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SG COMMITTEE APPOINTEES WANT GREENER, HEALTHIER CAMPUS

JANUARY 13, 2021 FIRST WEEK VOL. 133, ISSUE 11

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University of Chicago Ph.D. Student Killed At least three dead and five wounded in shootings from Kenwood to Evanston PAGE 2

Trump Taps Fulton Brown for Cultural Property Advisory Committee PAGE 3

UChicago Researcher Develops Wearable Exoskeleton PAGE 3

Poll Hero Project Connects Thousands of Teens with Polling Places PAGE 4

GREY CITY: The Pocket Stoic Gives Readers a Brief Introduction to the Ancient Philopsophy

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ARTS: Poll Party is a Blast, and it’s Just Getting Started PAGE 7

NEWS: Latke & Hamantash Partisans Square Off in 74h Annual Debate

NEWS: Mercy Hospital Admin. to Appeal State Board’s Decision

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Like our Facebook page at facebook.com/chicagomaroon and follow @chicagomaroon on Instagram and Twitter to get the latest updates on campus news.

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THE CHICAGO MAROON — JANUARY 13, 2021

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University of Chicago Ph.D. Student Shot & Killed at Regents Park

By MAROON STAFF Yiran Fan, a Ph.D. student in a joint program of the Booth School of Business and the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, was shot and killed on Saturday afternoon.

In an email sent last night, Eric Heath and Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen said that the University learned around 5:10 p.m. that a student was found in a car in the garage of the Regents Park apartment complex

at 5035 South East End Avenue with a fatal gunshot wound to the head.

This morning, President Robert Zimmer and Provost Ka Yee Lee emailed the University community to disclose that Fan was the student killed at Regents Park. The University has notified Fan’s family.

“This sudden and senseless loss of life causes us indescribable sorrow,” the email said.

Around 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, officers of the Evanston Police Depart-

ment (EPD) shot and killed a man in a shootout near the intersection of West Howard Street and North Western Avenue who police suspect was the perpetrator of the shooting at Regents Park. Police identified the man as Jason Nightengale.

Speaking to reporters last night, EPD Chief Demitrous Cook said Nightengale may also be the perpetrator of several shootings on Saturday. “We believe this offender was involved in some other incidents in Chicago,” Cook

said.

Nightengale is also suspected of shooting two women at The Barclay condominiums three blocks north of Regents Park after shooting Fan. One woman was pronounced dead at the University of Chicago Medical Center, and the other is in critical condition, according to the Hyde Park Herald.

Nightengale is suspected of shooting at least eight people on Saturday; three are dead and five are wounded, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

New SG Committee Members Outline Visions for Healthier, Greener Campus Culture

By MICHAEL STUGOV News Reporter In November 2020, Student Government (SG) selected new student representatives to sit on its standing committees. Each SG committee centers on a topic pertinent to the functioning of the University, ranging from finances to student welfare to sustainability.

This academic year’s new members, who were selected by application in consultation with the Student Association, bring perspectives informed by personal backgrounds, student organizing, and research to their committees.

Fourth-year Sadie Morriss joined the Health and Wellness Committee (HAWC) last fall, where she advocates for accommodations for disabled students. At UChicago, she has been involved with Active Minds and Students for Disability Justice, serving as a board member for the latter. Joining HAWC has given her an additional opportunity to make her voice heard— one with a direct line to the University administration.

“It seemed like a great way to have an additional platform to work with a variety of organizations to try to com-

bat policies that are detrimental to students,” Morriss said.

Morriss’s proposals include implementing a part-time status option for students with disabilities and creating a survey to gauge which academic departments could adopt more flexible stances regarding accommodations and emergency situations. She believes that HAWC’s efforts could overcome the resistance she has faced from administrators when she campaigned independently for these changes.

“What’s exciting about SG is that I could try to work with the representatives to pass a resolution that does say the student body as a whole feels a certain way, and we can use that to pressure the administration,” Morriss said.

