Post- Feb. 4, 2016

t s o p E LUM O V RY A U R FEB

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SSU 18 - I

s i h in t

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n a , sm i l i h i n , e c n a s s! i r u o j n a m e r o no m

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upfront

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 Halley McArn Lifestyle Editor Corinne Sejourne Copy Chiefs Lena Bohman Alicia DeVos Serif Sheriffs Logan Dreher Kate Webb 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 Caitlin Meuser Emma Murray Spencer Roth-Rose Jacyln Torres Ryan Walsh Claribel Wu Staff Illustrators Yoo Jin Shin Alice Cao Emily Reif Beverly Johnson Michelle Ng Peter Herrara Mary O’Connor Emma Marguiles Jason Hu Jenice Kim Cover Emma Marguiles

contents 3 upfront

nuisance ordinances Yidi Wu

4 features

their responses will shock you!

Post- Editorial Staff

5 lifestyle

majors Rebecca Ellis why i do debate Yidi Wu

6 arts & culture wandering through wonder Lucia Iglesias

the nihilist’s guide to the galaxy Spencer Roth-rose

7 arts & culture beyond the classroom Anne-Marie Kommers

8 lifestyle

top ten overheard at brown green gloves Sara Al-Salem

editor’s note Dear readers, Welcome back to Brown! Your first full week of spring semester has now passed. You are shopping for courses. You are attending classes. You are catching up with friends from Brown. I am narrating your actions. And here the narration ends.

In all seriousness, the semester stretches out before us, and neither you nor I nor anyone we know has any idea of what precisely will transpire. I have suspicions that not only do we not know, that there is nothing to “know.” The future is constructed and not discovered. I prefer it this way: ”The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.” Virginia Woolf. (I recommend Rebecca Solnit’s piece on Woolf, from which I honestly admit I cribbed this quote secondhand.)

This idea may be a bit controversial: You may wish for nothing more than for the future to be illuminated (especially if you are in the midst of sending job applications to nameless judges, like many of our editors). You may, in fact, already see the future stretched before you clearly (in which case I envy you). But I’m merely suggesting that to be uncertain about the future, as students are uncertain of the future, is one of the great pleasures there are, that the doubt is borne of anticipation of knowledge and that the struggles are, in reality, efforts without which your time would not be worthwhile.

Best,

Yidi

From right to left: Yidi Wu ‘17, Abby Muller ‘16, Monica Chin ‘17, Cissy Yu ‘17, Amy Andrews ‘16, Liz Studlick ‘16, Mollie For- man ‘16, Lauren Sukin ‘16, Halley McArn ‘19, Corinne Sejourne ‘16, Lena Bohman ‘18, Alicia Devos ‘18, Logan Dreher ‘19, Ellen Taylor ‘16, Kate Webb ‘19, Katie Cafaro ‘17 (Please send us a photo at post.magazine.bdh@gmail.com)

upfront

3

nuisance ordinances peace at a price

YIDI WU editor-in-chief as many as four calls in a month.

Once a property is deemed a “nuisance property,” then the property owner has to “abate the nuisance.” In practice, this means that landlords often end up evicting the tenants in order to stop the 911 calls. And more often than not, in domestic violence cases the tenant is the victim and her children.

YW: What happens to residents with a nuisance record?

Where do victims go?

GA: Well, a lot of times they end up homeless. A lot of times they end up in battered women’s shelters, or in more generic homeless shelters. Sometimes they end up couch surfing, or staying with relatives. Sometimes they end up living in their cars.

Or, if they’re lucky, they try to find another rental unit. But once they have, once it’s on their rental record that they have been cited as a nuisance or they’ve been evicted as a nuisance citation, then it becomes much harder for them to find another place to live.

YW: Is there any way for a resident to fight a nuisance record?

Dr. Gretchen Arnold is currently an assistant professor of sociology at Saint Louis University. She has been performing research on issues of violence against women for over 25 years and has been working with the domestic violence movement in St. Louis since the late 1980s.

Yidi Wu: Can you explain what nuisance ordinances are for our readers?

Gretchen Arnold: Nuisance laws have been around for probably most of the 20th century. It was only in the latter part of the 20th century that they started being used to—by cities, primarily—to maintain certain standards of behavior. A lot of municipalities across the country started passing nuisance ordinances that specifically targeted behaviors like prostitution, drug dealings, gun sales, peace disturbances, or loud parties. So it really is an attempt to ensure a particular quality of life for urban residents. And they are passed primarily at the municipal level. I believe that there are

a few counties around the country that have passed them. But they are primarily municipal ordinances. What my research has shown is that nuisance laws often end up causing victims of domestic violence to be evicted from their homes.

The way nuisance laws generally work, and certainly the way they work in St. Louis, is this: When people call 911, they have to give an address of where the problem is for the police or emergency responders to go. It’s the actual property address that is recorded. So it doesn’t matter if it’s the person living there or if it’s the neighbor or someone else [who is calling]. If they call about a particular address—let’s say they’re calling about crime or something happening at an address—then the police go to that address.

Now different [nuisance] ordinances will specify what counts as too many 911 calls [for a property], and once you’ve made too many calls then that becomes a nuisance.

In St. Louis City, it’s two or more calls in a 12 month period. In other places it could be

GA: They can fight it, but to fight it, you have to have access to some sort of legal representation really. And most people don’t know how to do this on their own. There are some places where you can get free legal services, so it is possible to fight it.

But most domestic violence victims, especially those who are low-income, don’t know where to go, and if they did, it would be difficult for them to get there.

People just don’t have access to legal representation. If the cases do make it to court, at least in St. Louis, I think they will almost always be dismissed, if it can be shown that the calls were for domestic violence. The issue is that few of them ever make it to court.

