April 16, 2021

The Huntington News April 16, 2021

The independent student newspaper of the Northeastern community

@HuntNewsNU

NU community organizes to alleviate food insecurity Illustration by Devin Raynor

By Marta Hill | Campus Editor When Northeastern Mutual Aid first started hosting weekly food pantries last fall, they only saw 30 to 40 people a week. Now, around 200 people from the Northeastern community come to the pop-up pantry a week, with an all-time high of more than 350 people last week according to data collected by Mutual Aid. “You can’t [focus on studying] if your basic needs aren’t covered,” said Harrison Garcia, a third-year double major in cell and molecular biology and business administration and a coordinator for NU Mutual Aid, a student organization that works to counteract food insecurity.

Though NU Mutual Aid, or Mutual Aid, doesn’t just address food insecurity, a lot of their work centers on providing good, healthy food to the Northeastern community.

Garcia said the increase in participation in their pop-up pantries indicates that the issue of food insecurity isn’t going anywhere and has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Food insecurity is defined as the “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate or safe food” by The Hope Center, a research center focused on college students.

According to a 2019 report, approximately 41% of students at four-year institutions experience food insecurity.

Northeastern students living in first-year residence halls are required to purchase a seven-, 12- or 17-mealper-week plan, and meals do not roll over from week-to-week. The average price of meal plans across the country is $2,250 per semester, but Northeastern’s cheapest meal plan, with only seven meals-per-week, costs $2,330 per semester.

The unlimited meal plan at Northeastern costs $4,245 per semester, while Boston University’s unlimited plan costs $3,100 a semester, or $6,200 per year.

Many students and organizations are looking at food insecurity on campus, and Garcia was involved in

running one survey of Northeastern students regarding food insecurity last semester.

“We found that a little bit over half of all students at Northeastern did not always have enough money for food each week, so that is very concerning,” Garcia said.

Alysa Gerlach, vice president and assistant treasurer of finance, who oversees dining at Northeastern, said she can’t work to make changes without having concrete, achievable ideas people want to see.

“I’ve been overseeing dining now for a year and a half, and, in that time frame, I have asked this question multiple times from my colleagues in student affairs, other students when I get an opportunity and nobody can really tell me what is it that you want versus what is it that we have,” Gerlach said.

The recent Student Priority Survey run by Student Government Association, or SGA, and the Center for Student Involvement featured several questions regarding food insecurity. Out of 1225 respondents, 948 people, or 77.39%, indicated that they had cut the size of their meals or skipped meals because they didn’t have enough money.

Another question asked if students would use a food pantry if it were available on campus and they did not have sufficient resources, and the response was overwhelming — 87.76% or 1075 respondents indicated that a food pantry would be a useful resource if they were ever in need of food.

How students are tackling the issue Joshua Sisman, the communications director for Young Democratic Socialists of America, or YDSA, co-sponsored a referendum that addresses food insecurity on campus, proposing changes to make meal plans more affordable for students.

The referendum aims to address the higher-than-aver-

age price of Northeastern’s meal plan. It proposed a plan where Northeastern guarantees three meals a day for students at a rate of at least 24% less than current plans.

“I regret not writing the referendum to say ‘guarantee students a meal plan for free,’” said Sisman, a second-year political science and economics combined major. “When we were talking about drafting the referenda, we were trying to be as bold as possible also considering what was feasible and what we had the most evidence and precedents to base our referendum off of.”

The referendum went before SGA in early 2021 and then was on the ballot for all students to vote on in late March. It passed with 3,988 votes, or 86% of the vote.

Ioanna Ploumi, who co-sponsored the referendum, said attending Northeastern and living in Boston is already expensive, so cutting costs in places like the meal plan would make Northeastern more accessible.

“The goal, of course, is eliminating food insecurity on campus and again, it’s an issue of diversity and inclusion — we want to make sure that the university’s as accessible as possible,” said Ploumi, a second-year biology and political science combined major.

While the referendum was being debated in SGA, second-year mechanical engineering and political science double major Sebastian Chavéz expressed his reservations with the referendum. As part of his job as vice president for student services, Chavéz coordinates the Food Advisory Board, a group open to all students that meets monthly with staff members from dining to discuss topics related to dining at Northeastern.

Chavéz said he feels the Northeastern community needs to address food insecurity, but that the solution proposed by the referendum is not feasible.

“The difficulty for me comes with knowing that there is such an issue on our campus, and knowing that this issue does exist, and knowing that many faculty FOOD, on Page 2

International student-athletes navigate the American athletic dream

By Mihiro Shimano Sports Editor For Swedish senior swimmer Matilda Weiler, it was an easy choice to decide to pursue swimming in college in the United States. From the get-go, she was enrolled in an athletic high school in her hometown of Helsingborg, Sweden, where she trained and competed on the national level. All of this led up to Weiler

transitioning to collegiate swimming in the United States, since there are no college athletics in Swedish universities.

“Swimming in America has always been a dream,” Weiler said.

There are many athletes like Weiler who envision coming to the United States to play at the collegiate level — for many, it serves as a pipeline to professionally pursue their sport in the future. The number of interna-

tional students who seek this opportunity is growing every year.

In 2018, NCAA Research found that international student-athletes made up 12.1% of all first-year Division I student-athletes, compared to 9.5% in 2013, just five years before.

Northeastern University currently has approximately 100 international student-athletes, which constitutes 20-22% of the entire program, said associate assistant director for com-

munications Scott MacDonald.

“We love having international student-athletes,” said Regina Sullivan, Northeastern’s deputy athletics director. “It adds an element of diversity, and it adds a breadth and depth to the experience. The choice they make [to come to the United States] is intentional, so they tend to be very committed in the classroom and other ways.”

For Weiler, Northeastern and its

education was also an important factor in deciding to pursue swimming in the United States.

“It helped me to know what I wanted to focus on because for me, the actual school has always been important to me as well,” she said. “It was important to find a school where I can thrive academically as well as in athletics.”

Other Northeastern international student-athletes have also echoed INTERNATIONAL, on Page 5

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Photo by Harriet Rovniak Mutual Aid recently opened a community fridge at 70 Saint Stephen St.

Students advocate for accessible food FOOD, from front members and administration members don’t necessarily think it’s as big of an issue as it is, but I’m also trying to balance that with the knowledge of how the dining program runs,” Chávez said.

Chavéz said he was originally unsure if the referendum was viable because of how large a change it proposed and the price of maintaining the current system, but after recent conversations with Maureen Timmons, the director of dining services, he thinks it may be possible. The changes would not be immediate but could come further down the road.

Passing referenda through SGA isn’t the only way students are advocating to address food insecurity at Northeastern — Mutual Aid is also doing its part.

The club’s mission statement lays out its goals of “determining the most effective ways mutual aid can serve Northeastern’s population” and working with all members of the community to meet others’ needs.

A large part of the work Mutual Aid has done this year is hosting weekly food pantries and running a community fridge at 70 Saint Stephen St. Garcia, a coordinator for Mutual Aid, has been involved with the food pantries since last fall and helped foster Mutual Aid’s relationship with Fair Foods, a local company that collects and distributes food that would otherwise end up in landfills.

“Obviously if we were able to feed the world, that would be great, but obviously we can’t, so we’re trying to work with Dining Services and YDSA and all these other organizations that correspond to these referenda and are trying to have Northeastern leverage their existing food infrastructure to

feed people on campus,” Garcia said.

Garcia’s work with Fair Foods and Mutual Aid has turned into a self-developed co-op for him. Now, in exchange for his labor, Garcia said Fair Foods provides Mutual Aid with “really good fresh, healthy, sometimes organic produce every week.”

“We have received positive remarks from the administration.

We’ve tried working with them and meeting with them and presenting what we do and the results of our work to them. … there are a lot of individuals who want to come together and get a more sustainable kind of food pantry thing going,” Garcia said.

Northeastern Dining’s perspective In response to these initiatives, Gerlach said Northeastern Dining is open to making changes to the system — they just need to know what direction to go in.

“I need to know what my product is, so I can figure out how to make it work within the structure of the organization,” Gerlach said. “It is not an impossible thing to do; I can say that very honestly.”

Starting as soon as this summer, Gerlach hopes to launch a survey asking students what they want from dining.

“We are really trying to make sure we gather all information and look toward the fall,” Gerlach said. “We have started conversations about how [we can get] student voices early and loudly around meal plan choice and meal plan structures.”

Northeastern is engaging Chartwells, a company focused on dining at colleges and universities, to survey students using the Onsite Insights, or OSI, program. Participants will begin being surveyed in the last few weeks

of the semester and the information learned will be used to inform decisions in dining.

Gerlach said over 300 universities have already gone through the process of surveying and adapting, and Northeastern is approaching it from “a market demand and a student demand perspective.”