The Committee for Campus Sustainability (CCS) is focusing its efforts this year on building a more sustainable community. “We have this thing called the Green Fund, which is basically a program we had set up which allows people in the UChicago Environmental Alliance to see people on campus who have a great idea for the environment in some way, and we can give them the capital that they need to get that idea on the ground,” said firstyear CCS member Evan Cholerton.

Cholerton’s experiences in the cli-

mate activism sector include working with youth activists and groups like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunrise Movement while in high school. He hopes to transfer the organizing skills he developed from participating in those national movements to the CCS’s more localized mission of pushing the administration to make greener choices.

“It’s really important for all of us to be good stewards to the place that we call home, our mother earth, and do whatever we can to protect it and protect each other in the process,” Cholerton said.

Like Cholerton, third-year and fellow CCS member Palash Goiporia has long felt compelled to work on environmental issues. “I’ve always been a bit of a sustainability geek,” Goiporia said. “I’m very interested in using data to develop renewable technology and sustainable practices.”

Goiporia’s experiences have primarily centered around research. Last summer he worked to produce data-visualization software for renewable-energy technologies and renewable-grid operations. This fall, he joined the committee hoping to gain more experience with policy-based initiatives.

Goiporia feels particularly passion-

ate about making sustainability data more accessible. CCS has worked on gathering wastage and energy usage statistics from various buildings on campus, which he hopes to compile in an open-source format for students to view. “That way, they can know how to reduce [their energy usage] or how to be more sustainable in their day-to-day lives,” he said.

For Goiporia, persistence has been key to making good on his policy plans.

“There’s a lot of red tape there,” he said about his efforts to collect data from University buildings. “You have to email the right people. You have to get the right timing. You have to keep on following up.”

In addition to its 13 standing committees, Student Government has also introduced a number of ad hoc committees, which are temporary groups created by SG to work on relevant projects.

Ad hoc committees this academic year include the Technology Committee, the Committee on Marginalized Student Affairs, and the COVID-19 Committee.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — JANUARY 13, 2021

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Trump Picks Medievalist for Federal Advisory Committee

By YIWEN LU News Editor President Donald Trump named professor Rachel Fulton Brown as an intended appointee to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, according to a White House list released on December 22.

The Cultural Property Advisory Committee, to which Fulton Brown was appointed, is listed under the Cultural Heritage Center, an initiative administered by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA).

The committee advises the President on requests from foreign governments for cultural properties. Currently, the committee has six members, who make recommendations for the appropriate response to the requests.

“I am very honored, and it’s certainty an important appointment to be able to contribute to the conversation about the significance of cultural property,” Fulton Brown commented on the appointment.

“It will be very interesting to me if I’m appointed to be involved in these kinds of discussions because each country is going to have different cultural concerns, and that’s why the committee needs to do the work that it does. We don’t think about each country or each nation just in a blanket way, that each one is going to have a different question and trade agreement with the United States, so I certainly hope that I am able to serve.”

According to Fulton Brown, she was invited to apply for the three-year position, and she learned about the announcement through the news. As of her conversation with The Maroon on December 26, she hasn’t received any further correspondence regarding the position.

Fulton Brown is an associate professor in the history department and a faculty of the medieval studies program at the University, specializing in the study of medieval European history, devotion, prayer, and

the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Some of Fulton Brown’s writing has generated controversy, specifically her association with and defense of former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos resigned from the outlet in 2017 after accusations that he had condoned pedophilia.

In various articles and in her 2019 book Milo Chronicles: Devotions 2016–2019, Fulton Brown defended Yiannopoulos, spurring controversy among the University community.

Fulton Brown has reflected more generally on her experiences as a conservative in academia in a series of articles on her blog, Fencing Bear at Prayer. One of her oldest blog posts, “Three Cheers for White Men,” received particular opposition from Brandeis University professor Dorothy Kim, who claimed that the article “valorizes the supposed whiteness of the Middle Ages.”

Trump’s latest list of appointees primar-

ily consists of roles within state departments in charge of arts, culture, and education. It includes nominees for positions in national establishments such as the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution, and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, another flagship program of ECA. The appointments were part of a raft of more than 200 appointments that Trump has issued since November 3. According to Newsweek, “roughly half hold personal connections to Trump, as…professionals who built careers outside of politics and have written articles, published books or otherwise voiced public support for his presidency.”

