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In This Issue

Liza Kolbasov

Samira Lakhiani

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Gone in a Moment

The Costs of Staying Informed 3

Danielle Emerson

One and Only Love Letter 4

Adi Thatai 5

Hindi Walking Songs Madaline Canfield

The Violence Signature 6

postCover by Emilia Mann

MAR 4

VOL 29 — ISSUE 3

FEATURE

The Costs of Staying Informed thoughts on news fatigue

By Samira Lakhiani Illustrated by john gendron

My desk is overwhelmed by tidy stacks of newspapers. Every crossword puzzle is solved, while every article is unread. An optimist beyond reason, it’s natural for me to abstain from the news. I’ll thumb through it every now and again, only to graze upon more of the same: new government policy perturbing the public, CDC guideline update, climate change swiftly expediting world doom…

I prefer to do the puzzles because I can disentangle them. It’s comforting to know that a solution is always within reach. The most frustrating aspect of reading global issues is that I can’t solve anything.

I can’t clean all of the oceans. I can’t bridge the wage gap. I can’t depolarize political parties.

The bitter truth: We can’t un-wreak havoc.

Reading the news is merely becoming aware of a

dilemma; it is knowing there are things to solve, but lacking the means to solve them. Racism, refugee crises, poverty, school shootings, carbon emissions, fast fashion, sexual assault, unemployment, theft, violence, corruption. All I see when I read or hear the news is a wealth of problems upon problems, accompanied by a scalding feeling of helplessness. And all I can do is watch them accumulate. Incessantly.

Perhaps I am projecting my frustrations with the world onto the news. I should clarify that I don’t find the news to be the sole villain here; these tragedies shouldn’t be happening in the first place. My unease with the news lies in its persistence.

The news is a constant presence: TV, print, radio, word-of-mouth, not to mention Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok. The familiar ping of news alerts throughout the day divert our attention to the latest headline. The bystander footage of bloodshed and destruction governs our phones while routinely tapping through stories on social media.

Naturally, we have become habituated to this everpresent stream of violence and catastrophe.

Growing up, my parents cautioned me on the importance of temperance: Too much of anything would never benefit me. But news is inescapable, it seems. Sitting in Blue State sipping a (remarkably overpriced) chai latte, I can’t help but overhear conversations around me: “Tragic kidnapping not far from here,” someone states nonchalantly as the radio plays over the cafe loudspeaker. California wildfires resisting containment efforts almost immediately followed by Beyoncé’s “Love on Top.” And on the print newspapers by the door, it’s unsettling to read “More American Children are Dying by Gunfire” directly adjacent to “How to Veg Out During Veganuary.”

discuss tragic happenings in an alarmingly casual manner to uphold this principle. Information is filtered through a sieve of sorts, with every ounce of grief, anger, and heartbreak trickling out.

Sometimes I agonize over whether my abstinence from the news is a privileged habit or a legitimate means of protecting my peace. This internal debate often concludes with grim feelings of guilt and shame. At any instance, I have the ability to shut off the TV or put down the paper, but this is not a common luxury. The people living in war zones, suffering from epidemics, enduring firsthand effects of climate change—they can’t abstain from the news because they are the news. They don’t have a remote in hand to switch it off whenever they please. It feels far too naive to just ignore them simply because I can. But repeatedly seeing and hearing the bleak and disheartening world occurrences takes a severe mental toll.

This fatigue, I discovered, is not a unique experience. Ellen Barry of The New York Times recently published an article about climate change anxiety, a seemingly “luxury problem” with a proven and profound impact on mental health. Others like me feel the demanding obligation to keep up with the catastrophic environmental news we so often hear.

Therapists are seeing more and more patients whose climate qualms from “doom-scrolling” are affecting them psychologically: depression, panic attacks, anxiety, or paranoia, all due to the relentless nature of the news and subsequent fear for the future. Barry fittingly compares scrolling through environmental news as subjecting oneself to the “rabbit hole”—getting consumed by the waves of information regarding the downfall of our planet. A new branch of psychological treatment, ecotherapy,

Objectivity is a fundamental tenet of journalism and broadcasting. We are fed emotionally-detached facts because the news’ bottom-line role is to keep the public informed, to provide unbiased/impartial/ rock-solid truth, which readers and viewers can interpret to their liking. Articles and newscasters

has emerged and is rapidly gaining traction to help people grapple with this reality.

The article was met with polarizing comments.

Some readers were infuriated that overly sensitive people are assigning blame to the news and seeking therapy because of it. Others, including myself, felt

Letter from the Editor

Shapes

Dear Readers, Overwhelmingly, this week has been dominated by tension. Waiting. Checking your phone—wait, no, focus—well, just check your phone this once. Bouncing from one corner of campus to the other, retro-screensaver-style. There are the small tensions of college life, the sword of Damocles of the unreleased midterm grades, the panic of deadlines approaching. But there is also the very real and ballooning horror of the world, which is always there and always pressing.

