Post- Sept. 22, 2016

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upfront

contents

editor's note I don’t know about you, but I’ve been going around all week doing (desperate) self-promotion in an effort to squeeze out other seniors in the race for a job. It’s not the worst thing to spend a lot of time thinking about your positive traits and running around telling everyone about them. But somehow, it leaves you feeling a little bit dirty. It’s a lot like applying to college, if you’ve done that recently.

So perhaps you should take me lightly when I say that we have a great issue for you this week. I greatly enjoyed reading through it. Give me a moment to persuade you.

We have such wonderful and odd topics as: The mysterious popularity of inflatable pool floats Steven Universe (a staff favorite here at Post-) Perspectives on Paxson (who has quite a bit to put up with)

And if you don’t like the issue, reach out to alicia_devos@brown.edu for a full refund.

Best,

upfront features 3 • here comes a thought

Lindsey Owen 4 • perspectives on paxton

Joshua Lu

lifestyle 5 • mid-july

Lily Meyersohn 5 • california dreaming

Grace Yoon 8 • the shape Ameer Malik

Yidi

arts & culture 6 • it started with a swan Annabelle Woodward 6 • the secret (and stylish) adversary Ananya Shah 7 • the truth doesn’t help you Anne-Marie Kommers

staff

Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Ryan Walsh Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin Managing Editor of Lifestyle Rebecca Ellis Arts & Culture Editors Joshua Lu Anne-Marie Kommers

we’re back!

Please email alicia_devos@brown.edu.

Features Editors Saanya Jain Claribel Wu

Serif Sheriffs Logan Dreher Kate Webb

Lifestyle Editors Claire Sapan Alicia DeVos

Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro

Creative Director Grace Yoon Copy Chiefs Alicia DeVos

Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Daniella Balarezo Tushar Bhargava Kalie Boyne Pia Ceres Katherine Chavez Rebecca Forman

Joseph Frankel Devika Girish Lucia Iglesias Ameer Malik Aubrey McDonough Caitlin Meuser Emma Murray Spencer Roth-Rose Chantal Marauta Ameer Malik Joshua Wartel Celina Sun Anany Shah Annabelle Woodward Alex Walsh

Jennifer Osborne Staff Illustrators Alice Cao Peter Herrara Jason Hu Beverly Johnson Jenice Kim Emma Margulies Michelle Ng Mary O’Connor Yoo Jin Shin

Cover Jenice Kim

features

3

here comes a thought how steven universe solved my problems in 11 minutes

LINDSEY OWEN contributing writer illustrator NATASHA SHARPE

“Take a moment to think of just Flexibility, love, and trust.”

It’s a Thursday night, Steven Universe night in my household, and my sister and I are sitting on our overstuffed couch, spring-loaded with anticipation.

This week, even after the credits roll, I find myself sitting in a stunned silence because a song from Steven Universe took every discomfort I’ve ever had, any adversity I’ve ever faced, and unraveled it for me, laying it back at my feet, resolved, in a perfect bow.

There is rarely a time when Steven isn’t brilliant. I could talk all day about how loving and inclusive this show is.

Rebecca Sugar—angel, queen, genius— created the show with the hopes that it could make everyone feel seen and heard and loved. In my mind, she is absolutely succeeding. Every week, with each new episode, I think: This is it, the peak, the pinnacle. This is as good as this show can get. There’s no topping this. And every week I’m wrong.

Recently, an episode of Steven called “Mindful Education” completely destroyed my preconceived notions of perfection. In one episode, the central characters learn to use mindfulness to cope with intrusive, anxious thoughts and how to let those thoughts go without ruminating on them. But before I get into it, a little background: Steven Universe centers around a rebel group of aliens known as the Crystal Gems who have fought for thousands of years to protect Earth from invading forces. The show chronicles their exploits as they raise 14-year-old Steven, a half-human, half-gem hybrid who is slowly discovering his powers.

Gems have the ability to fuse, a process in which two gems’ bodies merge to form an entirely new being, one whose personality is a literal manifestation of the relationship between the two fusers.

Fusions tend to be unstable, and if one member of the fusion falls out of balance, the two will separate. Steven and his friend Connie fuse into the genderfluid Stevonnie, and Garnet, a gem in a perpetual state of fusion, explains in “Mindful Education” how Stevonnie can maintain balance as a fusion.

In the song “Here Comes a Thought,” Garnet coaches Stevonnie as they deal with intrusive thoughts: “Here comes a thought that might alarm me What someone said and how it harmed me Something I did that failed to be charming Things that I said are suddenly swarming.”

What first struck me about these lyrics was just how seen they made me feel.

It cuts straight to the core of a problem that I’ve never had articulated for me before. We’ve all been raised with the idea that words can hurt, indoctrinated with the expectation that we should treat others the way we want to be treated. But the notion that our thoughts can hurt is rarely, if ever, acknowledged.

