Post- 3/2/17

MAR 2 – VOL 19 – ISSUE 16

In this issue...

Mirrors, Marks, and Moving on

Editor’s Note

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Dear Readers,

FEATURES

Ba ba da ba da ba da ba ba ba ba ba da ba da ba ba ba ba ba. I think about that day when I left him at the Greyhound station west of Santa Fe. We were seventeen, but it was sweet and it was true. Still, I did what I had to do.

The Lives Never Lived 3 Thoughts on Rejection 4

Because I just knew.

Summer: Sunday nights. We’d sink into our seats right as they dim out all the lights, a technicolor world made out of music and machine. It called to me to be on that scene and live inside each scene.

5 LIFESTYLE 27 Beauty Marks

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Who Let the Dogs Out 5 Syria on the Screen

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Without a nickel to my name, hopped a bus, here I came. Could be brave or just insane.

La La Land didn’t win the Oscar, and it’s getting warmer every day. Stop global warming.

Best,

Monica editor - in - chief

Post- Board Editor-in-Chief Monica Chin Managing Editor, Arts & Culture Joshua Lu

Managing Editor, Features Saanya Jain

Arts & Culture Editors Taylor Michael Josh Wartel

Features Editors Claribel Wu Kathy Luo

Managing Editor, Lifestyle Annabelle Woodward

Copy Chief Alicia DeVos

Lifestyle Editors Jennifer Osborne Celina Sun Creative Director Grace Yoon Art Director Katie Cafaro

Assistant Copy Editors Zander Kim Alexandra Walsh Layout Chief Livia Mucciolo Layout Assistants Yamini Mandava Elizabeth Toledano Cover Megan Tresca

7 ARTS & CULTURE Catch These Kids

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The Disturbing Clairvoyance 7 of Black Mirror The Crazy Ones

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Thoughts on Rejection “The job hunt and my love life are way too similar,” Chris says as we wait for our food at Julian’s on Broadway Street. He’s a friend, but I’ve asked him to get brunch today for reasons that fall somewhere between professional and therapeutic: to talk about rejection.

His statement strikes a chord somewhere. Toward the end of winter break, I got an email that hurt. In the weird, overly-polite tone of a rejection letter, it informed me that I wasn’t being awarded a fellowship I’d thought I had a good chance of getting. I read the email, cried for about five seconds, called my mom, stifled my emotions, plopped down on the couch, and started binge-watching Criminal Minds, the most mindless show I could think of. In essence, I pretty much acted as if I’d just been dumped.

The reality is, we’re walking around a pretty high-achieving place.

But even with all the students who are on fast-tracks to becoming CEOs or John Krasinskis, most students go to enough interviews that they have to have been rejected by some employers.

What’s more, way too many people are single, so you know that romantic rejection is floating around. And too many people have dropped classes for the university to be a fail-free place.

For a lot of other seniors, ’tis the season of getting rejected. Or, if they’ve finally landed a job, that season has just passed. But rejection can be tough—each subsequent denial adds another hue of uncertainty to our futures, and it’s hard not to count each one. Like dirty articles of clothing, you toss them onto the floor of your closet and shove the door shut. But once in a while—maybe it’s an especially smelly sock—the pile acquires something that’s hard to ignore. And that’s how I ended up at Julian’s, talking about rejection over pancakes with Chris. Later I talked with three other students, two seniors and one sophomore, about the laundry sitting in their closets, and how they deal with it.

(Please note that because of the nature of the topic, the people I spoke with were friends and this is by no means a representative sample of Brown’s student body.)

There’s something about middle school Let’s start at the very bottom of the pile, with the rejections that have probably stuck with you for a long time. I’m talking about certain middle-school horror stories: you know, the ones where you felt raw and

Meghan Friedmann staff writer

Michelle Ng illustr ator

That pile of laundry that’s sitting in your closet

exposed because the entire school knew you’d asked so-and-so to slow dance and he said “no”? While they probably once stung like hell, talking about them now isn’t so bad. For me, at least, they’re an exercise in humility, a reminder that we weren’t always highly-driven college students, but vulnerable 12-year-olds who had yet to deal with our first rejection experiences.

For my friend Mike, it happened at a bar mitzvah. He’d gotten the DJ to play a special song and then asked a girl to dance with him. Then, in classic middle school fashion, he said, “Will you go out with me?” She answered, “I think we should just be friends.”

By now you’ve probably heard this kind of story a million times. Chris had a similar experience, except that it happened over everyone’s favorite instant messaging service, AIM. Mike and Chris both say they got over these events fairly quickly, but the fact that they can each recall these experiences so easily means something. They got stored in the memory box for a reason, perhaps as an introduction to the feeling of rejection, which is, of course, no bueno.

The other two people I spoke with—Emma, also a senior, and Kelly Carey-Ewend, a sophomore—both recalled not romantic but athletic rejections as marked aspects of growing up.

Emma was so bad at sports that her elementary-school gym teacher kept telling her she had to be left-handed.

