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Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Abby Muller Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin Managing Editor of Lifestyle Cissy Yu Managing Editor of Online Amy Andrews Arts & Culture Editors Liz Studlick Mollie Forman Features Editors Lauren Sukin Nate Shames Lifestyle Editor Corinne Sejourne Copy Chiefs Lena Bohman Alicia DeVos Serif Sheriffs Ellen Taylor Logan Dreher Her Grey Eminence Clara Beyer Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Kalie Boyne Katherine Chavez Loren Dowd Rebecca Forman Joseph Frankel Devika Girish Gabrielle Hick Lucia Iglesias Anne-Marie Kommers Joshua Lu Hannah Maier-Katkin Caitlin Meuser Emma Murray Jacyln Torres Ryan Walsh Staff Illustrators Yoo Jin Shin Alice Cao Emily Reif Beverly Johnson Michelle Ng Peter Herrara Mary O’Connor Emma Margulies Jason Hu Jenice Kim Cover Katie Cafaro

contents 3 upfront

rationalism in politics Nathaniel Shames

4 features

a new narrative Claribel Wu

5 lifestyle

you are not alone Monica Chin life on pause Lauren Aratani

6 arts & culture

becoming caligari (or, the sound of silence) Mollie Forman dream city Liz Studlick

7 arts & culture terry pratchett Hannah Maier-Katkin

8 lifestyle

top ten overheard at brown like fine china Naima Msechu

editor’s note Dear readers, This week our writers wrote about narratives that change how they see the world, narratives that change how they see others, and narratives that they tell themselves to change themselves.

Narratives are more than facts. Even facts are carefully curated and presented to the world, as a quick trip through Snapchat on page four will tell you. What’s more, narratives aren’t just collages of the world, cut and pasted to give others the correct idea; the reality is that narratives underlie the way we see the world in the first place, too.

What would it be like to see the world without any theory, any stories with which to make sense of what we perceive? (I suspect we would be spending a good bit of time staring at vaguely human-shaped objects, unsure how to proceed.)

But I don’t mean to be pedantic. Stories are important because they have the power to do more than merely describe what has is already safely cemented in the past. They are often self-fulfilling prophecies: If you believe you will fail, you almost certainly will be more likely to fail. The confidence gap is a real problem, not only because it would be a nice thing if women thought better of themselves; those who think less of themselves take fewer chances, and ultimately express and make less of themselves. When I tell myself stories where my failures are constitutive of me, and not merely things that have happened to me along the path to whatever else is next, I find that those failures predict my future as well.

Of course, one is not wrong or delusional to have a less-than-sunny assessment of the past. At the same time, it is not true that the past will inevitably shape the future. It takes more courage and more faith to believe in a story where the future is different, especially when it is not what those around you say and not what you have seen. But this seems like this is the point of our endeavors; to be more than we have been. One of the surest ways to make this task harder is to tell yourself it is impossible before you begin.

Best,

Yidi we’re taking this week off...

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rationalism in politics a utilitarian conversation NATHANIEL SHAMES section editor of features

Political philosophers, it would follow, should have a politics. Unlike writers of imaginative literature, philosophers are engaged in a descriptive effort to understand the world, to declare how it works. Flowing naturally from the descriptive is the prescriptive, and there is no more central prescriptive activity than politics. Political philosophers, more than any other type of thinker, should attempt to marry the descriptive to the prescriptive. It is their form of abstract thinking that should translate most easily to a prescriptive project.

It would be interesting, then, for a political philosopher to decry politics altogether and eschew association with any practical program. And that is exactly what Michael Oakeshott did.

Oakeshott was a political philosopher in the 20th century in England who has consistently eluded attempts at classification and categorization. Oakeshott’s political writings are centered around one volume, “Rationalism in Politics,” in which he attacks the influence of what he terms “Rationalism” on statecraft. Rationalism, to Oakeshott, is the attitude of an engineer. It sees politics as a series of problems to be solved. Oakeshott writes, “Now, as I understand it, Rationalism is the assertion that what I have called practical knowledge is not knowledge at all, the assertion that, properly speaking, there is no knowledge which is not technical knowledge.” The failure of the Rationalist is, according to Oakeshott, one of vision. They fail to understand the incommensurability of different realms of life, that politics and science are not one and the same and that the methods and approaches of one cannot be applied to the other.

In opposition to Rationalism, Oakeshott seeks to ground politics on tradition. He does not believe that societies can be judged outside of their history and what they have inherited. There is no neutral space from which their practices can be judged. His great metaphor for society and the role of governance is that of a ship. “In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither startingplace nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.” There is no end to which politics aspires, no final state of being that it seeks to achieve. The job of government is to keep the ship afloat and this can only be done through the mobilization of practical experience.

Oakeshott fixates upon the importance of practical experience throughout his works as an antidote to the sort of disembodied, abstract reasoning that motivates the Rationalist and serves as the core of his project. This emerges in Oakeshott’s other great metaphor for politics: that of cooking. The Rationalist thinks that all one needs to know in order to cook is a cookbook. Like all activities, it can be reduced to a set of directions. Great cooks, however, are formed by habit and practical experience. Merely following directions from a cookbook is not the essence of what cooking actually is. Practical experience is handed down from generation to generation and becomes encoded in habit and tradition.

This is the source of his fierce opposition to ideology in any form. Ideology is the premier creation of the Rationalist.

