post- 02/05/2021

In This Issue

And Now the Piñata's Burst

Kaitlan Bui 4

Reaching for the Radical

CHole chen 2 liza kolbasov 4

3000 Miles from My Heart kyoko leaman 5

Turn the Page Together Antonia huth 6

A Reason to Love the Internet Today

postCover by Hee Won Chung

FEB 5

VOL 27 — ISSUE 1

FEATURE

Reaching for the Radical my unfinished journey to the left

By Chloe Chen Illustrated by Habesha Fasika Petros

CONTENT WARNING: sexual assault

of Democratic lawn signs and bumper stickers

I wasn’t alone in claiming the moral high ground.

here’s a Twitter thread that pops up on my

every presidential election. Everyone was staun-

Young liberals seem to flock toward any opportunity

feed every once in a while that poses the

chly, proudly, undoubtedly liberal. Barack Obama

to validate and legitimize our own wokeness, which

was our lovable idol, CNN was our channel of choice,

is enabled by the curated, performative nature of

Many responses recount the specific news

and everything from the media we consumed to the

social media. In high school, many of us became

story that shocked them to their core, a favorite eye-

dinner table conversations we entertained glamor-

more informed on current events and understood

opening book they’d read, or a family member’s wise

ized liberalism and villainized conservatism. Entre-

more deeply the significant role political ideology

words. Personally, I can’t pinpoint the exact event

nched in these Democratic beliefs, I grew increasingly

played in shaping our personal identities. I soon

that introduced me to radicalism; my journey was a

comfortable perched in a seat of moral superior-

noticed how my peers remodeled their social media

lot messier, a lot more undefined, and it continues to

ity, resolutely confident and self-satisfied with my

presences into conduits for performative activism.

this day. For such a monumental ideological change,

polit-ical identity. From inside this echo chamber,

Also known as “slacktivism,” performative activism is

I’ve been exploring it slowly.

it was easy to view the world in black and white:

“the practice of supporting a political or social cause

political parties as good and bad, politicians as heroes

by means such as social media or online petitions,

and enemies.

characterized as involving very little effort or com-

T

essential question: “What radicalized you?”

I grew up surrounded by mainstream liberalism, in a Los Angeles suburb that transformed into a sea

Letter from the Editor

Shopping Period Situations

Dear Readers, It may have been 47 weeks since Brown sent everyone into quarantine, but I’ve been brooding for the last nine weeks––obviously, since post- last published.

And I know you’re as astonished as I am that you’ve made it through this unbearable dry spell. Well, fear no longer, post- is back and as groovy as ever.

That is, when you define groovy as the cluster of talking heads––or more precisely, cackling and musing and bopping heads––that have filled the post- Zoom screen every Thursday night since September. At this point in the pandemic, I’ve heard rumors that even introverts miss the feeling of being in a crowded, sweaty room (if only for 30 seconds). But as much as I wish I could be in the old post- office, passing around CVS brand raspberry-cream cookies, and scrounging for the whiteboard marker between broken rolling chairs, there’s something electric about getting 25 people to more or less cohese over Zoom. Maybe it’s the adrenaline of straining to hear people over our hared playlist and toggling between six different private chats, or maybe it’s just the saturation of blue light and eye strain. Whatever it is, I am feeling the RUSH. Hopefully, you will be invigorated by the pieces here in this first issue of the semester. The Feature

2 post–

piece is bringing us radical ideas and a radical critique of Brown’s take on liberal activism. In Narrative, one author deals with the pains and wonders of growing up, while another dwells on how quarantine has changed how she thinks of home. Moving on from these musings, Arts & Culture is returning to the grooviness with a piece on Rina Sawayama’s influence on one writer’s outlook on life and another diving into a Kardashian-analysis Instagram account.

Finally, our Lifestyle writers are here to groove up the pandemic college experience with advice on getting through the semester, and even finding some COVID-safe activities (musically themed for maximum groovitude) to keep yourself going.

Whatever you take from this issue, know that we at post- are wishing you an electrifying start to the semester, and enough grooves to keep you rolling onward for the next ten (shhh) weeks.

Closing and reopening Zoom in the desperate hope that it will be time for prod again,

Olivia Howe

Editor-in-Chief

1. Not having the Zoom link 15 minutes before class 2. Guilt-shopping a course because the professor gave you an override 3. Expecting to go over the syllabus, only for the professor to say they expect you to have already read the syllabus 4. Zoom on the phone and the laptop to shop those overlapping classes 5. STILL not having your classes finalized even though shopping period has ended 6. Attending a class on a whim and having it change your life and your concentration 7. Dropping a class because the professor asked you to introduce yourselves 8. Hitting “Leave Meeting” because breakout rooms >:( 9. Shopping so many classes that you cannot do a single slice of work for a single class 10. Breakdown (technological and/or emotional)

FEATURE mitment.” It often lacks genuine support, focus-ing

to venture beyond the mainstream liberalism I was

instead on the appearance of allyship as conveyed

so accustomed to.

