post- 2/17/2023

Cover by Jasmin Lin @sasha_art_0201

My sister is a forest dweller. She leads a pastoralist existence—the trees her companions and the stars her teachers. At Colby College in Waterville, Maine, the rustic wind nudges time forward. The woods’ many creatures fend off adventure-hungry students skipping astray in the hills, nibbling at their heels until they surrender back to the library. I imagine this place to be a rural oasis. Like water in a desert, Colby is a refuge amidst a world of blaring city lights and screaming taxi cars. Children wear hiking boots and learn to check their skin for poison ivy stains when returning to their dorm rooms, untroubled by metropolitan dangers like smog or speeding vehicles.

I arrive in Augusta, the nearest urban center to Colby, as an October dusk drapes itself over the white pines. A bus station of desolation, it is located on the side of a road with a field as its only neighbor. One by one, my co-passengers are retrieved by friends and

Letter from the Editor

Dear Readers,

Time is cyclical. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s that mellow time just after Valentine’s Day again and JUST like last year I am fighting a (non-metaphorical, very much real) fever from not dressing warmly enough. I don’t think I’ll ever learn some things, and go on expecting that just because I am a different person now that doing the same things will yield new, surprising results. Life might as well be endless iterations of the same choices, but we only have an inkling of things repeating themselves. But sometimes I think that’s why people write, because if it wasn’t down on paper, thoughts humans have thought a thousand times come to us again like epiphanies.

Into the Woods

on the forest's teachings

By EllYse GivenS

Illustrated by elliana reynolds

relatives parked in nearby cars, en route to a more final destination. I, on the other hand, do not have an escort— just Uber and Lyft. I wrest my phone from my jacket pocket’s grasp to summon a driver, only to find the app struggling to load, perplexed by my blue location dot’s new rural whereabout. My fucking phone does not even know where I am.

I am alone at a bus station in the middle of nowhere. For a moment, I consider my uselessness. A metropolitan girl in the countryside—her telephone and academic fervor and interpersonal skills, once her most valued assets, rendered futile in this rurality. This weakness makes me angry. I Facetime my mom in annoyance and the screen glitches violently, her features frozen into place. Phones do not enjoy functioning in the wilderness—just as I imagine the wilderness despises these technologized vibrations that interrupt its intrinsic rhythm. Neither of these creatures wants

In post- this week, our writers looked to the past and did exactly that. In Feature, the author reflects on visiting her sister at a rural college and the value of being in the woods in an increasingly urbanized world. In Narrative, one writer fondly reminisces on the quirky experiences associated with his high school football team, while another reflects on her experience with ChatGPT to unpack her own relationship with writing and creative productivity. In Arts & Culture, one writer discusses the recent increase in films depicting feminine rage (!) and another talks about the virality of Ice Spice and why it’s not just a phase (spoiler: she’s the modern day Princess Diana). And in Lifestyle, advice on how best to participate in the lovely rituals of communion and scrapbooking.

to function in tandem, yet I bat my screen with a finger, determined to defy their dissonance. My mom comes alive again. Apparently, a small, Augusta-based taxi company has gleefully agreed to retrieve the stranded daughter from the bus station.

The driver arrives in an oviform, faded blue minivan that screeches faintly to a halt along the sidewalk. “We only take cash,” he remarks while shoving something into the glove compartment, not looking at me. “Yes, sir,” I respond. I cannot remember the last time I was in a taxi. He begins driving and I feel the car’s underpinnings vibrate beneath my feet, the vehicle emitting a peculiar buzzing sound that concerns me slightly. He turns up the music so that I no longer notice it. Excited to hear that I am from California, he speaks of his escapades in Mexico, his tales embellished by the “very beautiful women” he met along the way. He drinks from a silver can and I refuse to allow myself to wonder if its contents are alcoholic.

But really, what’s to say life is to be found in what is TRULY new when the same choices you’ve made before led to happiness and gratification?

It’s always good to be on the same page as yourself. Anyway, that’s my brain on a platter. I hope you enjoy our first issue this semester in tandem with the budding spring of yet another year.

Thinking about how pretty birds are, Kimberly Liu Editor-in-Chief

I see fuzzy cubes peeping from the abyss outside the window and am relieved. Colby College is perched atop the hill ahead, the pointed bell tower crowning Miller Library heralding the institution's presence like a lighthouse. We drive and the picture I see framed by the windshield comes into focus, quaint brick buildings now proudly defying the darkness attempting to engulf them. Light posts kiss the sidewalks with a warm yellow, outlining the curving paths that shepherd students from class to class during the daytime. The campus is so cute, like a quintessential colonial town, that the irritation brewing in my chest is forced to recede. It feels as if my surroundings are begging me to smile. And I do.

I see my sister’s smile from yards away and I almost beg my driver to stop. It’s raining now, but I am not scared anymore; I trudge through the darkness, my bags slamming into my hip bones as I walk. I nearly squeal when I see her, wrapping my arms around her body— the small frame I know so well now cushioned by the new puffer jacket she dons. She looks beautiful. It is a funny thing, sisters uniting within a world created not by their parents, but by themselves alone. It feels almost unnatural—to be together outside of our childhood home. It is also exhilarating.