“If we find our target, our students … we will have quite a few voices that are able to contribute to it,” Gerlach said. “We might not be able to incorporate all of those thoughts for fall specifically because of just ... all that administrivia in the background.”

Chávez said he thinks “food insecurity is a huge issue,” and the Northeastern community needs to tackle it. He has reservations about the referendum but still thinks there are ways to make change. “[The referendum] ideally is a great solution, but I think we should focus our efforts elsewhere if we want to tackle food insecurity because I know how big of a hurdle this particular path would be,” Chávez said.

“There would need to be a monumental shift to the dining program at the university if anything even near this were to come close to fruition.”

Future steps Chávez, who works with both student organizations and administrators, said he hopes the support he has seen from administrators will help make a sizable change at Northeastern.

He said the work Mutual Aid has done over the past year has helped show administration that food pantries are feasible, and though he doesn’t want to get his “hopes up too high,” he thinks seeing more permanent food pantries on campus is “looking pretty likely.”

Garcia said the goal for Mutual Aid is to make it so that nobody worries about where to get their next meal.

Even if that is not feasible, he said any change they can make is worth it.

“We have so much in this country — we’re one of the richest countries

Forty-one percent of people in four-year institutions will face food insecurity at some point, and that’s disproportionately lower-income students. If you’re hungry in class, you’re not going to do as well. It’s as simple as that.

— Joshua Sisman communications director for Young Democratic Socialists of America

in the world, but we waste so much, and we don’t help each other,” Garcia said. “We can’t feed everybody, so we all do what we can.”

While Mutual Aid continues holding food pantries, the referendum is moving into its next stage: the Northeastern administration.

Passing with such a large margin is helpful for the organizations backing the referendum, as it shows the large amount of student support. As elections vice chair for SGA, Ploumi said referenda that have been passed by students in previous years are usually dismissed by the university.

“In the past years, there’ve been very few referenda that have been implemented. … Something like this would require external pressure to actually get implemented,” Ploumi said.

Both the organizations behind the referendum and Mutual Aid are always looking for more students to be involved.

“It’s never too late to get involved, and everything that anybody does is important,” Garcia said. “With Mutual Aid as a concept, we all come together — all of our contributions are equally important. I couldn’t help lead the food stuff if it wasn’t for everybody else helping out in marketing and talking to the university officials and getting stuff done.”

Ultimately, initiatives like Mutual Aid and the meal plan referendum are seeking to address the same issue of food insecurity, just through different means.

“Forty-one percent of people in four-year institutions will face food insecurity at some point, and that’s disproportionately lower-income students,” Sisman said. “If you’re hungry in class, you’re not going to do as well. It’s as simple as that.”

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NU HEAT proposes solar charging initiative

By Jessica Silverman News Staff As the weather warms up and more students opt to take their remote classes outside, the Husky Environmental Action Team, or HEAT, noticed an issue — the lack of phone and laptop chargers located outside.

To fix the problem, second-years Madison McDermott and Emily Wallace teamed up on a project that would be both effective and environmentally friendly; they launched an initiative aimed at creating solar-powered charging stations.

“We realized there should be a way to charge your phone when you’re sitting outside at Centennial or one of the other green spaces on campus,” said McDermott, a politics, philosophy and economics major. “Northeastern lacks a lot of renewable energy, and we have little to no solar on campus, so we thought the solar panel picnic tables would be a great way to bring that renewable energy focus and make the campus more aware that this is something that we really need.”

McDermott and Wallace identified the lack of innovative approaches to charging on other campuses nationwide as well, so it was important that their proposal utilized renewable energy sources.

“When we were touring other universities two years ago, they had forms of outdoor charging in terms of large extension cords from the buildings. We wanted to provide a more sustainable and clean energy option that didn’t rely on extension cords or power from the buildings,” said Wallace, an environmental and sustainability sciences major.

The chargers convert energy from

the sun into electrical energy. From there, as opposed to charging the battery within the device, this energy is used to charge an internal rechargeable battery. This energy then charges the device so that an external power source isn’t required. Extension cords that come from buildings require more energy, which is ultimately more costly and less sustainable.

Their project consists of four recommendations to the university for solar-powered charging stations, including two solar benches, one picnic table with an umbrella and one without. McDermott and Wallace started research on the project during the first week of the spring semester.

They found comparable setups on campuses nationwide, communicated with sales representatives regarding prices and met with the university’s Office of Sustainability.

HEAT is collaborating with the Student Government Association’s, or SGA’s, Sustainability Board to finalize details before the proposal is presented to Northeastern’s administration. Wallace and McDermott are hoping to utilize SGA’s Renewable Energy Fund as a source of funding for the project. SGA’s Vice President of Sustainability Frank Mastroianni is excited to support the project by helping to secure funding.

“When it comes to SGA, people should know that we’re here to guide student ingenuity,” said Mastroianni, a second-year criminal justice and political science combined major. “I think our campus is a really creative, really passionate group of people, and I think that the purpose of this fund in my head is a grassroots fund for sustainable projects. … I think this is one of the best projects that

can happen on our end.”

Currently, the Renewable Energy Fund is powered by student donations through NUPay on the myNortheastern portal, but SGA is looking to change that so that donations can come from anyone, including those outside the Northeastern student body. The board that dictates the allocation of funding cannot approve spending more than 20% of its budget on any one project, so McDermott and Wallace must ask for additional university funding.

McDermott and Wallace have struggled to find sources to fund the expensive machinery, and they are hoping the university grants them money for the project. McDermott and Wallace estimate the project will cost about $10,000 for each bench.

“I think one of the challenges we faced is that there isn’t a formal process for student projects to undergo.

We’ve definitely had to reach out to different sources and see who would meet with us to get the word out there,” McDermott said. “We also are having challenges with funding. This is going to be an extensive project.

Although it will be super useful and

beneficial for the campus, it also costs lots of money to get this extensive machinery.”

While the proposal is still in its draft stages, it is endorsed by numerous on-campus organizations including NU Cruelty Free, NU Impact, NU College Democrats and the Roosevelt Network. These groups are helping McDermott and Wallace spread the word to students while also providing feedback on which of the solar chargers should be purchased.

Mastroianni believes the university would be receptive to following through on this project.

“I think if [McDermott and Wallace] can demonstrate that there is student interest in it — which I know there is, we’ve demonstrated this through numbers — that’ll be a huge plus,” he said. “I also think it’s a really cool project. … For example, if the school showed off, ‘Oh we have a solar powered bench here because some students thought of it and we built it,’ it shows a good relationship between the school and its students.”

Wallace and McDermott hope to finalize their proposal soon so the benches can be purchased over the

summer and ready for use by the fall semester. They believe their project will help the university meet its sustainability goals.

“I think something that’s really important to us is that everyone realizes how important renewable energy is,” McDermott said. “Northeastern’s campus has this huge commitment to sustainability, which they complete through many different endeavors, but they have so far not really committed to renewable energy. This will be a start and a talking piece for the Northeastern community to start talking about why we need renewable energy on campus.”

Once they finish this project, Wallace and McDermott are looking to further expand Northeastern’s sustainability efforts.

“It’s important to note that this is only phase one of what we want to do,” Wallace said. “There’s been a lot of proposals to Northeastern for solar panels on top of our buildings, and they haven’t been approved or denied yet, so there’s definitely a need for student push on that angle. … This is only phase one and we’re excited to keep going with this.”

Photo courtesy Emily Wallace and Madison McDermott Husky Environmental Action Team, or HEAT, is launching an initiative with the goal of creating solar-powered charging stations on campus.

NU professor highlights global COVID-19 data in online interactive dashboard

By Sarah Barber News Staff COVID-19 has undeniably overtaken the world in the last year, but infectious disease specialists knew this would be the case. Back in the early months of 2020, a team of data scientists and disease specialists began cultivating a list of every case worldwide.

Last year, a Google Sheet of approximately 80,000 international active COVID-19 cases was updated. As of February, that data has transformed into a fully functional, free internet database that consolidates information regarding global disease outbreaks under the name ‘Global.health’.

The database is a condensed list of all coronavirus cases on record since the initial outbreak in January 2020.

Global.health’s team is hoping that by having the information be completely open to public access, anyone can use the data to develop new disease response information and initiatives.

The website features an interactive map and a data dictionary, as well as a comprehensive list of cases, its outcomes and anonymized patient data.

Sam Scarpino, an assistant professor at Northeastern specializing in marine and environmental science, was one of the co-founders of this data initiative.

Scarpino, whose doctorate degree involved infectious disease modeling and public health decision-making, was involved in planning for Northeastern’s reopening last fall.

“At the end of last January, there was a group of researchers who were just manually entering COVID-19 case records as they got reported.

So, there would be a news alert that somebody had tested positive in Japan, and we would capture that information on a Google spreadsheet.