Trump in jail.

Studies show that our minds are wired to crave the

imperialism,

emotional release of revenge. When we exact revenge,

sensational photographs. I was continuously tagged

capitalism—were fascinating in the most twisted,

neural activity shoots up, and we feel rewarded. But this

to reshare and repost Instagram stories as proof of

sinister sense. Reading assignments sent me down

effect is short-lived. Feelings of hostility return, and

my wokeness. Performative activism was a liberal

rabbit holes of new, radical ideas. I confronted

we lose ourselves in a continuous cycle of retaliation.

competition for social capital that everyone was

my immense privileges and sat with the fact that I

While this human need for vengeance is natural and

obligated to compete in, lest they be judged by their

was being introduced to these ideas in a classroom

expected, it’s unhelpful for both the victim and the

peers as uninformed, unsympathetic, or, God forbid,

setting, rather than facing their physical consequen-

perpetrator. Vengeance does not lead to healing.

“un-woke.”

ces everyday. I considered, for the first time, how

While I understand the merit and reasoning

through online petitions, trending hashtags, and

The

topics—white

supremacy,

There is genuine good that can be generated

Brown University itself was implicated in systems

behind restorative justice and prison abolition, there

through social media. Authentic allyship is shown

of oppression, and what it meant to be a paying

remains an incongruence between my intellectual

through promoting BIPOC voices and creators, shar-

student at a land-grant institution built on occupied

values and my immediate, overwhelming emotional

ing articles and critiques that offer new perspect-

Indigenous land, a beneficiary of slavery and the slave

reactions. Radical ideas usually interest and excite

ives or information, and raising awareness for

trade, and an employer of a police force. I also felt

me. They offer worlds of possibilities, combating

community fundraising projects. The use of Facebook

hope as I was introduced to policy ideas that offered

hatred and bigotry by instilling love and kindness into

and Twitter during the Arab Spring is a testament

real, concrete solutions. Defunding the police and

the community. They seek to go beyond incremen-

to how social media can be used to harness powerful

reallocating funds seemed like a necessary and achie-

talist changes to the system; they want to dismantle

social change: organizers mobilized through online

vable first step in combating police brutality; remo-

the system itself.

channels, planning demonstrations, sharing informa-

ving SAT requirements in college admissions seemed

Still, radicalism frustrates me.

tion, and raising awareness.

like a logical plan to begin decreasing educational

It frustrates me that these ideas don’t immedia-

While the Black Lives Matter movement has found a similar degree of success with online organization, performative activism has complicated

inequality. These ideas just made sense to me.

But other ideas made me bristle with discomfort.

Some were completely overwhelming.

tely click with me, that I catch myself too often brushing up against emotional discomfort. After years of having my liberal values parroted by those

I was most affected by our conversation on

around me, it was an uncomfortable shock to

example,

prison abolition, a concept I was familiar with but

suddenly be not progressive enough. Having recently

#blackouttuesday, originally an initiative intended to

hadn’t fully explored. Prison abolitionists fight for

surrounded myself with radical voices, radicalism

disrupt the music industry by posting black squares

the elimination of the prison industrial complex and

was beginning to feel like a moral destination, rather

in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, was co-opted

“deep, structural reforms to how we handle and even

than a position among many ideologies. I placed

by countless people eager to jump on the bandwagon

think about crime.” For decades, mainstream politics

radicals on a moral pedestal and longed to join them.

and show their support. The initiative took a wrong

have peddled carceral punishment as both necessary

As I consumed radical content, I sometimes found

turn when the unending flood of black squares

and beneficial—that in order to “fix” crime, we need

myself disheartened at my own discomfort and

began to drown out informative posts, the work of

to condemn and punish the individual, rather than

misunderstanding, other times shocked to find myself

Black creators, and links to community funds.

heal and develop the environment and support

embittered with jealousy.

Similarly, during the Capitol riots, my feed was

systems around them (think “war on drugs” and “law

I’m jealous that radicals embody my same leftist

littered with short statements of condemnation

and order”). In contrast, prison abolition is rooted in

values, but that they do so fully, unabashedly, and

(“This is disgusting!”) and not much more. The posts

restorative justice: “a system of criminal justice which

wholeheartedly. They see infinite possibilities for

I genuinely valued—like news article screen-shots

focuses on the rehabilitation of offenders through

society and wholly recognize the substantial changes

with nuanced criticisms or breaking updates—were

reconciliation with victims and the community at

that need to happen for these values to materialize

lost in a flood of empty, sometimes uninformed posts

large.” Our class explored this idea through the story

in our world, in our time.

of performative activism.

of Amy Biehl, whose parents reconciled with and

Meanwhile, the chaos of the day-to-day often

After witnessing slacktivism’s potential for dam-

grew close to the men who killed her. The story

clouds my judgement, and radical ideas begin to feel

age, I felt an urgent need to critically reconsider the

highlights the possible successes of restorative justice,

like utopian dreams: fantastical and far from reach.

