February 22, 2022

February 22, 2022 | 34st.com

Between the Lines of Philly’s Radical Reading Scene

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 5 A glimpse into WilCaf

10 ASAM's 25th Anniversary

12 Local radical bookstores

19 Mourning Mary Tyler Moore

On neighborhood bookstores, escapism, and the value of reading

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used to spend a lot of time in bookstores—well, more like one in particular. Nestled between a consignment store and my mom’s go–to tobacco place was a used bookstore that had everything from history books about the Cold War (likely donated by someone’s grandpa) to trashy romance novels (courtesy of someone else’s grandma).

I would sit in the fiction section for hours, devouring anything short enough to finish there and taking home whatever wasn’t. The old man who ran the shop would always greet me with a smile and ask how my day was going, even if his deteriorating memory sometimes obscured my name from his mind. The faint smell of dust mixed with potpourri became my favorite scent in the world, and I would beg my mom to take me along on her weekly cigarette restock just so I could browse the shelves for 20 minutes while she did it.

When that bookstore closed, I cried. Not because I loved the location—truthfully, I didn’t care where the books were located. I was mourning the safety and tranquility I felt sitting between the stacks, the feeling of being immersed in a world so different from my own, even if only for a few hours.

As I grew up, reading transformed from a tool of escapism to one of

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reflection. I became a nonfiction junkie, reading everything from pop feminist texts to critical theory to self–help books. But hunting for these titles at the chain book retailer that replaced my favorite local shop wasn’t the same, and I slowly stopped going at all.

I’ve always felt that reading is a deeply introspective practice; it forces you to process your emotions and think about your own life in ways that few other mediums can. And as much as I joke that the internet has demolished my attention span, I think the real reason I read fewer books is because I feel more comfortable in my identity than I did as a child. I don’t have to rely on novels to validate my deepest thoughts when I am finally able to say them aloud.

Honestly though, I don't think I ever stopped reading—I just started reading different things. Some of my favorite pieces of journalism are thousands of words long—feats of attention in their own right. Much like a biography or memoir, a long profile is an unparalleled glimpse into another person’s inner world, but with the added color of little quirks that only a writer might notice.

That’s what I hope this issue of Street—and all of them, frankly— can offer. Our feature seeks to answer the question of what radical neighborhood bookstores have to offer in the digital age, digging deep into the origins and futures of four local bookstores. A piece about fanfic lets us understand why an oft maligned genre of writing means so much to so many people, and our profile of Williams Cafe here on campus gives a behind–the–scenes look at something many of us take for granted.

SSSF,

Fanfiction Emily

Illustration by Lilian Liu 34TH STREET EXECUTIVE BOARD Emily White, Editor–in–Chief: white@34st.com Eva Ingber, Campus Editor: ingber@34st.com Walden Green, Culture Editor: green@34st.com Arielle Stanger, Assignments Editor: stanger@34st. com

34TH STREET STAFF Features Staff Writers: Sejal Sangani, Angela Shen, Jiahui (Emilee) Gu, Avalon Hinchman

34TH STREET EDITORS Mira Sydow, Features Editor Meg Gladieux, Features Editor Julia Esposito, Word on the Street Editor Jean Paik, Focus Editor Kira Wang, Style Editor Alana Bess, Ego Editor Evan Qiang, Music Editor Irma Kiss–Barath, Arts Editor Cindy Zhang, Film & TV Editor Andrew Yang, Multimedia Editor Kira Wang, Audience Engagement Editor

Style Beat Writers: W. Anthony Pérez, Anna Hochman, Shelby Abayie, Naima Small

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Focus Beat Writers: Gabrielle Galchen, Sheil Desai, Connor Nakamura, Lina Chihoub, Sruthi Srinivas

Music Beat Writers: Derek Wong, Grayson Catlett, Kate Ratner, Samara Himmelfarb Arts Beat Writers: Jessa Glassman, Kaliyah Dorsey, Emily Maiorano

Staff Writers: Natalia Castillo, Chloe Hunt, Xinyi (Cindy) Jiang, Emma Marks, Shahana Banerjee Multimedia Associates: Roger Ge, Max Mester, Derek Wong, Andrea Barajas, Rachel Zhang Audience Engagement Associates: Kayla Cotter, Yamila Frej, Vidur Saigal, Caleb Crain, Katherine Han, Daniel Kochupura, Emily Xiong, Gemma Hong THIS ISSUE Copy Editor: Brittany Darrow Design Editor: Tyler Kliem Cover Design by Collin Wang

Film & TV Beat Writers: Jacob A. Pollack, Kayla Cotter, Julia Polster Ego Beat Writers: Anjali Kishore, Vidur Saigal, Grace Busser, Ariella Linhart

34TH STREET MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 22, 2022

CONTACTING 34TH STREET

MAGAZINE If you have questions, comments, complaints or letters to the editor, email Emily White, Editor– in–Chief, at white@34st.com. You can also call us at (215) 422–4640. www.34st.com © 2021 34th Street Magazine, The Daily Pennsylvanian, Inc. No part may be reproduced in whole or in part without the express, written consent of the editors (but I bet we will give you the a–okay.) All rights reserved.

34th Street Magazine is published by The Daily Pennsylvanian, Inc., 4015 Walnut St., Philadelphia, Pa., 19104, every Tuesday.

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WORD ON THE STREET

The Birds and the Bees—For Brown People How surveying South Asian American communities at Penn helped me understand culturally defined gaps in sex education | SIMRAN CHAND Illustration by Kilahra Lott

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lthough the table was meant to seat six, 11 of us squeezed shoulder to shoulder in 1920 Commons Dining Hall. As conversation shifted to binge–worthy Netflix shows, I shouted my recent favorite: “Sex Education.” One friend immediately snickered, while another laughingly retorted, “You’re telling me someone teaches you about sex?!” There was a chorus of agreement around the table.

I fired off dozens of follow– up questions to their dismissive, almost spiteful responses to a television show recommendation. Quickly, I discovered no one at the table had received a sex education from their parents. My personal experience was a painfully awkward series of conversations, but conversations nonetheless. The “birds and the bees talk,” which felt omnipresent in American media, was absent from my peers’ upbringings.

The students at that Commons table were, like me, Indian American. Not one of them had heard the word “sex” leave their parents’ lips. We live in a country

where media, literature, film, and other forms of entertainment often feel saturated with sex. We attend a university with a pervasive hook–up culture. Yet this group of individuals were never sat down by their parents to explain why puberty begins, how intercourse can take place, or what safe, pleasurable sex looks like.

Riveted by this disconnect, I found myself considering if cultural beliefs or immigration histories helped curate this phenomenon. I wondered if this silence had long–lasting impacts on relationships and overall well–being.

And where better to investigate these questions than the vibrant South Asian American community here at Penn?

It began via GroupMe. I spammed every cohort of brown people at Penn I could find— South Asia Society, Penn Masti, Penn Masala, Penn Pakistan Society, ASAM courses, even business and social frats with large South Asian representation— urging them to participate in an online inventory of their sexual education and the evolution of

their sexual knowledge, comfortability, and activity.

By no means was this an easy task. My participants had to trust me to safeguard their most well– kept secrets. Friends in pre–existing social circles revealed to me their broken family relationships and their closeted sexual identities. Complete strangers divulged scandalous details of their sexual experiences, and acquaintances confessed shame surrounding their complete lack of sexual activity. My role as the researcher, as a fellow student at Penn, and as an active member in several South Asian American spaces inherently presented obstacles to collecting data. Despite any distrust that may have dissuaded some from participating, I was able to gather responses from nearly 50 Penn undergraduates.

This alone reaffirmed my goals in exploring this topic because my peers were willing to take the risk, spend the time, and trust me in this information collection process. After completing this quantitative survey, eight Penn students offered me a deeper in-

sight to their experiences, their traumas, and their growth surrounding sexuality through one– on–one interviews.

Two key findings were immediately apparent. One, most brown adolescents do not receive a sexual education talk from their parents. Two, college functions as a gateway for brown students to explore their sexual desires.

All of the stories I collected point to a glaring lack of familial sexual education in the upbringings of this demographic. Of 48 brown Penn students, only three received a sex talk. Across the board, brown parents were not talking about sex. However, a lack of conversation does not necessarily mean a lack of communication. Numerous comments on my Google Form reported a similar phenomenon: despite rarely engaging in discussion, South Asian immigrant parents still make their viewpoints on sex abundantly clear. Some parents fast–forwarded through kissing or sex scenes in movies, inadvertently marring sexual acts with stigma, while some stated

outright, “You will be abstinent until marriage.”

According to professor Nazreen Bacchus of CUNY Queens College, these subliminal messages or restrictive comments convey morals and beliefs from parent to child, which unavoidably construct ethnically defined sexual boundaries. My own parents disallowed seemingly innocent shows like Hannah Montana or iCarly after they witnessed a kissing scene and deemed the show thoroughly inappropriate.

Without any spoken words, I understood that I was not allowed to have a crush, a boyfriend, or anything of that nature anytime soon. Even after my parents were finally privy to the existence of a high school boyfriend, they rarely asked about him, which inadvertently demonstrated that it was not something to be discussed.

My relationship felt like such a taboo topic that my parents did not even know we had broken up until three months after the fact.

These (real or imagined) boundaries not only deter conversation, but also have the

FEBRUARY 22, 2022 34TH STREET MAGAZINE

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WORD ON THE STREET

power to inform sexual decision making. The silence and restrictive messaging teaches brown adolescents that sex is illicit, not to be discussed or explored. For those who obeyed, they found themselves inexperienced and uncomfortable, both before and after arriving at Penn. One survey respondent described that because of parental expectations, “I was terrified of kissing someone for the first time and being a bad Muslim. I was especially terrified about losing my virginity.” For those who rebelled, they entangled themselves in a web of lies. In order to reconcile their parents’ disapproval, many respondents felt they had to resort to deception.

I was no different. In high school, you could find me sneaking around, concocting excuses, and blatantly lying to my parents as a way to meet the ethnic expectations they set forth, while also exploring romantic interests and expressing myself sexually. I pretended to be at field hockey practice when I was really on a third date. After a fiasco that resulted in my iMessages being sent to the family iPad, I relied heavily on TextFree for all clandestine communication. Most of the times that I was at “Starbucks” or the “library,” it was code for “random parking lot” or “boyfriend’s house.” From fake contact names to elaborate cover stories, my brown peers and I were masters

of deceit. I used to reflect on these seemingly toxic behaviors with guilt, but I now understand that we were simply using our means to navigate the incongruous standards of our bicultural identity.