***

Emily had three criteria to which her prospective post-secondary site of education had to adhere. “It needs to have a body of water nearby, uniform and consistent architecture, and a forest,” she would say. Contrasting my “I-probably-can-adapt”-attitude, she knew what she wanted, and I admired this. I had been to Colby’s campus before and enjoyed it, but walking into her dorm, into the space she has established for herself, I can sense that this place is exactly what she had wanted and imagined it to be. Outside her window is Johnson Pond, a picturesque body of water, its shine visible despite the curtain of pine trees veiling its circumference. The buildings do appear uniform, each dorm and academic hall appearing like a brick homestead to me, the former indistinguishable from the latter.

And the school does in fact stand within what could be considered a forest. The 714 acre campus is situated on Mayflower Hill, overlooking the Kennebec River Valley in Central Maine. Kennebec Valley is the largest northsouth region of Maine, covering more than 5,000 square miles. The Abnaki occupied the Kennebec River Valley at the point of first European contact, adorning it with the name "Kennebec," which means "snaky monster" or "long quiet water.” The River was one of the first explored by Europeans in the New World, who eventually settled along the banks to use the river for transportation and commerce of fish and furs. Mills for textile production and gristmills for flour were slowly littered along the shores, and major cities Augusta, Gardiner, Skowhegan, and Waterville emerged later on, becoming sites of ship

Hearts

tonnage production and ice harvesting. Now, the Valley is well-loved for trout fishing, hiking, biking, and bird watching, and even offers its own ‘moose safari’ for interested visitors. The region is still relatively rural, the native Grey Birch tree, Canada lynx, and black-capped chickadee existing in harmony without fear of too much human encroachment.

For Colby students, the forest is intrinsic to their emotional and academic growth. Each year, Colby inaugurates new freshmen students with a COOT: a Colby Outdoor Orientation Trip. Students can choose from a wide array of outdoor activities to commence their time at Colby, including backpacking, canoeing, fishing, rock climbing, and surfing—Emily met her best friend, Julia, on her COOT white water rafting trip. In addition to fostering interpersonal connection amongst Colby students, the forest also encourages academic achievement. Despite its relatively rural location, Colby boasts a 9% acceptance rate and attracts students from nearly 70 countries around the world. It is one of the nation’s premier liberal arts colleges, offering 57 majors and 36 minors. My sister took a class called “Landscape and Place,” during which they would often venture into the surrounding wilderness to garner inspiration. For all the Environmental Science classes, labs take place outdoors. Colby is also the only college with its very own Island Campus: located off the coast of Maine, Allen and Bander islands have become sites upon which Colby students study climate change, atmospheric pollution, and biodiversity.

This belief in the pedagogic and inspirational value of nature has been shared by countless others as well. Henry David Thoreau embarked into the woods adjacent to Walden Pond for two years and two months as an “experiment,” drawing closer to nature” and contemplating “the final ends of his own life.” He came to see God in nature, and believed that the world would be better off if “all the meadows were left in a wild state.” His experience “bore fruit” in the 1854 publication of his literary masterpiece Walden. Gautama Buddha found spiritual enlightenment in the woods, leaving his palace behind against the will of his father and journeying into the nearby wilderness. He seated himself beneath the Bodhi Tree in meditation posture and vowed not to rise from meditation until he had attained this perfect enlightenment, which he eventually did. Taylor Swift retreated to the woods as well, spending time in upstate New York to write her sister albums Folklore and Evermore. In the song “Seven,” she writes, “picture me, in the weeds, before I learned civility.” To me, her songs feel olive-toned—almost fire-lit. They are rustic and beautiful and unique, and won her a Grammy award. The woods may be where humans achieve their best.

***

And yet our forests are dying. During the European

colonization of the Americas from the 1600s to 1870s, the eastern region of what is now the United States lost about half of its woodland. Advances in lumber processing during the Industrial Revolution further stimulated this forest removal due to the increasing demand for clear land that could be used for agriculture, industry, and residence. This was the cost of modernity— the stripping of what is natural to make way for what is new, for what is ‘advanced.’

The mythos of cities mirrors this association between urbanization and progress. In the Bible, John saw the “Holy City” of Jerusalem and knew that there would be “no more death or mourning….for the old order of things has passed away.” In the Emerald City, the wishes of the Lion, Scarecrow, Tinman, and Dorothy can all be granted. John Winthrop envisioned America to be a “city upon a hill,” a beacon of hope amidst uncertainty. And today, nearly 180 of the nation’s largest companies are headquartered in just six major cities. It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in these infamous urban centers.

I see this rhetoric of metropolitan supremacy in my conversations. Some have said that Colby’s rural location is an “escape from reality,” yet commend my friend, Sophia, for “being brave enough” to live in New York City whilst attending NYU. They say she must be “maturing so much” (which I don’t doubt, Sophia). Yet who is to say that my sister is not experiencing a similar type of monumental personal growth while isolated from American cities?

The last two centuries have associated industrialism with modernity, and forest with incivility and antiquity. A city’s lights can bring terror and challenge—but what about finding yourself in a desolate place, no silver buildings present to guide you home, no honking horns to drown out your thoughts? I think it may take even more courage to do just this, to be in the wilderness without the comforting cushion of civilization. I think that, maybe, urbanization was implemented to distract. Living in a city, one forgets all that they do not know about the world below them—about the power Earth will forever hold over humans. To be in the wilderness, to be at Colby, is to surrender. One stands in the forest aware of their forever inferiority to the grounds atop which they stand. To be in the “middle of nowhere”—a place that has been an important somewhere all along—I think this action may be more ‘advanced’ than any skyscraper we could ever construct.