As students at a high-achieving institution, I think a lot of us tend to be ruminators, perfectionists. We let thoughts of our inadequacies pile and swarm, and as a result, we end up paralyzed in a stew of our own overwhelming fears. Or at least, that’s what happens to me. I first saw this episode a few weeks ago. The summer before my senior year was just about to end, and there were so many things I wanted to do. I wanted to produce out of the fear of being unproductive. I wanted to draw, write, and make music. I wanted to start my last year off caught in the throes of prolific inspiration because if I didn’t, what guarantee was there that my voice wouldn’t be lost

in the real world?

I had just come back from an internship in the entertainment industry, where I was discouraged not only by the incredibly narrow, manufactured paths that exist to break into such a career, but also by everyone’s seemingly endless flow of creative energy. It was expected that people work 10-hour days, then go home and work on their screenplays, their novels, their passion projects. I just couldn’t do it all. There was one day where I sat down with the intent to write a sitcom pilot. I wrote outside a Peet’s Coffee with the wrought-iron chair pressing pink diamonds into my thighs.

But the most productive I felt that day was when I taught an old French woman how to close the apps on her iPhone. I wrote about 10 pages, got discouraged, and haven’t looked at it since. I spent the rest of the summer going to work during the day and watching Netflix at night, all while feeling like I should be doing more, telling myself that the amount I could reasonably handle just wasn’t enough.

The more I thought like this, the more my thoughts stacked around me in an impending avalanche. When I saw Ruby and Sapphire, the fused components of Garnet, dealing with the same thing on Steven Universe, I suddenly felt an immense cathartic release. Part of me that never felt visible or even tangible before was now perfectly articulated onscreen. I felt as if something inside me, an ancient artifact, had been discovered.

I was no longer scared now that I could see what this something was, unearthed and held up to the light, and put a name and a feeling to it instead of a vague sense of unease. Sapphire experiences intrusive thoughts, visually represented as a swirling, enveloping vortex of butterflies. Ruby, conversely, zooms in on one butterfly, and fixates on it: “All these little things seem to matter so much.”

It’s hard to separate yourself from the details. The small things loom large in a college student’s eye, especially at this point in the semester. You don’t get into a class you wanted, or there’s a schedule conflict, and suddenly your future disintegrates. Now you won’t have time for that extracurricular, you won’t meet that requirement, and (gasp!) you won’t graduate. Every grad school will stamp your application with a big, red, “REJECTED,” and potential employers will be specifically instructed to laugh you out of the building.

This is where Garnet’s advice comes in…

“Take a moment, remind yourself To take a moment and find yourself Take a moment and ask yourself If this is how we fall apart.

But it’s not, but it’s not, but it’s not, but it’s not, but it’s not.

It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.

You’ve got nothing, got nothing, got nothing, got nothing to fear.

I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”

It’s okay to feel bad. It’s okay to have thoughts that make you uncomfortable.

You don’t have to let those thoughts make you scared.

It was such a relief for me to hear those words because really: what a concept! To a large extent, your thoughts are your reality. It doesn’t always feel like you have a lot of choice in how they affect you, but that mantra, “It’s okay,” did a lot of work for my sense of control.

You can cuddle up to that feeling of discomfort, like calluses on your fingertips, acknowledge it, and let it go. Because, after all, it’s just a thought, and “we can watch, we can watch, we can watch them go by / from here, from here, from here.”

4 features

perspectives on paxton brown and the upper east side

JOSHUA LU a&c section editor illustrator MICHELLE NG

This summer I had the pleasure of interning at Providence Media, which distributes four lifestyle magazines all over Rhode Island on a monthly basis.

Their content is centered around local lifestyle—new restaurants, small businesses, upcoming events, and interesting people are often the centerpieces of their articles—and is therefore catered toward the local people.

One day at work I was given the task of sifting through old editions of the magazines and organizing them into boxes—intern stuff, essentially. To my amusement, I discovered an old edition of East Side Monthly, a magazine centered on the east half of Providence and distributed to every residence in the area. Its cover proudly displays Christina Paxson, smiling somewhat awkwardly in front of one of Brown’s many nondescript brown brick buildings. The date is marked October 2012, and its tagline reads, “Brown’s New President Hits the Ground Running.”

The actual article begins, “Brown University’s 19th president, Christina Hull Paxson, seems to be the real deal.”

Paxson is described as “bright, charming and unpretentious” as well as “smart” and “likeable.” Her outlined goals as president include nothing about student well-being. Instead, she discusses expansion of Brown’s Medical School, Thayer Street renovations, and her plan to take a cooking class at Johnson and Wales, which they offer to her for free.

She claims to be “very mindful of our obligations to be a good neighbor to the community,” a central detail that gets paraphrased and repeated several times in the article.

East Side Monthly magazine is not targeted toward Brown students. Its intended audience is made up of residents who live around Brown and probably view the University as little more than a collection of buildings with strange inhabitants. Issues that Brown has faced in recent years—alcohol policies, sexual assault, Ray Kelly—are largely irrelevant to this audience. Indeed, although an article on Brown’s adjusted alcohol policies did appear in an edition of the magazine last April, it focused entirely on how this policy might force “party-hungry 20-year-olds to off-campus apartments the way people in the ’20s sought out illegal speakeasies.” In other words, the article was not concerned with the impact this policy would have on Brown; instead, it was concerned with the impact it would have on the community at large.