She wasn’t. The whole situation made her feel disconnected from her school’s sport-centered culture, which bothered her until she got to college Kelly, who had two really athletic siblings, tried every sport he could but did not succeed at any of them. At one point he made the A-team of ultimate Frisbee, only for the coach to quickly move him to the lower level. Often, he felt like the team didn’t want to talk to him.

After Kelly talked about his issues with the Frisbee team, something inside me clicked. Growing up as the world’s clumsiest person, I dealt with a less searing version of Kelly’s athletic rejections (less searing because I decided I didn’t care really early on and because no one in my family was big on sports). But still, Kelly’s description of the exclusive Frisbee team allowed me to articulate one of the reasons rejection hurts so much: In whatever way, shape, or form it arrives, rejection insists that you do not belong. You can’t be on our team. You can’t sit at our lunch table. You can’t work at our firm. It takes away a possibility, and

leaves us feeling a little bit less. Now the laundry’s really started to smell, and we’re left trying to figure out what to do about it.

Enough is enough Somehow, I managed to subconsciously figure it out in elementary-school gym class: that sometimes, you might really not belong to something, and that’s okay. Kelly figured that out, too, and now he can admit the existence of unbelonging loud and clear. He said his perseverance in sports actually hurt him, because it just wasn’t going to happen and he should have known when to cut his losses. Sometimes getting up and trying again is important, but other times it’s okay to toss out a few of those clothes—for that solution, you don’t even have to use your three remaining Bear Bucks.

Chris’s hardest rejection was a recent one. One of the “big three” consulting companies emailed him in August as part of their recruiting process. He was flattered. For high-priority candidates like him, “They give you a lot of love and affection,” he said.

He killed the first interview and later went to L.A. for the final round, which didn’t feel like an interview at all but like a “let’s meet your new wife.” A couple hours after the excitement ended, though, he got a call. They weren’t going to hire him. “It felt like the first time I got dumped,” he said.

Of course, that’s pretty much how I felt over winter break—hence the subsequent Netflix binge. Yes, like my losses, Chris’s were cut for him—he didn’t really have a choice in the matter. But he also admitted that, looking back on the whole experience, he’s glad he didn’t get the job. He would have hated it.

But right in the moment of a rejection, there’s another problem: How do you keep it from making you feel like you’re not good enough? Mike, Emma, and Kelly all touched upon this, with Mike saying he’d only recently reached a turning point where he was able to separate himself from his rejections.

His friends helped him reach that point by telling him he was being ridiculous when he was, well, being ridiculous. On a similar note, Emma talked about how important it is to surround yourself with people who recognize your worth. Plus, “when you talk to your friends, you realize they’re amazing people who’ve accumulated rejections.”

Kelly’s advice especially resonated with me because I’d never quite heard

rejection put in these terms: After dealing with a rejection, Kelly said, remind yourself that “it’s not because you’re not good enough, it’s because it just happened that way.” The first time you tell yourself this, you probably won’t believe it, but keep on thinking it. Then, accept the path the rejection has put you on, and try to move forward without internalizing it. Get rid of the laundry. Or, use it in some kind of alternative art exhibit. Your choice.

The evil sock you can’t get rid of Of course, not every rejection goes away easily. Some will stick around for a long while. That one sock you thought you threw away a thousand times will keep showing up again, sitting there cheekily in the back corner of your closet.

Often, these rejections will be deeply personal ones, perhaps those in the realm of that crazy little thing called love. Mike’s worst rejection just occurred—a relationship with a girl he’d been crazy about just ended—and he’s still trying to process it. When I asked why it was so hard, he put it bluntly: “Because this person told me they couldn’t live without me, and then they went and did that, so I felt used and manipulated.”

What do you do about something that difficult? Mike leaned on his friends and family. He started seeing a therapist. Besides that, he gives the proverbial advice to everyone dealing with rejection: “Time is the best medicine.”

Although my hardest rejection ever also has to do with the love bug, the email I got over winter break probably marked my roughest rejection in the past year. It left me drifting toward the abyss that is graduation, this time without a lifeboat. But after I got back to campus this semester, something strange happened. The moping transformed into motivation, and I signed up for the most challenging class I’ve ever taken at Brown, one in feature writing. I knew it would push me; I also knew it would give me valuable skills for the post-graduation abyss. With the course on my plate, the lost fellowship floats ever further from my mind. And I’m not sure I would have taken the class had the email delivered good news.

With that in mind, I would add one thing to Mike’s advice: For those rejections that are hardest, for those evilest-of-all socks, the best we can do is try to keep them clean, prevent them from being a disgusting mess that stinks up our whole lives. Learn to live them in a way that makes us stronger, more resilient. Whatever happens, don’t let the pile become something that gnaws at you and becomes an accumulation of emptiness or unhappiness. Do something with it.

Note: All of the names of the people in the story, except Kelly’s, have been changed. This reflects the subjects’ wishes to remain anonymous.

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The Lives I will Never Live

A Sophomore’s Struggle with the Open Curriculum When I was first considering applying to Brown, I heard of the Princeton Review’s famed “Happiest Colleges in America” list, in which Brown consistently places in the top 10. I remember wondering why students at Brown were so happy, and a few Google searches told me that one main reason was the open curriculum. With unlimited freedom and no constraints, there was nothing stopping students from utter satisfaction with every class they took. I came to Brown wholeheartedly believing that implicit in the notion of choice was the idea of happiness.