***

The other day, I was speaking with my grandfather and he asked if Emily had “survived” the -20 degree temperatures experienced by Maine just a week ago.

“You know, I admire you, Ellyse, but it’s Emily who I think is brave…going all the way from southern California all the way up to Maine,” he said.

“Yeah, she is pretty brave. And I am so proud of her.”

“The French call it a petit orgasm.”

“I crowdsourced my gender.”

1. <3

2. Anatomically correct

3. Artichoke

4. Queen of

5. Finger ;)

6. -beet

7. Stopper

8. -y bowl of cheerios

9. strings

10. -less :(

The Peglegs vignettes from my

on a

high school football team

by Damian Wasilewicz

Illustrated by hannah zhang

Honey, There’s A Lineman In The Kitchen

The first thing you want to do as a lineman is to get into a squat. If you’re on the right side of the line, left butt cheek tenderly kissing the right cheek of your friend Matt, you want to clamp down that right hand on your thigh. You might feel it trembling from the squat— probably shouldn’t have skipped the stretch. Stick your left hand up, ready to defend the quarterback behind you from anyone rushing towards them with malice in their heart. If you’re feeling dangerous, wriggle your fingers a bit. Now the enemy knows they’re in trouble.

With my makeshift drill finished, I straighten up from the squat and make my way across the kitchen to check on my mouthguard. The mouthguard is struggling to stay afloat amidst a turbulent sea of boiling water whose heat I feel with my hand above it. I fish it out, rinse it under cold water for a second, and shove it in my mouth. When it no longer feels like I’m biting down on a chew toy, I take the guard out and put it back into cold water to let it finish setting.

I move on to giving the rest of my body a fighting chance. The discomfort of the groin cup is preferable to having my genealogical tree prematurely trimmed, but only barely. I slip into my girdle, jumping a little to get it fully on. It’s a pair of long white underwear with built-in thigh pads. Once it’s on, I make a fist and slam against my thigh, pleased with the thud that it makes in response.

My shoulder pads are next, confusingly extending beyond their namesake’s jurisdiction to also cover my back and chest with dark gray plates. The pads dig into

my chest as I reach over to pick up my helmet, and I make a mental note to loosen them up. I stand before the mirror as I don the matte blue helmet, anticipating the striking image of a warrior I will see before me once it’s on.

I look like a bobble head.

Radioactive Merwomen

Stuyvesant High School isn’t particularly wellknown for its athletics. It’s a public school with one extra step—all potential students have to take what’s known as the SHSAT to gain admission. Many of the 850 students in each grade get access to resources that they otherwise could never have afforded and an express ticket to colleges they could never have dreamed of.

In other words, we’re all small and nerdy, and our best sport is table tennis.

Every year a handful of Stuyvesant students get sucked into The Peglegs, trekking down the steps to the basement for the first time and coming back up with gear that’s either a half size too small or a half size too big. Our football team is named after Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch director general of the New Netherland colony, who had to part ways with one of his legs after it was blown off by a cannonball, but found new love with a wooden prosthetic.

During the regular season, the team makes the 15-minute walk over after class to Pier 40 for practice together. We step out of Stuyvesant and onto Tribeca bridge, a small gray pedestrian bridge plugged directly into our school that crosses over West Street, before making a sharp turn down a side exit and tumbling down a metal staircase.

For a number of years there’s also been a small statue of a white bicycle covered in flowers resting near the staircase. It’s a memorial dedicated to the victims of the terrorist attack that took place the Halloween of our junior year, in which a man drove his van into bicyclists and pedestrians along the bike path we walked beside daily to practice. The day of the attack, our practice had been canceled due to a coach’s wedding—it was the only day off we’d had in four years.

But none of that has happened yet. Today, we’re

making our way down the path to the Pier, with the Hudson River to our left, a view of the New Jersey waterfront across the water, and a bike path to our right. The unreasonably large red Colgate Clock beckons to us from Jersey City, but we can tell the time just fine on our watches. We often joke about the Hudson River being radioactive, but this doesn’t dissuade Evan from jumping into it, proclaiming that his search for women on land has not been fruitful and that he must turn his sights to the sea.

I look past Evan and his radioactive merwomen to catch a glimpse of Pier 40 in the distance. A reflection of Manhattan’s limited wiggle room, Pier 40 pokes out from the city and into the Hudson River. Its side rises vertically, giving the pier the overall impression of a square donut placed atop a massive artificial turf field. The field is surrounded by a concrete perimeter with benches and walkways. Beneath certain parts where the concrete meets and hovers above the field, you can see the river through a small fence, waves ebbing and flowing in response to the Pier bobbing on top of it. Patrick mentioned once that, according to recent reports, the Pier is gradually sinking into the Hudson. We celebrated the news by jumping up and down in sync to see if we could speed up the process.

Homecoming

The homecoming game always has a special energy to it. For one, we get record turnouts, which for us means approximately fifty people in the audience. Another distinguishing point is that this is the only game that our cheerleading team performs at, and before the game we hold a joint pep rally in the school gymnasium. In a few weeks, the cheerleaders will be off to compete at Nationals, while we find out whether we’ve moved up from the lowest division in the city. For one night, we pretend to be worthy of their cheer. At the rally, the cheerleaders perform a well-choreographed routine while we cheer them on and try to find something to do with our hands.

