Tears well up in my eyes the instant the plate hits the ground. It shatters on the kitchen floor beneath me, its pearly ceramic fragments blending in almost seamlessly with the tile. I’m six years old, and my dinner plate has slipped out of my small hands en route to the dishwasher. My dad picks me up, moves me to the living room, and checks to make sure my skin is free from any of the shards. He and my mom sweep up the formerly intact plate, then reassure me that accidents happen; I just have to be very careful when I am holding something fragile. Being the overly sensitive child I am, I continue to sob over this inconsequential incident. My parents are used to this. My mom lovingly takes my hand and says, “Darling, did you know that breaking a plate is actually good luck?”
My tears come to a sharp halt. I look at her, befuddled by the association of something so arbitrary with good luck. But the conviction in my mom’s voice makes me believe her without asking for an explanation. I feel better, hopeful. Eagerly anticipating something good coming my way.
Superstitions are curious. Some seem sensible, like abstaining from walking under ladders; the potential precarity of the ladder falling provides a logical association with bad luck. Others, like throwing salt over your shoulder
Dear Readers,
I really do love writing that. Dear Readers . I usu ally eschew “dear” as a term of address, finding it oddly intimate yet simultaneously stilted in the con text of, say, an email or letter. But in cases such as this, there’s just no other word for it. Because you are so dear to me. Every part of this magazine is dear to me, from the writers to the illustrators to the editors to the copy editors to the layout designers to you, the readers. I’m thinking awfully hard about all the things this magazine has meant to me—laughing over Top 10 list contributions and staying up until the wee hours of the night and workshopping sentences in sprawling Google Doc comment chains and saying endless thank-yous over the course of a night. Thank you for your edits. Thank you for coming. Thank you
or wishing on a wishbone, have less obvious or well-known explanations. People may not actually believe in these superstitions or take them seriously, but they are hardly ever sincerely challenged. I like that we have a blind faith in them. We are constantly questioning ideas in realms like in politics and science, yet without batting an eye, the entire world has welcomed knocking on wood to avoid a jinx.
A poll conducted by Research for Good in 2019 indicates that the superstitions regarding good luck are widely observed among Americans. Roughly half believe in good luck resulting from picking up a penny or a four leaf clover, and 40 percent believe in the sanctity of a lucky number. Yet superstitions involving bad luck, such as seeing a black cat or breaking a mirror, are not followed nearly as rigorously. Only 20 percent of responders expressed belief in these more inauspicious occurrences. It’s hard to believe that this discrepancy is coincidental. There is a romantic element to this—perhaps as a society we have a tendency to hold onto hope, by any means possible.
In elementary school, I was introduced to a more meticulous way of walking: without stepping on the cracks of the sidewalk. This habit emerged from an absurd rhyme, “don’t step on the crack, or you’ll break your mama’s back.”
for everything. Sometimes I think the biggest part of my job is being grateful.
It is such a difficult beast, saying goodbye. In Narrative this week, one of our graduating post- edi tors also writes about goodbyes, approaching the concept as she does all things: with poetry and love liness. Our second Narrative writer imagines what her older brother would have been like, if she had one. The Feature looks towards superstitions, both personal and cultural. In A&C, one of our writers con siders Drake as a figure in the media and discusses his recent album. The other contemplates a possi ble interview with a Grimm fairytale archetype as a means of processing the Club Q tragedy. Lastly, our Lifestyle writers think about fashion, friendship, and colors.
Well, here we are. Here I am, at the end of three
Even as a kid, I knew the expression was nonsense. Yet I adhered to it almost religiously until high school. It was like a game, where knowing that the consequence was not legitimate made it feel like I could win every time.
Most superstitions’ foundations lie in culture or religion. I grew up with plenty of those. Some I had no problem with: If I was ever gifted money from a relative for a birthday or holiday, there would always be an extra dollar included, apparently for auspicious reasons. The checks I would deposit read “fifty-one dollars,” never 50. The origins of the superstition stem from the fact that round numbers, like 50 or 100, have a finality associated with them. The extra dollar, called shagun (from Sanskrit), signifies prosperity by offering the money room to continue to grow after receiving the gift.
Other superstitions in my household were slightly more ludicrous. Growing up, I was told to never cut my nails past sundown. Both my parents were raised to abide by this, so I complied without ever asking for its rationale. Recently, I discovered that this superstition, common in Indian culture, dates back centuries. Long before nail clippers existed, people trimmed their nails with makeshift blades, so it was best to do it in sunlight to increase precision and avoid injury. It’s incredible that even though this practice belongs to the past, it has sustained itself for
years editing at this magazine, at the conclusion of a long string of weeks spent waiting for Thursday night. Our lovely prods, our little jokes, our scavenged pizza and spontaneous icebreakers and collabora tive playlist a thousand miles long. I love post- for the people who were here when I began, curled on the Copy Couch in 195 Angell. I love post- for the era of Zoom prod nights, each lovely face rendered a pixelated postage stamp. I love post- for its future: I am so happy to be leaving it in Kimberly’s capable hands. All there is left to do now is say goodbye as I do at the end of every prod night: with the deepest, deepest appreciation.
you for everything,
ages. And this is certainly not the only one.
I was also raised to lay shoes flat next to each other (never stacked), to face all beds in the house to point north, and to never wear henna in the month of August. All of these superstitions are intended to prevent bad luck. My grandparents and their grandparents regarded these as valid truths to adhere to, not just obscure superstitions. Growing up continents away from my grandparents has always made me feel detached from my culture, so I hold on dearly to anything passed down through the generations. While I may not believe in the validity of these superstitions, I believe that upholding these practices tightens the knot that connects me to my family. Logic and practicality aside, I can’t see myself ever abandoning these practices.