Brown University is in a bubble, which works to both the advantage and disadvantage of its students. From an academic perspective, Brown’s relative insularity allows its students to focus on complex ideas, with the eventual goal of coming up with unique solutions to a motley set of issues that the world faces today. This blessing also has downsides, however, one of which is often aimed at millennials: Insularity creates a limited

mindset that sometimes ignores “the real world,” whatever and wherever that is.

Paxson has faced a lot of criticism, at least some of which is warranted, from the student body she serves. It’s easy to forget, or perhaps ignore, the responsibility that she also has toward the community at large and the community that Brown students are not a part of, the community of Providence. The community’s attitude towards Paxson seems to have changed since the publication of that original article. For example, renovations of Thayer were met with strong consternation from both the magazine and from East Side residents when Brown proposed the demolition of seven “dilapidated but historic” buildings on Brook and Cushing Streets. A tempo-

rary parking lot would be constructed in their place, then perhaps a residential or academic building.

“I personally think that Brown has some mending to do within the community,” said local resident Hollybeth Runco in an East Side Monthly article on the renovations. Brown is a recurring target, and even the University’s most seemingly insignificant decisions sometimes result in outrage. Just this August, a reader wrote to the magazine to say she was “appalled to read… that Brown has given a lease to a national cookie store franchise” instead of supporting a local business. “Why would an institution that exists tax free not support the local community by inviting in a local business?” she wrote. She concluded her

letter rather incisively: “That was a fail.”

The student community here at Brown has given the University—and by association, Paxson—a fair deal of pressure and criticism over the years. As members of the University, it’s natural to care about how University policies affect us more than they affect the community. But it’s important to understand this perspective, to know that there’s this whole other community a five-minute walk from Faunce that’s also affected by Brown’s policies. Their criticisms rarely make it to the ears of Brown students, but it’s hard not to occasionally feel bad for Paxson, whose responsibilities include appeasing not only a volatile student body but also an East Side community that’s just as prone to outrage.

lifestyle

5

mid-july the longest summer solstice

LILY MEYERSOHN contributing writer illustrator YIDI WU

My father didn’t die of cancer this summer.

There was a moment, mid-July, when I thought he might, but I’ll tell you now that the oral cancer that arrived so suddenly in early July vanished by early August. Technically, the oncologists said it wasn’t sudden at all; the tumor invading my father’s mouth and lymph nodes had probably been growing for months, invisible. When they did notice, the doctors took swift action and planned the surgery within days.

So no, this summer wasn’t exactly dope. It wasn’t hype or tight or dank or wicked, or any of the other answers you’re supposed to give when asked about summer, with long-winded stories of people you met abroad and drunken adventures you shared. When I answer, my voice moves up a nervous octave. “It was okay!” I did meet people and I did have adventures. But my world shifted slightly–and yet, did not flip on its head as much as I might have expected–when my parents picked me up from my summer job in western Massachusetts. They came to break the news they had already been grappling with for a few weeks.

“We didn’t want to tell you over the phone.” “We didn’t want your brother to know before you.”

They waited with baited breath at home, scheduling doctors’ appointments and speaking in hushed tones, or so I imagine.

Eventually, my parents did come to Williamstown, and they did tell me, and for a time it all felt less like shared suffering than it did a celebration. Saturday night my parents took me out to my fanciest dinner of the summer and we laughed, genuinely, over veal schnitzel and sesame tuna and chamomile creme brulee (our favorite).

Afterwards, we stayed in a revitalized set of row houses called The Porches, in North Adams. In the middle of this depressed, industrial town, for 400 dollars a night we drank cold brew coffee in

the morning and slept on smooth white cotton and took a hot sauna and altogether pretended like my parents weren’t scared shitless of the uncertainty ahead. Even the cancer ‘reveal’ itself was too beautiful for the occasion: casually orchestrated but not contrived, how my father pulled up a wicker chair on the hill above the inn at sunset and how my parents held hands and cried but did not sob, so as not to scare me.

My parents are very much in love. They have been for 29 years, and the diagnosis made them stumble. They each only found their balance with one another, in their own private world. I glimpsed it when we drove on Sunday back to New York, where my brother didn’t know it but was waiting to be told the news. They played James Taylor in the station wagon and squeezed each other’s shoulders knowingly at Shower the People. In the backseat, I felt not much of anything besides annoyance at their sentimentality, and guilt for that annoyance. They seemed so affected. “We’re reevaluating our life goals,” they told me with solemn faces. Together, they had had time to process the threat of imminent mortality. My father didn’t look or even feel sick, so to me, he just wasn’t. The cancer would not make itself apparent until his neck was carved with a six inch scar, until his taste buds were destroyed by radiation, until his gums were burned, until his hair fell out from chemotherapy.