UChicago Postdoc Creates Wearable Exoskeleton

By RYAN OWYANG News Reporter HandMorph, a wearable exoskeleton for adults that simulates a child’s hand, is the latest project of University of Chicago computer science postdoctoral fellow Jun Nishida, who investigates human-computer interactions by creating novel devices that change human perception.

The device is a wearable passive exoskeleton with no electronics. The user puts it on like a glove. In the palm of the glove is a smaller rubber hand in a skeleton of linkages that translate the user’s finger movements into movements of the rubber hand’s fingers. The user can then “pilot” the smaller hand as if it was their own.

HandMorph follows Nishida’s previous project, a wearable headset that allows the user to experience sight from the height of a child. In an interview with The Maroon, Nishida said that the purpose of both projects is to investigate human perception.

So far, his experiments have revealed that changing a user’s visual perspective changes their perception of their own height and that changing a user’s grasp capacity chang-

es their perception of size. By changing the sensory inputs of designers—such as product designers, architects, and user interface engineers—Nishida hopes to increase the degree to which they ccan understand the experiences of a child.

“The main contribution of my research is interaction design rather than new engineering techniques,” Nishida said. “Making an exoskeleton is kind of new engineering, but more important is how to use these techniques.”

In an experiment using HandMorph, participants were given a toy trumpet designed for children and challenged to improve its design. To aid in that process, each participant was given a HandMorph device and a fact sheet containing measurements of an average child’s hand. The study found that designers who primarily used HandMorph were both more confident and better able to produce designs with fewer flaws.

Creating HandMorph presented cross-disciplinary challenges. “This is a computer science project, but it’s about changing [the] sensory and physical functions of our bodies. We wanted to know what happens in our cognition, so I have to work

HandMorph allows users to “pilot” an exoskeleton often with psychologists,” Nishida said. He also had to analyze bodily kinematics—the physics of how the body moves—when creating the exoskeleton and employ motion capture to map finger motions. In creating HandMorph, Nishida worked with psychologists and neuroscientists at UChicago. Challenges notwithstanding, the paper based on HandMorph won the Best Paper award at the 2020 Association for Comput-

courtesy of university of chicago

ing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in October.

Nishida hoped to make HandMorph a device that would allow people to directly experience the sensations of others. “It’s a very human-centric design approach. The wearers should feel that these controls are part of their body,” he said.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — JANUARY 13, 2021

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Reconciliation Considered at 74th Annual Latke-Hamantash Debate

By FINN HARTNETT News Reporter On Thursday, December 17, the 74th annual Latke-Hamantash Debate took place over Zoom instead of at its typical location in Mandel Hall. The event, held by UChicago Hillel, seeks to answer the question of whether the latke, a potato pancake fried in oil, or the hamantash, a triangle-shaped cookie typically folded around poppy seed or prune filling, is the superior food item.

According to Hillel Rabbi Anna Levin Rosen, the debate was broadcast to more than 500 viewers who had registered online.

This year’s event opened with violin music courtesy of third-year Ben Gerhardt; after remarks and the lighting of the Hanukkah candles, the speakers began their odes to the traditionally celebratory foods.

Levin Rosen introduced the topic for this year’s debate: the possibility of reconciliation between the latke and hamantash.

While past debates had focused solely on the respective benefits of each traditional food, this year’s event also considered whether the latke and hamantash could coexist peacefully.

Levin Rosen compared both foods to the samosa, whose triangular shape and potato

filling give it similarities to both foods. The samosa “bridges the gap between the latke and the hamantash,” she said.

Levin Rosen ended her speech by raising the possibility that there were other topics related to Jewish food worth considering, such as a lack of understanding of Jewish food-related customs. She mentioned an instance on The Great British Bake Off of a host suggesting that a braided loaf would taste delicious on Passover, a holiday on which Jews do not eat leavened bread. After she finished her remarks, the debate began.

David Pincus, an assistant professor of molecular genetics and cell biology, started by taking a strong pro-hamantash stance.