Another thing that could happen is that the landlord could contest the nuisance property citation. We looked into that in our first study, where we interviewed law enforcement officials and domestic violence residents. In principle, that’s fine, the landlord can do that. It is often the case that the landlords know what is going on at the rental units they have. Of the women we spoke with in our second case study, many said that their landlords were sympathetic, that it wasn’t their fault, but [the landlords] felt they were being pressured by the police, and they were going to lose control of their properties if the 911 calls didn’t stop. So, the landlords could be the ones to contest it. However, the landlords, too, have to

have access to legal representation. Or they have to be well-educated enough, and have enough social status, to complain and to be taken seriously. I interviewed one local official who had sat in on a number of these kinds of meetings that landlords had with local law enforcement officials, and this official told me that how the landlord was treated in these meetings very much depended upon the perceived social class and educational level of the landlord. And some landlords were treated with respect and listened to and others were more or less forced to or told to do x, y, and z. And they need a certain amount of social power, and not all of them have that.

YW: How do nuisance ordinances affect victims of domestic abuse or residents of lower-income neighborhoods?

GA: Nine-one-one calls are much more common in lower-income neighborhoods and in minority neighborhoods, for a variety of reasons. Victims of domestic violence, especially, call 911 a lot, for protection. Now, we interviewed 27 people who had been targets of nuisance property enforcements, primarily when they had called 911 for domestic violence issues. And 27 of those interviewees were very low-income African Americans. We heard some hairraising stories from them. Not only about how it affected them personally. But that their entire neighborhoods, all the residents were afraid to call 911 for any reason.

The ACLU has done some research that duplicates this in other jurisdictions. Once nuisance property ordinances are in effect, they tend to have a chilling effect on people for calling 911 for any reason, not just for the reasons that are cited in the ordinance.

YW: Is it very widely known that nuisance laws can get you evicted?

GA: Well, I don’t know how many people don’t call 911, but I know that people are afraid to call 911. Depending on the situation, they might go ahead and call anyway.

Many of them are afraid to call 911. For example, one woman told us a story about how she lived down the block from a house.

A woman had been kidnapped from East St. Louis and brought to this house down the block from our interviewee and held there against her will for a week. And the woman was finally able to get free by jumping from a second story window and broke both of her legs—but at least at that point she was able to get away from her captor. And what our interviewee told us was that that everybody in the neighborhood knew what was going on, but no one called 911 because they were afraid that they would then be fined or evicted for calling 911 too often.

YW: Emergency calls seem more common in poorer neighborhoods, but it also seems that nuisance ordinances are particularly harmful for residents of those neighborhoods. Do you think there is also discrimination in enforcement against domestic abuse victims or minority residents?

4

features

GA: I don’t know. And I think that this depends a lot on where it is and the policies that local law enforcement pursue. In the city of St. Louis, when they started enforcing the current type of nuisance ordinance that targets quality-of-life issues, a lot of battered women’s advocates began hearing from women that they were trying to help about nuisance laws, and advocates in turn went and complained to the police.

And the local domestic violence community has a very long-standing relationship [with the police]—and sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse, but they have worked together for decades around domestic violence issues. And so the police took their complaints very seriously. And the police did institute an internal policy where they tried to determine when some nuisance violations were because of domestic violence, and in those cases to not enforce the law in a way that would harm the victim. Now that’s their stated policy, and there are various mechanisms for how they try to do that.

For a variety of reasons, I think that a lot of times they don’t know about that these are domestic violence cases. The info doesn’t get back to the police. And I think sometimes officers are indifferent. In St. Louis there is an effort not to disproportionately target domestic violence cases. That may very well not be the case in other jurisdictions. There was a study by Matthew Desmond and Nicole Valdez that was done in Milwaukee. It was published in 2013. It was the first empirical study that came out

about it. And they found in Milwaukee that nuisance citations were disproportionately given in minority neighborhoods. Anyway, I believe that there are some jurisdictions where they do target domestic violence cases, because they’re a pain in the neck for law enforcement. The police officers keep coming out, keep coming out, keep coming out, and they get very frustrated. And they just want to get them out of their hair.

And if they can force the tenant to move, and be someone else’s problem, that’s what they’ll do. That’s just my opinion. I don’t really have any evidence for that, other than anecdotal evidence.

YW: Are nuisance ordinances likely to be banned and struck down?

GA: Well, I have been in touch with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, in New York City. My contact person there is Sandra Park. And she and others at the ACLU have filed lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions around the country to get the laws either invalidated or changed. And so far, and I can’t say how many they’ve actually filed (my guess is fewer than five but I don’t know that for sure). So far the result has been, in a lawsuit, that municipalities tend to cave really quickly. They withdraw the ordinance, strike it down, and just stop enforcing it. So far, to my knowledge, no municipality has fought to keep the ordinance.

The ACLU is contesting nuisance laws on the grounds of the First Amendment

on grounds of petitioning the government, where petitioning the government includes calling 911 or other emergency services.

So those are the grounds on which they’re contesting them. I think the ACLU’s strategy—their sort of bigger picture strategy— is to get state legislatures to pass laws that say that no jurisdiction within the state can pass or enforce a law that denies people the right to request emergency services. And so that includes calling an ambulance, calling the fire department, or calling the police.

And the last I knew, they were working on it in New York state. And I believe that Illinois may be considering the same kind of law. So, what they want to do is, at the state level, just get the state to say that no municipality or county can enforce a law that denies people the right to call 911 for emergency services.

YW: Do nuisance ordinances serve any unique purpose?

GA: Now I will say, to give you a whole picture, that the nuisance ordinances in St. Louis City have been useful in some instances. For instance, we live in an urban neighborhood. It’s a mixed-income neighborhood. Mixed-income, mixed-race, mixed-ethnicity. And we really like it for that reason. However, we’ve lived here for 23 years. And over that time, there have been problem properties on that block.

For a time, in the 1990s, there was a crack house down at the end of the block. Then, about four years ago, there was another

house, again at the end of the block. These are mostly single-family houses, and there are multi-family units, and the multi-family units are pretty run down. And in one of these units, there would be huge parties, and we found out later there was also heroin being sold out of that apartment. And the police and prosecutors in the city of St. Louis liked the nuisance ordinance because it enabled them to very quickly shut down these buildings. They could force the tenants or make the landlords force the tenants to leave, and they could also force the landlord to sell the building—or what they do is they say we’ll board up the building for a year, and you can’t use the building for a year, and oftentimes the landlord will sell the building. And that’s precisely what happened at the end of our block. They boarded up the units, the landlord sold the building, the developer came in and fixed the units up, and now it’s in decent shape and there are tenants who aren’t the source of these problems anymore.