Penn, however, offered respite—to myself and my brown peers. With the ethnically prescribed sexual boundaries left behind, the plethora of people, knowledge, and open discussion in college created an opportunity to learn about, become comfortable with, and experience sexuality. My survey’s data measured this cohort’s increase in sexual activity, knowledge level, and comfortability with sexual expression from high school to college. These developments were often attributed by participants to physical distance from parents and the new environment offered by a university. Living in the Quad or Hill or even KCECH, away from our parents’ watchful eyes, we could go where we wanted, see who we wanted, do what we wanted. With my boundaries dissolved, I felt fully independent and autonomous for the first time in my life. Armed with this newfound sense of freedom, I (and many of my peers) were empowered to engage in new romantic and sexual experiences.

In short, Penn enables its brown students to connect with their sexuality.

Yet, sexual explorations in col-

lege does not immediately bridge the cultural gap. Nearly all of my interviewees reported lying to their parents — ranging from virginal status to significant others to sexual orientation — while exploring those things at Penn.

Unfortunately, the problem extends far beyond a few white lies. From conditions going undiagnosed to complications with drug prescriptions, several students I interviewed experienced potentially harmful ramifications to their physical, mental, and sexual health. For example, one student Tanvi* was barred by her parents from receiving the HPV vaccine. She had to actively maneuver around her parents in order to secretly receive this series of injections. Not only did my interviewees describe precarious medical situations, but they also had to deal with the mental anxiety and risky sexual behaviors that accompanied them.

It feels easy to jump to conclusions that South Asian migrant parents are culturally conservative, but much of it boils down to differing intergenerational priorities. According to professor Miliann Kang of UMass Amherst, totalizing these parents as strict or repressive would be unfair to their lived experiences. Parenting choices are not without reason.

These parents are not sanctimonious villains, actively steering their children away from sexual temptations. They likely did not

receive a sex talk themselves, may not want to encourage sexual behavior, or may maintain some degree of traditional gendered expectations from their home country. The decisions they make are informed by their lived experience of adhering to South Asian gender norms, learning South Asian values, and practicing South Asian religions. How can they be expected to deliver a talk that is normative by American standards, but unfathomable by some South Asian standards?

Ultimately, my research revealed a differential prioritization of sexual communication between South Asian immigrant parents and their American– born children, stemming from the disparate lived experiences of the two generations. Coming to terms with this truth was pivotal for my own relationship with my parents. I finally understood why they behaved the way they did, and rather than blaming them, I empathize with them. After I shared the topic of my thesis with them, my parents immediately expressed remorse for any instances where I felt they were strict or unapproachable. They assured me that despite any differing opinions we may have, they always want me to be comfortable talking to them. While it felt awkward at first, we now have open conversations about relationships, contraceptive methods, and marriage—discus-

sions I never dreamed of having with them.

Even after I submitted my completed thesis, my project still felt unfinished. I realized I developed an unmet personal goal over the course of my research: I want to start conversations.

Discourse with my interviewees and my parents vitalized my passion to carry this project a step further. Whether it’s with friends, partners, therapists, or even parents, discussing sex, intimacy, fears, and feelings allows us to slowly remove the taboo we have learned to associate with these topics. I want the students who still felt uncomfortable to engage with their discomfort and explore the positive aspects of sexual expression. I want students who feel unable to talk to their families to find solidarity in shared experiences with others. I want South Asian parents to hear about this work and take on the task of educating their children.

The “birds and the bees” are normal, natural, and important components of humanity.

Lifting stigma and engaging in free–flowing conversations with my friends and my family has enabled me to form healthier and stronger relationships with them, with significant others, and with myself. In the coming year, I hope to continue sharing my findings and encouraging these discussions to embolden others to do the same.

*Names have been changed to preserve anonymity

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34TH STREET MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 22, 2022

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The Happiest Place on Campus: A Glimpse Into WilCaf

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WilCaf goes above and beyond when it comes to both coffee and composting. | ANJALI KISHORE

t Williams Café, the student–run coffee shop that dominates the first floor of Williams Hall, the coffee is strong, the chatter is incessant, and the energy is buzzing. It’s really one of those places that people tend to stumble into one day and never look back.

Because what’s not to love?

For WilCaf executive director Sarah Finkelstein (C '22), it was hardly love at first sight. "As a [first year]," she reminisces, "I never came to WilCaf, because I was on a dining plan and didn’t want to spend my money." Now, she's the one who manages the money that caffeine–fiend students eagerly spend on a myriad of items, from the tried–and– true iced coffee to locally made pastries. At the end of her freshman year, Sarah applied to be a barista. ”When I started working there, it was just everything I needed,” she says. Since then, it's been a central part of her Penn experience, behind the coffee bar and beyond. “It’s very much a connection–building place. All of us being students makes it less ‘I am visiting a coffee shop’ and more like ‘I am engaging with my community at Penn,’" Sarah says.

Brendan Lui (C '22) began frequenting the cafe in his freshman year because he had classes in Williams. Now, the political science student is the cafe’s training manager and social chair, “because as a cafe, we’ve got one of those,” he chuckles. But of course they do. WilCaf is a social space just as much as it’s a food establishment, student association, or small business. What is it about this place that draws people in?

For Sarah, it all comes down to one thing: It’s run by Penn students for Penn students. “We cre-

ate a really approachable energy, maybe because we’re all students, but it’s also a product of the people we have working there,” she explains. “People like to feel they’re having a human interaction when they go into a coffee shop, which is something that we prioritize a lot at WilCaf.” When

coffee grounds are really nutrient rich and regarded as a really great composting source for farms and in local urban circular economies," she says.

Masterson first reached out through a listserv of urban farmers and offered the cafe's used coffee grounds to whoever might

room farmers typically have to use grains or sawdust to grow mushrooms, which entails a high–energy sterilization process.

However, WilCaf's already–sterilized coffee grounds allow him to skip that step, minimizing the amount of energy necessary to grow his product. Masterson

Illustration by Erin Ma people enter the cafe, they can feel the positive energy radiating from behind the counter.

WilCaf’s new program to connect with local farmers in West Philly to compost coffee grounds is a great example of how the staff themselves are able to contribute to grow WilCaf. Thanks to senior Maeve Masterson, the cafe is now able to directly interact with community members outside of the Penn bubble while also benefiting as a business through their newfound composting initiative.

An environmental studies major, Maeve has been interested in composting for most of her life and decided to take action.

"I've generally been into composting for most of my life and realized that there's tons of waste at the café from our spent coffee grounds that we would dump into the trash, I remembered that

find them useful for compost.

Now, WilCaf has partnered with two Philly farmers: mushroom farmer Jonah, who is experimenting with indoor growing and hydroponics with hopes of being able to get his sustainably sourced, energy–efficient mushrooms into the kitchens of Philadelphia restaurants, and community grower Hannah, who volunteers at Woodlands and Warrington Community Gardens, where she uses the cafe's ground to contribute to inner–city gardening initiatives.

The two farmers drop buckets off at the café and the staff fills them with used coffee grounds.

Then, when they're full, Masterson texts them and they come pick the buckets up themselves.

The composting initiative has had an immediate impact.

According to Jonah, mush-

gets audibly excited discussing Jonah's projects and his plans to distribute the mushrooms and the proceeds from his sales into the community, and it's clear that this is a passion project as much as a business initiative.

WilCaf is a place with room for everyone's passions. That element of freedom and space for expression directly contributes to the cafe as a community space; it's comforting to walk in somewhere and see a familiar face behind the bar, open to having a conversation about your T–shirt or a shared class. But beyond that, it's critical to the business aspect of the cafe.

Masterson's idea, borne from her unique perspective on food waste and production, has clipped the cafe's margins significantly. Previously, they had been using a paid composting service

to do the pickup and distribution of used coffee grounds. Now, thanks to Masterson's inspiration and WilCaf's collective efforts to contribute to the composting process, the cafe “no longer has to pay for a service that had, ultimately, become unsustainable for us as a small business,” explains Sarah.

Balancing the role of WilCaf as a business and WilCaf as a community space is something that Sarah found challenging at first, especially coming into her role as executive director during the pandemic. After being shut down for almost a year and a half due to COVID–19, people were just happy to be back.

When it comes down to it, a visit to WilCaf is much more than just a caffeine kick. “One of my professors said, ‘I feel like WilCaf is one of those places on campus where people forget they have things to do and jobs to apply for and assignments to finish.

It’s just everyone coming and grabbing a coffee.’ I totally agree with that. I think it’s just one of those fun spaces,” Sarah says.

The people of WilCaf and their personalities are embedded in the way the business runs, the products they put out, and the events they have to offer us as a student body. It's a place to satiate the body (hurrah, hurrah, chai latte!), mind (open mics soon to come, of course), and spirit (just think of the rush of trudging into Williams to endure your last class of the day, only to see a group of your friends huddled in the corner, sipping and spilling the tea). Probably a good portion of the people who are reading this article right now are part of the WilCaf following.

But for those of you who don't know, now you know. WilCaf is the place to be.

F E B R UA RY 2 2 , 2 0 2 2 3 4 T H S T R E E T MAG A Z I N E

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EGO

JULIA PARK HOMETOWN: Long Island, N.Y. MAJOR:

Urban studies with a minor in chemistry

ACTIVITIES:

Service Link, UNAIDS at Penn, Fellowship with Grace Covenant Church, work with the Urban Studies Department

Between volunteering at church and addressing housing disparities in Philly, Julia Park keeps busy. | VIDUR SAIGAL 34th STREET: Tell us a little bit about your senior thesis project.

JULIA PARK: My senior thesis is about addressing housing instability in Philadelphia.

I did a case study looking at a housing program spearheaded

by Temple University Hospital.

Over the past decade, housing has been seen as a social determinant of health. Whether you have housing or not largely determines your quality of life and your quality of health. Unfortunately, not a lot of hospitals address homelessness, specifically housing instability in its various forms. I think when we think of homelessness, we immediately think of somebody that we see on the street, but there are various types of housing instability, like people who are couch–surfing, people who are at risk of eviction, or various populations that are falling through the cracks.

The case study at Temple University Hospital was one of the first housing health collaborations spearheaded in Philly in collaboration with two insurance companies. The study asked the question of how we address housing in regards to 6

health care. My thesis was an analysis of the program, looking at how effective it was and its impact. It was very encouraging to see that Philly was one of the few cities jumpstarting progress in the space of housing health collaborations.

STREET: Tell us about your involvement with the religious community at Penn.

JP: I grew up in a Christian household. Like many people who have grown up in Christian households, college was the first time I was presented with the question and opportunity of whether I wanted to keep going to church or whether I wanted to no longer attend. I checked out Grace Covenant Church once I got to campus, and I decided that the religious community remained important to me. And I would say that being involved with Christian Fellowship has taught me how to take ownership of my own faith while also finding and defining my own beliefs and morals. When we get to college we're told college is where we learn to become an adult. We’re told it's where we get life experience.