effects of my actions and my online presence. I

when lawbreakers take responsibility to repair the

It’s difficult to imagine a world without electoral

approached social media with caution, asking myself:

hurt they’ve caused and communities work together to

politics when the presidential election headlines

Why am I sharing this? Whose voices am I uplifting?

heal and grow.

the news everyday, or a world without land-grant

things. There is evidence that it can be dangerously counterproductive

and

harmful:

for

My immediate reaction to this story was

institutions when I am attending one myself. I

I was moved to take Introduction to Ethnic

astonishment. I envy the family’s love, understanding,

feel powerless in the face of systems of oppression

Studies as my first class at Brown in order to escape

and commitment to healing. But I don’t know if I

and inequality that have been built into the very

this epistemic bubble of moderate Democratic tho-

would be capable of doing the same.

foundation of our lives. And I’m angry—both enraged

What does this add to the conversation?

ught and performative allyship. Professor Adrienne

As a survivor of sexual assault, resentment festers

and horrified that what we’ve been handed is so

Keene marketed her class as a “sampler plate” of ethnic

within me every time I’m encouraged to forgive. My

inherently flawed that generation after generation

studies topics: a brief introduction into a wide variety

case hasn’t been closed, and the person who harmed

has had to fight tooth and nail for justice, and that

of subjects like settler colonialism, anti-Blackness,

me, among others, has escaped to another country

the road ahead seems long and never-ending.

intersectional feminism, and critical university

and remains unfound. My mind becomes awash with

So, what radicalized me?

studies. It was an offer to set out and take a bite, to

rage. I don’t want the onus to be placed on me to

I’m not a radical, at least not yet. But my intro-

taste the sickening pungency of the horrific, oppre-

heal the person who hurt me—I want retribution. I

duction to these ideas and feelings is the first step.

ssive systems that plague every American institution

want to see corrupt politicians and policemen face

I’m trying not to position radicalism as the endpoint

and seep into the everyday lives of countless people,

consequences for their actions. I want to see Donald

or goal of my journey, because I want to offer

“Can they (children) even conceptualize parrots?…

Well, I suppose because of pirate media.”

“I think I just saw a horse but it very well could’ve been a car. Large, four legs, they look the same.”

February 5, 2021 3

NARRATIVE myself the freedom to fully explore my political identity without designating a destination. If I ever decide to claim this identity, I will do so proudly and authentically—not for the sake of being most “woke.”

It’s okay to be learning and growing. It’s okay to change your mind.

While I spent high school in a rush to align myself with progressivism, I’m now finding the space to truly explore these ideas. I’m moving beyond empty slacktivism and learning how to use the foundations of radical thought to question the world around me and to imagine new possibilities for the future.

Radicalism has taught me to ponder my notion of self and my position in the world, to sit and evaluate my discomfort, to stand by my values, but always be open to change. And in the end, isn’t that what learning is all about?

And Now the Piñata's Burst

on the miracle of growing up

by Kaitlan Bui Illustrated by Angela Baek Recently, I’ve been enjoying my carrots.

You might think that’s a strange way to start an essay (on growing up, no less—a very somber phenomenon), so you might be tempted to skip ahead to paragraph five and jump right into the meat of the words. But my essay is vegetarian, thank you very much, so don’t look for what isn’t there.

Instead, appreciate what is: Recently, I said, I’ve been enjoying my carrots.

I’ve begun enjoying other foods too, like bitter melon and grapefruit, and I drink tea like an old lady, which is to say, hot and unsweetened. I also like to watch TV shows that make me cry (and I actually do cry now), as well as movies that scare the living sheets out of me (though I sleep like a baby afterwards). For some reason, very small things— like daily vitamins and functional light bulbs—bring me comfort. I didn’t notice these changes until the carrots happened, and now I’m left wondering what on earth has gotten into me.

Have I grown up or something?

This thought waltzed into my mind the other day as I sat on a beach towel on my front lawn, dead brown grass itching my legs. I had gone on a jog (the first time in a long time I had been outside, let alone exercised), and I was now typing away on my laptop.

It was strange to be sitting there, the California

4 post–

winter air nipping at my skin, when the world seemed to be raging with news article after news article. It was strange to feel the sunlight warming my toes the same way it would have in an alternate, virus-free world. It was strange to stare into a sky so innocently blue.

For a moment, the earth stilled, and I was reminded of a shirt I owned in high school, a cotton tee that read, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” The sentence had me confused for so long that one day, in the spirit of Marie Kondo, I had chucked the shirt in the donation bin. Now, after three years, the quote was coming back to haunt me.

And I finally understood what it meant.

Two years of college and two months of living abroad—disappointment, success, failure, friendship, and everything in between—had brought me back to this place: the same grass under the same sky. It was a moment of poignant awareness, one in which I felt very grown up.