As a result, Oakeshott becomes nearly fetishistic about tradition. To him, it is the only legitimate basis for governance, the only form of governance that respects the nature of human life and human communities. It is not so much that tradition is inherently good, but rather that tradition is the only possible guide. Without it, human beings and human communities would fall into incoherence. Unlike another great English conservative, Edmund Burke, Oakeshott does not seek to evaluate the good and bad parts of his community’s inheritance. Indeed, Oakeshott would have found Burke’s valorization of the principles of the Glorious Revolution as troublingly close to ideology. A critical posture towards tradition, for Oakeshott, threatens the entire project of establishing a political community.

This leads Oakeshott into some posi-

tions that are, to say the least, challenging to understand for us residents of the 21st century. Oakeshott would have had nothing but contempt for the opening lines of the Gettysburg Address, that “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He would have called them incoherent and misguided.

A government cannot be dedicated to anything other than governance. It is not motivated by principle or ideal. It is not designed beforehand. It consists of the reception of habits and practices that have been developed by a community over centuries. He would have reserved the same criticism for the Declaration of Independence, which seeks to found the American project upon the truth “that all men are created equal.” Following Burke, Oakeshott held that the notion of universal rights was prima facie absurd. Rights were not abstract principles; they were specific privileges that were the product of a particular community’s history. He continued to offer withering criticism of women’s suffrage long after it became an entrenched reality as an example of dangerous Rationalist attempts to think of society as motivated primarily by ideals such as justice or equality.

What, then, is the value of this anachronistic philosopher? It is true that his attack on ideology is valuable, as it gives brilliant insight into the source of the danger of totalitarian movements that ravaged the Western world and the core of their destructiveness. His prose, unlike that of most philosophers, is creative and clean. In reading him, you see

a powerful mind at work sifting through the vagaries and challenges of rigorous thinking. All of these make him worthy of reading. But above all else, Oakeshott requires us to question how we imagine the human individual and human communities. He demonstrates the persistent narrowness of how we think about ourselves as we constantly reduce the plurality of realms in which we operate to a unity that simplifies life unnecessarily, destroying the wonder of our inheritance.

We live in a world in the grips of a poverty of collective imagination. The communal has been relentlessly degraded in pursuit of the individual. Unmoored from tradition and history, our collective memories grow shorter and shorter. This has deprived us, it seems, not only of our powers of vision, but also of a great deal of what makes us meaningfully human. If your memory is short, your vision will be small, your entire being will be impoverished. We have attempted to compensate for this smallness by obsessing over visions of the future and attempting to implement them through convulsive and destructive social transformation. Oakeshott does not repudiate modernity. He is not a counterrevolutionary who would seek to roll back time to before 1968, 1789, 1776, 1648, 1517, or whichever other date certain traditionalists have identified as being the cause of the world’s ills.

With these efforts, Oakeshott seeks to refocus our attention on things almost universally overlooked by politicians and political philosophers: the preciousness of the everyday. In an election cycle in which great promises are made and great furies are whipped up, we would all do well to step back from the political madhouse and remember that which

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makes life worth living.

Oakeshott instead exhorts us to pause and consider the transient, fragile joys of life that do not fit into any political program, that elude any attempt at categorization. To Oakeshott, this is the substance of a life well lived, and any politics that threatens these precious goods is a threat that must be combat-

ted. It is easy to call for big changes, for sweeping renewals and revolutions. It is much harder to appreciate the goods that trouble our powers of articulation: love, friendship, poetry, ritual, religion.

Oakeshott instead would like man to see himself as a participant in an ancient and eternal endeavor, “As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, nei-

ther of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.” It is Oakeshott’s reverence for our ability to converse, to wrestle and struggle and learn with one another, that

lies at the core of his thought. This is what he seeks to defend from utilitarian reductiveness that sees man as nothing but a problem to be solved.

Illustration by Michelle Ng

a new narrative snapchat and superficiality CLARIBEL WU contributing writer I understand now why the Snapchat logo is a ghost: Wherever we are, whatever we do, we inevitably feel the lingering influence of this popular social media app. Eating a meal? See something funny? Snapchat it, or else it didn’t happen. These seemingly silly trends lead many to believe that Snapchat is the most inane form of social media. Is this a fair perspective? What is it about Snapchat that appeals to us so much?

As social creatures, we want and need to understand the people around us–what better way to do this than to experience life from another person’s perspective? Rømë Lansang ‘19 said, “I like the fact that you get to see the world through the literal lens of another human being (...) we don’t realize other people have complex, interesting lives too, and I feel like Snapchat helps to bridge that gap.” When we view a story, we are able to live vicariously through the brief, seconds-long moments of another and therefore understand that individual slightly better. It’s amazing how Snapchat can bring viewers into the intimacy of another user’s moment.

Some of my friends went to a Maroon 5 concert, and through their /snapchats I almost felt as if I were there beside them.

The flashing lights, the roaring crowds, the ear-shattering bass–all important components of the concert experience, condensed into the concise package of a 150-second-long story. The “my stories” appropriate the best moments of an experience and allow them to be shared with Snapchat audiences.

The stories not only communicate experiences, they also communicate personalities. People can express their humor uniquely through the various Snapchat filters and features and present themselves in ways that cannot be achieved in face-to-face interactions.

Snapchat does (for the most part) contribute to a unique culture of efficient, highly-personalized communication that permits a different brand of interaction and humor. I’m sure many of you have been keeping up with the Ivy League snap story. That strange dance with the

arms (I’m still not sure exactly what it is or where it came from), the common struggle over midterms, the competitive “we do it better” posts–these all unite the otherwise individual Ivy League student bodies. Through these experiences, even if they are not physically shared, the barriers that separate us slowly come down, and our mutualities prevail.