I think part of becoming

34TH STREET MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 22, 2022

an adult has involved defining my own beliefs. I have learned what my priorities in life are and what's important to me.

In the midst of my professional and academic pursuits, I found myself questioning and challenging the Christian theology that I grew up with. Overall, I am less afraid to ask questions and I have been able to explore theology. I have claimed ownership of my own faith and become more of an inquisitive thinker. I built off my own faith by going into places where I can ask these questions about religion with peers who were going through the same struggles. I think this was super helpful in learning the value of community. I think Christianity has really been important to me; it is one of the first labels I would define myself with.

My growth alongside Christianity has made me bold and able to ask tough questions both inside and outside the classroom.

STREET: Out of all your extracurricular activities, which would you say has had the biggest impact on your experience at Penn?

JP: I would say Service

Link. Service Link was one of the reasons I changed my major to urban studies. I was previously studying biochemistry, but as I was listening to the stories of medical patients and their struggles, I realized it made me want to take action.

My heart broke because of the numerous inequities that exist in the city of Philadelphia and the discrimination that a lot of people around us face. Meeting and talking to these individuals and seeing how their lives are actually impacted by systemic racism and other inequities in health care makes you really think about how we can help.

As a student in Penn, how can I help the larger community of Philadelphia? Service Link has made me a better listener and helped me see humanity.

Additionally, it has changed the way I think and interact with people. I'm really thankful for the program.

STREET: Who are some of the professionals in the field of urban studies that you’ve been able to speak to?

JP: Urban studies introduced me to the nonprofit space in Philly, which I was previously unaware of. I switched

into an urban studies major late sophomore year. Even though I started a bit late, I was able to meet the CEO of Why Not Prosper, Rev. Michelle Simmons. She is the epitome of a boss woman, and she helps support formerly incarcerated women. She eases their transition and integration back into society when coming out of prison. She's one of the coolest people I've met. I admire her work, her drive, and her passion. And I actually think working in the nonprofit space in Philly has really expanded my perspective on what makes up a city, and also Penn's place in the larger city of Philadelphia.

STREET: How have you found balance in everything you do?

JP: I think [it’s important to] pause to actually think about what you're doing and take intentional time to evaluate where you are spending most of your time. Is that reflective of what you care about?

You know, I think Penn is a really fast paced environment.

And there's always this notion of how you always have to be doing something, you always

EGO

about? You know, I think Penn is a really fast paced environment. And there's always this notion of how you always have to be doing something, you always have to be productive, whatever that means. You always have to be making the best use of your time. I think in the midst of the busyness, we often forget why we're doing the things that we're doing. You know, I think finding spaces to be able to pause, reflect, and really evaluate your

life is helpful.

I think for me, part of this activity [of ] pausing and reflecting is giving thanks for all the things that you have.

Practicing gratitude is actually a really great way to find balance or even sanity, in the midst of busyness. It takes a lot of intentionality to actually pause and think about what you're doing, and how you're living. I think intentionality is the one word answer I would give. I think actually, some-

thing that's largely a part of that is showing yourself grace.

I think showing yourself grace is critical and finding balance or any type of rhythm in life.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my friends, mentors, and professors who’ve always been a steady support network for me. I also have friends who love me so well and mentors and professors who continue to challenge me and help me grow.

Doing life within a commu-

nity makes all the difference.

STREET: What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned during your time at Penn?

JP: Compassion goes a long way. I have learned how to be compassionate to others and how to receive compassion.

STREET: What's next for you after Penn?

JP: I would consider myself a generalist, so I have many [insurances] and many things

I enjoy. I wouldn't say I have a specific thing I find great passion and joy in, but I am interested in the public health space. I want to improve people's quality of life. Whether that be through medicine or through policy, I'm not really sure. Medical school and working in the nonprofit space are also of interest to me.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

LIGHTNING ROUND STREET: Favorite study spot on campus?

JK: Beiler's Doughnuts and Annenberg Library STREET: There are two types of people at Penn …

JP: People who care and people who don't care STREET: And you are?

JP: Well, I can’t say I don’t care. You can take that for what you would like.

STREET: Last song you listened to?

JP: "Help My Unbelief" by PsalmCollective STREET: Last thing you cooked?

JP: Dakdoritang (Korean Spicy Chicken Stew) STREET: Death row meal?

JK: Kimchi–jjigae (Kimchi Stew)

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FEBRUARY 22, 2022 34TH STREET MAGAZINE

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MUSIC

Mitski Wants You to Know that She Didn't Want to Make 'Laurel Hell' Following her supposed exit from the music industry, Mitski dusts off her skills to create an introspective comeback album about her career. | DEREK WONG

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onesty is the best policy, as the old adage goes. For Mitski Miyawaki, honesty is the only policy.

Mitski has always been known for her brutal frankness, from diary–like song lyrics that rival Taylor Swift’s to proclaiming that fans “should not meet [her] because they would be disappointed.” Yet, the bluntness in her candor manages to create an aura of allure and sincerity surrounding the indie star.

When fans heard that she was quitting music in 2019, they panicked, fearing that it would be the last time they would experience the musician's unique approach to her craft. Mitski later clarified that she was only going on indefinite hiatus, but hence began a long drought of Mitski music, save a few soundtrack songs and one–off projects.

Finally, we’re at the end of the “indefinitely” phase. This month, Mitski gifted us Laurel Hell, a short 11–track project that shows the singer–songwriter as her most honest self.

Throughout the album, she explores how her career affected her personal life while continuing to expand her motif of detailing unhealthy relationships.

The name Laurel Hell is very indicative of the mood of the album. While laurels are historically worn as an honor, Mitski implies that such honors are a sort of hell, a standard that she feels like she has to reach.

As an artist constantly stuck in between fame and obscurity, Mitski knew her comeback to music meant that all eyes were on her. Thus, on the opening 8

34TH STREET MAGAZINE

track “Valentine, Texas,” she reminds herself to “step carefully into the dark” when going back into music but optimistically concludes that she’ll “remember [her] way around.”

Just this short opening track already reveals so much about Mitski, and the rest of the album follows suit. A more pessimistic view of her career arises from the track “Everyone,” where the singer notes that she

planned exit where she would be “free.” In fact, she has said in interviews that she initially grumbled about making this record, which was contractually obligated by her label.

Continuing the self–evaluation of her career, Mitski explicitly details her struggles with continuing music on the lead single “Working For The Knife,” feeling that “the road ahead appears the same.” The singer–

all the bravado reveals a vulnerability present in the lyrics that disappears behind the upbeat, rock–forward production.

“You stay soft, get beaten / Only natural to harden up” goes the chorus, implying that sex was used as a mechanism to hide the pain. This deliberate juxtaposition is very on brand for the singer, who intentionally created the song so people “don’t feel alone” in this unhealthy action.

songwriter has publicly stated that quitting music helped her regain her love for creating music, and indeed, the lyric that follows (“Maybe at thirty, I'll see a way to change / That I'm living for the knife”) showcases an artist’s newfound appreciation for their art.

That said, it wouldn’t be a Mitski album without a deep dive into relationship dynamics.

On "Stay Soft" she announces that she's a “sex god," but under

“Love Me More,” also deals with themes of isolation and love. “Love me more / Love enough to fill me up,” begs Mitski in the chorus, wanting a lover to fill the void of her emotions. On “I Guess,” she admits that she “[doesn’t] yet know quite how to live” without her former lover. Mitski excels at these deeply personal moments, often foregoing conventional song structure in favor of portraying a more candid and

Illustration by Lilian Liu sometimes feels free “until [she] finds [she's] back in line again.”

These lyrics, backed by a jarring synth line that's constantly repeating in the background, convey a monotonous, claustrophobic feeling. Mitski has always prided herself as an independent artist and frequently critiques the music industry for being too capitalist. Yet, she admits she’s a part of that industry as well. In Mitski's ideal world, Be the Cowboy should’ve been her

F E B R UA RY 2 2 , 2 0 2 2

truthful atmosphere. Nearly half of the songs don’t even contain a strictly defined chorus. That, combined with the mostly upbeat, pop–rock production, creates an atmosphere one could describe as dance–crying.

In an interesting development, Laurel Hell marks the first time Mitski co–wrote a song, breaking a streak of completely self–written albums. “The Only Heartbreaker” was co–written by Dan Wilson, who previously collaborated with the likes of Adele and Swift—artists known for their own heart–wrenching, personal lyrics. That may be the reason why Wilson’s contribution is indistinguishable from Miyakawi's, as the pair doesn’t deviate from Mitski’s usual style of honest, no–filter lyricism. “So I'll be the loser in this game / I'll be the bad guy in the play” she sings, revealing her feelings of self–doubt and self–deprecation.

Overall, the album feels like a standard Mitski album, but don’t be deceived by her usual candor.

Laurel Hell is rooted in Mitski’s realization of her love for music, somehow creating a more personal album than her previous works. It comes from a deeply independent artist who tried to shy away from the music industry and didn’t even want to create this album. Mitski has been able to tap into her creative reserves at least one more time, yielding her highest–peaking album to date on the Billboard 200.

It's obvious that the demand for Mitski isn’t going away, and as long as she doesn’t either, Mitski will continue to hold her grasp in the indie and alternative music scene.

MUSIC

'Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You' is All Things that

Illustration by Kilahra Lott

Big Thief’s fifth album invites us to find comfort in the human experience. | KATE RATNER

B

rooklyn–based indie– folk band Big Thief is nothing short of magical. Their music gives us space to feel and to love, with no questions of whys or hows.

On Feb. 11, they released their fifth album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, which is dedicated to all feelings and to all love. The record's lengthy title is the response to a question asked by lead singer and guitarist Adrianne Lenker on “anything,” from her 2020 solo record, Songs: “Dragon in the new warm mountain / Didn’t you believe in me?” This 20–track album features everything but the kitchen sink in the best way possible. With a chaotic combination of humor and heartbreak, Big Thief explores the natural highs and lows of emotional transparency.

DNWMIBIY begins with “Change,” a bittersweet tribute to heartbreak and finding promise in moving forward.

Lenker perfectly conveys the mourning of a relationship while anticipating what is yet to come. When she dwells in jealousy of her partner finding love in somebody else, she compares change to “water” and “skin;” though change is

difficult for us to process, we require it. Like water and skin, we would not be who we are without change. “Change” was one of the first singles from DNWMIBIY, released last October. Those first four singles, including “Change,” “Certainty,” “Sparrow,” and “Little Things,” illustrate the phases of a past relationship: the infatuation, the impending doom, and the end. On “Little Things,” Lenker compares the passion of new love to “some cheap classic movie,” admitting to herself that maybe she's “a little obsessed.”