By about this time last year, we were running up against the limit of the size of a Google spreadsheet, which, in our case, is about 80,000 [datapoints],” Scarpino said.

In the beginning stages, once Global.health had transitioned out of just working on a spreadsheet, Scarpino described it as an early- to mid-stage technology startup with many different people gathering information about how the public would interact with the published data.

“That information then fed into the design descriptions of the software tool that we were going to build, which then feeds into the engineering teams who actually figure out how to build it and then make it,” Scarpino said.

The platform can be accessed completely freely by the public, providing

data for any and all who may find it beneficial. Scarpino said this data will be helpful even after the pandemic. “[Monitoring for flare ups] is a lot harder to do from a surveillance perspective because, right now, if somebody has a respiratory infection, chances are still pretty good that it’s COVID,” Scarpino said. “But hopefully coming into the fall, things will be a bit more normal, and, if somebody has an upper respiratory infection, it could be one of many different things.”

Scarpino began as a volunteer, before eventually becoming one of the official co-founders. He worked in collaboration with product designers, researchers and data analysts, as well as 15 Google employees whose role was specifically crafting the software.

Scarpino collaborated with project lead Joe Brilliant throughout the development of Global.health.

Brilliant, who worked with Scarpino in previous years on other start-up projects, was responsible for bringing him onto the project.

“I learned a lot from him, and I think he’s only grown. His skillset, like a lot of epidemiologists and people in his field, became really critical in the pandemic just to help decision-makers understand what was going on,” Brilliant said. “What

he’s so great at is communicating, [he was] working with reporters, through his own channels on Twitter and other partnerships to help contextualize it and make sense of a very complex, challenging, fast moving, ever-changing problem.”

Another individual who worked closely with Scarpino on both Global.health and projects in the past is Robel Kassa, whose background is in computer science. Kassa worked on data visualization for Global. health during development but has since moved on to other projects.

Throughout this year, he’s also done contract work on Northeastern’s COVID-19 reopening plan.

“Sam sort of has been my gateway into all these amazing projects that I love, [and] that I’ve been lucky enough to work on,” Kassa said.

Kassa’s role as a software engineer for Global.health allowed him to work on many different portions of the project.

“My main focus was building out the online presence or the marketing website. So, when you go to Global. health, what you see there in terms of presentation and functionality, that was something I collaborated on with the design team at Google Earth,” Kassa said. “When the marketing website and all my personal stuff was

sort of getting tied up, I moved on to supporting the map visualization part of global health.”

Kassa initially struggled to process such a large collection of data. He said that the initiative was “overwhelming at first.”

“I couldn’t even get my head around the fact that there’s a chance that there’s going to be more than 20 million rows of individual lined data,” he said. “That was an incredible amount of data, and it took a lot of work. It was definitely designed to challenge [us], in terms of what’s the best way that all of this [information] can function in your browser and not kill you.”

Now that Global.health has launched, Scarpino, Brilliant, Kassa and their team are trying to plan for the project’s next steps.

“The surveillance systems that we’re building, [and] the data we’re capturing are going to become increasingly important as we go back down toward lower levels of COVID-19 transmission, and we need really fine grained detail and carefully curated data to help guide the response and avoid additional lockdowns,” Scarpino said. “We’re also interested in Global.health software tools being used by ministries of health globally as a part of a rapid outbreak response.”

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April 16, 2021

College newspapers aim for inclusivity

By Milton Posner News Correspondent

community,” he said. “I have friends and family who have gone through [mental health challenges]. So being able to make it personal makes an audience member or someone viewing it feel like they can connect to it. When you hear the raw emotion from the person I’m interviewing, you can tell that this is serious.”

Torres is not the only one with a personal connection to some of his work. Edmonds recently penned an op-ed titled “Listen to Black Voices” where she discussed the weight of historical and enduring racism on Black people, the experience of being Black in unfamiliar — and even hostile — spaces and the need for deliberate listening to, and action on behalf of, Black people. It’s that need to elevate voices that she said she wants to emphasize in her paper’s coverage.

“When you are interviewing a source who is just putting their input on [the topic], but it doesn’t actually affect them, that’s an ineffective story,” she said. “You’re not amplifying the right voices.”

Edmonds also said that while it’s easy for reporters to interview people who look and think like them, she’s told her editors to ensure that writers “are finding diverse sources and pitching diverse stories.” She also wants to empower her journalists to tell their own stories and the stories of their communities.

“If there’s ever a situation or topic where a reporter feels really connected to that subject and wants to write about it, I want to support them in that,” she said. “That’s how it should be, because those are the people who know how to do it properly and can actually connect with it. ... If they aren’t given the chance to report on that, you lose out on the value they bring to that reporting, because that is their lived experience and they will get

those things correct.”

Relying on student journalists of color in this way is often difficult when the ranks of these papers are as white as they are. Part of this problem is beyond the capacity of student papers to solve, as they don’t have much sway over the demographics of the student bodies they draw from.

Student journalists also experience barriers that are microcosms of issues in the wider industry. For instance, much has been written about how unpaid internships — which are often gateways to quality, paying journalism jobs — are accessible only to those who can afford to work for months without pay. Since young white people comprise a disproportionate number of such people, it affords them an advantage in the job search.

At student-run papers, unpaid editors often put in a full-time job’s worth of time every week. Edmonds estimated that The Daily Free Press editors log about 45 to 50 hours per week and said this time commitment makes their paper (and those like it) less accessible to students who already work paid jobs — disproportionately students of color.

“There’s this culture where journalists pride themselves on that, almost like, ‘Oh, we don’t need the money, we can have free internships, you can do this because it’s so rewarding,’” she said. “But that mindset just continues to perpetuate the issues that we already have because working for such little wages is really not attainable for everyone. You can do that if you have a safety net, if there’s someone who can support you financially.”

Edmonds said that, while she was fortunate enough to be able to commit to her editor-in-chief workload over her former job, she knows not everyone has that luxury and that it’s hard to balance the paper’s need to publish with its need to support people who

have to work elsewhere for pay.

“I’ve tried to do my best to communicate and have my section editors communicate with me and just be flexible with that,” she said. “If you have work and can’t come to an editorial meeting, that’s fine; I’m not going to punish you for that. If you have work and have to start editing later, that’s fine.”

For Torres, who made a point to amplify Black students’ voices this past year in addition to his Latinx-related work, there is another solution he wishes papers would try to amplify different voices. He said he passes by several journalism schools on his commute to Suffolk University from his home in Allston-Brighton, and he’d like them to be more connected.

“If we really want to get stories out there and do great investigative reporting or more in-depth reporting, we should be working with other schools to break better stories and share more perspective,” he said. “Being in Boston, being [in] the capital of Massachusetts, being near the state house, being near city hall, we have a responsibility to make sure we’re amplifying the voices of our people and making sure they have a platform.”

For Edmonds, it’s about creating and sustaining a newsroom culture that’s inviting to student journalists of color.

“What I can do is create an environment that is supportive and inclusive and train my successor to do the same, and then their successor will do the same. So it’s going to be slow change,” she said. “It starts with the board of directors saying, ‘We’re going to make a diversity and inclusion chair, and then we’re going to make a commitment to that and to equity. ... Individually, we can still make an impact and say, ‘I’m going to talk about this. We’re going to bring this up, and we’re going to do something to fix it.’”

Illustration by Ashley Mandel

On Feb. 9, a sophomore English student at Boston University took over the school’s Instagram account for what seemed like an ordinary student feature. But when he received a racist comment mocking his Asian heritage, it became a very different story.

After the incident, the featured student used his personal Instagram account to call out the comment and draw attention to the recent rise in anti-Asian sentiment and hate crimes around the world. The school’s independent student-run newspaper, The Daily Free Press, published a piece on the incident which highlighted wider trends of anti-Asian racism; the reporter, an Asian student journalist and associate editor named Vanessa Bartlett, spoke to several other Asian students about their experiences. For Colbi Edmonds, a sophomore journalism and political science double major and the paper’s editor-in-chief, it was a prized kind of coverage.

“It’s stories like those [where] it’s just really, really important to have people who have that shared experience,” said Edmonds, who is Black and Hispanic. “It’s not my place to tell the story of an Asian American student if I’m not Asian American.”

“I hate that we have to pick and choose,” Edmonds said. “You’re not going to have enough staff of [any given] demographic, so which stories have to get given to someone else?”

The difficulty Edmonds alluded to is one the entire journalism industry has dealt with for generations — one that has gained a wider spotlight in the last year as increased awareness of racial issues has compelled all types of American institutions to examine their track records on race. In the case of journalism, a particular focus has

fallen on larger, national news outlets, which tend to employ disproportionately high numbers of white journalists from elite, wealthy backgrounds.

But the issue is not limited to those professional outlets. As a major university hub, Boston is dotted with numerous student-run newspapers where the journalists of tomorrow are learning the trade. The problem is that these newsrooms often reflect the same racial disparities professional journalists observe in their own newsrooms.