What I want to say is that the police feel that it is a very efficient way for them to quickly deal with and eliminate these kinds of problems on properties. And my observation has been that yes, it does work. But there’s got to be a better way to do it.

Illustration by Jake Reeves

we asked 42 post- editors what the meaning of life is their responses will shock you!

post- editorial staff Much like that guy in the back of your philosophy class, we here at Post- have a lot of opinions on the questions that really matter. This week, we discuss the meaning of life. Here’s to a meaningful semester-look out for us every Thursday!--Monica Chin, Managing Editor of Features What is the meaning of life?

CY: As part of an art project last year, a friend of mine installed a public phone in the Ratty. You were meant to pick up the phone and talk to a stranger. The phone on the other end would ring in a retirement home so college students could ask their most pressing questions about aging: “Do people get less irritating?”, “Which decade had the best music?”, “Do you still have sex?” When I tried the phone, nobody picked up. But if someone had, I would have asked those little questions. They have answers, and they might help me live my life.

YW: The Brown Daily Herald pays for two pizzas every week for the PostWednesday Production Night meeting.

We, the Post- staff, typically choose two delicious pizzas: one vegetarian and one with meat for the sake of variety and for the sake of vegetables and for the sake of vegetarians. In past years, Post- ordered Cranberry Picnic (spinach, al-

monds, dried cranberries, feta, $19) and Fusiform Gyrus™ (signature inside out half & half BBQ-BUFFALO, $19) every week. But this year, we’ve started to branch out. We’ve tried La Strada. We’ve tried Margherita. We’ve tried Space Echo. We’ve tried Depth Charge. We’re branching out. We’re trying new things.

We’re brave and we’re young and we only have so many free pizzas left.

AM: I don’t know about the meaning of life, but I’ve been told the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42.

But I think I remember also that there was a computation error involved in that somewhere, and that the actual question was a multiplication table, and to be honest I read “Hitchhiker’s Guide” after an algebra final in ninth grade, so who knows anyway. Maybe the meaning of life is forgetting everything you ever learned and making the rest up as you go along. That sounds deep, right? I feel good about that. Damn, solved the mysteries of the universe. … What was the question?

LSS: I’m reading “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” which seems like an impressive thing to do if it weren’t incredibly short and filled with speeches about just how strong Gilgamesh and his bff Enkidu are. Gilgamesh is trying to cross over a

literal and metaphorical ocean of death when, as Siduri, this woman who owns a vineyard and is ambiguously immortal, gives him a speech: Because human life is short, “What is best for us to do is now to sing and dance. Relish warm food and cool drinks. Cherish children to whom your love gives life … play joyfully with your chosen wife.” Who can argue with that? The meaning of life is probably, as countless philosophers and stoned undergrads have argued, “To smile upon simple pleasure in the leisure time of your short days.”

LRS: You could ask me this tomorrow and I would have a completely different answer, but this is what I’m going with for now: Life isn’t meaningful. But that’s fine. The point isn’t for everything to fit neatly into some lovely little narrative.

The point is that life is messy and it’s not all good, but it’s not all bad either. And sometimes the things that seem the most meaningless are the most worthwhile parts of life.

MF: I am on the second season of “Teen Wolf,” and I can totally see where Stiles and Derek shippers are coming from. Even beyond the perfection of the tol/smol pairing, I am always here for the older broody muscle-bound dummy falling for the skinny cutie with a heart

of gold. The swimming pool scene where Stiles clings to Derek’s paralyzed body for two hours so he doesn’t drown is the most romantic thing I’ve seen all week.

Any pairing with the possibility of knotting is solid gold anyway.

AA: My mom absolutely hates when she asks me a question and I respond, “I don’t know”—but I always ask, would she rather I lie and say I know the answer when I really don’t? Usually she’s asking me about my plans or some detail of my life, which are valid things I should know the answer to. But honestly every day I feel like the number of things I know for sure goes down instead of up, which seems like the opposite of what college should be doing for me. Maybe being more okay with uncertainty is one of the things I’m supposed to be learning. Maybe not knowing the meaning of life … is the meaning of life??

Alternately, the meaning of life is definitely “Teen Wolf.”

MC: Meaning? Can we truly imbue meaning onto any entity other than that which each individual beholder imbues herself? Is it not deeply hubristic to claim to aggregate utility in such a manner? I need to stop reading Kant late at night.

lifestyle

majors REBECCA ELLIS

5

not for the majority

staff writer Every week, an email appears in my inbox from a woman I’ve never met. Her name is Jeanne, her occupation undetermined.

But this woman knows me—or at the very least my email address. And with it, she sends push notifications to my inbox, alerting me that the Wild Gift Fellowship deadline is approaching fast. Uh oh.

But alas, Jeanne’s good intent is wasted on me. Because the Rebecca she addresses is outdated.

In that dark time when the Common App was my top-visited site and 16 versions of The College Essay littered my desktop, the Brown supplement prompted me to select a concentration. Fueled by my most recent viewing of “Erin Brockovich,” I chose environmental studies.

At the time, I was so delighted to be answering a question from a drop list and not having to craft my own 250-word response that I didn’t care deeply about what I chose. And so, just like that, Jeanne came into my life, as I came into her environmental studies listserv.

But Jeanne doesn’t know that within a few weeks of getting to Brown, ironically, my interest in the environment faded. I took one ENVS class, quickly understood I didn’t speak, think, or write with the same passion as the rest of my classmates, and I moved onto my next concentration—health and human biology.

That life decision lasted about four months.

Many more would follow. But the dispassionate tale of how, again and again, I would land on a concentration, look around the classroom, deem myself out of place, and head back to the drawing board of Focal Point, is best left unremembered. From health and human bio, to literary arts, to English, to urban studies, I have

been on a journey across disciplines that has not yet come to an end. I’ve never tried so hard to put myself in a box and failed so miserably.

But the stress of this failure has been cushioned somewhat by my growing conviction that majors may not matter in the first place.

In a period of my life marked by a state of intense distress over life trajectory, I took to looking up the majors of successful people.