After the rally, we make our way to the locker room, which is really just a small section of a parking lot within the Pier. Looking past Coach Tauber, who’s yelling at

time

not-so-great

us to warm up and just yelling in general, I spot Hao squatted over and taking a bite out of a dragonfly’s wing that he found on the ground. Grinning, and with flecks of iridescent wings stuck in his teeth, he boasts that it’s high in protein.

Warmed up and, in Hao’s case, refueled, we continue our march to the field. I run into my mom and Jerry, who’s still wearing his hip-hop outfit from the practice he just came from. I thank them both for coming and blow kisses to my mom, but Jerry intercepts them and blows them back. We’re past the crowd now, and we take one final push to charge through a banner and onto the field. We’re immediately stung by rain— we had the foresight to schedule the game during the worst thunderstorm of the year.

The scream of a plastic whistle signals the start of the game, and time starts slipping away on a filmstrip. In one frame I get the jump on the lineman opposite me and drive him back, in another it’s him both jumping and driving. In a different scene I tackle the running back, wrapping my arms around his soaking legs and driving us both into one of the many puddles that’s formed on the ground, a tactic that leaves us both drowning. Another shot somewhere between those other ones shows me spraying Gatorade at my mouth and missing, and for a few minutes after that my world smells like orange.

Halfway through the second quarter, the referees call the game, and since we’ve managed to put up a solid lead on the enemy team we get to celebrate an early win. Ecstatic, with too much unspent adrenaline in our veins, and directly against the orders of the referees to take shelter, our whole team runs around a Pier transformed by a monsoon. Enormous chunks of the field have become equally massive puddles, and we alternate between pushing each other into them and jumping in ourselves.

I hear Jerry hollering in celebration, and see him pressed against the fence on the side opposite of us. He’s jumped onto the fence, sneakers and hands dug into its diamond pockets, shaking it alongside other faces I love. In a few years I’ll have an article about a car crash in Colorado bookmarked on my laptop. In a few years I will be shaking his sister’s hand at his funeral and telling her what an honor it was to be his friend. In a few years, yes, but right now I yell back at him.

Finding a suitable puddle to fall back onto, I let myself drop. I imagine that this is what it’ll look like when the Pier finally sinks into the bottom of the river, and I know that this too, like many things, will come to pass. But for this moment, I dig my fingers deep into the turf, I stretch my mouth wide, I taste the rain.

Christmas Adventures in OpenAI on what makes a writer

by alissa simon

Illustrated by hannah zhang

On the sixth night of Chanukah, which is also Christmas Eve, I am awake and burning in my childhood bed. It isn't a flame, but a computer running on my bare stomach that sears a red spot into my skin. But I can’t find it in myself to move. Not quite a week has passed since coming home, and I’m more at peace than I’ve been in a long time. Dark comes quickly now and so do other things: the sound of locking cars and wind. It’s a pleasant kind of paralysis.

This past semester was a long one. One

where I promised myself I would get back into writing after a disorienting spell of self-doubt and hesitation. All fall, I waited on myself to start writing like I did when I was a child—poorly and abundantly—but the words never came. I’m too busy to write, I said, which was true. I have this idea… but I always choked a few sentences in. But now, I’m not busy anymore. My exams are finished and I’m in the quiet of my room, drinking the good coffee my cousins brought from New York. But I’m still not writing. Instead, I’m playing with ChatGPT—the new mass obsession—and biding time until the sun sets.

+ There’s a cold snap settling in and we’ve camped out in the living room for the weekend. A fire is burning and has somehow managed to stay alive all afternoon. Someone keeps feeding it while I’m asleep or my head is turned. I open my laptop. Recently, I’ve been asking ChatGPT small, stupid questions to pass the time, testing the infinite magic promised by generative artificial intelligence. Draft an email to a professor. What’s a good stocking stuffer? How was your day?

My uncle sees my computer screen and makes a joke about OpenAI running us out of our jobs. In a room of students, lawyers, and retirees, no one laughs. It’s a bad audience. Not a single one of us knows how to write a line of code; none of us really understands what artificial intelligence is, only what it might signal about our digital privacy or capacity to make and lose money. The conversation gives way to easier things: television shows, recipes for pasta sauce, and books—ones we’ve read, loved, should read, heard about others reading, need to read. I will put the books on my list. I will write the list down somewhere I can remember.

+ The day after Christmas, the house stinks of clementines and I want to finish something, for once.

I’ve had too much coffee and my stomach hurts; there’s a stitch buried in the left side of my waist that feels as if I’ve been running a long, long way. But I haven’t. I’ve been sprawled on my too-small mattress, typing and deleting the same three sentences for half an hour while my window panes hum with cold. I think I want to write something new, something in the style of Anne

Carson or maybe Maggie Nelson, but I am lightheaded and flighty. I feel pinned like an insect to bedposts with nail polish stains that must be over nine years old. The stitch screams.

I open ChatGPT. What is the style of Anne Carson’s Nox? How do I start a story? I feel like my stomach is going to hurt forever.

It tells me that Nox is notable for its codex format and combination of written and visual elements, that two of the five most memorable first sentences in literature are by Charles Dickens, that I should up my fluid intake and try an ibuprofen.

In some cases, stomach pain can be a manifestation of emotional distress or a way for the body to express emotions that are difficult to verbalize.

