
up in Kenya. And I grew up seeing them, and they’re of the
Mau Mau freedom fighters. They were given to my dad but I
stole them when I went back. It’s about Kenyan history and its
history of struggle against British colonialism.
Read his fiction and find out more about him at
mukomawangugi.com
10

INSIDE ITHACA’S
PLANNED PARENTHOOD
an interview with local activists maureen kelly and liz gipson
by Katie O’Brien
This summer, anti-abortion group The Center For
Medical Progress released videos that were deceptively edited
and spliced to make it appear as if a Planned Parenthoodaffiliated
social worker was facilitating the illegal sale of
fetal tissue. The full videos, available online, show that the
context of the conversation actually had nothing to do with
fetal tissue sale, but fetal tissue donation for medical research,
and the social worker’s list of prices was in reference to
transportation costs. Despite the videos being obviously and
verifiably fake, the Republicans in Congress have used them
to fuel their extreme agenda to defund Planned Parenthood
and systematically remove women’s access to essential, legal
health services.
In accordance with the Hyde Amendment, a provision
of Roe vs. Wade, Planned Parenthood’s federal funding does not
even go toward paying for abortions. Instead, the approximately
11

$530 million in funds that the nonprofit receives annually
provides millions of women with birth control, STI screenings,
pap smears, breast exams, sexuality education, and general
healthcare.
Ithaca’s Planned Parenthood clinic is an affiliate
of Planned Parenthood of the Southern Finger Lakes (PPSFL),
which serves four upstate New York counties with healthcare,
and ten with advocacy. There are health centers in Ithaca,
Watkins Glen, Elmira, Corning, and Hornell. To find out more
about the importance of Planned Parenthood in our own
community, as well as on a national scale, kitsch interviewed
two women who work at Ithaca’s Planned Parenthood.
“We’re Never Quite Off-Duty”
Maureen Kelly, VP of Education & Communications,
has worked at our local Planned Parenthood for the past 21
years. She first became passionate about reproductive rights
when she failed a women’s health class at her Catholic, allgirls
high school for attempting to give a presentation about
contraception. “That was a pretty formative moment for me as
a young activist. I remember thinking ‘wait...what? You don’t
get to pick what I get to know. These are my parts!’” She has
since dedicated her life to educating youth about sexual health
and sexuality, working first at Planned Parenthood’s front
desk, then as an educator, and now managing the education
program. “I come from the philosophical approach that we
have to talk about this stuff, we have to eradicate shame, we
have to eradicate secrecy and that sense of embarrassment,
whether it’s an abortion story or a need for birth control or a
concern about an STD,” she said.
part of people’s communication or their prevention behaviors.”
But they also have to have their guard up a bit more when
talking about their work, because they never quite know how
someone is going to react. “I think it takes a very specific type
of person to work at Planned Parenthood, because you do have
to deal occasionally with people saying terrible things when
they find out where you work,” said Gipson. “And so it has to be
something that you’re passionate about and that you’re willing
to really fight for, whether you’re anything from an educator to
a billing associate. It’s something you have to be willing to talk
to people about constantly.”
“We Serve Our Community As It Exists”
PPSFL annually provides healthcare to 11,000
and education to 16,000 people of all genders, ages, and
socioeconomic backgrounds. However, the majority of
patients are under 25, low income, and people of color, due
to the prejudices and barriers that make it more difficult for
these groups to access healthcare. “It’s such an intersectional
approach to how we do healthcare, which is, being a young,
African-American girl in the city of Ithaca, you’re dealing with a
different circle of stuff that’s going to make accessing healthcare
harder,” said Kelly. Despite the efforts of the Affordable Care
Act, there were still over 32 million uninsured Americans in
2014. Forty-eight percent of those individuals said they were
uninsured due to the cost of insurance, according to the Henry J.
Kaiser Family Foundation. “In terms of age, race, socioeconomic
status and background, we really do serve our community as it
exists. Our job is to see you and whatever experience you bring
and to honor that, and to care for you—period, non-negotiable,
“Our job is to see you and whatever experience you bring
and to honor that, and to care for you—period,
non-negotiable, what do you need?
”
Liz Gipson, Director of Public Affairs, says she first
became involved with Planned Parenthood as a patient
herself. Then, after she graduated college, she began work for
a political reproductive rights organization, and volunteered
at a Manhattan health center as an abortion doula, supporting
women as they went through the procedure. In July, she began
work in Ithaca. “I’m really lucky to be one of the few people
that’s gotten to see Planned Parenthood from three different
sides,” she said.
Kelly and Gipson agreed that one of the things that
makes them proudest to be part of Planned Parenthood is
the way people open up to them. “We tend to be people that
hold people’s stories,” said Kelly. They both said that patients,
strangers, and friends often confide in and consult them. “You
get friends that contact you because their kid’s having their
period, and they don’t know how to talk to them. So we’re never
quite off-duty. I have picked up countless packs of birth control
pills and emergency contraception; you become a more integral
what do you need?” said Kelly.
Due to its position in New York, a liberal state, PPSFL
faces fewer limitations and restrictions on their ability to
provide care for patients than many other states do. “New
York State is one of the 14 states that uses state funds to fund
abortions which is fantastic, and we’re one of the few states
that actually opted to do it, was not sued into doing it, which
is something that I’m really proud of as a New Yorker,” said
Gipson. This means that they can help more people pay for
their procedure that would not otherwise have coverage—
“people traveling from Pennsylvania, people whose insurance
won’t cover it, people who can’t get Medicaid or make just
over the Medicaid cutoff.” Planned Parenthoods in New York
are uniquely positioned politically as well, because they can
push more progressive legislation that other states “could
never dream of.”
However, PPSFL’s position in a rural community can
bring challenges. The decreased visibility of upstate New York
12

as compared to New York City means that state funding is often
allocated downstate, leading to strains in resources. And a
major difficulty for patients in accessing Planned Parenthood’s
health services is the availability and cost of transportation in
upstate New York—there is no abundance of buses and trains
like there is downstate. If someone cannot get transportation
or time off work, they could have to delay their appointment
by weeks. “For many people, we’re the only doctor that they
see that they can have access to, and we’re one of the only
Medicaid providers in the area,” said Gipson. Being in a rural
community also affects the education work they do. New York
State does not require schools to teach sex ed, so there is
“a massive inconsistency” in what students learn. “Often our
education and outreach staff are really the only informed,
expert resource they’ll come in contact with about the actual
facts,” said Kelly. “We’re dedicated to combating the myths,
making sure that young people, in particular, know that they
actually have a lot of rights, being a New Yorker. If they were
living in Pennsylvania, it’d be a really different story—they
don’t have the same kind of access.”
“All the Restrictions and the Barriers”
In the 21 years since Kelly began work at Planned
Parenthood, limitations on reproductive rights have only
become stricter and stricter. “When you look at all the
restrictions and the barriers and just the sheer volume of votes
have is based on the idea that ‘if we don’t tell young people,
they won’t do it,’ which is just the opposite of everything we
know,” Kelly said. She cited the Netherlands as a place where
they start sexual education much earlier, in much more detail
than the US does, and the average age of becoming sexually
active is two years later than it is here. Similarly, the states
with the highest teen pregnancy rates are New Mexico,
Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma—all
states with abstinence-only education. Meanwhile, states with
comprehensive sexual education have the lowest rates.
Kelly said that in the future, one of her dreams is to
have a drop-in, after-school sex ed program, where students
can feel comfortable asking any questions they have about
sex and relationships and all the things they don’t talk about
in school. “We want to make sure there are many more ways
for people to access information and support and resources to
have full, healthy sexual lives as people, instead of relegating
that to one semester, one class,” she said. “When you ask a
group of college students in their freshman year, ‘how many
people got a really accurate, adequate, and complete sex
education?’ people are like... ‘yeah no.’ And so there’s gaps.”
Planned Parenthood also works with campus advocacy groups
to do many dorm education programs at area colleges. “The
demographics we serve overlap with college students, we
serve a ton of students. So making sure we are engaging
“ ”
The recent attacks on Planned Parenthood have not affected operations in
that we have not been closed a single day because of them.
But we are seeing an uptick in protests.
we’re fighting against, it has definitely been sliding backwards,”
she said. When Kelly started her job, many of the doctors
she worked with were able to recall the time when abortion
was illegal, and all of the medical consequences that came
along with it. “They had a really different, intimate orientation
to seeing what that looked like—the sepsis, and the loss of
fertility, and the infections—they saw that,” said Kelly. And due
to all the increasing restrictions on abortion on both the state
and federal level, America has slowly, scarily, been returning to
this time: “I went to a national Planned Parenthood Conference
a few years ago, and a really brilliant CEO got up in front of
everyone and said: ‘We live in post-Roe America; it’s now.” In
other words, we no longer have to imagine what it would
be like if the 1973 court case that legalized abortion were
overturned—there are now so many restrictions on abortion,
that for many people, it effectively is illegal.
And restrictions have not just been tightening when
it comes to abortion, but also when it comes to sex ed. Kelly
noted that in 1994, she could teach much more in middle
schools than her education staff can now, thanks to the federal
push for “abstinence-only” education that began in 1998.
According to Advocates for Youth, none of these programs have
been shown to have any success in delaying sexual activity or
reducing teen pregnancy, and often contribute to the spread
of misinformation about the effectiveness of contraception.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the ways that information gets tinted
by some of the shame and assumptions and hopes that people
students we are providing services for and helping them feel
empowered can empower us all,” said Gipson, who oversees the
campus organizing program.
“An Uptick in Protests”
“The recent attacks on Planned Parenthood have not
affected operations in that we have not been closed a single
day because of them. But we are seeing an uptick in protests,”
said Kelly. The Ithaca health center sees regular protesters who
stand across the street with signs, but do not bother patients
and staff. The health center in Corning sometimes gets “more
aggressive” protesters. And ever since the fraudulent videos
were released, PPSFL’s Hornell center, one of the smallest
clinics, has been seeing up to 40 protesters show up at a time,
harassing patients as they try to enter the building. The staff
discovered that the protesters are not local, and are being
bussed in from outside of the communities they serve. “Our
first thought is always ‘how can we make our patients feel
safe?’” said Gipson. “Having escorts to walk you from your car
to the health center makes a huge difference for patients.”
The fallout from the attacks has also forced them to
keep an even closer eye on what is happening in Congress.
“Politically, we’ve been paying attention to our elected officials
and how they’re voting. Tom Reed just voted to defund Planned
Parenthood for the second time. We are grateful that Obama
is in office because he is going to veto that bill, but it is
something that we are constantly thinking about and looking
at,” said Gipson. While PPSFL does not have to worry about
13

losing funding on a state level, if Planned Parenthoods in
Pennsylvania and Ohio lose funding, PPSFL will be affected
because many of those patients will have to come to upstate
New York.
However, there has also been a silver lining to the most
recent efforts to discredit the organization—many supporters
and former patients have been speaking out in support of
Planned Parenthood. The online campaign #IStandWithPP
was trending on Twitter, with people circulating reasons why
Planned Parenthood is important. And those who participated
in the campaign #ShoutYourAbortion fought to decrease
stigma around the procedure by sharing real stories. “In the
future, I would love for Planned Parenthood to have a whole
army of advocates that are former patients of ours. One thing
Planned Parenthood has not been great at in the past is being
able to empower our patients to become advocates,” said
Gipson. “We’re realizing the importance and the desire from
our patients to learn about what’s happening, and how they
can support Planned Parenthood.”
“Make Them Listen To You”
On January 25th, Planned Parenthood staff and
supporters will travel to Albany for the annual Day of Action,
where they will lobby New York State’s elected officials. “It’s
a fantastic opportunity for students, we pay for the whole
thing, transportation, food, training on how to lobby, so if you
are anyone even mildly interested in activism and political
organization, this is a great thing to do because it teaches
you the skills you need to talk to elected officials and make
them listen to you,” said Gipson. For 2016, Planned Parenthood
will be lobbying for the passage of three bills. One is the
Comprehensive Contraception Coverage Act, which would
mandate that health insurance companies follow the Affordable
Care Act’s requirement that they cover contraception. “If you’re
on birth control you should not have to pay for it legally; when
you go to the pharmacy to pick it up it should be free. But that
is not happening, people are having to pay co-pays, and that’s
illegal,” said Gipson. The second bill they are pushing is the
Paid Family Leave Bill. “We see that as integral to the work
we do because if you can’t take off time because you’re sick
or your child is sick, that affects your health, and we also see
people canceling their appointments because they can’t get
time off.” And the third bill would prohibit solitary confinement
for pregnant women—an important justice issue especially for
upstate New York, which has a high prison population.
The work that Planned Parenthood does is clearly
integral to the communities it serves. Especially while the
United States does not provide universal access to healthcare,
and school systems provide woefully inadequate sexual
education (or none at all), Planned Parenthood is absolutely
essential for women and youth to be able to take control
over their own reproductive health. And defunding Planned
Parenthood only takes away access to essential health
services for lower income women, while those who have
adequate money or coverage for the procedure still have
access to it—accomplishing nothing but increasing inequality
in this country even more. We are lucky to have such strong,
passionate advocates for our reproductive rights at our
Planned Parenthood here in Ithaca.
Photo courtesy of Vox: Voices for Planned Parenthood
14

DEPENDENCE
a college student’s complicated relationship with coffee
by Zoe Ferguson
The collective relationship Americans have with
caffeine is a kind of polymorphous perversion. Though caffeine
is a drug, and people overdose on it just like any other drug,
coffee has saturated our collective consciousness to such
a degree that to dislike coffee is almost akin to being un-
American.
What does it mean to be a coffee drinker? First, let’s
consider what it means to not be a coffee drinker. If I don’t
drink at least one cup a day, I can never live up to the ideals
of my biggest role models. Most notably, the four role models
who raised me: my mother, my father, and Lorelai and Rory
Gilmore have a passion for coffee at all times of the day
and night that seemed to fuel their ability to pull off weird
outfits and hilarious quips. When I was 12 years old, my dad
noticed my increasing inability to get up in time for school and
decided I was probably “a coffee person.” This characterization
made me feel validated, like I had been initiated into a way of
life, or a very unsociable fraternity. Now that I drank coffee to
get things done, I could be just like Mom and Dad, who slept
at odd hours and caffeinated all day and in the middle of the
night. Having coffee in the morning became an act of selfvalidation:
if I drank this, I was officially in The Adult Club. It
set me apart from my younger siblings and my seventh-grade
classmates. When I couldn’t focus on a test in geometry class,
I remember thinking, That’s the last time I skip coffee in the
morning. In the spring of seventh grade, I had to give it up for
a mandatory three-day class camping trip, and I experienced
withdrawal headaches and sickness.
In high school, I didn’t caffeinate as much. I found more
energy (and solace) in food, so I got high—and crashed—on
carbs and sugar. It all went downhill in college. While it’s true
that coming to Cornell was a great move for many reasons—
friends, learning, gorges, etc.—in other ways, it doomed me
to an existence of wavering dependence on and a strange
existential attachment to the drink. I place part of the blame
on Cornell’s coffee card program, which allows you to get a
art by Julia Pearson
free drink after 10 cups, but Collegetown’s plethora of coffee
shops doesn’t exactly help either. What’s a girl to do when she
passes Starbucks, Collegetown Bagels, and now Dunkin’ Donuts
on the way to class?
The whole university system seems to be enabling
caffeine dependence. It prioritizes independent individuals. Yes,
it’s cool to have friends, but what’s really cool is being a selfmade
person in America. That’s what this country is all about.
But for many, being a student at a highly competitive university
also means being dependent on something—and if it’s not
drugs or alcohol, it’s probably caffeine. Being a caffeine addict
is part of the canonical life of the college student. Staying
up all night in the library stacks is even easier with Libe Café
serving coffee until midnight every weeknight. Independence
is a function of how much energy you can muster up every
day, and that energy is facilitated by a daily caffeine dose. In
an environment where everything else is shifting—friends and
relationships come and go, jobs and classes are fluid, even
living situations are often in limbo—coffee becomes the friend
15

we didn’t know we had.
At some point though, we develop a tolerance for
caffeine, just as we do—to an extent—for the rain and hills
of Ithaca. We drink it for the routine, to keep ourselves on a
schedule and plan a no-fuss date at Stella’s, but it doesn’t
give us the high anymore. We don’t feel the effects until we’ve
drunk three cups in a row and start to get the shakes.
For a bunch of intellectually curious people, it’s odd
that we don’t think more about the physical effects of the
caffeine we consume so habitually.
As much as it pains me to say this, coffee stunts your
growth, dehydrates you, and dims your teeth. The English still
insist on drinking tea, which has one-third the caffeine of
coffee, and they seem to be doing all right. But coffee remains
a super-giant, $30 billion industry in America. Thanks largely to
the development of K-Cups—nine billion of which were sold in
2014 alone—Keurig Green Mountain made $4.7 billion in 2014.
As James Hamblin argued in The Atlantic, Keurig machines
are relatively cheap compared to most espresso machines,
“but once you have one, it has you, too.” Both mainstream
and artsy coffee brewers are seeing enormous profits as well:
according to market research firm Mintel, cold brew coffee
grew in the U.S. by 115 percent in 2014 and made $7.9 million.
Starbucks’s profits also climbed by 22 percent from 2014 to
2015, bringing their profits up to $626.7 million, according to
The New York Times. This fall, West Coast-based Peet’s Coffee
bought Portland’s pet coffee company, Stumptown, eliminating
competition and raking in profits.
The branding efforts for coffee are also insane. Not
only has the annual release of Starbucks’s PSL—pumpkin spice
latte, for those who live under a rock—become basically a
national holiday, but smaller brewers are getting smart, too.
In September, Stumptown partnered with The Late Show with
Stephen Colbert to give out 10,000 bottles of “Col’ Brew” (get it?
Colbert? Col’ Brew?) on the streets of New York City, to promote
Colbert’s new position on the show. This is a step ahead of
branding ice cream with celebrities’ names. (Colbert has his
own Ben & Jerry’s flavor, too: Stephen Colbert’s Americone
Dream.) Emblazoning his face on a bottle of artisan cold brew
coffee seems different, but truly, the appeal of coffee is just as
universal nowadays as that of ice cream.
The pull of coffee, like the pull of ice cream, isn’t one
with an aim. Much like in Freud’s admittedly weird theory
of the sexual aim, the consumption aim (a term I just made
up) is actually perverse in almost everyone. Freud says that
“perverse” isn’t a pejorative term. Instead, it just means that
we’re attracted to people for reasons other than procreation.
Such is coffee. It’s not exactly a practical drive that steers us
towards caffeine. Though it might have the temporary effect
of getting us through a few more hours of studying, coffee is
really a fix, a stopper for an emotional life that goes wild once
we start abandoning our routines. Most people would probably
be fine without coffee, and I’ll bet that a large percentage of
self-proclaimed “coffee addicts” wouldn’t know the difference
if they were served decaf. That’s how strong the placebo effect
can be. Of course, ice cream also serves an emotional purpose,
but we’re vocal about it. When you get dumped, you get a pint
of Americone Dream. But we don’t talk, as a society, about the
emotional void coffee is filling. This is the void that makes us
feel like we are “less than.” Without coffee, we may feel useless,
anchorless, and friendless. Drinking coffee even becomes a
moral value when you look at it this way. What does it mean if
I give up coffee? Does it make me a quitter—have I given up
on the relentless ambition that I promised to follow when I
accepted my spot at Cornell? Does it mean I’m somehow doing
it wrong, showing weakness, if I add lots of milk and sugar?
Clearly, I don’t know the answer to these questions,
because I am the person who spends a ton of money on coffee,
takes one sip, and then holds onto the full cup for the rest of
the day, hoping that carrying it around will somehow validate
my spending and make me cool and motivated by osmosis. All I
can say is that the emotional side of coffee drinking is real. Any
quiz that purports to tell you what kind of person you are by
what coffee drink you prefer is a waste of time. What you really
need to ask yourself is why you’re drinking it in the first place.
When you figure it out, let me know.
“While it’s true that coming to Cornell was a great
move for many reasons—friends, learning, gorges,
etc.—in other ways, it doomed me to an
existence of wavering dependence on and a
”
strange existential attachment to the drink.
16