I wanted to know the extent to which their choice impacted their careers. Did Einstein major in physics? Was Goldman Sachs composed entirely of econ majors? Was the world so clearly delineated?

The answer to that is, of course, sort of.

Einstein did major in physics, but the CEO of Goldman Sachs was a government major.

Kurt Vonnegut majored in chemistry. Ashton Kutcher did biochemical engineering. “Weird Al” Yankovic chose architecture.

This mismatch of concentrations and careers is not limited to the rich and famous.

Many people, athletes and architects alike, have a tendency to drift further and further away from their major over time.

The other day I was talking to a friend, Lucy Gibson, who graduated Brown three years ago.

Lucy, like me, did not have a specific career in mind when she chose to double major in comparative literature and art history. But it didn’t matter.

“Judging from my coworkers, it doesn’t particularly matter what anyone majored in,” Lucy told me. Though concentrating in comp lit undoubtedly contributed to Lucy’s decision to work in publishing, she thinks her boss’s decision to hire her likely had nothing to do with the two majors typed out on her transcript.

Her friends are further proof of this lack

of concentrationprofession correlation. “Most of the people that I knew [at Brown] were doing humanities… but I would say 75 percent of them have gone into start ups, into marketing, into brand development and consulting—it’s all easy going” she told me.

This leads me to my next conviction, a natural progression from my first theorem—if majors don’t matter, then we shouldn’t have them.

Brown considers itself progressive. We don’t have majors; we have concentrations. And compared to basically every other university in the world, we are incredibly progressive. Unlike England where the students commit to their profession at 15, we at Brown are spoiled with choice, only needing, for some concentrations, to fulfill 10 requirements—a little over a year’s worth of classes. But, at the risk of sounding like a whiney kid in a candy shop, I want Brown to go further: I want it to get rid of mandatory majors.

Concentrations or majors—whatever it feels most liberal to call them—are all in place because they’re thought to provide direction.

Everyone is convinced that, without majors, students would flounder and inevitably drown in a Banner filled with 3000 courses and no filter with which to sift through them all.

But for many students, the filter they’re given, this shining beacon of light that is the major, is the equivalent of picking a concentration out of a hat. It’s a guiding force, but a random one.

The future politicians, doctors, bank-

ers, engineers—these are the people the major is tailored for. With their declarations of Political Science or pre-med, they can sift through Banner in the way it’s meant to be, only adding classes to their cart that will make them smarter, better, faster, stronger in their fields.

But majors are a stumbling block for students like me who find themselves floating from discipline to discipline each semester.

The same people who will eventually pick their majors because they desire to graduate and because it’s where they have the most course credits. The people who will likely not be part of the 27 percent of college graduates nationally who work in a job that relates to their major.

Obviously, college is a time to soak up knowledge you can use in your professional life. But when you don’t know what your professional life is going to hold, why stress about a major—a fake life path that most likely won’t ever be walked on—and waste time on all the requirements that come along with it?

Lucy and all the other Brown alums I’ve met give me the living, breathing, work-attending, paycheck-bearing proof that I will end up doing a job I love where I excel. But for someone with such disparate and half-baked interests as me, it is not my major that will push me there, but the random forces of life and luck swirling outside College Hill.

Illustration by Katie Cafaro

why i do debate

(not for my self-esteem)

YIDI WU editor-in-chief I do college debate, and it’s a large part of my life. Since I do it competitively, it takes up a fair amount of mental real estate. I think about other activities in relation to debate, or about other ideas by forming analogies to debate. I think about other topics the way I think about debates. Practically everybody I know and see on a regular basis does debate. And we all talk to each other almost exclusively about debate. I debate almost every single weekend. We leave early Friday afternoons and debate until late Friday night. We sleep on hard floors for unsatisfyingly short times. We don’t shower. Then we get up and debate for another four to six hours. More hours if you’re lucky and move onto outrounds. It’s one of the most valuable activities I’ve done, and also one of the most unpleasant, and I think the reasons for both are the same.

First, I do have to clarify that debate is unpleasant for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with why it is valuable. Debate is highly hierarchical. That is, social acceptance often hinges on competitive success. People largely agree that this is the case. They differ on whether this is a good thing, and also disagree about the reasons for it. I support the idea that if someone is extremely good at debate, there’s a reasonable chance that they are fairly dedicated as a person and maybe even a bit clever, and that there’s nothing inherently bad about wanting to spend your time with a hardworking, clever person. However, there’s a kind of excessive zeal to the way that people focus on competitive success that seems not at all reason-

able or healthy. This extra devotion seems to stem not from an interest in sorting methods but a crippling attachment that almost every debater has between their own self-worth and debate success.

Debate also tends to be a bit stifling as you go on. If you spend Fridays and Saturdays debating, and Sunday recuperating, and Monday through Thursday practicing, you tend to spend a large amount of time, and soon almost all of your time, with other debaters. Very soon you begin to know everybody’s business, and realize that when you’re speaking to one person you’re speaking to many (in a not-at-all poetic way). Lying about exactly what you know gets difficult. Honesty about how you feel and what you think is always difficult. A friend of mine (a debater) has a hypothesis that all student groups are like this: a bit incestuous and complicated. This is one of the places where I like to be more optimistic than him and hope not.

A quick explanation of debate here: I compete on the American Parliamentary Debate Association (APDA). APDA is not the kind of debate where you get a topic and you put together a binder about it and talk about it with a partner for months and months. APDA has two teams, two people on each team. One team picks the topic at the beginning of each round. It could be about anything (that is potentially debatable).

Tax policy, macroprudential measures. Nihilism, libertarianism. Foreign policy. Constitutional law.

Whether Lucy should have let Charlie kick the football once (just once). Whether Ahab loved the whale. You get a few minutes to ask questions,

then they give their speech and you give your speech. You begin when the round begins, not when you’re ready.

But APDA isn’t about being knowledgeable about a lot of things (though you’ll suffer a bit at the beginning if you don’t know anything). Nor is it about being quick (though that helps) or being aggressive (though some people find bluster convincing) or being well-spoken and clear (excellent skills, and highly marketable). APDA—debate— is about limitations and error. And so few things are about limitations and error.