This week, our writers are also thinking about the world falling apart. In Feature, we have an article about the fatigue that comes from constant access to the news. One of our A&C writers considers how Gen Z has been desensitized to violence, while the other turns toward family, reconnecting with his culture through his father’s Hindi walking music playlist. In Narrative, one writer considers the ephemerality of certain experiences while the other thinks back on past crushes.

Finally, our Lifestyle writer provides a guide to fitting in as a small city girl in the Big Apple.

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Our issue is here to bring you food for thought, some moments of levity, and most of all to keep you company.

A release for the small tensions, a sense that you aren’t alone in experiencing the big ones. Doing what we can, always. It may feel a bit cataclysmic, and perhaps it is, but all there is to do is continue.

Sending wonders your way,

Kyoko Leaman Editor-in-Chief

1.

Heart <3

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Venn diagram

3.

Taurus? Torus?

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Riktingo

5.

Boobies

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Love triangle

7.

Square, as opposed to there

8.

Parallelepiped

9.

Blob

10. Shape of You — Ed Sheeran.

FEATURE recognized and less guilty about avoiding the news for the purpose of self-protection. *** The news has not always been this much of a societal force. With the emergence of technology and social media’s prevalence, it has infiltrated our lives to an extreme extent. I think about if Covid-19 had erupted 20 or 30 years prior to 2020, before the news overwhelmed every platform, whether the universal reaction would have been different. A substantial number of people fell victim to depression as a result of isolation from loved ones, which likely would have happened regardless of the year. But in 2020, there was the added misery of checking Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., only to see more news posts about the pandemic’s destruction. There was a constant reminder that Covid was everywhere. A global pandemic was obviously going to drown out anything else that was happening, but it was draining hearing about it and seeing it all the time. It was a narrative that had exhausted itself.

An essay in Psychology Today explains the stark difference between news relevance generationally.

The author, Dr. Michael Pittaro, describes how in the ‘90s, news didn’t circulate the way it does now, on a multitude of different platforms. Thus, it never took up much mental capacity. It didn’t distract from daily life. People worried, but it rarely ever consumed them. In contrast, today’s therapists are seeing more and more patients with severe mental health concerns as a result of stress from world occurrences.

Dr. Pittaro explains that there likely will be consequences of this constant and exaggerated news exposure, particularly for today’s youth: the iPhone generation. He fears that this perpetual exposure will make our society less empathetic towards each other. It makes sense, given that the presence of the news on social media provides such an available avenue for opinion. Social media posts about current events that lack hostile comments are scarce.

Go to any news post on social media and take a look at the comment section. It is almost guaranteed to be congested with users berating others about pandemic opinions, or belligerently forcing their political tenets onto the internet. This toxic culture desensitizes us to a basic human skill—regard for other people’s feelings. We don’t apologize on the internet. We say what we feel, and rarely face the repercussions of doing so. Seeing these terrible things happen in the news at such an uninterrupted pace makes people feel a need to project their grievances onto others, and the internet provides them with a means to do it.

With time I’ve realized that ignorance is bliss—to a degree. I don’t want to shelter myself completely from the world’s goings-on, but I also don’t want to sacrifice my mental health to understand everything that is happening. For me, constantly keeping up with the news has the impending consequence of resenting the world. I don’t know how else to cope

with the news, so I am doing the best I can to combat the problems it inundates me with: Shop sustainably, donate when you can, treat others with dignity, and limit your news. Maybe this way we can all stay hopeful.

Gone in a Moment

loving a world that’s slipping out of my grasp

by Liza Kolbasov Illustrated by meera singh A few weeks ago, on a grocery run, I came across bunches of daffodils—the first sign of spring. I bought a bunch and brought them home, cradling them gently; I put them in an empty pasta jar and propped them up against the windowsill. Daffodils always remind me of home—my mother loves them and buys them every March because they make her think of spring. In turn, they remind her of her mother, who used to do the same.

Perched by the window, drinking in the sun, the buds quickly bloomed and smiled at me for a few days. Then, almost as quickly as they opened, they shriveled, leaving a trail of petals on the countertop. *** Lately, I’ve been waking up feeling like the ground is falling out from under my feet. Each day, I open my eyes to the rays of sun peering into my face from over the windowsill and feel the dread of another day slipping away.

Maybe it’s the way deadlines this time of year start to feel more and more inescapable, suffocating.

It feels like tumbling down a cliff, desperately grabbing onto nearby branches and twigs, trying to somehow stay on my feet. When trying to keep all the due dates in my head, I inevitably start to lose my personhood. Who am I again? A student—a human?