I heard somewhere that growing up happens in one moment, and if that’s true, then maybe my moment was with the tangerine-colored vegetables.

But if it’s not true—and I’m beginning to believe it’s not—then maybe the carrots are just my looking glass.

Maybe, like my T-shirt implied, my “growing up” happened over a series of cross-stitched moments.

And now the piñata’s burst and those moments are tumbling out, twirling towards me and smiling.

I suppose even memories are beholden to the laws of gravity and emotion, because the heaviest ones roll out first. They are shaped like little planets, glowing bright and waiting to be remembered. I pick one up.

“797 days ago,” the small globe reads, and I see myself running on a treadmill in a college gym in a small city. I see myself breaking the seven minute mile and then closing my eyes in proud accomplishment. Then I see myself stepping onto the bathroom scale, my self-esteem shrinking, my mind wondering if the people back at home will say, “You look different” when they really mean, “You’ve gained weight.”

Another glowing orb rolls toward me.

In this memory, I am crying on a couch in New York. I am depressed but I don’t even know it, and I’m trying to hide my gloom because it’s Thanksgiving, 435 days ago. I’m visiting my youngest cousin, and a three-year-old doesn’t deserve to be around a sad person. So during our trip to the museum, I make sure to smile a lot, and I try to feel grateful for my company. My feelings are a mixture of confusion and insecurity, loneliness and guilty despondency.

I fall asleep to a broken heart and wake up to an arrhythmic one.

There are many other bittersweet memories like these ones—bitter because they remind me of the pain I once endured, and sweet because it is pain no longer. Like the carrots I’ve learned to appreciate, they taste somewhat of adulthood. But the process of growing up is not only found in pain, and I look down to see a million other globes pirouetting towards me.

Here is the time I clicked out of LinkedIn and told the inner voices to “shut it!” Behind it rolls a reflection of a poem I wrote because I felt inspired, not because I pressured myself to prove my artistry.

Here is the day I took my cousin to the public library and taught him Newton’s three laws of motion.

Here is the time I realized my freshman year acquaintances had become my lifelong friends, and the time I talked to a professor I admired, and the time I jogged outside and genuinely enjoyed it. Here is the time I looked in the mirror, and smiled, and meant it.

Here is the time, as broken and beastly as it is, and here I am facing it. Here is the time I recognize all that is wrong with the world, its woe and its weariness, and yet here is the time I trudge on. I look up and my life unravels before me, a million globes glittering, a million tiny choices that flipped the railroad switch and propelled me into a future that is now my present. Somewhere along the way, my actions, however small, evolved to mean more than just myself—and my world, however big, emerged from the modest moments.

It is in those moments that I began to unearth myself, a shining carrot in my own right. The sky greets me as if it were any other day.

I sit in quiet and feel at home.

3000 Miles from My Heart on missing hometown comforts by liza kolbasov Illustrated by ella harris At dusk, the sky in Palo Alto turns pinkishpurple, a sort of hushed shade that makes the world feel softer. At home, this is my favorite time of day: the quiet, distinctive glow in the moments between harsh daytime sun and darkness enveloping the streets like a warm blanket. It’s been four weeks since the last time I’ve seen a Palo Alto sunset, and there’s a purpletinted spot in my chest that hurts every time I think of it.

I’ve always thought that I wanteda, more than anything, to get away from home. Applying to colleges, I dreamed of escaping the sun-baked monotony of California’s one-story cement buildings and endless brown grass. I romanticized the East Coast—real seasons! Brick buildings! Museums and architecture and functioning public transportation! When COVID-19 postponed my departure for Providence, I resented the delayed start to my independence. I longed for a fresh start, idealizing the chance to build my own identity in a place where no one knew me, far away from the influence of my past self.

The freedom of being alone in a new place enticed me, and I gave little thought to the loneliness that would come with this freedom. More than ever before, the pandemic made home a place of restlessness and boredom. I felt trapped in a place I thought I’d outgrown. Of course, I knew I would miss the people I’d have to leave behind, but the town itself seemed inconsequential.

NARRATIVE

Turn the Page Together renewal, rina sawayama, and the new year

By Kyoko Leaman Illustrated by LUcia Tian

And yet, I’ve come to miss it.

Here I am, in a new corner of the world, grasping at the lukewarm coals of memories I keep stored away in my pocket—fragments of my heart scattered throughout my hometown. A set of strings ties me to each piece, stretched to the breaking point across three thousand miles.

The coffee shop I’d take walks to every couple of days throughout quarantine for my takeout caffeine fix, with its colorful mural and obscure drink names, where I always knew exactly what to order (an iced New Manhattan in the summer and a hot Philharmonic in the winter, both with medium cream and medium sugar). It’s the same place I spent countless hours studying in my junior year of high school, alone or with friends, half-listening to the conversations bubbling around me.