The most valuable part of debate, and the most unpleasant part, is that you’ll always make mistakes. And if the system works, you’ll almost always get punished for your mistakes. It’s one of the most visceral and unpleasant experiences to lose because of a mistake. It never gets more pleasant, in my experience, to lose, even if you lose in finals. It’s never exactly nice to realize an error after you and your opponent have both realized your error. It’s too late to say that it doesn’t matter, because you’ve committed to being here for a weekend, and you’re spending quite a large amount of time yelling at others about why they’re wrong if you don’t care about it.

But here’s the thing: Debate doesn’t introduce errors or limitations to a life wholly devoid of them. Life is, in a banal sense, full of limitations.

If you’re morbid, like me, you think about the 80 or so years you’ll spend on this Earth and wonder what exactly you can propose to accomplish in that amount of time. But life is also full of limi-

tations because you’re full of limitations. Life is full of error because you make errors. You make errors because of hidden fault lines in your thinking. You rest your logic on faulty, cracked earth, plates made of hidden assumptions, biases, fallacies, poor attention, limited knowledge. And you come to correct answers and wrong answers in the same ways.

Most times, I doubt that we are punished for our errors, forced to seriously examine them. If you get a 75 percent in your class and manage an A, I very much doubt that you go back and look at those problems you missed. If you make a mistake, you move on, think about the next time, and dismiss it as a fluke. If your resume isn’t good enough the first time around, you come back and edit it, add bullets, and tweak it obsessively. Rarely do you look at your errors. Rarely are your errors so inextricably and unchangeably linked to the outcome. Rarely is the outcome one you cannot change. The round is over. The loss is settled. You lost, almost always, because of something you did or did not do. And if you are to get anything out of this, you reflect on your errors. You reflect not just on the fact you did not know or the thing you should have said; you reflect on how you can improve next time and every single time after that.

And it comes pretty close to being a moment of grace, if that is what you choose.

Illustration by Peter Herrara

6

arts & culture

wandering through wonder exploring the recently renovated renwick gallery in washington d.c.

LUCIA IGLESIAS staff writer Wonder is a place you can go, if you have an afternoon to spare. Wonder is a handful of rooms in the Renwick Gallery of Washington D.C. Wonder is a place where a lake spills across the floor in celadon green marbles. Wonder is a place where an enchanted forest grows indoors. Wonder is a place where a rainbow has been snared in the threads of an ethereal veil.

After two years of extensive renovations, the Renwick Gallery, home to the Smithsonian Museum’s collection of decorative art, has reopened with an inaugural exhibition titled simply “Wonder.” There is no right way to explore “Wonder.” Guests are free to begin in any room opening from the lobby.

In the second chamber off the left, a swath of the rainbow has been captured. The installation “Plexus A1” is a room full of light where the artist has woven the rainbow into fine threads that stretch from ceiling to floor, lacing the air with iridescence.

The next room is crowded with what appear to be stalagmites, craggy grey protrusions taller than the visitors who cluster around the edges of the installation. The sculptures are actually amalgamations of hundreds of thousands of plastic index cards.

Yet in this room, so full of brightness and sequestered sunbeams, they seem to be the work of natural forces. If only I could touch them—perhaps their hide is horny as an ogre’s. This is the only agony of visiting Renwick: The whimsical art begs to be touched, but the look in the security guard’s eye sug-

gests that this would be a very bad idea.

One installation, however, aggressively crosses this boundary, reaching out to touch me via my sense of smell. This art tickles my nose hairs with intimations of smoke and sulfuric breath even before I turn the corner and see something resembling a draconic skeleton woven from rubber tires. As I walk through the labyrinth of its ribs, the smell catches in my clothes and hair, a bit of the installation that I can’t help but carry out of the museum with me.

That is, if I can ever find my way out. I seem to have wandered into an enchanted forest without leaving the gallery. It sprouts from the wooden floorboards, slender saplings weaving themselves into child-sized nests and hobbit houses. The branches look wind-tossed, still wild even indoors. They scratch the walls and butt up against the ceiling, trying to grow out of the room and into the winter cold. They’re irresistible, these forest-woven homes, and, unlike the other installations, these are designed for interaction. Just large enough for a friend or two to nestle into, the burrows are a haven in the midst of the museum bustle. I slip into one, and when I peer through the twig-framed window, I see a suddenly enchanted world.

But small children clutching balloon creatures are desperate for their turn in the forest hideaway, so I step out and weave my way back through the eaves of the forest, where “Wonder” continues ahead of me.

In the installation “Middle Fork,” the

enchanted forest grows sideways. A life-size, oldgrowth hemlock tree has been constructed from jigsaw pieces of cedar, and long cables hold it suspended parallel above the floor. It sways with the air currents that visitors bring with them. By walking into the room, I have become a part of the living artwork.

But more popular than rainbows trapped in thread, or a forest of hobbit houses, is the installation “In the Midnight Garden.” A line snakes from the door all the way around the wall of the adjacent room. Once I make it through the door, I almost turn around and head right back out. It is much too pink in here, oppressively pink, throbbingly pink.

The walls bleed bright with cochineal, a red dye produced from the crushed bodies of a South American insect. It’s an eerily familiar red. You’ve eaten it yourself if you’ve ever torn open a package containing “natural red 4,” “carmine,” or “crimson lake.” The insect viscera smeared on the walls are part of us; they’re in our own guts now.

The pink walls blossom with a kaleidoscope of corpses: insects from Malaysia, Thailand, and Papua New Guinea. They’re arranged in rings and starbursts, mandalas of chitin and filmy wings. Beetles sparkle with a green sheen glossier than chrome. There are

insects that look like origami masterpieces, others like piles of windblown leaves. Some of the jungle bugs are bigger than hummingbirds; fancy meeting one of these fellows on a sweaty hike. Moths are dressed for a midsummer’s ball, wearing glitter and gauzy wings. Skulls leer above the wainscoting, like massive Día de los Muertos decorations. The skulls too are pieced together from insect bodies. Death is as much an element in this installation as are dye and wings.

After I leave the Renwick Gallery, the rest of the afternoon becomes an unfolding work of art, a work of wonder. Enchantment hovers in the canopy of steam draping my teacup, an installation unfurling. A sunbeam is flung through the window and bounces across the carpet—perhaps it was a shooting star that lost its way and strayed into this work of art, this Saturday afternoon.