Ask me again tomorrow, which will come sooner than it should. *** This year, February coated the streets with blankets of fluffy white snow. Pillowy, clean sheets covered the sidewalks, the streets, and especially the quads and open areas. The smoothness never lasted; invariably, it’d become scattered with trails of footsteps, spiraling in and out of each other.

Rough marks we leave on the world, rushing to class, trying our best to stay upright in a February that wishes us to stay indoors and leave its sparkly snowbanks in peace. Or else, marks made with intention, reveling in the satisfying crunch of snow underfoot, and in seeing one’s physical form collide with the physical world, leaving behind a sign of presence.

Then, the next day, the snow melts away, and the footprints with it—our marks erased by February’s

temperamental moods. *** Maybe it’s being a college student, watching my entire routine turn upside down as a new semester replaces the last. As soon as I build a life with a daily plan—post-class breakfast with a friend on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a nine-to-five work schedule, classes I walk to almost thoughtlessly—it falls apart, and I have to rebuild it from the ground up.

And there’s also the background knowledge that the life I’m building will, inevitably, turn upside down in just two years. Occasionally, I wonder if there’s any reason to decorate a castle that will inevitably be knocked down. *** One of the things I miss most about Northern California is walking along the beach. It’s almost always cold and gray, the waves breaking against the rocks, birds spinning overhead. Looking out over the horizon and into the fading gray makes me feel so small. In these moments, I let myself fade away a little, lost in thought and in the smell of soft, sandy salt. Sometimes, I run up to the edge of the waves, daring their icy tongues to lick at my feet. Other times, I’ll write words in the sand, letting my thoughts be swept away by the sea. *** Maybe this is just what life is: grabbing on desperately for moments, watching them slip out of your hands like ribbons made of light blue silk. It’s so hard, nowadays, to believe that anything can be lasting. Each day, we’re bombarded by news of the various ways in which the world is likely to fall apart in the next few years. If everything is doomed to collapse, what is the point of trying to build anything up? We play a giant game of Jenga where the odds are against us a million to one. Some days, the dreams all seem to slip away. *** My favorite room in my house is the kitchen. It’s a narrow room with cozy lighting and plants lining the windowsills. My housemates and I tend to gather around whenever someone cooks, sitting on the countertop or in chairs dragged into the corners.

Cooking a meal together is one of the sweetest feelings. Slicing vegetables for someone’s stir fry, mixing dry ingredients for pancakes, or even just washing dishes to help speed up the process. Listening to music, surrounded by warm conversation.

Making something touched by many hands, meant to be enjoyed and consumed. *** Honestly, maybe that’s the whole point. Or rather, maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe that’s all I can do—live moment to moment, hold them each for a second in the palm of my hand, pressing them against my cheeks. Go outside and feel the cold air sting my face, look up at the sky and count the clouds. Drink a cup of tea with milk and taste its sweetness on my tongue. Look up at the moon and smile at the

“A Libra has never serial killed in the United States.”

“I’m trying… trying to anti hist my mines.”

March 4, 2022

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NARRATIVE

streetlights and write down phrases in my journal and laugh with the people I love. Maybe it’s the fact that things end that makes them matter. We are all so small, just one note in the universe’s song. Just kaleidoscopes of moments and memories. *** It was midnight, and we’d just finished watching The Secret Garden. I was squished on the couch between two friends as the snowflakes floated down outside. We were talking about something, laughing, maybe, I don’t remember why anymore. Just one snapshot of many. All I remember is that, at that moment, I wanted to be there and nowhere else. And it didn’t matter if, eventually, it would fade away.

Sometimes, laughter is most beautiful as it’s fading away.

One and Only Love Letter

old crushes, the act of caring, and yearning to be cared for

by Danielle Emerson Illustrated by moe levandoski I’ve only written one love letter in my entire life.

And honestly, it wasn’t as much of a love letter as it was a handwritten apology.

You don’t have to respond. I just wanted you to know.

Don’t feel obligated to talk to me. Just please don’t share this with anyone.

It doesn’t feel right to call it a love letter, because I don’t think I actually “loved” him.

The moment I started noticing him: We were in our eighth grade Life Sciences class. This was the peak of my Hunger Games phase, so I was probably wearing a ‘Katniss-Peeta-Finnick’ shirt from Hot Topic. We were told to make energy-themed collages from a large pile of magazines on the front table.

Everyone scrambled to grab a magazine, while I tentatively waited for the crowd to settle before walking up. Only scraps and bundles of torn pages were left behind. I groaned and complained to a nearby friend—“there’s no more left.” My friend just shrugged. But right next to me, a kid I’d only seen in passing offered up his magazine. We locked eyes for a moment. And I said, “Thank you.” He made a joke I don’t remember, but I do remember forcing a laugh.