A glance through the editorial boards of seven Boston-area student newspapers — Northeastern University’s Huntington News, Emerson College’s Berkeley Beacon, Boston College’s BC Heights, Boston University’s Daily Free Press, Tufts University’s Tufts Daily, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s The Tech and Suffolk University’s Suffolk Journal — reveals a deficiency of journalists of color, particularly of Black and Hispanic journalists. Save for The News — where nearly half the editorial board is non-white — and MIT’s paper, where the board is mostly Asian, the editorial boards of these papers tend to be about three-quarters white.

Asian students are represented more than any other minority group, while Black and Hispanic editors are few and far between.

But despite these disparities, Black and Hispanic students are not absent from the publications. Oscar Torres is a senior broadcast journalism major at Suffolk University, a staff writer for the Suffolk Journal and has reported for New England Cable News. He’s also Honduran American and said that while Boston is predominantly white, student journalists of color do “take it upon themselves” to make sure their audiences have perspectives from people of color.

“I personally have done visual stories about mental health in the Latinx

Acting Mayor Janey declares mayoral run

By Kelly Garrity City Editor On April 6, Acting Boston Mayor Kim Janey formally announced her candidacy for a full mayoral term starting in the fall.

“The work to address the challenges we face from COVID-19 and the racial inequalities that have been inherited from centuries of structural racism will take longer than a few months to change,” Janey said in a

statement. “It is going to take fearless leadership, bold action and a commitment to doing the hard work to make Boston the equitable city our residents want, need and deserve. I am 100% committed to leading this change.”

Janey, former City Council president, entered the role of acting mayor March 24 after former Mayor Martin J. Walsh left office to join President Joe Biden’s cabinet as labor secretary. Janey made history when she became the first woman and the

first person of color to lead the city.

Janey’s announcement does not come as a surprise. Since taking office, Janey has removed the “acting” part of her title from her press releases and public schedules on occasion and has been pulling in campaign funds since February.

The 55-year-old fourth-generation Bostonian joins an already crowded race, with fellow City Council members Michelle Wu, Andrea Campbell and Annissa Essaibi George, as well

as State Rep. Jon Santiago, the city’s former Chief of Economic Development John Barros and former hotel manager Dana Depelteu. Janey’s current position, however, may give her a leg up on her opponents. In 1993, after Mayor Raymond Flynn accepted an ambassadorship from President Clinton, Thomas Menino was able to leverage his position as acting mayor into a full term, eventually becoming Boston’s longest serving mayor.

In her campaign video, titled “Your Mayor,” Janey highlighted a number of Black and female politicians and referenced her experience growing up in Boston during the busing era, noting how people would throw rocks at her bus as she traveled from Dorchester to Charleston for school.

“We can’t go back. We can only go better,” she said in the video. “So let’s keep on going together, Boston. Your mayor is asking.”

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International student-athletes navigate American athletic dream International, from front this sentiment.

“I chose Northeastern also for the education, and I knew it when I was coming here,” said French junior hockey player Chloé Aurard. “I knew the support system was amazing because I was talking to the coaches and the upperclassmen.”

For Aurard, the decision to play ice hockey in college came naturally as she was first recruited during the 2019 IIHF Women’s World Championships in Germany where she was playing for the French national team as well as during her high school career at Vermont Academy. Playing in national tournaments helped Aurard get noticed by U.S. recruiters.

But not all international student-athletes are able to gain initial contact for the recruitment process as quickly. After deciding to play at the collegiate level, one of the

I knew the support system was amazing because I was talking to the coaches and the upperclassmen.

— Chloé Aurard

biggest hurdles for international students is the recruitment process.

Unlike students in the United States, it is uncommon for international students to be noticed during a championship game or to get in contact with the right people in the first place. International student-athletes rely on their connections and thus have to decide earlier whether they want to go down the path toward college in the United States.

For Quirin Emanga, German-raised sophomore basketball player, the connections were vital in his decision to enter collegiate basketball. As part of his German basketball team, Emanga first came to the United States in 2014 to play in a tournament. The team’s coach, who was American, was one of the big connections he utilized to get recruited by U.S colleges.

“I was always amazed by college sports and college basketball overall and the sports culture in the United

States,” he said. “But the initial spark [for recruitment] can be kind of difficult to get.”

Sullivan, who serves as the sports administrator for most of the NU athletics teams, said that Northeastern coaches sometimes travel overseas to national championships or tournaments to recruit international student-athletes. However, there are fewer opportunities overall for these athletes compared to those in the United States.

The difficulty of travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic has further reduced the number of chances available for coaches to scout athletes and posed many challenges for international student-athletes already enrolled in the NU athletics program. Weiler decided to return to campus last fall only after learning that the women’s swim and dive team would hold practice in person.

Other international student-athletes were unable to return home

completely during this time. The last time Aurard was able to go back home to her family in France was December 2019. However, Aurard has been in the United States for seven years and being away from family has helped her during this time, she said.

For the entire summer and even the beginning of the fall semester, it was uncertain how the athletics program would function with COVID-19. As a result, the NU athletics department supported both international and domestic student-athletes’ decision to stay at home or return to campus.

“I think there were a lot of bumps on the road this entire year, a lot of unknowns,” Sullivan said. “We got more answers as we went through the summer and the fall, but we also had more questions as the year went along. We did the best we could do to be advocates, to be of support and be of help.”

Stella Clark ends her college career with ultimate achievement

By Niyati Parikh News Staff Scoring 1,000 points once is an astonishing accolade but to do it twice during one’s basketball career is monumental, and senior guard Stella Clark ended her Northeastern career with an extra cherry on top.

Having accomplished this milestone once in high school, she also became the twenty-third member of the Northeastern University women’s basketball 1,000-point club.

The precise moment of her collegiate thousandth point couldn’t have been written better for Clark.

With less than a second left in the contest against Towson University, Clark was sent to the charity stripe just two points shy of 1,000.

“I never thought I’d get it at my senior night, especially with 0.4 seconds left on the clock and the possibility that the refs might not have given the ball to me,” Clark said.

“I would have much rather done this accomplishment in Cabot [Physical Education Center] rather than on the road because Cabot has been home for the last four years.”

Scoring her thousandth point in high school was a much different situation. She was facing Wall High School, a team consisting of players she went to middle

school with. She knew that she was going to achieve the feat during the game and did just that on a threepointer, which also happened to be the hundredth three-pointer she had made in her high school career.

“I think it’s a bigger achievement and more meaningful to me in college because it’s a much harder feat because there are fewer games and a more competitive style of play especially with how this year went with COVID and cancellations,” Clark said. “I think it was just meant to be, especially since that game was my hundredth appearance wearing the Northeastern jersey.”

Since her time playing AAU basketball, Clark has held the number 11 jersey. Dichotomous, resilient and competitive are some of the adjectives Clark used to describe herself.

“I liked the two one’s [on my jersey], two ones add up to two and I’m the second born in my family; I’m a Gemini, so there are two sides to me, hence dichotomy being a word I’d use to describe myself,” she said.

In terms of being resilient, Clark was the first CAA player to bring a career with three consecutive Rookie of the Week awards and was named to the All-Rookie Team.

“I didn’t even

Photos by Mike Puzzanghera From left: 1. Clark will continue to play at the collegiate level at graduate school 2. Senior guard Stella Clark averaged 14 points per game in her final season with the Huskies.

3. After scoring her thousandth point in a February game against Towson, Clark was presented with a ball from head coach Kelly Cole to commemorate the moment.

know there were awards; I was just playing my best game and it just happened. You get out what you put in,” Clark said.

Clark knew she wanted to play college basketball despite how large of a commitment it was. She received a letter from Northeastern that invited her to a camp in the summer of her junior year of high school. For her, Northeastern was a really great overall choice in regards to both academics and location.

“I guess I just really impressed the coaches and committed the summer of my junior year of high school, and the second out of my class,” she said.

Clark has been competitive. She hails from Sea Girt, New Jersey, which has always had a stockpile of great basketball competition.

“I grew up watching all these great people in years above me and watching them growing up and seeing women’s basketball flourish there is what got the ball in my hand,” Clark said.

Another big inspiration for her growing up was her cousins, Addie and Faith Masonius. Clark would watch them play basketball and even asked their coach at an AAU tournament to let her play when she wasn’t even on the team. Not only were they the reason for her inception into basketball, but she also followed Addie

to join the surf team at Manasquan High School where they went on to win the state championship.

Family has always been important to Clark. While Sea Girt was a huge part of her life, she lived back and forth between there and Spring Lake, New Jersey. Family has even played a role in her academic career decisions here at Northeastern. Clark is a design major, a choice she made after she took a graphic design course her senior year of high school and one that followed a similar route to that of her family.