Though the band released eight singles prior to DNWMIBIY, there's no shortage of unfamiliar songs on the album. The impressive 20–song tracklist isn't the only surprising twist on DNWMIBIY. Big Thief excited fans with their approach to the bluegrass–country genre, a sound we haven’t heard from them before. “Spud Infinity,” a personal favorite from the album, is a beautiful mess of words and feelings. Lenker asks us to appreciate ourselves and everyone around us, for we are more similar than we realize. At the end of the day, “Everybody steps on ants / Everybody eats the plants / Everybody knows

to dance, even with just one finger.” Our inherent similarities connect us, and for that, we deserve to celebrate. Characteristic of her eclectic lyricism, Lenker sings of potato knishes and garlic bread for the sake of rhyming. “Spud Infinity” is made complete by Lenker’s brother Noah on the jaw harp and Mat Davidson of Twain on the fiddle.

The everlasting dream of DNWMIBIY continues with “Red Moon,” another jam band–esque track. This song, also experimenting with a more playful sound, is reminiscent of growing up in the mountains, being raised on fables, and following family values. “Burning the rubber down, crossing the hot concrete / I’m gonna leave town, there is someone to meet,” Lenker sings, hopeful of what lies beyond her questions: “What do you yearn for? / Where do you long to be?”

These songs consider our relationships less with ourselves than with others.

Throughout the album, we circle back to the initial feelings of grief that come as a romantic relationship ends. DNWMIBIY is a product of self reflection and discovery, which would not be

complete without allowing ourselves to lean into painful feelings. “Promise is a Pendulum” is Lenker’s emotional retelling of taking three steps backward.

She reckons with the need for acceptance, including “listening to the echo telling [her] to let go.” Similarly, “Love Love Love” describes the desperation in losing love and the overwhelming self–reassurance that it’s still real. Lenker fears a life without this love, with “the cigarette in [her] fist.”

Though we expect Big Thief to sing only of romance’s pitfalls and despairs, the sweetest songs on the album, and possibly the most meaningful, are those that celebrate platonic love. Much of Big Thief’s discography is dedicated to romantic love, but “No Reason” is a campfire sing–along anthem for simple togetherness, a breath of fresh air, a moment to stop feeling and to just exist. Lenker encourages us to “come together for a moment / Look around and dissolve.” While recording “No Reason” in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, the band overheard musician Richard Hardy playing the flute and invited him on the track. Hardy’s instrumental break allows for a moment of

catharsis, as brief as a “fallen eyelash.”

“Blue Lightning,” the final song on DNWMIBIY is Lenker’s love letter to her bandmates, her greatest platonic love yet.

After our emotional journey through this album, we join around the campfire for one last song. Lenker expresses her gratitude for the group of musicians with whom she has experienced many of her greatest and most difficult memories alike.

She sings to them, “I wanna be the wrinkle in your eye / Yeah, I wanna be the vapor gets you high.” “Blue Lightning” is a tribute to the purity of friendship, Lenker’s “blue lightning,” “blue heron,” “blue angel.”

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is unlike any of Big Thief's music so far. This album gives us both songs to sing together and songs to enjoy in private moments of suffering, overcoming, and eventual rebirth. Amid the loves that are found and lost, DNWMIBIY asks us to look inside of ourselves and “accept the alien you’ve rejected in your own heart.” Before anything else, this album is for the individual and for finding beauty in the places where we fall short.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022 34TH STREET MAGAZINE

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FOCUS

Asian American Studies

Celebrates 25 Years of Struggle with Hope for the Future

2

022 is a big year for the Asian American community at Penn. This year marks the Asian American Studies (ASAM) Program’s 25th year anniversary, a milestone that will be celebrated with various programming events leading up to a special ceremony on March 19, themed "Visualizing Asian American Futures." However, the moment is bittersweet for many students and faculty. The 25 years since the program’s founding have been defined by a long struggle—one where the program has had to fight tooth and nail just for the right to exist.

Asian American Studies is a relatively new field of study. In the mid–1990s, following global movements against colonialism, students at UC Berkeley demanded the creation of an ethnic studies–focused “Third World College” that would center the understudied histories of marginalized students. Stemming from these student-led protests, the world’s first ASAM Program was established.

The ASAM Program’s inception and existence at Penn is also the result of relentless activism by students and faculty. In the mid 1990s, Kate Lam (C '92) and her peers in Students for Asian Affairs, a group predating the Asian Pacific Student Coalition (APSC), demanded a program focusing on Asian American history and identity. It took six years for their proposal to grow beyond a weekly lecture series into a formal academic program.

Since Asian American Studies is a program rather than a department, it cannot hire its own faculty. Most of ASAM’s faculty belong to other departments at Penn, and only work in ASAM part time. In 2008, the University administration proposed severe budget cuts to the pro-

Penn’s ASAM Program reflects on its tumultuous history, while envisioning what growth, community, and change can look like. | SHEIL DESAI gram, which was already struggling without full–time faculty.

Grace Kao, ASAM’s Program director at the time, threatened to resign, precipitating student protests that successfully reversed the budget cuts. But when Kao left Penn for Yale University in 2017, only three standing faculty members remained: Josephine Park, director of ASAM, Eiichiro

Fluharty, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, announced in March 2021 that the university would begin the process of filling three standing ASAM faculty positions, effectively doubling the size of the ASAM Program.

To oversee the expansion, ASAM Associate Director Fariha Khan was promoted to Co–Director.

ASAM Undergraduate Ad-

says, ignoring the decades of student activism calling for these same changes. The ASAM Program went four years without a replacement for Kao, and even more time has passed since new faculty were hired. Sadly, it took a devastating event and global media attention to compel Penn to support its Asian American students.

Illustration by Collin Wang Azuma, and David Eng. Administrative duties were carried out by Associate Director Fariha Khan. After four years of calls for a replacement program director, yielding no action by the administration, Eng announced that he was considering leaving Penn, pointing to the lack of support for the ASAM Program from the Penn administration. Ultimately, despite receiving offers from other universities, Eng chose to take a sabbatical and return to Penn in spring 2022.

In spite of ASAM’s tumultuous history at Penn, the program has reasons to be hopeful. Steven

10 34TH STREET MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 22, 2022

visory Board (UAB) Co–Chair Claire Nguyen (C '22) emphasizes that the timing of Penn’s announcement is not lost on the Asian American community.

“Penn is choosing to bolster the ASAM Program after the rise in anti–Asian violence across the country following the pandemic,” they say. Dean Fluharty’s cluster hire announcement came two weeks after the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shooting, which drew international attention to the rise in anti–Asian violence. The ASAM Program expansion comes across as reactionary and performative following the shootings, Nguyen

But the expansion of the ASAM Program is a step in the right direction. Despite the administration’s refusal to acknowledge student activism, ASAM UAB Co–Chair Jennifer Kang (C '24) notes that "the increased support for the ASAM Program is a culmination of efforts from the UAB from five years ago.

Although it’s a victory, we want to build upon this and grow the ASAM Program even further,” Kang says.

While the ASAM Program has always been important for Penn’s Pan–Asian community, the recent uptick in anti–Asian

sentiment has turned the ASAM Program into a lifeline for many students. “When Atlanta happened, Dr. Khan checked in on everyone in the UAB. We were able to process events with our professors. They gave us the space to articulate our experiences with racism and xenophobia, especially in a society that wants to invisibilize our experience,” Nguyen says.

For her part, Dr. Khan is using this anniversary as an opportunity to look forward. “I hope the growth of Asian American Studies is relentless over the next 25 years. This means more research opportunities, more programming, more courses, and finally growing the ASAM minor into a major,” she says. Due to the lack of faculty, there have not been sufficient courses for the ASAM Program to offer a major, something that may change following the cluster hire. This will be a key step for the ASAM Program to eventually develop into its own department.

Dr. Khan, ASAM faculty, and UAB representatives like Nguyen and Kang all envision the future of ASAM to be one of growth.

Over the course of 25 years, even in the face of many challenges and struggles, students have continued to imagine what a thriving ASAM Program could look like at Penn. They also underscore the importance of confronting long– standing issues, such as offering more classes that explore the depth of Asian American identities, including the experiences of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities or Asian American refugees. Students deserve an ASAM Program that can reflect the diversity of these lived realities, one that celebrates the complex, nuanced, and vibrant communities that embody what it means to be Asian American.

ARTS

The Rotunda Offers a Space for Art, and Community Too W

hen we make art, we tend to focus on the art itself, never the space where it was created.

The Rotunda, at 40th and Walnut, is not only a versatile space for art exhibitions— from multimedia galleries to trapezists—it's been the site of a community. Whether after seeing a movie at the Cinemark or party hopping, almost every Penn student has unknowingly passed The Rotunda, with its iconic, web– like pattern on the windows and clay–colored shingles.

Initially a church, The Rotunda has been an artistic venue for almost 30 years now.

Gina Renzi has been the director of The Rotunda and an employee at Penn for almost twenty years. She's seen not only irreplaceable pieces of original art, but irreplaceable stories of Philadelphia's found family. West Philadelphia has always historically been, as Renzi puts it, “a hotbed for arts and activism.” When you enter The Rotunda’s “main room” (separate from the actual “rotunda” itself ), the ceilings are framed with landscape murals of street art combined with tribal art—a line of people holding hands beneath vines to three picket signs asking, "West Philly? University City? Lenape Hawken?" It's a subtle encapsulation of the way art and community values are entwined at The Rotunda.

In 1996, the University purchased the building (which is still in Philadelphia Register of Historic Places). After a

Illustration by Joanna Xiang series of pitches, professors of an Urban Studies seminar at the time successfully got approval for what would become the Foundation Community Arts Initiative, with their first event being a free, public jazz concert. The Rotunda's status as a home for artists has flourished ever since. However, its original intention of “bridging the gap between Penn and non–Penn communities,” as Renzi describes it, has dwindled since then. At a time when Penn’s role in the gentrification of West Philadelphia is especially contentious, rekindling a relationship with The Rotunda would not only expand Penn’s artistic life, but extend that life to one that coexists and collaborates with West Philadelphia.

One aspect of The Rotunda's communal nature, as Renzi explains, is that “anybody can walk in and put on an event”— a model that is still practiced today. She says its “greatest strength is word of mouth … without an exact science,” which attracts more people and makes it fully accessible. The Rotunda has not only been the force that allows artists to carry out their visions, but has been the spot of life–changing events for people of the neighborhood.

One artist who used The Rotunda for Afro–rock–and– soul festivals got married on stage and years later, returned with his four children, who performed alongside him. The Rotunda was also one of the first performance spaces for

Inside a landmark West Philly cultural center | EMILY MAIORANO the Alash Ensemble, a Tuvan throat–singing group that emerged out of a technique of singing multiple pitches at once, to echo sounds of nature. Alash has since gone on to perform internationally with numerous record labels, but they still come back to The Rotunda as a community favorite where, Renzi said, “people are clamoring to get in with their faces pressed against the windows.”