It is a rarity to find things that are agreed upon in just one place, let alone multiple parts of the world. While superstitions vary considerably across nations, some have a certain near-universality. Several airlines, hotels, and hospitals all over the world lack a 13th aisle, floor, or room to keep misfortune from befalling their occupants. And, around the world, it is common in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, China, India, and Turkey to knock on or touch wood as a good luck ritual. Many ancient cultures believed trees to be the homes of spirits and gods, so this was a way of communicating with higher powers and petitioning good fortune. In Italy, however, the lucky material is not wood. Rather, they say “tocca ferro”, meaning “touch iron”. This practice comes from the notion that evil can be repelled by horseshoes. Regardless of the material, it is clear that the longing to govern our own luck is universal.
The ubiquity of superstitions is a product of our human desire to seek control over our lives and our fates. They allow us to create our own certainty, albeit a false one. Within control exists comfort, and psychology researcher Jane Risen proposes that this universal blind faith “can help us manage the uncertainty, and the stress and tension that comes from not knowing what’s going to happen.” Avoiding sidewalk cracks to spare our mothers’ spinal cords is a wonderfully altruistic sentiment, but also one motivated by an underlying desperation to claim control where we have none. The happenings in our lives are unpredictable, and if there is an opportunity to control even a morsel of our destiny, we will seize it, no matter how irrational it may be.
In a world where practically everything is dictated by logic, I view superstitions as a way to keep the magic in our everyday lives. Whether that might be crossing my fingers as I open Canvas to see a test score, letting myself get rained on for a brief second so I don’t have an open umbrella inside, or smiling instead of crying after accidentally breaking a plate, I’ve found that superstitions offer glimmers of hope and excitement in the most arbitrary of circumstances.
Illustrated by Josephine Hostin
People think I have an older brother. Maybe, they are picking up on my tomboyishness, an unexpected fluidity. The way that, during elementary school recess, I played football with the boys instead of dress-up with the girls. The way that I wore oversized, masculine clothes that looked pre-worn by someone larger. A new friend said she could picture him—tall,
fluffy brown hair, a little lanky. “He definitely majors in something like film or media at Brown or somewhere.”
My cool-but-approachable, Tarantino-loving older brother. When he comes home to North Carolina from college for winter break, his tufts of hair tickle my cheek as we hug. We open Christmas presents with our parents and our dog, Oreo, around the Hanukkah bush, inside jokes abounding. We take long walks on the Eno River trail, pine trees and monkey grass lining the paths. Set a backyard fire, eat gooey marshmallows and semi-burnt Eggo waffles that have been sitting in the freezer for a little too long. He is my family, but also a friend. We shoot each other conspiratorial looks when
“I thought, ‘Hotttt!’ And then I was like no, that doesn’t make sense for you.”
“Happy Spotify wrapped week to all that celebrate.”
“Can’t you just let me enjoy a nice double standard?”
our parents say something embarrassing in front of the neighbors. He plays soccer, like me, and we sneak into our old elementary school playground to take some warm-up shots on the miniature goals. He always teases me about girl problems when we first reunite but offers gentle advice as we warm back up to one another. We are thick as thieves.
I am an only child, but I like the idea of a sibling, of being part of a family sub-unit. One of two. A part, a piece, of the bigger family puzzle.
My dad has a brother who lives in Southern California, where they grew up. As the younger brother, my dad was a nuisance. He would fart into the bathroom while my uncle was peeing and then pull the door shut so that the smell got caught inside. One time, he short-sheeted my uncle’s bed— folded up the top sheet so that my uncle wouldn’t be able to stretch his legs out beyond the middle—and replaced the legs with pencils, which collapsed as soon as he tried to get in bed. The best story of all is when my dad dared my uncle to eat a live sand crab off the beach. He actually did it. He shoved the writhing mass of crab into his mouth, at which point my dad immediately clamped my uncle’s jaw shut to keep him from backing out of the bet. I imagine a sandy esophagus and potential organ damage, but mostly it just sounds gross. All I know is that my uncle’s payback was just as devilish. Easily affected by motion sickness, my dad had to get on one of those hellish theme park rides that strings you up like a Vitruvian Man and spins you upside down. Four times. My uncle then forced him to drive home while answering math questions. Needless to say, my dad threw up. Multiple times.
My mom does not have a brother. She is an only child like me. She did have a poodle that she cleverly named Poochie. She painted Poochie’s nails bright colors and attached clip-on earrings to her ears, redubbing her Princess Poocheskela. I think of her chosen stoop siblings in Park Slope; the adopted family of kids on the block who she gathered with late into her high school years, smoking, drinking, getting up to all of the typical things high schoolers do.
In my mind, my brother and I go to the Eno trail and cloister ourselves in a thicket of trees off the main path. I’m nervous about stepping in poison ivy, but he doesn’t really care how I feel, excited by the knowledge that he has and I do not. I’m tripping over my shoes, trying to keep up with his long strides. We settle into the forest as the sunlight fades and the air cools. He passes me a handmade joint with a crooked smile. I choke nervously on the smoke and am not really sure if I’m high or not. But I am so glad to be there with him, eating animal crackers and Gushers in the middle of the woods, that for once, I don’t mind the ambivalence.