Another Snapchat user, Hannah McMullen ‘19 further commented that “Snapchat is an indicator that our society loves instant gratification”. Perhaps another reason why Snapchat is so popular is that we relish in the immediacy with which we can exchange pictures and videos in a particular moment. I think there is something profound about the ephemeral nature of the stories. They exist for only 24 hours before disappearing, which is something that distinguishes Snapchat from other popular forms of social media. Snaps sent directly to a friend last for an even shorter sliver of time, at a maximum of 10 seconds. Imagine having to send that funny video you took through, say, Facebook. Doesn’t it lose something?

There’s a beauty in only being able to see a post for a limited amount of time, and I think it speaks to us more because it more accurately reflects how moments are in life—fleeting, and precious.

All of these qualities make Snapchat one of the most popular apps among millennials. Yet I don’t deny that people aren’t always using Snapchats for the right reasons. Natalie Nguyen ‘19 pointedly asks, “Are the best points in our life only the ones worth sharing?”

Snapchatters are constantly on the prowl for “Snapworthy” material—in the process, the slightly less-glamorous moments in life are invalidated. Our need to glorify otherwise normal activities might play into our fear of appearing mundane to others. By seeing all the fun moments that you aren’t a part of, it is easy to get a case of FOMO (fear of missing out). I will admit that this has been at times an issue for me, where I would subconsciously try to post Snapchats that exaggerated how fun my

activities were in an effort to compensate for my FOMO. Friends who then viewed my stories might have gotten FOMO, which ironically stemmed from my FOMO, continuing the cycle. This competitive side of social media can blind us from the everyday moments that matter the most.

People can also use Snapchat features to mask their self-perceived imperfections and further feed their insecurities. There are instances where I conveniently place a caption on top of a glaring pimple, or enlarge an emoji to cover unattractive eye-bags the size of Alaska. Don’t get me wrong, this is great, but what are the implications?

These filters further the notion that we can’t be appreciated in our natural, unadulterated state. The more features are added, the easier it is to develop a dependency on them. Although Snapchat is an advent for communication, it can also perpetuate a person’s feeling of social or physical inadequacy. Again, though, this depends on how you use it and what you hope to get out if it.

Snapchat is just another evolved form of communication, and its widespread popularity can be attributed to a vast array of reasons that reflect some-

thing about human nature: our inherent desire to reach out to others, our demand for instant gratification,our persistent insecurity of self. You may only snap important events, or you may prefer to capture everyday instances— either way, Snapchat is a vehicle of expression and a novel way to write your own narrative. Why and how you use Snapchat exposes how you may identify with others, as well as how you identify with yourself. That said, I think it’s unfair to say that Snaphat lacks substance.

Beyond the captions and filters, there is truth to be found about yourself.

Illustration by Bev Johnson

lifestyle

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you are not alone q&a with mental health activist stefanie kaufman MONICA CHIN managing editor of features By the time Stefanie Kaufman ‘17 graduated from high school, she was already founder and CEO of Project LETS, a non-profit organization supporting students and young adults with mental illness all over the world. Post- sat down with Stefanie to talk about her work as a mental health leader and the current state of mental health support at Brown.

MC: What first drew you to the work that you do for mental health?

SK: In high school, I lost a friend to suicide, which largely initiated my activist role in this community. Her death was handled very poorly in our school district, and I became more vocal about policy reform, curricular changes, and giving these difficult conversations a starting point.

I was also living silently with my own progressing mental illness and was being failed by the system.

Once my family was able to cajole my insurance company into paying for a not-so-decent therapist, I saw an approach that was wrong, harmful, and ineffective. In terms of the community approach, I saw a concentration and heavy focus on awareness, which is still happening today. Raising awareness about mental illnesses without also addressing health disparities, cultural differences, inadequacy of mental health care treatments, insurance issues, and professional and clinical stigma is not enough. We must actively work to create accessible resources, reform existing oppressive policies, and understand that clinical and professional help do not work for everybody.

MC: You’ve interacted with mental health professionals and advocates from universities and organizations all across the country. What do you think about the work that is currently being done in your field?

SK: I’m really excited for the growing support

and evidence-based field coming out of peer support and peer counseling. I also think the connection between mental health, marginalized communities, and the prison pipeline is becoming more visible, which is something that has been lacking publicity for a long time. However, we have a long way to go in terms of actual mental health care, whether it’s legal reforms, insurance policies, clinical stigma, funding, etc. I’m excited about individuals recognizing that there is more to this battle than raising awareness—there are deeply rooted oppressions, stigma, and inequalities surrounding mental health and mental health care, and I think more of these issues are being brought to light.

MC: In your view, what is Brown’s mental health infrastructure lacking? What steps need to be taken?

SK: Mental health on this campus is not given enough attention, quality interest, or financial interest. With CAPS, it is absolutely unacceptable to offer only seven sessions to students who attend this University. In addition, there are many issues with appointments and availability, leaving students who are struggling without an appointment for up to two weeks in non-crisis situations.

The seven-session limit results in many students being referred off-campus, where insurance and travel can become difficult factors. There are issues with medical leave policies and how they are handled. Communication with students on medical leave is less than stellar, and psychological leave guidelines vary in poignant ways from personal leave requirements. Many students have frustration and difficulty with gaining accommodations and working with their professors to make sure their accommodations are fulfilled correctly.