These are only two examples, not just of the capacity for personal relationships developed through art at The Rotunda, but of the unlim-

ited scope of art that it can produce. Consider the Bright Bulb Screening Series, where every second Thursday of the month, film artists screen their work with free admission. This celebration of art and community is reminiscent of historical traditions in the Philadelphia art scene, such as First Friday: A monthly, city–wide night where art galleries and studios are open for the public to view. Integrating art with the community is essential to Philadelphia’s culture, and Penn shouldn't isolate itself from that culture, but rather harmonize

with the neighborhood.

For artists at Penn with a work of art that needs not only a space, but a home, they should seek out The Rotunda.

Because of Penn’s partnership under University of Pennsylvania Facilities and Real Estate Services Arts Portfolio (FRES ARTS), most student groups are not charged for use. Renzi, whom students can reach out to if interested, says that one simply needs a “clear idea of what they want to do.” Art always holds a responsibility to the community receiving it, and trusting The Rotunda ensures art's lasting imprint.

Large 10 bedroom house on 41st and Pine Streets $725 per room + utilities Available June 1st, 2022!

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Call or text: 215-768-5051 FEBRUARY 22, 2022 34TH STREET MAGAZINE 11

F E AT U R E

Between the Lines of Philly's Radical Reading Scene For Philadelphia’s radical, queer, and feminist bookstores, the spaces they create extend far beyond their shelves. | WALDEN GREEN

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“

Are bookstores even a thing anymore?” says my Social Psychology professor, apropos of nothing, in the middle of a lecture on social cognition. Long gone are the days of couches in Barnes & Noble and Kanye West rapping “we met at Borders.”

Even further in the rearview mirror is a distant era when a romantic comedy like You’ve Got Mail could be powered by the David and Goliath struggle between a mega chain bookseller and a beloved, independent local bookstore. Maybe that’s because it feels like Goliath wins every time.

In 2020, retail bookstores made up only around 34% of the $25 billion of books sold that year. And according to the American Booksellers Association, more than one independent bookstore closed each week at the beginning of of the COVID–19 pandemic. These are astronomical losses for the communities that grew within and around the havens that bookstores create. And Philadelphia is no stranger to these casualties.

In June of 2020, we lost People’s Books & Culture, and just last month, Center City’s beloved Joseph Bookshop sold its last book after 70 years.

doors. Rather than let this happen, Philly AIDS acquired Giovanni’s Room. “It was kind of a no–brainer. Everybody was like, ‘Let’s do this, this makes sense. We have to save this place,’” says Chelak.

That thrift store mentality has permeated the way the bookstore operates. The store sells a combination of new and used queer books, some that get sent in by long–time patrons and others that have been around since before the store’s acquisition—still marked with their original Giovanni’s Room stickers.

These stickers are not the only relics of the bookstore’s past. The walls are practically plastered with layers of old flyers, posters, and even graffiti that immortalize decades of queer activism in the city.

“Have you ever heard the word 'hauntology'?” Milon asks, eyes glimmering inquisitively behind her glasses. It’s the best word she’s found to capture the bookstore’s spirit, and she double–checks online to make sure she’s getting the definition right:

In spite of these inhospitable conditions, for every bookstore we’ve lost, another remains—or has even sprung up out of the ground to take its place. Philadelphia’s share of radical, feminist, and queer bookstores spans decades—old institutions and modern incarnations that evade being labeled as “bookstores” at all, but they share the same ethos—and reckon with the same challenges—when it comes to supporting, educating, and invigorating anyone who steps foot inside.

Giovanni’s Room, Philly’s destination queer and feminist bookstore, and Wooden Shoe Books, which specializes in radical literature, have both stuck around for some 50–odd years, and are deeply enmeshed in their respective corners of the city. Meanwhile, their newcomer counterparts, like Making Worlds Bookstore and Social Center and Harriett’s Bookshop, are pushing into districts that may be more or less receptive to their ideologies. These are all bookstores, but the role they serve in their communities—the buildings, blocks, neighborhoods, and city they occupy— goes far beyond just selling books.

Hauntology haunt·​ol·​o·​gy \ ‘hȯnt-ˈä-lə-jē \ 1 : “a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.”

From left to right, top to bottom: 1­–3 Giovanni's Room | Photo courtesy of Andrew Yang 4–5 Wooden Shoe | Photo courtesy of Andrew Yang 6 Making World's Bookstore | Photo courtesy of Rachel Zhang

Illustration by Collin Wang 1 2 34TH STREET MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Katharine Milon is plenty familiar with having the significance of her work disputed or disregarded. During our conversation, Milon, a manager at Giovanni’s Room, which is right on the border of Philadelphia’s Gayborhood, describes a customer who came into the store that past Sunday: “He looked me straight in the face and said, ‘Do you really think people need gay bookstores anymore? I wouldn’t think they needed them anymore because it’s become so mainstream.’” Milon was incredulous. She grew up in the Washington, D.C., area, where she hung around Dupont Circle and the now–shuttered LGBTQ bookstore Lambda Rising—experiences fundamental to her queer adolescence.

Milon grasps that “It’s hard to explain the importance of physical spaces to people who are either not used to them or [who] are so used to them that they

don’t question them at all.” But Giovanni’s Room and other brick–and–mortar bookstores are important precisely because of the physical space that they occupy. They pay rent. They’re part of a neighborhood.

They have doors you can open, chairs you can sit in, and rooms you can have conversations in.

It’s hard to think of a bookstore that’s more entrenched and integral to the fabric of Philadelphia’s queer subculture than Giovanni’s Room. A brief trolley ride from Penn, it happens to be the oldest queer and feminist bookstore in the country.

But it’s been a hard road keeping it around for almost half a decade—the bookstore wouldn’t exist today if not for an intervention from another city staple.

Alan Chelak, another of the bookstore’s managers, was working at Philly AIDS Thrift when Giovanni’s Room announced, in 2014, that it would be shuttering its

Nothing exemplifies Giovanni’s Room’s haunted quality better than the God of WordStock, a computer that’s at least a decade older than I am, and which resides in the store’s third–floor office. It runs on a tape and doesn’t even have a mouse, so the staff have to learn all the keyboard commands, but it also contains a running database of every LGBTQ book published since the late 1980s up to those that will be published six months into the future.

The risk of revolutionary literature is the ease with which it can be lost—from changing social values or simply the passing of time—when it only reaches a small group of people. With that in mind, a repository of books that exist at the margins, like the God of WordStock, is worth its weight in gold. More so, it’s proof that stores like this carry more history than can be obtained from just the pages on the shelves.

If there’s anyone who understands the challenge of keeping radical thought alive, it’s Carl Craft, co–founder of Wooden Shoe. “The Shoe,” as it’s referred to colloquially, is a collectively–run anarchist bookstore that opened in 1976. The store has always placed a premium on physical

FEBRUARY 22, 2022 34TH STREET MAGAZINE 13

F E AT U R E

“The internet’s a shitty place to learn things. I mean, it’s a good place to learn things. But honestly, in my opinion—I’m not a fucking Luddite or anything—but it doesn’t provide an environment.” ­–Will Clark, Giovanni's Room

From top to bottom: 1–2 Making World's Bookstore | Photo Courtesy of Rachel Zhang Harriet's Bookstore | Photo Courtesy of Andrew Yang

“Books have this incredible ability to help us time travel— reading helps us to read ourselves." ­–Jeannine A. Cook, Harriett's Bookshop 14 34TH STREET MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 22, 2022

space, which is hard to find within anachist organizing. A group of dissatisfied libertarian socialists, anarchists, and radical feminists originally conceived of the Shoe as a means of consolidating published anarchist materials into one location. Its aims have always been political first and literary second.

Craft recognizes the irony of this. “It’s funny, in one sense, the contradiction of being an anarchist, libertarian–left project that’s anticapitalist but has to swim in the ocean of capitalist retail,” he says. Craft laments the Shoe’s obligation to major wholesale book retailers like Ingram, which require they mark up the titles sold in the store by “200, 300—even 500%.” Craft adds that, “You have to live with contradictions of what you think should be done with books, information, [and] knowledge” on one hand, “and knowledge as a saleable commodity” on the other. Although he can laugh it off, there’s a palpable sadness when the best way to accomplish your political goals requires compromising them.

Both Giovanni’s Room and Wooden Shoe have become indispensable parts of their neighborhoods, which in turn have taught them how to best be of service. Gender, race, and sexual politics are all represented among the Shoe’s shelves, and that’s in large part because devoted employees and patrons curate their content. “If you’re a small, independent book retailer, you don’t

have to go to a corporate office to get approval to buy anything,” says Craft. Their catalogs are in the hands of the community, not a corporation.

Will Clark, another manager at Giovanni’s Room, also notes how the store’s patrons influence the books they order. “There are people, literally, who will come in and have a list of books,” he says, “and they’ll say, ‘You should get these.’”

During my conversation with Craft, I observe a similar process at the Shoe—a customer comes into the store looking for a book they don’t have in stock. Before she leaves, Craft takes down the book’s title and author, making sure to spell everything correctly.

He plans to order it, making sure that “Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gappah—G–A– P–P–A–H” will be available to anyone who comes in, whether they’re looking for it or not.

Jaskiran Dhillon represents the two sides of this reciprocity—she is both a curator and community member. Dhillon has been a resident of West Philadelphia for over 12 years, and now she works at Making Worlds, located at 45th and Walnut, as part of its co–op model. Making Worlds opened its doors on Valentine’s Day of 2020 as an extension of the publishing house called Common Notions, just one month before the COVID–19 pandemic forced the fledgling business to recalibrate its operations.

Both Dhillon, a Penn alum, and founder Malav Kanuga, an Annenberg School for Communication postdoctoral fellow, are reluctant to throw around that label of “bookstore,” and for good reason: Making Worlds has always extended beyond that humble premise. Dhillon is reluctant to box it in, arguing that spaces like this have the potential to be so much more than bookstores.

They can “be a space where people find a set of encounters and access to conversations and experiences that allow them to continue learning, but also to bring things that they care about to the center of a neighborhood conversation.”

But Making Worlds is still a place where books are sold, and Kanuga plays a significant curatorial role in choosing which ones, largely focusing on those published by Common Notions as well as other “independent and movement–related publications,” end up in its display window. “We are all already carrying multiple worlds of experience, through largely the contradictions of how we’ve arrived at who we are,” says Kanuga. The books themselves are really just “openings to being able to read more fully and connect to a sense of your own imagination.”