GOING CLUBBING
why we compulsively join clubs in college
by Melvin Li
During the 2014-2015 academic year there were over
a thousand student organizations at this university—almost
one club for every kid at my high school. Download the 25-
page Orgsync PDF and count them if you like. These clubs
include the Film Club, the Adult Film Club, the Surf Club, Take
Back the Tap, the Teszia Belly Dance Troupe, the Pokemon
League, and societies for a host of different countries around
the world (except for Kyrgyzstan). Walk-on clubs like Rainy
Day are always happy to take in new members at any time,
while more competitive clubs such as the Whistling Shrimp,
Cornell Bhangra, and Yamatai actively encourage all who are
interested to come to their auditions. And to the great relief
of our parents, mentors, club recruiters, and even ourselves,
many of us here at Cornell eventually find our paths in the
organizations we join.
Stepping onto Cornell’s campus for the first time, my
biggest concerns were being away from home and not being
able to make friends among the 3,222 other freshmen who
enrolled that fall as the class of 2017. I was sure I would end
up spending the whole year hiding in my room. Instead, as I
walked around campus the following day, I was quite literally
swept into the Big Red Marching Band, one of the first Cornell
student organizations to begin recruiting in the fall. To make a
long story short, I spent the remainder of freshman year going
to class and going to band, where most of my friends were, and
that was perfectly alright with me.
The Bank of Mom and Dad, however, wasn’t as pleased
with my progress. That summer, I was fed a double cocktail
of advice that countless knowledgeable adults tell college
students every year: “You need to be more active on campus”
and “You need to network and form connections.” As an English
major I had to get to know other English majors and people who
shared my interest in writing, and I figured the easiest way to do
that was to join writing clubs on campus. So come sophomore
year I pulled a stunt common among students who had never
been to Club Fest before. I headed down to Barton Hall and
signed up for three clubs that fit my interests: The Cornell Daily
Sun (The Princeton Review’s favorite college newspaper), Rainy
Day (Cornell’s undergraduate literary magazine), and of course
the lovely little magazine you’re reading right now. I knew I
was wading into a lot of commitments, but I wanted to devote
a lot of my free time to extracurriculars after having almost
none freshman year.
What I did not expect was that I would end up
spending most or almost all of my free time with clubs and the
people in them. Now in my case this might be because I suck
at time management, but many college students who devote
themselves to extracurriculars do so for reasons ranging from
passion about the club’s function, to a desire to spend time
with the people in their clubs or pad their resumes. Don’t get
me wrong—I love parading around at football games, covering
events on campus, reading literary submissions, and writing
articles like these. But I, like all students here, also have classes,
exams, papers, and other important things that I’m supposed to
worry about. My parents sent me to Cornell first and foremost
to get an education, and so for me tomorrow’s classes take
priority over today’s clubs. But getting a good education and
dedicating oneself to clubs don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
With their most immediate goals fulfilled (attending
stimulating classes at an elite university on their way to a
lucrative job), students would be expected to attend fewer
clubs after getting into college, but actually the opposite has
been observed. Students at Cornell and most universities in
the United States participate in many times more student
organizations than the typical high school student. So what
about extracurricular activities keeps students involved
17

around their campuses throughout their university years?
Many college students attend clubs not only regularly but
eagerly and passionately, managing their time and schedules
to accommodate what have become integral parts of their lives.
Why do we often become so passionate about the clubs we
join that we desperately look forward to afternoon rehearsal
or evening practice, and bond more closely with our co-club
members than the people with whom we attend class or live?
And why does this happen when these clubs aren’t always
related to the fields we plan to find careers in?
One reason is that college clubs are often continuations
and intensifications of our high school interests and passions.
I certainly followed this track: I’d been in my high school
marching band since ninth grade and written for my schools’
newspapers since seventh, and I had no intention of letting
either of these passions die upon entering college. This pattern
applies especially to students who join club sports in college
without plans to pursue careers in sports. Peter Li, a freshman
in the College of Arts and Sciences, arrived at Cornell fully
intent on joining Club Swimming because he had spent nine
years as a member of a swimming club back home and two
years on his high school’s varsity swimming team. Although he
plans on going into statistics and finance, he refuses to give up
a sport he enjoys. “I swam club before and the feeling of being
part of a team and doing something I’m okay at was something
I hoped to relive in college,” says Li. Although Li eventually left
the club because its heavy time commitments conflicted with
his schoolwork, he has taken up lifeguarding as a much more
flexible way of remaining close to the pool.
Whether or not you join with a social goal, socializing
is an undeniable appeal of many clubs in college. Even the
Cornell Project Teams website states that perhaps the most
important incentive to joining a team is the opportunity to
“have fun while working on projects that you are passionate
about.” Taking time off of schoolwork or other obligations for
the sake of being together is a powerful sign of attachment
no matter how you look at it, and so inevitably members of
a club who meet regularly will bond even if they come from
different backgrounds and fields. We’re not talking about the
casual, once-a-week gigs in high school either—some of the
more intense student organizations in college require multiple
meetings a week.
Ethyn Leong, a sophomore in the College of Agriculture
and Life Sciences, is in marching band, Hawaiian Club, Japan-
United States Association (JUSA), Cornell Wushu, Food Science
Club, and Cornell Gourmet Club. He said that while he joined
the Food Science Club and Gourmet Club because he is a food
science major, he joined his other clubs mostly for non-academic
reasons and now spends a significant portion of his time on
pastimes not related to his field of study. “I joined marching
band and JUSA just cause,” Leong said, “I joined Hawaiian Club
because they made me join, and I joined Gourmet because I’m
a food science major.” Leong first joined Wushu after being
introduced to it by a friend and stayed in the club because he
enjoys the personal discipline, rigorous exercise, and cooking
opportunities it provides him. Being a part of so many clubs
does take a toll, so excellent time management skills are a
must if one wishes to get good grades and still be an active
extracurricular member. “Think about it like this,” Leong said of
fitting all his clubs into his schedule, “how often do you think
I socialize during the day?” Spending every night at practice
or socializing with clubmates means that, like other heavily
involved students, he is often very busy catching up with work
during the day.
Unlike undergraduate admissions officers, graduate
schools and employers look more at experience in your chosen
field instead of simple well-roundedness, so joining tons of
different clubs is not necessarily the greatest job-hunting
strategy. That being said, some clubs and student associations
do provide college students with career opportunities while
requiring very little effort and dedication in return. For Niranjin
Ravi, a sophomore computer science major in the College
of Engineering, something as simple as reaching out to a
professionally-oriented club helped expose him to internship
openings. “I’m in ACSU, the Association for Computer Science
Undergraduates,” Ravi said. “I don’t go to any of the meetings
but I’m part of the list-serv. It’s really to help people get jobs
and there’s a lot of information on internship opportunities.”
As Alexandra de Leon mentions on the AfterCollege blog,
professionally motivated clubs can also be highly beneficial
beyond the listserv. She recalled how an astronomy major
friend attended an Engineers Without Borders event for free
“Stepping onto Cornell’s campus for the first time, my biggest
concerns were being away from home and not being able to
make friends among the 3,222 other freshmen who enrolled that
fall as the class of 2017
”
pizza and ended up realizing that civil engineering was actually
the right major for her. De Leon said that joining clubs “gives
you the option of exploring a career without fully committing,”
pointing out that professional organizations for students
usually invite employees in the field to share their insights
at speaking events, provide their members with internship
opportunities, and even help members develop hard skills.
It’s clear that we cannot simply discredit clubs as a
waste of valuable time and tuition money. There are many
perfectly valid reasons why college students might choose
to adjust their daily schedules to attend clubs and other
associations. Furthermore, clubs are voluntary, which means
that one of the primary things keeping members coming back
is their own devotion to each other and shared interests. Here
at Cornell and in my experience, clubs are spaces to form deep
friendships, pursue long-lasting passions, and perhaps advance
a career network all at once. While joining too many clubs may
carry more burden than benefit, college students will continue
to set aside time for activities other than class and work, and
will continue to enrich their lives long into the future.
photo by Connor Smith
18

DAMNED
IF YOU CODE
DAMNED IF YOU READ
stem or humanities, women can’t win
In America, there is a rampant version of sexism
directed towards women who, in one way or another, try to
break the boundary between their prescribed academic
interests and the evolving—and profitable—world of digital
technology. Though male leaders like President Barack Obama
and Vice President Joe Biden encourage women to pursue
scientific fields through the Office of Science and Technology
Policy and the White House Council on Women and Girls, the
environment is both overtly and covertly hostile.
Take, for example, the Gamergate fiasco, in which
thousands of men online converged to attack and threaten
a few feminist gamers and women in tech, like Brianna Wu
and Anita Sarkeesian. The problem, as one student from the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas wrote in the college’s online
publication The Rebel Yell, is the perception that “men are
from STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics],
women are from humanities.”
According to Ben Schmidt, associate professor of
history at Northeastern, almost half of bachelor degrees
granted to women in liberal arts fields were in the humanities
in 1965. That number has decreased to about 25 percent. But
the women who have left the humanities are not entering
tech: instead, more and more are studying social sciences
like psychology, economics, and political science. And a huge
number of women are earning pre-professional degrees—
more than half of these degrees are conferred to women.
Why are the humanities dwindling in popularity? New
York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks writes that there is
a simple economic explanation: “Accounting majors get jobs.
Lit majors don’t.” But there is more to it than that, he says: the
humanities are less popular because they just seem irrelevant.
It’s true that students are pursuing “practical” majors
to be employed after the Great Recession. But this pattern is
older than the 2008 economic crisis, so we have to ask: to
by Zoe Ferguson
what extent is the perceived irrelevance of the humanities
predicated on the field’s association with women?
As the American Association of University Women
(AAUW) wrote in a 2013 report, “Most people associate science
and math fields with ‘male,’ and humanities and arts fields with
‘female.’” This wasn’t always the case: back in the Renaissance, a
man who was an expert in all fields, especially the humanities,
prevailed. When novels first came on the scene with Daniel
Defoe’s 1719 work Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela, they were hailed as original works of genius.
But by the time Mary Ann Evans—who went by the
male pen name George Eliot—wrote The Mill on the Floss in
1860, novels were considered an inferior literary form because
women, who did not have day jobs, liked to read them and
had even begun to write them. “Silly novels by Lady Novelists
are a genus with many species, determined by the particular
quality of silliness that predominates in them,” Evans wrote in
a mocking 1856 essay entitled “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.”
Since then, the trend has stayed the same. Even as
men dominate the literary world, “silly novels by lady novelists”
have become “chick lit.” What makes the pursuit of literary
knowledge a feminine one, even today, while computer science
has become the hot field for men? What accounts for the lack
of a female presence in computer science, when every other
scientific field has seen an increase in women enrolled?
The AAUW’s research shows that while the percentage
of bachelor’s degrees earned by women in the life sciences
and even physics and engineering have risen dramatically
in the last 50 years, the percentage of women in computer
science is barely greater than it was in 1965 and has dropped
significantly in the last 30 years. Last spring, here at Cornell,
the college of engineering had 107 women computer science
majors, compared to 311 men. That means almost 75 percent
of Cornell’s CS majors are still men. So, what gives?
19

The AAUW attributes the disparity to implicit bias—
bias that we might not even recognize in ourselves. Both
women and men can have implicit bias towards women, which
silently reinforces ideas that women can’t or shouldn’t do
certain things. In the context of computer science, the impact
of implicit bias is strong: while women may have an interest in
the field, they may also have an internalized notion that CS just
isn’t something women do.
And not only do people hold stereotypes about what’s
masculine and feminine, but they don’t allow for crossover
either. As a woman, there is no way to “win”: if you study English,
you are assumed to be doing so because it’s a typical feminine
major. If you want to cross over and study computer science,
you will likely be perceived as incompetent and unlikable.
What worries me is how serious the enforcement of
the line is—this thick black American line between men and
women that bleeds over into academia. You can either be a
woman in humanities or a woman in STEM, or you can be a
man in STEM or a man in humanities, if you’re an especially
rare breed. There is absolutely no room to blur that line by
being interested in both computer science and humanities.
This is why women in STEM—encouraged by
numerous government initiatives, programs, scholarship funds,
and schools from pre-K to graduate school—seem like such a
big deal. They represent a switch, a crossing-over from one
side to the other. But what they do not represent is an actual
tearing down of boundaries or a blurring of the line.
The celebration of “Women In STEM,” while worthy
and important, must be seen as something that is progressive
but not the final step. When we have people of all genders
integrated into various fields of study based on what they
feel interested in, rather than what they are told is the most
valuable, then we will have real equality.
This equality may never come—more scholarships
and programs encouraging girls in CS pop up each day, while
nothing of the sort is happening in the humanities—but
it’s worth considering. If the aim of programs encouraging
women to pursue science is really to emancipate women from
barriers that may stop them from doing what they want to do,
it is important that we not simultaneously glorify technology
at the expense of the humanities. Along with many of my
classmates, I have been asked countless times what the
“point” is of spending so much money on higher education if
I’m going to “waste it” on a degree in literature. As long as we
continue to devalue and even degrade the study of arts, there
can be no progress in either gender equality or elitist social
attitudes that think less of people for what paths they choose.
“What worries me is how serious the enforcement of
the line is—this thick black American line between
men and women that bleeds over into academia.
”
art by Jin Yoo
20

SEEING DOUBLE
a meditation on double majoring at Cornell
by Alejandra Alvarez
With my junior year well underway, thoughts
concerning the impending reality of my life after Cornell and
what I will do with it now occupy nearly ever corner of my
mind. As a double major in English and Psychology, I have had
to begin asking myself what I intend to do with these two
degrees once the cap and gown have been shed and the fanfare
of graduation has subsided. How will I apply the knowledge I
have gleaned from these two degrees to my navigation of the
professional world?
I’ve reached far back into the mind I possessed as a
freshman to remind myself why I chose to study these two
disciplines in the first place. The resulting process of soulsearching
has been a tumultuous one. Surrounded by some
of the most brilliant and motivated minds in this world, I
have had days where I have criticized myself for being too
passive in my quest to land a position in graduate school or
a job. Instead I have spent a disproportionate amount of time
pondering how best to synthesize my two degrees. I believe
this is a plight many a double major has faced.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, the
percentage of undergraduates choosing to double major
increased by 96% between the years 2000 and 2008. Though
the overall representation of double majors in the American
collegiate body remains small (about 5.5 percent as of 2013)
at some institutions upwards of 40 percent of students pursue
multiple majors. Why the sudden and widespread urge to
expand one’s academic horizons?
Selecting a discipline to major in proves to be a
complex decision for most undergraduates in the United
States. Some enter as freshmen secure in their undecided
status, content to spend their first few semesters taking
a variety of courses in the hopes that one will nudge them
in the professional direction that is right for them. Others
check the box next to a specific major while filling out their
Common Application and hit the ground running, taking the
associated curriculum and seeing this academic path through
to graduation. The decision to double major, however, entails
a bit more than either of the two aforementioned categories.
It requires a justification to oneself as well as to society and
one’s family, a dedication to both subjects, and a vision of a
future in either of the disciplines. But more importantly, it
involves envisioning a future that ideally combines these
disciplines.
This is the beauty of the double major, a beauty that
makes the occasional doubt from others as well as from yourself
endurable. Nobody double majors for no reason—the decision
to take on multiple majors is a thoughtful, well-constructed
one that is more often than not in line with the true interests
of a student. And for some students, two majors isn’t enough:
Neil C. ‘17 is a triple major in Biology, French, and Government:
“I was—and still am—extremely interested in microbiology, and
felt that the Biology major was the best avenue for pursuing
that. I chose the French major because my mother has a
doctorate in French, and instilled a deep appreciation for the
French language and culture within me. I have always been
pretty interested in foreign policy, so I started the International
Relations minor. Then I realized it might actually be easier to
major in Government, so I am currently pursuing that as well.”
For Neil, his decision to triple major was a confluence
of personal affinity, interest, and practicality as he went on
to tell me about his dreams of becoming either a member of
the Armed Forces or a doctor. “If I become a doctor, then the
humanities classes I have taken would encourage me to treat
my patients as something greater than a collection of parts
that require repair. I truly believe they would make me more
conscientious and empathetic as a physician. If I were sent to
war in some capacity, then I would have a better sense of the
moral and historical ramifications of any actions I may have to
take,” he said.
The College of Arts and Sciences houses the most
double majors I know at Cornell. I do not think this is a
coincidence—the humanities lend themselves to double and
triple majoring more than any other discipline here at Cornell,
as well as in academia in general. As Neil’s experience and
so many others’ may confirm, the A&S curriculum, due to its
flexibility and its broad selection of humanities and STEM
courses, very much fosters interdisciplinary study, or the
application of certain concepts acquired in one discipline to
those acquired in another.
I myself have detected traces of some of the concepts
in my Psychology courses in the content of my literary studies,
and vice versa. Nothing that you learn in an English class is
irrelevant or unconnected to something you discuss in an art
history course; nothing you learn in a mathematics course
can’t be traced along the arc of history or found in the archives
of scientific discovery; no language you learn to speak will
21

not influence your understanding of human cognition or
perception.
In a similar vein, Jesse G. ‘17 illuminated for me one
of the most fulfilling aspects of his double major in English
and Spanish: “the courses I take for my Spanish major usually
encompass literature that I want to read but is not offered in
translation in the English department.” As a lover of literature
and as an individual of Hispanic descent, this is very important
to him. “On a personal level, to go from a kid with a debilitating
speech impediment to majoring in two separate languages
just feels like an accomplishment in and of itself. On a cultural
level, to study the language that my Abuela spoke, and was
probably discriminated against for speaking when she moved
to the US, feels like a massive affirmation of our Latinidad. And
on a very selfish level, I just love reading and writing, so to be
able to turn that into my life and livelihood is the dream, really.”
The humanities are constantly spilling into one another,
which means that regardless of which humanities discipline
you study, you will most likely emerge well-educated and
confident in numerous intellectual skills. As Roya S. ‘16, who
is pursuing a dual degree in Urban and Regional Studies and
English, says, “The skills I have developed in my two majors—
among them writing; critical reading; cultural analysis; urban
design; community, administrative, and city planning; and verse
writing—will equip me to view the problems I encounter in
my vocation creatively. This is the value of an interdisciplinary
education. It teaches you how to think in an interdisciplinary
way. Arguably, in no field is this more important than urban
design. Due to my studies at Cornell, I will not be restricted
by disciplinary thinking in designing solutions for serious and
recurring urban and regional problems.”
employers tend to value experience over candidates’ majors.
The article maintains that students pursuing a double major
have less time to devote to internships as they have heavier
course loads and may need to take classes over the summer in
order to graduate on time.
“I had considered a double major briefly my freshman
year, but had written it off as being too much work,” Jesse G.
informed me in reference to his early years at Cornell. For many,
a double major does connote more time spent on completing
the additional set of graduation requirements. Jesse went on
to say, however, in taking the courses he enjoyed, many of
which were courses in the Romance Studies department, he
realized he had not only enough credits to minor in Spanish,
but enough to major in the language. “It didn’t make sense not
to double,” he said.
For those double majors content with their academic
trajectory, studying in this capacity has not detracted from the
time they spend on extracurricular activities or from pursuing
internships during breaks—if anything, the skills they accrue
from a double major enhance both of these experiences.
Thus, the USA Today article and others like it are misguided in
their conclusions about the effects of heavy coursework and
potential underachievement in the double major experience. It
does not have to be that way. With a reliable team of advisors,
genuine interest in your fields of study, and commitment to the
course load, pursuing degrees in multiple fields is more than
just feasible…it is enriching and enjoyable.
There was a point in time when I thought I would
have to give up one of my interests for the other in order to
make the most of my professional life. But one day while I was
discussing post-graduation career options with my English
“The humanities are constantly spilling into one another, which means
that regardless of which humanities discipline you study, you will most
likely emerge well-educated and confident
in numerous intellectual skills.
From a professional standpoint, you would think that
since most employers appreciate and hold these skills in high
regard, they would see a double major’s degrees and think
their skills doubly impressive. I honestly thought that would
be the case once I squared away my double major decision—
way to diversify your résumé, self! However, based on some
sobering Internet searches (most of which have consisted
of, “is my double major worth it? Is my double major in the
humanities worth it??”), I have learned that many employers
are not necessarily impressed by multiple majors.
A 2011 USA Today article cites three reasons why
employers may be underwhelmed by a double degree: first,
employers will often consider “any major” for a position,
affording them the opportunity to “cast a broader net and locate
the most talented candidates for their positions.” Second, some
of our single-major peers may collect skills otherwise acquired
from a double major via their extracurricular activities, minors,
or concentrations—in other words, rather than devoting all of
their time to studying a second major, these students have
diversified their time and, by extension, their portfolios. Third,
”
advisor, Professor Ishion Hutchinson, he told me something I
will never forget. It has become my new mantra: I don’t ever
have to sacrifice one aspect of myself or my interests in order
to make the others work.
The humanities have emerged, out of all the diverse
and complex disciplines that comprise them, as a cohesive area
of study that attracts thousands of students to its classrooms
year in and year out. And if that isn’t going to change anytime
soon, why should I? So for all you undergrads out there
thinking of adding another major to the mix, do it because you
enjoy the material. Do it, not because it is going to diversify
your job application, but because it is going to diversify your
personal experience, because it will enrich your discussions
and give you more to think about, because it will help you see
the interconnectedness between disciplines and people. I am a
firm believer that in this world there can exist a single outlet
of expression for all of a person’s interests. And if it does not
already exist for you, nothing should stop you from creating it
yourself.
22