I lived in New York this summer. My grandparents and I got dinner one night in Harlem. Somehow, the topic of family genealogy came up and we got to talking about my grandfather’s mother, Janet, and his older sister. I didn’t know my grandpa had a sister. My grandma weighed in on their tense relationship: “He was always the favorite. As soon as you came along, your parents forgot about her,” she said quietly. “I don’t think she ever stopped resenting you for that.” He smashed his face between his palms, stuck in a past he’d like to forget. I was struck by how deeply ingrained this resentment is, between my grandfather and his sister, his sister and his mother, his mother and his sister and him. A complex spider web of bitter threads, spun with love and hate. I asked my grandpa how long it has been since he talked to his sister, whose name I still don’t know. Nearly 20 years, he told me. When Janet died, he reached out to his sister about the funeral arrangements, but she had no interest in mourning their mother.
I’ve always thought my imaginary brother would
be the favorite because he would have had an extra few years to make a good impression on my parents. “Not fair, but that’s my lot,” I’d think.
But now, suddenly, I think about how I’d feel once he left for college years before I graduated high school. I am alone. I have become Oreo’s favorite sibling. We don’t eat at the dining room table anymore, because there’s enough room for our small huddle of four— three humans and one dog—at the island in the kitchen. My brother doesn’t check in much, perhaps because he is busy learning guitar to try out for an indie band in college that is inspired by the Velvet Underground and has a spunky one-word name. Secretly, he is afraid of being forgotten. I don’t check in because I am “busy with school,” and similarly afraid that he has forgotten me.
Over the past few years, I have gone out with two people with older brothers. One’s brother was infamously kicked out of summer camp for breaking into the girls’ cabin and stealing all their underwear. The other’s used to fling ping pong balls at her in the basement of their house for fun. Another time he made her eat flour, which made her choke so badly that he had to pull the wet clump out of her throat with his hand.
What would it be like to talk to my older brother on the phone? Everyone I know seems to talk to their older brothers on the phone. By now, he would have graduated college and moved to Brooklyn to make a documentary film about the dangers of gentrification in urban areas, or something else socially impactful. His hair would still be floppy, but he would probably cover it with one of those hipster snapbacks that all the people in Brooklyn wear now. He would go to the neighborhood pickup soccer games and have advice on the local food scene. We would call to talk about the pitfalls of online dating and that thing mom said yesterday on the group FaceTime and I would ask about his job at the new studio. In a few months, we would both be home for summer vacation. It’s been too long since we’ve seen each other, we’d agree.
On a roadtrip to Lake Lure in North Carolina one summer, my family decided to take a pontoon boat out onto the water. In the boat was my mom, my dad, Oreo, and me. Oreo is scared of moving vehicles, but she was trying her best to be brave and my mom was cooing at her in that special, indecipherable way that dog owners do. A sudden thought hit me.
There are only four of us, and someday, I will be the last one left.
This is my family unit. I am one of four, but I am also one of one. An only child, and eventually, the only one left.
It is strange to feel the loss of something before it has gone away. It is more strange to me than feeling the presence of a brother who does not exist.
I see the details on his face so clearly. The dimples that curve on the sides of his mouth are just like mine. The dimple on the right side is always just a bit deeper than the left. I see the patch on his eyebrow that matches my own, the place where we both rub too hard when deep in thought. The toenail that mom always tells us to stop picking is finally growing back.
He’s right next to me. Back for the summer.
He dips his toes into the muddy lake water off the side of the boat and tells me if it’s warm enough to wade in. He smiles at me as my mom mutters softly in Oreo’s furry ears, flicking some water at my dad to distract him from his seasickness. I feel his rough palm before it lands on my skin.
He taps my arm lightly to say, “Hey, let’s jump together.”
The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.
— “ForM”
by Mikko HarveyOf all the parting phrases, “see you around” has always been my least favorite. It’s bereft of intention, leaving things up to fate; “see you around” suggests that if or when you see someone again, it’ll be by accident. It’s a maybe. And from people I like, I’ve always wanted certainly. There doesn’t need to be a false promise of soon. Just eventually
This is why I’ve always said “see you later” instead— there’s that promise nested in the middle of it, that singing note of certainty. Maybe soon, maybe not. But definitely, and eventually.
But graduation feels like running out of see you laters, watching what was once a bountiful reserve of years dwindle down to months, then weeks, then days. See you later, see you later, see you later, and then, suddenly— +
For as long as I can remember, I’ve said goodbye to my bedroom at home before I leave it. It’s a silly ritual, formed some time before I left for a family vacation, but it feels necessary, like an act of respect. The kinships we have with places—be it bedrooms, kitchen tables, cities, lakes, yards, fire escapes—can be as dynamic and formative as the ones we have with people. I believe it’s important to honor that.
My childhood bedroom has housed sleepover dramatics, middle school sulks set to the soundtrack of Marina and the Diamonds, sluggish high school early mornings where I would literally groan out loud upon waking. I spent endless evenings as a teenager watching the sun lower into the sparse Michigan winter trees, hoping everything would turn out alright. My room watched me turn seven, turn sixteen, turn eighteen—like a family member. Thus, saying bye, room, before I head off back to school after yet another break just feels polite.
Walking through my neighborhood in Providence lately, I’ve begun to feel the impending goodbye like a shadow falling over me. Its cold shade is visceral: I remember taking turns down Transit Street as a first-year and thinking it was some great detour. The area was like a brand new pair of boots, and I laced them up four years ago and set out to break them in. Now, they’re familiar and worn, wrinkled with Four Seasons Market visits with my roommates and walks over the bridge, the gray cityscape to my right watching me grow older and happier. The blisters of first heartbreak, impending loss, and crushing disappointment have all become tough calluses, keeping me safe amid the coldest winter winds and the rockiest ground.