Most importantly, Making Worlds has a meaningful presence in its neighborhood; it serves as a center point where community members can congregate. The shop is within walking distance of Penn, but there’s

F E AT U R E

also a vast expanse of West Philadelphia beyond it—enough to house robust, flourishing West African, Vietnamese, and Laotian communities, to name only a few.

Making Worlds is situated at a locus where many different ethnic, social, and cultural worlds intersect and overlap.

But what if you’re a Black business owner making inroads into a predominantly white neighborhood?

“How did I end up outside a protest handing out books?”

That’s Jeannine A. Cook, sounding somewhat incredulous at her own anecdote. Cook is the founder of Harriett’s Bookshop, located on Girard Avenue in Fishtown, which is overwhelmingly white and one of Philly’s most gentrified neighborhoods.

As an undergraduate student, Cook started selling books from a stand at the corner of Broad and Cecil B. Moore, right next to Temple University. From our conversation, Cook’s DIY determinism and ability to galvanize those around her is obvious.

“Sometimes if you want to get something done you just have to get it done yourself,” she says, and “Books have been a huge part of my ability to do that.”

Both Harriett’s and its sister store, Ida’s Bookshop, celebrate women authors, artists, and activists—their names come from Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells, respectively. In that sense, Harriett’s isn't so much “haunted” by things as it is haunted by people: Black women who have irrevocably changed the course of history but haven’t gotten their historical due. Cook situates herself in the lineage of these women: “Books have this incredible ability to help us time travel—reading helps us to read ourselves,” she says.

In the summer of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in Philadelphia and other cities around the country, Cook revitalized this practice.

Instead of bringing signs, Cook and company brought books, a “guerrilla–style” act. Harriett’s’

activism doesn’t just exist within the confines of its storefront. “A lot of things have happened behind closed doors—behind four walls—for far too long,” says Cook. She’s made a commitment to reaching out to her community, whether that’s through handing out books at protests, or through Harriett’s’ soapbox reading series, which takes place in a circle on the sidewalk at the corner of Marlborough and Girard.

Why do we read? We read to learn about ourselves, about our world, and about our identities, particularly for those of us who can’t experience them—in all their nuance and complexity— through mainstream cultural representation. A cynically minded individual might say that any of this could be easily accessed online, but anyone who’s worked at—or even spent time in—a radical, feminist, or queer bookstore would be wary of that claim.

Ever the wordsmith, Cook warns of “keyboard gangsters” who spread misinformation and create ignorance. Will Clark, from Giovanni’s Room, puts it even more bluntly: “The internet’s a shitty place to learn things.

I mean, it’s a good place to learn things. But honestly, in my opinion—I’m not a fucking Luddite or anything—but it doesn’t provide an environment.”

Entering a bookstore is completely free from commitment.

You can walk into a place like Giovanni’s or Harriett’s without letting it define anything about who you are, other than a willingness to learn and expose yourself to new ideas. The accessibility of these bookstores—where all you have to do is open a door and step inside—plays a big part in that. Clark sums it up nicely when he says, “This is the nature of a bookstore: It’s a casual space, anyone can go in.”

But sometimes taking the first step into one of these spaces can be a really big deal. Milon paints a picture of people’s whole bodies “lighting up” upon entering

the store, and Chelak, also from Giovanni’s Room, reaffirms this.

“You can tell that crossing the threshold of the door is a really big, important moment for them.

They’re excited to be able to find books about people like them or for people like them,” says Chelak. These bookstores allow young people to have profound experiences of their queer identities—of seeing and being seen.

Giovanni’s Room facilitates those experiences, and it’s nothing short of miraculous. I asked every person I interviewed why they thought it was so important that feminist, radical, and queer local, independent bookstores exist—each answer they gave was different, but interconnected.

Carl Craft of Wooden Shoe says they offer people an opportunity to put their money where their politics are, while Making Worlds’ Malav Kanuga emphasizes the importance of actually occupying buildings, asking questions like, “Who does the city belong to, brick by brick, neighborhood by neighborhood?”

For her part, Jeannine A. Cook fashioned Harriett’s Bookstore as an antithesis to institutional racism, trying to build an institution of her own that was based on the values of freedom and liberation.

But it’s Alan Chelak’s answer that’s perhaps the most viscerally compelling: “Why not? We’re allowed to. You gonna stop me?

You're gonna stop all of these people from doing this?”

Giovanni’s Room cribs its name from a novel by James Baldwin, but it’s another Baldwin quote—this one from a 1963 Life Magazine profile— that best encapsulates why radical bookstores are so essential to the people that step through their doors. Back in the dusty, cluttered third–floor office, the same one that houses the God of WordStock, Katharine Milon opens up her laptop and reads it aloud to me: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

–James Baldwin

Wooden Shoe | Photos Courtesy of Andrew Yang

FEBRUARY 22, 2022 34TH STREET MAGAZINE 15

EGO

Making Moves in the World of Mindfulness and Meditation Max Chan muses over passion, ambition, and overcoming ego. | ARIELLA LINHART

A

s I sit in Panera to interview Maximilian Damien Chan (C '24), I think about our initial exchange on Instagram, when I messaged him to set up an interview. I look back at his response—slightly perplexed, but amused: “Hey Ariella!

That’s so funny you’re interested in writing an Ego piece when the direction my life is heading in is to not have an Ego :) I’m interested!”

For sophomore and newly decided religious studies major Max, meditation has been a new solution to an old problem. In talking about his recent major switch from neuroscience to religious studies, Max recounts, “I was just doing [neuroscience] and I felt like I was in a desert, trudging along gasping for water, and there’s no water anywhere—just a torturous journey.” Meditation has helped him figure out what he truly loves: breaking down his ego and discovering the intentions underlying his goals and ambitions. For Max, this included reevaluating his plan to become an entrepreneur while studying neuroscience and electing instead to major in religious studies, his true calling.

A few months ago, Max burst onto the Penn extracurricular scene by starting the Penn Yoga and Meditation Community. Its Instagram boasts nearly 400 followers, and advertises events such as group meditation sessions and hapé ceremonies. I ask Max about how the club started, and what meditation means to him. I’m expecting a story of the stress and anxiety all Penn students face, or a prac-

tice employed since childhood and adapted to fit college circumstances. What I’m not expecting, however, is the story Max tells me. “I am so lucky to have had a pretty bad life prior to this year. I look back and I’m so glad it happened.”

Utterly at ease, he continues, telling me about difficult past relationships and strained family ties.

“People knew me because I had a 21–step plan to becoming a legend … Every single day I was obsessed with planning my future, and I only realized after that the reason I was doing it was because I was trying to escape from the present and past,” Max says.

Finding himself at an all– time low last summer—in an abusive relationship and numbing the pain with substances—Max describes how an out of body experience led him to book a flight to Florida to attend a meditation retreat. After that, his life was changed. “For the first time in like four years I smiled for no reason. Just because I was happy. I think I healed right there,” Max says.

Max enrolled himself in a meditation course when he returned home, and when he got back to campus in the fall, he brought his newly found practices with him. He began meditating on high rise field, where he would attract looks from passersby. Before long, people began to join him— those he knew and those he didn’t.

That was when he decided to start the Yoga and Meditation Community through a carefully thought–out marketing strategy. “I’m very proud of

16 34TH STREET MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Photo courtesy of Andrew Yang

this. I was so passionate about it, so I made a list of all the people that I knew at Penn.

I asked each one of them to share the first two posts of the club. I asked the original team members—only six of them— to share it as well. Within the first few days we gained 250 new members because of just mass social media, GroupMe, Instagram and anything you can think of,” he says.

Since then, Max has organized a large variety of group events and hopefully an upcoming group trip to a meditation retreat. Max, attentive to all details, carefully curates the experiences, choosing the location, candles, smell, size of the room, and seating arrangements. He leads the attendees in meditation, then encourages them to share. He asks them to talk about their weeks,

their feelings, the last time they cried—all prompts to help attendees better understand one another and themselves.

As the interview winds down, I rattle the ice at the bottom of my coffee cup and ask Max the question I’ve been itching to ask since he’s sat down. After a conversation about ego, ambition, truth, and passion, I ask Max his take on “Penn Face.” He sits back, pondering the question.

Ambition, Max explains, can be fueled by two things: passion and ego. Passion–fueled ambition is people doing things because they love them—they want to work hard, help people, and genuinely love what they are doing.

Ego, on the other hand, drives ambition because people want things. They want to be recognized, they want to have

nice cars, nice clothes, and get more girls. Ambition fueled by ego means you’re attached to what you’re becoming, and not focused on what you’re doing.

You do not live in the present, but rather the past and the future, which don’t even exist in the moment.

“The ego always comes about because you're dissatisfied with the present moment,” Max says. “But in truth,” he continues, “Ego stems from a place of inferiority or insecurity. That's where evil comes from. If not, you just do what you love. But if you're worried, if you don't feel good enough, then you get an ego of whatever it is that you don’t feel good about.”

And suddenly, the cheeky answer I received from Max when I first reached out makes total sense.

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FILM & TV

Hollywood’s Colorism Problem: Where has Lupita Nyong’o been?

Nyong’o should be one of Hollywood's most in–demand actresses. But now she mainly resides on magazine covers. | JACOB A. POLLACK

N

early a decade ago, Lupita Nyong’o was awarded an Academy Award for her first feature film role as Patsey in 12 Years a Slave. Overnight, Nyong’o went from just another talented actress to a bonafide Hollywood star. Winning an Oscar is a massive achievement in Hollywood, something that boosts someone’s career to new heights. Yet when comparing Nyong’o to her fellow Best Supporting Actress winners from the past decade like Regina King or Laura Dern, who have experienced career highs directing or starring in coveted roles, Nyong’o’s filmography seems minor and empty. Why has Hollywood not given Nyong’o the same opportunities?

In the nine years since receiving the top in ten full–length films, including the critically–acclaimed and landmark Black Panther, Us, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But of these ten, four have been motion–capture or voice– over roles. Meanwhile, Nyong’o was on the Vogue cover four times in the span of three and a half years, a frequency not matched by other Vogue stars, such as Rihanna or Michelle Obama.

Besides Vogue, Nyong’o has been on the cover of British Vogue, Vanity Fair, and many other popular magazines.

At first, it’s confusing why Nyong’o has been in few film projects since winning her Oscar, after garnering reviews that labeled her performance in 12 Years a Slave as a “revelation” and “quite the most bold feature debut by an actress in recent memory.” Nyong’o has shown her range too, especially in the horror–thriller Us, where she plays two versions of herself (one sane and the other psycho).

Nyong’o is also a Yale School of Drama graduate, which boasts alumni like Meryl Streep. But Nyong’o’s dried–up career boils down to a very simple truth that Hollywood has tried to hide with her frequent magazine covers: Her darker skin has made her less in–demand than other actresses, whether Black or white.