But in the middle of first semester, sophomore year, I began to feel unhappy with the world and myself. College Hill, once a place full of boundless optimism and promise, had become bleak and boring. Caught between my own expectations and disappointments, my pride and angst to seek help, I found myself following daily patterns. I grudgingly pulled myself out of bed, ran to class, monotonously wrote essays and submitted problem sets. I felt disengaged from my coursework, unfulfilled by what I was learning. I felt trapped in my routines, in my own choices—choices that I had initially made to secure my own happiness. That’s the trouble with choice, a flaw that is rarely acknowledged by Brown’s open curriculum. What if you choose wrong? And when you realize that you’ve chosen wrong, that you’ve caused your own unhappiness, how do you carry that burden?

The burden of choice and the promise of happiness is a heavy one to bear. In his famous TED Talk “The Paradox of Choice,” Barry Schwartz addresses the shortcomings of endless opportunity. He argues that unlimited choice does not lead to freedom but rather can result in paralysis. In the act of choosing, an option must be discarded and another must be selected.

A central concept in economics is termed “opportunity cost,” which rep-

resents the benefits lost by not choosing the best alternative option. And because of this opportunity cost, there will always be a slight dissatisfaction with the outcome. With choice comes a twinge of regret. And this regret could lead to lower satisfaction. Schwartz furthers his argument by arguing that with more choice comes a higher expectation. When all options are made available, the expectation of finding the perfect solution increases. We lose the open mindedness and surprise of discovering the mundane becoming the extraordinary. Instead, the burden of the opportunity cost forces us to demand perfection with our chosen outcome.

In sophomore year, first semester, I found myself grappling with many of Schwartz’s criticisms of choice. All those around me appeared to know what they were doing, but I did not.

I heard about algorithms in upper level computer science, critical theory in comparative literature, and I felt myself slowly disintegrating. Disintegrating because I did not know what my friends knew and may never know what they knew. The ways in which these and other disciplines seemed to employ critical thought and foster independent thinking made me rather envious. What did I want to do? What did I feel immersed in? Truth be told, I became more and more disenchanted with what I was studying. I found my biology and public health PowerPoints to be copious and exhausting, devoid of any deeper meaning or significance, unable to reignite the curiosity and intrigue that had first drawn me to both disciplines. I began to deride myself

for my choices—it was my fault that I had chosen classes that were making me miserable. All the lives I would never have crushed and squeezed me, compressing my lungs and weakening my joints. I realized there were so many disciplines, books, ideas, people, places, languages, countries, and experiences that I would never have the chance to encounter in my life. I became so fixated on the experiences I was not having, the ways of thinking that I did not have access to, the lives I would never live, that I became more what I was not than what I was.

It was a conversation with my mother that made me realize that I simply couldn’t continue thinking about life the way I was. “You’re one person, and you have a lifetime to study. There’s so much to learn right in front of you if you just bother to look.

You can’t do everything! ” she exasperatedly told me. Oddly enough, with those words (or the annoyance with which she said them), I saw clarity. I stepped back. I learnt that big is in the small. Magnanimity is in the minutia.

To experience everything, I did not need to have everything. To experience everything, I had to be content with the small, with the mistakes and the bad decisions, the regrets and the lost opportunities. I had to accept my limitations to live largely. I cannot live every life I want to, I can never be limitless. But I can find the limitless in the limited.

This semester, I’ve returned to human biology with a new perspective.

With added political science, statistics, and public health classes, I’ve found myself falling in love with what

initially enchanted me about biology— understanding human life. My varied coursework ranging from problem sets to critical essays to rote memorization has restored the variety I initially sought in my education. Understanding health from both humanistic and scientific perspectives has allowed me to grapple with both the big and small questions. It has reminded me why biology, the study of life, is so essential to understanding human nature and pertinent to addressing the challenges we face in the 21st century.

What Schwartz fails to acknowledge in his TED Talk that I have learned in the past few months is the power of choice can provoke self reflection and vulnerability. The ability of choice humbles and reminds us that we must embrace and celebrate imperfection. My unhappiness stemmed from the pressure to make good choices. And if Brown has taught me anything, it is that bad choices can be a blessing in disguise, a calling to embrace the turmoil of life. That is the innate beauty of the human experience, that even at the end of life, we sit on our beds, with regrets and lost opportunities. We push and stretch and bend—only to sit on the cusp, the edge, the tipping point, of something more. We are all bound by time. What we choose to do with the time we have makes it all the more special—sweet in its ephemerality, precious in its fleetingness.

Divya Santhanam staff writer

Jenice Kim illustr ator

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27 Beauty Marks

When you were 14 years old, you counted 27 beauty marks on your body. You told yourself that you would one day find someone who knew this number by heart, and they would tell you that their favorites were the ones scattered haphazardly across your face (the same marks that got you teased in the fifth grade). You looked forward to how they would kiss each one with a gentleness that could save you.