+
This week, my roommates and I started making a list of Providence favorites to hit for the last time before we leave. “This is going to make me depressed,” Sylvia said as we started.
She was right. The thought of leaving Providence is usually a flame too hot to touch—I’ve tried to become practiced at hovering my hand just above it, feeling the abstract warmth of the idea without burning myself.
Talia threw out suggestions, and we picked and chose the crucial ones, as if every single one didn’t feel precious, as if we’re not a little terrified of the nameless territory stretched out in front of us. That’s what scares me the most about what comes next: how unlabeled it is. It’s become a point of pride to know all the street signs in my neighborhood, what turns to take, what spots are worth going to for good books or good coffee. I wasn’t ready for my world to become amorphous and encrypted by unfamiliarity again.
Seaweed’s, Xaco Taco, Hot Club, Ellie’s, Louis Family Restaurant. Each potential future visit summoned all the past ones in my head—celebrating Jane’s 22nd birthday on the back patio of Seaweed’s, a heart-shaped sparkler illuminating her laugh; sitting at Xaco Taco with Addie and her parents sophomore year, pleased to find that her parents are just as warm and fun as she is; eating fried pickles at Hot Club with Nat and my roommates, watching the city lights on the water.
On nights I’m feeling particularly sentimental, it feels cruel that the conventional life path is set up this way: carefully knitting ourselves into the fabric of a place, only to be asked after a set amount of time to extricate ourselves and start again.
+
The first time I ever wrote for this magazine, I was a firstyear. I wrote a Narrative piece about feeling completely and utterly lost. This was in the geographical sense (I couldn’t get anywhere without Google Maps), the emotional sense, the intellectual sense, the fashion sense—you name it, I probably didn’t know what was going on.
This Thursday, I will squeeze into the little upstairs conference room at 88 Benevolent Street for the last time. I love the people who make this magazine, who were here before and who are here now and who will be here after I leave. I love our hodge-podge playlist of everyone’s combined music taste, the Rina Sawayama and the Hungarian songs. I love that postused to be called Fresh Fruit and had a sex advice column. I love seeing what funky earrings Kyoko will wear each week. I love chatting with her and Alice and Joe and Aditi and Kimberly and the collection of people who gather to read and chat and sigh and scroll throughout the night. I love reading writers’ stories about Minnesota loons and ghosts and country music. It’s an uncomplicated, simple love.
How fitting, all those years after writing about feeling lost, to bring in a piece on feeling found. And I won’t even need Google Maps to get to the office. +
This is the part of the piece where I start lingering uncomfortably near the door, resisting the bye, room
In a way, that’s what taking this last extra semester was— my friends and I forgetting our proverbial scarves and coming back later for them. Laughing sheepishly as we found ourselves back here, in our beloved yellow house, like kids asking for one more bedtime story before sleep. And Providence is generous, so we got one.
When we retrace all our past steps these next few weeks, we’ll be telling it and retelling it to ourselves—here I was, here I was. Here I am.
I realize now that it took running low on see you laters for me to finally understand the value of see you around. It took meeting these people that I love, and then learning what it is to miss them, be it over an indefinite pandemic or a summer break.
The later is important, but turns out the around is just as crucial. Because I’ve been spoiled with it—the around. The domestic, the daily, the constant companionship. Being able to watch Sylvia sit on the floor with her growing pile of crochet, to sit with Mary on Wriston underneath our favorite tree, to listen to Maya and Talia’s singing voices weave into one another in the kitchen, to eat challah that Hannah just took out of the oven, to lose terribly to Peter at Wingspan. When the around we’ve always known is taken away, we’ll have to make it ourselves. +
The night that first post- piece was published, I was told I could come to prod for 9-spot. At the time, the BDH office was on Angell Street (but the post- room was still just as cramped). It was hot inside, rolling office chairs jousting for space, greasy boxes of pizza laid open, the room full of chatter and joy. I was nervous, because there was nothing I did my first year with a resting heart rate. But everyone was kind and welcoming, telling me their name and asking for mine even though we knew we’d both forget. I instantly wanted to be a part of it, this easy rapport, this space of fluorescent light and clattering keyboards carved out in the middle of Thursday nights. I left a few hours later with a small smile on my face, excited for my very first piece to come out the next day.
An hour later, I got an email from my editor at the time. I had left my scarf at the office.
CW: Homophobia, Violence, Club Q Shooting
“The End of the World was a nightclub... The End of the World was loud. The End of the World leaked music like radiation, and we loved the neon echo, even though it taunted us or maybe because it taunted us…”
Saeed Jones, Alive at the End of the World
“‘I would get up at one or two a.m. and I would call every gay bar I had the number to from the 1940s. I wouldn’t say anything. I would just stay on the phone and listen to the sounds in the background. I would stay on until they hung up, and then I would call another one of my numbers, until I had called all the numbers I had… That phone. Those numbers. That was my lifeline… It meant there was a place somewhere—even if I couldn’t go there— that place was out there. I could hear it. Freedom.’ She called the bars two to three times a week like this—for fourteen years.”
An interview with Myrna Kurland in Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall by Marie Cartier.
Where are you?
I’m inside a box on a grassy hill.
You’re literally inside a box on a hill?
Yeah, I’m literally inside a glass box, resting on a hill.
Wow. Tell me about that.
A woodpecker pecks at my coffin like a persistent boy pulling on his mother’s sleeves. Sometimes the light dances along the edges of the glass. I feel like dancing with it. Most of the time it is so quiet and the only sound is weeping that comes in faint droves. They say someone is coming for me soon. I’m dubious.