Project LETS at Brown is working to fill some of these voids. We have successfully implemented QPR [Question, Persuade, Refer] suicide prevention training at Brown and currently provide many educational panels and workshops on various mental-health-related topics. We have launched the Peer Mental Health Advocate program, which is a Peer Counseling program for all Brown students struggling with their mental health or living with a mental illness. In addition, all Peer Mental Health Advocates will staff Wellness Spaces throughout the week, where students can visit Open Hours and talk to students with lived experience. In addition, we are working to launch a Mental Health Crisis Line, where students can speak to a Peer Counselor and fellow Brown student at the touch of the button, whether it be for a general question about CAPS or a crisis situation.

MC: What advice would you give an undergraduate student struggling with mental health?

SK: To any undergraduate student at Brown struggling with your mental health: First and foremost, you are not the only person. Not by any means. Since we are all experiencing the stress and anxiety of being Ivy League students, it can be difficult to understand when something typical isn’t so typical anymore. However, something essential and worth mentioning: There is a critical difference between average stress and anxiety and a mental illness. It’s easy to tell ourselves, “Everyone is stressed, everyone is working hard and not sleeping, or not eating, etc.,” but you do not need to wait until a crisis hits to get help. If you are struggling, in any way, with or without a diagnosis, there is a space for you.

To any undergraduate student at Brown who

has tried to get help—If your attempt failed, or it took up too much of your time, or you were referred out, or you were stigmatized, or judged, or you can’t seek help because your parents don’t understand or you cannot afford it: Please do not think there are no options or supports for you.

You can speak with a Peer Counselor for free. You can attend our panels and workshops, our LETS Spaces, our Wellness Spaces, our Office Hours.

You can request an advocate if you feel you have been treated unfairly or discriminated against.

There are students on your side, living a battle quite similar to your own, who really, truly understand. There is no shame when working peerto-peer.

MC: What are the next steps for you and for LETS? What are you currently working on?

SK: We are working on building our partners—local, national, international, and corporate (money is, literally, everything). We are incredibly excited to expand our Peer Mental Health Advocate program to clinics, hospitals, prisons, schools, universities, etc., and allow this essential form of support to thrive in all kinds of communities. We have some podcasts, new programs, campaigns, and amazing team members joining us, so I’m incredibly excited to see where LETS goes in the next few years!

Illustration by Mary O’Connor

life on pause

thoughts on having a double life

LAUREN ARATANI contributing writer Ever since I started college, I’ve felt like I have two separate lives: one life at home and the other at Brown. When I leave one to go to the other, it’s as if I’m un-pausing the life that I had before leaving. I distinctly remember the first time I visited home after being away for four months. After an eleven-hour flight from Newark to Honolulu, I was in an exhausted daze. With a backpack full of the books that I never got to read for fun during the semester, I made my way out of the plane and was surprised to be hit by a gush of warm air.

A big sign that read “Aloha: Welcome to Hawaii” greeted me as I tried not to the think about the inevitable headache that was coming. As I made my way toward the carousels, I looked all around for my mom. My fellow travelers surrounded me in the baggage claim area, exhausted with post-flight hangovers and jackets tied sloppily around their waists. My eyes bounced from person to person until I found my mom. She was sitting on a bench, looking around for me too.

“Hi, Mom,” I said as I approached, and started to tear up when she went in to hug me. I recall thinking how weird it was to be so emotional to see my mom after spending literally my entire pre-college life with her. After I got my suitcase, she drove me home in our blue Honda CRV. While we talked in the car and downtown Honolulu rushed by my window, I felt, for a moment,

like I never left.

That night, I decided to go to bed at the earliest time I have ever gone to sleep since I was a child – 8 p.m. (Of course, the five hour time difference meant that I was technically going to bed at 1 a.m. eastern standard time.) Though I expected sleep to come easy, I ended up staring at my ceiling for half an hour thinking about how unfamiliar it felt to be back home. It was a bit of a paradox—being at home was weird to me because I never felt so much like a stranger there before.

The whole idea of home relies on the comfort that it brings. While I definitely felt comfortable being in my own bed again, I felt strange without my roommate, or even the awkward encounters going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I especially felt lonely knowing that it was just me, my mom, and my brother around.

Of course, as the long winter break continued, I eventually adjusted to the feeling of being home. I spent that winter break seeing my friends and family, eating ono (which means delicious in Hawaiian) food, and learning how to drive. Everything was back to normal, except, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that I missed the life that I had put on pause. While I loved being home, I missed being able to knock on my friends’ door down the hall and then immediately go out to eat Indian food (shoutout to Kabob &

Curry) without needing a car. Although the constant stream of homework, essays, and upcoming exams is never fun, I longed for the feeling of being productive instead of sitting on my bed watching videos of baby corgis and scrolling through Facebook. I was even starting to miss the cold (which I would regret by April, three snowstorms later). After a month of life at home, I knew that I was ready to un-pause my life at Brown.

As my life continues to pause and unpause whenever I go home and come back, I am reminded of a scene from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, when Holden Caulfield is in the Museum of Natural History in New York City. He looks at all the animals on the display and realizes that a person could go to the museum a thousand times and the displays would remain the same no matter what. What would be different he says, is you. Indeed, whenever I unpause my life, everything that I had once left behind seems to be the same—the thing that changes the most is myself.

Unfortunately, the process of pausing one life and going to another is emotionally harrowing.

The transitions bring me immense sadness because I have to say goodbye to the people I care most about. Though technology makes communication easier, knowing that I won’t see my

family or friends for months takes a long time to accept. Perhaps what I miss the most is a feeling of continuity—a feeling that I don’t have to separate home from college, to put one on pause and play the other. The differences between the locations and cultures of the two places exacerbate the problem. They are twelve hours and a world of lifestyle apart, and going back and forth between the two can be jarring because of the dissimilarity alone.