DEAR WHITE PEOPL
musings on the politics of black hair
by Yana Makuwa
When I was growing up, I wanted a sheet of long
black hair. I wanted it to fall down to the center of my back
like a waterfall, gracefully cover my face with polite strands
when the wind blew, and reflect light like a still dark lake.
Essentially, I wanted to be Pocahontas. I cannot describe to
you how frustrated I was that the soft curly poof on my head
would stay wherever I put it instead of swishing back and forth
behind me, and that when I tied it back my ponytail looked
more like a rabbit’s tail. I was convinced that my hair was the
only thing holding me back from reaching my true potential as
a beautiful, popular, and successful human being.
As I entered the early stages of pubescence I did
everything I could to wrestle my hair out of spirals and into
the straight strands that I desired (although it’s never been
quite long enough). I was thrilled when I finally convinced my
mother to let me chemically straighten my hair. I felt adult,
powerful, and most importantly, on my way to pretty. What I
didn’t realize then was that I was making a choice based on
skewed and exclusionary conceptions of beauty, and that this
placed me squarely in a fraught historical and political context
that I would eventually have to face.
To get to the real roots of this issue would require an
analytical knowledge of history that my hodge-podge of an
education simply didn’t provide. First, this dialogue is situated
heavily in an American context. Even if my naïve 12-year-oldself
had wanted to think more carefully about the ramifications
of what I was doing to my hair, I could never have anticipated
the extent that it would matter because the significance is
simply not the same in Harare, Zimbabwe. While the country,
and consequently its beauty standards, are of course affected
by a traumatic colonial history, the absence of a racial legacy of
slavery and Jim Crow changes and reduces the weight placed
on hair. So in looking to the past for some insight on how I
ended up spending vast amounts of time and money thinking
about and changing my hair, in the interest of writing what
I know this article will focus on the particularly
American and particularly female.
Keeping in mind that we are skipping
over the hundreds of years of slavery that
left a considerable mark on the African-
American psyche (how could a collective
consciousness not be changed by being
completely removed from a cultural
context and placed in a world where your
identity is prescribed for you and then
instantly dehumanized?), we could begin
tracing the identity politics of hair in
the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.
The turn of the previous century was
the moment when altering black hair
became not only crucial for admittance
into an economic sphere, but also
became an industry in and of itself.
After slavery, there was a new burden
on the black population to participate
in an economy that structurally had no
place for them. It was crucial for them to
present an unthreatening, assimilationist
image; they had to bring the house-slave
aesthetic with them into freedom in order
to make a living wage. In an entry titled
“Black Hair Care and Culture, A History” on the
website of non-profit organization The African
American Registry, Ben Arogundade writes, “Many
blacks argue that imitating European standards of
beauty and grooming was necessary for blacks to be
accepted by white culture, especially by potential
white masters and employers.”
In a serendipitous turn of events, this
drive to imitate white beauty not only allowed
23

E WITH DREADS
black people to enter the economic sphere, but also created
the impetus for the first highly successful entrepreneurial
venture run by an African-American woman. Madame C.J.
Walker, born Sarah Walker in 1867, founded and produced an
entire line of products designed to transform the experience
of straightening black hair from an arduous, long-lasting, and
frequently dangerous ordeal, into a pampering and, at the very
least, comfortable experience. As Cornell Professor Noliwe
Rooks writes in her book Hair Raising, Madame C.J. Walker’s
business not only placed her prominently in a public and
economic space that used to and continues to exclude women
of color, but also created an industry where other women could
begin making a life for themselves. She left a legacy of black
women running hair salons where other black women could
go to feel safe, taken care of, and nurtured.
The economic importance of hair in black communities
continues to this day, with small hair companies like Carols’
Daughter being one of (if not the only) black owned hair-care
companies retailed by Sephora, and hair salons being a primary
business option for many women of color, and particularly
immigrants. There are YouTube channels dedicated to hair,
and women establishing what Rooks calls in an interview with
ITYC Radio “cottage industries [of] hundreds of little Madame
C.J. Walkers who have YouTube videos and websites.” Hair
salons are still central to black female communities, and have
provided a space for intellectuals like Rooks to examine what
it means to be black in America.
On the political side of things, seven decades after
Madame C.J. Walker’s game-changing innovation, the social
importance of hair had only become more present in the
collective African-American mindset. As the Civil Rights
Movement moved forward into the 70s, one of the definitive
images of the Black Power and Black is Beautiful movements
was the afro. In “The Impact of the ‘Fro in the Civil Rights
Movement,” Chime Edwards proclaims that “the afro is more
art by Thelonia Saunders
24

than just a hairstyle, it was an incredibly powerful symbol of
the civil rights movement.” It is radical in its rejection of the
idea that “‘nappy’ hair [is] unattractive and undesirable” and
that “possessing nappy hair was negative and shameful.” This
article identifies the extent to which wearing your hair in this
“
And as I was realizing this,
certain hairsyles on certain
women began piquing
my interest—women with
long blonde hair, but worn
in dreadlocks; my gut
reaction was a mix of envy,
proprietary anger, and
disdain
”
style was a marker of political affiliation—many women who
had afros did so in imitation of civil rights activist Angela Davis:
“a black person wearing a ‘fro was dubbed as militant and
threatening.” The politicization of black hair was something
you could not escape in the 70s, and as much as wearing a ‘fro
was a symbol of participating in the movement, not wearing
one was by default not participating.
The political nature of black hair didn’t leave us in
the 70s. In the same article, Edwards later comments that the
movement towards natural hair in our own time, a period of
renewed interest in the need for social change around race
issues in America, is parallel to the natural hair movement
of the 1970s. In a similar (though perhaps less intense) way,
wearing your hair natural today makes a statement that you
believe that aesthetic to have as much, if not more worth
than the “European standards,” and carry a subtle but implicit
rejection of those standards. With her light condemning of
“abrasive methods” to “alter who [she] was naturally” and hope
that “it’s not just a style” for her readers, she clearly points to
the unavoidable political affiliations that black women make
with their hair.
This brings us back to the present, to a younger me
thrust into the realization that in America (the magnified
and intensified college-campus version), the way I wear my
hair carries a very particular and very heavy weight. The ten
cornrows my mother learned how to plait across my head are
from a centuries-old African tradition that used to express
kinship, status, religion—a tradition that then moved through
American history, picking up traces of devaluation, critique,
and eventually empowerment. My relaxed hair wasn’t just
something I decided to do when I was 12, it was me participating
in one of the first industries led by and for a marginalized and
excluded social group.
In my new collegiate context I started to work through
all of this new information. I had to come to terms with the
history of women of color in America. I had to learn what new
codes applied to me now that I occupied a new social space. I
realized that I could no longer be blissfully ignorant of the fact
that even if I do my hair based on a whim, it will always carry
the history of people with hair like mine.
And as I was realizing this, certain hairstyles on certain
women began piquing my interest—women with long blonde
hair, but worn in dreadlocks; women braiding thin cornrows
into their straight dark hair, fixing them with beads. Every time
I saw them, my gut reaction was a mix of envy, proprietary
anger, and disdain. At first I tried to quash my negative kneejerk
response to these hairstyles, telling myself that judging
other women for their hair choices was participating in the
practice that I fell victim to. Maybe they weren’t thoughtlessly
following what they assumed was a fad, or callously assuming
wearing their hair that way gave them cultural capital. Perhaps
they know more about the importance of the hairstyle than I;
who am I to judge a prominent scholar or devout Rastafarian
based only on the color of their skin or texture of their hair?
But try as I might I couldn’t wrangle the anger into a generous
benefit of the doubt.
I existed in this limbo for ages, feeling anxious about
how my hair was perceived, about how it was and wasn’t
what I wanted it to be, and anxious about what I thought
was irrational anger. I spent my time resenting that anxiety,
and searching for a way to tame my mane while in Ithaca
(my daunting experience of trying to find a place to get my
hair done as a freshmen in this town is a story for another
time). And then I started hearing grumbles from corners of the
Internet that I stumbled upon during my hair research. I read
about Bo Derek, a white actress, who is famed for popularizing
cornrows in 1979 when Cicely Tyson had been wearing them
on screen in the early 70s. I read about how Madonna wore an
afro in the 90s as one of her many “out there” looks, and how
Lady Gaga did the same with dreadlocks in 2013. I read about
magazines like Elle and Marie Claire touting Gwen Stefani and
Katy Perry as trendsetters of styles like bantu knots and babyhairs
which had been black hairstyles without fanfare for ages.
25

And it all came to a head with the outrage surrounding Kylie
Jenner’s cornrows in July of this year.
I read about all this and I decided that I was right to
be angry. Something within me was reacting to what I knew
was fundamentally unfair. I realized that the reason I wanted
to look like Pocahontas so badly that I was willing to sacrifice
This language, taken directly from the US Army’s regulations
on black hair which also refers to dreads and twists as
“faddish” and “exaggerated,” reveals white America’s deeply
rooted misunderstanding, devaluation, and exoticization of
black hair. It is attitudes like these that lie beneath E! News
senior reporter Giuliana Rancic’s description of Zendaya’s
dreadlocks as smelling “like patchouli oil. Or weed.” Her later
apology for sliding into offensive and damaging “clichés and
stereotypes” does not change the fact that even amidst a
time of reclamation of natural black hair’s beauty and value, it
remains charged with real and tangible negative connotations.
It is ridiculous that white celebrities continue to be
congratulated for adopting styles that are deemed inappropriate
and low when worn by the people who conceived of them—
styles that decades ago were worn in protest of the aesthetic
ideals that those white celebrities embody. It is ridiculous that
people should rise to the defense of any public figure who
irresponsibly misuses their position in the spotlight and lacks
the sensitivity to acknowledge criticism from a member of the
appropriated culture.
What it boils down to is this: lying behind the style,
convenience, or comfort that motivates each individual black
woman’s choice about how to wear her hair is the pervasive
message, overt and covert, that white hair is more beautiful than
black hair. There is the need to adjust hairstyles to overcome
a barrier to entry to the white economic sphere. There is the
knowledge that how you wear your hair announces you, and
carries a certain politic and a cultural weight to both a white
and black gaze, whether you intend it to or not. And unless you
are white you do not have the luxury of wearing these styles
in ignorance of all this.
“There is the knowledge that how you wear your hair
announces you, and carries a certain politic and a
cultural weight to both a white and black gaze, whether
you intend it to or not.
the length and health of my hair was because she was the
only princess who looked even remotely like me. Meanwhile,
these women grew up with a wealth of princesses to choose
from (Cinderella, Belle, Snow White, ad infinitum), and now they
were casually choosing hairstyles that I had to fight against
society and myself to accept.
I am angry because in addition to the media-abetted
whitewashing and fetishization of this intensely personal and
political aspect of my life, society still manages to punish black
women for how they wear their hair. In 2013, a Florida school
threatened to expel 12-year-old Vanessa VanDyke for wearing
her hair natural. Describing it as a “distraction” and in violation
of dress codes, the school asserted that students must conform
to a white norm, regardless of the effects that may have on
the health of the student’s hair or psyche. In September of the
same year, a school in Tulsa, Oklahoma sent home a sevenyear-old
because in their policy, “hairstyles such as dreadlocks,
afros, mohawks, and other faddish styles are unacceptable.”
”
Black women did and do their hair to participate in an
economy that wouldn’t make room for them beyond keeping
houses that weren’t their own. Black women did and do their
hair to take ownership of their beauty and identity in a media
context that doesn’t represent them. Black women think and
talk about their hair to build a community that helps them
process issues both complex and mundane.
What makes me riled, what underlies the perhaps
disproportionate rage that overcomes me when I see white
women with dreadlocks, is the knowledge that those people
who comfortably sit on America’s narrow pedestal of privilege
can blithely adopt the hairstyles of those who have always
been kept off the top.
Nothing can change the fact that they get to choose
whether or not their hair defines their politics and aesthetics,
and I do not.
26

THE MUSEUM
OF
THE AMERICAN OTHER
do ethnic-specific museums remedy exclusion or perpetuate it?
by Jael Goldfine
Museums, to me, have always been supremely pleasant
and benign places—the marble-columned, high-ceilinged
destinations of family vacations and elementary school field
trips. Even as a kid, I could already sense something essentially,
ontologically good about museums. This is perhaps a result of
the powerful rhetorical ethos that surrounds them. Museums
impulsively evoke big shiny ideas about scholarship, public
good, education, community, and of course, diversity. What could
be more benevolent, if not downright noble, than the discovery
and dissemination of knowledge? Than the preservation of
heritage and history? Than missions of education, outreach,
and scholarship? The answers to these questions seemed selfevident
to me for a long time as, on a level detectable even to
children, museums occupy a sainted and sacred position in the
public mind.
At this point, please don’t jump to the conclusion that
I am attempting to expose some sort of nasty underbelly of the
museum world. This rhetoric may not be unmerited, or even
necessarily misleading, however, it is perhaps distracting from
critical conversation. It was not until recently that I began to
recognize that, like all institutions involved in the projects of
telling and representation of human experiences, museums are
deeply political spaces. And when museums become marked
by ethnicity and culture, the more political they become.
This past summer, like an obedient Washington D.C.
intern, armed with wide-eyed trust in the city’s greatest notso-natural
resource and dreamy visions of myself hanging in
galleries after work, I visited a great number of museums. On
a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI),
I first confronted the politic of the ethnic museum and thus, of
the museum itself.
This confrontation was as simple as a tour guide
explaining to me that the very existence of the NMAI was
fraught with controversy, both public and internal. The
cognitive dissonance of this possibility struck me. What could
be wrong with a museum dedicated to Native Americans?
My trusty 12-plus years of 21 st century public
education had done its job—instilling in me an impulsive
validation complex of anything having to do with diversity,
or the appreciation and understanding of “other” cultures—a
practice I was taught was important, without being taught why.
I didn’t then understand why I might visit a museum
like the NMAI either with confidence, or with skepticism.
Ethnic-specific museums arose sometime in the 70s,
out of an anti-racist activist, academic, and political response
to museums’ lack of cultural diversity and sensitivity. This
movement demanded remedy to the misrepresentation, if not
total erasure, of non-white and non-Western experiences in
the museum world. As Cliff Pereira, former chair of the Black
and Asian Studies Association indicts, museums’ “imperialistic
terms have not moved on into the 21 st century. In fact, they
haven’t moved to the post-colonial.” In this sense, ethnic
museums have become a force in the decolonization of the
museum.
For a long time, the art, artifacts, and history of
indigenous and minority groups were apt to be found in natural
history museums, displayed among fossils, dinosaur skeletons,
and gemstones. Non-Western people were considered
27

primitive—a facet of natural rather than human history, the
objects of anthropological study, as passive as rocks and
skeletons, and as frozen in time as fossils. This is, of course,
consistent with the racist and ethnocentric ideologies that
were internalized in the disciplines of history and anthropology
themselves.
This ideology limited the relevance of these groups to
the American public. If they were included in (human) history
museums, it was only within a narrative of their interaction
with the Western world. Until the late 1970s, the National
Museum of American History (NMAH) exhibited all its Native
American objects within exhibits about the colonization of the
Americas: representing Native Americans exclusively within a
narrative of conquest, and subsequent disappearance.
And a racist interpretation was, of course, if such
groups were represented at all. In many cases, mainstream
museums simply neglected to collect and study objects and
artifacts associated with these groups, to tell even the broadest
of stories about them. When the National Museum of History
and Technology opened in 1964, it scarcely mentioned African-
Americans, and its collections included no African-American or
indigenous artifacts.
In addition, the un-shocking exclusion of cultural
and ethnic minorities on museum staffs—from researchers
and curators, to boards and councils, to administrative jobs—
certainly played a role in the uninterrupted dominant historical
narrative presented in museums.
So, ethnic and culturally specific museums seem like
the perfect reparations for this exclusion and abuse. Identityspecific
museums have become a powerful and prolific part of
the museum world. National Museums of the American Indian
exist both in D.C. and New York, Michigan is home to the Arab
American National Museum, LA has the Contemporary Jewish
Museum, the Chinese American Museum, and the Japanese
American National Museum, and there is the National Women’s
History Museum in Virginia—to name a few of the hundreds
of ethnic and identity-specific museums that have sprung up
across the country over the past 40 years. The Smithsonian
Museum of African-American History and Culture is set to
open on the mall in 2016, and a proposed D.C. National Latino
Museum is currently in hot debate.
This intuitively seems like a positive trend—consistent
with all the shiny rhetoric that, in my mind, left me complacently
uncritical of museums for most of my life.
But what does it mean to take the stories of people
of certain cultures and ethnicities, and put them in separate
buildings from the museum called the National Museum of
American History? Does this kind of division ghettoize nonwhite
histories in the museum world, and within history itself?
Does this place them even further outside of the American
experience?
What stories will be deemed as too specific—those
of Latina/o artists, black politicians, Asian-American activists,
Native American leaders, Arab-American authors—for museum
visitors interested in American history? Where do the paintings
of Diego Rivera, scrapbooks from Japanese internment camps,
naturalization certificates of Jewish immigrants from Ellis
Island, the Treaty of Canandaigua, or an FBI “wanted” poster of
Black Panther, Angela Davis, belong?
Surely such artifacts are imperative pieces of American
history, critical for all American museumgoers wishing to
learn about the nation’s history to see. And if we recognize
art by Daniel Toretsky
28