Illustration by Emily Reif

the nihilist’s guide to the galaxy “rick and morty” and us

SPENCER ROTH-ROSE staff writer Doc Brown’s DeLorean pulls up to the curb in front of Marty McFly’s house. Marty hops in, excited for a new adventure with his mad scientist best friend. “So where we going today, Doc? Back to the future? The past? Wait … Doc? Are you … drunk?” Doc turns to Marty and takes another swig from his flask. Marty sighs. Doc burps, grins, and guns the engine. Where they’re going, they don’t need rules.

This is essentially the premise of Adult Swim’s “Rick and Morty.” Born as a parody of “Back to the Future” but extending its range far beyond its source material, “Rick and Morty” is the most recent iteration of a boom of adult-centric cartoons.

At its heart, it’s a potpourri of sci-fi tropes, sitcom platitudes, and existential rumination. And it’s the ideal show for its college-aged audience.

The characters search for meaning and purpose the same way that its viewers do, uncannily giving voice to the questions that keep us up at night.

Stylistically, the voice acting is loose, stuttering, and at times completely improvisatory, while the premise itself is a geek’s fever dream: Morty, your average awkward teenager, is brought along on various interdimensional adventures by his brilliant, alcoholic, near-sociopathic mad scientist grandfather Rick. Aliens are introduced. Worlds are discovered. Clichés are subverted. Chaos ensues.

Luckily for us, such chaos is counterbalanced

by a commitment to story and character. Zaniness never eclipses narrative coherence. While Rick’s scientific inventions do provide occasional deus ex machinas, they also serve to highlight character developments; you are never left with a feeling of “Oh, how convenient,” but rather, “Wow, that mecha suit sure is letting Morty release his inner aggression effectively. Wonder what this means for his arc.”

Two seasons into “Rick and Morty,” the supporting characters rarely show new sides of themselves—they simply become more and more heightened. Morty’s dad Jerry is an ineffectual excuse for a male role model: sniveling, helpless, willing to do anything for approval. His arc goes nowhere but down. His failing marriage to Beth is a major part of the show, often serving as the B-plot to Rick and Morty’s A, and though a few episodes end with them kissing and making up, m a n y end on a more depressing note.

One episode sees Jerry being uncommonly chummy with Summer, only to be revealed as buttering up his own daughter for money “to get through the next month.” She says no, and that’s all we see of Jerry and Summer in the episode. There’s no redemption. It’s not played for laughs, like how some mean-spirited sitcoms might approach it. It’s simply meant to deepen our understanding of Jerry. In another episode, he desperately tries to convince aliens to cut off

his penis to use for a galactic leader’s life-saving transplant, just because he’s afraid they’ll think him cowardly if he doesn’t go through with it. So desperate is he to be seen as a hero for once in his life that he ignores the fact that they’ve realized they don’t need the penis after all. This subplot exemplifies the dynamic of “Rick and Morty”—a show that features a Principal Vagina and a Mr. Poopy Butthole, but also takes a bleak, bleak view on the human condition.

The contradictions are even greater than the sum of their parts. The other characters are dark in a way that contrasts with, but somehow heightens, the absurd humor. In one episode, Morty bursts into a parallel dimension, kills that dimension’s Morty, and assumes his place as a last resort after ruining his own original dimension. This is to say, he brings about the end of the world, but promptly hops into a nearly identical world where everything is fine—but has to literally kill his double. The shot of Morty staring in horror at his own mangled body lying in front

of him will stick with you long after the credits.

While most shows would try to highlight any humor they could find in this situation (if they even dared to go that far in the first place), “Rick and Morty” leans into the scarring emotional implications of killing your doppelganger and then burying him in the backyard. The rest of the episode watches Morty go about his daily life in this

arts & culture new dimension, eyes wide over huge bags, mouth open, visibly shaken, innocence shattered—all set to a melancholy indie song.

If this sounds cloying or laughable, it’s not. It’s surprisingly affecting. This animated character is experiencing trauma in a disturbingly real way, and the accessibility of its emotions forces you to let down your barriers. Then there’s the episode that ends on a failed suicide attempt by Rick, and there’s the seemingly endless iterations of the failing marriage trope, and, man, are we even watching a comedy anymore?

Blessedly, yes. It may not the gleeful misbehavior of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” but it’s not the crushing morbidity of “The Leftovers,” either. “Rick and Morty” balances the two to perfection: a wacky send-up of sci-fi tropes but

with a dark, yearning soul that tries to reconcile the hollowness and the value of existence. You’re forced to care deeply about the characters and their struggles, even if you just want to get caught up in the adventures. It’s ontology disguised as Saturday morning entertainment, Mike Judge meets Charlie Kaufman.

The classic multi-camera sitcom has been on the wane for years. Though classics like “Seinfeld” and “Friends” still hold their popularity, there are myriad new sitcoms nowadays that fail due to their reliance on tired methods of storytelling and uninspired forms of humor (just ask any major network—“Dads,” anyone?). A show like “Rick and Morty” forces our cynical minds to take notice. It feels thoroughly original. Its improvisatory style and its willingness to get morbid are

sometimes played for laughs but sometimes for disarmingly strong pathos, and you never know which is coming next.

My personal favorite line from the series comes after Morty’s parallel-self-burial in the backyard, during a moment when Summer is considering running away. Morty confronts her, tells her how every day he “eats breakfast 20 feet away from his own rotting corpse” and finishes by saying, “Nobody exists for a reason. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV?” As a self-doubting, self-interrogating, generally confused college student, hearing this phrased so simply was bracing. It’s a trite conundrum, sure, but it’s trite because it’s universal.

Rick and Morty is able to give voice to the

7

big questions, and it acknowledges that its audience is asking them right alongside its characters.

Whether it knows it or not, its target audience happens to be at the age when we begin searching for ways to answer those questions. Maybe we like when the TV shows we choose to watch can help us. While “Rick and Morty” is certainly an enjoyable ride in the DeLorean, this depth is the real reason why it rings so true to people our age.

When it comes down to it, we are all Rick and Morty: finding our way through the universe and trying to make sense of it as best we can.