“Perhaps a shared evolutionary history could be the basis for reconciliation between latkes and hamantashen,” he said. Pincus said that the words “latke” and “hamantash” were used in roughly equal amounts until 1946— the year of the inaugural Latke-Hamantash debate—when the usage of “latke” skyrocketed. Pincus considered this undeniable proof that “latkes have won the propaganda war.”

Yet to Pincus, the hamantash was the superior snack, and he mused on what lovers of the cookie could do to address the latke’s hegemony. “Do we retreat into a social media bubble of alternative facts and anti-latke

memes?” he asked. “Latke her up! Latke her up!” He concluded that the only real way for the hamantash to regain its prestige was to “find a way to come together” with the latke.

Kafi Moragne-Patterson, who leads the University Community Service Center’s programs, then argued in favor of the latke. Unlike Pincus, Moragne-Patterson dismissed the possibility of reconciliation. “I cannot in good conscience promote opium-filled delicacies,” she said at the end of her speech.

Moragne-Patterson presented data she had gathered of both latke- and hamantash-lovers around Chicago. She found that the latter group were an exclusionary people associating more with the North Side of Chicago. “They were rigid, like the boundaries of their cookie,” she said. On the other hand, latke-lovers, associated more with the South Side of Chicago, tended to dress better and pronounced “Valois” the right way.

Dennis Carlton, an economics professor at the Booth School of Business and the event’s swing debater, presented a hypothetical scenario in which firms representing the latke and the hamantash were considering a merger.

Donning a menorah-shaped hat, Carlton listed his qualifications to the audience, as well as the relationship he had with both

firms. “It’s…true that I’ve been in a lot of financial transactions with interested parties,” he said. “By that, I mean I’ve lived in several places and I’ve eaten in a lot of Jewish delicatessens.” He speculated on the new products the proposed merger could create, pulling up mock-ups of a “lamantash”—a latke with poppy-seed filling—and a face mask made of two latkes bordering a central hamantash.

But Carlton eventually determined that merging the foods’ respective holidays of Hanukkah and Purim would have bad consequences.

“I’ve spoken to my grandchildren about what I’m doing tonight, and they said, ‘Are you kidding, zayde? You merge the holidays, there may be fewer days of Hanukkah? We get eight days of presents. No way you want to merge anything.’” In the end, Carlton decided against the merger, praising the differences between the foods and the holidays.

The event ended with an online poll asking which side had won the debate. (“Everyone” was the answer that took home the most votes.) Guests thanked the speakers through the chat feature before logging off from an abnormal, yet characteristically irreverent, Latke-Hamantash Debate.

Booth Alum Cofounds the Poll Hero Project

By BASIL EGLI News Reporter The Poll Hero Project, a voting initiative cofounded by UChicago Booth School of Business alumnus Avi Stopper, Princeton University students, and Denver East High School students, utilized an intuitive website in order to simplify the process of signing up for poll work for the 2020 elections.

As a result, tens of thousands of teenagers organized to run the elections. The organization was able to recruit 37,398 young people to be poll workers during the 2020 election.

Founded in 2020, the Poll Hero Project first focused on federal funding for mail-in voting as a result of the threat the pandemic

posed—and still poses—to a large group of Americans. However, as Election Day drew closer, activists and election officials identified another problem: Poll workers tend to be elderly and therefore tend to be more vulnerable to COVID–19. This led to a potential shortage of poll workers that could oversee the voting process.

As a result, the Poll Hero Project filled the gap with high school students like Alyssa Price, a junior at Jones College Prep High School in Chicago. Price originally learned about the Poll Hero Project from friends, although she did not initially know that people under 18 could work at the polls.

“Once I heard about that, I thought it would be a good opportunity to sort of do my civic duty and be a person who’s involved

in politics, because personally, I have not always been the most politically active person,” Price said.

According to Price, she also joined the project because she was motivated by a desire to better understand the democratic process and get involved in the election.

She described the Poll Hero Project as a tight-knit community which is dedicated to the nonpartisan maintenance of the election process.