the museum as a part of a project of national identity, as Fath
Davis Ruffins, a curator at NMAH, suggests, could an African-
American museum actually serve to “take African-American
history and culture out of American history and culture?”
This line of questioning is only one that might
complicate the neat and tidy solution to the colonial museum.
Another may ask: if ethnic museums play a role in the
construction and expression of ethnic identities, will these
specific museums reduce fluid and complex identities to
essentialized narratives? There are 562 federally recognized
indigenous tribes in America. African, African-American, Afro-
Latino, and West Indian people living in America all have
unique experiences and histories. The very word “Latina/o”
“
as the chosen title for a museum brings into question whose
stories it will tell. What of Americans who identify as Hispanic
or Chicana/o? What of biracial Americans? Many critics are
skeptical that ethnic-specific museums can fully embrace
diversity within their own communities.
Essentially, the debate comes down to the question
of whether or not ethnic-specific museums reproduce the very
systems that they are trying to break down.
I believe they can do this, or they cannot. If their
existence precluded “general” history museums from being
inclusive, or enabled a loophole for museums to continue
excluding and misrepresenting non-white Americans, then the
reaffirmation of traditional hegemonies, which some consider
likely, would indeed be the case.
However, they simply do not offer such a loophole—
the same movement that produced ethnic museums also
demands that American history must tell an inclusive story. And
if a “general” museum fails to do this, it should be recognized
as marked—and as ethnically specific as other museums—as
White-American or European-American museums. For haven’t
we always had ethnic-specific museums, that have simply
gone unqualified due to the perpetual American confusion
that “white” is not a race?
Some have said that we should simply demand
that existing “mainstream” museums become equitable and
inclusive rather than erecting freestanding museums to
represent marginalized cultures. Proponents of this schematic
have said that this solution will underscore the commonality
and interconnectedness of all people.
Camille Akeju, Director of the Anacostia Community
Museum, has said, “I don’t think we do ourselves justice
by having a standalone identity. It will always make you
vulnerable.” However, it seems that marginalized identities
have historically been made most vulnerable when they are
contained within white and western institutions: in the context
of a museum, vulnerable to misunderstanding, tokenization,
exoticization, essentialization, or erasure.
Discussing, paying attention to, and deeming racial
difference as important is not the same as segregation,
and does not essentially undermine human commonality—
particularly when the traditional American approach to
difference has been to ignore or subjugate it.
As Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of
African American History and Culture, says, “Let’s take African-
American culture and use it as a lens to understand what it
means to be an American, the mainstream story of America
shaped by race. A museum that’s separate really allows us to
illuminate America in a way we couldn’t if we had a gallery
and a half in the Museum of American History.” The stories of
What stories will be deemed too specific—those of
Latina/o artists, black politicians, Asian-American activists,
Native American leaders, Arab-American authors—for
museum visitors interested in American history?
”
specific ethnic groups are too big to be contained in existing
museum spaces, both logistically and theoretically.
Perhaps we have trouble swallowing the idea that
something called a museum (quite literally, an institution)
can be radical—remember those benign marble-columned,
high-ceilinged field trip destinations I mentioned? However,
radical identity politics gave birth to ethnic-specific museums,
and they have the potential to be a part of change, more
radical and visionary than adding in a few more info panels
about Native or Asian or Jewish-Americans in a Museum of
American History—which still largely tells a single American
story, through the lens of a dominant identity. I believe
these museums are crucial because they are an opportunity
to pursue a depth and breadth in stories of specific groups;
allowing for a level of true recognition and valorization of
specificity, that would be impossible in larger museums. These
museums return the agency of self-representation and selfdetermination
to cultural and ethnic groups—a privilege
dominant identities have always had. Most importantly, they,
in conversation with each other and with the public, create a
forum for conversation about the plurality of experiences in
America—one that demands participation.
However, these museums need to do more than just
exist. Each museum—and those who fill it with objects, art,
and history—will have to answer enormous questions about,
as David Schneer, a professor of Jewish studies at University
of Colorado, sums up, empowerment versus commoditization,
critical self-reflection versus cheerleading, insider versus
outsider audiences, and plurality versus essentialism.
So, this was not the summer that I realized museums
are corrupt with racist and imperialistic politics, but rather
when I began to see museums as the product of human
decisions and human mistakes. Go on and attend your field
trips and indulge in your after-work fantasies—but do so
critically, and with recognition that you are participating in the
forum of the museum.
29

“
NO
SE PUEDE
MIRAR
”
photography of agony and the western gaze
by Kira Roybal
On September 2nd of this year, images of Alan Kurdi,
the young boy whose body was found washed up on the shore
of Bodrum in Turkey, began to circulate. Journalists from across
the news media, as well as politicians and human rights group
leaders, tweeted and retweeted the photograph, captured by
Doğan News Agency’s Nilufer Demir, which shows the threeyear-old
lying face down in the sand and salty foam of the
beach.
Hugh Pinney, the Vice President of Getty Images,
commented in TIME that “the reason we’re talking about it after
it’s been published is because it breaks a social taboo that has
been in place in the press for decades: a picture of a dead child
is one of the golden rules of what you never published.”
That’s not to say that Alan Kurdi was the first published
child casualty. In 2014 New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks
published his account of the attack on Gaza along with the
photographs he captured—including those of four Palestinian
youths killed on the beach. Photographs of children in agony
also have a relatively long history: Nick Ut’s photograph of a
young Vietnamese girl running away from a napalm bombing;
Kevin Carter’s of a vulture watching a starving, emaciated
child in Sudan; and James Nachtwey’s of children struggling in
Romanian orphanages.
What all the photographs of violence inflicted upon
the human body – whether that be through war, famine, social
and economic upheaval—have in common is, in the words of
art critic and writer John Berger, that “as we look at them, the
moment of the other’s suffering engulfs us.” In other words,
such images are “arresting” (italics mine). They demand that we
pause, stop, freeze; for a period of time, we are disconnected
from our own realities and overwhelmed by the immense pain
and suffering of others.
What are we—the viewers—to make of such
photographs? How are we to respond? The media certainly
knew how. Nicholas Jimenez of Le Monde stated, “I’m convinced
that until you’ve shown this photograph, you haven’t shown
the reality of the crisis.” Max Fisher of Vox, on the other hand,
tweeted “I don’t say this to be scoldy or self-righteous or
whatever, but I’m pretty uncomfortable with people tweeting
photos of dead migrant kids.” Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights
Watch noted, “I think for a lot of the public, their first reaction
is: ‘This could have been my child.’” But could it really have
been? Parents in Western nations may imagine the horror of
such agony inflicted upon their own children, but they can
rest assured knowing that this will most likely never happen.
The discontinuity between the viewer and the subject of the
photograph is not erased by sympathy, pity, or sadness.
Going back to the question I posed in the previous
paragraph: what are we supposed to make of such photographs?
Are they meant to be instructive? (“Look at what’s going on
with the rest of the world!”) Are they meant to be moralizing?
(“This is the photograph that’s going to end the war!”) Are they
meant to call us into action, or leave us paralyzed, knowing that
change is often a slow and bitter process so why even bother
doing anything? How are we to help those living thousands of
miles away from us, unaware of our gazing at their suffering?
There is a story of Socrates’ in Plato’s Republic that
tells of a young man’s inner struggle between disgust and
30

art by Jin Yoo
fascination at the sight of battered human bodies:
Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was going up from the
Piraeus along the outside of the North Wall when he
saw some corpses lying at the executioner’s feet. He had
an appetite to look at them but at the same time he was
disgusted and turned away. For a time he struggled with
himself and covered his face, but, finally overpowered by
the appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed
towards the corpses, saying, “Look for yourselves, you
evil wretches, take your fill of the beautiful sight[!]”
Certainly there’s something that provokes—invites—
us to look, some sense of mystery or discovery of a scene never
before seen. The first time I had heard of Ernst Friedrich’s Kreig
dem Kreige! (War Against War!), while reading Susan Sontag’s
Regarding the Pain of Others, I knew that I had to see at least a few
of the photographs from the book for myself. This is an album
of photographs compiled from German military and medical
archives that depicts the visual story of the First World War, or
as Sontag puts it, “an excruciating photo-tour of four years of
ruin, slaughter, and degradation.” I believe I could only glance
at about five photographs, and I only looked at one from the
“Face of War” section, which shows close-ups of soldiers’ facial
wounds. I know not what instrument of war, what poison could
have caused skin and tissue to form like that on a wounded
young man’s face. I stopped my little investigation after that.
There is something voyeuristic and invasive about
passively viewing photographs of this type. In her essay “In
Plato’s Cave,” Sontag claims that “to photograph people is to
violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves,
by having knowledge of them they can never have,” which
implies that taking a photograph transfers power to the
photographer. The subject overwhelmed by war, illness, or
economic oppression, opens up, either reluctantly or eagerly,
to the power of the camera, as if to say, “This is my story, and
if someone doesn’t tell it then no one will ever hear it.” As
viewers, in order to prevent baseless voyeurism, we must
have a heightened sensitivity to the context surrounding the
photographer’s decision to capture the subject and the realities
of the circumstance thrown upon them, and a will to help ease
the suffering—or at least a will to break the boundaries that
prevent us from easing the suffering.
Francisco Goya, the nineteenth century Spanish
artist most popularly known for his painting The Third of May,
created a series of etchings called The Disasters of War, which
documented the atrocities committed by both the French
and the Spanish during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The
inscriptions he adds to each etching is what truly makes the
collection eye-opening, anti-heroic, and modern; this series
31

could be considered a precursor to war photography. One
etching states “Yo lo vi” (“I saw this”); another “No se puede
mirar” (“One cannot look”); another “Esto es malo” (“This is
bad”); and another “Esto es lo peor!” (“That is the worst of it!”).
Images, by their very nature and use in society, invite us to look.
However, Goya’s etchings and their respective inscriptions lead
the viewer to question their voyeurism—to feel a sense of guilt
in looking at severed limbs, murder, rape, and torture. This series,
like the wide and varied collection of photographs of bodies
in agony, is not simply documentation; these images resonate
too closely with the moral standards of many people to not
be considered a pity, a tragedy, an event to be remembered,
or the catalyst for a course of action. To this, Sontag states,
“Let the atrocious images haunt us…The images say: This is
what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do,
enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.”
In December of 1971, Bangladesh won its war of
independence from Pakistan, and thus began the punishment of
Bengalis suspected of collaborating with Pakistani militiamen.
On December 18, Mukti Bahiti (the Liberation Army) bayoneted
and publicly executed four men accused of murder, rape, and
looting. Horst Faas and Michael Laurent of the Associated
Press were among the few photojournalists to document the
event; they compiled their photographs of the “Death in Dacca”
“To us, the viewers living in wealthy and powerful countries, such
images do not instill fear or a sense of awe within us—as they may have
we are overcome with pity and the desire to find a remedy;
we as benevolent outsides want to “fix” the place and the
people overrun by violence.
within our ancestors living in ancient towns and villiages. Rather,
”
(now Dhaka) and won the World Press Photo award and the
Pulitzer Prize.
Many photojournalists believed the execution would
not have occurred if photographers were not present. Magnum
Photos’ Marc Riboud and United Press International’s Peter
Skingley, for instance, refused to attend. Others, like Faas and
Laurent, believed it necessary to stay and capture the story.
Does the camera, perhaps ironically, encourage violence and
suffering? Does it provoke the winner to show off his triumph,
knowing that it will make headlines?
To us, the viewers living in wealthy and powerful
countries, such images do not instill fear or a sense of awe
within us—as they may have within our ancestors living in
ancient towns and villages. Rather, we are overcome with pity
and the desire to find a remedy; we as benevolent outsiders
want to “fix” the place and the people overrun by violence.
Perhaps to photograph someone is not only to violate them,
but also to take power and autonomy away from them. The
subject becomes a victim in need of rescue, the photographer
becomes messenger, and the viewers become…well, we just
remain as viewers and attempt to make sense of where we,
as individuals, fit into the Dhaka executions or the current
refugee crisis.
Earlier this semester, I attended the Caochangdi Work
Station Performance at the Schwartz Center, which centered
around interview footage of the elderly survivors of China’s
Great Famine. Very few times had I cried so much in my life.
People ate tree bark; mothers were forced to let their children
starve to death; millions died in their homes. And I could do
nothing about it—this all happened in the past. I experienced
a great sense of discontinuity in my life afterwards; I couldn’t
completely return to my role as a university student whose
worries were grades, social activities, and the Bursar Office—not
death by starvation. Perhaps I was simply meant to remember
the event, to keep it from evaporating into the back corners of
history. Why did I even feel that I needed to do anything?
It’s quite difficult to let “victims” die without
recognition, without some sort of honor for the time they spent
living on Earth. I could not change the past, but at the very
least I could understand the survivors’ struggles.
The power that is taken from the subjects—the one
that evades the viewers—is often passed onto our world
leaders. Upon seeing the photographs of the execution in
Dacca, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian
soldiers aiding the Bengal liberation to prevent such events
from occurring again. Once the photograph of Alan Kurdi
surfaced, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s tone about the
refugee situation changed from “We can’t economically sustain
this influx of people” to “Refugees are welcome here!”
As for the ordinary, not-politically-powerful person
viewing a photograph of agony, John Berger notes:
Confrontation with a photographed moment of agony
can mask a far more extensive and urgent confrontation.
Usually the wars which we are shown are being fought
directly or indirectly in “our” name. What we are shown
horrifies us. The next step should be for us to confront
our own lack of political freedom. In the political systems
as they exist we have no legal opportunity of effectively
influencing the conduct of wars waged in our name.
In our age of great and widespread violence, we must
ask what our government—the government that represents
us—is doing to ease the suffering and stop the violence. If we
are not satisfied, then why should we allow our government
to keep functioning in the same manner that it currently is?
Photojournalists and their subjects are asking us to look and to
be aware and to do something, so let’s do just that—something,
in our own names, that neither Merkel nor Obama nor any
other leader would be capable of achieving.
32

EXIT LAWRENCE LESSIG
a lost battle in the war of campaign finance reform
by Nathaniel Coderre
art courtesy of Politico Magazine
I’d been having debates with friends about why
Colbert wasn’t the same on The Late Show for two months until
the reason crystalized perfectly for me with one segment on
November 5 th . It was an installment of his “Hungry for Power
Games” segment, which he uses every time someone drops out
of the 2016 Presidential race. What was really frustrating to
watch (although perhaps not shocking), was that the segment
was completely devoid of his informative, satirical wit, and
instead consisted of lame barbs about how few people had
heard of Lawrence Lessig. His attempted demolition really
struck me because I had taken a great interest in this candidate.
To some degree, Colbert’s jokes about how he’d never heard of
Lessig make sense, because he is a Harvard Law Professor with
little political experience and no name recognition. But the
segment seems disingenuous when you learn that he actually
interviewed Lessig on his old program in 2009. They were
mostly talking about copyright law then, but they eventually
drifted towards talking about how ineffectual Congress was.
Colbert’s character ends the discussion by saying “The system
is working for me, so welcome to the mouth of madness”.
Colbert’s efforts once were directed towards revealing the
depths of this madness, but since coming to The Late Show,
his comedic gaze doesn’t reach quite so far. When Colbert
didn’t tear into Donald Trump on September 23 rd , it set a
new precedent of compromises on his new show. But it was
incredibly disappointing when he discarded Lessig. Lawrence
Lessig may never have emerged as a viable Democratic
nominee, but he was a voice speaking out against systemic
misuse of power.
Who is Lawrence Lessig? And why am I making such a
huge deal about him? For a long time, Lessig has parlayed his
role as a Harvard Law professor into political activism, all of
which led up to his late run for the Democratic nomination this
summer. He didn’t have as much of a public profile as many
of the other candidates, but he did receive an initial burst of
media coverage for his unique campaign. He styled himself as
a referendum candidate, someone who wanted to be elected
to deal with a single issue, campaign finance reform, and then
voluntarily resign. He was an unforseen commodity spouting
ideas that would never come from a known, reliable candidate.
The ambitious plan frightened the Democratic Party so much
that his campaign was doomed from the start. I don’t think
they ever knew what to do about a candidate who said he
would willingly give up his office. This kind of chaos is actually
what originally attracted me to Lessig. Could you imagine what
would happen if he won the nomination? Who would he select
to be his Vice President (and inevitably succeed him in the
presidency)? Would he have been unelectable in the general
election? Could he have tapped into some sort of populist
groundswell of support no one expected? Being more realistic,
what would have happened if he had gotten into one of the
debates? I imagine that he would have shifted a lot more of
the national attention towards campaign finance, but we’ll
never know.
Advocates for campaign finance reform worry that
the influence corporations have in political campaigns is
turning our country into a plutocracy. They would argue that
our national politicians speak for the wealthy instead of their
constituency. The 2010 Citizens United decision underscored
the corruptive influence of money in politics for Lessig (and
many others), exponentially increasing the calls for new
reform. This Supreme Court decision removed the ban that
prevented corporations from giving unlimited money to
support or oppose individual candidates. While this (and a
subsequent decision called SpeechNow.Org vs. FEC) doesn’t
allow for direct contributions to political campaigns, it does
allow the creation of super PACs (political action committees),
which are groups that can spend unlimited money supporting
or attacking campaigns. There is a nominal restriction that
says that super PACs and politicians cannot coordinate, but
candidates have already blatantly circumvented that rule.
33