Nyong'o’s lack of roles, despite giving

Illustration by Joanna Xiang incredible performances whenever given the chance, is the result of Hollywood’s long–standing exclusion of darker– skinned actresses. This is an example of colorism, which is the prejudice against people who have a darker skin tone compared to those with a lighter skin tone within a racial or ethnic group.

Nyong'o has spoken about her own experiences regarding colorism at home in Kenya and Hollywood. “I definitely grew up feeling uncomfortable with my skin color because I felt like the world around m e awarded lighter skin,” Nyong'o says in an interview with BBC Newsnight.

In a 2019 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Nyong'o acknowledges the stereotypes surrounding dark skin in Hollywood. “I recently had a makeup artist say to me, 'Oh well, you know, your skin can take anything, it’s so tough' … [but] I have very sensitive skin.

It’s just misunderstood,” Nyong’o says.

In the same BBC Newsnight interview, Nyong’o also discusses how her skin color has prevented her from booking projects, mentioning that she once auditioned for a TV show and was told she was “too dark to be on television.” If an Oscar winner is being subjected to colorist ideals, one can only imagine the discrimination facing actresses with less exposure or popularity.

1 8 34TH STREET MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Oscar–winning actress Viola Davis, considered one of the greatest actors of the 21st century by The New York Times, has also given voice to her experience with colorism in Hollywood.

Even with a Juilliard education and roles in theater on– and off–Broadway, Davis experienced countless rejections that were at least partially due to her darker skin. It was only when she got the part of Annalise Keating in ABC’s How to Get Away With Murder that she finally became the leading lady.

Davis spoke to The New York Times prior to How To Get Away with Murder's premiere, questioning whether audiences would embrace her and her character, who are both women "of color, of a certain age and a certain hue."

“I don’t see anyone on TV like me in a role like [How to Get Away with Murder].

And you can’t even mention Halle Berry or Kerry Washington,” Davis says, referring to two actresses with lighter skin.

Light–skinned Black actresses have also reflected on the very real issue of colorism. For example, Zendaya recognizes that she’s Hollywood’s “acceptable version of a black girl,” pointing out the varying degrees of discrimination faced by Black women in the modeling and acting industries.

However, Hollywood’s history of sidelining darker–skinned actresses has not stopped Nyong’o from pursuing her own projects, including outside of acting. She currently produces TV shows, serves on philanthropic committees like Michael Kors’ “Watch Hunger Stop” campaign, and is a member on The Africa Center’s board of trustees. In 2019, Nyong’o wrote a New York Times Best Seller picture book called Sulwe, which is about a Kenyan girl who shares many of Nyong’o’s own childhood experiences of dealing with colorism and self–esteem; Netflix has plans to adapt Nyong’o’s ​​ children’s book into an animated musical.

You’ll next see Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which is projected to be a massive hit.

But after that, Nyong’o has no more acting projects lined up, or at least none that have been publicly announced.

It makes no sense, considering she’s given some of the most memorable performances of the last decade. If Hollywood doesn't want to offer a role to an actress, it should be because they aren't suitable for the role, not because they have darker skin. In order to truly advance Black representation, Hollywood needs to stop practicing colorism in its casting decisions.

FILM & TV

Mourning ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ and the Great American Television Comedy In 2021, one of television’s greatest ensembles of all time faded away—but was there even more lost? | JULIA POLSTER Illustration by Brian Lee

W

hen Mary Tyler Moore died in January of 2017, I was completely oblivious to the fact that the world had just lost a star, someone who had charmed American households over the CBS airwaves for decades. That's because I wasn’t aware of her groundbreaking, aptly named television program, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The show is a sitcom from the 1970s about a young woman, Mary Richards, who breaks off her engagement and moves to Minneapolis to start a career. She balances her time between the newsroom of a local television station, where she serendipitously lands a job as an associate producer, and her modest but glamorous studio apartment.

Cloris Leachman died in January of 2021—almost exactly four years after Moore’s passing.

At this point in my life, I’d turned to television history for a hobby, distraction, and comfort. I was specifically enamored with TMTMS, which I parceled out in individual episodes once a week, trying to savor the sharp writing and rich ensemble performances. Leachman herself was a dominant force on the show as wacky landlady Phyllis Lind-

strom. She was the first member of that wildly talented and cohesive group of performers whose death I processed in real time; Moore, Valerie Harper, and Georgia Engel had passed away in those few years prior, and Ted Knight, who dominated many episodes as nincompoop newscaster Ted Baxter, died of cancer in 1986, less than a decade after the show went off the air. Suddenly over half of the main cast was gone, and over the course of the year, the remaining TV legends of TMTMS—Gavin MacLeod, Ed Asner, and Betty White—all passed away. When taking into consideration the further losses of producer Allan Burns and director Jay Sandrich that year, it's apparent that one of the great television legacies has suddenly grown very faint.

One might wonder whether this sense of loss is representative of the erosion of other long–standing, seemingly crucial aspects of comedy television.

One of the things that made TMTMS so superlative was its full embrace of the found family trope—a common sitcom element in which the protagonist grows close to their friends and coworkers, developing a familial bond. The found family trope

was at the heart of everything on TMTMS, from the theme song, which emphasized that “Love Is All Around,” to characters like Lou Grant or Rhoda Morgenstern, who served as surrogate father and sister, respectively, to Mary. With the longer seasons that were traditional during the show’s airtime, the viewer, too was, invited to join the family each week.

The found family trope is a part of a larger theme in comedy history; that is, the role of comedy as comfort to the viewer.

Broadcast comedy dates back to the radio shows of WWII, when a listener or viewer could turn to another world for refuge from both the issues of their daily lives and the larger problems that face the world. One would think our current era of disease and political chaos would predispose the country to appreciate the escape these programs can provide.

However, the role of comedy in people’s lives today barely resembles the weekly reunions of television viewers with must– see sitcoms. The dominance of streaming services and the internet have led to dramatic shifts in the nature of people's media consumption. We watch our late–night talk shows on

YouTube the next day—if our favorite host isn't moving away from weekly broadcasts entirely.

For the first time in fifty years, NBC had no comedies in its entire 2021–22 television lineup.

Active rejection of the broadcast model and certain sitcom staples, like the laugh track and multi–camera format, permeates our culture. The biggest loss, however, might be the lack of regularity that has come with the takeover of streaming services.

Having moved beyond the exhausting 39–week television comedy schedule of the 1950s is probably a good thing for television casts and crews. But there’s a big difference in how we experience television when we can binge ten–episode seasons in a day, and when these seasons are stretched years apart by involved production schedules. The fact of the matter is that the reliability and dependability of television, which served as a unique comfort and support system for generations, is now gone.

So, let’s mourn it. Not just the cast and crew of TMTMS, but the entire era, where you could peek into the apartments of Lucy, Mary, or Jerry, or take a load off after a long day of work with a glance into a newsroom,

a radio station, or a paper company. Where, if you needed a friend, you could choose a vicarious sidekick, like Ethel Mertz, or grab a stool in a bar where everybody knows your name.

Let’s pour one out for the great age of American television comedy. She was slain by streaming services in the late 2010s, and is resting peacefully in a media graveyard with hundreds of Blockbuster Video stores and eight–track tapes.

Or is she?

NPR says to hold your horses—television comedy is back.

There may not be anything quite as robust as CBS’s 1970s Saturday night lineup, but new shows like Abbott Elementary and American Auto are bringing back the network sitcom of decades past. We'll probably never recreate the specific environment and unique theatrical qualities of the sitcoms that our parents grew up watching, but that’s alright—there’s a new generation coming up in the ranks with exciting ideas that can rejuvenate this long–standing entertainment tradition.

So instead, let’s just mourn the first great age of American television comedy. And get very excited for the second.

FEBRUARY 22, 2022 34TH STREET MAGAZINE 19

ST YLE

Fanfiction: The Good, The Bad, And The Thirsty To be honest, fanfiction isn't as weird as you might think. | SHELBY ABAYIE

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ith the success of fanfiction– turned–movie– series "After," fanfiction is becoming more mainstream—a truth that has been met with both surprised acceptance from fans and snobbishness from the high–brow community. Despite the perception of fanfiction as a fringe form of art common in only niche fandom subcultures, it is broadly defined as amateur fictional works involving elements of existing property, such as books or movies. But while you might not have secretly read fanfiction under the covers, squealing as a dark–haired, mysterious lover gripped Y/N's waist, you’ve certainly read fanfiction in some form or another.

Fanfiction surprisingly exists everywhere in literature.

The acclaimed classic Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare is considered fanfiction by definition, with much of its plot being inspired by the poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet" by Arthur Brooke. But fanfiction isn't just relegated to historical texts. "After," a One Direction fanfiction written in 2013 that gained over 600 million views on Wattpad, spawned a commercially successful movie of the same name. Yet, there still remains a large stigma against fanfiction.

Today, the majority of fanfiction exists on several self–publishing platforms including Archive of Our Own (AO3), Wattpad, Fanfiction. net, Tumblr, and more. On these platforms, fans can develop their writing and build community with others passionate about their fandom.

Although many fans share a platform and passion for writing, how they start varies greatly. Pamela de la Cruz

(C '23) has been a fan writer for several years, and her introduction to the medium is just as surprising as the topics of some of her fiction. After a friend introduced Pamela to the popular BTS fanfiction "House of Cards," she decided to test her hand at writing stories of her own.

"I wondered what would happen if I wrote a regular fic-

But you can't get perfect unless you practice. Right now, in my serious fiction, I can confidently use a lot of techniques because I’ve experimented so many times [through fanfiction]," says Pamela.

The line between a "real" author and a fan author is constantly changing and blurring.

Fanfiction authors like Anna Todd and Cassandra Clare

it’s a fluffy, slow–burn love story that’s sure to satisfy the "shipping" desires of any fan.

However, some may have concerns about stories written about real people and their relationships. The ethics of publishing stories about real people without their consent are deep, dark, and murky.

"Personally, I don't associate the people in my fanfiction

Illustration by Alice Choi tion story as a sociology experiment and changed the names to fit into some random fandom, just to see if it would get comments and [likes]. Then a lot of people commented and liked it. So after that happened, I decided to keep doing it," says Pamela.

Pamela has multiple fanfictions with hundreds of kudos, which make up AO3's "liking" system. Often, writing a piece in a popular fandom means that thousands of energetic and eager fans will read the piece and offer genuine feedback and advice. To an author, receiving extensive feedback is an opportunity to develop their craft.

"Because of this [fanfiction], I've been able to really experiment with genres and concepts. When you publish something, it has to be perfect.

20 34TH STREET MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 22, 2022

have written incredibly popular fanfictions with minimal changes (like swapping the names of fandom–recognizable characters into generic names) that turned into bestsellers and blockbuster movies.