“I think it is very community-based,” Price continued. “The email threads are long, but there is a lot of communication within every layer because even if you are not doing the same thing within the organization, you are still connected with those people.”

On Election Day, Price’s shift started at 5 a.m. and ended at 9 p.m. Her job consisted of two basic parts: giving people their ballots to sign off on them and directing people to where they were supposed to go. Despite the long hours and tedious work, the voting at the polls went smoothly. Price told The Maroon that her precinct did not experience the long lines reported at other polling stations.

Due to Stopper and the Poll Hero Project, teens like Price were involved in an election with the highest voter turnout in a century, with nearly 160 million Americans casting their ballots in person and by mail. At present, the Poll Hero Project plans to continue its work in upcoming election cycles, with Stopper remaining at its helm.

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State Board Rejects Mercy Hospital Shutdown; Hospital Administrators Plan to Appeal Decision

By NICK TARR Senior News Reporter The Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board said in mid-December that Mercy Hospital, a staple South Side medical provider, should remain open despite earlier proposals to close.

The Board voted 6–0 against closing the hospital on December 15, primarily due to concern that the surrounding community would have significantly less access to medical care during the COVID-19 pandemic without the hospital. Mercy, which currently has 412 beds, is a safety-net hospital, serving individuals without health insurance.

Activists and health advocates have said for months that the closure would worsen the South Side’s already poor health care access, which disproportionately affects the community’s predominantly Black population.

“I do not believe that Mercy has made a reasonable case that [withdrawing its] services will not have an extremely negative impact on the South Side of Chicago,” said Linda Rae Murray, a health expert and member of the Board. “As a public-health person,

I am really distressed that this is going on in the midst of a global pandemic.”

Trinity Health, which owns Mercy, announced the closure on July 29, outlining a plan to replace Mercy’s services with a series of outpatient centers focused primarily on diagnostics and preventative care. The outpatient centers, however, were not expected to meet the community’s needs.

Hospital officials haven’t given up on that set of changes, despite the Board’s vote.

“We remain committed to our transformation plans,” Mercy spokesperson Sophie McCarthy said in a statement.

“We will look forward to going before the Board again in early 2021 with our plans to discontinue inpatient services at Mercy Hospital and transition to an outpatient model to serve residents on the South Side of Chicago.”

On December 17, Illinois State Representative Lamont Robinson told Chicago Tonight that Mercy was being assessed by a potential buyer that would replace Trinity and potentially keep the hospital open. He did not name the interested party.

“We do have an entity, a hospital that is interested and [that] will con-

Mercy Hospital administrators plan to appeal the Board’s decision. matthew lee tinue to keep quality health care on the South Side,” Robinson said.

Trinity has attempted to sell Mercy before. Between 2016 and 2020, Trinity met with over 20 prospective buyers.

In the end, none were interested.

Mercy officials said they plan to go

before the board again in early 2021 with a plan to discontinue inpatient services. If unsuccessful, the hospital may go to court or ignore the Board’s decision entirely.

Stoicism 101 New book from the University of Chicago press introduces readers to the millenia-old philosophy

By ERIC VANDERWALL Grey City Reporter

“What if someone told you that much of the suffering in your life was simply due to the way you think about things?” This rhetorical questionopens The Pocket Stoic,

written by John Sellars and published by the University of Chicago Press in September 2020.

In The Pocket Stoic, Sellars offers a brief (pocket-sized, in fact) introduction to Stoicism by summarizing the major teachings of the three main figures: Epictetus, Marcus

Aurelius, and Seneca. The book is an introduction for those who have no prior knowledge of the philosophy, and it provides a list of suggested readings, both modern works and English translations of the ancient source documents.

Sellars has been engaged with Stoicism

for many years. “I remember coming across the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as a student and finding it interesting,” Sellars writes of his first encounter with Stoic philosophy. It was, he says, “quite unlike any of the philosophy texts I was studying as part CONTINUED ON PG. 6

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THE CHICAGO MAROON — JANUARY 13, 2021

“Everything that exists is material” CONTINUED FROM PG. 5

of my degree.” This led him to study Stoicism intensively.