“I wanted to pick a major that I could really see myself doing something with, and it’s a really growing and up-and-coming thing,” Clark said. “A lot of my family is artistic and entrepreneurs and created their own businesses, so I’ve definitely been influenced by having a creative mind and the determination of doing things on my own.”

Being a design major, it naturally makes sense that she loves art and expressing herself through art.

Clark’s favorite tattoo is one she shares with her mother: a sunflower.

Despite leaving behind the Huskies upon graduation, Clark is not ready to give the rock up yet, as she has committed to play her graduate year in her home state while completing her master’s degree in design at Monmouth University.

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April 16, 2021

Photo by Katie Miller

‘PANDEMIC PUPPIES’ LIFT

By Gray Timberlake News Correspondent

Photo by Mark D’Aleo Stuck at home during quarantine with more free time, people started to adopt and buy “pandemic puppies,” shifting the culture of dog training and shelters.

Photo by Mark D’Aleo

Photo by Katie Miller

While some people picked up hobbies like knitting or baking during quarantine, fourthyear entrepreneurship and political science major Katie Miller decided to train Fitz, her now 11-month-old golden retriever.

“For a long time, I really wanted a dog, and I was thinking about maybe an older dog, so it would be a little bit less work, but I was going to be home for many months with my parents in the suburbs,” Miller said. “I figured I wouldn’t have a few months of free time in a long time, and I wanted to do the ‘puppy stage’ as involved and invested as I could, so quarantine seemed like a good time.”

With quarantine leaving people at home, often lonely and with lots of free time, many people adopted or bought dogs, also known as “pandemic puppies,” changing the culture of dog training, shelters and owners.

As Miller said, even with online classwork, students often had excess free time during the start of quarantine that could be channeled into hobbies. However, for those in the work world who relied on their jobs as their income, quarantine was a very different experience.

Unemployment rates in the United States skyrocketed because of the closures from COVID-19, with 3.5% unemployment in February rising to 4.4% in March and jumping to 14.7% in April of 2020, before slowly declining to 6.2% in the most recent report, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Mark D’Aleo worked for Petco but was one of the 22 million people laid off in 2020, which led him to turn his side hustle of walking and training dogs into a full-time job.

“I hate to say it, but my business took off during the pandemic and it still is doing well as the pandemic is lifting,” said D’Aleo, who founded a dog training company called Tricked Out Pup. “There were so many puppies and first time dog owners, and owners didn’t know where to train their dogs.”

Many people purchased dogs from breeders during quarantine, but adoption was also popular — so popular that many adoption centers,

including the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals – Angell Animal Medical Center, or MSPCA-Angell, ran out of animals.

“It didn’t take long after the shutdown orders for people to realize, ‘I’m working from home, now’s a good time to get a puppy,’ so we experienced about a 20% increase in demand for adoptable animals almost immediately after the shutdown,” said Rob Halpin, MSPCA-Angell’s director of communications. “About six months ago or so, the demand for adoption started to outstrip our supply.”

The MSPCA-Angell encourages people to “adopt, don’t shop,” but as shelters ran out of animals, the shelter needed to find new ways for owners to get pets without having to buy them from breeders. The adoption center decided to affiliate with the Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem, which has a robust transport network, to be able to transport animals from other shelters.

“The Northeast Animal Shelter has vans, they have relationships with shelters of the South and they have a track record of successfully bringing up thousands of animals from areas of the country where adoption prospects are poor, to the Northeast, where demand for them has reached soaring heights,” Halpin said. “We have now brought up close to about a thousand animals in the eight or nine weeks since we’ve been working with the Northeast Animal Shelter.”

The MSPCA-Angell had to change the way they found new homes for animals but in doing so ended up placing over 4,000 animals into adoptive homes throughout the pandemic.

Business was booming for both animal shelters and dog trainers, and D’Aleo also had to adapt his business to be able to train dogs safely during the pandemic.

“It was difficult because I didn’t have a place to train them; I had to meet people outside one-on-one, social distancing with a mask on,” D’Aleo said. “It’s very difficult to train a dog with a mask on because dogs read our faces and see muscle movements in the human face that we can’t see with the human eye.”

D’Aleo also noticed that getting a dog during

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April 16, 2021

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Photo by Katie Miller

Photo by Mark D’Aleo

T SPIRITS IN QUARANTINE the pandemic has caused dogs to be overly-reliant on their owners, to need constant attention and to develop separation anxiety. Miller, who was getting interrupted by her dog Fitz’s barks and whines for attention, says that getting Fitz during quarantine caused him to be attached to her, and she finds he still needs the constant attention he received when Miller had more free time in the beginning of quarantine.

To combat dogs’ separation anxiety, D’Aleo recommends getting a dog walker, who can take the dog out for a walk and away from their home environment, and that the owner not act like the dog has been gone for a long time when they return from the walk to normalize them spending time apart. In addition to healthy distance, D’Aleo believes socialization is the most essential way to care for dogs, which can be especially hard during a pandemic.

“I believe the order for dogs is socialize, exercise and training, and in that order,” D’Aleo said. “They need to be socialized; they need to be exercised, and once those are habitual, the training will come much easier.”

Many dogs, including Miller’s dog Fitz, go to playgroups for socialization. In addition to Tricked Out Pup, D’Aleo and partner Jim Ferris have a business called Barking Car. The dog trainers take groups of dogs who have received individual basic training on walks and adventures in packs to encourage socialization.

Both dogs and people were stuck inside without socialization during quarantine, and both had to adjust to a different lifestyle once school opened in the fall.

Miller not only had to personally adjust to moving back to an apartment after being in the suburbs over quarantine, but also had to adjust to life at school with a dog. While she admits caring for herself and her dog as a full-time student can be hard, Miller says the benefits outweigh the difficulties.

“It’s difficult, and it’s definitely a lot of responsibility. I make a joke that I feel like a teen mom a lot of the time because I treat him like my child,” she said. “But I definitely wouldn’t rather spend my time doing anything else — I feel like I get 100% of the effort back that I put in.”

Getting a dog can be a decade-long, expensive commitment, with adoptive costs of pets sometimes costing hundreds of dollars in addition to training and ongoing costs such as food, dog walkers, pet insurance and unforeseen medical costs, according to the American Kennel Club. While caring for an animal requires a lot of time, which may have been more abundant during the start of quarantine, the MSPCA-Angell has not seen an increase in animal surrenders, Halpin said.

Part of this may be due to the work done in the communities outside of the shelter walls to ensure animals who might be vulnerable to surrender have the care they need. The MSPCA-Angell does on-site vaccination, microchip, spay and neuter clinics in parks and outdoor locations around low-income communities in Massachusetts in addition to distributing 2 million pet meals since the pandemic hit.

The MSPCA-Angell provides resources for pet owners to help lower rates of surrenders, but the people who are adopting animals are often well-prepared and eager for a pet and will not be in a position to surrender them, Halpin said.

“We’ve seen very few instances where people have been just completely totally spontaneous about getting an animal. The overwhelming tenor of those conversations has been, ‘I’ve always wanted to get a dog and now is the right time to do it,’” Halpin said. “When we fall in love with a pet, many people will do everything they can to work their life around the pet even once they’re back to work.”

Photo by Katie Miller

Photo by Mark D’Aleo

Photo by Katie Miller

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April 16, 2021

Calendar compiled by Rachel Erwin and Clara McCourt Graphics by Marta HIll

Ongoing Stolen Art Tour Join the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in a virtual tour of its famously stolen art, highlighted in the Netflix docuseries “This is a Robbery.”

Online, Free

Now - April 17 A-Típico: A New Latinx Play Festival Teatro Chelsea presents six plays

by Latinx playwrights held in a workshop format. This festival is helmed by a recent Northeastern graduate.

Online, Free

Now - April 30 20 Knots: Daffodils For Boston View this Seaport art installation of 20 inflatable daffodils, celebrating the Boston Marathon and the beginning of spring.

85 Northern Ave., Free

Saturday, April 17 Neponset River Cleanup Volunteer for this spring river cleanup to make a difference and spend some time outside.

Online registration, Free

Thursday, April 29 “Black Freedom” Book Talk Watch author Alaina E. Roberts speak on her book “I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land,” a gripping look at African American history.

Boston Athenaeum, Online, $5

Screenshot by Dawn M. Simmons.

James Ricard Milord, Jasmine Rush, Evelyn Howe, Brandon G. Green, Jade Guerra and Alejandro Simoes in the developmental workshop of “Young Nerds of Color” (working title), a new play written by Melinda Lopez and directed by Dawn Simmons. Streaming as part of The Brit d’Arbeloff Women & Science Theater Festival April 8 to 11.

Theatre festival celebrates underrepresented voices in STEM through art

By Grace Comer News Staff Art and science combine at the Brit d’Arbeloff Women & Science Theater Festival to uplift and give a voice to those underrepresented in both fields.