Over the years, this fictional character became more and more in love with you and you with them. They didn’t really have a form though. They existed in an amorphous way, like a spirit. But they felt like someone you’d met before in a different life, and you had to wait to run into them again.

Neither of you would remember you’d known each other in infinite universes, but you would feel a sort of severe nostalgia after the first hello, and you wouldn’t know why.

You’ll feel like you’re falling in love with this person when you show them your favorite song, and they will listen as closely as possible because they know you want them to find that part of you that exists recklessly within those 32 bars. You’ll feel terribly exposed. You’ll wonder if being in love is the same.

Twenty-two, and you’re worried that you’re in the universe where you might not meet this person. Twen-

“So you built a small house.”

ty-two, and you start to think you’re in the universe where love has been swallowed whole by the fear of texting back too soon. Twenty-two, and you are told to be more patient. “You’re young, you have years ahead of you.” “Maybe your expectations are too high.” “Have you tried Tinder?” “When you stop looking for love, that’s when you’ll find it.”

(This last one is the greatest offender.)

Except you’re 22, and you can’t even imagine how holding their hand could feel both overwhelming and exhilarating. You can’t imagine meeting someone who makes you laugh those big, hearty, hurt-your-stomach types of laughs. You can’t imagine being so naturally at peace in their presence, the kind of peace where all the rattles in your head settle down. You begin to chip away at the person who’s settled comfortably in the corner of your mind because keeping them around has begun to hurt in light of these new fears.

But—and it’s a quiet, whimpering but—you see your friends around you look at their partners like the moon wouldn’t make an appearance at night without their say-so. Some have been in love for six months, some in love for six years. But they are in love. You see it in the way they say, “That’s her favorite movie, too”—like they are the proud owners of the most important fact in the world.

Who Let the Dogs Out Sometimes, when I’m meeting new people, I like to tell them things about myself that would elicit more intrigue than anything I could say about my hometown or concentration. Some favorites include “I’ve never had a PB&J” and “I’m in a feud with Ethan Hawke” (I promise I’ll discuss both of these at length in future articles). The latter especially served its purpose as my first semester icebreaker, but it rarely worked, as not many people seem to know who Ethan Hawke is or why he sucks. But to me, the best statement in my arsenal is “My dog is a social climber.”

Normally, my conversation partner will want clarification, so I continue, explaining that I used to love my dog and that when my family first got him, he’d only hang out with me, but then he moved on to my sister, and then my father, and then ended up with my mother, and no longer spends time with me. One could extrapolate that this denotes my family’s hierarchy (a rather depressing statement about my own position), but usually the conversation moves on with my partner amused but uninterested in my relationship with my dog. But, aside from the statement’s entertainment value, I now wonder why I say it.

I don’t hate my dog; I actually used to be obsessed with animals. In elementary school, I drafted an army of stuffed animals to sleep with me so that I would be surrounded by a

You have been a decent enough person, you think. You believe in good karma. You have gone on enough dates and opened yourself to as many opportunities as possible. You have not done anything in this lifetime for the universe to bar you from love. Don’t feed into a narrative that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, you tell yourself.

So it’s not your fault you have yet to meet the person who loves knowing that your favorite color is yellow, but it will be your fault if you destroy hope

because 22 years feels like 22 years too long. It will be your fault if you believe so actively in the loneliness you’ve grown used to. And, most importantly, it will be your fault if you have made this person into someone who gives you something only you can give yourself. Their love for your 27 beauty marks should only add to your own, not exist as a placeholder for it. Maybe it’s been 22 years because you still are not too sure how to do this. Maybe it’ll take a couple years until you do.

Sara Al-Salem

staff writer

Doris Liou

illustr ator

Definitely Not Me

veritable zoo of beasts who’d never leave (that is, until I left for college, at which point I’d only managed to hold on to my beloved Blankie Bear, a creature whose name is almost too self-explanatory). I studied the dodo, the impala, the panda, each at varying stages of endangerment or extinction, and developed a crusade to protect all animals from harm. As such, I did what any normal seven-year-old would do and convinced my family to travel to the Galapagos Islands. These Ecuadorian gems are most famous for being the location of Darwin’s evolutionary studies, which included hurling lizards into the ocean (ah, science) and analyzing blue-footed boobies, marine birds with no sex appeal, contrary to what one might think. The islands had also been featured in many ecological conservation studies, so my parents saw the trip as equally exotic and worthwhile, and thus we set sail in the summer of 2006 on a voyage that mostly involved seasickness and island hopping. (I mean this literally, as one of the islands was covered in so many iguanas that we had to jump from rock to rock to avoid stepping on them.)

Though the vacation didn’t do much for my fantasies of saving all the animals, I had two key takeaways: one, Dramamine patches are placebos, and two, watching the second Austin Powers movie every night for a week doesn’t make it any better.

But in all seriousness, my love

for animals was unwavering. I dreamt of running the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF for short, an acronym similar enough to WWE that my dad was able to mine the comparison for mild humor in one of our annual holiday letters) and, for years, begged my parents to get a dog. My mom was the sole protester, arguing that she would end up being the only one taking care of it, but eventually caved. She went to a breeder, looked at the available pup-

pies and for whatever reason chose the one who tried to eat her shoelaces. And so, a young cockapoo named Rocky became part of the Stelian family.