I think I decided to “like” him because he was pretty easy to “like.” He wasn’t rude or mean. He kept to himself. Quiet. It was so easy, that I just decided to

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keep on “liking” him.

1. Because I knew nothing was going to happen between us.

And 2. because sometimes he made it seem like something could happen between us—that’s just how nice he was.

The moment I knew I liked him: We held hands once. Only because we were doing some kind of trust activity in our P.E. class. But I remember looking down and thinking, “I like how my hand fits in his.”

Of course, this was in middle school, so our hands were probably gross and sweaty. At the time, I wasn’t as opposed to touch as I am now. Like most kids from abusive and emotionally distanced households, physical affection wasn’t common growing up. So at 13, I was much more curious about than repelled by the concept of touch. I don’t remember if we said anything; I was too focused on our hands. Maybe he made another joke, and maybe I forced another laugh.

I don’t think he felt what I was feeling. And I don’t think I wanted him to. *** Freshman year of high school, I noticed a girl on the basketball team. Growing up in a small town means you go to school with kids you’ve known since kindergarten. So, it wasn’t like I didn’t know her. I already knew of her.

But because you know of everyone, you sort of stop paying attention to everyone.

I joined the yearbook club, where I learned early that nobody wanted to take photos of girls’ sports.

Everyone wanted to go to the boys’ games. The yearbook upperclassman assigned the girls’ games to new members. I was a little disappointed—Eighth Grade Life Sciences Kid was on the boys’ crosscountry team. I considered joining cross country, too. But I’ve never been athletic, and running five miles a day felt impossible. I guess I didn’t like Eighth Grade Life Sciences Kid that much. So, like a good freshman, I attended my first girls’ basketball game with a peeling Nikon D3400 and a black zipperless camera bag.

When I think of a “love-at-first-sight” experience, time slows down; everything goes soft and out of focus around the edges, and the world falls silent.

Maybe the sound of violins soars in the background, and maybe you feel invincible—like those mothers who miraculously gain super strength when their baby is in danger.

When I actually experienced love-at-first-sight, yes, time slowed down, and yes, the world fell silent.

But everything moved fast in the sense that every-

thing doubled. My heart rate, my thoughts, my breathing, my sudden loss of apathetic cynicism and the sweeping rush of school spirit—gO BRONCOS! You don’t know you’re experiencing love-at-firstsight until after it happens. And yes, I’m counting this as a love-at-first-sight experience because even though it wasn’t the first time I saw her, it was the first time I’ve ever looked at someone and instantly thought, “Yes, I love this person.”

She was a freshman, like me, and already a starting player. We were in a few classes together— Ms. Cline for English class, Mr. What’s-His-Name for trigonometry. Did she sit behind me? I couldn’t remember. As I watched her play, I found myself wondering if she did the homework Ms. Cline assigned over the weekend. Wondering if she stayed after school late for practice. Wondering if she’d want to hang out sometime because I stayed late after school too. Wondering if she liked Pokémon or Digimon more. Wondering if her hair was as soft as it looked through the camera— I wondered and wondered and wondered all throughout the game.

If anyone asked, I’d just say she was cool. That I respected her—that she was a good athlete and honors student. I remember, when my father would pick me up after games, he’d ask: “How’d it go?” And I’d always reply with some variation of: “Basketball girl was great. She scored a bunch in the first half, but struggled with three-pointers.”

One day, my dad said: “You sure like that ‘basketball girl,’ huh?” He said it in a callous tone, weaving between cars in the school parking lot. I just looked away and muttered, “It’s not like anyone else’s gonna take us to states.” Eventually, I stopped talking about her after games.

Halfway through our sophomore year, she started dating a boy on the boys’ basketball team.

Fifteen-year-old Danielle didn’t want to think about how that made her feel. It cemented everything, made my emotions real. Not wanting to deal with my sexuality, I just went back to liking Eighth Grade Life Sciences Kid. It just seemed easier. And it wasn’t like I was lying. I did like Eighth Grade Life Sciences Kid. And I continued to like him until high school graduation. *** I wrote him the love letter the summer of our junior year. I don’t remember it being sappy. It was handwritten—in pencil, because the permanent nature of pens stressed me out—on white, lined paper, and folded into a tiny square.

The plan was to slip it into his locker during lunch. But I didn’t want to think about what came after. What if he doesn’t say anything? What if he does say something and it’s a rejection? Or even worse, what if he does say something, and it’s that he reciprocates?

I carried that letter in my backpack for two months, before ripping it up and throwing it away.

By then, the pencil writing was smeared and unintelligible; the paper wasn’t as white anymore, and distastefully crumpled in the corners.