+

Neat, six-line little things written in firm, careful strokes. The pencil must have been dull; the words are soft, almost oily now, and there’s a familiar smear of eraser marks underneath. My first poems were clever, though you might not guess it from the way I rhyme “day” with “away” or “red” with “bed.” It aches a little bit to see all the small, complete things I made and held in my hands.

It’s a gross luxury, all this paper gone stale. I could have dedicated the shelf space to other people’s writing. Instead, it holds a half-dozen, half-filled composition books that neatly chronicle my progression from the six-line rhymes to embarrassing imitations of Poe. But, in my new jewelry and gifted sweater, I’m charmed. I’m generous with myself tonight in a way I haven’t been for a long time. I’m glad someone decided to save these notebooks and glad that, at least, this kind of purposelessness will remain. If anything, we’ve become more compulsive about documenting and compiling our things with no promise that we will ever return to them.

+

Something funny happens when you ask ChatGPT to not just inform you about art, but to create it. Request a poem in any style—sonnet, haiku, free verse—and watch as it hesitates just a moment before spilling forth with clever, cleanlyformed lyric.

Write a poem about banana muffins. About the desert and my friend’s green shirt. About those 20 minutes after the sun sets but before it is dark.

After a few rounds, you might notice the poems start to feel stale. Patterns begin to look like programming, and cloying words like “bright” and “serene” say too much and too little at once. For these reasons, poet and critic Katha Pollitt dismisses AI poetry as “cliche and tiresome,” and she’s right. I know that ChatGPT poetry isn’t good, per se. But I don’t think it's bad either. It’s correct, at least, every form satisfied, every word and its corresponding meaning accounted for. And it’s complete—that has to count for something.

How do you get better as a writer?

As an AI language model developed by OpenAI, I get better as a writer through the process of machine learning. This involves training me on a large dataset of text written by humans, which allows me to learn patterns and relationships in language. The more data I am trained on, the more accurate and diverse my responses become.

How do I get better as a writer?

The chatbot spits back another list of tips and I get tired halfway through reading it.

+

I think what fascinates me most about generative AI isn't its implications for high school history classes or online conspiracies—it’s the way the software attempts to mimic the process of artistic growth. In the span of a few quick commands, ChatGPT can act out the minute shifts from childlike syntax to what we commonly recognize as “good” writing that otherwise takes years to develop. This ability isn’t perfect. A New York Times quiz asked readers whether they could correctly attribute written passages to either a chatbot or a real fourth grader and I guessed correctly every time. In all the passages written by ChatGPT, there was something off . The vocabulary was uniform, the grammar simple but perfect. If you looked closely, you could see it: the touch of something more (or less) than human. Still, it now feels easy to see where this is going.

Ask it the right questions, prod it the right way, and it might be possible to draw out my fourthgrade self in stilting bursts of text.

Do I think I could make her parrot back to me something I once made? Maybe one of the clever poems or the story about the girl with the green eyes in the Wild West? I filled notebooks, at one point, with things like that.

The truth of it is that something about the idea of ChatGPT made me want to start writing again, for real. Maybe it’s a sense of competition. Maybe it’s fear. But I’m not exactly afraid—not yet, anyways.

In Nox , Anne Carson writes: “I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy.” When asked to produce a passage in her voice, ChatGPT writes: “The night holds within it a stillness that speaks volumes. It is a silence that echoes, a silence that is a song.” There’s no contest.

I don’t really believe that this website can write like Anne Carson on command. I don’t think it can even write like me. But it will never stop trying. One AI expert noted that ChatGPT has “no human experiences” on which to base writing, “ but also no human foibles, like exhaustion, distraction, anxiety, or forgetfulness.” While I am staring at the wall, cooking eggs, buying the books on my list, AI is at work. It is compiling more words, turning in on itself, swelling like the heat of a steady, low-burning fire and running combinations until something beautiful eventually emerges.

+

How do I write again?

A blinking pause. There’s a tantalizing moment where it doesn’t matter that there is no human typing back at me. Nothing matters but the promise, the space from which anything could emerge. I close my laptop before it does, pick at my nails in frustration. Underneath, the software hums on.

I hear voices—someone is laughing

downstairs. I hear the beginnings of cooking. I hear the trucks arriving to collect Christmas trees left by the curb. I put a hand to my stomach. I’ve felt paralyzed for a while now, fingers flickering over the keys, unsure of what there is left to say.

The Craze for Feminine Rage

why we love to see women angry

by emily tom

Illustrated by lulu cavicchi

I’ve seen the clip a few times now. Anya TaylorJoy is on a press tour, promoting her movie The Menu in a BBC interview. “I have a thing about feminine rage,” she says. She kicks the air playfully as she speaks. “This is no disrespect for any writer. I get a lot of men doing really terrible things and women sitting silently while one tear slowly falls.”

Taylor-Joy continues, “And I’m like, ‘Oh, no, no, no. We get mad and angry. I remember pulling Mark [The Menu’s director] aside and saying, ‘I’m really sorry, but the only way to play this truthfully is for me to attack him.’”

The video has gained nearly three million likes on TikTok, as well as a flood of supportive comments. We’re sick of being so reserved to avoid being called crazy, one viewer writes. Honestly, the way the media portrays our emotions and our fights is too dainty, says another.