At first, I was elated; my love of animals had finally manifested itself into something real. I had zero say in the breed (a Cocker Spaniel-Poodle mix chosen for combined cuteness and intelligence, a decision that didn’t really pay off in the latter category) or the name (Snowball and Snowy were

Bianca Stelian staff writer

Natasha Sharpe illustr ator

my first picks), but I loved him all the same. Until I didn’t. The novelty wore off over time, and Rocky became a nuisance who would pee on the floor (he’s still not fully house trained) and take attention away from my childhood antics. And so, I began to neglect him.

I did nothing abusive; I just had no interest in being with him or looking after him. The prophecy was fulfilled: My mom ended up bearing the brunt of the work, but in return, Rocky gave her his affection and loyalty, and the same could be said, to a lesser degree, for my sister and father, who each also loved him but had less time to devote

to his care.

One weekend, while collecting canned goods for our church/cult’s annual food drive, I was in charge of walking Rocky. Frustrated that he wouldn’t budge and seeking to impress my fellow churchgoers/cult members with my strength, I held his leash with both hands and lifted Rocky up into the air, creating an image of legitimate animal mistreatment that my father says has been seared into his memory ever since. Upon realizing what I was doing, I quickly put him down, but I think that event was the proverbial nail in the coffin that doomed our relation-

Syria on the Screen At the end of an art history class I took last semester, we learned about the Ashcan school, which was not an organized group or movement but rather a hodgepodge of painters connected by their choice of subject matter: scenes of the urban quotidien in America with a focus on the poor and working-class.

In the art world, they were rebelling against American impressionism, the institutional choice of the early 20th century. Though their work was not political in itself—they were simply taking advantage of the greater range of the American experience that could be represented in urban America— they were deemed anarchists by mainstream society. The problem lay in that what they painted was frightening to those who did not live it. * * * About a week after this class, it was finals. I had secluded myself in a dark, freezing corner of the SciLi, telling myself that the horrible heating and cooling system would keep me more alert as I studied for my art history final. This was the same night that many Syrian refugees were denied their evacuation relief by the United Nations and their live videos were smattered all over Facebook and Twitter. I would watch one of these demoralizing videos from my corner and then look up at my peers, buzzing around the library, the stress and concern and pressure that has burned in them throughout their lives as students emanating from them like a poisonous smoke that we have all gotten used to breathing.

It is hard to be a student. We are lucky to be students.

I told myself to snap out of it. That yes, the world is a terrible place, but right in that moment my job was to study for a test, to get a good grade, to inch closer to my degree—to inch closer to the comfortable life I will most likely lead. But when I looked down at the notebook in front of me, I realized that I had last written “Winslow Homer, The Sharpshooter on Picket Duty” five times in a row. It was then that I told myself I needed to snap out of something entirely different. What was I doing memorizing the names of paintings?

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ship forever. It’s been about a decade since, and he and I have yet to address it, instead awkwardly tiptoeing around each other in the house while avoiding eye contact. Occasionally, I’ll step on his foot by accident, and I sense that in those moments, we both experience a sort of deja vu.

I don’t think much about animals anymore, and when I do it’s certainly not about how to save them.

Though I used to think my adoration was indestructible, having a pet that required constant care made me realize I wasn’t all that fond of animals altogether. Rocky put me to the test, and

I failed. But it’s okay, I think, because with age comes the discovery of new interests, and if the world’s horse-obsessed middle-school girls prove anything, it’s that obsessions rarely last forever. Fortunately, these days, I’ve found new crusades, the most recent of which being my efforts to save the dying art form of the self-indulgent personal essay. So far, I think I’m doing a pretty good job.

family and emotions and stress, to build a life and pass exams. It is hard to be a student, but I am so lucky to be a student. I have to remember that, or I will lose my sanity. I have to take that luck and pass it on, but in order to do that I must allow myself to succumb to the whirling mess that is my ordinary, lucky life. Keeping that in mind, and keeping in mind that my stress and

fears are real, I can hopefully someday transcend my privilege.

Their work was not inherently political, but they were deemed anarchists. I hope that this wasn’t a mischaracterization. I hope that some small part of each one of them was an anarchist. I hope that you are too. I hope that I will find it in myself to be.

Lucky to be an art student

I packed up my things and walked briskly home. I got in bed and started watching video after video, reading article after article about an unthinkable, unimaginable humanitarian crisis that our inaction—my inaction—had brought to this point. Our apathy had forced men, women, and children, standing in the shadows of bombed out buildings, enmeshed in the ruins and tragedy of their former lives, to look and to beg for the world to see their humanity and help them. I felt that by continuing to study, I was denying my own humanity, staying ignorant of its potential. So I donated $20. I watched and I read until I felt confused and distraught and dehydrated, my body responding physically to watching horrors unfold from the warm confines of my bed.