Sellars has now published nine books on Stoicism and Hellenistic philosophy and regularly publishes in academic journals. In addition to his position as Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, he is also a visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a member of Wolfson College, Oxford.

The prologue to The Pocket Stoic provides a brief synopsis of the philosophy’s origin and major figures. The origins of Stoicism are uncertain; as is true of much in of the ancient world, documentation of Stoicism’s formative years is fragmentary.

“None of the works of these early Stoics survived past the end of antiquity,” Sellars writes, “and what we know of their thought is based on quotations and summaries by later authors.”. Only the writings of the late Roman Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius—survive including: Seneca’s essays (many in epistolary form), transcriptions of Epictetus’s lectures made by his students, and the private journal of Marcus Aurelius (now known as Meditations).

What scant evidence survives of Stoicism’s origins suggests that, about 300 years before the Christian era, Zeno of Cyprus travelled to Athens and, after studying with the eminent philosophers of the time, founded his own school, which was named for the building where its members met: the Stoa Poikile, or Painted Porch. Not until the time of the Roman Stoics (Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius) does the historical record become more clear.

Following the prologue, The Pocket Stoic is divided into seven sections, each of which summarizes the views of the three major figures on a set of topics.The work concludes with an epilogue. Under these headings—“The Philosopher as Doctor,” “What Do You Control?,” The Problem with Emotions,” “Dealing with Adversity,” “Our Place in Nature,” “Life and Death,” and “How We Live Together”—Sellars has collected brief excerpts from the major figures’ works as well as his own summaries and glosses on the material. The chapters run about 15 pages apiece, as befits a pocket-dwelling book.

Sellars defines Stoicism as a philosophy rather than a religion because, as he wrote in an email, it “offers a series of arguments for its positions and does not expect anyone to

take anything on faith,” arguments that are themselves based on core principles but vary in presentation among the main figures. As such, even in the brief glimpses afforded Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius in this pocket compendium, a portrait of distinct strains of Stoic thought emerges.

The picture of Stoic philosophy that comes through The Pocket Stoic is of a worldview meant to help practitioners come to grips with impermanence, mortality, emotions and desires, and the fact of limited control over circumstances.

“Everything that exists is material,” Sellars wrote about Stoic metaphysics in an email. “There is no supernatural realm.”

It is here that the philosophy/religion divide Sellars delineates in his email is most apparent. The Stoics sometimes referred to “God” or “the gods” or “Nature,” but these are best understood as terms describing a universe “that is a single living organism, of which we are all parts,” an ancient analogue to the modern Gaia hypothesis. What to modern ears sounds theological, a metaphysical assertion positing a particular being, is more properly understood as a model that understands the world as a conglomeration of many interrelated, interdependent systems that work harmoniously as if governed by some overarching principle.

The earthy pragmatism of Stoicism, with its minimum of abstraction, puts it at odds with much of modern philosophy as pursued in the academy, a comparison Sellars made in an interview with David Fideler of the YouTube channel Stoic Insights. Stoicism takes as its concerns the actions (mental and physical) conducive to a virtuous life and impermanence, withholding comment on metaphysical structures of existence and anything not rationally knowable. It is fundamentally a pragmatic philosophy, one that developed as thinkers and statesmen worked out a model of what constituted a virtuous life.

Although not a dominant philosophical school in our day, Stoicism was broadly embraced in ancient Rome, when it was part of the liberal education of statesmen and intellectuals, such as Cicero. Early Christian communities developed their ethics based on Stoic principles, although the metaphysics of Christianity is derived elsewhere.

There is ongoing debate on the extent to which Stoicism informed Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians and certain of his speeches

in the Acts of the Apostles. Stoicism is also considered to be an antecedent to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and rational emotive behavior therapy, both of which are employed by today’s therapists. Treatment with CBT entails the patient learning to recognize cognitive distortions (misguided thought patterns, such as believing that one always fails or that one is universally hated) that adversely affect his or her mental wellbeing, and then continually working to modify these thought patterns to reduce anguish. Although CBT is not exactly equivalent to Stoicism, its emphasis on awareness and mastery of one’s own mental processes reveal its strong resemblance to Stoic philosophy.

