The Miscellany News
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Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY
Volume CLII | Issue 6
October 10, 2019
Meet the 24-year-old progressive running for mayor Aena Khan, Mack Liederman News Editor, Editor-in-Chief
al candidate that has ever brought what I brought to a candidacy.” Ward’s candidacy has found its headquarters in the middle of Main Street, Poughkeepsie’s struggling business center, which today is a physical reminder of a once-thriving industrial economy. Sprawling across a spacious second-floor apartment, campaign posters, pins and policy proposals written in marker on poster paper fill the living room, dining room and kitchen. The space is more than enough to host Ward’s grassroots campaign, which amounts to about 20 on-andoff volunteers—six of whom are his See MAYOR on page 5
Courtesy of Grace Rousell
A master’s in law from King’s College, London, at age 23. An internship in the Obama White House, along with a gig at the United Nations. A degree from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse, at age 19. A distinction as the youngest valedictorian in Poughkeepsie High School history, at age 16. If there is anything that now 24-year-old Poughkeepsie mayoral candidate Joash Ward lacks, it’s certainly not confidence. “I am a very good representation of what life after Poughkeepsie
High School could be,” declared Ward, only eight years removed from his senior year. He spoke with an air of determination. Backing his words with vibrant gesticulations, the millenial sat across the coffee table in tight-fitting black pants and a manila-colored turtleneck—a subtle rebuke of the politician’s expected suit-and-tie uniform. Ward continued, “Few people have the experience that I have in my background, professional and academic. Few people have lived their entire lives, gone through the struggles of growing up in this city, and then been asked to represent that city. So, I would say there is no mayor-
Pictured in front of his plans to combat the school-to-prison pipeline, 24-year-old Joash Ward is vying to become the youngest mayor in Poughkeepsie history. His endorsements include the Justice Democrats.
College investments fund ‘Vassar plague’ spreads on campus ongoing climate crisis Lucy Brewster Guest Reporter
Olivia Watson News Editor
O
ver the past two weeks, Vassar has hosted both a climate strike and a community tree planting day to fight climate change. Although these events were led by students, the College has taken a public stance for environmentally
friendly policies. In 2016, the administration released a Climate Action Plan, detailing how Vassar hopes to reduce its impact on the changing climate. The plan aims to make the campus carbon neutral by 2030. The Sustainable Investment See ENERGY on page 3
W
ith the picturesque autumn leaves turning red and yellow, fluttering onto Vassar’s quad, the annual change in the season brings cough drops and tissues alongside foliage and apple picking. In addition to the sound of intellectually stimulating conversations promised by Admissions ring the sounds of raspy voices
and hacking coughs. It is not uncommon for viruses or illnesses to spread quickly across Vassar; sleep-deprived college kids living in close quarters is a recipe for germs to become epidemics. Yet, according to Chloe Kellner ’22, it seems like this particular sickness going around has taken more victims than other colds she has seen at Vassar. “Everyone on my floor is either sick or get-
ting sick,” she told me. “I had a sinus headache and a sore throat for three weeks,” she elaborated. Maria Ziaja ’22 echoed Kellner’s sentiments, describing her current state—fatigue with a persistent cough—as “certainly a popular condition” around campus. Sulekh Fernando-Peiris ’22 additionally noticed many students absent from classes and heard of profesSee PLAGUE on page 3
Students accept imperfect planning Baseball scrimmages for pediatric hearts Am Chunnananda Guest Columnist
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Inside this issue
6
ARTS
The body as a canvas: Spotlight seeks Vassar’s world of ink
13
OPINIONS
day. These pages are sandwiched between spontaneous spreads of ideas or lists. Messy as it is, it currently works for me, even if that might not be the case in a couple weeks’ time. In one of his videos, YouTuber and procrastination-conqueror Thomas Frank quoted David Allen, creator of the famous “Getting Things Done' time-management method. Frank said, “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” Thus, it’s important to create and use systems that catch your floating thoughts, so that more room is left for having those thoughts rather than attempting to retain them. And while a large part of me wishes my disorganized written thoughts were neatly housed in pre-planned spreads embellished with themed doodles and an established color scheme, the past five years of attempted, self-modified bullet journaling has taught me that that’s just not how I think. My messy pages allow my ideas to be held, and that’s good enough. My planning journey has taught me a good deal about self-acceptance. Samantha Steeves ’21, a daily bullet-journaler, and I both See PRODUCTIVITY on page 10
Intellectual or just plain elitist? A critique of art critique
Alessandra Fable and Jackie Molloy scrimmage that supported chilGuest Reporters dren with heart conditions, like aseball in October means Jack. many things to many people. The squad decided last year to Playoffs. Championships. Lega- begin using their fall scrimmages cies. But for a young heroic boy to draw awareness to causes like named Jack, it meant a chance to this one, with benefits reaching pitch for one of his favorite teams: beyond the team itself. This year, the Vassar Brewers. The Brewer’s Head Coach Matthew Righter baseball team concluded their fall and the team wanted to focus on ball season with an inter-squad See BASEBALL on page 19
B
Courtesy of Matt Righter
s the midterm season rolls in, alongside the turning leaves that gather on the ground, there’s just one thing I wish I had more of: time. I wish I had more time to write that paper, more time to lay on the grass and savor the sun, more time to attend that film screening for that really cool org. I wish, I wish, I wish. Time can be a strange and difficult concept to grasp a hold on. Even after discussing its different modalities in my cultural anthropology class, rewatching Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival” and practicing “being present” during a mindfulness workshop in Metcalf, I still don’t quite know how to wrap my head around what it really means, and, more importantly, what I am to do with it. Do I let time naturally unfold and allow the moments I experience to guide me, or do I meticulously plan what to do with my life by the minute? I find myself, in many ways, more compelled to resort to the latter; indeed, as students, we’re often told that planning is crucial to succeeding, academically or otherwise. Given that planning is a means
through which I, a feeble, lone human being, can only grapple with the grand concept of time, and that it is supposedly pretty important to achieve and accomplish things, I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to do it. I’ve color-coded categories of events on my Google Calendar, burned through at least seven A5 dot-grid journals from MUJI (an Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journaling obsession that was sparked by discovering Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal method in 2015), archived a bajillion Google Keep notes and posted more post-its than should be humanly permissible. And yet, I’ve found no stability; my planning system just keeps on changing. As of right now, I’m relying mostly on a quaint 64-page yellow notebook my mom bought me as a small gift. Some of its pages are filled with lists numbered nine through 24, corresponding to the times of activities scribbled in adjacent blocks. This makeshift daily schedule, which I (try to) write up for the upcoming day every night, is nested in a vomit of tasks, reminders, notes and other chicken scratches from conversations or meetings throughout the
Eight-year-old Jack Foley poses with outfielder Connor Levchuck after throwing the first pitch of Vassar’s scrimmage last Saturday. The event benefited Gift of Life International.
18 SPORTS
The NBA’s performative activism prioritizes profit