The pain and confusion I felt that night and in the following days only made it harder and more confusing to be a student. In order to get back to the stress and worker bee buzz of the Scili basement, I told myself that if we don’t exercise the rights we are so wildly fortunate to have, then where will those people in tragic circumstances run to? Today, the answer to that question has never been more volatile, more uncertain, more heartbreaking.

We can protest and call our members of Congress. We can stay informed, but sometimes it feels like I am drowning in the hurt of it all. I am lucky to be a student. I get to memorize the names of paintings. I know I am lucky. But sometimes it is hard to be a student, to be me, just as sometimes it is hard to be you. So where do we draw the line?

I want to serve myself and those I love, but it feels too naive and uncaring to watch the world go up in flames from my computer screen. * * *

The Ashcan school artists were deemed anarchists, yet all they were doing was expressing themselves by interpreting their world through art.

Perhaps they chose to paint scenes of the working-class and the poor, of those whose lives were not like their own in order to highlight a part of the world and a type of people that many choose to ignore. It is hard to be a student and a person with friends and

Charlotte Bluementhal staff writer

Socco Fernandez Garcia

illustr ator

7

Catch These Kids

Look away, look away, this show will wreck your evening, your whole life and your day, every single episode is nothing but dismay, so look away, look away, look away. These are the lyrics to the opening scene and theme song of the new Netflix series, A Series of Unfortunate Events. Based on the book series written by Daniel Handler, who uses the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, this show will achieve the opposite of wrecking your evening, and every episode is nothing but a true delight to witness.

Starring Neil Patrick Harris, Patrick Warburton, Malina Weissman, Louis Hynes, K. Todd Freeman, Presley Smith, and with special appearances by Will Arnett and Cobie Smulders, the series delivers a stellar cast to excited fans who may have previously felt discontent at the previous attempt to bring the beloved children’s books characters to life: namely, Brad Silberling’s 2004 feature film starring Jim Carrey, Emily Browning, Timothy Spall, and Jude Law as Lemony Snicket. The criticism at the time was first, that some of the casting choices were unfitting, but more importantly, that the movie was too short to fully develop the stories it proposed it would tell.

For those unfamiliar, Unfortunate Events tells the story, over the course of 13 books, of a trio of orphans, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire (Weissman, Hynes, Smith), whose parents’ fiery death leaves their children with a large inheritance. A family relative,

Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

Count Olaf (Harris), aims to acquire it any cost, and in search of the orphan’s fortune, Count Olaf, an out-of-work, talentless actor with an ankle tattoo, and his theater troupe constantly cause havoc for the children, making them go to extreme lengths to escape from dangerous and unfortunate situations and chasing them away from different relatives who are assigned the task of taking the orphans in. The manager of the orphan’s fortune, Mr. Poe (Todd Freeman), is oblivious to the dangers and evil plots of Olaf and Co., placing the children in the hands of various (at times incompetent) guardians throughout the series. The book’s “author”, Lemony Snicket (Warburton), serves as narrator to the Baudelaire adventures.

The series, although intended for children, is fit for anyone interested in exploring themes of loss, abuse, morality, and human nature. Though the 2004 movie was geared towards children, it seems fair to assume that the Netflix show aims to target not only viewers who remember the series from their childhood, but also those people who were too young or too old when they were first published between 1999-2006.

The show, produced by Harris, is visually stunning and an updated version of its cinematic predecessor. If the 2004 film felt Tim Burton-esque, the Netflix version feels like Wes Anderson gone emo. And that’s a necessity for this project specifically, for a key

component of the Baudelaire universe is the inability for the reader, or viewer, to be able to find themselves in a known place or time. We do not know the geographical location or the year of any of these events, and it all gets confusing when the orphans use both horse-drawn carriages and beautiful vintage 50s cars as modes of transportation.

The series follows the first four books, dedicating two episodes to each book. Thus the setting changes every two episodes, but the aesthetics invoke a similar experience throughout all eight episodes—a strange, visually enthralling world that more closely resembles a Dr. Seuss live-action movie than a modern fantasy film. Well, if The Cat in the Hat were a sad orphan.

There are a few musical numbers, a great deal of word definitions, lots of funny moments, and, in an unexpected twist, the unraveling and parallel narration of the some of the stories the 2004 film never covered. Specifically, the tales of some secret organizations (told in the later books of the series) which are consequential to the stories of the Baudelaires, their fortune, and their parents’ death.

The cast pulls off the book personalities to a tee, unlike the 2004 film.

But aside from the strength of the main cast, the secondary characters are really what add a sense of fun and unexpectedness to the show. These additions range from the always talented Joan Cusack portraying the giddy but lovely

The Disturbing Clairvoyance of Black Mirror The images, characters, and neuroses that populate the pastel world of “Nosedive” are eerily familiar: Styled latte shots. Breezy captions. Hitting “post” as anxiety for social approval sinks in like teeth.

But season three’s first episode of Netflix Original series Black Mirror, released in October 2016, insists on interrogating the reality we know. For every interaction, online and in person, the inhabitants of the world in “Nosedive” rate one another on a scale from 1 to 5. The average is publicly displayed, resulting in preferential treatment for elite 4.7s and pariah-like status for those whose ratings fall. The hierarchy is based on social media graces and forced pleasantries.