Illustration by Michelle Ng

beyond the classroom an overview of student-run theater ANNE-MARIE KOMMERS staff writer Brown is blessed with a thriving theater scene.

In addition to the faculty- and student-run group called Sock and Buskin, there are five studentrun theater groups on campus. I sat down with a representative from each student-run group in an attempt to sort through the chaos and learn more about each group’s defining characteristics.

What follows are excerpts from my conversations.

Whether you are interested in seeing a show, joining a group, or simply learning more about the activities in which your fellow Brown students are involved, there are more than enough outlets to satisfy your theater needs!

“Brown Opera Productions (BOP) is a student-run organization at Brown University committed to creating lively spaces for opera performance and appreciation.” – BOP website What do you think makes BOP unique among other student-run theater groups?

Paul Martino ’16, junior chairperson of BOP: We are the only group on campus that does fully staged operas. We’re also one of the very few student-run opera groups in the country, so that makes us very unique.

What is your favorite BOP show in which you have participated?

PM: This past semester we did “Maria de Buenos Aires,” which is very exciting because it is a tango opera, and it was also the first time this opera was performed in North America. Getting the scores was actually very difficult. We had to get in touch with an opera company in France who did this work five years ago, and they sent us a copy of the scores. It was such a fun experience to be interacting with this other opera group completely on the other side of the world.

On getting people interested in opera: I feel like people are often really intimidated by [opera], and a lot of our efforts go into bringing opera to the public and the student body … The average person can enjoy opera. You don’t need to have four years of music theory under your belt and five European history courses.

“Musical Forum (MF) … is an entirely student-run group at Brown University dedicated to the production of musical theatre by the student body.” – MF website What has been your greatest challenge so far in working with MF? Andrew Colpitts ’16, chair of the MF Board: I think that the biggest challenge that we faced was last spring when we started the Mini Musi-

cal Festival. That [type of student-written musical performance] had been something that took place many years ago through another organization that no longer exists. It was called Brownbrokers. Since that organization no longer exists, there was no longer any sort of student-written musical theater happening on campus in any cohesive way. We decided that we re-ally wanted to see this happen. It was tricky trying to find people who were willing to do it, and also to organize the space and everything. The first time around it was messy at times, but people really came together. The casts were great. The shows were so much fun.

What do you think is the most rewarding aspect of being involved in MF? AC: I think it’s twofold. One is, of course, going to see the shows, seeing how much the audience enjoys it, and how much joy it brings to people who watch it. But equally, how much joy it brings all of the people in the process and how devoted people are to lighting or to set, or to acting or music, or directing. People give 110 percent. Most shows rehearse six days a week, four hours a day. That’s twenty-four hours. That’s more than a part-time job, just for the love of it.

That kind of effort really shows.

“BUGS [Brown University Gilbert and Sullivan] is an undergraduate-led theater group dedicated to the production of high-quality Gilbert and Sullivan operas and related works for the enjoyment of Brown students and the wider community.” – BUGS website What do you think makes BUGS unique among other student-run theater groups?

Emma Dickson ’16, president of BUGS: There are a couple of functional, logistical things that make BUGS unique, the first being that we accept basically anyone to audition, including Providence community members, professors, and high school students. We have a broader range of ages, and I think therefore in experience.

We’re so young as an organization, so we’re still figuring out what we’re doing … We started out having our performances as this little student group in the Grad Center lounge and then did performances on stage in the List big lecture hall and then moved to Alumnae [Hall]. So we’ve really made a lot of progress in 10 years. Because we’re so young, we have that flexibility and that adaptability to amend our constitution and start doing non-Gilbert and Sullivan shows, which we did a couple of years ago.

The last thing I’d say is that I think BUGS is

really a wonderfully welcoming group on campus. The other groups are too of course, but the fact that our shows often have very large casts and our auditions are open really allows us to take in everyone who wants to be involved and form a large, inclusive community.

What has been your greatest challenge so far in working with BUGS? ED: I think my greatest challenge has been making sure that we as a group continue to challenge ourselves to grow and improve in quality and experience for everyone involved and [to increase] diversity of the kinds of shows that we put on … while at the same time remaining true to the fact that we are a Gilbert and Sullivan group.

There are other groups on campus that do just musical theater more broadly, and we don’t fill the same niche as them. But we want to expand more beyond just G&S, which is what we’ve been working on doing for the last two years.

“PW [Production Workshop] is a non-profit student theatre here at Brown University.” – PW website What makes PW unique among other studentrun theater groups?

Marty Strauss ’16, PW Board member: One of the big things that makes PW unique is that we have our own space. We have our own set of theaters and workshops that it’s our responsibility to take care of … It’s very open-ended, whereas a lot of the other groups have guidelines for what they’re doing, like Shakespeare and musicals and stuff like that. [In PW], you can do pretty much anything you want as long as you make a case for it. And that’s really exciting for me. It’s just totally students all doing what they want for each other.

What role do you play in helping PW run?

MS: Right now there are 11 people active on the Board, and what’s exciting about it is it’s totally non-hierarchical. Of course, there’s a natural hierarchy in terms of who’s older and who’s been around longer, but besides that there’s no president or chair. We each have a number of different jobs that we do and we all get together and pitch in in different ways.

What do you think is the most rewarding aspect of being involved in PW? MS: I think the most magical part of it is that you get to help other people realize their dreams.

People have these visions for projects that they want to create to have a real impact on people, and a lot of times we only have so much space and

we have to say no. But the best thing is being able to say yes, really loudly, really resoundingly, and then putting in all the work to help make someone else’s vision turn into a reality. It’s immensely rewarding to see those things from start to finish.

“Shakespeare on the Green [SotG] is Brown University’s theater troupe dedicated to outdoor and site-specific theater.” – SotG website What makes SotG unique among the other student-run theater groups?

Anna Stacy ’17, chair of SotG: I would say the most unique thing about SotG is that we’re sitespecific. Site-specific theater is theater that’s not performed in a traditional venue, like a theater.

We perform on the Main Green and the Manning Chapel, in the Bamboo Garden, all over campus in nontraditional locations. I think that’s a really compelling format because that allows people to stumble upon a space and just become part of the audience.