Though there is sadness and pain leaving home or Brown, I am so entirely grateful that I have both places in my life. Being able to have lives in two amazing cities—with people I care about, and who in return care for me—is something that makes the emotional strain and stress worthwhile. As time goes, perhaps life in Hawaii and at Brown can feel connected somehow. But for now, I’m just going to have to keep on pushing the pause button. At least I know that soon after, another part of my life will start playing once again.

Illustration by Emily Reif

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becoming caligari (or, the sound of silence) silent film, revisited MOLLIE FORMAN section editor of a&c In the early days of film, movie-watching was said to induce a kind of madness: “The hypnotic power of cinema could cause members of the audience to become anxious, or even lead to bodily harm,” said District Court Judge Albert Hellwig in 1916. This critique is not too far from those that modern critics level against the effects of violence in modern film. Nevertheless, Hellwig was speaking to an entirely different cinematic environment: For one, there was no sound.

Sound films are now the norm. They have been for a long time, slowly but surely moving toward complete dominance of film since the release of “The Jazz Singer” in 1927. “The Artist” (2011) was the first widely-released silent film since Mel Brooks’s “Silent Movie” in 1976.

It’s also only the second silent film in history to win Best Picture, the first being “Wings” at the Academy’s inaugural ceremony in 1927. Films with sound and color are so dominant that when “The Artist” was released, an audience in Liverpool demanded refunds after realizing the film they walked into was sans dialogue.

The consensus is clear: The movie-going public loves it some sound.

Yet for all this, we wouldn’t have a movie industry if not for silent film. During the golden age of silent film between 1912 and 1930, almost 11,000 silent movies were produced. The vast majority have since been lost to fire, deterioration, or misplacement, but many of those that remain deserve better than the rap they’ve been given. Even putting aside the fact that 50 percent of the silents made between 1911 and 1925 were written by women (compared to the paltry 7 percent of female writers and directors

making blockbusters today), silent films hold up surprisingly well to the test of time.

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is a personal favorite of mine. Directed by Robert Wiene and written by pacifists Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, the 1920 German film opens with a young man, Francis, relating a horror story to his companion. Some time before, he and his friend Alan had attended a village festival where they met the mystic Dr. Caligari. Using his powers, Caligari had awoken the somnambulist Cesare from 23 years of hypnosisinduced slumber in order to tell the crowd’s future. When Alan asked how long he had to live, Cesare prophesied that he would die by the next day’s dawn. Alan did die, becoming the first in a string of strange murders and crimes that included the attempted abduction of Francis’s fiancée.

This might sound like a straightforward horror movie, but the framing of the story reveals many more layers—all of which are just too brilliant to spoil. What’s really fascinating about this film is how it reflects the culture of post-WWI Germany, a country overwhelmed by both individual and broader cultural trauma. Probably the example of German expressionism, the film’s set design is characterized by distorted, fractured, and claustrophobic forms meant to convey a visceral sense of discord. The muddled narrative, as well as the film’s unstable relation to time and space in the form of flashbacks and convoluted sets, makes the audience as well as the characters question the nature of reality.

I can say with certainty that no film like this could be made today—not just because of the

evolved zeitgeist, but because of the genre itself.

The visceral levels of madness and grief suffered by the characters and their culture couldn’t be conveyed through modern methods of scripting and acting. Silent films are often derided for their campy, over-the-top performances or cited as boring for their lack of speech. But there are few shots in film history more haunting than Cesare’s first waking: With a close-up on his face, his heavily lined eyelids draw slowly upwards, and his face settles into a rictus of terror and psychotic breakage, which seems to encompass the whole of the horrors of war.

In this sense, “The Artist” is not a true silent film; the acting and other elements were updated so they would be accessible to mainstream audiences. These changes were appropriate for this particular story, but would not have worked for “Caligari.” “Caligari” is a film about war and its aftermath—events too terrible for the subtlety of modern

acting to convey, or even for spoken word to explain.

But cinematic memory is short. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Times change, technologies evolve. I would never advocate a complete return to the days of mouthed speech and black-and-white images. But that doesn’t mean such films don’t deserve a place in our memory and a spot on the shelf.

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is on YouTube in its entirety. It’s a little over an hour— give it a try.

‘Cause you never know. It might be time to let a little madness into your life.

Illustration by Emma Marguiles

dream city on finding bubble tea and yourself in new york LIZ STUDLICK section editor of a&c This summer, I was determined to have an authentic New York experience. Wait, it gets better: I was a 21-year-old transplant from Houston who was determined to have this authentic New York experience while living in SoHo and working in investment banking.

I turned up my nose at the idea of living in an overpriced place in Tribeca (obvious

banker territory) or an undersized New York University dorm and convinced two friends to live in a overpriced, undersized apartment on Thompson Street, less than a block away from the bakery that invented cronuts. My street was all custom hat shops and sunshine and parklets, making it easy to ignore the fact that the rest of SoHo was a glorified mall.

Those first mornings, I would saunter to the subway, the daily nod from the guy who guarded the line of sugar-bomb-seekers still novel to me.

And the first nights when I left work, I would find myself inexplicably smiling, looking south at Times Square and the mobs of theatergoers converg-

ing for showtime, my sense of superiority momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer hum of activity.

I quickly imagined a life for myself: my corporate coworkers would spend their nights at crowded bars while I explored the city in a non-touristy fashion, discovering my own secret parks, searching for the perfect bubble tea, and finding myself. I had grown up with once-a-year trips to the Museum of Modern Art and Central Park, and I knew that there must be something more to Manhattan, some way to lay claim to it if I only tried hard enough.