The Sunday farmers’ market on California Avenue—the routine of walking through the stands, admiring the flowers and succulents, smiling to strangers as they shop for vegetables. Then, getting a sundried tomato bagel with chive cream cheese from the nearby bagel shop and sitting down to enjoy the sun.

The route I would drive down every day on my way to work, following the same path I used to bike to my high school. The familiar turns, past the public library where I once got yelled at for sneaking food in during finals week, past the park that was perfect for picnics (if I felt daring enough to run the risk of bumping into a high school classmate), past my old elementary and middle schools.

The boba place where my friends and I inevitably ended up for almost every birthday or celebration.

Eight of us crammed together at two tables, sipping black sesame milk tea, overdressed and getting weird looks from the other customers but not really caring, annoying the owners with our laughter. It closed for a few months because of COVID, and reopened just two days after I left for Providence. It makes me sad that I didn’t get to say goodbye.

I miss the smallest pieces of home. The way I was just a ten minute drive away from my friends’ houses, knowing that I could be near them at any time. The smell of the dry, wind-tossed air. The specific background noise that became my own silence—the soft hum of cars, the train in the distance, the whistle of the wind in the trees. The things that made it feel

comfortable and familiar, a place I knew intimately, a place I belonged in. Now, with three thousand miles and a three hour time difference between me and these comforts, I’m acutely aware of how much of a luxury they were.

But I feel myself losing these pieces of home— the glow of their coals dimming as I replay the memories in a dorm room on the other side of the country. Every time someone asks me where I’m from, I say “San Francisco” and mentally apologize to Palo Alto for the betrayal. San Francisco is a place for day trips, a hill-studded getaway, an acquaintance I smile at once in a while—hardly home. But it’s well-known, easy to place on a map. Even if someone would happen to have heard of Palo Alto—“Oh, that’s where Stanford is, right?” or “Oh, Silicon Valley!”—they still wouldn’t really know it. The contrast between how special my hometown feels to me and how inconsequential it is to everyone else makes the distance, and the ache that comes with it, more real.

A few months ago, some of my friends and I drove up to the hills to stargaze. From up above, I could see my entire hometown as a series of specks—glowing fireflies I could hold in the palm of my hand. Watching the cars crawl along the streets from up above, I felt my heart squeeze for a moment, rising to my throat—a flash of the nostalgia I’ve since come to know intimately. I wanted to hold that moment forever: sitting next to people I love, looking down at a place I called my own.

Perhaps I’m romanticizing my hometown in the same way I once romanticized the East Coast, looking back at Palo Alto through the soft glow of its sunsets. But I miss having a corner of the world to myself. Oddly enough, many of the things I imagined Providence to be actually came true.

Last week, I stepped outside to discover a world transformed into a powdered sugar wonderland of snow. It’s beautiful, but it just isn’t my powdered sugar wonderland quite yet. Walking across campus, I still feel like a lost high schooler on a college tour, in awe of the college students with places to go and things to do. Hiding from a pandemic in my dorm room, I haven’t yet had time to find new places to call my own—corners of Providence which might one day hold fragments of my heart. For now, I’m left wishing for a left-behind place.

Down the subway, you looked my way With your girl gaze, with your girl gaze I was 17 when I heard the song “Cherry” for the first time. The high school cafeteria was deafening and washed-out and terrible, but I wasn’t listening.

A playlist called “wlw pop” rolled through my cheap earbuds, the volume inadvisably high. The rubbery synth of one song faded out, and after a brief beat of silence, an ethereal voice said, “Hello?”

So begins Rina Sawayama’s coming out anthem, which I soon folded into the soundtrack of my 11th grade fall. I added it to my monthly playlist, bounced my fingers along to the beat in Calculus, blasted it through my speakers on long, aimless drives. It was one of the many songs that burned on repeat in my car, catchy and neon, stuck in my head.

With one look you take me back to everything I used to be When everyone was seventeen with no ID, no ID “Cherry” found me just when I needed it and matched me pace for pace. It was an act of selfexpression that was proud but cautious, still a little shy. I let it bubble out of my windows at stoplights, but turned the music down when I pulled into the driveway.

I didn’t dive into Rina’s discography right away.

In fact, it would be years before I listened to another song of hers. Maybe if I had, I would’ve recognized earlier how similar we were, how powerfully her music could speak to me. But her songs ended up reaching me again at the right moment, even when I didn’t go looking for them.

Shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up (You, I see you) My 2020 began on college sidewalks littered with posters announcing the umpteenth Roaring ’20s themed party. 2019 had been a crucible, had melted and remade me. Now I was new, strange to myself, untested.

The first semester of freshman year had been wild and wonderful, but it had brutalized my sense of self. Who was I here? And who was I becoming?

During the months I’d spent getting lost on College Hill, I’d bounced between social circles, abandoned club meetings before they began, lost myself to an unfamiliar anxiety. I was more desperate to please than I’d ever been.

With the new semester came the possibility of creating a better version of myself. I started with one New Year’s resolution: This year I will be a bitch again. As in: certain of myself. As in: unafraid, or at least faking it.