I’ve never interviewed a person in a glass coffin.
It’s transparent as all display cases are. When the stranger I’m waiting for comes, he’ll stoop and brush the hair out of my face. “I’m finally here, have you waited long enough? Have you had enough of resentment yet?” He will be decorated in his number of previous kills (stars across a sash). He’ll permit me to rejoin the rest of them (I’ve learned my lesson this time) and take me away to his high-walled palace.
We settle down, have the right number of kids. Baseball practice. A porch to sit on. Sunday service, picnics in July, church plays at Christmas and Easter. Mulch sales. A terrible beast is buried beneath our green lawn. Suntan lotion slathered on heavily for days at the community pool. Barbeques for every occasion. A wooden rocking horse and a freshly painted mint green saddle. A weighted silence after it rains. Goldfish you can buy with pennies, fried dough in copious sums. Our children still can’t imagine what it’s like to grow old.
The light on the floor, seeping in. Nowadays I’m afraid of sleep. I didn’t use to be an insomniac, but being cursed to sleep for one hundred years can do that to a person. I try different remedies—counting sheep, counting blessings, warm milk, cold showers, mixtures of pills, calisthenics—but none of them help. I read the news and my chest hurts. I can’t stop reading the news even though getting closer makes it worse; they want to make ghosts out of people I love.
Moonlight carried home in hats. Crumbling church spires as they fall into the sea. Numbers that end in three and seven. The hunter, sent on an interminable mission, sees something she wants for the first time, so she spares my life. A tundra sprawls before us and covers us. Instead of just me, we are both entrapped. We walk for days in the snow, rendered speechless by the wonderful world. We burrow in a hiding place together, loving one another oddly. We die by the sword and live out of sorts. My head keeps drumming.
What do you do in your spare time? I’m assuming you currently have a lot of it.
Spinning fear into gold. Switching out hot and cold packs for the ache. Guessing the names of short and ill-humored baby snatchers. Fantasizing about a world in which we’re more than a cautionary tale.
Once, I took a train on a cold night. Studied my face in the window as the stars fell into the water below. I stood at the bank of a fast river and listened to it for hours while entertaining the idea of falling in and staying for a while. Every story is a souvenir of survival. Raizan wrote, I must be crazy not to be crazy in this crazy spring nightmare. This house spins and I spin within it to create the impression of stillness. As long as the music is
Last thing you ate?
Day-old potato salad. Humpty Dumpty, made omelet. A legion of soldiers decorated in their harms, one by one, spitting out their red and gold jackets and stupid fur caps. A biscuit that shrunk me down and allowed me access to another world, with only the price of never being able to look back and be content. As a child I ate communion wafers and prayed to God to look out for all of us, listing the names of everyone I loved; and then, after I’d exhausted that list, everyone I knew or had run into at one point or another. Now I’m older and know better.
Who is responsible? Who isn’t?
How will you get revenge? If you’re comfortable sharing Chopping off their hands, like how the vengeful kings used to do it. Proofed and baked in an oven inside my gingerbread home. By way of bird, dropping a heavy stone. At last, their ends will correspond to their deeds (2 Corinthians 11:15). We yell get up get up and our dead friends do get up and reclaim their seats at the table, their places already set. There are no more vigils in parks. We stop all this nonsense of losing, and the stories are true; the dragons can be killed. I hold my own close to me, carefully, tightly, and somehow that is enough.
It’s late summer. We fly kites all afternoon. You row us out to the middle of the lake, and we listen to the mix of loons and coyote calls from every shore as the sky gets dark. We fish out from the bottom of the lake an old amulet, arrowheads, and a few gold coins from previous adventures. I tell you a story about us and—because this is still fiction—we make it and stay in love forever.
I’m sorry I forgot to water your plants that time you were away and they died. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten how to kill dragons; I wouldn’t recognize one if it showed up and laid down at my door now, how useless. Our favorite band came to town, and I went alone but not really because I was thinking of you the whole time. I miss eating breakfast with you. Not too long ago, I threw a gold coin in a well and then was embarrassed I thought anything would happen. Here’s how everything has changed.
Every one of us comes home. The day bends towards us and we are alive! Swimming on a hot day, we imitate the swans for a while, then paddle to shore. We give each other haircuts at home and sleep through the whole night, a song drifting out with the box fan perched near the open window. We get ice cream and squeeze onto the carousel like kids again even though we’re too big, having grown beyond our expiration dates. We hug one another and it only means goodbye for now.
“Draaaaake?...Aubrey Graham in a wheelchair?”
This quote from rapper Soulja Boy on the morning radio show the Breakfast Club lives forever in the rap industry. In the infamous interview, Soulja Boy objects to Charlamagne’s claim that Drake is more successful than Soulja—an objection so loud and off base that it inspired endless social media memes. Clearly, Soulja Boy is wrong about Drake’s success; he is the star of our generation. What Soulja Boy was correct about, however, was that Drake’s riches, fame, and celebrity all began with acting. Drake first came into the public consciousness by playing a boy in a wheelchair on the coming of age teen drama Degrassi. And ever since his first role, Drake has been playing a character: on diss tracks, he is a gangster rapper; on Certified Lover Boy, he is a lover; on Scorpion, he is a father and a son; on Honestly, Nevermind, he acts as a DJ in a club; through all of these ventures, he varies his language and accents to fit each persona.
It is fitting however, that his music and public interactions are filtered through acting because he requires the audience to generate meaning. Although characters may feel like real people living, breathing, and feeling on the screen, in reality, they are merely personas. In the absence of a true human subject, meaning comes from the audience’s interpretation. While the actor may portray emotion, the audience member is the one who identifies it and feels it, making acting fundamentally dependent on the consumer’s gaze.