The episode begins as amiable (specifically, 4.3), everygirl Lacey decides to raise her rating. In the tradition of most Black Mirror protagonists, Lacey is thwarted, and her situation quickly unravels into nightmare.

The premise of “Nosedive” sums up the driving ethos of Black Mirror, the brainchild of British producer Charlie Brooker: Tap into a real-life anxiety about technology and human nature, and run with it to its furthest, most disturbing hypothetical.

Like its speculative sci-fi/dystopian predecessor The Twilight Zone, each episode of Black Mirror has a distinct narrative and cast. Both shows explore

the theme of cynicism toward technology, but what sets Black Mirror apart is that every episode is set in a near, plausible future. While The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling introduced audiences to a supernatural dimension “beyond that which is known to man,” each episode of Black Mirror evokes a deliberate and disconcerting intimacy between real life and dystopia.

Each episode is grounded in the world-as-we-know-it, but with one futuristic “what-if ” alteration: What if a hacker group collected private information on the internet and used it to orchestrate mass blackmail? What if people had sophisticated recording devices implanted in their eyes, rendering memory both perfect and inescapable?

The situations are outlandish, but, perturbingly, are not outlandish enough. Each episode imparts the queasy feeling that this isn’t quite fiction. In many ways, the world of “Nosedive”—with its commentary on the desire for validation, on how easy it is for the wealthy, beautiful, and white to achieve popularity—merely makes explicit the social machinations already at play today.

Black Mirror impels us as viewers to recognize ourselves in the horror that unfolds—not just as onlookers, but as culpable participants.

On that note: Don’t expect to get

Justice Strauss, Aasif Mandvi as the farcical reptile-loving Uncle Monty, and Cleo King as the cheerfully conniving newspaper editor, Mrs. Poe. These characters are so fantastical, that watching the show really becomes an instance of finding one’s self in another world.

Finding one’s self in another world is the biggest achievement of Unfortunate Events. The storyline is interesting, but perhaps not riveting.

The characters are fascinating, but not wholly multifaceted. (One note is that Patrick Harris portrays Olaf ’s evilness as a constant, never causing one to even want to feel empathy for the attimes comical man, as can often happen with a well-developed villain). The dialogue is clever, but not the smartest on television.

Yet, the show is binge-worthy.

Tune in for 50-60 minutes and you are sure to find yourself not being able to look away, look away—for this strange world is just interesting, enchanting, and twisted enough that you don’t want to miss it.

Dani Balarezo staff writer

Clarisse Angkasa illustr ator

Technology’s scary future is already here

the warm fuzzies from this show. Most episodes are roughly the same degree of devastating.

Standout episodes include “San Junipero” and “Be Right Back” (or, as I’ve taken to calling them, “the best thing ever” and “the dead boyfriend one,” respectively). “San Junipero” unspools slowly, as a budding romance between two young women blurs the bounds of time and space. In “Be Right Back,” a young woman mourning the sudden death of her boyfriend signs up for a service that allows her to “talk” to him—chillingly, through an algorithm that synthesizes his digital traces to recreate his speech patterns, preferences, and memories.

These episodes represent the show’s strongest artistic capacities.

Beyond scathing social commentaries cloaked in horror, Black Mirror also has the potential to achieve moments of startling tenderness and insight into our humanity.

Black Mirror is emotionally and intellectually compelling. It is also stressful. While the stress can be productive and enjoyable, I do think that some episodes require a trigger warning. I urge readers to be aware of their own comfort level and to consider researching more about the content of each episode before watching.

So why watch Black Mirror today?

It’s no secret that now is a time of

collective disillusionment with institutions: a time of distrust, not only of rapidly-evolving technology but of the passive assent to these new technological capacities despite the ethical quandaries they pose. Contemporary cynicism makes well-crafted art like Black Mirror exceedingly salient, even cathartic, to watch.

I can’t put it better than a friend, who (ironically) messaged me via a social media platform to speculate, “Maybe it’s because society is so messed up already that I love seeing it decay through Black Mirror.” We are already living at the edge of hysteria—a show that is as smart as it is ruthless, Black Mirror shows us our proximity to the fall.

Pia Ceres

staff writer

Olivia Lord illustr ator

The Crazy Ones

James Feinberg staff writer

Megan Tresca illustr ator

Someone is playing a trick on David Haller (Dan Stevens), the lead of Noah Hawley’s new FX series Legion, which airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. It could be the sinister agents of the semi-governmental organization cryptically referred to as Division Three, who tell him he’s insane. It could be the kooky spiritual therapists at a woodland retreat called Summerland, who tell him he’s the world’s most powerful mutant and the key player in an upcoming, ill-defined war. But whoever’s the con man and whoever’s the stooge in this whole hazy setup don’t compare to the show’s writers, who easily bamboozle the viewer; the fun of watching Legion is the subconscious feeling you get that it might wind up sending you to an asylum yourself.