The month-long festival, which began April 7, features two fulllength plays and seven 10-minute plays written by women and people of color, as well as several panels with playwrights and scientists from underrepresented groups.

“The work of the festival goes into how the arts and sciences have been seen as so separate and so disparate and having nothing to do with each other,” said Des Bennett, a recent Northeastern graduate and a member of the creative team for the play “Young Nerds of Color.”

In fact, Central Square Theater, the host of the festival, has been collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for almost two decades through the Catalyst Collaborative.

“We haven’t had a festival before, but we’ve had productions that were chosen to center on stories related to women in science,” said Debra Wise, the co-director of Catalyst Collaborative. “It’s pretty unusual to have an informal ongoing partnership like this between a theater and a major research institution, and it’s produced a lot of good thinking.”

Another goal of the festival is to provide representation to marginalized groups in science, including people of color, women, LGBTQ+ individuals and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

“There are many stereotypes that exist about who contributes to science and engineering and who doesn’t, who is naturally gifted and talented and who is naturally smart in certain areas,” said panelist Ebony Hearn.

All the plays will be streamed virtually, and the live panels will be recorded. Although Zoom is not

always conducive to theatre, it allows people from all over the country to participate in and watch the plays whenever they want.

“We tried to make lemonade out of lemons and figure out how we could have added value because of the virtual format,” Wise said. The first full play, “Young Nerds of Color,” streamed from April 8 to 11.

Written by Northeastern professor Melinda Lopez and directed

by Northeastern lecturer Dawn Simmons, the play incorporates interviews with scientists from all underrepresented backgrounds.

“The deepest theme within the play is how diversity impacts the creative solutions that we find within science,” Bennett said. “When you’re able to get in a room with a diverse group of scientists who all come from different lived experiences, you have many different factors about what these people are looking for based on their identity.”

Each of the characters in the play is based on a different interviewee.

Hearn, one of the interviewees, said the interviews allowed scientists to talk both about their motivations and their struggles in the field.

“Young Nerds of Color” is accompanied by panels from its creators, as well as from several of the scientists who were interviewed in the process.

These panels will touch on topics of encouraging young people of color in science and promoting equality and inclusion in STEM. “I think it’s important for young people to have folks that they can look up to and see that have accomplished in spite of barriers and stereotypes, who have gone on to do great things,” Hearn said.

The 10-minute plays are written by a variety of individuals from across the country. Each play tells stories of women engaging with different elements of science.

Among these plays are the stories of an interview between an older and younger woman, a bot infiltrating

When you’re able to get in a room with a diverse group of scientists who all come from different lived experiences, you have many different factors about what these people are looking for based on their identity.

— Des Bennett Creative team member for “Young News of Color”

a dating website and a woman who made strides in understanding lead poisoning.

Alex Lin’s 10-minute play “Final Contact” is about a Chinese American astronaut on the International Space Station.

“I hope that young East Asian girls who might be dreaming of pursuing careers in space can see that not only is there a place for you, but there’s also a place for you to be a leader,” Lin said.

The second full-length play, “Splash Hatch on the E Going Down,” will be streaming from April 19 to 25. Written by Kia Corthron and directed by Lyndsay Allyn Cox, it tackles issues of environmental racism and justice through the lens of young characters.

Environmental racism refers to the way that laws are often lax in poorer communities and communities of color, causing these individuals to be disproportionately affected by pollution.

This issue is only further exacerbated by global warming.

“Splash Hatch on the E Going Down” is also accompanied by a related panel on environmental racism, in Boston and in Harlem, where the play is set.

The prevailing theme of the festival is the importance of underrepresented individuals seeing themselves represented in science.

“If you actually break [STEM fields] down in terms of leadership and managerial positions, the fields are still overwhelmingly white,” Lin said.

This lack of representation can make it difficult for students to break into the field.

“What we try to do is make sure our students have a community, a good sense of what’s to come and know some of the barriers that they might experience,” Hearn said.

Whether you are interested in science, theatre or both, the festival will have events running from April 7 to 27. Tickets are based on a pay-it-forward system and are available online.

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Review: ‘Chaos Walking’ is a boring crawl that muddies its source material

Photo courtesy Lionsgate When Viola Eade (Daisy Ridley, not pictured) lands on a planet where all the men’s thoughts are on display – a force called “the Noise” – Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland) vows to protect her in “Chaos Walking.”

By Natalie Duerr News Staff Audiences have finally gotten to watch the long-awaited “Chaos Walking” film, and it was not worth the wait. Initially slated to be released in March 2019, “Chaos Walking” was plagued by reshoots and negative test screenings that stalled its release for two years. The film adapts a book trilogy of the same name written by Patrick Ness into a measly one-hour 40-minute runtime. Even the starstudded cast of Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley, Nick Jonas, Mads Mikkelsen and Cynthia Erivo couldn’t save it from a crash landing. “Chaos Walking” drags its feet through the book’s least exciting aspects and manages to lose everything that made the trilogy so fantastic.

The rights to the book were initially purchased in 2011 by Lionsgate, around the same time the highly successful “Harry Potter” and

“Twilight” franchises were coming to an end. Every studio was looking to snap up the next big young adult novel to turn into a highly successful film franchise — “Chaos Walking” looked like that opportunity.

The story is a typical dystopian narrative, following Todd as he discovers the true history of the world he inhabits. A few things make Todd’s environment different from ours — everyone can see your thoughts through “Noise,” and women do not exist. It isn’t until Todd finds a crashed rocket ship that he realizes things may not be as they seem. The lone survivor of the crash, a girl named Viola, and Todd run away from Prentisstown together to keep her safe from the dangerous Mayor Prentiss.

“Chaos Walking” as a trilogy book series had everything an adaptation needed to succeed — intriguing characters, fantastic world-building and interwoven real-world issues. It

is hard to understand how its film adaptation could turn into such a mess.

Before a trailer was even released, the casting announcement of Tom Holland as Todd and Daisy Ridley as Viola felt like a misstep for anyone familiar with the source material.

Casting older actors to play teens is nothing new but pretending that Holland can pass off as a “boy” is egregious. Todd’s boyhood and presumed innocence are a massive pillar of his character. When he makes a mistake or acts naive in the book, it is easy to accept that this is how a 13 year old would react. In the film version, Holland looks over 20 years old, and the character just seems foolish.

On top of that, both actors have already had their breakout roles in Disney franchises. This makes it hard to separate them from their more well-known counterparts, especially as Ridley plays a space

orphan again. There is one scene where they descend into a spacecraft ruin by climbing down a rope, which is a literal sequence from Ridley’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

The film would have benefitted from casting younger actors who could have grown into older versions of the characters for a sequel.

The film also seems to ignore many of the main themes that made the novels feel relevant. The book layers in discussions of toxic masculinity, colonization, the cost of war and living with trauma. As a trilogy aimed at a younger audience, it is pretty impressive that Ness could cover so much ground while still crafting a suspenseful series.

Instead, the film is a shallow dive into these topics with throw-away lines hinting at what could have been. It changes critical character development moments to advance the story but leaves the characters flat. There isn’t a moment for things

to soak in for the viewer or the characters themselves, making it seem like no one grew from this journey.

The one praise for this film is its visual effects. The visualization of the “Noise” phenomenally translates what could have been a cheesy gimmick on screen. And while the screenplay may end up relying too heavily on it, this visualization is something special that the books could have never had.

“Chaos Walking” was not only a dud with fans, but also couldn’t build up enough steam to attract a general audience. With a budget of around $100 million and just $21 million in the worldwide box office, it has been a total bomb for the studio.

Maybe in 10 years, someone will be brave enough to give the books the adaptation they deserve.

“Chaos Walking” is now in theatres and available to rent on all platforms.

Not Just Co. uses straight-forward, New England approach to make healthy eating simpler

By Gwen Egan News Staff Not Just Co. is a pantry staple company working to make healthy, gluten-free, vegan and vegetarian eating easier for everyone.

Jacqueline Grady Smith and Catherine Smart founded Not Just Co. in 2018 in Boston. The two taught cooking classes together for two and a half years, where they would have conversations about how to improve the process of making dinner every night.

“The company started because I approached Jacqueline when she was six months pregnant in the Boston Public Market,” Smart said.

Smith and Smart both grew up in New England, with Smart coming to Boston to pursue a master’s degree in gastronomy at Boston University in 2007 while Smith grew up in Massachusetts. The two raised families in the greater Boston area and believe that this, along with their other experiences, taught them what it takes to run a company. As their business has developed, Smart said they’ve been embraced by the Boston food community.

“We’ve both traveled, and we’ve both seen the world, but I think we fundamentally both really feel like there’s a solid ground here that we can build the company on,” Smith said. “We can be a part of the community. It’s a little bit no-nonsense, and I feel like we really relate to other people like that.”