Drake’s success is rooted in the actor’s masterful command of this gaze. Through acting, Drake learned how to cultivate a specific response from his audience. He ascended the ladder of pop culture not with artistic genius, but with his spectacular ability to hold the public gaze hostage. Drake went from icon to iconic: he is, as he tells us in a song with DJ Khaled, a POPSTAR.
As he approaches his 40s, Drake has sat atop pop culture’s highest throne for over a decade, and he has become increasingly self-aware of his positionality. Age has brought the pop star a perspective that is at once retrospective and introspective. This insight, however, is a double-edged sword: as Atlantic staff writer Spencer Kornhaber writes, “More than ever, Drake’s superpower and limitation are his con man’s senses of empathy and self-awareness.”
While Kornhaber wrote this as a description of Drake’s 2021 album Certified Lover Boy, it rings even more true in his most recent project, Her Loss, a collaboration with Atlanta rapper 21 Savage. In promoting the album, Drake’s self-awareness became a PR superpower. Drake and 21 Savage appeared on all of the typical promotional tour programs—except they were all fake. They did a fake NPR Tiny Desk Concert, a fake Vogue appearance, and even a fake Saturday Night Live performance airing on Drake’s YouTube channel at the same time as the real SNL musical guest’s performance. Drake’s performative promotion is sheer marketing genius—most people consume these shows in chopped up clips scattered across social media, making it harder to identify their lack of authenticity. Therefore, Drake and 21 Savage received all of the PR benefit without actually having to benefit the programs themselves.
how celebrity and the sneak diss escape popular morality and endanger women
Only Drake is capable of pulling off a stunt like this: not only does he have the capital to ward off Vogue’s subsequent lawsuit, but more importantly, he has the cultural capital to make this move successful, and he knows it. He knows that we will believe his performance, for not only have we seen him appear on these platforms before, but his celebrity status is such that there is no stage he could not walk across with ease. With these videos, Drake is laughing at us from his perch on top of popular culture: not only has he conned the media, but he has also conned his fans, and his knowledge of his own celebrity fuels his deceit. The song he and 21 performed on fake SNL was even titled “On B.S.,” a sly pun on his conscious embrace of falsity.
Similarly, Her Loss flies off the shelf not because of any authentic lyrical genius, but because of Drake's cultural standing. Drunk on its own consumer value, the tracks on Her Loss are comically lacking in terms of substance—the album features lyrics like “crusty, musty, dusty, rusty/ fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” or “wham bam thank you ma’am,” and, my personal favorite, “if you a dog, then roof n***a, I’m a dog.” Drake’s lyrics begin to make clear the simultaneous superpower and limitation Kornhaber speaks of: while it may allow for bold moves without fear, self-awareness “can make you complacent.”
However, Her Loss’s self-awareness does not just limit Drake’s creativity; its most profound constraint is the one it places on the listener. In Circo Loco, Drake’s con man approach to music goes awry. He raps, “This bitch lie about getting shots, but she still a stallion/She don’t even get the joke but she still smiling.” Many listeners received this line as a diss to Megan Thee Stallion, who was allegedly shot by fellow rapper Tory Lanez; in true Drake fashion, it does so behind the cover of performed meaning. Lil Yachty, a collaborator on the album, claimed that Drake was referring to cosmetic injections and using stallion as a general slang term for tall women. Nonetheless, Twitter users and music critics alike immediately pounced on Drake; Megan Thee Stallion herself even tweeted in response,“Stop using my shooting for clout.”
While cancel culture has been tossed around in political contexts as a buzzword, its true arena is pop culture: in today’s discourse around celebrity accountability, canceling or boycotting has become synonymous with moral condemnation. The main moral question I apply to public figures who have morally transgressed is as follows: “Can one separate the art from the artist?” If the answer is no, the artist is condemned to cancellation; if yes, however, they emerge without consequence or blame.
Drake holds a unique position in this dichotomy: he has never been a part of his art, so we don’t even know who
he is. He hides behind characters, accents, and layers of meaning, making it impossible to assign him any moral blame within our current framework. While his recurrent sexism is clearly a shortcoming of his own, Drake’s escape from meaningful scrutiny despite his transgressions reveals the holes in our moral analysis of the modern celebrity. As Kornhaber writes, “Lyrics can have layered meanings, but it’s laughable to say that Drake, who’s as calculating as a computer, didn’t intend for the words shots, lie, and stallion to trigger exactly this kind of controversy.”
In the supposed Meg diss, Drake appears in costume once more: just as the actor hides their person behind their expression, Drake hides behind layered meaning. Pop culture’s lexicon simply cannot ascribe blame to a figure as flimsy and transient as a Drake character—the man himself has never been present.
While we may not have the language to pinpoint the nature of his wrongdoings, Drake himself does, cementing his role as pop music’s con man. Her Loss is teeming with—to return to Kornhaber’s analysis of Certified Lover Boy—“the language to talk about your own awfulness.” On More M’s, Drake boasts, “Thought I was a popstar, I’m Slaughter Gang, I baited ‘em.” Here, he explicitly says that his movement between personas is often intentionally deceptive. Her Loss is one large baiting of popular culture: Drake elicits controversy while evading accountability by returning to his acting roots: he presents cues that he knows will invoke a response, but he lets the listener assign the particular meaning. As he tells us in the latter half of the bar dissing Meg,“She don’t even get the joke but she still smiling,” Drake is giving us language whose true meaning we will never understand. Nonetheless, he gets his intended reaction out of us, and escapes unscathed.