Actually, it was Colbert himself who first brought these
loopholes to the public’s attention. He showed that super PACs
could hire candidate’s lawyers, consult with former members of
their staff, or simply watch their candidates say their strategy
on TV.
This influx of money is undoubtedly detrimental to our
political system. Well-supported studies estimate that most
members of Congress spend 25 to 50 percent of their time in
office fundraising for themselves or their party. The money that
candidates solicit gives the wealthiest a platform to control
candidates’ public policy that almost no other Americans have.
“Lawrence Lessig is the
rare presidential candidate
whose final words are
”
not
merely attempts to save
face.
For example, “In one [email] exchange, McDonnell [a former
Governor of Virginia] e-mailed Williams [a donor with interests
in tobacco] to ask about a fifty-thousand-dollar loan and, six
minutes later, e-mailed an aide to check on scientific studies
that Williams wanted conducted on his product at public
universities.” Given that the strength of the tobacco industry
rests (at least somewhat) on studies concerning the product’s
health risks, this is an example of a politician potentially
using the influence he has in his role as an elected official
to disproportionately benefit one of his patrons. The Citizens
United decision flooded the election season with money,
fundamentally altering campaign strategies for both parties.
The election cycle after it (2012) raised more than $2 billion
more than the season that preceded it (2008). The super PACs
alone spent $1 billion, 73 percent of which came from 100
people.
As a modern political party whose sole objective
is to find and nominate the most electable candidate, the
Democratic Party has a vested interest in protecting Hilary
Clinton, the person with the most realistic path to the White
House, as well as the image of the party as a whole. The
emergence of a radical, unconventional candidate who speaks
out against their electoral system is a nuisance to it. Lessig (and
many others) provide a very credible case that the Democratic
Party intentionally and knowingly worked to prevent him from
getting into the debates. As a latecomer (his campaign only
began in September) without name recognition, he desperately
needed to get into the October 13 th debate for his campaign
to have a chance. He hit every benchmark that the party set
up. He raised more money than half of the other candidates
did, and he hit one percent in three polls, more than half of
the other candidates. Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee were both
given podiums at the first debate, despite polling closer to .7
percent in many polls. Chafee actually needed the prodding of
Conan O’Brien’s joking pleas to his fan base to hit one percent
and both candidates were laughed out of the election after the
first debate. Several major polls didn’t even include his name
on the ballot, despite including Joe Biden, someone who had
repeatedly denied having an interest in running. Of course, one
percent almost seems like too low of a bar for candidates to hit
to reach the debates, but there was no harm in trying to keep
a larger pool of candidates for early debates.
After he failed to get into the first debate, his
campaign limped on through the end of October, Lessig ended
his campaign on November 2 nd after it became obvious that
he wasn’t going to be admitted to the second one either. The
real shame in his exclusion, beyond squashing his fledgling
campaign, is that he had a real opportunity to shift the
discourse of the discussion. Both Sanders and Clinton have
expressed interest in campaign reforms, but neither have
underscored it as their fundamental issue. In Lessig’s view,
solving the other issues they discuss is not possible until we
make radical changes to our electoral system. Just as Sanders’
relative rise has forced Clinton to back more left-wing policies,
Lessig would have forced them both to address campaign
finance reform more comprehensively. Of course, the very
issue he is fighting against made it impossible for him to be
elected. A genuinely outside candidate would have to defeat
an avalanche of money to win, an almost impossible task.
It would certainly be appropriate to draw a dire
conclusion—the ambitious outsider soundly defeated by
the political establishment—but Lawrence Lessig is the rare
presidential candidate whose final words are not merely
attempts to save face. Lessig intends to remain an activist
against political corruption, working with groups like Wolf
PAC to organize communities. Wolf PAC’s goal is to pass an
amendment that ends corporate personhood, provides publicly
funded campaigns, and restricts large monetary donations—
all measures that attempt to decrease the influence of
money in politics. Interestingly enough, they don’t necessarily
need a political champion to galvanize a corrupt Congress.
Amendments can also be passed through a constitutional
convention, something that hasn’t been done since the first
one in 1787. While it’s certainly possible, they would need 34
states (two-thirds) to submit an application, and they only have
four so far. Sounds far-fetched? Of course it is. But six more
states have passed it in one house, and people are actively
working all around the country to increase public support.
Interestingly, many political pundits have drawn
comparisons between Lessig and the big story on the Republican
side, Donald Trump. They argue that both candidates are trying
to tap into the same emotions on opposite ends of the political
spectrum: dissatisfaction with the promises and the clichés of
“Washington insiders.” Supporters for both of them imagine a
populist hero changing the political landscape. Even Lessig
himself has expressed some solidarity with Trump (hear him
out!). “He did an enormous service to the debate by opening
the issue up on the Republican debate stage by calling out
the other candidates as not independent of their funders,”
he says. Of course, Trump’s bravado comes from being a selfobsessed
billionaire, but he nevertheless repeatedly accuses
his opponents of being beholden to special interests. Trump’s
line of criticism will obviously prove as fruitless as Lessig’s, but
it further illustrates an important point. There is a mounting
disgust for the corruption in our political system, and political
activists like Lawrence Lessig will continue to fight until we
see radical campaign reform.
34

THE NEW NEST OF
CAMPAIGN DONATIONS
twitter forces its way into the political funding game
by Sarah Chekfa
This past September, Twitter took a decisive step
towards politicizing its platform, introducing a function that
allows users to directly donate money to candidates’ political
campaigns with a solitary tweet. Before I begin criticizing
Twitter for its subliminal destruction of the rationalistic
foundations of our political donation system, surely you’re
wondering—how does this new-fangled technological
Twitterian trippiness operate?
Well, it’s pretty simple, as far as politics go. A campaign
signs up for a Square Cash account and is assigned a distinct
“cashtag,” which can then be shared on Twitter. A donate button
will appear on the campaign’s Twitter account and, through
that, users will be able to donate with a debit card, preserving
their information forever in the digital cosmos to allow for
future simple (near-mindless!) one-click donations.
Cringingly capitalistic connotations of the phrase
“cashtag” aside, at first glance, this modernization seems like
an acutely obvious move for a platform like Twitter. Twitter
has succeeded Facebook as ruler of the realm of existential
status updates, providing us with notifications ranging from
irrelevant blurbs about that avocado turkey panini your ex
had for lunch, to headstrong pronouncements of resounding
political statements that you don’t necessarily agree with. So
this update comes to us as nearly endearing, an almost cute
way to meld two seemingly opposite spheres of operation—
technology and politics—into one unified product of Teamwork.
It’s beautifully intended to further democratize our already
very democratic political system by “making it easier for Twitter
users to actively support candidates and causes.”
While its intention was clearly well-meaning, this
move by Twitter has been subjected to the inevitable law of
unintended consequences. Twitter likely never meant to spark
a conversation about the arguably deteriorating nature of our
political support when it released this revamp, but it has. And
we must take this opportunity for what it has become: a wakeup
call on the nature of our political personas.
This summer, Calvin Harris asked us all how deep our
love was. Perhaps we can revise his noteworthy query for the
fall season: how strong is our support? Let’s be dangerously
real here—it is unbelievably easy to open up a new tab, head to
a candidate’s website, and donate to them directly from there.
Yes, it might not necessarily be as convenient as sending a tweet,
and it might take away five more precious minutes of your time
on Earth, but it’s worth it. Right? Because this is a candidate
you care about, genuinely—someone you desperately want to
see emerge victorious in the Game of Thrones-esque battle
that is the American political campaign. Surely you could spare
them these five minutes, in addition to your monetary support.
The internet has already made the act of political
donation accessible to the civic newbie: we can donate with
the literal click of a button. In this sense, the added step of
accessing the candidate’s website directly is like a test of
loyalty, signaling a determined commitment to the cause. It
could even be perceived as an obstacle between us and unwise
political spending. In seemingly direct opposition to this idea,
a Twitter representative actually went so far as to say that
this modernization is the perfect tool “to allow people who
are feeling passionate at [an] exact moment in time to donate
35

ight then and there.” Implicit in this statement is the idea
that it’s okay—no, that it’s preferable even—to make financial
decisions when we are at our most excited, most angry, most
emotional.
I’m not suggesting that we should let platitudes
guide our journey through life, but isn’t it a common truth
that we shouldn’t act on our impulses when we’re feeling
most passionate? This kind of visceral reaction is what
demagogues like Donald Trump (let’s save him for another
time) aim to incite—this is what they manipulate in their
despotic clambering for political leadership. Rational thought
sets emotion aside from fact, and allows us to deal with the
situation in a steady, clearheaded manner. Political donation
should begin and end in evidence-based, near-scientific,
meditated thought processes—and the dangerous ease of
donation through Twitter is a threat to logic-based political
support. The flames of sensation have no place in the political
realm, no matter how desperately certain political figures
might try to push you into their embers.
So slowly retreat from the embers—no, flee from
them! Yes, I admit: these heuristic flames can be tantalizing in
their fervent, gilded incomplexity—it would be so easy to just
fall in, submit to their eager simplicity—but I challenge you to
defy that Freudian death drive. Freud won’t be disappointed.
He’s dead. But another death is at stake here—that of the
sincerity of your political support. Will you let it perish? Or
will you transcend this possibility, and reclaim your rightful
political integrity?
Perhaps it’s better we assume the temperament of a
reasoned owl when considering political donation, instead of
that of a sing-songy, naïve, lightheaded Twitter bird.
“Implicit in this statement is the idea that it’s
okay—no, that it’s preferable even—to make
financial decisions when we are at our most
”
excited, most angry, most emotional.
36

FRENCH
GIRL
SYNDROME
the subconscious imperialism of the american wannabe
by Yana Lysenko
art by Riley Henderson
In France, to be a French girl is to have been born in
France. In America, to be a French girl is to fit the American
framework of how a French girl should look: obviously skinny,
cigarette in mouth, wearing sunglasses, and running her hands
through her beautiful messy hair. She doesn’t wear makeup
because her skin is already flawless, she never blow-dries, and
her jeans are 3 years old but still look new because they’re
high-quality and cost half her month’s rent. The French girl
should also, perhaps, speak French.
Young Americans—specifically girls—are obsessed
with the idea of looking and acting French. It’s an aspiration
that stems from the 1960s, when Jean-Luc Godard and other
new French directors entered the world’s cinematic scene with
their DIY-produced, angst-ridden New Wave films. Drawing on
“ ”
American film noir, but with younger actors, a fondness for pop,
and a stereotypically French preoccupation with sex, the New
Wave solidified an image of French-ness that has lasted to the
present day. To be French in American culture is to look and act
cool—in the whitest way possible. The qualities that Americans
deem fundamental to French culture are so generalized and
flawed that they create France and its people as the society it
was perhaps 50 years ago: a whitewashed bourgeois culture
that has since disappeared, but still exists in the mind of the
idealistic Anglo-Saxon Francophile.
The most obvious example of this idealistic
generalization is Pinterest, where the idea of “stereotype” is
conceptualized into pictures titled “French Girl Style,” “What to
Wear in Paris: A 7-Day Outfit Guide,” and “Dressing Parisian Chic.”
Put these pictures next to each other, and they all feature the
same thing: a blue and white striped marinière t-shirt, a trench
coat, and ballet flats. Anything else featured will inevitably
include basic garments in varying shades of black, gray, and
white. And stripes—Americans think the French love stripes.
All of these ideas point to a perception of style that, according
to tourists and Francophiles, comprise the entire wardrobe of a
homogenous Gallic French society. Of course, the French know
that is not the case. Sit on the Parisian métro and you will see
as much diversity in clothing, body types, and skin colors as
you would in the New York subway. Even for the non-French
observer who has been exposed to French culture beyond the
“French Style” headlines of Vogue, and has seen more of France
than the Eiffel Tower quickly realizes how unrealistic it is to
Anything else featured will inevitably include basic garments in
varying shades of black, gray, and white.
And stripes—Americans think the French love stripes.
aspire to be French when there is no such thing as the typical
French man or French woman.
Generalization is the offspring of ignorance. In this
case, it’s not a complete lack of knowledge, but a selective one.
American references to French culture and style immediately
point to one of the best-known French films across Western
culture, Godard’s Breathless. The likely reason for the obsession
with this 1960 film is the fact that Jean Seberg, the main
female character, is an American in Paris who never drops
her American accent, but lives the American girl’s dream: she
finds herself multiple Parisian lovers and perfects the gamine
French-American style we have now deemed classically French.
The film is a conglomerate of black-and-white shots of Paris in
all of its glory, along with the typical French shots of smoking
37

cigarettes and drinking coffee in cafes. The characters are all
white, and Jean Seberg is of course wearing stripes, sunglasses,
and a cute feminine skirt under her trench coat. This image has
engrained itself not into the French cultural identity, but into
American perceptions of the culture it worships and aspires to
become.
The France we imagine is something from decades
ago—a time of political turmoil as France struggled with its
ruptured imperialism and attempted to maintain its stronghold
on the indigenous peoples of Africa and Southeast Asia. Many
young French men and women accept that New Wave cinema
and all of its various elements are essential to the cultural and
political history of French art, but that it no longer represents
an accurate picture of French society or the struggles they
face today. And yet, when we look at American online articles
on the youth culture of France and how to become more
French, they still boast the beauties of French culture. Beyond
that, they exalt a white fashion that ignores the millions of
immigrants across all of France, many of whom face alienation
and discrimination. These immigrants are in a constant battle
to prove their own unique Frenchness in a society that quietly
segregates between “true French” and “new French.”
Obviously, commercial fashion is still a largely white
enterprise, but when it is supported by cultural assumptions
of a homogenously white society, we start to address a
subconscious racist nostalgia for the time when Europe was all
white. A public American image of France through novels like
French Women Don’t Get Fat and How to be Parisian Wherever
You Are—both written by French authors in English for an
American audience—assumes that all French women simply
have the time and resources to spend all their days in cafés,
their nights sleeping with multiple lovers, and their money
on Saint Laurent, Guerlain, and foie gras. In America, we look
at books that feature generalized American bourgeois values
with disdain and skepticism, because they ignore the social
stratification we work so hard to overcome. An Amazon review
typical of our attitude complains that “It’s just another white
rich woman telling people how to live as extravagantly and
tastefully as she does,” in response to a book’s expression of
American bourgeois culture. Yet when it comes to other cultures
that represent a sexy rich white dream, we just assume it’s all
true. A society stuck on the days when whites ruled the world
wants to believe such places still exist. No wonder Paris is the
number one tourist spot in the world.
It’s all clickbait, of course. Pointing out the inadequacies
of our own culture and fashion in a society constantly struggling
with insecurity prompts the aspiration to become a part of a
different society—in this case, one we deem cooler and more
chic. French fashion blogger and photographer Garance Doré,
quoted in an article with The Guardian, explained that our
perceptions of the French are entirely mythologized, created
out of a desire for a cooler culture and society around us. The
article, written by American fashion blogger Jess Cartner-
“
In a way, a society stuck on when whites
ruled the word wants to believe such
places still exist. No wonder Paris is the
number one tourist spot in the world
”
Morley, states, “Actual real-life French people are completely
bemused by the concept of High French-ness as portrayed in
listicles entitled, ‘28 Shoes French Women Would Never Wear.’
To be fair to the French, they don’t write these; we do.” We have
created a fictionalized society of basic clothing staples and a
café culture that ignores the brewing turmoil of this society
that equals our own.
It becomes increasingly clear that Paris and France
are not simply the land of croissants, coffee, and Christian Dior,
but one of forceful homogenization and shushed oppression.
To go to Paris expecting a to find a perfect white rich haven
and to dress like a Parisian is wishful thinking that isn’t
introspective enough to realize the harmful ignorance that
comes with it. The real France is a country of culture, fashion,
beauty, and marginalized ethnic groups trying to earn the title
of “French” in a much deeper way than our facile attempts. To
truly understand the society we deem better than our own, we
can’t simplify it to statements like the “high-watermark of chic.”
But are we really trying to understand it anyway?
38

PLAYING
THE
tavi gevinson and new creativity
ROOKIE
by Maura Thomas
Tavi Gevinson, 19-year-old artist, actor, and writer, has
alternately described herself as an elf and a feminist. In both
respects, she’s perfectly serious: it’s possibly her combination
of intelligence and self-awareness that has gotten her so far,
so fast. Tavi started a blog, Style Rookie, at age 11, and her
popular website for teenage girls, Rookie, at 14. She later
spoke at TEDxTeen, lectured at the Sydney Opera House, and
most recently starred in a Broadway run of This is Our Youth.
But wait: she’s also guest-edited an issue of Poetry Magazine,
written articles for Elle, interviewed the likes of Lorde and
Adrian Tomine, and been on the covers of New York and Nylon.
What’s more impressive than this list of
accomplishments is the fact that thousands of girls like me
watch her interviews, anticipate her monthly editor’s letters
on rookiemag.com, and scroll longingly through her Instagram
feed. In short, we pay very close attention to what she’s doing.
She started Rookie through an impulse to treat teenage girls
as a multifaceted, thoughtful group “still figuring it out,”
feeling under no obligation to accept the kind of top-down,
deductive, or restrictive representations of girls in magazines
like Seventeen. She began to write in her bedroom in Oak
Park, Illinois. Her solution was to launch a website that is
horizontal—overwhelmingly, the contributors are young and
female, too—informal, and invitingly visual. It’s written, y’know,
like THIS. A recent post explains “How to Talk About Yourself
(Without Feeling Gross).” The digital pages look like, and in fact
often are, glittery or decorative journal or diary entries. The
categories range from “Fiction” to “Eye Candy” to “Sex + Love.”
The content is emphatic and easy to read, which often betrays
its weight and complexity.
I’m stating the obvious, but I want to give a sense
of Tavi’s character, or what I’ve constructed of her character
through what she writes and how she presents herself. She’s
what the avant-garde artist Kenneth Goldsmith might call
an “uncreative writer” or artist, frequently citing other artists’
work in her own. She doesn’t appropriate anything directly,
but she references influences constantly, citing the validation
and direction they provide her life. For example, she ends one
of her talks by telling the crowd to “be Stevie Nicks.” She has
talked at length about how movies and shows including Ghost
World, The Virgin Suicides, and Freaks and Greeks have informed
her sense of the way she would like to live. In “Tavi’s Big Big
World,” she confesses, “Part of what worries me is the fact that
all of my references are traceable: everything I do or say could
be tracked down or exposed as being heavily influenced by
a book I’ve written about before. I’ll never seem like Bjork…
who came out of nowhere with impeccable taste, and a neverending
set of skills, and incredible artistic ability, and no one
to credit for any of it.”
Instead of cursing her supposed “Lack of Originality,”
or its equally discouraging cousin, “It’s All Been Done Before,”
she’s skilled at mapping influences and resources into an evergrowing
web of self-definition. The Internet has provided her
with the platform for her career—first with her fashion blog,
which featured a clever 13-year-old in avant-garde outfits,
and then later with Rookie. She’s become a master parser and
analyst of pop culture, music, fashion, movies, and art, which
has garnered her the friendships of Taylor Swift, Hilton Als,
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and other people of whom you’d be equally
jealous.
We were talking about what it means to be creative
in my poetry class, with little success. Tavi is so successful as
a creative because she’s a filter—Rookie has formed a kind
of constellation on the Internet where people congregate to
discover and share new influences, celebratory of both the
alternative and the mainstream. Maybe the new creative is the
person who can take an enormity of information and make it
accessible. In much of her work this is a main focus, not just a
technique peripheral to the “original artwork” of other artists.
It’s one of the reasons she’s so popular—she’s affirming that as
a young woman, you don’t have to be a solitary genius to be
creative or successful.
39

“
The digital pages look like,
and in fact often are, glittery
or decorative journal or
diary entries.
”
It’s this notion of an “uncreative genius,” of a person
who makes meaning out of the meaning of others, that is
rightly gaining currency in the digital age. In “The Creative
Apocalypse that Wasn’t,” The New York Times confirmed that
“writers, performers, directors, and even musicians report their
economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts
15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved.” The cost
of producing culture has also dropped. The pond is basically
infinite, but there are far more niche outlets through which you
can be paid for making or offering content, if you’re well aware
of the relentlessly evolving landscape.
My sister and I go back and forth on the merits of
Instagram as a creative platform—for what reason (and usually,
for whom) do we share things really? On social media, you’re
both an editor and a consumer. So I’m following Tavi (@
tavitulle), for example, and she’s posting pictures of books she’s
reading (Speedboat by Renata Adler and Babe by photographer
and friend Petra Collins), of outfits she’s wearing (pom-pom
earrings, Rachel Antonoff dresses, gold skirts), and of various
Rookie readers and friends. In a recent post, she’s pictured
addressing an audience onstage in a long white shift dress, with
the caption “Brainwashing the youth into keeping diaries and
talking about their feelings.” Essentially, an Instagram account
is a visual attempt to brainwash others into understanding
or sharing your point of view. It’s about trying to take what’s
“original” about your life and market it in a way that is both
intimate and collectively enviable.
That Tavi knows exactly how to balance her presence
as a professional and a 19-year-old means she feels like both
a leader and a peer. This is one of the great features of social
media in general: whether you’re Taylor Swift, Tavi Gevinson
or anyone else, everyone works under more or less the same
creative restrictions within a given platform. From this mass of
essentially “uncreative” output comes inventories of personal
choice, influence, and transition: exactly the stuff of Tavi’s
appeal and success.
When Jonathan Safran Foer visited Cornell in
September, he talked about the project of writing novels as the
process of simply figuring out your preferences—he said, “We
really don’t know what we like.” If we’re active on social media,
it’s usually because we’re trying to achieve and broadcast some
sense of a stable self. Tavi started a publication that is steadily
ingraining in a new generation of young women a sense of
agency to figure themselves out in the midst of transition,
while affirming that pursuit as a creative project. For that, I
am grateful a certain woman came out of nowhere with
impeccable taste.
art by Maura Thomas
40