These viewers are not alone in their frustration. For as long as I can remember, my anger has been an inconvenience at best and shameful at worst. Before my first high school debate tournament, the team captain pulled me aside and said, “Boys are going to yell at you in-round. They’re allowed to yell. But if you act like them, the judges will think you’re a bitch.” She ended up being right. Male opponents would consistently raise their voices, talk over me, or cut me off when I asked a question, and my debate partner would make me take prep time to

calm down. A few years later, when I shouted at a man for grabbing my ass, some members of my family chided me, saying that I should “just let it go.” My anger made them more uncomfortable than his sexual harassment.

This is why Anya Taylor-Joy’s interview caught my attention. It’s why the comments are full of women agreeing with her sentiment. It’s why the interview went viral in the first place. We have found ourselves in a feminine rage craze.

TikTok and YouTube are saturated with compilations of angry women characters: Carrie unleashing the “curse of blood” at prom; Megan Fox seducing, attacking, and eating men in Jennifer’s Body; Toni Colette arguing with her onscreen son in Hereditary. Over the past year, female anti-heroes have taken film and television by storm. Onscreen depictions of feminine rage like Yellowjackets, which the show’s creators have described as an allfemale version of Lord of the Flies, work to show that women are just as capable of brutality as men. And by circulating clips of these women, often with kaleidoscopic filters and a girlboss Lizzo anthem in the background, the internet validates our love for feminine rage by making anger fashionable.

The most obvious reason we crave feminine rage is its subversion of gendered connotations of violence. Women are most often passive characters or, worse, victims. In her essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” Leslie Jamison interrogates the relationship between suffering and womanhood. There is something that draws people toward women in agony, from Miss Havisham burning alive in her wedding dress to Sylvia Plath sticking her head in an oven. “We can’t look away,” Jamison writes. “We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.” When our culture has spent so long infatuated with female suffering, we should not be surprised by the surging popularity of female rage. If a woman hurts someone on screen, women in the audience will at least be relieved that, for once, they are not the ones being hurt. This subversion of expectations is enough to feel like progress.

This is not to say that the trope of the angry woman is anything new. Femme fatales have always been popular. Take Medea from Euripides’s play of the same name, who takes revenge on Jason by killing his new wife and their two sons. Or take Amy Dunne from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, who frames her husband for her murder after she learns he is having an affair. But feminine rage, just like sadness, is all too easy to fetishize; Medea and Amy Dunne are both examples of the way a woman’s anger has typically been, as Dr. Lisa Coulthard at the University of British Columbia puts it, a “hyper-personal revenge in response to rape or loss of a child.” Medea, for example, only embarks on her violent rampage after her husband leaves her for another woman. Dr. Coulthard points out that in Kill Bill, Uma Thurman’s character is seeking revenge on the assassins who have destroyed her unborn child. These depictions of female rage support “stereotyped notions of female purity, emotionalism and ties to child rearing. [Characters'] violent vengeance is deemed appropriate or acceptable because of the level of violence that precipitated their actions,” Dr. Coulthard says.

I’ll be the first to admit that I love angry women. Whenever I talk about The Vegetarian by Han Kang, I tell people that I enjoyed it because I enjoy stories about women going insane. It’s the same reason I love Amy Dunne’s “Cool Girl” monologue from Gone Girl. There is something visceral about watching these fictional characters—women who harbor so much anger, sadness, and heartbreak that

one day it boils over. I think about them. I think about every mean girl who made fun of me in middle school. I think about every perverted man who has catcalled me on the street. I think about my racist eighth-grade history teacher. I think about the condescending teenagers I debated in high school. And I imagine what would have happened if I had spoken up, or cussed them out, or screamed, or flipped the table, or punched someone, or at least allowed myself to look angry. I think about this, and I can live vicariously through these fictional women.

It is cathartic, and it is freeing.

But it is that very catharsis that makes fictional depictions of feminine rage a cop-out. As video essayist Alice Cappelle explains, “In the context of female rage, cathartic movies serve to create a space for that anger to exist. But ultimately, that goal is for you to leave that anger behind and find peace. To go back to your life and live hand-in-hand with patriarchy again.”

In other words, these characters and their stories are like pillows to scream into. It is satisfying to release your anger, but there is a reason you scream into a pillow and not out loud. No one actually wants to confront the screaming. No one actually wants to acknowledge how angry you are. We can enjoy the fantasy of showing our emotions for a short time, but once the lights in the theater come up, we must return to a world in which we are expected to censor ourselves.

I’m not saying the world would be a better place if all women unleashed their internal rage and became violent. Even if I had the opportunity to attack every person who has ever made me angry, I would not—not because of the patriarchy but because it would be immature. But I do think that fans of the feminine rage trope should be aware that these films and television shows are just that: fiction. We can enjoy the catharsis, but we also cannot expect it to signal real social change.

I wish I could conclude by offering some solution, by saying how exactly we get to a world in which women are free to express their ugly emotions. But when I became captain of my high school debate team, I gave the freshman girls the exact same advice that my captain had given me before. When I saw the man who grabbed my ass again, I greeted him with a hug and acted as though nothing had happened. Being unashamed of my anger is easier said than done. So I will continue to watch the TikTok compilations, and I will read the “Cool Girl” monologue from Gone Girl, and I will watch Anya Taylor-Joy lunge at her onscreen boyfriend in The Menu, and I will hope that the catharsis is enough for now.

Ice Spice Gives Baddie, Body, and Structuralism

Spice samples it on her song “No Clarity,” one of her first songs to gain traction, pop becomes a signifier: From the first few notes alone, Ice Spice, the rapper who came from nowhere, emerges already familiar to us.