These were the images that frightened me, even more than the survival rates listed on the Oral Cancer Foundation’s website, which my parents warned me not to browse. These were the images that made me fear for my father and also for myself as I drove alone on Monday, taking the tight swerves of the Taconic back up north to my job. I sped through the entire three hour drive, anxious not to be alone and lonely, yet dreading

my interactions with summer friends, who I knew were just acquaintances.

I didn’t start to cry until I watched the car to my left veer off the road into the grassy median strip, a blurry scene in my side view mirror in the torrential downpour.

Now that I was crying, it was hard to distinguish what obscured my vision more, the tears or the rain. I kept driving, paralyzed in my seat.

I didn’t cry for long. In part, I didn’t have time to. Three weeks after that drive and two weeks after my father’s surgery, all of the pathologies and scans came back, and to everyone’s surprise, my father was cleared indefinitely. No radiation, no chemotherapy. Stage III oral cancer, gone. Hoorah! On the other end of the phone line, I sensed my mother’s frustration at my near-apathy to the news. Where were my tears of joy, my thanks to God? I never fully processed the fact that my father truly did have cancer, so the news that he was cured, at least for now, felt obvious, or even anticlimactic, like someone had just ended a joke in poor taste. As suddenly as my family began living with cancer, my father became a cancer survivor instead. We don’t use those exact words; he never battled, he never fought. He just had cancer, and now he doesn’t.

Summer is over; September has come; my father celebrated his 60th birthday on the 11th. Just

as we have since 2001, this year we again rejoiced in his life on a day usually marked in this country by death. The lisp from my father’s surgery has now nearly subsided, his stitches have fallen out, and his tongue has healed, like some strange, red earthworm severed at a playground. The long scar across his lymph nodes sits nestled, almost comfortably, in the folds of his softly wrinkled skin, framed by his new post-cancer beard, more salt than pepper. My father will continue to live his normal, otherwise healthy life, with dandruff and dry knees and slightly high cholesterol and the scar over the place where his appendix used to be and the hair that grows from his ears which my mother sometimes trims, but don’t tell anyone. And although the doctors never called this a medical miracle, my parents consider it their own. We are not religious Jews, but my mother tells me she still accepted a prayer from the old, withered nun that came by to offer some solace before my father’s surgery. I’m glad she took the prayer. If I were there, I would have taken it too.

california dreaming finding a new home on the west coast

GRACE YOON creative director illustrator CLARISSE ANGKASA

I wasn’t ready yet. I told myself that I would not fall in love again so soon.

But as I stood at the top of Battery Spencer, surrounded by the vast blueness of the sky and the water engulfing the land of San Francisco, there was no denying it.

Compared to the immenseness I was seeing, I felt helplessly infinitesimal. I was used to this.

In the sea of super intellectual, accomplished, and talented students back on campus, I’ve had my share of grappling with humility churned into inferiority, doubting my self-worth, and constantly feeling inadequate and insignificant.

But, unlike before, I now found solace in this familiar smallness: I was just one individual who could occupy so little within this breath of beauty that we’ve come to inhabit and call Earth. This is the law of nature.

Never have I felt more powerful and alive. It made my knees weak, and I could barely stand still from the adrenaline rushing through my body.

At first a stubborn New Yorker, I was hung up on making my way back before halfheart-

edly pursuing an internship in San Francisco instead. In hindsight, perhaps my low expectations set me up for a summer of wonder and appreciation.

I was astounded that something as simple as the newness of a place could be so potent.

Charmed by the warmth of the weather, the sunlight just grazing my skin, and the cool breeze playfully rustling my hair, I became less afraid and more willing and daring to venture.

Tracing the inclines of North Beach, observing the intricate design of houses in Alamo Square, I hungrily took in the contours and curvatures of the cityscape. Even after a full day at work, I still met friends for dinner and then climbed up the Bernal Heights for a breathtaking view of downtown glimmering against the dark, foggy night. Another day, I embarked on an hour-long walk from Legion of Honors, at the northwestern part of the city, to Baker Beach, just to get another view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“It’s just so nice here,” I would gush to colleagues, again and again, when they asked me how I was doing. It could be exhausting having the same questions — “How are you liking the city? How long are you going to be here?”

— thrust at you repeatedly as the newcomer.

It was hard for me to resist the smile creeping onto my face as I purred each time, telling ev-

eryone about my newfound romantic interest — “Yes, I found someplace new. Yes, I’m very in love.”

“Yes,” colleagues would nod, rhythmically, slightly hesitant. “But —” Here it was. San Francisco’s “but,” my colleague’s concession to the “uglier” side of San Francisco, despite all the beauty that the city seems to offer.

“— there’s just so many homeless people,” they would continue. “It makes sense, considering how the weather’s warm and nice enough for people to stay and sleep outside. Not that it makes you unsafe per se, but still uncomfortable anyway.”

As my colleagues suggested, San Francisco has an undeniable homeless crisis. There’s little policing done to care for the homeless, and the hospitals fail to properly care for the mentally ill, who are then prone to ending up on the streets instead. The city can’t keep up with the surge of the homeless, as well as the rise of property value.