In the end, I decided I was okay with never telling him. *** Freshman year of college was awful. I didn’t know how to speak to people. I didn’t know how to make friends. I sat by myself in the corner a lot.

I think my nervous energy threw people off, so they were less likely to talk to me—which made me feel even worse, because how does one turn off their nervous energy? Answer: you can’t. And in this weird accumulation of, “I-want-to-cry-butI-don’t-want-this-person-to-know-I-want-to-

NARRATIVE

cry-because-I-want-them–to-be-my-friend,” and “If-anyone-talks-to-me-I’m-going-to-screambecause-my-body-is-in-fight-or-flight-mode,” I realized I didn’t have as much control over my emotions as I thought I did. So, unlike middle and high school, I developed crushes left and right as a sort of one-sided speed dating coping mechanism.

An upperclassman at the Swearer Center who smiled at me and always started the conversation first, so I felt welcomed and never like a burden.

A literary arts concentrator who sat next to me in two classes and always said something during discussions, so I didn’t have to say anything if I didn’t want to.

A head co-photo editor who made dad jokes at the beginning of every BDH team meeting, no matter how many times we rolled our eyes. Admittedly, I eventually found them quite funny.

A person in my year, who did lighting design and stayed late in the Production Workshop Black box—I helped her put up lights after I finished drawing circles on the wall and called it set design.

I never took any of these crushes seriously. No matter how involved I got, or how prominent the person became in my life. If they liked me back, then I instantly stopped liking them like that, my emotions becoming a piece of paper I could crumple and toss. And if I’m truly honest, I don’t think I’ll ever be close to someone like that. I’m not too sad about it, but sometimes I find myself simply wondering ‘what if…’—what if I let myself be honest, what if I told this person I really like them too, what if I said yes, what if I’m missing out on something monumental like in those shoujo-romance animes I watch? But even after wondering, I came back to a simple conclusion: I need to learn to love myself first.

Maybe I’m like this because of my childhood: because of my father’s abuse and turbulent emotions. These are things I need to work out myself.

The two crushes I had growing up were never completely felt. I didn’t talk about them with anyone.

I didn’t try to process anything. And at a certain point, my crush just became a convenient placeholder.

Where I could stifle and direct my feelings of selfloathing, confusion, and fear.

I wrote that first—and only—love letter as an apology for how I felt. A handwritten invalidation of my emotions. It’s a strange realization, that I’ve never felt safe enough to express myself—to allow myself to be cared for, and to care fearlessly for others. I’ve liked quite a few people in my life, and I currently care about quite a few people. But I’m

still working on welcoming and managing my feelings, on telling people they’re important to me, and on being comfortable with vulnerability. I don’t want to perpetuate my father’s cycle of his father’s cycle of his father’s father’s cycle of emotional trauma. I’ve reached a point in my life where I feel secure enough to own my emotions as my emotions.

While reflecting on that letter, I realized I’m so much closer to learning to love myself than I thought. I won’t crumple and toss my feelings to the side anymore, especially as I’m currently the most cared for that I’ve ever been. Those people deserve to be cared for in return.

Hindi Walking Songs coming home

by Adi Thatai Illustrated by ooviya sathiyamoorthy What does this mean? 18 likes… Who is liking what? My dad’s voice buzzes through my phone speaker, my dog’s howling and the distant chirping of birds coiling into the spaces between his words.

“It means that 18 random people found your playlist on Spotify and liked it, and now they probably listen to it sometimes,” I reply, laughing into the early autumn air as I walked to a friend’s dorm to watch Naruto. “That’s actually pretty cool, Papa. I think my most popular playlist has 4 likes.”

What can I say, beta. Your father is pretty cool. I’m glad your studies are going well. I’m going to get back to walking Baloo and listening to my cool music. You should come home soon. Your mom has been feeling low and missing your sisters, and she’s been missing you. You know that Mama wants your sisters to move back to the East Coast. Now that Lily’s been born, your mother and I have been struggling with the distance.

San Francisco is just too far away for us. Hey, you better not move there!

“No plans to move anywhere yet. I’ll make sure to call her soon, but the semester just started. My friends are here, and I don’t really want to come home just yet. Bye Papa!” I hang up the phone, open up Spotify, and search for his playlist. It came up immediately, hindi walking songs by the user deepak. I looked at his two other public playlists, prayer and bruce (an ode to one of his favorites, Bruce Springsteen). I follow him, press the little heart on my screen, and added one to the 18 likes. I save it to listen to later. ***

One night over winter break, after a snowy walk and a particularly competitive video game session, my best friend Danny and I lay on my bed looking up at the ceiling.

“Have I told you about my dad’s playlist yet?” I asked.

“No, what! I think my dad only listens to old Russian music on CDs,” Danny replied, chuckling quietly.