How come you don't expect me To get mad when I'm angry?

I was making the valiant trudge up Waterman Street when I listened to Rina Sawayama’s single “STFU!” for the first time. It was a revelation. “STFU!” was a shocking departure from the classic pop sound that had infused “Cherry.” The song draws on rock and metal inspirations, devolving into gruff screams.

It’s unsubtle, simmering with irony, and it made me feel vicious.

Like before, I discovered Rina’s song at the perfect time. I was trying to teach myself to be angry again, to unlearn the strange muteness that had settled over me. And, just as I was intent on reinventing myself, Rina Sawayama was using this song February 5, 2021 5

ARTS&CULTURE

A Reason to Love the Internet Today the kritique and mystique of @kardashian_kolloqium

By Antonia Huth ILLUSTRATED BY Solveig Asplund

to make a statement about her own musical reinvention. “STFU!” was released as the lead single for her debut album SAWAYAMA as an intentional upset for her fans. In a video about the creation of the album, she describes her desire to surprise people with a new sound. She wanted to catch them off guard without apologizing for it.

Dragging my heels through the late January street slush, I was caught off guard just as she intended. I couldn’t tell if I liked the song yet, brash as it was, but I knew that it unspooled something inside me. Something that had been held, quiet and tense, for far too long.

Fuck this world, it's dying 'Cause you people keep on lying Power gets, power drips on down By the time SAWAYAMA was released, only three months after I first listened to “STFU!” on a frigid Providence sidewalk, the world had been inescapably twisted by the coronavirus pandemic. All of my intentions for the semester had fallen to the wayside as I scrambled to say goodbye to friends I’d come to love, packed my newly-reinvented life into boxes, and drove the long 12 hours back to my hometown. 2020 buckled into itself, collapsing into a cramped new reality the size of my childhood bedroom.

SAWAYAMA, when I finally got around to listening to it (one month after its release and two months after the beginning of quarantine), was explosive, vivid, painful—a shifting landscape of genres and themes that crawled into my skull and played on repeat.

I could untangle a thousand tiny threads tying me to SAWAYAMA. It’s awash with lyrical turns of phrase that echo my own thoughts and careening guitar riffs that sweep me under. Watching interviews and reading song lyrics only made the album more meaningful as I replayed it for the fourth, fifth, tenth time.

I found an examination of myself in her songs.

In the ritual of re-listening, I found a sense of recognition. A reflection that smiles back in the mirror.

I'm gonna take the throne this time All the words all mine, all mine SAWAYAMA spans topics from intergenerational trauma to forgotten friendships, mashing together genres from stadium rock to nu-metal to early-2000s pop. Some critics are quick to accuse the album of lacking cohesion, of pinballing too quickly from one sound or idea to another.

I can’t comment on the musical (in)consistencies; I can’t be bothered. I don’t need an album to sound the same throughout, I need it to make mefeel something, which SAWAYAMA does without fail.

But I would argue with critics about thematic cohesion. I believe the incredibly varied themes of 6 post–

SAWAYAMA come together to form a single conclusion: personal identity is created with other people.

Across thirteen tracks, Rina sings about the forces that inform her identity, from her family and culture to her anxieties and frustrations. The album is a self-portrait of Rina not just as an individual, but as a product of the places, people, and ideas that have influenced her.

It would be easy to say that I connect with this album because I am a gay, part-Japanese woman and Rina is a pansexual woman singing about her own Japanese background. But I think that SAWAYAMA speaks to me not because of these similarities, but because of its meditation on identity. In such an isolating time, it felt revolutionary to think of personal identity as something collaborative. Finding or solidifying your sense of self is done in collaboration with the people you love, at times in response to people you hate, in acts of creation, in acts of self-preservation—it is a constantly shifting amalgamation of all these things and more. But it is never, never done alone.

You're changing my, changing my, changing my, changing my mind, yeah I'm shedding, I'm shedding, I'm shedding, I'm shedding my snakeskin I ended up abandoning my New Year’s resolution. 2020 didn’t end up being a year for bitchiness or relearning anger. Instead, it became a time for deep and unwavering investment in other people.

In their safety, their health, their happiness. It was a time to become buoyant and determined, to reach out to the people I love and commit to staying afloat together.

Even if I was no longer trying, 2020 did teach me to embrace anger, the kind that mobilizes you, sets you on fire. It brought new disappointments, new despairs, new hopes, and new commitments.

A year that made us all grapple with ourselves in unexpected ways. A year that made it clearer than ever that there’s nothing more sacred than our connections with other people, even as those connections are challenged, or translated into some alien medium, or pushed to their limits.

One day, when it’s safe to return to the vibrant and wild crush of togetherness, I will still have learned from my freshman year. I will not abandon myself in search of approval from others. But I won’t lead with anger, either. I won’t be a bitch.