In “No Clarity”’s music video, Ice Spice is objectively steeped in drill culture: She wears a red Moncler puffer, a true emblem of New York drill, over her sheer bodysuit. The bass of her beats declares itself drill with each bellow and groan; in her language, she often utilizes the term “grahh,” an ad-lib found in nearly every drill song. In a recent profile of Ice Spice as the new face of drill, The New York Times picks up on this juxtaposition, labeling her work “Pop drill.”

However, something about Ice Spice’s particular “grahh” feels slightly out of place. It is, traditionally, a sound that intensifies the gritty violence of what the critic called “rah rah drill.” “Grahh” usually accompanies death threats, repping sets, and dissing opps. For Ice Spice however, it is a word completely incongruous with the rest of her aesthetic.

In attempting to understand this fundamental incongruity, it is tempting to ask, “How is Ice Spice more than a drill rapper?” When Ice Spice samples pop, she uses it to mobilize her particular musical expression. Like the 2010s pop beats, the hard baselines with “grahh” sprinkled between could function more as a form than a home, making drill a signifier rather than an identity. What does invoking the sound and aesthetics of drill allow her to do? If drill too is functioning structurally here, what is it giving ?

“I said baddest in the room because that’s what it gave,” Ice Spice declares matter-offactly in a Genius interview, explaining the selfaffirming lyrics to her song Bikini Bottom . From the outset of her career, Ice Spice has prioritized giving “baddie.” It wasn’t until she went viral on Tik Tok with the #BussItChallenge—a “thirst trap” which features her twerking—that she “knew [she] could be an artist,” she told the Times

As a Black woman in the rap industry, giving body , or platforming one’s body, always comes with the risks of objectification, commodification, and even physical danger. During a cultural moment in which Megan Thee Stallion, one of the biggest emblems of female body positivity in hip hop, was the victim of a public assault on her body, the violence of men who feel entitled to the female body is especially relevant.

Using the structure of drill, Ice Spice’s poetics combat this presumed bodily access at every turn. The formulation, “that’s what it gave” is particularly informative here: Her combination of the past tense and a vague pronoun reference for a subject places the right to evaluate her body just out of the average listener’s grasp. Without a clear subject or agent giving Ice Spice this power, no one can claim ownership over it or refute it. She uses the same formulation in the viral hook of her song Bikini Bottom: “How can I lose if I’m already chose.” She protects her claim to her body by housing it in a fortress of semantic ambiguity.

by evan gardner Illustrated by sol heo

Gum-covered bus rides. Fingers stained Bomb Pop red. Billabong swim trunks clinging to two still-growing legs. This is what “Clarity”—Zedd’s iconic 2012 pop banger—means to me. When Ice

While it may be foreign to grammarians, “it gave” is a phrase that is prominent in New York vernacular. The language of drill—a subculture within New York—has a particular lexicon, a narrow group of signs, signifiers, and signified, that only holds meaning for a specific group. When Ice Spice raps, “Like, grrah, keep it a stack, bitches move wock' 'cause they know I got bands,” nothing happens in a narrative sense, and the

The embodied poetics of "doin' my dance"

phrase is meaningless to an outsider. In reality, however, the words themselves do communicate something: group membership in the New York drill genre. Lines like these are more valuable for their semiotics than their semantics, for the only way to generate meaning from these words is by connecting them to the subculture.

In its syntax and vocabulary, the structure of drill gives Ice Spice the protection of exclusivity. Ice Spice embodies the Gen Z expression “IYKYK” with quotes like: “I said what I said if you get it you get it”; “If you not from New York you wouldn’t understand”; “You just have to be from the Bronx to get it.” Drill not only identifies her as a New Yorker, but it determines the signs she uses, and thus the audience who can properly perceive her. Perhaps the most powerful example of this mode of expression comes when Ice Spice “comes out,” so to speak: She raps, “I like ni**as, bitches too,” a statement delivered so casually and in so few words that it initially meant nothing to me. However, her Genius interview put all the pieces into place, with a simple, “Had to let ‘em know, we’re here and we’re queer.” By embedding her sexuality within the language of drill, Ice Spice is hiding it in plain sight (to borrow from Benoit Blanc). To those who speak drill, she is powerfully asserting her presence and the queerness of her body. At the same time, she protects herself from a broader popular culture that often fetishizes and objectifies queer bodies by speaking in terms that do not signify queerness in standardized English.

Within the space provided by drill, Ice Spice has forged her own body-positive aesthetic: she embodies what drill researcher Nicole Racine calls “sexy drill,” a drill that is about “being feminine.” Ice Spice’s sexy drill can be traced back to her iconic line in “Munch,” where she

rhetorically asks, “You thought I was feelin’ you?” In her lyrics and imagery, Ice Spice refutes the implicit claim of someone else feeling her body by placing her body firmly within her own grasp. Ice Spice’s signature dance move is literally feeling herself; In almost every appearance, she rubs her hands across her chest, waist, and butt. The cover for her recent EP Like..? features a cartoon image of her bending over and covering her genitalia, a move which she has called “doing her dance.” With these sensual signature moves, Ice Spice draws power from her own body by visually staking claim on who gets to access it. In the few instances in which she is pictured dancing under the touch of someone else, the only people feeling her are the circle of homegirls who hover around her in every music video. So, even when she does relinquish control, it is only as “a baddie with her baddie friends,” girls who mirror her own persona.