Thus in an era dominated by cancel culture, Drake’s self-awareness has impeccably guarded him against cancellation; it is his superpower, and a glaring limitation of our moral cognition. As the album’s title suggests, canceling Drake truly would only be her loss: killing the character we see, hear, and watch leaves the man himself unscathed and falls short of addressing the suffering of the women who fall victim to his backhanded blows. To address the sexist harm of albums like Her Loss, what needs to grow is our critical assessment of pop culture accountability; this does not entail a stripping down of lyrical layers, but instead an understanding of what exactly builds them. If we understand how Drake functions and the gaze that created him, then we can begin to dismantle the harm of his sly, evasive violence, of our own societal notions, and of producing an unreachable yet dominant figure.
The annoying, prodding question galavanting across every purchase: What does it mean to be fashionable? It is a question unanswerable, too subjective to even approach. Yet a thousand different corners have thrown a thousand different hats in the ring.
One of the most distinguishable features of this decade’s style and fashion community, concentrated in the last few years, has been the emergence and explosion of microtrend aesthetics over social media and their influence on how we view and clothe ourselves. Group fashion has always been an indomitable aspect of social presentation, from the early days of Ivy Style at Princeton to the low-cut everything vibes of the early 2000s. But the proliferation of social media—an infinite expanse of self expression absent of group sociality— has smashed “universal style” and instead allowed a thousand microtrends and subcultures to take its place. The fashion aesthetics we see today (cottagecore, grandpa-core, TikTok’s rediscovery of preppy and its transmutation into “old money aesthetic”) are directly informed by social media fads and accompanying discourse; a trendy loop by which microtrends are born and feed upon themselves before multiplying into various smaller, more specific offshoots.
Take ‘dark academia’ for instance, one of the most popular and lasting of the microtrends to rise out of social media. The premise of dark academia is simple (as are the reading lists its followers posit, but you didn’t hear that from me), a throwback look based around vintage silhouettes and the aesthetics of academic and university life, particularly the mysterious and esoteric avenues of such lifestyles. Think dark, earthy tones and the use of muted colors like maroon to create a sort of Victorian and Gothic literature-inspired dress. High-waisted trousers in tweed and wool flannel, dark-colored turtlenecks and roll necks, button down shirts underneath chunky sweaters, tweed and corduroy blazers paired with dark overcoats, and throwback university-wear to point to literary and academic roots are hallmarks of the style. Primarily, it is a fashion aesthetic that lends itself to vintage clothes and secondhand ownership, a continuation of living history from the previous owner to the next. But one look at the current state of dark academia and you can see quite clearly that a desire for a vintage look has been completely overtaken with a desire for cheap, aesthetic clothing.
Most of the content being produced around the dark academia aesthetic is highly virulent memes: TikToks featuring all the fashion goals an aestheticcraving audience could dream of, carefully crafted Instagram and Reddit posts showcasing just how much their life is within the style and how cool they look doing it. But the majority of the style (the aesthetic being dominated by clothes) is visibly cheap, produced from fast fashion companies marketed toward young audiences who crave the instant satisfaction of cheap and available clothes. All the posturing about the aesthetic falls apart when you realize a discomforting majority of its followers are flashing their SHEIN fits and copies of The Secret History like their some young scholar delving into Thomas Wolfe in the 1930s. A brief cursory search of Reddit threads and TikTok comments will show the aesthetic’s disciples recommending ASOS
coats and other cheap alternatives to vintage clothes.
It should go without saying that a vastly consumable, quick-paced hijacking of aesthetics by fast fashion is highly dangerous. The desire to dress in a way supplemented and marketed by fast fashion companies has catastrophic consequences for the workers who have to meet demands of consumers hungry for cheap, trendy clothes. Workers in SHEIN factories are paid a monthly wage of around $556 with an expectation to make 500 articles of clothing per day, not to mention the eighteen hour work days and draconian punishments for any mistakes made on the production line.
Beyond the human cost of the demand, we have to investigate the environmental damage that fast fashion is creating. For example, the demand for cheap cashmere has led to overgrazing of Mongolian plains, leaving barren landscapes that can’t sustain the vigorous production of cashmere for mainly Western consumers. Some herders have been forced to resort to buying grass and feed for their goats to prevent their starvation. The lack of available grass and healthy, sustainable conditions have led to the overall worsening of cashmere quality over the years and—if the demand for fast fashion continues—for the foreseeable future. The quality of these clothes also leads to pieces which fall apart much more quickly than quality-made fashion. With no incentive of quality to invest in repairs and the easier option of just buying more cheap clothes to replace old, damaged items a Google Chrome tab away, fast fashion has led to a glut of clothes occupying landfills and thrift stores, another nail hammered into this climate coffin.
Some may think that being part of an aesthetic or movement makes one immune to trends and fast fashion. This does not hold up when fast fashion companies are involved in the aesthetic, through marketing and production, in every level from purchasing to creating
a TikTok for your middling attempt at an influencer career. It is important to remember it is never okay to buy from fast fashion companies because all major brands and companies are implicit in poor labor practices and environmental damage, and that there is never an excuse. Even acknowledging that many modern brands engage in unethical labor practices, the sheer volume of clothes and their poor quality that are being churned out of fast fashion companies dwarfs the impact of many of the modern brands people might point to. Even the progenitors of fast fashion in the early 2000s, Zara and H&M, who made their name from their rapid fire collection releases, are dwarfed by modern fast fashion companies, with their astounding ability to analyze, influence, and design trends and release them to market with extreme speed.