For most of the summer, this plan worked. I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art what felt like most weekends but was really only twice; I found the requisite dim sum places and ice cream shops.

I bought mango in a plastic bag on Broadway and ate it, shoppers streaming around me. I read Joan Didion at work and was thrilled by the fact that I, too, had gold curtains. I was living in New York City, damn it.

But small things chipped away at the illusion. Coming back from work increasingly late, too tired to force anyone to Experience the City with me, I would scroll

through social media, noting just how many people I knew had also seen the new Whitney this weekend. Quite a few people were also feeling free-spirited on a Sunday and walking the High Line. I had so little time—the length of the summer, but also my limited free time—and I was spending it just like everyone else.

It was hopeless. Every places that I envisioned becoming special to me turned out to be another item on every other summer dweller’s checklist. The spots I hoped would stay secret showed up with alarming frequency on acquaintances’ snap stories.

Even the dive bar I found that played Star Wars inexplicably and continuously was crashed by a girl I knew in high school.

How was I supposed to find a home here when tourists wouldn’t stop walking through?

It was around the time of this crushing realization that a friend suggested we go to an art show she had heard about. It was called the Dream House. We scoffed at the “Sound and Light Environment” descriptor on the site, but the circa 2002 site design—plain black text on fluorescent gardenia—screamed authenticity.

I was thrilled to find that we had to be

arts & culture

buzzed up at the virtually unmarked door.

The volunteer at the top of the steps was appropriately blasé about the droning noise bleeding through the door behind him. Inside, it was even louder, a screech at a register calculated to cause maximum physical and psychological damage. Red and blue lights bounced off simple spirals hung against walls. Several people sat on the white carpet, eyes closed, as the blare and the unmediated summer heat washed over them.

The site had recommended we budget one to two hours to fully appreciate the experience. We lasted about twenty minutes.

Mystified by my experience, I Googled the Dream House after we left. It turned out this was no pop-up exhibit we had wandered into—it had first opened in 1993 as a collaboration between La Monte Young, an avant-garde sound artist, and Marian Zazeela, a minimalist sculptor.

The song I had been listening to was called “The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered Above” and—well, you get the idea. Sonic Youth and Animal Collective had hung out on those same warm floors. And everyone agreed that it was a super meaningful experience.

Clearly, I had done something wrong.

I was determined to return and make the unique New York space mine. I passed the three days it was closed with some impatience. On the sunset of the fourth day, I set out for the exhibit on foot, armed with yoga pants and increasingly grandiose ideas. I could make it my go-to meditation spot, an oasis away from the masses of tourists that flooded my neighborhood.

I could interview volunteers and visitors, finally proving obscure enough to be published in the Indy. I could discreetly disclose the spot to friends, safe in the knowledge that none of them would have heard

of it before.

I reached the same unmarked door and pressed the buzzer. Nothing. I peered through the window, hoping to catch the eye of the volunteer on duty, but my view was blocked by a piece of paper taped to the door: The Dream House is closed for the summer and will reopen September 20th.

I took this as a personal offense. I wandered the streets of Tribeca and then Chinatown and then Little Italy, the same alone-in-a-crowd feeling that had freed me earlier this summer now suffocating me.

In the more perfect version of this story, there’s a turning point. I buy gelato on the street and sit in Washington Square Park, watching men play chess under lamplight.

I realize that making a home somewhere isn’t about finding the right obscure spots, that it’s more of a process of settling in and finding the comfort that only comes with time. I accept that living in New York is

7

just living in a city and your relationship with it a series of compromises, that there is no secret authentic place that exists, that you make what you can of it.

But the truth is that I walked around for a bit and went home angry. My choices were to fully face the fact that my quest was futile or to continue it. I chose the latter with some bitterness, the idea of some truer place bumping up against my naïve constellation of places and daily dramas.

Over the next few weeks, the realizations of that imaginary turning point would come to me, in slow bursts. Eventually it would surface like a bruise, ambiguous evidence of an impact between expectation and reality. By the time it had faded, I had left the city behind.

Illustration by Jenice Kim

terry pratchett the writer and his creations HANNAH MAIER-KATKIN staff writer Sir Terry Pratchett, known predominantly as a prolific fantasy writer, died on March 12, 2015 at the age of 66 at the end of a long and public battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He had been diagnosed eight years prior with a rare form of dementia—posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), also known as Benson’s Syndrome. This variety of dementia disrupts the visual processes of the brain while leaving the episodic memory and the patient’s sense of self largely intact. In Pratchett’s own words, “The disease slips you away a little bit at a time and lets you watch it happen.”

Pratchett managed to continue producing work until his death despite the sustained decay of his brain; his last published book, “The Shepherd’s Crown,” was released the same month he passed away.

Terry Pratchett’s death was announced by his daughter as having been natural, although for years Pratchett spoke publicly in favor of the ability to choose when and where he would die.

Pratchett became an outspoken advocate for assisted suicide, or euthanasia, after receiving his diagnosis. The process—currently legal in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and five U.S. states—allows people with terminal diseases, for whom palliative care is the only option in making their day-to-day existence bearable, this alternative to reclaim a sense of agency by ending their own lives. His BBC documentary, “Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die,” follows Pratchett and a man suffering from a motor neuron disease to Switzerland where the latter, on camera, legally takes his own life. The film was highly controversial, but Pratchett argued: “It should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.”

I was introduced to Terry Pratchett’s work by my sister, who has read, I imagine, nearly every installment of his Discworld series, a collection of 41 novels (he wrote more than 70 in total) that all take place in a universe of Pratchett’s creation. The Discworld is a flat, disc-shaped planet propped upon the back of four cosmic elephants who ride through space atop an enormous floating turtle named Great A’Tuin. Pratchett put a staggering amount of thought and detail into his

creation, which functions by its own set of laws.