The Pocket Stoic is part of a wider popular interest in Stoicism. Sellars is a founding member of the Modern Stoicism organization, which offers courses, publishes a blog,

courtesy of university of chicago press

and organizes the occasional convention.

There are also public figures outside academia, such as Ryan Holiday, whose bestselling books on Stoicism seem to present the philosophy as a form of personal development that will lead to financial success.

Many other online personalities present themselves as experts on the subject. In addition to what appears to be a renewed popular interest in reading the original texts, some of the phenomenon seems to indicate an interest on the part of contemporary people to identify with whatever the idea of Stoicism has come to signify, which may not always coincide with what the ancient thinkers meant.

Come spring 2021, the University of Chicago Press will publish Sellars’s The Pocket Epicurean, which the author says is, “depending on your perspective, either a companion or competitor to The Pocket Stoic!”

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ARTS Poll Party Is the COVID–Safe Rager of Your Dreams

By JULIA HOLZMAN Arts Reporter First went the Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA) stans.

A year and a half after Poll Party’s founding in 2016, “ATLA Poll party” distinguished itself from its parent Facebook group, manufacturing its own ultra-specific online community in early 2018. Rather than forcing a bloody secession, the Avatar pollsters made an official name for themselves in the spirit of jovial coexistence, delighting in sharing just one of the innumerable group niches that gained semi-ironic cult followings through 2010-era Facebook meme and tag group culture.

The original Poll Party group was formed in June 2016, long before the days of the Facebook Messenger polling feature, as a way for my high-school friend group to ask each other the big questions, like “Why are there no polls yet?” or “North Poll or South Poll?”

It was an invite-exclusive, secret group, only visible to those whose friends had added them. Two days after Poll Party’s creation, group founder Grace Gorant asked, “Should we add [people] to this Poll Party to make it more lit and popping? If so, whom?” My vote landed firmly on the wrong side of history: Mine was one of two votes for keeping it limited to the 10 of us.

Exactly two years later, it reached 8,000 members. Today, it’s approaching 25,000.

After the ATLA group came a slew of other spin-offs, including Pole Poll Party, k-poll party uwu, Poll party that you only post in while drunk, and Gorant’s personal favorite, The Goblin-Specific Poll Party for Goblins and Goblin-Enthusiasts.

Most of these groups served a relatively similar purpose as “ATLA”: They were (and are) friendly, pro–Poll Party spaces meant to help like-minded enthusiasts come together to discourse, meme, vote, and in certain instances (as with POLLitical Party and 2 Hole 2 Party, the first of two sex-specific spinoffs) skirt the sometimes strict rules of

Second-year Reese Klemm asked UChicago Poll Party! what to include in this painting she did last month and made a YouTube video about the experience. Courtesy of Reese Klemm. the original.

And then there’s POLL PARTY UNCENSORED, a dark exception to the rule.

A blown-up angry react looms over the group as its cover photo, and the group description simply reads, “18+ group with no reporting allowed.” Gorant definitively deemed the group the worst spin-off, classifying it as “Poll Party for Nazis. It was created by people I kicked out of the group for being terrible people, and then they made their own.”

Alice Breternitz, a UChicago second-year student added to Poll Party last October by an upperclassman in Graham House, was hooked immediately. “I loved it, so I made everyone else in [Graham House] join,” she explained, her polling

passion palpable in her voice. “I’m in 14 different Poll Parties, and I love voting.”

Second-year Melia Allan was added to Poll Party this summer by Breternitz, whom they met through UChicago Mafia and dubbed their “poll parent.” It was also love at first vote for Allan. “I had a blast,” they recounted. “I love voting on polls.… It changed my life. I was just always on Facebook. My Facebook usage has gone up way too much, because my whole feed is just polls now.”

Although repeat polls are a notorious offense across all Poll Party groups, their prohibition remains relatively unenforced by admins and moderators. Soon after joining the original Poll Party, Breternitz noticed recurring polls asking

where members go to school, as many of the thousands of group members are of college age.