SHARPAY WEARS
SHORT SKIRTS;
GABRIELLA WEARS
T-SHIRTS
the false dichotomy of disney’s female characters
by Simi Best
The first time we see High School Musical’s Sharpay Evans,
she’s dressed head to toe in pink, strutting through the halls
of East High, texting on her pink flip phone as the crowd parts
around her. Even before Zeke calls her the “ice princess” and
proceeds to high five his laughing bros, we already know all we
need to about Sharpay: she’s The Bitch. Aspiring star Sharpay
loves shopping with Daddy’s credit card, wearing short skirts,
cozying up to Troy Bolton, and trying to manipulate anyone
and everyone who might stand in her way—like, for instance,
Gabriella. Gabriella is different. She has brown hair and she
reads books…for fun.
And so we have our opposites. In what is familiar territory
for the Disney Channel, we’re tipped off to the fact that we’re
supposed to identify with Gabriella not just because she’s
the sympathetic antithesis to Sharpay’s “ice princess,” but
also because she’s modest and quietly intellectual. We’re
conditioned to hate one and identify with another very specific
type of girl, and by creating this opposition Disney pits us
against girls with certain characteristics and encourages the
same bias we see on TV in our own lives.
Character pairs are all over Disney Channel. Camp Rock’s
Tess Tyler (resident Camp Bitch) bears a striking resemblance
to Sharpay—blonde, rich, fashion-obsessed, boy-obsessed, and
in possession of a temper and a drive to make it to the top.
But Mitchie is different. She comes from a modest family: her
dad owns a hardware store and her mom is a cook. She’s got
brown hair to match the earth tones of her casual outfits and
a shy, unpretentious personality despite her beautiful voice. Of
course, Tess is the sequined villainess pitted against our downto-earth
heroine. Take, too, Lizzie McGuire’s ex-best friend and
later enemy, cheerleading captain and evil queen bee Kate
Sanders—Kate came back from summer camp one year with a
bra and consequently, a new attitude. In addition to displaying
her unfortunate personality, our antagonist tends to check her
hair in the mirror and refuses to eat carbs. And of course, it
follows that we hate her.
According to Disney Channel, cool girls are allowed to be
beautiful, smart, and talented, but they can’t be boy-crazy, wear
pink, shop at the mall, care about dieting, or, apparently, require
a bra. Why does Disney Channel consistently use stereotypes
of popular-girl femininity as shorthand for “bad”? This isn’t
just lazy TV and film writing—it is part of impressionable
childhoods. Content like this makes kids think that “girly”
interests are an invitation for mockery. We grow up knowing
that we’re meant to identify with modest, casual Gabriella and
not sparkly, over-the-top Sharpay, because Gabriella is good
and Sharpay is evil. To anyone watching those characters, girly
is equated with mean.
The concept of “girly” as shorthand for “mean” is more lazy
than vindictive. Maybe the intent is to give credit to the girls
who don’t fit the stereotypical teenage popularity norm, so
that while caring about appearances is equated with vanity,
girls who don’t feel like they fit the beautiful, popular girl
image (read: pretty much all girls) can feel proud of their
own diffidence. Instead of encouraging self-esteem, all Disney
Channel does with these stock characters is reinforce the
notion that we should be proud of our assumed superiority over
Sharpay’s vilified characteristics. It feels good to feel superior
41

to the cool girl, and Disney feeds that. No one identifies with
the villain—we’re all underdogs in real life, we all want to
identify with the protagonist, and therefore, that protagonist
can’t be the untouchable cool girl.
It’s true that, of the two, Gabriella is the High School
Musical character to which we should aspire. She’s genuinely
presented as a generally cool gal, while Sharpay is still a
probable sociopath. Even if Disney Channel isn’t aiming to
blame Sharpay’s horrible personality on her pink feather boas,
it’s still enforcing that pink boa as a symbol, implying that
because she’s attractive, rich, and well dressed, she’s probably
also vapid, narcissistic, and cruel. If all of our role models look
and act like Gabriella, that’s not great encouragement from
Disney Channel to tell girls that you can look and act as “girly”
as Sharpay but still be, you know, not sociopaths.
What’s even more troubling is that not just the audience is
meant to swoon over the nerdy girl and reject the prom queen;
because the nerdy girl is so different, she’s always the one to
get The Boy. Sometimes the nerdy-but-secretly-cool girl is the
protagonist, but other times she and her evil foil character exist
only to teach The Boy a lesson about nice girls—the lesson
being, according to Disney Channel, that they can be found
hiding behind brown hair and glasses but never in the body
of a cheerleader, prom queen, or aspiring celebrity. Gwen, the
most popular and beautiful girl at Sky High, literally turns out
to be a supervillain, the reveal of which finally pushes Will to
realize that he should maybe just be into girl-next-door Layla
instead. Even Max Keeble learns that pretty, blonde Jenna isn’t
worth his time, seeing as he’s got girl-next-door Megan to keep
him occupied.
Disney Channel is telling girls that this is what you should
want to be. This is how boys want you to be. You should be
“
It
secretly, modestly gorgeous and cool, but super casual and
uninterested in anything stereotypically feminine. Basically, be
one of the boys, but hotter. It’s yet another botched attempt at
a positive message—Disney wants to tell its viewers to go for
substance over surface, but of course it’s a lot simpler to tell
that story if the gap between those two qualities stays wide
open and the character remains concerned with only one or
the other.
Telling us over and over again that we shouldn’t want
to look like the hot, popular cheerleader is fundamentally
about attacking and tearing down other girls. Disney Channel
makes it seem like for every Gabriella in the world, there’s a
Sharpay waiting to attack. This sad dichotomy grooms young
viewers to scoff at pink boas, cheerleading uniforms, lipstick,
and anything else “feminine,” and aspire to be more like
reserved, low-key Disney Channel heroines. There’s nothing
wrong with either type of girl—but the two shouldn’t be pitted
against each other, or even portrayed as opposites. Sharpay,
Kate, Tess, and all the other blonde Disney antagonists based
on a ridiculous stereotype are part of a lazy generalization,
teaching us intentionally or not that judging people by their
appearances equates to judging them by their actions. If in the
Disney universe the girl in the pink dress is always the villain,
what does that say about spotting villains in real life? Sooner
or later Disney Channel is going to have to face the fact that
finding the source of all evil is not as easy as locating the head
cheerleader.
feels good to feel superior to the cool girl,
and Disney feeds that. No one identifies with the
”
villain...
art by Julia Pearson
42

MULDER & SCULLY:
MEANT TO BE
even if the writers don’t think so
byTia Lewis & Thelonia Saunders
Even those who cringe at the acronym “OTP” (ourselves
included) can’t deny it—the romance between FBI Agents Fox
Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in
The X-Files harnesses an impressive chemistry. It goes beyond
character, dialogue, and the actors themselves to become
the very foundation of what makes the show great and, well,
believable. For many who revel in the age of mid-90s sci-fi
television trash, The X-Files has always been a tasty mix of the
classic TV crime drama and science fiction-fantasy. A successful
executive gamble, The X-Files has tackled its circuitous plot with
gusto, covering perhaps every urban legend and mythology on
earth, and has still found the time to fill an extraterrestrial
storyline with Snowden-level government conspiracy theories.
Despite its complexity, the dedication to the bizarre, and the
nod to the American people’s distrust for their government, it’s
Mulder and Scully’s ever-evolving relationship that undeniably
holds the show together. But what happens when the beloved
show is revived, and its writer does not know where else to go
with the (spoiler alert) captivating romance he has created?
Well, he splits them up, of course!
In case you’ve been living in a different galaxy, here’s
a little background. The X-Files is a franchise that began as
a TV show on the Fox Network and ran from 1993 to 2001
with nine seasons, 202 episodes, and two movies. It has been
revived for a six-episode miniseries due to air next year, much
to the unexpected bewilderment of many longtime fans. To
add to that bewilderment was Fox’s announcement that in the
revival, Mulder and Scully will have split up and essentially
become estranged, despite the fact that they appeared happily
and romantically involved in the 2008 film, The X-Files: I Want
to Believe. It seems that the long will-they-won’t-they plot
line was just too good for Carter to give up—or maybe, he just
does not know how to continue writing an interesting, secure
relationship between two characters. Of course, he isn’t the
first writer to take back the obvious conclusion he’d so slowly
built up. TV shows do this all the time, splitting up clearly “end
game” couples to regain tension: take Nick and Jess in New
Girl, or Blaine and Kurt in Glee. However, some shows commit
to the relationships they create, and choose to advance them
instead, like Leslie and Ben in Parks and Recreation and Mindy
and Danny in The Mindy Project. So what’s your excuse, Chris
Carter? When the majority of your fan base and even the
actors on your show
are rooting for the
romance you’ve
created, why tear
apart the world’s
most lovable
alien-hunting FBI
agents?
Perhaps he
doesn’t need to explain.
Maybe it’s just who he is.
Despite being the creator
and frequent writer
for the show, Carter
has a longstanding
history of being
at odds with its
fans. He has even
inspired the trope
of the “The Chris
Carter effect,” which
TV Tropes states is
when “the fans decide
that the writing team will
never resolve its plots, [and]
then... will probably stop following
the work.” While some creators of
popular shows, like Carter, love throwing in
43

twists and turns to keep their viewers on edge, there is a fine
line between being interactive with an audience and just plain
pissing them off. Pretty Little Liars is a great example of this—
the show is full of unexpected cliffhangers and plot twists, but
fans’ comments on the show’s Facebook page and throughout
social media make it clear that they see the show as trying
too hard to be complicated, at the expense of it actually being
good. (But we digress.)
“The Chris Carter effect” obviously has not stopped the
fans—one need only check the fan reaction to the short previews
of the revival—but there is definitely an underlying animosity
between the fans and Chris Carter, which existed long before
he split up Mulder and Scully. For that, we can see two reasons.
For one, there is the overly complicated, incredibly convoluted
“government conspiracy plot” that made much of the mythos
of The X-Files seem to keep building and building with little to
no payoff. In fact, most of the answers given along this plotline
only served to raise more questions. In the name of a “plot
twist” they would sometimes straight-up contradict earlier
revelations so the viewers’ whiplash would prevent them from
questioning the narrative gaslighting. While the theme of a
government conspiracy plot is intriguing, Carter’s execution of
it turned a potentially poignant and relevant discussion into an
inconsistent mess. Secondly, Carter seems morally contracted
to hold out on any resolution of that aforementioned will-theywon’t-they
tension between the two main leads, making sure
as little actual finality as possible is achieved canonically. This
is an uncreative trend Carter has continued to push into the
revival with his decision to break up the two, for reasons that
likely revolve around a need to add tension. As noted previously,
plenty of other shows prove that a plot can continue to move
and develop with the main couple together and advancing
through life in a
positive romantic
relationship. Just
because Carter
can’t write it
doesn’t mean it’s
impossible.
W h a t ’ s
really interesting
about Carter’s clumsy
destruction of a
relationship he (perhaps
accidentally) did a great
job building is how
absolutely no one
seems to agree
with him about it.
Both the actors
involved and the
fans themselves have
decided that certain
romantic milestones
between Mulder and
Scully must have occurred at
some point off-screen, because
Carter refuses to give them the simple
moments they deserve. If anything, Carter
is a perfect example of why readers, viewers,
and media consumers should not worry about the intent of the
author, because it is the actual, created effect of a work that
portrays its real truth.
“
Carter is a perfect example of
why readers, viewers, and media
consumers should not worry about
the intent of the author, because it is
the actual, created effect of a work
that portrays its real truth.
”
Take the New York Comic Con X-Files interviews from
pinnacle of journalism, BuzzFeed. When asked to guess when
Mulder and Scully first fell in love, Carter answered that he
“didn’t believe it was love at first sight.”
“He accused her of being sent to spy on him, so I
don’t think he fell for her exactly at that [first] moment,” Carter
said. “I think he fell in love with her through the course of the
beginning of the show.”
Unsurprisingly, the other interviewees disagreed.
Kumail Nanjiani, a comedian and X-Files super fan who will
be featured in the revival, said with certainty, “Their chemistry
in the first scene is so undeniable. It’s a love affair from the
beginning.”
Actor Mitch Pileggi, who plays FBI Assistant Director
Skinner on the show, had a similar answer, saying simply, “The
first time he looked into that face.”
It’s not that it’s impossible to have a harmonious
relationship between creators and fan bases—the weird, if
family-like, atmosphere achieved between the Hannibal fans
and production team is a testament to that. It’s that The X-Files
has felt for so long to be the actors (and, by extension, their
characters) versus Chris Carter. The chemistry between Mulder
and Scully—with more credit to actors Duchovny and Anderson
than to Carter—has always been the main driving force for what
makes the show work. Their genuine relationship, whether it be
as friends or as a couple, has consistently pulled the ridiculous
alien, conspiracy, and urban legend plots into a sphere of
tolerability, so it seems foolish for Carter to fiddle with the one
thing that keeps viewers and fans hooked—especially after
he built it up for years with little reward. Because let’s face
it: if you’ve ever watched an episode of the show, you know
that as fun as a monster mystery episode is to watch, it’s not
Sasquatch that has us glued to the screen. It’s how Mulder and
Scully deal with Sasquatch.
Heading into 2016 and the return of The X-Files, we
must remember that no matter what goes down, whether the
two are married, divorced, or ultimately end up separated, it’s
all going to be okay.
And whatever happens, remember, there is always fan
fiction.
art by Thelonia Saunders
44

art by Michelle Savran
srsly, he’s pretty funny
THE CATHARTIC ABSUR
In today’s media, where there are so many outlets
for comedy and so many funny people, I still always find
myself returning to Mel Brooks. His brand of silliness is
critically acclaimed (he is in the elite EGOT club), and I often
regard him as a safe choice for a favorite comedian. Brooks’
lowbrow vulgarity drives movies such as History of the World
Part 1 (1981) and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). While
these are hysterical movies, he is most remembered for the
films Blazing Saddles (1974) and The Producers (1967), which
have stood the comedic test of time and include some of
the most famous scenes in comedy history. Who knew that
cowboys farting over and over again could be so funny?
This clearly philistine humor coincides with Brooks’ efforts
to push material boundaries. The Producers and Blazing
Saddles were met with criticism regarding insensitivities
toward race and religion, but the fact that the same two
films eventually became celebrated by critics illustrates how
movies can successfully tackle controversy if the material
is enough of a spoof and still tells an honest human story.
The controversy surrounding The Producers stems
from issues of anti-Semitism and the film’s portrayal of
Nazis. Max Bialystok and Leo Bloom, two Broadway theatre
producers, enter into a get-rich-quick scheme when they
realize they can make more money with a flop show than with
a hit. They attempt to produce the worst show ever written
by the worst director who ever lived, and decide on a little
production called “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Eva
and Adolf at Berchtesgaden.” It is penned by Franz Liebkind,
an ex-Nazi, and directed by Roger De Bris, a flamboyantly
gay man. Naturally, controversy ensued with this plot.
Released just 23 years after the end of World War II,
the film was criticized for its insensitive ethnic humor. Renata
Adler of The New York Times wrote in 1968 that many parts of
the film are “shoddy and gross and cruel.” The film was thought
to be crude, with many scenes in bad taste. While the uproar
from critics was not unfounded, the film works because of
its ridiculous, over-the-top nature. A few Nazi jokes sprinkled
throughout a plot may cause concern, but a full-on Nazi
musical production containing Nazi showgirls dancing around
in the shape of a swastika? I beg you to try not to laugh. The
45

absurd humor in this movie is necessary for tackling such heavy
subjects in a comedic manner. Franz Liebkind is an undeniably
delusional Nazi, and the movie makes this clear when Bialystock
and Bloom go to his house to get his permission to produce
his play. He screams in excitement to his pet pigeons about the
prospect of getting his show produced, and proceeds to make
Bialystock and Bloom take the Siegfried Oath pledging their
loyalty to Hitler. Liebkind’s goal to restore Hitler’s reputation
through “Springtime for Hitler” is emblematic of the fallacy
of his Nazi perspective. Similarly, his diatribe against Winston
Churchill ultimately portrays him as insane. Depicting the
Nazi character as the most ridiculous fosters the satirical and
hilarious tone of the picture. The all-out nature of the scene and
the film overall makes laughter the only rational way to respond.
As mentioned previously, the highlight of the
movie is the actual production of “Springtime for Hitler.”
The audience gets to see a small sample of the show, and
Brooks goes for all-out shock. In the span of three minutes,
the audience experiences every German stereotype, including
showgirls dressed as pretzels and beer. The dancers are
dressed in Nazi uniforms and their dances incorporate the
Hitler salute and a swastika formation. This performance
makes a statement about Hitler’s status, and Brooks creates
a demeaning depiction through his choreography. One officer
sings, “don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi
party,” as shots fire. The lyrics further display the absurdity
suggests that Liebkind kill the actors because they are the
ones actually ruining Hitler’s reputation. This inane and
illogical problem-solution sequence imitates the fundamental
lack of sense that is embedded in historical reality. These mad
“His outrageous spoof doesn’t
eliminate the tragedy of
allows us to process its
insanity.
history but points out and
”
suggestions serve not just to make the viewer laugh but also
to expose the true irrationality and disconnect of the past.
If The Producers was met with controversy, Blazing
Saddles pushed it to a whole new level. This film, released seven
years later, is Brooks’ first Western parody. In it, he channels
the traditional racism and sexism that appear throughout
the genre, and through the ridiculous plot, he points out the
inherent idiocy of those tropes. The main story arc involves
an evil railroad builder attempting to drive the citizens of the
western town Rock Ridge out by appointing a black sheriff. The
first scene, in which white railroad workers demand a working
by Felicia Kuhnreich
DITY OF MEL BROOKS
and stupidity of their horrifying organization. Of course, in
retrospect not a single “smarty” would ever consider joining,
but stating the opposite of what the audience truly feels
or believes makes it all the more poignantly ridiculous.
Brooks uses his lowbrow humor and silliness as a
tool to demean the evil forces in the world. His outrageous
spoof doesn’t eliminate the tragedy of history but points out
and allows us to process its insanity. It is not just ridiculous
in its exuberance, but also in its lack of rationality. Liebkind
is extremely angry in the second act after “Springtime for
Hitler” becomes a success. His solution is to shoot himself, and
the ensuing minute sequence lacks any semblance of logic.
He mocks people who cling to life “like baby butterflies” and
tries to die like a man, but as he screams that he will soon
join his idols and pulls the trigger, it jams. He then throws
the gun away in anger and mutters, “when things go wrong,”
upset about not dying, but not determined enough to doublecheck
the gun and give it another try. Liebkind’s decisionmaking
displayed in this chain of events is entertainingly
illogical. Reason further escapes the situation when Bialystock
song from black railroad workers, illustrates racial tensions,
and as the story unfolds it continues to explore race relations.
Co-written by Richard Pryor, his and Brooks’ social commentary
on race shines through the silly gags. Brooks creates a synergy
between the absurdity of racism and the movie’s innate
madness. The townspeople are portrayed as so ignorant that it’s
funny. If their stupidity goes over your head, Brooks breaks the
fourth wall—in signature style—to call the racist townspeople
idiots, making his criticism both humorously exaggerated
and impossible to miss. Blazing Saddles’ success can be
attributed to the inherent truth found though the craziness.
Racism in America and Nazism are not light subjects.
But Mel Brooks’ comedic and cinematic style takes these
uncomfortable and horrible truths and puts them in a comedic
context. By making us laugh at things that are simply not funny,
Brooks shows us that some of the most horrifying aspects of
humanity are based on an inhuman ridiculousness. This allows
us to experience and contemplate events that might have been
too sensitive to discuss and find some closure and catharsis in
laughter.
46