My colleagues would complain, turning sideways as they faltered, and the conversation would end with an air of defeat, shrugging shoulders, “Oh well, what can you do.”

You would think this might be nothing new for someone who has spent years in major cities like New York and Providence. Yet, there

was something different about the homeless in San Francisco: many of them operate together, forming mini-communities across whole blocks, sprawled across subway stops or coffee shops.

The first time I walked into a coffee shop in San Francisco, I looked out the window and had a full view of a dozen people, unshaven and in ripped, disheveled clothes, conversing and sitting in circles along with their extremely skinny dogs. They were just minding their business, none of them ever coming inside nor stopping passersbys to solicit money. Yet, the juxtaposition of the well-dressed coffee shop patronizers, circled around the tables, and the huddled homeless, separated only by the thin wall of glass, was uncannily jarring.

I wonder what my next experience will be like, if I were to return to San Francisco. Because this summer was my first visit, I allowed myself to be swayed by the pretty parts of the city, which I’ll now miss and long for. But the next time I return, I know that, with the initial infatuation worn off, I cannot stay blind to the problems and challenges that the city faces. I wonder if I’ll be ready to see San Francisco for what it truly is, beneath its surface, and embrace both its charms and its flaws.

6

arts & culture

it started with a swan the inflatable pool toy craze

ANNABELLE WOODWARD staff writer illustrator RUTH HAN

Have you seen the shapes inflatable pool toys are taking these days? And the preteens that are posing with them? It seems like every zoo animal under the sun has been caricatured and set adrift in infinity pools across America. And not just real animals—fictional animals, too! Animals we wish were animals.

From Montauk to Miami, mythical creatures and pizza slices alike have occupied the shallow end — forever altering the way the 1% summer.

These pool toys first made their debut on Taylor Swift’s Instagram in July of 2015: a timeless shot of her and her then-boyfriend Calvin Harris surrounded by their swan-saddled supermodel pals. The caption? “Swan squad.”

And just like that, luxury inflatables quite literally “blew up.” They’ve since been endorsed by nearly every A-list celebrity with a good butt. That’s right. Alessandra Ambrosio, three Kardashians AND two Jenners. It’s kind of a big deal.

Initially, I was surprised by the novelty pool float’s popularity. Astounded, even.

$399 for a rubber duck roughly the size of a Smart Car? Think of all the Chipotle burritos one could buy with that cash.

But in a world where validation is measured in likes, luxury inflatable pool toys are in fact practical—necessary even—worth every cent of burritos foregone. Since value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, we have to consult the teenage girl’s hierarchy of wants. Instagram likes are pretty high on the short list, right up there with food, shelter, and cell service. What better excuse to debut that scandalous one piece than straddled across a nine-by-four foot pegasus?

Even more interesting is the brand that has cornered the upscale inflatable market.

FUNBOY: a Los Angeles company that describes itself as a “water obsessed, family creative collective working around the clock to bring you, the FUNBOY community, the very best of the float life.”

That’s right. The float life. What exactly does the float life entail? Leisure, I’m guessing, and the kind of effortless sexiness achieved only by off-duty runway models.

Listen to this product description: “Featuring sleek lines and a six foot base, FUNBOY redefines the white swan and luxury pool floats.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were talking about a Lexus. What was probably just the cannabis-inspired lightbulb moment of a couple of twenty-somethings has successfully taken Southampton by storm. By simply making pool toys that appeal to the elitist in all of us, FUNBOY has secured itself a spot on the list of glitzy summer must-haves, as essential as a Land Rover in the driveway.

So why should we, broke college students, care about luxury pool floats? If your parents are anything like mine, they’re keen on emailing you the links to articles about the hostile, competitive job market we face after graduation. Articles with titles like, “College Graduates Don’t Get Jobs Anymore,” and, “Ivy League Graduates Don’t get Jobs Either.”

If you’re like me, and you really like going out to eat, unemployment really isn’t an option. So why not try entrepreneurship?

“Create an app!” everyone says, but I

don’t know how to do that. It sounds scary and complicated. As FUNBOY’s success illustrates, there are far easier ways to take advantage of the frivolous American consumer.

Our great nation’s wealth disparity ensures that there will always be people with cash to spend on stupid stuff. Stuff like elephant tusks and iPhones for six-year-olds. So what’s stopping us from developing the next cool, virtually useless but aesthetically desirable product?

With the proceeds from my iglow-in-thedark bath towel, I could start an orphanage in Taiwan. I mean, that or buy up real estate that will support me while I struggle to buy groceries with the salary of my entry-level publication job (God willing).

So to the drawing board with you people!

Start thinking! What would be super nifty to have in my dorm room but has zero practical application? What is essentially inessential?

It could be anything. Except for a lava lamp. That’s been done. Also, a glow-in-thedark bath towel — patent pending. That is my intellectual property. Mine.

the secret (and stylish) adversary a review of BBC’s “the night manager”

ANANYA SHAH contributing writer illustrator KATIE CAFARO

Warning: Spoilers ahead Much to my parents’ chagrin, I spent the first three nights of our vacation in a Himalayan village watching AMC and BBC’s miniseries, “The Night Manager.”