With her body firmly established as her own, Ice Spice uses it how she sees fit: She takes her body beyond the aesthetic and uses it to generate meaning—a practice of embodied poetics. On the radio show Ebro in the Morning , she explains that her catchphrase “like..?” only works when accompanied by a head tilt and eye roll. In a silence defined only by ellipses and an eye roll, Ice Spice makes the recipient feel ashamed, foolish, and out of place. Here, her body becomes a physical extension of the uses of drill: It functions as an elusive structure, an alternative means of expression which no one outside of her physical space can claim ownership over. In Glissant’s terminology, her body is another form which preserves her opacity.

As a scholar of drill, I’m picking up what Ice Spice is putting down; as a listener—and proud member of the Spice Cabinet—however, I am still

left with a nagging question. What is she giving us? How can Ice Spice—a woman whose work is predicated on being unreachable and reveling in nothingness—be so catchy? Why can’t I stop saying “you thought I was feelin’ you??”

Loni Jones writes that the “most profoundly human act we can commit is to feel.” How, as a listener, does one access Ice Spice’s intimate acts of feeling herself? Here, I return to the concept of “sexy drill” in that it recalls Audre Lorde’s Uses of The Erotic . Just as sexy drill is both sexy and feminine, the erotic “is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” Lorde’s terminology describes Ice Spice’s work perfectly: It weds the unapologetically personal to a poetics of feeling. Lorde’s erotic also holds the key for understanding the communal quality of what Ice Spice is giving, for the erotic is “selfconnection shared,” a feeling that “cannot be felt secondhand.”

Thus Ice Spice is giving us exactly what drill gave her: the locational, linguistic, and bodily space for us to be baddies. While Ice Spice may rap in the first person, her poetics construct a space that is at once personal and communal, a space that one must physically embody themselves in order to access, a condition which at once empowers the body and protects it from objectification. Those who find themselves habitually ‘doing her dance’ in any remotely reflective surface are not just fans of the music, but people experiencing an embodied experience of “self-connection shared.” Therefore, when she raps, “the baddest in the room, so tell ’em to make room,” she is also effectively articulating what she will only explicitly say post-facto in an interview: She “wants us all to be baddies.”

Scrapbooking the Sunday Scaries Away creatively

collaging the little moments

by sarah Frank

Illustrated by kianna pan

The Sunday Scaries are only scary when you think ahead to Monday. I’ve always had the Sunday Scaries, but at the start of freshman year, one of my best friends and I started a tradition called Smoothie Sundays to combat this feeling. Amidst a quiet campus, Tabitha and I got drinks from Tropical Smoothie on Thayer Street. We walked around, caught up on our weeks, and savored the silence of Brown at rest. When the weather got cold, we moved our tradition inside, renamed it Scrumptious Sundays, and ate at Meeting Street Cafe.

This year, we wanted to add something extra to our tradition. Unbeknownst to me and Tabitha, we’d both been scrapbooking random things we collected throughout our days. We’d pick up business cards and stickers and takeout menus and everything in between, separately pursuing the same thing: a productive hobby that allowed us creativity and peace. Scrumptious Sundays became Scrumptious + Scrapbook Sundays. Now, our tradition is to cook pancakes (cinnamon and chocolate chip respectively) and scrapbook together as we eat.

Scrapbooking is a physical collage of memories or thoughts—there is no right or wrong way to do it. However, here are some tips and tricks I’ve found helpful:

1. Collect resources

Turns out that everything works in a scrapbook. We cut up the free magazines from the Starbucks on Thayer, pick up business cards, find pamphlets, and use stickers to our hearts’ content. Whatever the object may be, if it has two dimensions, it can be scrapbooked.

2. Work with color

I’ve found that my most aesthetic spreads are ones working entirely with one color or a color scheme. So neutrals are of great value because they work on every page. It works out well, then, that black and white text is the easiest to find.

3. Glue or tape pages together

If you do any writing with pens or markers, it will inevitably bleed through and render the page behind it ruined. I use an adhesive tape roller to tape pages

together so I never have to worry about disrupting the art.

4. Layer!!

There is a huge difference when you layer elements of your page. Looking for solid colors in magazines to use as simple backgrounds helps fill the space without making your art feel busy.

5. Have a scrap bag

Whenever Tabitha and I scrapbook, there is always a sprawl of supplies all over the table. To help maintain some level of control over the chaos, we have a designated scrap bag where all the slips of paper and garbage go straight away. It makes cleanup easier— after all, a relaxing activity should never conclude with a dreaded task.

Sundays are scary only when you allow them to be. If you incorporate something peaceful, reflective, and creative into your routine, you’ll find the Scaries are completely erased. Perhaps it’s a Scrapbook Sunday. Perhaps it’s a Scrumptious Sunday. Or perhaps it’s some other combination of things you love that can make your Sundays just as lovely.

SOCIAL MEDIA

“The radio spits country music, the audio absolutely fried by the ancient speakers. Other cars start to spill into the empty streets as the sun punches suddenly into the sky. My mouth still tastes like strawberry.”

—Kyoko Leaman, “IHOP French Toast” 02.19.2021

“These moments are not planned… They are spontaneous, unexpected, and utterly profound, like the helpless smile of a woman who cannot help but love another—even as their paths forward demand otherwise, they have shared an experience. They have lived.”

—Robert Capron, “Portrait of a Senior on Fire” 02.21.2020

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