I will have made new resolutions. I will reckon with new fears, invent new selves. But for the first time, I will recognize that the act of reinventing myself is— and has always been—collaborative.

Or, as Rina Sawayama puts it: Hand me a pen and I'll rewrite the pain When you're ready, we'll turn the page together

The Instagram post shows an image of Kris Jenner, matriarch and momager, standing with arms on hips, wearing stripes, a beret, red suspenders, and classic (except for the burgundy lipstick) mime makeup. Above her, a title reads: “‘Life on a Stage or Staged Life? The Chicken or the Egg Dilemma of Reality and Unreality on Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ Calabasas University Press (2018).”

The poster, @kardashian_kolloquium (note the “k” in “kolloquium”) writes in the caption: “The visibly genuine affinity @krisjenner has for clowns and mimes I somehow find to be very illustrative of this fairly abstract concept.”

I have stumbled across the post by chance and some successful algorithm-targeting on the part of my digital overlords. Though my interest is piqued, I’m puzzled. What, I ask myself, is this? According to the account’s bio, this is: “A Kompendium of notes/ reflections/theories [brain emoji] [peach emoji] Researched by @mjcorey Works Cited: Hulu, E Network, et al.” The best description I can come up with is a series of academic theses in various stages of planning, ranging from mere titles to elaborations so long they surpass Instagram’s caption wordlimit and must be continued in the comments. The topic of the theses, of course, is in the Instagram’s title.

As of November 2, the account has 10,000 followers, a milestone celebrated in the caption of a video clip taken from an early season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians (KUWTK), in which Scott Disick is out day-drinking in Las Vegas and slurring his words. The subtitles read: “Yello! Wouldn’t mind a little drink here. Not talking to you, Balzac.” As @mjcorey, the sole owner and author of the page and a self-proclaimed millennial cat-lover, lesbian, writer, and psychotherapist from Brooklyn, deftly points out: “Either he said ‘ball-sack,’ and Hulu closed captioning interpreted it as the French novelist whose stylistic fusion of romanticism and realism anticipated literary modernism—or Scott really did inexplicably call that unsuspecting strange ‘Balzac.’

Either way, an absurdist win.”

As a long time KUWTK-watcher (I’m still unsure if I wish to identify as a fan), as well as a Modern Culture and Media concentrator and borderlineGen-Z member of Ivy League academia, I could not be more smack in the middle of @kardashian_ kolloquium’s target audience. Any MCM student at Brown can tell you that the world carries meaning even in the most inconspicuous places. In the words of French semiotician Roland Barthes, “the cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comicstrip character[s]”—and by the Kardashians. As one might suspect, finding @kardashian_kolloquium was the moment I had prepared for all my life.

The Kardashian-Jenner family and their realityTV show KUWTK, now in its twentieth and last season, are a touchy subject. This is surprising if one considers that all the Kardashian women appear to be, are a group of women capitalizing on their beauty and lifestyle via mass media—a description that applies to an entire industry of model-it-girls, influencers, and YouTubers. It is all the more astonishing in light of their immense following online and the fact that

KUWTK remains one of Variety’s 100 most-watched TV shows of the 2019-2020 season.

To my parents, the Kardashians represent the ultimate perversion of 21st century celebrity culture.

Either famous for being famous, or famous for an impressively explicit sextape, their wealth and status lack traditional justification. Watching the show, according to my mother, kills brain cells.

To many of my friends, the Kardashians are equally distasteful. Everything the family embodies can be summarized by the word “problematic” in the year 2020. They are cultural appropriation repeat-offenders and engage in black-fishing. They continuously promote diet culture for profit, all the while championing the famous, surgically-enhanced “Kardashian figure” which has become America’s current beauty standard.

Then there was the reveal that “Kylie Jenner lips,” which were sold to fans in the form of lipsticks (and harshly judged after the emergence of the “Kylie Jenner lip challenge”), were the product of lip fillers. There was Kendall’s notoriously inappropriate Pepsi commercial, Kim’s husband Kanye’s Trump endorsement and, recently, his own presidential campaign, in the course of which he publicly revealed he had wanted to abort the pregnancy which produced their daughter North (as a result of which the couple is reportedly in the process of getting a divorce). There was Caitlyn Jenner’s car crash resulting in the death of another driver, the revenge porn Robert Kardashian posted of the mother of his child, Blac Chyna, and, of course, the immortal rumor that Kim’s sex tape wasn’t revenge porn itself at all, but a marketing ploy devised by her mother Kris (as we like to say on the internet, “the devil works hard but

Kris Jenner works harder”)—the list of offenses, amassed over the better part of the last two decades, is almost infinite.

You see why I hesitate to call myself a fan. But despite the disapproval of boomers and the ethical condemnation of millennials, the Kardashian-Jenner clan have indisputably achieved success of gargantuan proportions (a quick Google search will tell you all about Kylie’s latest controversy, which alleges she doctored her Forbes net worth to be one billion, instead just under 900 million). I have yet to meet anyone at all, including my German, octogenarian grandparents, who haven't heard of them. They are the closest thing to omnipresent, besides (perhaps) Beyoncé, that currently exists in American culture. I cannot help but find them fascinating.