While they sat outside, watching the stars (“You can actually see them when there’s no pollution!”), I was glued to my laptop, consuming the show based on John le Carré’s novel of the same name.

The six episodes present a world so stylized that I could be forgiven for not paying attention to the dazzling North Indian skyline.

The show opens with Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) making his way to the Queen Nefertiti, a posh Cairo hotel where he works as a night manager during the height of the Arab Spring. He is charismatic, confident, and calm— unfazed, he comforts distraught guests with ease during the shooting outside.

Later in the series, we learn that he is a British ex-soldier and that his father was also a soldier who died before the series began. Seemingly charmed by his genteel manner, Sophie Alekan (Aure Atika) gives him a document to copy. It is a list of weapons that Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), “the worst man in the world,” in

Alekan’s words, is supplying to the Hamid family. Sophie is Freddie Hamid’s mistress, and Hamid is the scion of the wealthy, corrupt family. Pine sends the document to a friend of his in the British intelligence, which leads Freddie Hamid to murder Alekan, but not before Pine and Alekan develop feelings for each other as Pine tries to help her escape. In a frantic last scene, Pine gets a call that she is in imminent danger. Pine rushes to her room, the Queen Nefertiti suite, only to find her corpse lying on the floor.

This becomes something of a recurrent nightmare for him—numerous scenes in the show feature her ashen body beseeching him to act.

Angela Burr (Olivia Coleman), of the International Enforcement Agency, recruits Pine to infiltrate Roper’s inner circle in an operation called “Limpet”. It turns out that she has been trying to nab him for years.

Pine and Roper’s relationship is one of the most intense in the show, although parts of it don’t quite ring true. In Majorca, Pine rescues Roper’s son from a kidnapping that is later revealed to be staged. Pine’s seemingly brave actions are enough to make the usually sceptical Roper trust Pine wholeheartedly. As I

watched them, the stage brimming with enigma and tension in Roper’s lush Majorca villa, I was reminded of Hugh Laurie’s character in “House,” who famously proclaims, “Everybody lies.” Laurie uses the same piercing, incisive gaze in this show, but unlike Dr. Gregory House, Roper does not succeed in doing an Xray search of Hiddleston’s character. I expected his probing scrutiny to yield some results, for him to suspect that Pine was indeed lying, but rather unrealistically, the truth only dawns on Roper when it is too late. Indeed, he goes as far as to tell Pike that he reminds Roper of himself, and to entrust him with a major chunk of his business. It seemed like a classic maneuver—the villain discovering a kindred spirit in the anti-hero stationed to take him down.

If Roper comes across as moderately naïve, Pine does appear to be the antihero. Even though he is opposed to Roper’s arms trade, he himself has a murky ethical sense, at best. He doesn’t show the slightest hint of remorse for murdering Major Corkoran (“Corky”) at the Syrian border when Corky threatens to blow his cover. However, to be fair, we don’t see very much of his private life or musings at all. The only clues we

have regarding his inner turmoil are the gruesome flashbacks of Sophie’s corpse.

In Majorca, we don’t see his composure, mask-like almost, slip even when he’s alone. Sometimes, he fiercely adopts his role to such an extent that even Limpet officials find it hard to trust him. Like Roper, the only insight we can glean is from his intense glances, but even that is not quite validated by his behavior. His enigma makes him seem less and less like a night manager, and more and more like a wounded spy. Indeed, after the show was aired, Hiddleston became a favorite to play James Bond in the newest interpretation of the series.

The show is different from the novel in a few key ways. (Fun fact: John le Carré appears for a split-second in a scene shot at a restaurant). The 1993 novel presents Roper as a rogue arms dealer who supplies weapons to a Colombian drug cartel. Instead, in the 2016 show, Roper’s arms make their way across Egypt, Turkey, and Syria.

In the book, we don’t have Angela Burr’s dogged character. We have Leonard Burr, an earnest, honest intelligence officer out to nab Roper. This transformation works, especially since Burr is pregnant in the show and plays a dif-

arts & culture

ferent role than the other women, such as Alekan and Jed (Elizabeth Debnicki), Roper’s American girlfriend with whom Pine has an affair. Even though Alekan and Jed play pivotal roles in the drama— Limpet would never have been conceived if not for Sophie and Jed—they serve primarily as the love interests of powerful men. They are both economically dependent on Hamid and Roper—Alekan changed her name from “Samira” to “Sophie” to appear more Western, while Jed supports her child with Roper’s money.

Burr’s character adds to the spectrum of women, as she is financially independent (her job is more demanding than her husband’s) and is not attracted to Pine.

Her pregnancy is also never portrayed as a hindrance—we see her single-handedly take down one of Roper’s henchmen.