As you might expect, Legion is the latest installment in the ever-expanding X-Men universe, which, due to a torrent of copyright lawsuits that might be even harder to follow

Watching Legion on FX and Detroiters on Comedy Central. than the show itself, occupies a space unconnected to the gargantuan Marvel machine, and is on something of a roll right now—Deadpool, a good movie, has managed to convince a whole generation of filmgoers that it’s a great one, and Logan, the yetto-be-released final Hugh Jackman Wolverine picture, has fans chomping at the bit already. By far the greatest strength of the show, however, is that it pays no tribute to the long history of the franchise. Hawley, who is also the creator of FX’s Fargo, wrote the first two episodes and directed the pilot, establishing a visual style that’s the bastard child of Wes Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, and Darren Aronofsky, all in the service of that rarest of treats: a show so simultaneously low-key and high-stakes that it’s impossible to tell as of yet whether too much or too little is going on.

It’s hard to say how long Hawley can keep this up, but as of now the series is captivating—anchored by the entirely sympathetic presence of Stevens, of Downton Abbey, a chameleonic Brit who’s been too busy with the press tour for the live-action Beauty and the Beast to revel in his return to TV. Which is too bad—he effectively centers a characteristically Hawley-esque sprawling ensemble that includes the excellent Rachel Keller, the pleasantly surprising Hamish Linklater, and the off-the-deep-end Aubrey Plaza, who here forever shatters her typecast mumbling, nihilist persona. If some of the acting outside this central circle

is weak, it’s easy to ignore. The minute the show becomes unbelievable, there’s a hard cut to a ping-pong game lit like a disco, or a tank of undulating leeches, or, most often, a creature accurately known as the Devil with the Yellow Eyes. And you’re left wondering, “Am I crazy…?” As a utilitarian tool for questioning your own sanity, Legion outdoes anything reality TV has to offer. * * * If David Haller feels like the only crazy person in the world, he’d do well to visit the Detroit of Comedy Central’s Detroiters, Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m. As a tribute to the home city of its two leads, the rising star Sam Richardson and the former SNL cast member Tim Robinson, and as the portrait of a dysfunctional dependent friendship, it’s drawn immediate comparisons to Broad City, another Comedy Central show, that aren’t far off. But like on Broad City, where hijinks take pride of place over character, most of the plotlines in Detroiters are secondary—the show expertly cultivates that atmospheric warmth that normally doesn’t envelop a sitcom until a few seasons in.

Richardson, as Sam Duvet, lives next door to Tim Cramblin (Robinson), who’s married to Sam’s sister Chrissy (Shawntay Dalon), and their blended-family intimacy feels earned, perhaps because Robinson and Richardson are best friends in real life, much like Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of Broad City. (Amy Schumer and Jennifer Lawrence should be getting the call

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from Comedy Central any day now.)

Detroiters’ distinctiveness comes in the way it’s structured, right from the beginning, to play right to its stars’ strengths. As directors of a podunk advertising firm, specializing in clients like “Eddie Champagne, the Hot Tub King of Detroit,” Richardson and Robinson are such aggressive sad-sacks that feeling sorry for them feels beside the point. The possibility of their advancement is ridiculous. Of course they’re going to pass up the chance to buy a cheap production van to buy a tiny fire-engine-red motorcycle to ride together. Of course when they get the chance to pitch to the head of advertising at Chrysler (guest star and executive producer Jason Sudeikis), they’re going to hit him with their car. You expect that. It’s nothing new.

The viewer gets caught up, however, in the little tics and idiosyncrasies that probably make Richardson and Robinson themselves laugh—Robinson’s default expression of wide-eyed disbelief, Richardson’s totally unfounded suavity. Robinson is better here than he ever was on SNL (which is not a high bar), while Richardson is not quite as good as he is on Veep (which is). But generally it’s amazing to watch them wandering the streets of their Motor City to realize that everyone in this version of Detroit is just as endearingly nuts as they are. The show may not be challenging or original, but it’s easy and pretty consistently fun.

There are worse places to hang out on a Tuesday night.

Public Embarrassments Worse than the One that Happened at the Oscars 1 My Brown interview 2 When you wave and loudly say hello to someone who is unaware of your presence 3 All 920,329,310 GOP presidential debates 4 When you try really hard to open a salsa jar but you can’t open it so you pass it to someone else and they open it on the first try 5 One time I was at Atlanta Bread Company, which is kind of like Panera but with slightly softer bread and slightly more watery soup, I walked toward the counter to order and walked right into a sign (I was at a right angle to it, so I couldn’t see it) that hit my face right down the middle. I bounced off and stepped back, confused and hurt.

Of course, my first reaction was to look around and see if anyone saw. No one did, so I turned

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back, walked toward the counter, and hit the exact same sign with my face again. Good times.

The entire Crocs era Being mistaken for a minor at 22 When you have food on your cheek and no one tells you When a GIF is actually a Vine and everyone hears what you’re watching Throwing up at Jo’s

ve i t rea C to an o r nt er th I o int hard .” g ttin ion is litzer e “G fict Pu n a No ning win

“Readin gs? Ain’t nobody g for that. ot time Well, I g o t time for but I’m s that, till not g oing to d o it.”