I often find myself doubting, for example, whether Kim and Kanye’s family photoshoots, which are also unofficial Yeezy advertisements, have crossed the boundary into capitalist-materialist performance art. I had a near-existential crisis about the nature of education in the 21st century when I realized I’d learned more about giving birth from Kourtney and Khloe’s televised labours than from three years of sexed. And who could forget the cultural impact of Caitlyn Jenner’s public coming out in 2015 as a 65-year-old medically transitioned transgender woman on the cover of Vanity Fair?

For @kardashian_kolloquium, unpacking all this is a playful yet undeniably intellectual calling.

The page’s content ranges from new media theory analyses of the show and psychoanalytic readings of the family’s dynamics, to speculative dissection of their marketing strategies. On a paparazzi photo of Kim and Kanye arguing in a drive-thru after

“I’m trying to trust that I, too, am wrapped in an envelope of possibility, even if it’s too transparent for me to fully see just yet. Seven years from now, 28-year-old me is cringing at these metaphors. In another universe, 56 years from now, a 63-year-old woman is laughing at both of us.”

-–Anna Harvey, “Moving On Up,” 1.31.20

“I, like many other musically minded people with an at least moderate inclination toward aesthetic observation, have a thing for the city at night. Did that sound pretentious? That’s good; it was meant to.”

—Julian Towers, “What’s Coming After That?,” 2.1.19

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Olivia Howe a FEATURE Managing Editor Alice Bai Section Editors Andrew Lu Ethan Pan ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Emma Schneider

the aforementioned abortion-debacle, the account comments: “Our roles elevate from ‘audience’ to inspectors of authenticity […] the fundamental formula of the show’s power is its #dialectics […] It’s possible that these photos are both real and staged at the same time. If that’s true, what does it mean to us?”

The caption of a screenshot of the news story “Kylie Jenner keeps Kris Jenner’s personal wax figure at her house” reflects on the family’s comfort with the uncanny, writing: “The #adlerian psychotherapist in me wants to point out that it is the #baby of the family who keeps a figure of the #mother in her home.”

Finally, the academic examination of the Kardashianphenomenon (or -simulacrum, in @kardashian_ kolloquium’s terms) that it deserves.

Though the account’s number of followers is relatively low, especially by Kardashian standards, it has found a dedicated and engaged fan base. The page could easily be a pseudo-publishing house for the creator’s takes, but instead acts more as a discourse forum for a group of interested part-time cultural critics. The comment section is frequently the place of dynamic civil discussion. In an Instagram poll depicting a 1950s craft-making book which remarks on the uniting potential of a parent-child “project in doll making,” MJ asks: “Did Kris and Kim uniquely and deeply bond while co-creating Kim’s image?”

93% of respondents voted “Yes.” Follower @alixzbee comments: “When a mother helps create the doll of desire, there’s so much less fear of shame, because it’s a joint birth between mother and daughter, fostering/valuing/ supporting the new identity. [...] An iconic empire built on familial support systems is a fairly unique narrative outside of royalty.”

Ever since I first became co-admin of a Harry Potter Facebook fan page bizarrely named “I’m holey Fred, get it?” - George Weasley at the age of thirteen, I have loved the Internet. Going online, to me, feels like being a child let loose in the Grand Canyon— the freedom and abundance of potential discoveries are exhilarating! @kardashian_kolloquium illustrates what the Internet can make possible. Not everyone, of course, is interested in earnest intellectual discussion of the Kardashians, nor in the occasional existential Kardashian memes the page provides. But if an interest so niche can give rise to stimulating and inspiring discussion, and to something which I can confidently call a community, then anyone can find what they’re looking for online: discourse, the self, imagined realities. Though the internet often breeds the bad and the ugly, @kardashian_kolloquium convinces me it can equally breed the good, the beautiful, and the fun.

NARRATIVE Managing Editor Minako Ogita Section Editors Siena Capone Christina Vasquez LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney Section Editors Kimberly Liu Emily Wang

Section Editors Kyoko Leaman Maddy McGrath

COPY CHIEF Aditi Marshan Copy Editors Emily Cigarroa Laura David Samuel Nevins Eleanor Peters SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS Tessa Devoe

CO-LAYOUT CHIEFS Briaanna Chiu Jiahua Chen Layout Designers Lily Chahine Sharlene Deng WEB MASTER Amy Pu

STAFF WRITERS Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Editors Eashan Das Kelsey Cooper Danielle Emerson Julia Gubner Jordan Hartzell Kyra Haddad Nicole Kim Jolie Rolnick Gus Kmetz Chloe Zhao Elliana Reynolds HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Adi Thatai Victoria Yin Joanne Han

Want to be involved?

Email: olivia_howe@brown.edu!

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