The conclusion of the show is also different from that of the novel. In the novel, after Pine’s cover is blown, Burr sacrifices his operation to save Pine and is discredited by the other agents who worked with Roper. In the show, Burr and her colleagues blackmail these agents, who abandon Roper. I enjoyed the institutional breakdown of Roper’s empire, but since the agents working with him go scot free, I wondered how effective this conclusion was. I wished that there had been some sort of resolution for them in the dubious light of their activity in the chain, and I couldn’t help but find the legitimacy of the ending a bit questionable.

Given the option between an eternal Himalayan sky and this show again,

7

I would choose the skyline. The show was glamorous and depicts instances of amazing acting, but it isn’t perhaps as deep as I would have liked.

the truth doesn’t help you a review of the night of

ANNE-MARIE KOMMERS a&c section editor illustrator Julie Benbasset

There is a moment in the first episode of the HBO miniseries The Night Of when detective Dennis Box drives up to the crime scene in the dead of night. An accused murderer is waiting anxiously in the back of a squad car and a worried neighbor in a robe is sitting outside the victim’s front stoop. One of the police officers, having just emerged from the scene of the gruesome stabbing, is trying not to gag because “this is a nice neighborhood.” In the midst of all this horror, Detective Box drives up playing opera at top-volume in his car.

It is this kind of quirky detail that permeates each scene of The Night Of. Although the story revolves around a crime, critics have called it an “anti-procedural,” a series more akin to the in-depth analysis of Serial than the one-crimeper-episode formula of shows like Law and Order. Writers Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, the latter best known for penning the script for Schindler’s List, reveal the details of the crime into the first episode. The remaining seven episodes analyze the night in question and all of the characters involved.

The first episode also introduces us to Nasir Khan (Riz Ahmed), a studious business major with a soft voice and large, innocent brown eyes.

He is a shy kid with seemingly little exposure to wild college parties or girls. Characters later in the series sometimes refer to him as the “golden boy.”

Yet by the end of a rare night of partying, drugs, and sex with a stranger named Andrea, he wakes up to find his new lover stabbed to death in her bed. The next forty-odd minutes unfold in agonizing suspense: Naz is arrested, interrogated by Detective Box, and accused in what Box calls “the most open-and-shut case I’ve had in a long time.”

Islamophobia, a problem rarely portrayed

on television, is an important part of the series’ backstory. Naz’s parents are Pakistani immigrants, and incidents of casual racism pepper the storyline. Before the murder, a passing man taunts Naz, “Did you leave your bombs at home, Mustafa?” Meanwhile, the media sensationalizes Naz’s religion, and hate crimes against Pakistani cab drivers skyrocket. But as reviewer Lorraine Ali wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “While Islamophobia plays a role here, it’s the individual thoughts and actions of Khan, his family and his Jackson Heights neighborhood that make the characters rather than the social commentary central to the show’s success.”

Indeed, as much as I could write about the “social commentary” of the series, it’s really the complexity of the individual characters and their strange quirks that drew me into the story.

Riz Ahmed, a rising star popular for his roles in Nightcrawler (2014) and Jason Bourne (2016), is mesmerizing as Nasir Khan. He conveys most of his emotion through his eyes, quietly watching and dreading events as they unfold, and it is fascinating to watch him transform from a shy college kid to a hardened prisoner on Rikers Island.

Khan’s father and mother (Peyman Moaadi and Poorna Jagannathan) have comparatively little screen time, but deliver impressive performances as parents stretched thin by money and stress. Bill Camp plays Detective Box, an ambiguous character who spends much of his time trying to solve the case while his colleagues shoot the breeze or try to leave work early.

It is Stone (John Turturro) who leaves the most lasting impression in this series as Naz’s lawyer, a man who typically represents petty criminals and plasters the city with cheesy ads that promise, “No Fee Till You’re Free!” Stone has a

thick old-timey New York accent that, as the actor has said in interviews, probably doesn’t exist anymore, and he suffers from almost dramatically horrible eczema all over his feet that he frequently scratches in public with a chopstick.

Although many of the characters’ personal details are unrelated to the actual murder, they help create a believable world that does not revolve solely around a plot point. The best example is Stone’s eczema, to which the series devotes ample screen time. We see Stone scratch his feet in agony, visit doctors who prescribe medicines that never seem to work, and attend a support group for men with chronic skin conditions. This backstory provides comic relief, but it also heightens the drama of a climactic scene and reminds us that all the characters have their own lives independent of the murder trial. The series operates more like a sprawling novel than a formulaic TV show.

The night of the murder itself contains its own strange details: eerie images that recur in Naz’s flashbacks. These images are compelling not because they’re symbols for some grand theme, but because they create a visual experience for the viewer akin to the experience Naz may have had on the night of the murder. Our memories usually recall disjointed images from important events, not perfect film reels that replay the action in real time. Similarly, Naz’s flashbacks jump from the bloodied knife on the dimly-lit table in Andrea’s apartment, to the deer head by the staircase with its glassy eyes, to the city lights reflected off the river.

I will be re-watching The Night Of in the future. I know how the trial ends now, and without revealing the ending I can say that it has left me with an enduring feeling of sadness, relief, and

even love for the characters with whom I spent so much time. The series is so complex that I know I will gain further insights on repeated viewings, through the subtle expressions of characters and the small details that humanize them.