“Yeah, turns out my dad has a Spotify and has this playlist with like, 19 likes. I was the 19th actually.

Pretty funny, right? I haven’t listened yet actually.”

“Wanna listen?” Danny asked. I took out my phone and showed him the playlist.

“Look at this one, called Sun Raha Hai Na Tu Unplugged by Shreya Ghoshal. Means ‘You’re listening, right?’ It’s from this Indian MTV Unplugged album. I didn’t even know there was MTV Unplugged in India.”

“Woah… looks cool. Put it on.”

I rolled over, hauled myself out of bed with a grunt and put the song on my stereo. The song opened with the simple, soft, mellifluous runs of a solo harmonium—a traditional, accordion-like Indian instrument that involves pumping air into a small keyboard.

“Wow, the last time I heard harmonium like this was at my aunt’s bhajans when I was a kid,” I recounted.

“Ohhh yeah, I remember going to a couple when we were younger,” he replied.

“Yeah, Shalini Bua used to host these monthly religious gatherings where everyone would bring instruments and sing Hindu chants. I remember there was an old uncle who played the harmonium. I used to sit in his lap, and he’d show me how to play.

I hated going when I was a kid, but now I wish I had appreciated it more.”

As we chatted the music continued its runs.

Suddenly, the solo harmonium was joined by the deep notes and infectious wobbling rhythm of tablas and dholaks, Indian hand drums. Shreya Ghoshal’s smooth and precise vocals entered at the same time, weaving a tapestry between the instruments. Danny and I stood up simultaneously and made eye contact. We both began dancing and strutting around my room, laughing deep from our stomachs.

“Oh my gosh, this is amazing!” Danny exclaimed through tears. “I cannot believe your dad walks around Lexington, Massachusetts to this. This is literally the best walking music ever.”

“Agree. I don’t know what I was expecting from this playlist, but this is better than anything I could imagine.”

We finished out the song, dancing, doubling over with laughter, and discussing the absurd beauty of the image of my dad walking around to such epic music. Afterwards, we went into my parents’ room and told my dad that we liked his playlist. He made fun of our generation for always trying to go viral, identified himself as an influencer, and told us to go to sleep. Before we turned the lights out, Danny asked me to send him the link.

“There. I liked it. I’m number 20.” *** “Once Papa passes, I think I will move back to India to finish out my life.”

My mom drops this bombshell while we are out for dinner over Thanksgiving break. My dad, my sister Shreya, and I sit quiet around the table.

“So, can I get you guys anything else?” The server barges in, wine menu in hand. We all make awkward dissenting noises, and he seems to purse his lips in response to the tension bubbling off our table.

March 4, 2022

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“Okay, don’t worry, I’ll be back!” he calls over his shoulder as he scuttles away, running his hand through his wispy hair.

“What do you mean, Mama?” my sister asks after a few moments of silence, her voice trembling.

My dad clicks his tongue. “Lata, you can’t just say things like this without thought. You know how this will upset the kids.”

“Well, I mean it,” my mom retorts. “I just can’t do this. I need my family around. And I hate California.”

“So instead of moving to San Francisco, you’d go to the other side of the world? Because of some arbitrary hatred of one of the biggest states?” Shreya asks, tears in her eyes. “Just to be clear, I have been bending over backwards to figure out how I can move back to the East Coast after med school. All my friends are in SF and it’s my favorite place in the world. And you’re so stubborn that you can’t even think about moving to SF even if Papa dies?”

“She’s right, Lata,” my dad adds. “Our parents supported us moving across the world. Why can’t we support our own kids and what makes them happy?”

My mom spotted the nervous waiter coming back. “Alright, whatever,” she interjected. “We need to order anyway. I just miss my kids, okay? It’s hard that they’re all so far. Let’s drop this.” *** hindi walking songs was the defining sound of my winter. I particularly loved the old romantic filmi on the playlist, Bollywood songs that reached mainstream popularity. I liked to imagine my father walking briskly around our neighborhood in his particular way, with his long strides and swinging arms, his head angled downward as if to maximize aerodynamic efficiency. I liked that I knew he was listening to the rhythmic romance of Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhosle through his little green earbuds.

The songs of a sweltering Punjabi childhood under the snow-capped canopy of suburban Massachusetts.

My mom was particularly excited about my newfound connection with Indian music. One night, I sat at the kitchen table watching Naruto on my laptop, the spicy heartwarming smells of my mom’s cooking swirling in my nose.

“What language is this?” she asks.

“Japanese. It’s an animated TV show my friends showed me. I really like it,” I replied.

“If you like watching TV in a different language, why don’t you watch Hindi shows? There are some pretty good ones.”

“Really? The last one we watched together was too dramatic to handle,” I laughed.