THE OLIVIA POPES
& JESS DAYS OF TV
typecasting television’s favorite female leads
by Riley Henderson
Many people may argue that Shonda Rhimes is the
boss of all things dramatic. She has become a TV Drama
phenomenon in less than a decade, each one of her shows
being more popular than the last. With series such as Scandal,
How to Get Away with Murder, Private Practice, and Grey’s
Anatomy (now in its eleventh season) under her belt, it seems
that more often than not her audience eats up every last
second of her 40-minute episodes, gripping the edges of their
seats. However, once you sift through all the twists and turns
of her shows, the murders, the affairs, and the infinite number
of blow-out screaming matches between main characters,
each show shares one important factor: a take-no-bullshit,
I-do-what-I-want, insanely successful female lead. Is this the
quintessential key to her show’s popularity? Most likely, yes.
When you count up the jobs that each female lead
character has had in Rhimes’ shows, you get the following: two
doctors, one criminal defense attorney, and one miracle worker
or “fixer” with infinite wads of cash, the source of which is
unknown. It is safe to say that Rhimes creates strong, successful
women who tend to be independent to an almost outrageous
level. Whether it is Meredith Grey, Olivia Pope, Addison
Montgomery, or Annalise Keating, each woman seems to have
quite the accomplished life. They control people, and often find
powerful men fighting over them. However, the unanswerable
question is whether all of this female empowerment is simply
good TV, or whether it intentionally and effectively creates
aspirational characters for viewers to look up to. The “punch”
of each show is what keeps the audience interested, but the
takeaway hits a much more serious note.
Although Rhimes’ shows are arguably much less
about identifying with the female leads than other TV shows,
the actresses who partake in the given roles definitely can
inspire the audience in a positive light. Stripping away the
absurdity of each TV drama—which includes the characters
fixing unsolvable problems within seconds, hiding murder
scenes on a daily basis, and always looking spectacular and
well dressed while doing so—there lies a perhaps more indepth
and refined message. Finding an understanding of the
female characters in terms of their personalities and achieved
successes allows the doors of aspiration and even imitation to
open. These doors encourage viewers to admire who they are
watching every Thursday night.
Rhimes’ perhaps less realistic, but highly aspirational
characters are strikingly different than the relatable, quirky
47

“Jess Day, or the ladies of
Broad City for example, are equally
independent and prime
looking-up-to material, and the
Olivias and Merediths can be
relatable in their twisted
”
familial issues.
art by Julie Pearson
characters of Comedy Central or Fox, for example, where the
likes of Amy Schumer and Zooey Deschanel parade across our
screens. The popular genre of shows surrounding the eccentric
(and sometimes silly) lives of city girls attests to not only the
extent of variation in TV genres, but also in TV’s female leads.
New Girl’s Jess Day is goofy and out of the box to say
the least. She sings what she says more than just saying it, and
her desire to wear bows on her outfits and striped or polkadotted
anything fits her personality flawlessly. While the Olivia
Popes under Rhimes’s reign are off burying bodies and having
seductive and juicy affairs, the Jess Days are crafting middle
school plays and living in the quaint but odd dynamic of an LA
loft with three male thirty-somethings. Nevertheless, it is hard
to argue whether one show is better than the other in sending
creating role models for the audience.
The character that Jess Day conveys to viewers—that
being yourself is ideal and what should matter and her quirk
or spunk if you will—is what makes her who she is. Olivia Pope,
however, puts out the message that being a powerhouse in
any industry is an attainable and striking trait, even if it is in a
corrupted or absurd context.
One person might relate to Jess Day in all her weird
glory, while another might feel he or she can look up to Olivia
Pope’s powerful independence. However, that’s not to say there
is no overlap. Jess Day, or the ladies of Broad City for example,
are equally independent and prime looking-up-to material,
and the Olivias and Merediths can be relatable in their twisted
familial issues. I suppose there is no real answer for which
kind of character is more impactful, except to acknowledge
that both types are widely diverse and complex. Perhaps we
don’t have to choose to associate with one or the other, but can
instead connect with both. And that’s why we come back and
watch week after week.
There is an entire spectrum of women in the real
world who range from sharing the internal turmoil of Olivia
Pope’s psyche, to the day-to-day duties in Jess Day’s world. We
may want to consider adopting the qualities of both sides of
the scale into our lives because, in my opinion, a polka dotwearing,
President-dating, badass woman who crafts children’s
plays while solving murders would be pretty fantastic. Either
show may simply be good TV, but I like to believe there can
be more than just ratings behind these sometimes spunky,
sometimes terrifying TV marvels.
48

FEMINISM 101
WITH NICKI MINAJ
calling out white feminist hypocrisy
by Susie Plotkin
“And now back to this bitch that had a lot to say about me
the other day in the press—Miley, what’s good?”
This line, which Nicki Minaj delivered during her
acceptance speech for Best Hip-Hop Video, is the standout
memory from the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. People will
forget who hosted the show, they’ll forget who won which
awards, they’ll forget the guest performances, but they won’t
forget that Nicki Minaj called Miley Cyrus a bitch, because that’s
all that matters. They will forget, too, the reason Minaj called
out Cyrus and the context of Cyrus’ even more outrageous
statements about Minaj. In the end, Nicki said that Miley was a
bitch on stage, and that’s much more important.
The media seemed to understand that this line was
the takeaway from the VMAs. Following Minaj’s acceptance
speech, the Internet exploded with headlines about the
exchange. The Guardian recapped the VMAs with an article
titled, “VMAs 2015: Nicki Minaj calls Miley Cyrus ‘bitch’ on stage
at MTV awards.” Other news outlets decided to steer away from
the traditional route of simply explaining what happened, and
focused instead on the Cyrus family’s reaction to what Minaj
said. Entertainment Tonight, via their online forum, featured an
article titled, “Watch the Cyrus Family’s Stunned Reactions to
Nicki Minaj Calling Out Miley at the VMAs,” including a series
of photos of Cyrus’ parents and siblings in the audience, wideeyed,
hands over their mouths, shocked. The Daily Mail similarly
headlined an article, “Stunned! Miley Cyrus’ family can barely
contain shock as they watch singer branded b**** by Nicki Minaj
at MTV VMA’s.” Bitch—a word so foul it can only be expressed
in asterisks. We are supposed to read these headlines and, like
Cyrus’ family did, understand that Nicki was rude, crass, and
wrong, and Miley was taken off-guard, a victim, and poised.
Most of these articles, of course, would eventually
include Miley’s response later that night: “We are all in this
industry, we all do interviews, and we all know how they
manipulate shit. Nicki, congratu-fucking-lations”. Oddly
enough, there were no headlines reading, “Ouch! Miley Cyrus
says ‘Congratuf***inglations’ to Nicki Minaj when she won Best
Hip-Hop Video Award.” Miley’s response (which was just as
crass) and what she did to instigate Nicki’s original attack were
not important enough to flood headlines.
This all started when Minaj’s video for “Anaconda,”
which broke Vevo’s then-record for most views in the first 24
hours, was not nominated for Video of the Year. Minaj tweeted,
“If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you
will be nominated for vid of the year,” calling out the music
industry’s obvious preferred acceptance of certain body types
(read: white and super thin) over others (read: not white and
not super thin). Minaj’s tweet wasn’t controversial, raunchy,
or crass; she was frustrated that her highly successful video
wasn’t nominated in a category she thought it deserved to be
in. She recognized that the women featured in her video have
very different body types than the music industry prefers, and
called it out for that. Minaj did not mention any specific artists
or videos that were nominated in her tweet, and only protested
the general trends of the music industry for women, but still
Taylor Swift took it personally.
Swift tweeted, “@NICKIMINAJ I’ve done nothing
but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against
“It is the responsibility of so-called
feminists like Taylor Swift and Miley
Cyrus to not silence the voices of
women who are hurt by the social
”
systems they benefit from
each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot.” Clearly
Swift missed the point of Minaj’s tweet and wasn’t able to
comprehend that Minaj could simultaneously A) be a woman
and B) make a comment about racism in the music industry
without “[pitting] women against each other.” Minaj’s tweet
came from her perspective as not just a woman in the music
industry, but as a woman of color. Swift doesn’t need to think
about how her race plays into her success because she’s white,
just like any person born into a majority group doesn’t need to
consider what part of their identity put them in the majority.
This is to say that while Swift might experience sexism in
the music industry, she will never experience sexism in the
same way that Minaj does. When she redirected the message
49

of Minaj’s tweet, which was a critique that stemmed from a
place of intersectionality, to an accusation against her in the
name of “one-size-fits-all” feminism, she actively silenced and
ignored the entire problem Minaj was referencing in the first
place. In Swift’s world of White Feminism, sexism exists in a
gender vacuum, ignoring all other personal identities that
inherently accompany it—race, sexual orientation, etc.—which
is why her suggestion that “maybe one of the men” took Minaj’s
nomination is so predictable; she dismissed the possibility that
race could play any factor in this by focusing solely on gender,
thereby implying that white women and women of color face
the same kinds of oppression.
Minaj was clearly taken aback and confused by Swift’s
tweet, replying, “Huh? U must not be reading my tweets. Didn’t
say a word about u. I love u just as much. But u should speak
on this @taylorswift13.” The remarkable thing here is that
Minaj must have been frustrated with Swift’s tweet, but she
still responded without any malice. She even went so far as
to tell Swift she loved her too, and invited her to “speak on”
Minaj’s initial tweet. Although she must have recognized the
implications of Swift’s tweet, she still asked her for her support
on the issue. But Swift didn’t take that opportunity to redeem
herself, and instead tweeted, “@NICKIMINAJ If I win, please
come up with me!! You’re invited to any stage I’m ever on,”
which is condescending at best.
The next morning, Swift finally apologized, tweeting,
“I thought I was being called out. I missed the point, I
misunderstood, then misspoke. I’m sorry, Nicki.
@NICKIMINAJ,” and Nicki tweeted back, thanking
her for her apology, which should have put
the issue to rest. However, then Miley Cyrus
decided to add in her two cents about the
exchange in an interview with The New
York Times before the VMAs, despite the
fact that she admitted to not having
followed it closely enough to know the
specifics. Cyrus disapproved of
Minaj’s role in the fight, saying,
“If you do things with an
open heart and you come at
things with love, you would
be heard and I would respect
your statement. But I don’t
respect your statement because
of the anger that came with it.” This
tone policing is classic among members of
majority groups, Taylor Swift included, that
suppress the messages of minority groups,
refocusing the message of what someone is
saying from its content to the anger behind it.
Who cares what Minaj had to say if she wasn’t being
polite? If she had been less angry, Cyrus would have
“respected her statement”—which is confusing
for a few reasons. Primarily, Minaj’s initial tweet
was not anger ridden; it was constructive and
honest. Moreover, Cyrus has never criticized
an activist on her side for being too angry in
their remarks (for example, a sexually liberated
white woman). Cyrus herself is known for risqué
remarks, like the time she said in an interview
with W Magazine in 2014, “I’m trying to tell girls, like, ‘Fuck that.
You don’t need to wear makeup. You don’t have to have long
blonde hair and big titties. That’s not what it’s about.’” It’s not
entirely clear to me how that statement, or any of the other
number of similar statements she’s made, is more open-hearted
and less angry than Minaj’s tweet. Not to mention the fact
that here, when Cyrus spoke about feminism and empowering
women, she was clearly targeting a white audience, as having
long blonde hair isn’t often a societal beauty expectation for
women who are anything but white.
Both Swift and Cyrus have commented on how sexism
in the music industry has affected them many times in the past.
In reference to people who didn’t believe that she had written
her own music, Swift told Billboard in December of 2014, “They
may have to deal with their own sexist issues, because if I
were a guy and you were to look at my catalog and my lyrics,
you would not wonder if I was the person behind it.” Similarly,
when she was on the cover of Marie Claire’s September issue,
Cyrus said about the music industry, “There is so much sexism,
ageism, you name it... Kendrick Lamar sings about LSD and he’s
cool. I do it and I’m a whore.” Neither of them sugarcoated their
statements. They both acknowledged and spoke out against the
sexism that they face in the industry. Yet, when Minaj spoke out
against the oppression she faces, both women dismissed her
statement and attacked her. It seems that Swift’s emphasis on
empowering other women is limited to her girl gang of white
models, and that Miley’s assertion in an interview with BBC in
2013 that she’s “one of the biggest feminists in the world”
is only true if you ignore every woman who doesn’t
face the same obstacles as her. Feminism means
equality of the sexes, but this can’t be achieved
by ignoring and disregarding the
types of oppression that women
of color (or gay women or lowincome
women or trans women)
face. It is the responsibility of socalled
feminists like Taylor Swift
and Miley Cyrus to not silence the
voices of women who are hurt by the
social systems that they benefit from
(whether they realize it or not).
If Miley was going to criticize
Nicki for being “not too nice” when she made
a constructive statement, then at the awards
show that Miley was hosting, Nicki damn
well would be “not too nice.” And regardless
of how the white-lauding press decided to
handle it, I think the stand-out memory from
the VMAs came after Nicki called her a bitch,
when the camera panned to Miley to
show her reaction: standing in her fake
dreadlocks, jaw-dropped, speechless.
Although just temporarily, their roles
were reversed: Nicki managed to
silence Miley.
art by Thelonia Saunders
50

THE LINGERING ERA OF THE
MALE
TALK SHOW HOST
seeking female faces on our screens
by Barbara Esuoso
The lights in a large theatre are dimmed for a
nightly ambiance, while the studio erupts with the noise of
an enthusiastic crowd anticipating the appearance of the
iconic 6-foot-4 redhead. Conan O’ Brien confidently makes his
way to center stage under the weight of unceasing applause.
Experience exudes his persona as he makes goofy hand
gestures at the nighttime crowd, eventually getting them to
quiet down. He smoothly begins to talk about national news
(read: Donald Trump), generously sprinkling in some rudely
humorous comments with the help of his announcer.
One remote flick to channel 4, and an infectious theme
song begins blasting, with the spotlight now on a blue-lit
stage and a woman with a blond pixie cut and a tailored suit.
The audience is a sea of women with high-pitched screams
for their beloved daytime host, Ellen DeGeneres, well-known
stand-up comedian and talk show host. She starts off the show
with a comedy bit, leading into an exercise that somehow has
the crowd laughing for 20 minutes.
What’s the difference between Conan O’Brien and
Ellen DeGeneres? They’re both funny, a subjective statement
nonetheless proven by their immense success. Like most
talk shows, both follow a similar format: celebrity guests, top
musical performances, comedic banter, etc. And yet TV is full of
so many more Conans than Ellens.
Aside from the vulgar Chelsea Handler on E!, whose
show is now off-air, and programs like The View that are
created for and primarily watched by bored housewives, most
television talk show hosts are male. We have veterans and
icons like Jay Leno, David Letterman, Larry King, and those that
are still on the air: Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, Conan O’ Brien,
Carson Daly, the Jimmys (Fallon and Kimmel). On the other
hand, there is a questionably low amount of female talk show
hosts. The icon and legend, Oprah Winfrey, cannot be forgotten,
but once she retired, female presence in the talk show world
quickly waned. Women like Suze Orman, Ellen DeGeneres,
Kelly Ripa, and Wendy Williams were left to hold down the fort,
while the male-dominated talk show landscape soldiered on.
A recent issue of Vanity Fair put a spotlight on late
night television, and the photo accompanying the article
featured all men. The article described the insider business
of passing on “late nights” and “daily shows” from host to host,
man to man. Jay Leno gave The Tonight Show to Jimmy Fallon,
“Do these high expectations
mean that people in the media
industry do not find women as
capable of success?
”
who gave Late Night to Seth Meyers. Meanwhile, successful
female entertainers like Margaret Cho or Kathy Griffin weren’t
being considered for these positions.
Of even further importance is the disparity between
daytime and late night shows. Late night, or primetime,
generally generates more viewers, as adults and students are
home from work and school to tune in and keep up ratings. On
the other hand, daytime television can only cater to a smaller
audience. In recent years, Chelsea Handler’s Chelsea Lately was
the only late night show with a female host, and even then
she was on E! rather than a mainstream public broadcasting
channel such as ABC or CBS. In a CNN article, Breeanna Hare
seeks out the reason for the lack of female presence, especially
in late night television, and finds the issue to be, of course,
society’s power imbalance. Hare quotes James Poniewozik
of TIME: “When late night shows began, male-dominated
51
Leno Letterman King O’Brien Daly Fallon Philbin Harvey Kimmel Stewart Maher Carson Cooper Povich Hall Meyers

comedy reflected society’s power balance. Now guy humor is
an increasingly isolated preserve of omega-male movies and
geek-aggressive TV shows piped into man caves…it may hold
out longer than business or law, but culture can change too.”
As movements for gender equality progress and
permeate into law and business, let’s hope that they make a
direct difference in culture as well.
Clearly, the media has been, historically, a maledominated
industry. The history of male-dominated professional
fields runs far back to the early years of gender structures and
roles in America. As these roles become less strictly defined,
especially as gender equality resurges as a prominent national
issue, women are filling larger roles in industries, including
media. The question is, why haven’t they filled these new roles
in a substantial way in the talk show business? In the same
article, CNN interviews the legendary late Joan Rivers, who
says: “It’s a very special art, a very special talent, and you [a
female] have to be very strong. You have to be a great talker, a
great listener and you have to be a fan. And they just haven’t
found the woman with all that yet. But she’s out there.”
The bar is raised high for women in the industry, given
that, in the past, they haven’t had an established network or
foundation. Do these high expectations mean that people in
the media industry do not find women as capable of success?
This can’t be true, especially considering female
comedian powerhouses such as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler,
who have generated millions of fans, hosted several wellknown
award ceremonies, and acted as the leading ladies of
their respective television shows. Women like them are clearly
capable of succeeding at late night hosting—they just haven’t
been given the chance to prove it in the talk-show world, with
its long legacy of white-male-behind-a-desk entertainment.
Regardless, optimism for the emergence of a leading lady
prevails.
I do believe that there is hope, based on the past
phenomenon of the long-standing empire built by The Oprah
Winfrey Show. Winfrey, through her tear-jerking, evocative, and
entertaining talk show, generated millions of viewers for over
twenty years—and it was daytime. She created a new realm of
talk show presence by prefacing legends like Dr. Phil and Suze
Orman. If Oprah is capable of creating a media movement,
aren’t other women capable of hosting a talk show?
In short, the media industry has had an infrastructure
that supports a certain host type—usually men—in the
spotlight. Bringing women into the spotlight would mean a
challenge to this infrastructure, a new era of talk show media,
and, as Joan Rivers said, a risky step that must be taken by the
right female host. That’s why today we are only able to look
at memes of Family Feud’s Steve Harvey and the beautifully
non-aging Anderson Cooper. It’s why we’ve had legends like Dr.
Phil and Maury Povich to fix our seriously messed-up problems,
and Regis Philbin to deceive us with the false hope that we
could be as rich as him. We can all be grateful for this, while
simultaneously demanding that their female equivalents not
pass by undetected. •
photo by Sam Jones
Leno Letterman King O’Brien Daly Fallon Philbin Harvey Kimmel Stewart Maher Carson Cooper Povich Hall Meyers 52