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lifestyle

topten

Professorisms

1. “as it turns out...”

2. “in point of fact...”

3. <blatant self-promotion> 4. “case in point” 5. *handsteepling* 6. “now i’m not an artist but...” *proceeds to butcher simple

Anyways...history always makes me horny.

So I guess you’re wondering why I’m trying to guess who’s menstruating You look like you would be really cool... if this were 2006 I’m really attracted to you.. and you’re not that attractive I sexually identify as a crowbar

“

hot post time machine

“

This green tea will make you poop until you look like me.

illustration” 7. “please do try to arrive on time” 8. “comments? questions? concerns?

9. “...okay. anyone else?” (in response to nonsense answer) 10. *arthritically gestures with laser pointer *

For me, just one glance at that 6 foot, naked Food-Bearer and I remember that some things are larger than schoolwork.

bear naked • 4/30/10

the shape a fable

AMEER MALIK staff writer illustrator KAY LIANG

The great oak tree walked toward Michael, wrapped its long, thick roots around him, and pinned him to the ground. Thin roots slid into his throat. They crept out of his nostrils, ears, and eye sockets.

Everything burned, as if the tree were made of fire.

He thought the tree was bending down toward him to tell him something. He thought he could hear a voice in his head, deep and full: Are you the planter? Where is the planter? The tree shook its branches wildly. The voice sounded again: Are you the one who made me? Who abandoned me?

Michael looked past the tree at the reddish sky of dusk above. Stars flashed into bright yellow lights before disappearing, like candles being extinguished.

Then the roots clawed his throat. He coughed and gagged, convulsed, vomited on himself. His eyes squeezed shut, he cried.

When he opened his eyes, the tree was gone.

The stars were back. Michael was alone, lying on the ground. *** That was not the first vision. It was not the last.

When it began, Michael witnessed the beings of the natural world trying to kill him. Bats. Sparrows. Earthworms. They all tried to destroy him.

Sometimes he heard a voice accusing him of some misdeed or evil.

He tried to stay in the human-made realm, with its stacked concrete, glass walls, and molded metal, in the hope that his visions would stop and his life would be spared. But it continued. Once,

a streetlight twisted around him and shone so hotly in his face, he thought his skin was melting off. Once, a crack in the sidewalk burst wide open under his feet, sending him into a dark abyss.

He thought he would be able to bear with his visions, but they became too much for him, so he stayed inside. Afraid of the objects that filled his house, the bookshelves and the silverware, the tables and the lamps, Michael retreated into the basement, where there was nothing but white walls, a gray carpet, a pantry with boxes and cans of food, and the simple wooden staircase that led upstairs. He put up with the pantry, for he needed sustenance. He had his can opener with him. He was thankful it never tried to kill him. *** One night, after his dinner of cold tomato soup and dry pasta, Michael lay on the floor and pondered: Was the crisis in his mind, or in the world around him? It felt too great to fit inside him alone.

He mused. Everything that had wanted to kill him had accused him of evils that he had never done. Perhaps the beings and objects who wanted him dead were mistaken. Perhaps they had confused him for someone else, someone who had come before him and done evil, and he was now being punished for those deeds.

When he drifted into sleep, he saw a shape of a person. It could have been anyone; he couldn’t see who it was. He saw the shape walk through the city. The trees, animals, street signs, and park benches attacked it. But everything that the shape touched disintegrated.

Upon waking, Michael shivered. He won-

dered if the one who had come before him and done wrong would return. Could this person even be punished? Or would this person destroy everything? *** Michael’s terror of the world and of the return of the one who had come before him was so heavy, he could not rise from the floor. He stayed there for days. He told himself that if everything might be annihilated, then there was no reason to leave the ground. But, in truth, he did not want to die like this, frozen in fear. Hoping to ease his pangs of hunger, he dragged himself toward the pantry door. When he was inches away, he was shocked by a sudden sound, and he curled into a ball to defend himself.

Minutes passed. He was so hungry. He was not sure if he was safe, but he reached for the door and opened it. Everything inside the pantry was still. *** The food in the pantry ran out. Michael began to starve. The pain was so hard to bear that, despite his fear, he resolved to search for any food that could be salvaged. He crawled up the stairs and into the kitchen.

He thought he sensed a presence there. Something that he did not understand compelled him to stand up.

It was hard to see, the house was so dark. The red glow of the setting sun seeped in between the blinds, and his eyes made out the shape of a person.

His heart stopped for a moment. Was this the end? The shape neared, and Michael could not move. His head throbbed. Even when the shape was in front of him, he could not see who it was.

The shape raised a hand, pushed it into Michael’s chest, and pulled out his heart. Michael felt a wave of heat pass in and out of him. The shape crushed Michael’s heart into pulp before walking away.

Michael dropped to the ground, landing on his back. Blood poured out of him, made his chest and arms sticky. His body was still. He thought he could feel his breath leaving him. He closed his eyes as he lay on the floor of his basement.