“Okay, maybe. But they’re not all soap operas.

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Here, Papa and I just finished a great murder mystery set in the beautiful mountains of Himachal. It’s about a series of murders that a village attributes to the “nar tendua,” a were-panther. You’d be shocked to see what remote parts of India look like. Let’s watch it.”

After a bit of push and pull I begrudgingly agreed to watch it. Five nights of binging later, I sat on the edge of my couch, biting my nails through the season finale. Despite my puzzling, I couldn’t figure out who the murderer was, and I started to believe there might actually be a nar tendua. My mom was right; with all the Hindi songs and TV, I was getting a lot of language practice in. Even though it had never been a barrier, I even felt like I could understand my parents better. After the end credits played out, I asked my mom if she could teach me how to make a few of her dishes.

“Of course, beta. Just help me out for tonight’s dinner. We’ll make something good.”

I put hindi walking songs on the stereo, washed my hands, gave my mom a good hug, and got cooking.

The Violence Signature

mourning the creation of a generational culture

by Madaline Canfield Illustrated by monika hedman

CW: Violence On a Sunday we exploded.

Or, well, no we didn’t. That much is demonstrable.

The buildings remained intact; the students remained upright; the roads still lay there paved with the perfection of their previous imperfections. I can see it all now out the window, historic and unchanged.

But last November in the afternoon hours something exploded, and if not the physical structures, then that something must have been our phones, at the very least. Sirens, but reduced ones. The banal and bored whimper of a bomb alert shoving itself out the speakers of our trusty digital devices.

“The university might blow up (we don’t know why) so you should probably move your person if you are currently situated here or here—oh, or also here.

Thank you and good night. Actually, our apologies, it is not yet nighttime, but you should please head indoors, just not to the wrong indoors, that might be bad might be fatal might be—something. It’s a dangerous world out there.”

We read it, and we blinked. We packed our bags,

and we shuffled our feet. We wandered to our rooms, except for those of us who lived in rooms that might soon find their walls and their floors and their ceilings reconfigured into an abstract array of rubble. We don’t know where those students went. And by “we,” I mean everyone.

I am not making fun of the university; I am making fun of the authorities writ large. Because the dangerous something isn’t simply our reality, or this country, anymore. The danger has seeped out of the Structural, colonized the Quotidian, and has now announced its modern monopoly over the Culture. Perhaps this is the defining feature of Gen Z. We are not “Zoomers,” not “The Social Media Generation.” We are the arbiters of this newfangled culture of violence. I won’t essentialize, but that is our essence. *** The morning before that un-Bloody Sunday, an alarm snatched me, unapologetic, from the clutches of sleep. On the lockscreen of my phone awaited a notification banner, announcing a deadly tragedy at a concert in Houston, the city that raised me. First, I assumed bullets, naturally—a thought that washed my supine body with a wave of disgusted exhaustion.

Welcome to the remains of a carefree Saturday morning, murdered by Friday night. Second, I wondered if I knew anyone at the festival, a possibility replete with both the nausea of the question and the frustration of knowing it might take a long time to discover the answer.

I was wrong on the first account. No guns; people had trampled each other to death without motive.

The supreme actuation of senseless violence. I never understood stampedes because they made no sense, but the illogic retreated to the margins of the matter, usurped by stories of chaos and suffocation. In the hours and the days that followed, I learned that yes, I knew people who had survived Astrofest. My old classmates watched their music fun become mauled by the very thing that brought them there, the mass of people eager to enjoy the event together, their entertainment spontaneously substituted with the feverish will to remain upright and breathing as they guessed their way toward the edge of the crowd. My own brother intended to go with his friends, but he had a school commitment that night. Nearly every attendee and every casualty was a member of Gen Z. Weeks later, when I returned home for the break, I drove past the stadium that held every concert and cultural event of note in my life. In lieu of giant posters announcing the next lineup, I saw caution tape. Chainlinked and padlocked, the stadium cloaked itself in a fashionable attire. Its exterior alerted the passing drivers of the events that transpired within its gates— gates that have long held the spectacles of a city, but now wear the markings of an atrocity. We saw these articles and we knew intimately the symbol of such a dressing, much as we understood the iconography that announced the Astroworld fest—the ginormous structure of Travis Scott’s golden head, with his mouth agape and severed at the tongue. This image, inimitable and ubiquitous as it may be, is not the ultimate signature of a generational culture.

At the fest, the music and technicolor smoke jets were only openers for the stampede, the headline act. Once the entertainment devolved into the unforgettable tragedy of mayhem, a new ethos took over as the central spirit, the way any culture does.