His sets of characters each inhabit different parts of the Discworld and periodically collide—some even fall off the edge of the Earth. Morning car rides to school, a long and otherwise boring commute, were filled with audiobooks of various installments in no particular order, because you can situate yourself in any of his books and find it immediately clear and charming.

Many of the books in the Discworld series are amusing spoofs of classics. “Wyrd Sisters,” for example, imagines a premise that mixes the storylines of Hamlet and Macbeth. The story takes the perspective of the three w i t c h e s who appear in the beginning of The Scottish Play, scheming. The ending, however, is much less macabre than Shakespeare’s tragedy. Pratchett comically inverted typical tropes of fantasy novels. The wizard Rincewind, for example, a protagonist in many of Pratchett’s books, is not heroic but instead both cowardly and incompetent. He saves the world on multiple occasions, albeit reluctantly. Pratchett could make an intelligent quip about anything, which upon first glance would appear whimsical but with more thought reveal immense depth and insight. His reading was, and remains, exciting, overflowing with hidden treasures begging to be uncovered.

The colorful collection of Discworld book spines—rich purples, blues, and greens—adorns the shelves of the room I shared with my older sister until she went to college the same year I started high school. They still rest on top of flimsy wooden boards, now collecting dust, alongside Harry Potter and an embarrassingly large collection of Sarah Dessen’s teenage romance novels, the aggregate of my introduction to reading.

When I was just starting to care about books, the Discworld series appeared to me as both accessible and meaningful. Most of his allusions may have been lost on me, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment. The lightheartedness in his writing could mask the greater forces at work.

“Snuff,” one of his more serious titles, is a story that tackles issues of genocide, crimes against humanity, retroactive law, and systemic racism.

The story takes place while Commander Vimes of the city watch is on vacation. He is confront-

ed with evidence of a slave trade of goblins, orchestrated by the rich and tacitly endorsed by the surrounding villagers, as humanitarian laws do not afford protection to the goblin race. I admittedly feel ridiculous describing this plot in terms of the goblins and city watch that classify Pratchett’s work in the fantasy genre. Despite the silly language that superficially separates this story from our modern times, Pratchett used his work to discuss larger, timeless issues surrounding humanity.

On belief, even, Pratchett had veiled commentary that could catch you off guard with its intricacy. He insists, in “Hogfather” (his version of Santa Claus), that children are taught to believe in the little lies—such as the “Hogfather” or the tooth fairy—so that they can be able to believe in the big lies as well: justice, mercy, duty.

He posits these bigger ones as social constructs, insisting that humans need “fantasies to make life bearable.”

In reading one of Terry Pratchett’s novels, it is not the case that you read it once and struggle to maintain a grip on the story. Rather, you laugh the first time around because of his often hysterical, even whimsical prose. Subsequently, in each passage you reread, there lingers a previously unnoticed detail that amplifies your appreciation of the piece. There’s a certain sincerity to his humor that is immensely appealing. He did not put on any sort of pompous affectation, but had the effortless ability to make you laugh, stop, and think.

Pratchett’s arguably most compelling character was Death, who he described as “not cruel—merely terribly, terribly good at his job.” Death is not the paradigmatic rendering of the Grim Reaper. Instead he is a sympathetic, humanized character who likes cats, eats curry, and is deeply fascinated with human beings.

Death remarks, “It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.” The inevitability of death is something that frustrates Death himself, which creates an interesting conflict for the reader—and a certain solace in solidarity,

no matter how futile. The inevitability of death lurks before all of us as an impersonal, terrifying reality and there is something oddly comforting about its domesticated personification. Death, in the Discworld, is a character constantly in dialogue with others who is making deals, struggling to communicate. His presence cannot be ignored and the ultimate meeting he has with the characters he encounters—donning his dark robes and menacing scythe—cannot be escaped (although certainly delayed). But he does not have to be as grim as the typical reaper.

When Terry Pratchett died, his encounter with Death was documented in true modern fashion through a series of three tweets: “AT LAST SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.” “Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.”

“The End.” Tweets are a medium of brevity and impersonality, but highly effective in mass communication—and as a fan, I find these three beautiful. This is a lot to pack into 140 characters.

We are led to believe that Pratchett welcomed Death with open arms as would old friends, despite meeting for the first time. In mourning his loss from the position of a reader, I am thankful for the new understanding that he left of old models. The lens he offered into his lavish, inexhaustible imagination through the world he crafted left an invaluable mark on this one. His books are not the works of the canon; they’re not nearly so stuffy. Writers offer their readers the ability to peer into someone else’s head, to interact with someone else’s method, to deepen their understanding of the world they inhabit and its endless possibilities. Terry Pratchett offered his readers a view of the world that was satirical, cutting, yet above all warmly optimistic.

Illustration by Peter Herrera

8

lifestyle

I don’t need to take a class on masculinity. I’ve had a lifetime of that.

I had a dream where I got menopause and then I shrunk and became small and powerful.

En dashes are beautiful too.

Hey, are you using that like an insect?

We really need to up our sexy carrot quota.

More than an hour? Would that make him a a prostitute?

They’re both, concurrently, the shit.