By most accounts, both authors are still considered "real" authors in spite of their fan writer past.

Riley* (C '23) recently finished an 80,000–word fanfiction—the length of a short novel. The piece centers on Jinyoung and Jaebum (Jay B), two members of the world–famous K–pop group GOT7. In this alternative universe (AU), a mark of one’s soulmate appears on their wrist during puberty. However, not everyone believes in the concept of soulmates, especially when love can go so horribly wrong even with a wrist marking. Overall,

with the real people," says Riley. "I understand that those aren't real people and that they aren't actually in these relationships. Rather, these people inspire me, and I like the idea of a universe inspired by their looks or aspects of their personalities."

Although many fanfiction writers have a mature opinion on the parasocial relationship that forms between fans and fandoms, there are still stigmas painting fanfiction writers as taboo, obsessed, and cringey.

Consequently, many writers would rather stay anonymous than face the enormous stigma surrounding fanfiction.

"There's no barriers to [fanfiction] publishing. Nothing is censored even if some stuff really should be. And, this is in opposition to an industry that is very censored and elit-

ist. [Fanfiction spaces tend to be] an uncensored, gay haven, which unsurprisingly carries a big backlash. Are some fanfiction writing styles lazy? Yes. But that's not what this stigma is about. The violent stigma against fanfiction is so mean and venomous that it becomes really obvious that it's not about the writing style. It's about the type of people that write," says Pamela.

Riley has similar opinions on the matter of the intense stigma against fanfiction and fan writers.

"Fanfiction and other kinds of [fan] media are an escape from the world and from what's happening in your own [life]. Maybe you don't want to read about women doing certain things. Reading about two men literally removes you from the situation and the story. Fanfiction lets you explore queer stories," says Riley.

Despite the stigma, the fanfiction community remains social and energetic. The outside world may hold a stigma against fans' love of a certain fandom and fanfictions, but their communities act as safe havens to explore themselves and their passions.

“I set up a Kofi and wasn't expecting much, but a lot of people donated money to me and left touching messages [about how] I changed their life or [comments like] 'I made your [fanfiction] my entire personality for six months.' I was really shocked,” says Pamela.

To those interested in exploring a fandom more or developing their writing skills, Pamela has some advice: "Just try it once because it’ll be worth it to explore. And if you don’t like it, you can always stop." *Names have been changed to preserve anonymity

ST YLE

Nepotism Babies: It–Girls or Just Rich?

“

Why are we so obsessed with Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Lily–Rose Depp? | NAIMA SMALL

It–girls” like Lily–Rose Depp, Maude Apatow, Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, and Kaia Gerber all have one thing in common: their enormously successful relatives. Numerous TikTok posts have been dedicated to making fun of these “nepotism babies,” but they have also been idolized through edts of people’s favorite “nepo girls.” Their effortless style, automatic fame, associations with other celebrities, and linear path to success have led many to wish for the nepo baby lifestyle.

As the nepo baby aesthetic— which is rooted in elitism and exclusivity—grows in popularity among the younger generation, so do conversations about wealth inequality and the unattainability of the American Dream. In fact, “eat the rich” is an often–uttered phrase among Gen–Z, even by those with money. But despite the outward dislike of everything elitist, our chosen aesthetics and it–girls say the opposite.

The trend of idolizing those who have benefited from nepotism in the industry reveals how what used to be an accusatory insult is arguably now an aesthetic of its own. In many ways, the internet’s fascination with nepo babies mirrors the fervor over the “old money” aesthetic. The old money aesthetic is pitted against “new money,” which supposedly lacks the sophistication and quiet coolness of wealth passed through generations.

Though most nepo babies are considered new money, the idea behind the nepo baby ideal and the old money aesthetic is the same— when your wealth has been inherited, it looks more “authentic.” And when wealth looks more authentic, it becomes more coveted. As the saying goes, money talks, but wealth whispers. The nepo baby lifestyle is completely out of reach for most of us, but that’s likely why it’s so widely discussed and dissected.

Illustration by Devdyuti Paul As Adolescent magazine writer Sophia Peyser points out, Gen–Z’s obsession with wealth as an aesthetic is antithetical to what (most of) our generation stands for socially and politically. “By dreaming of belonging to that exclusive, privileged, greedy world, we’re justifying it,” she writes. Having wealth or connections passed down from generation to generation is a privilege overwhelmingly reserved by white people, and unsurprisingly, most nepo baby icons are white.

Nepotism in Hollywood goes deeper than the likes of model it–girls such as Kendall Jenner or Bella Hadid—many seemingly "up–and–comers" or "innovators" in the industry have been helped along by their parent’s connections. For example, Euphoria’s Sam Levinson is the son of an Oscar– winning director, indie icon Billie Eilish is the daughter of actress Maggie Baird, and Dakota Johnson comes from a family of famous actors.

Nepo babies often have the ability to pay for lessons and other training that the average person couldn’t afford. Expensive trips around the world are what create that worldly, unique “it factor” that all nepo baby icons are so heavily praised for. In short, wealth—not innate coolness—is what makes

it–girls coveted.

Idealizing nepotism reinforces the notion that meritocracy isn’t the backbone of a fair and inclusive industry. Despite diversity in Hollywood being an issue that our generation always seems to be

fighting for, the number of nepo babies put on a pedestal further increases the barriers to entry in show business. Despite people of color continuing to face issues with being typecast or getting roles at all, even in spite of prominent move-

ments like #OscarsSoWhite, predominantly white nepo babies flourish due to prior connections and already–existing wealth and resources. While our generation claims to want to "eat the rich," we further their success through our fixation on nepo babies and it–girls. It seems as if the only way to be "cool" in Hollywood is to be wealthy.

So many stars have built their names on “authenticity” and realness, even though they were born with a golden ticket right into the industry. That’s not to say all nepo babies are untalented, because many genuinely are. But at the end of the day, it can’t be ignored that their families helped them get where they are today.

Recognizing the ills of nepotism won’t make it go away—but we can at least stop pretending it’s a good thing.

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UNDER THE BUT TON

Penn to Suspend Campus Operations Until They Get To the Bottom of What's Going on (Theta Big-Little Week) SCOTT NEWMAN

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ou open Instagram and peruse through a few stories, as one is wont to do. After a few promoting mediocre performing arts group events, you eventually tumble upon a picture of a twin-sized bed adorned with oversized bags of Skinny Pop, black and gold sorority paraphernalia, and large balloon letters that spell “Theta Loves You.” An air of enchantment and enthusiasm settles over your person. Surely, it’s not possible.

Have we already reached that time of the year? A new class of

queens, princesses, and duchesses had only been inducted into the honorable and august Kappa Alpha Theta a few weeks earlier.

Were we now being treated to prominent social media posts about their most sacred tradition?

You arrive on campus only to find that classes had been canceled. You assume it’s just an aberration. After meeting with a friend for lunch plans, you learn that Interim President Wendell Pritchett has suspended all campus operations in honor of the holiday.

No longer bearing the burden of superfluous coursework, you can dedicate your attention to what really matters. An eerie silence has settled over campus as students have returned to their homes to fastidiously monitor the Instagram activities of Kappa Alpha Theta sisters. Magic Carpet and Franklin’s Table report a sizable decrease in their revenue as their most loyal patrons execute the week’s tasks with a grim determination, only sparing time for meals between meticulously planned social media campaigns.

Photo Courtesy of Jenny Hu

Photo by SignalPAD

Penn to Cease All Classes, Instead Robs Students at Gunpoint for Four Straight Years TAYLOR WHITEHEAD

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Photo Courtesy of Pixabay / CC by 2.0 22 34TH STREET MAGAZINE

F E B R UA RY 2 2 , 2 0 2 2

he University of Pennsylvania is the first in a possible string of top-tier schools that have decided to cut to the chase and remove classes from the curriculum entirely. Why waste all of the time and money required for things like classes and professors? These endeavors serve no good other than distracting Penn’s board from their main focus, which is exponentially increasing the endowment and, in a constant ratio, the tuition. To

help reach the goal of overtaking Amazon and Tesla in terms of net worth, Penn is implementing several new policies: • Instead of attending classes, students (or “commodities”, as Penn has stated they will be referring to students moving forward) will sit for four years in a 5-square-foot-by-5-square-foot, dank dorm as they are forced at gunpoint to do nothing but mine Bitcoin and buy meal plans for 23 hours a day.

• Any writings that threaten the reputation or honor of The People’s Democratic Republic of The University of Pennsylvania shall be taken down and the perpetrators responsible hanged in the Perelman Quadrangle.

• All college house bathrooms have been replaced with buckets and hoses Disclaimer: Of course it goes without saying, but Wharton students will be unaffected by the new policies.

UNDER THE BUTTON

Quitting Nicotine Is So Easy! I’ve Already Done It Like Six Times JOSH MUKHERJEE

A

fter giving my Tinder date a handjob in the movie theater and realizing that he stole my Juul in the process, I decided to enter my new era of selfimprovement. No more nicotine for me! Each morning, I would wake up and write “Vaping Kills” in my journal, over and over, until my hands bled. I would go online (to the YouTube) to watch videos of why vaping is bad for you. I even had plenty of athome remedies for curbing my cravings: My most effective solution was to repeatedly bang my head against my kitchen counter until I would lose consciousness.

After my move to college, I really entered a new period of self-amelioration.

The posters hung up around the quad informing me that vaping is, in fact, bad for you, kept me on the straight and narrow. Each time I faced temptation, I would walk to one of these posters, stare at it, sob violently for an hour, and take a nap after.

Of course, this didn’t apply to stealing or hitting other people’s Flairs at parties because that doesn’t count.

Neither does buying cigarettes, because that makes me look mysterious. Overall, 10/10 experience! Quit vaping, guys.

Photo buy sarahjohnson1 / CC0

Penn Therapy Dog Tired of Your Shit DARRION CHEN

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fter countless sessions of socializing with depressed, unhappy, and washed out Penn students, Penn therapy dogs have begun to show signs of PTSD. Billy Ozark, a therapy dog handler, has observed that all of the dogs under his care have been extremely anxious, nervous, and uneasiness.

"Fluffy used to always be excited to see college-aged students," said Ozark. "But now, whenever they see a college student, he whimpers and cowers away."

Therapy dog Fluffy had logged the most hours out

of all of Ozark’s dogs. Fluffy had interacted with countless students who had sought him for comfort in dark times.

Most students even found it soothing to talk to Fluffy about their troubles, assuming Fluffy couldn’t understand them.

“These students think I can’t understand them,” said Fluffy. “But I can understand everything. All the things they tell me, they hurt me. I never knew the world was such a horrible and cruel place. And I don’t understand why I have to bear the psychological burden of the cruel human world. Now I can never sleep at night.”

Photo by PXHere / CC0 Public

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