Culture does not need to be a nice thing. The violence became an entity. It became a medium through which the concert goers related to one another. It became something greater than themselves: It became their world. ***

Today, the violence does not require a motivation, or even a target like in its most common iterations, the product of anger or hatred or other oppressively systemic things. The violence may simply arrive on the scene without explanation, parachuting down from some unseen plane, knowing we will react with instinctive recognition—a shift into a certain mode of terrified yet unfazed interaction with one another.

The violence acts as something familiar that orients us together in place and time. *** I should be clear. I am not saying that the blanket of spontaneous, everyday violence is new. I am not speaking of any often-critiqued phenomenon like the glorification of violence, like with gory video games or graphic movies or abusive porn. Those are all representations of violence inside conventionallymarketed qualifiers of culture. In our generation the violence needs no medium, no mediation, no artistic expression. The experience itself is enough. Raw and rote, each ensuing destruction etches its despotic name into our culture.

We are no longer transforming violence into art.

We are turning art into violence. *** Shootings, beatings, storming buildings, sexual assault; Astrofest, Charlottesville, Orlando, Atlanta.

The accumulation of these quotidian and monumental incidents melds a diversity of experience into one great fugue state that permeates the shared knowledge and interactions of a depressed generation.

“Newsworthy” or otherwise, each incident becomes known as a name, the connotation of the place where it occurred or the force that enacted it. Our ability to recognize those names, to invoke them at appropriate moments and to feel the constant weight of their memory and their future possibility, is itself a culture.

If culture is what it means to socialize collectively, to participate in and apply the recognizable signifiers of a community, I express my identity as a young person in reaction to the siren. To be young today is to ache with a keen sense of knowing that originates in the viscera and metastasizes, subsuming the flesh. A body knows to sigh, tremble, flee, amble, to anesthetize itself and to cry in the same instant. As bruises and blood seep into every inch of our interest, Gen Z crafts all the appropriate responses, the behaviors and the emotions to learn personally and practice collectively.

Our reactions become measurable, communicable, along a gradient of all the necessary possibilities between blinking and screaming. We recognize each other in the size and the flavor of our response. It is an aesthetic sort of relating to each other through relating to the constant horrors that arrive without warning. And that is how culture appears: as aesthetics. An engaging exterior which represents the vast and uncontainable idea submerged inside it. Violence is boundless, but it approaches some semblance of shape when our bodies and our conversations reflect its presence.

The violence itself has become a culture. And it is supplemented by a shared understanding. We

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Kyoko Leaman

“When I stand there with the house behind me, looking out at the water that shivers in the gusty November air, my nostalgic sadness drains away.”

—Eleanor Peters, “Moose House” 02.19.21

“It is easier to hide behind a computer screen than it is to look you in the eye and tell you I am baring something of my soul to you.”

—Anna Harvey, “Tell Me How You Really Feel” 02.21.20

FEATURE Managing Editor Alice Bai Section Editors Andrew Lu Ethan Pan ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Emma Schneider Section Editors Joe Maffa Sam Nevins

have chiseled a second culture out of the necessity of responding. Our personal reactions cannot remain personal when we are inundated with the ceaselessness of the public eye. We text pictures and videos around, post infographics on Instagram, and read the articles in the news. We document the stumblings and the tragedies, disseminating the knowledge through the endless vortex of public engagement, from firsthand to secondhand to third, fourth, fifth, on and on as the real contracts and distorts into the imagined. But reality is not the question for now. Our discussion is on this passage between people. Because everyone feels, or hears, or sees, how violence obliterates the borders of its immediate moment. It activates the senses, like any good art. It seeps slowly, then invades quickly, moving without direction but with clear purpose—the entanglement of all our interactions into this miasma.

It is the knowing that we are left with. If nothing else, we know each other as we run from the explosion, or when we take a video of it and blast it across the digital ether. Our responses are virtual, and our responses are embodied. In both, the understanding is collective. At least, each time the next one comes, whether it’s real or only a warning, we are not lonely in the aftershocks.

NARRATIVE Managing Editor Siena Capone Section Editor Danielle Emerson Leyton Ho LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Kimberly Liu Section Editors Tabitha Lynn Sarah Roberts HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Connie Liu

COPY CHIEF Aditi Marshan

CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Briaanna Chiu Jiahua Chen

Copy Editors Katheryne Gonzalez Eleanor Peters Tierra Sherlock SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS Kelsey Cooper Chloe Zhao Tabitha Grandolfo Natalie Chang

Layout Designers Alice Min Angela Sha Caroline Zhang Gray Martens STAFF WRITERS Dorrit Corwin Lily Seltz Alexandra Herrera Olivia Cohen Ellyse Givens Joyce Gao Zoe Creane Danielle Emerson Kaitlan Bui Julia Vaz Liza Kolbasov Marin Warshay

Want to be involved?

Email: kyoko_leaman@brown.edu!

March 4, 2022

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