Despite these similar experiences, what makes their business partnership work is their different backgrounds.

Smart is a former food journalist and private chef. Smart is heavily involved in the Boston food scene after years of experience working for her master’s degree and later in the food industry itself.

“In addition to [Boston] being a part of the brand and really being grounded here, we really benefited from the support of the food community,” she said.

Smith comes from a background in business operations. She has experience in the food industry through work as a buyer for Whole Foods Market. Smith and Smart’s difference in experience helps their business function.

“It seemed pretty clear to us that

our skill sets were very complementary and that we both add a lot of value without being too much on top of one another,” Smith said.

Right now, Not Just Co. produces Not Just Pasta Sauce — the 10-veggie pasta sauce that started it all — Not Just Pesto, Not Just Caramel and Not Just Salad Dressing. All of these products are gluten-free and vegan.

For Smith, the focus on gluten-free eating was especially pertinent to her experiences with food.

“Everything is vegan, and we did that not because we’re prescriptive but because we want more people to be able to access it. I’m gluten-free, not by choice, so that was important to me,” Smith said.

Not Just Co. also has a blog on their website aptly titled, “not just a food blog.” This blog contains recipes for different meals and articles on topics related to food and the food community.

When looking toward the future, the entrepreneurs said they’re looking to provide more meaningful gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan options for their customers.

“We shy away from anything that’s diet culture or prescriptive,” Smart

said. “But at the same time, we do try to have healthy, wholesome meals, and it’s an ongoing process, building out this database on our food blog. … We just want to make it seem really easy and accessible.”

One of their most popular recipes is chana masala, a recipe that also happens to be vegan and gluten-free.

Smart said they’re geared toward expanding their products to include different variations and hopefully will be finding a retail space for a Not Just Co. store in the future.

Additionally, they’re trying to minimize the company’s carbon footprint. The company’s packaging is carbon-neutral, as it plants more trees than the number of trees harvested to make the product. Smart is working to reduce Not Just Co.’s overall environmental impact as it begins to include more products and exists in more retail spaces.

“We just switched our manufacturing facility, and we’re exploring how much more we can be using local products,” Smart said.“We are very cognizant of greenwashing and don’t ever want to be over promising.”

Both women also hope to expand

Photo courtesy Jacqueline Grady Smith Jacqueline Grady Smith and Catherine Smart founded their pantry staple company Not Just Co. to make healthy eating easier. the food blog into something that can contain more recipes for different families’ needs while not overwhelming whoever is cooking dinner that night.

“We’re definitely not a media company; we’re a food [Consumer Packaged Goods] brand,” Smart said. “Content not for just the sake of content, but because we really want to be putting good, educational, informative, fun, relatable things out into the world.”

OPINION

Page 10 The Huntington News EDITORIAL BOARD Editor-in-Chief

Matt Yan

April 16, 2021

Column: The NU community should adopt the Sunrise Northeastern Green New Deal

Managing Editor

Rachel Erwin Mihiro Shimano Editor-at-Large

Sofie Kato Campus

Marta Hill Annie Probert Skye Richmond City

Kelly Garrity Sarah Barber Breaking News

Gwen Egan Ethan Wayne Sports

Vitoria Poejo Lifestyle

Clara McCourt Katie Mogg Lily Elwood Opinion

Madison Boudreau Popovic Poon Singhatiraj Projects

Jayden Khatib Photo

Harriet Rovniak Quillan Anderson Design

Angelica Jorio Multimedia

Avery Bleichfeld Hannah Rosman Web Manager

Shannon Haley Social Media

Grace Comer Luiza Loyo Copy Chief

Alexis Santoro

BUSINESS

Business Manager

Eva Arad

Development and Outreach Coordinator

Brittany Mendez

Advertising Manager

Ashley Mandel

NEWS STAFF Ananya Sankar, Annie Probert, Arjun Ramachandrula, Christie Ya-Chi Lee, Elena Plumb, Erin Walsh, Grace Comer, Isaac Stephens, Jessica Brite, Julie Sung, Lucas Cooperman, Luiza Loyo, Marisa Lijoi, Maeve Singer, Mia Merchant, Natalie Duerr, Niyati Parikh, Petrina Danardatu, Sarah Barber, Seamus McAvoy

COPY EDITORS Alex Choung, Alexis Santoro, Ariana Bennett, Avery Westervelt, Dayna Archer, Emily Zhang, Hannah Anthony, Hannah Rosman, Jenna Chin, Jill Makin, Joanna Zhao, Jo Ashman, Katie Mogg, Katrina Makayan, Laurel Booth, Lea Packer, Lily Murphy, Madison Boudreau Popovic, Maria Lovato, Petrina Danardatu, Rachel Mann, Santhosh Kumar Vijayakumar, Sarah Brinsley, Vishrut Sundararajan, Zoe Baumgartner

DESIGN STAFF

Photo by Harriet Rovniak Northeastern University needs to be a national leader in campus sustainability.

Photo by Kelly Thomas You may have heard about the Sunrise Movement, a progressive youth movement made up of students, faculty and community organizations. The movement spread across U.S. college campuses to make climate change an urgent, national priority. The Northeastern chapter is pushing for a new climate justice plan that considers not only those on campus but also those in the neighborhoods surrounding us — the Sunrise Northeastern Green New Deal, or GNEUD, which focuses specifically on making the administration’s decisions about sustainability more transparent to the community.

Every five to 10 years, Northeastern publishes its sustainable action plan to the public. The last plan, published in 2010, was a roadmap toward the university achieving carbon neutrality. It was a comprehensive summary that touched on renewable energy generation, green buildings, transportation, recycling and sustainability. The plan called for upgrading energy management systems and

replacing existing electric motors with premium efficiency models.

It was prepared by influential and key professors at Northeastern, like Susan Powers-Lee and Carol Roskam, the director of sustainability.

Although this plan provided a strong blueprint toward how the university can achieve carbon neutrality, students and faculty felt as though the plan did not provide for campus-wide involvement. A broader perspective from students and other faculty at large might have led to the development of smaller projects that were more achievable by individual students and would have created an all-encompassing campus-wide initiative toward sustainability.

Northeastern is about to publish its next action plan, and Sunrise NEU is “on it.” Sunrise NEU wants a people-focused plan that implements justice-oriented climate principles.

This approach is not just about becoming carbon neutral, but it is also about community-based action and environmental justice that was largely ignored in the previous plan. The grounding principles include environmental justice, community-based action, transparency and solidarity.

This semester, the environmentalist community at Northeastern has grown tremendously. With the introduction of Canopy, a coalition of environmental groups at Northeastern, the exchange of communication and the push for transparency are broader than ever.

Canopy contains many different

This approach is not just about becoming carbon neutral, but it is also about community-based action and environmental justice that was largely ignored in the previous plan.

— Maeve Singer

Columnist environmental clubs as its members, including the Student Government Association, Sustainability Board, the Husky Environmental Action Team, Cruelty-Free Northeastern and Sunrise Movement. The goal of Canopy is to get these clubs talking and working together to achieve each

club’s individual projects faster with the help and participation of more people. This coalition is a perfect setup for a Sunrise GNEUD — it has made it easier to spread the word of the club and get entire clubs on board with the plan.

Despite the blossoming network of environmental clubs, a Sunrise GNEUD should not rely solely on environmental activists at Northeastern.

Northeastern environmental activists have always pushed for participation by any student who wants to be involved. This deal will require work from the entire campus to get passed, including students and faculty who do not attend weekly sustainability meetings and those who might not know about the GNEUD. We must encourage everyone to get involved with sustainability and work proactively to make their campus greener.

There is no reason not to support the GNEUD. The deal is not trying to pass stricter “laws’’ enforcing fewer carbon emissions or trying to restrict an individual in any way. Rather, this GNEUD creates a foundation of trust and transparency between the administration and its students to make it clear that the goal of the plan is to cover gaps in the Northeastern Sustainability Plan. In doing so, we can ensure that the plan will successfully benefit us all.

Maeve Singer is a first-year computer science and environmental science combined major. She can be reached at singer.ma@northeastern.edu.

Alaine Bennett, Charlie Allan, Devin Raynor

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Bill Mitchell, Carlene Hempel, Gal Tziperman Lotan, James Ross, Laurel Leff, Lincoln McKie, Mark Gooley, Meredith O’Brien, Olivia Arnold, Rachel Zarrell Opinions expressed in The Huntington News through letters to the editor, cartoons and columns are not necessarily those of The News staff or the Board of Directors. Northeastern University students conduct all operations involved in the production of this publication.

For inquiries about the Board of Directors, email outreach@huntnewsnu.com. For general inquiries, email managing@huntnewsnu.com.

The Huntington News 360 Huntington Ave. 102 Lake Hall Boston, MA 02115 huntnewsnu.com

@HuntNewsNU

Photo by Harriet Rovniak As carbon emissions continue being released into the air, Northeastern must take systemic action to become more green.