His whole campaign strategy is “Netflix and chill.”

hot post time machine “No matter how terrible my day, no matter how many papers there were to write, exams to study for, and internship applications to fill out, I knew that stuffing those globes of cake into my mouth would always make me happy.”

muffin love

-10/23/13

topten halloweekend costumes 1. Sexy cat 2. Where’s Waldo wearing another costume 3. Sexy Donald Trump 4. A well-rested, mentally stable college student 5. Sexy Alexander Hamilton 6. Jar of dirt 7. Sexy potato?

8. Internal Revenue Service 9. Crushing loneliness (so, go as yourself) 10. A mouse, duh

like fine china a short story

NAÏMA MSECHU contributing writer Dad picked me up, that time, on a Sunday. He opened the passenger side door for me and turned on the radio as soon as he sat down behind the wheel, reaching both hands through the sunroof and drumming his palms on the top of the car. After we waved goodbye in the general direction of the house Mom and I shared, he told me we were going to see my grandpa (a man I’d never met because Dad hadn’t allowed me to before now), and it caught me so off guard that I forgot for a second about wondering when he would pick me up next time. It was useless, anyway.

Plans with Dad were always indefinite until he pulled into the driveway—no point in planning anything out, much less worrying.

Now I counted the yellow bird feathers Dad had stuck behind the passenger seat’s sun visor since I had last seen him, every extremity tingling with excitement. Eight. He had called my grandpa (his dad) a “barmy old coot,” and though I didn’t know exactly what that meant, I began repeating the last word in my head as we drove—coot, coot, coot—like some sort of bird call.

He was taking the highway out of town, which either meant we didn’t have far to go or he just didn’t want to drive on the interstate. I didn’t bother asking. Dad never gave me details about the surprises he had in store when he picked me up, and this was the biggest one yet. He hummed along to the music, and I stared through the windshield at the corn fields I’d seen about a million times, my eyes squinty from the sun I couldn’t block out with the visor unless I wanted the feathers to fall to the floor. I was glad when we passed a sign that said “Crane’s Country Store” and Dad pulled off the road.

“Does Grandpa work here?” I asked despite myself. Mom and I had driven past the store so often I’d forgotten it was there, but I’d never been inside.

Dad laughed. “No, your crazy grandpa works at a screw factory. He doesn’t get off work till four. I have something I want to show you before then.”

The store smelled strange, like minty cleaning solution mixed with cigarette smoke.

My dad led me past shelved non-perishable foods, refrigerated drinks, and racks of utility pants and camouflage t-shirts, to where a case of gleaming guns stood against the back wall.

“You want to show me those?”

He shook his head. “Look on the wall.

The birds.”

I looked. About a foot above the display case, dwarfed by the frozen faces of a buck, a coyote, and a fox, were the tiny bodies of three stuffed birds. I looked closer at the first one.

“It’s just a cardinal!” Mom and I saw ones like it in our yard sometimes, bright feathers like a skinned knee, a red so shocking I couldn’t have forgotten the bird if I’d tried.

It seemed too common for anyone to care enough to mount one on a wall, though.

“Not just a cardinal,” Dad said. “It’s Cardinalis cardinalis.” He pointed at the wooden board the bird stood on, where the foreign words were engraved on a small bronze plaque.

“Why the same name twice? Isn’t that kinda cocky of it?”

“Come on, Bree,” Dad groaned, and he didn’t seem to be joking like I had been, so I shifted my gaze to the blue jay directly beside the cardinal.

“How do you say its name?”

“Cyanocitta cristata.” He made the “t”s sound like the click of fine china, the kind I imagined grandmas would have in a tea set, porcelain as blue as the wings of the bird in front of me. I knew the jay’s call in real life sounded less fancy, more like a grandma yelling at you for something silly like walking through one of her flower beds, or at least that’s what I assumed. Both of my grandmas had died before I was born, Dad’s mom only a month before Mom had me twelve years ago. Until today, I’d only really known one grandparent, my Grandpa Ben, who visited Mom and me every other Christmas.

Dad gestured to the right of the blue jay.

“Colaptes auratus is my favorite.”

Unlike the other birds, the last one was displayed in full flight, and I could see why: The undersides of its wings and tail feathers

were the yellow of clustered dandelions and mustard on a summer hotdog. And its first name, which sounded to me like collapse, reminded me of the fragile yolk of a sunnyside-up egg and how easy it was to miss a sunset, the way Mom often did when she came home from work half an hour too late even though she’d promised me we’d watch it from the porch. I was unsurprised when my dad told me the bird’s English name was Flicker.

I stayed there, looking at the way the fluorescent light bounced off its golden feathers until he offered to buy me a slushie (flavor of my choice) because “it’s not every Sunday you get to meet your grandpa.”

Back in the car, he pulled the flicker feathers out from behind my sun visor and handed them to me. “For you,” he said. “So you can start being a feather collector like your old man.”

I paused. “Did you…”

“No, no—I found these on the ground.

Feathers are like eyelashes: they don’t count unless you find them by accident. And I didn’t shoot the birds in there, if you’re wondering. I just noticed them one day and thought they were too pretty not to share with you.”

I looked at the feathers in my hands, trying to imagine how good it would feel to find one myself.

“Show them to your grandpa when you see him—he likes feathers, too.” Dad started backing up the car. “Just don’t be too hyper.

I think you’re old enough to deal with him now, but like I said, he’s a crazy coot.”

I nodded, giving him what I hoped was a grown-up smile, but as we drove, the chorus of coot, coot, coot began again inside my head.

If I were a word collector, I decided, I’d want that one first and foremost. I wondered if it was worrisome that the same word that was a warning bell to Dad was a sound I would follow into a forest without even the promise of a dropped feather.

Note: This piece is reprinted due to a layout error in the original edition.

Illustration by Alice Cao