THE KOMINAS
ARE PUNKS
synthesizing cultures with a new brand of punk music
by Jagravi Dave
HipMama, there is much evidence that the independent
music scene is largely homogenously white, to the point of
an almost overt exclusion of other races. The whiteness of
popular, punk, rock, and indie music artists in the U.S. is a gross
misrepresentation of the racial makeup of the country and the
listeners of this music.
The last few years have seen a small rise in racially
diverse punk bands. In defiance of labeling, Just About Music
(JAM) Program House on Cornell’s North Campus decided to
put on a show with music “from people who don’t subscribe
to boxes.” The headliner was a punk band from Massachusetts
called The Kominas. The Kominas, along with other minority
artists such as Mitski and Awkwafina, are slowly filling this gap
in the racial makeup of independent music.
With an Urdu name that roughly translates to
“scumbags” (punks?), The Kominas have received media
attention for their open discussion of Islam and audacious song
names such as “Suicide Bomb The GAP” and “No One’s Gonna
Honor Kill My Baby.” They are simultaneously provocative,
photo courtesy of Eddie Austin
hilarious, ironic, and completely serious. “I am an Islamist/I am
Punk music has always been about rebellion. It is a the Antichrist” sings Basim Usmani (also the bassist) in their
vehicle for artists to engage with issues that are emotional most popular song, “Sharia Law in the USA,” which mirrors both
and difficult to talk about—issues that are often ignored, or
“
affect people who have historically been silenced. One of the
most iconic punk bands, The Clash, used their music to raise
awareness of the problems faced by the working class and
In their loudness and rebellion,
black people in the UK The feminist movement took to punk
music in the form of Riot grrrl, a style in defiance of patriarchal
they are giving a voice to issues
norms that addresses issues of domestic abuse, rape, and
sexuality. Punk music is fiercely independent, epitomizing
of Islamophobia and religious
a do-it-yourself attitude that allows artists to remain free
from the confines of what is appropriate or inoffensive. This
conservatism that are not
”
independence creates within punk a space for pure selfexpression
and self-definition.
addressed in mainstream culture
However, punk music has also historically been white,
a fact for which it has more recently come under much criticism.
Punk has been used as an instrument of movements for racial in lyrics and title “I am an Antichrist/I am an anarchist” from
equality as well as white supremacy, but in both cases it has “Anarchy in the UK” by the Sex Pistols. They are paying homage
been used exclusively by white people. There have not been, to the band to whom they owe the roots of their particular
nor do there exist today, many prominent punk musicians of brand of in-your-face political raucousness. The Kominas stay
color. From Sarah Sahim’s article in Pitchfork, “The Unbearable true to the loud uncomplicated drumming and straightforward
Whiteness of Indie,” to the personal experience Tasha Fierce catchy riffs of punk music. In the DIY spirit of punk, their sound
details in “Black Invisibility and Racism in Punk Rock” for is raw, unpolished, un-infiltrated; Usmani’s voice and words are
53

the focus.
The Kominas are using the ethos of punk to do in
present day America what punk was always meant to: subvert
the mainstream and vocalize problems facing a cultural
subsection that has been neglected. In their loudness and
rebellion, they are giving a voice to issues of Islamophobia and
religious conservatism that are not addressed in mainstream
culture. In their music, all the anger, frustration, confusion,
rebellion is allowed to explode. Yet what they do is not as
simple as just making music. “What we do is sociopolitical
first,” said Usmani in an interview with Colorlines. In some ways,
The Kominas are making a sociopolitical statement simply by
existing. They are not entirely Muslim or Islamic: one member
identifies as atheist. They are not entirely Pakistani: all of them
were born in the U.S., and one of them has Indian parents. “We
have a lot of intersectional elements going on and identify
in a lot of ways,” said Usmani to Paper. Most journalists are
so confused by them that they have to rely on their simplistic
labeling systems to understand them. They have been called
“Islamic punk,” “Muslim punk,” and “Pakistani-Americans,” but
none of these can really encompass the breadth of experience
that The Kominas represent. “We’ve been describing ourselves
as a ‘Post-Colonial punk band’ lately,” said the drummer Karna
Ray in the same interview, highlighting the importance of
self-identification in the rejection of expected categorization.
The term “Post-Colonial” is especially important here in that
it refers to the racially-charged history of the cultures The
Kominas come from, while also acknowledging the racism
resulting from this colonial history that persists today.
Another aspect of their contradictory and complex
existence is their rejection of the idea that punk and religion,
perhaps particularly Islam, are incompatible. “The main problem
we have is with anti-religious punks who cannot see any value
in a religious heritage,” said Usmani in an interview with The
Guardian. Religion is an important aspect of self-identity
and the music of The Kominas is another vehicle through
which they explore what religion means to them, and how to
reconcile this meaning with the society in which they grew
up. “I don’t think Islam is ever going to go away, I’m just trying
to see how it best fits in my life,” said Usmani in an interview
with CNN. Some experts, including Mark LeVine, a professor of
Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Irvine,
who is also a musician and the author of Heavy Metal Islam,
have suggested that it “makes sense why punk has been the
music of choice for young, politically active Muslims... The
straight edge movement in punk, which was about no drugs,
no alcohol, was clean yet very intense and political. It’s a way
for them to rebel against their families in some extreme ways,
yet still be ritualistically, ‘good Muslims.’” The Kominas’s brand
of punk music allows for this reconciliation.
The need for this reconciliation is strongly felt in the
subculture of Asian-Americans that The Kominas themselves
are a part of. The increased immigration of families from South
Asian countries to the United States in recent decades has
created this subculture that faces a crisis of self-identification.
This new generation of young Asian-Americans deals with the
double pressure of retaining the cultural roots it has been
distanced from while attempting to belong to the American
society in which it has grown up. The Kominas are speaking
for and to this generation. An important part of what they do is
break down the stereotypes about Asian-Americans that are so
prevalent, due in large part to the very limited representation
of Asian-Americans in media and popular culture. Children of
immigrants feel a great societal pressure to conform to the
“model minority” status and become an academic, or a doctor,
or an engineer. The Kominas defy this stereotype. For someone
like me—a young adult of Indian heritage who spent her
formative years in the U.S., who doesn’t fit the model minority
myth, who has perhaps always been more comfortable in
alternative culture—they represent the possibility of existing
beyond this label. The Clash were to England’s white working
class what The Kominas are to us: by showing that Asian-
Americans can and do form punk bands, they are giving voice
to our often-neglected experiences and frustrations.
“The Kominas are an American band... We could not
have happened anywhere else,” said Usmani to The Guardian,
raising an important point that all members of the band are
Americans, born in the United States. They have various cultural
heritages, but so do all other Americans. By using punk music,
something they and others have called “white man’s music,”
they are laying claim to their American heritage. By singing in
Punjabi and Urdu, by addressing issues such as Islamophobia,
they are declaring their South Asian heritage. The result is a
culturally synthesized music that South Asian-Americans can
relate to. This cultural mixing combined with the subversive
defiance of punk is raucous and inflammatory. As the guitarist
Shahjehan Khan said to Colorlines, “We are a product of 2015
America and we express what we express unapologetically.
Our identities—both personal and as a group—cannot help but
find themselves in the material that we have produced. We are
doing our best to be as authentic as we can about how we
feel as artists, and that certainly can and should make people
uncomfortable.”
art by Maura Thomas
54

From Breath to Brain
Puffy cotton grows underneath my eyelids
The sheets are deep blue, sticky from last night’s sweat
He reassures me it’s not smoke,
so sink further into the mattress and look around.
Thumbtack holes in the walls
Galaxy mobile dangling, our solar system in the breeze
Then it starts with a tingle.
Cotton swabs swell
Then E. No, G…? G….? G sharp?
“Catch me I’m falling.”
The floor vibrates with each pitch
little kernels of electric popcorn.
My fingers brush notes in the air
Swaths of turquoise and white
Bounce off the corners
Hitting the edges of Pluto
Splintering against nebula grits.
The harmonies pile on as the notes spark more movement
He blows the vapor into animated air
nauseated at the gray dribbling off his chin
my stomach rolls over in leftover strawberry acid
the notes pounce and land on the top of the furniture
Catch me I’m falling—
He wraps me in, tucking the corners to make sure I don’t spill out.
What do you see?
I open my mouth
but B flat. A sharp. Key to my lock, my soul is Kiii Eleichaa.
He laughs but I don’t understand.
55
poems by Ariella Reidenberg

Erosion: Part 1
What cities are destroyed
when grains erode from beneath my toes?
How many colonies and civilizations in one granule?
And how many times do we play god
making sand castles out of stars?
An hourglass on my desk,
plucked from beaches to be
a servant of time. Screams
a sound only Horton
could hear, forced
to tumble
through
a
tiny
hole
emptying
dead ruins into
the vacuumed bowl
below, falling
thousands of—
there is no measurement
to scale the size—
Yet,
Catastrophic.
but believe me it is
they rebuild and settle only
Erosion: Part 2
My friends ask me why I care so much
about sand
to be turned again.
My father asks why I do not analyze my theories under a microscope
My mother says, “You think that’s big…
…wait ‘til you look at tide pools!”
I ask myself, why the incoming waves are genocidal
But dumping a block of sodium into the gorge
and watching the walls crumble
is fun.
Like a pencil to a wooden desk,
the graphite of my mind smears dark streaks onto walls
painted over until
it’s graffiti to me.
I hold a bead of sand between my thumb and forefinger
rolling gently, wondering if it can get any smaller
tiny enough to clog a pore and large enough to taste between your teeth
it plays its part anonymously.
Yet,
back on the beach, I feel the ocean kidnapping each grit beneath my feet
and I hear screaming.
56

hell is real
hell is a fog
hell is dissonance
and confusion
I am a fisherman
but am no fisher of men
I was fished out of the sea
and I was not deposited on land again
or sea
the fog
is in the insidious stares
of your loved ones
in the barbed circumlocution
of your priest rabbi bishop
in the calculated confusion
of the papers papers papers and forms
it is formed by
your mind
“hell is real”
the billboard
that chilled you
on the warm summer day
as you drove into the sunset highlighter orange
(middle school trivia
mitochondria and Marbury v Madison
dancing in Technicolor)
pop trash singing its seductive mindless numbing
(anesthetic bread and circus
feeding you
prepping you for combat
waged against your own)
windows (and defenses) down
breeze running gentle fingers
through your hair
(tangling here disentangling there
caressing singing whipping
more alive and vibrant vivid vivacious vicious
than you can ever hope to be)
is not real
the shiver down your spine is real
the misting of your breath on the glass is real
the paper cut is real (the scar is not)
the memory of the ache is real (the ache is not)
the fog is real
fake leather
fake leather and cigarette smoke
caught in my hair
as I sat on the curb
outside 7-Eleven
sepia slow motion laugh tracks
childhoods caught behind loud lyrics
taste like cinnamon
and cyanide
I thought myself a god
but remain a sheep in wolves’ clothing
artlessly sharpened teeth
catching in the soft pink of my lips
57
throw a line in
hope to find something concrete
stone to build your house upon
but you are not on land or sea
you find for the foundation of your construction
only sand
the sand is not real
poems by Naroé

that was my name
They say the devil’s in the details or maybe it was god or maybe I just hate detail oriented people. I’m not too sure
and I’m not too sure I care either. If the Buddhists are right and god is in everything or if the Catholics are right
and I’m going to straight to hell (I stole candy from a blind man once haven’t we all) well , there’s not much to
it either way. I can see myself meeting the devil. Don’t be sad for me. I see you there sighing under your breath.
You. Are. Projecting. Sympathizing. Sympathizing as if that were even possible in this godforsaken world. This
godforsaken world. This godforsaken.
Godforsaken.
God.
Forsaken.
Where are You anymore? God? On the corner of first and Amistad? Hah see that fucking pop culture reference
when I should be looking for You. I can’t see the details I can’t see the trees for the forest and it is so beautiful. You
are not here. Or maybe You just aren’t. Maybe You are just a hole that was left in my chest
by, I don’t know , by the fuckin’ commies. Heaven knows this country’s always blaming everything on them (and
what am I but a product of my surroundings).
I never wanted to feel sad. But there is a certain exquisiteness. There are small sharp pinpricks that caress, that
linger, that fade into the sting behind your eyes. And , you know , your body always accepts it more easily than you
do. You hold your breath fighting that saltiness but eventually the sweet sweet H2fuckingO spills down your face
and all you can feel is the slickness on your cheeks. And your body heaves its long awaited rasping breath your
lungs can’t get enough oxygen.
I mean , yes ,
happiness is nice too
(yes , the happiness that comes from our commercially driven drivel , our McDonalds playgrounds littered with
happy meals , our Southern Silk need to be touched and touched and sexed)
but there is nothing like the deep soul crushing feel-it-in-your-bones heaviness that comes with sadness.
Real sadness I mean.
I forget to run from it
I feed it sometimes. And boy , doesn’t it feel good.
My eyesight’s not 20/20 I’ve never been good at sweating the small stuff , man. I never wanted to be (that’s what
I tell myself anyways). I wanted the foolish fucking prince to slay the fucking dragon I wanted my departure
from mortality immortalized I wanted to duel the damned firstborn for the desperate peasants I wanted to
lead deadly armies I wanted to revive the dead that didn’t deserve to die.
I wanted to look at You.
I wanted to look upon Your countenance delight
in Your presence.
I would have cowered before You!
You said Your kingdom was at hand but I can only see the multitude of trees.
I can only see the forest and whether You are god or the devil I can’t see you.
58

Judgement Day
by Spencer Holm
Ralph is a reason to keep hand sanitizer on hand.
I was so green it’s not even funny. No laundry machine, no dishwasher, I didn’t even have a fridge.
-Not even a fridge?
No way man. I didn’t need one. My liquor store had a walk-in beer cave, and I was so green I would get a six-pack there and
drink it before it got warm. Oh and God-damn, the number of bottles I returned! What do you think, four thousand? A million?
I don’t even know…
-Five cents apiece right? Oh and cans too, those count. Yeah, I used to see you walking up State Street with a grocery cart
overflowing.
Say, what are you writing there? Ralph grabbed the arm-rests of his chair but his elbows shook too much to lift him up.
-Oh nothing to worry about, just paperwork I do for everyone.
What kind of paperwork?
-Uh, tallies and yes or no questions. It helps me see trends at the end of each year, or trends in age or race. Like here’s a question
you just answered: “Candidate demonstrates appreciation for environment.” You got a five out of five on that one! I
haven’t looked at your carbon footprint report, but I’m sure you scored well above the mean. Let’s see, on a scale of one to
five, how many times does the candidate exercise per week?
Ralph started to relax in his arm-chair, a simple chrome-painted plastic frame with worn blue pads beneath his butt and behind his
back. The rigid frame held his craned neck uncomfortable enough to keep him awake. There was no way he would fall asleep
with the blindingly florescent ceiling above him.
So workouts on the weekends don’t count?
-No, no it includes the whole week.
But it’s on a scale of one to five. It would make more sense if it were on a scale of one to seven. What about the workouts on
the weekends?
-The weekend workouts count.
Then I’d give myself a seven.
-But it’s on a scale of one to five.
So I should get extra credit? I never took a day off for twenty years.
-Never took a day off of what?
The grocery cart! I pushed that thing from sunrise ‘till…
-But, but that’s not what I mean by working out. I’m talking about going for a run, or playing pick-up basketball.
Pick-up basketball? Are you kidding?
-That’s just an example. I guess, well I’ve never really thought about a grocery cart as a mode of exercise. But go ahead Ralph,
tell me about it.
Ralph returned to his semi-relaxed position, his neck draped over the backrest’s chrome-painted plastic frame. Well, I got that cart at
a junkyard. By the way, give me a five for theft. I know that question’s in there. But I never stole anything, I swear. Or would
you give me a zero for theft? Because I stole zero things in my life. That cart was gonna get scrapped, and fifty others too.
They were left over when Wegmans bought Acme. And Wegmans wanted black shopping carts that didn’t get dirty, or look
dirty, I guess. So they bought all those new black carts. Man they were slick. They never rusted, and those smooth rolling
wheels, dual-pivots in the front. Man, I wanted one of those, but I’m not a thief. I just waited by the junkyard and when
59

those silver Acme carts rolled out, I picked out the smoothest roller. Yea she squeaked, but she was with me for twenty
years. Betty had a way about her. I swear sometimes it was me who was getting pushed by her!
-Betty is your cart?
Yea man! Don’t judge me, I just, I mean we had a lot of time together. Oh and I was saying that we exercised a lot of endurance.
On Thursdays, we walked all the way out to Varna. You should mark that down as a workout. Me and the owner of a
restaurant there had a deal that I could take all his empty champagne bottles if I picked up all the cigarette butts outside
his bar. Those champagne bottles man, they’re extra thick so they don’t explode. The glass is so thick that all the pressure
from the bubbles in those bottles, all that pressure pops out the cork. You know, the path of least resistance and all. I got a
buck a bottle for ‘em when I recycled down at Wegmans.
-Wait, what did you say about picking up cigarette butts?
Oh yea, that’s what I did for the champagne bottles. But hell, I would’ve done it for free because sometimes the butts were
half-full. I call them shorties. Like people took a drag or two and realized how drunk they were. Then they toss those short
cigarettes into the parking lot, and as long as it wasn’t raining, I found a handful of half-smoked cigarettes every time.
Man I made out like a bandit with a cart full of champagne bottles, smoking shorties all the way to Wegmans.
-Ohhh, that explains it.
Ralph watched as his interviewer scribbled frantically in-between glances to a computer screen. Say, man what are you talking
about?
-Yeah, hold on one second. I just got your carbon footprint report. While it was loading I noticed a discrepancy. Here, look at
this. God turned his computer towards Ralph, who now sat at the edge of his plastic chair. The green spots on the map are all
of the cans and bottles you picked up. Oh, those dark green ones look like litter you picked up on the sidewalk. You see,
that’s great, that’s what it takes to get into Heaven. Fifty thousand Flower Power bottles, that’s a record! But those red
dots, you see, all the way from that restaurant in Varna to downtown by Wegmans. Yeah, those are the cigarette butts you
dropped, no you LITTERED, after you smoked them. Once a cigarette it smoked, it becomes property of the smoker. Unfortunately,
even though you picked up those butts, you ended up tossing them, LITTERING them. If we zoom in, we can see
the quantity. Yea, over six thousand smoked and littered by you, Ralph, in the restaurant’s parking lot. Damn, three-hundred
fifty dropped down the road within a fifty-foot perimeter of Belle Sherman Elementary School. This is not good, Ralph.
But that’s right on the way! How was I supposed to know I shouldn’t put them there?
-Because it’s an elementary school Ralph! Damn, you were doing so well until this popped up. All these infractions in a school
zone are multiplied by one hundred, and oh no… it looks like twenty times in your life, school-children at recess saw you
smoking. Do you know what kind of effect that has on a child’s brain development? And even worse, two of those times
they saw you drinking out of a paper bag! Ralph, come on man! Those are multiplied by five thousand!
But what about all my cans and bottles? Don’t those cancel out?
-Yeah, about that. That’s not how the math works on Earth is it? I mean, you get five cents for a bottle, but in New York State
a cigarette costs almost a dollar apiece! I wish I could help you out, but that’s just how the math works. At the end of the
day, your life just doesn’t add up. But hey, you’re not the one to blame, Ralph. I’ll give you another shot down on Earth. Let
me see… Oh perfect, my computer’s telling me a Mrs. Julie Scott is about to give birth any minute. She was sneaking shots
and tossing shorties all throughout her pregnancy. Good luck Ralph, I mean, little baby Scott!
60

kitsch
JOE SHELTON and Cayuga Press
Maureen Kelly and Liz Gipson
thank you!
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
robert ochshorn, our
throwback kitsch web guru
Georgia O’Keeffe & Andy Warhol
our advisor, Michael Koch
The Student Activities
Funding Commission

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