Photo by Harriet Rovniak Student support of the Sunrise Movement can help protect the NU greenery we all love.

OPINION

April 16, 2021

Page 11

Op-ed: Care Days are a less than half measure

that the only housing that was left was incredibly expensive. Economy and standard housing were essentially gone, only leaving enhanced housing which is the most expensive option. Students who did not have a time slot on the first or second day for second-year housing were out of luck if they wanted affordable housing. The only options were to pay for more expensive housing or enter the PAWS system and hope other housing options become available in the coming months. Neither of those sound promising.

In the past, Northeastern students’ search for on-campus housing was often futile. I’m not saying that Northeastern’s housing department is intentionally stressing out students who are looking for housing, but it is evident a housing crisis exists as 53% of NU students live off campus, according to U.S. News & World Report.

Even though some may do so in order to gain more independence, many also do so because it is cheaper than some on-campus living options. Regardless, it is clear that this issue is not minor.

In an attempt to increase housing options, housing was available for first-year students at The Midtown Hotel, which is obviously not on NU’s campus. Some students who lived there have said they felt isolated from the NU community. Living in a hotel room is not the same as living on

campus and in a dorm, as students are deprived of key components of the traditional college experience. When Northeastern has to outsource its housing in such a manner, it becomes increasingly apparent that the current state of on-campus housing needs to be systematically reevaluated.

While many colleges don’t require students to live on campus at all, NU makes it mandatory to live on campus for at least the first two years, unless you are a transfer student.

This policy restricts opportunities for those who can’t afford housing on campus but are somehow stuck paying the bill rather than trying to find a more affordable place off campus.

The university requiring first- and second-year students to live on campus is part of the problem. Second years are allowed to live off campus if they petition for it, but many do not know that this is an option. An easy solution is to allow all students, or at least second-years, to live off campus if they wish. This would both ease the financial burden for students who cannot afford expensive on-campus living options and clear up housing for those who wish to stay on campus for convenience.

How can Northeastern and other colleges create more housing options? Finding a solution to this problem is long overdue.

Another solution could be making

should have been done with spring break and the Care Days. We can only look in hindsight at these well-intentioned mistakes and offer some judgment. I can say that it might have been better to give us a Friday off instead of a Wednesday to allow for actual downtime to decompress, but that doesn’t change anything.

This is not, however, a reason to let Northeastern off the hook. The lack of an adequate response to burnout in tandem with Northeastern’s incredibly lackluster — though not new — handling of students’ mental health crises leaves a deeply bad taste. When 77% of college students say they need at least some help with

mental health issues, it’s hard not to find the Care Days more than a little insulting. When a waiter is given an inadequate tip, we don’t ask them to be grateful for getting anything at all.

By this same logic, we need Northeastern to start addressing problems in ways that genuinely center the well-being of students. What we don’t need is more of these less than half measures.

Harrison Staley is a third-year English and philosophy combined major.

He can be reached at staley.h@northeastern.edu.

Number of additional CARE DAYS by college

The News analyzed the spring break plans of 27 colleges and universities in the Greater Boston area.

Of those schools, six colleges had neither a SPRING BREAK nor CARE DAYS. Of the 27 schools that The News analyzed, eight colleges held SPRING BREAK. In half the cases, that break was shorter than usual.

Lesley University

Tufts University

New England Conservatory

Cambridge College

University of Massachusetts Boston

Quincy College

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

Length of SPRING BREAK by college Boston Architectural College

As spring further emerges, and the semester comes to a close, it seems clear that we ought to analyze Northeastern’s handling of it. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that this has been and is continuing to be an exceptionally challenging semester. Work seems to take twice as long as it used to, and though the end of COVID-19 seems near, it’s not here quite yet.

Speaking personally — though I’m sure these thoughts are not unique — I’m incredibly burnt out. Usually, spring break is a time to both relax in the midst of the semester and to get out of town to party. It’s the latter reason that caused universities all over the country to cancel spring break in order to deter students from travelling and spreading COVID-19.

While the intention here is clearly sound, the end result of these decisions was anything but. Those with the desire and the means travelled anyway. With classes being online, it didn’t matter if a student was in their bedroom or a beach-side bungalow.

Those of us who stayed behind are left with little more than a growing pile of work on Canvas and a vague

resembles the spring of just a year ago. Nevertheless, some amount of hope remains. A walk through Boston Common or on the Charles River Esplanade on a Saturday shows close-knit, though distanced, groups finally emerging in public after a year of slumber. As of April 14, more than 1.6 million people in Massachusetts are fully vaccinated. Further, Northeastern has announced that the Fall 2021 semester will be at least primarily in person with normal campus operations. It’s nice that there are things to look forward to.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that I — or anyone for that matter — have all the answers about what

Bay State College

Photo by Harriet Rovniak

hope that at some point this semester might actually end.

Northeastern’s response to the burnout that resulted from a lost spring break was the implementation of two “Care Days” scheduled for March 24 and April 12 — though the latter of these was just a holiday moved a week early. This approach is not unique. Many colleges all over the United States have opted to provide a few days off as a consolation for not providing a break. Now that these days have passed, the reality of these measures seem apparent. I spent my Care Days catching up on the same work I would have done if we had class. The Care Day did little to nothing in alleviating burnout, especially given its place in the middle of the work week. Essays were still due, and exams still loomed ahead, with one day of instruction lost.

Many professors found out about the Care Days not long before they were created. Syllabi had to be adjusted and necessary learning material had to be squeezed into a tighter schedule. Professors had to figure out how to deal with the fact that a group of students was now going to be an entire class behind. Some had to consider whether or not to assign the same work or upload recorded lectures to make sure material got through to students, thereby defeating the purpose of the Care Days in the first place. To their credit, I’ve seen professors adapt quickly and creatively to this challenge, though that has nothing to do with whether or not they should have been made to face it in the first place.

This semester has been stressful and challenging. Little about it

5 2 24 1 Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Brandeis University

Boston University

4 2 31 1 Berklee College of Music

Simmons University

5

Bentley University

Harvard University

2

Northeastern University

1

Emerson College

Lasell College

Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Boston College

Of the 27 schools that The News analyzed, 19 colleges offered CARE DAYS instead of a SPRING BREAK. Graphic by Avery Bleichfeld

Column: Northeastern must stop holding students hostage financially

Photo courtesy Madison Boudreau Popovic Moving into college is always hard because of all the preparation.

But even once you get settled, one of the most stressful parts of college living is selecting future residences.

Housing selection draws to a close for yet another semester, but the PAWS process continues for months after official selection days, which is when Northeastern housing places you in a dorm or apartment based on a form that students provide them.

Selecting housing not only reminded me of the NU housing crisis, but also served as a reminder of the other ways in which NU takes advantage of its students financially. We desperately need solutions, so future students don’t have to struggle.

I was fortunate enough to receive a decent selection day and time.

However, it became evident about two days before my selection date

more buildings. What if NU, and other colleges, allocate more funds toward housing? It would be a noteworthy way to use some of the ridiculously priced tuition that students have to pay. LightView was built by a collaboration between Northeastern and American Campus Communities. However, these apartments aren’t affordable for many NU students and gentrify the surrounding community.

By building LightView, Northeastern is hurting the growth of Latinx, Asian and Black communities in Boston.

Northeastern not only needs to make more housing, they need to make new housing that’s affordable.

Furthermore, NU students are not just robbed in terms of housing options — they are almost forced to stay on campus if they want financial aid. When I opened my financial aid letters for the fall and spring semesters, there was a catch: If I want to renew this financial aid reward, I must live on campus. It is almost as if NU is holding students hostage: get financial aid and worry about housing semester after semester or move off campus and worry about losing these aid packages.

Northeastern’s billing also targets honors students who are promised a $3,500 fee waiver for a first-year summer dialogue. However, as COVID-19 persists, students began to question if this waiver can apply

to future dialogues. NU has yet to adjust their policy regarding this waiver. It seems as if NU is looking to take as much money as possible from their students.

It’s necessary for me to make it clear that NU’s financial aid department is incredibly helpful. Whenever I called regarding any billing issues or with general questions, staff answered them and, if no one had the answer, I received an email from them after it was figured out.

College is generally a money-making business, so it’s understandable why billing rules are strict. However, Northeastern is a non-profit and should be more willing to listen to the concerns of the NU community because, after all, they’re the ones footing the bill.

It’s outrageous to keep worrying year after year about whether or not affordable housing will be available.

People who apply to NU as first-year students are guaranteed housing for four years, but NU fails to consistently provide adequate options for housing in these four years, creating undue stress for students’ undergraduate career.

Madison Boudreau Popovic is a first-year political science and business administration combined major. She can be reached at popovic.m@northeastern.edu.

Page 12

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