There is nothing wrong with being part of an aesthetic. In fact I would be surprised if anyone was immune to it now that we are so immersed in popular culture and social media. What is wrong, however, is buying into an aesthetic in a way that supports and sustains the processes of something with such detrimental consequences. There are so many helpful resources: guides on how to thrift, where to shop for which item, wardrobe guides, sustainability guides. Ignoring all of that in favor of an easy solution is being complicit in the environmental and human cost of fast fashion. It can be an uphill battle at first, but I promise there are always ways to dress the way you want to without buying into these markets of destruction, and hell, if you’re really desperate, shoot me an email and I’ll try my best to help.
Stay warm, stay cozy, and stop buying shit.
Synesthesia: the ability to hear shapes, taste colors, or see music. For some, there is an involuntary reaction that happens between senses where one sensory trigger will consistently and predictably cause an interaction with another.
I think everyone has their own form of synesthesia. I have a friend who sees a number whenever they think of or interact with a person—odd numbers mean different things from even, and a person who is a four is entirely different from a person who is a forty. For me, months of the year follow the outline of a rectangle in my brain (starting with January in the upper left corner) so dates are physically placed in a specific spot along the perimeter.
While I think it would be cool to taste the color of every wall I see, I don’t have synesthesia. What I tend to do though (and I guess will settle for) is see a color and immediately think of a person in my life who embodies that color. Perhaps the discrepancy between shades can be argued according to personal relationships with the individual, but I believe there is still a general agreement of color association. A guide to color-match your friends, a Pantone list of my dearly beloved:
Forest green (emerging from a dark turquoise), Pantone #3308
Different shades of green are entirely different people. Forest green people are well-balanced. It makes sense why I see you the least in our suite. You are far more balanced than I am, and now that I’m thinking about it, I haven’t seen you since Monday. Perhaps I could’ve seen you yesterday had I not gone to the 10:05 p.m. movie showing and woken up at 9:30 a.m. this morning. Let’s snuggle in your bed and watch The Parent Trap (Lindsay Lohan version
only) soon, okay? I’ll roll the joint for us.
Forest green people settle into their specific shade and lean into it. For you, everything in your life has begun to be painted by those broad strokes. Forest green people probably run outdoors to exercise (maybe with a fanny pack strapped to the waist), do puzzles on Thanksgiving Day, and eat granola and non-dairy yogurt for breakfast (which, of course, they never skip).
Deep fuchsia people will probably wear pants that are also deep fuschia. Maybe with pearls, too, and drive a dented car. Deep fuchsia is bright and loud and entertaining, and indeed, deep fuchsia people are all those things. They have strong personalities, but everyone could use a bit of deep fuschia in their life. Once you do, you might climb up fire escapes with them or jump out of planes from 14,000 feet together. They’ll have the dented car bouncing to the heaviest beat when picking you up from the station at 3 a.m., and maybe you’ll roam around the rainforest with them too. You pick, it’ll be a good time regardless.
Blue is blue the way white is white, at least for Pantone #0293
Classic, true, honest. It’s like when people have 18 pairs of blue jeans in their closet, there is still a single one that is the classic, love-worn staple, and the perfect shade of blue. You are my favorite pair of blue jeans. I would sacrifice all my
other pairs in a heartbeat if it meant I could keep you.
Some days blues are a Pantone #2955 and other days, a Pantone #0298. If there was a set of ten markers and one of them was blue, the shade might be different between each brand of markers. But there will always be a blue marker— blue is blue the way you are you.
Yellow, Pantone #3935
“Yellow is capable of charming God.”
There is a physical effect with yellows. Seeing you has the same effect as sunlight when you’re seasonally depressed. You just make the world brighter in a literal way. You are just cavalierly happy and it’s infectious. Hues of yellow will of course differ, but there is an undeniable radiance of yellows. So let’s crochet together and cook dinner together with the rosemary from your impressively healthy dorm plant. Or we can put on goggles and go for a dip in the sound, but it’s colder now so maybe we can just go climbing together. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what we do—as long as it’s with you, I know I’ll be okay.
Orange, Pantone #0804
Orange is for people who grow persimmons in their backyard, who re-wild their lawn to allow nature to reclaim its ground. Orange is for people who get emotional at cookbooks and unashamedly read romance novels while also reading Moby Dick. Orange is for people who are brilliant and are the
exception to orange-color-haters. You are the exception and there is nothing quite like my love for you.
Moss green (in the context of a medallion yellow, Pantone #0130), Pantone #5767
Now, moss green is important because the context of the color will change its meaning entirely. Moss green has individualized relationships with its adjacent color, whatever it might be. Moss green people can never be generalized; their conversations with one person are like moss cultivated in a Japanese garden, and their conversations with another like moss as Christmas decoration.
Let’s consider a moss green next to a medallion yellow, Pantone #5767 to Pantone #0130, respectively. In this context, moss green people send postcards on roadtrips, will have a personal connection to the word “cabin”, and exclusively shopped at REI and Patagonia on Cyber Monday.
But that’s not to say moss greens can’t survive on their own. Moss, absent of roots and stems and leaves, can grow anywhere. In fact, moss comes alive in the rain.
How much more sweet, tasty, and brilliant the world around us becomes when colors come alive in this way.
—Kaitlan Bui, “In The Places We Once Called Home” 12.03.2021
“I think that any reflection upon this time will inevitably unfold as a stubbornly linear narrative, defining itself through the recognition and repetition of salient events.”
—Anneliese Mair, “A Decade Undone” 12.06.2019