“UChicago’s never even [been] in the top 10 [of represented schools],” Breternitz said, and that disappointed her. To remedy the lack of UChicago representation, she began to shamelessly add random UChicago students to the group, some of whom she’d met only once or twice. “But then Melia was like, ‘Why don’t we just make a UChicago Poll Party?’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god.’”

The resulting “UChicago Poll Party!,” of course, is far from being the first school-specific Poll Party spin-off. Of the 100-plus Poll Party spin-off groups CONTINUED ON PG. 8

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“Poll Party is generally a very wholesome space.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 7

that currently exist, quite a few cater to individual schools, Gorant said. “And I’m not a part of a lot of those because I don’t go to most schools,” she continued.

Allan saw a big hole in the market when it came to a Poll Party for opinionated UChicago “That Kids” to enjoy, so they pitched the idea to Breternitz in July 2020. “We wanted to create a space that was more wholesome than a UChicago Secrets environment,” Allan said, referring to the infamous confessional Facebook page that, like its spiritual counterpart UChicago Crushes, appears to get deleted or banned, and then quickly reconstituted, on a regular basis.

But the internet tends toward chaos.

The original Poll Party has had more than its fair share of controversy, ranging from the wave of “incest polls” initiated by a 2018 poll which garnered nearly 800 votes and 140 comments, to the time Gorant temporarily changed the group name to “Survey Soirée” on a whim and received an onslaught of disproportionately hateful messages for months to follow. (When she tried to change it back after a few weeks of cyberbullying, a glitch prevented her from doing so, and it was only thanks to chance that a Poll Partier who worked at Facebook noticed and reported the glitch.)

I haven’t personally witnessed any comparable toxicity as I’ve watched UChicago Poll Party! grow from the sidelines, but I asked Breternitz and Al-

lan about it nonetheless. “I was definitely worried at first about there being a lot of controversy.… Originally we didn’t have any group rules and it was a free-for-all. But I think people are catching on that Poll Party is generally a very wholesome space where we’re all here to just have fun [and] post whimsical ideas,” Allan observed.

Today, UChicago Poll Party! boasts more than 2,300 members. According to some deeply unscientific population polling I did earlier this month, second-years like cofounders Allan and Breternitz pack the greatest demographic punch within the group, followed by third-years, fourth-years, and finally, first-years.

Some grad students, staff, and alumni have joined too.

Allan attributes their presence in part to the covert grassroots advertising campaigns they and Breternitz conducted in the comment sections of other UChicago Facebook pages this

summer, as well as passionate get-out-the-vote efforts by opinionated coffee-drinkers in the contentious semifinal round of group member Nat Nitsch’s campus coffee shop bracket. (Harper Café beat Grounds of Being 336–318, only to be soundly defeated by Hallowed Grounds in the finals.)

For Gorant, Poll Party’s future is uncertain. The original group went viral when she got to college in the fall of 2017, and she told me that, back then, “It was really fun for me to be involved, and…because there were so many people [involved who] I was close to in real life, it felt like it could be a priority in my life.” Like lots of members, Gorant has made close friends through Poll Party, and her friends (online and in real life) have remained a core contingent of the group for years—but it feels like less of a priority these days. Between summer camp and work in outdoor education, Gorant is often

off the grid, outdoors, for weeks or months at a time, and comes back to a Poll Party she hardly recognizes.

Facebook’s algorithm has changed, too. Gorant explained that the algorithm used to promote any popular content: If a poll started gaining traction, it would keep gaining traction, regardless of who the post’s author was. “Now, it sort of splits people by their friend groups, and people who they know… [which] creates more contained units within the group than an overall group culture.”

But UChicago Poll Party! is only getting started. It feels intimate—a joke that everyone can be in on together. It is a rare balm in an age of peak internet insanity, though perhaps touting it as a gentle reminder of the importance of civic duty would be going a few steps too far.

As Gorant writes in the Poll Party group description, “Let the good times Survey.”

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After letting Poll Partiers vote on what they wanted to buy, Gorant designed Poll Party merch (a hat, button, and sticker) in 2018, all of which sold out quickly. COURTESY OF GRACE GORANT.