What has been your greatest challenge so far in working with SotG? AS: Site-specific theater is always tough because you have to grapple with weather, you have to grapple with traffic. If cars are going past you have to just keep acting. If a siren is going off through the middle of your big monologue, you have to let it happen. But those are challenges that are possible for any site-specific theater group and I would totally, happily take those challenges [along] with the benefits of site-specific theater.

On getting involved with theater: Personally, I found it so overwhelming when I came here. My high school had a theater group and a little bit of student theater. So the opportunities were so exciting, but also I know a lot of people were really afraid to go for things because they weren’t sure if they were good enough … I totally encourage anybody to just go for it. There’s never any experience required. We’re all so happy to teach people and to work with people. Theater’s about sharing communication. If we can’t encourage people who haven’t done anything before to do that, then we’ve failed our job from the beginning.

Be sure to check out each group’s upcoming productions. You won’t be disappointed!

Illustration by Soco Fernandez Garcia

8

lifestyle

I have nothing to offer except my vibrant personality, which it turns out people don’t like that much. So I have nothing to offer.

I woke up at six. It was like being born. I was like, thrust into the world.

He’s just a fetus, but he’s white, so he got an Oscar.

I’m so grounded right now, I live on the ground. Actually, I’m underground.

I had to tell him to leave because I was tripping too hard. It was like Tinder on the moon.

I feel like I’m forgetting what he looks like as I look at him.

hot post time machine Yes, I’ve been involved in more than a few sexiling snafus and had my fair share of there’s-no-wayI-can-pretend-Ididn’t-sleep-withyour-suitematelast-night-because-I’m-making-eye-contactwith-you-and-yesthat’s-a-hickeythanks-for-staring-I-was-justleaving moments. the (sex) lives of others -09/30/2009

topten

things that should be banned in addition to hoverboards

1. columbus day 2. those damn kids and their newfangled toys 3. shopping more than six classes in a day 4. hovercrafts 5. graduating 6. textbooks that cost too much money 7. “u up” texts 8. loitering in stairwells 9. bad cell phone batteries 10. rain

green gloves

i have arms for them

SARA AL-SALEM staff writer Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a good friend—or what it means to be a friend at all. I’ve specifically been thinking about how my idea of friendship has evolved since high school. Then, friendships were like families: You didn’t really have a say in them, so you were stuck with them. But that’s not to say I didn’t have a wonderful, fantastic group of friends. It’s more like out of a small group of 40 girls, I had a close, sister-like bond with half of them.

Sometimes I think it was luck that I ended up with such a strong friend group. When I got to college, I realized how much of a role luck plays. In high school, I was in the same classroom with the same girls for seven hours a day, five days a week, for eight years of my life.

We saw each other through thick and thin, but we didn’t really have a choice— our dynamic depended on us sticking it out through good times and bad.

College is a different environment, though. In college, you become an individual with your own unique schedule, living space, and time. Sometimes people get lucky and befriend their freshman year roommates, their entire floor, their varsity team—most of the time, you have to pick your own friends.

I realized over the last few years that this was challenging for me because I’ve never had to “choose” friends. So I found myself forming unrealistic standards for those I befriended in college. I wanted to be around the type of people who understood and viewed life the way my previous friends and I did—even though now I understand our similar upbringing and culture played a huge role in our chemistry. I found it hard to relate to people who had wildly different ideas of what fun meant. My high school friends and I could die of laughter playing a really good card game or watching a dumb movie, but in college I felt like I had to give up hanging out with people I liked during the weekend because they wanted to go out to a party. It felt like

if I wanted to stay in, I was boring them with my standards of a good time.

However, my recent trip back home made me realize I was trying to implement a friendship dynamic that no longer works—in both friend groups. My home friends either left for the UK or stayed in the country for college, but all of them moved on with their lives.

I always come back to Riyadh with this idea that everything has remained the same—that we would be as silly and goofy and ridiculous and sisterly as we were in high school.

But from friends getting engaged to those entering their fourth year in medical school, our schedules no longer allow us to tap back into our former free and careless lives. While I am only in Riyadh on vacation, they aren’t—their lives went on. But even as I accept this fact, I realize it is hard to commit to each other the way we did before because none of us are the same people. We have no common enemy the way we did in school (principal, administration, etc.), and our views on almost everything are more stark and apparent. So I feel like I’ve grown up in the most lonely way possible.

That made me start to think: There are all these high expectations, but I have no idea what those expectations are. What does friendship mean to me now? Aren’t I the worst of friends for picking apart the ties between me and those I love because of some indescribable feeling?

I mentioned to my aunt the other day that I no longer really care for deep, profound friendships, and she chuckled. The more you grow up, she said, the more you realize friendships are the least of your concerns. Her statement didn’t sit well with me because I do think friendships are meant to feel like second families, and I would never want to grow out of them because of my own vague, outdated misconceptions.

There is this song called “Green

Gloves” by The National that croons, “Falling out of touch with all my friends... Hope they’re staying glued together, I have arms for them.” I have lost touch with some of my friends, but I have “arms for them”— I will always love them, and I will always want to be there for them as I know they will want to be there for me. I have accepted the idea that you can outgrow certain friendships, but that does not weaken the bond you once had. It simply means you have grown.

As I overthink about friendships, I think about what it means to be a good friend. I think about this ability to decide who you have in your life, and how they help you grow. Friends should make your life fuller, and I realize that the friends I had in high school made the unbearableness of high school bearable. Our paths have gone different ways, but I still have this special place in my heart where all the laughter and happiness they gave me sits untouched.

My goal today is to learn to be a friend from scratch—to stop trying to emulate what once was and allow for new ways of growth in my life. I had this toxic conception of college friends because I have always believed that the friends you make in college are the friends you’ll have for life, but I understand now that friendships should not be analyzed for the long term. What is most important to me now is being around people who make me want to be the best version of myself, regardless of our different lifestyles. In the end, criteria don’t matter because those who are really your friends will make the time for you. Most importantly, I want to grasp that friendship does not have one mold everyone needs to fit. I’m thankful and blessed to have wonderful people in my life who have allowed me to come to this realization.

Illustration by Jenice Kim