Issue 4 Spring 2019

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OBS ESS ION.

Vol. CXXVIII. Issue 4.

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Tufts Observer

March 5, 2018

S TA F F EDITOR IN CHIEF: Alexandra Benjamin MANAGING EDITOR: Wilson Wong CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Erica Levy FEATURES EDITOR: Jesse Ryan NEWS EDITORS: Anita Lam Brittany Regas ARTS & CULTURE EDITORS: Juliana Vega del Castillo Alice Hickson OPINION EDITORS: Sasha Hulkower Alexandra Strong CAMPUS EDITORS: Myisha Majumder Josie Wagner POETRY & PROSE EDITORS: Ruthie Block Cris Paulino VOICES EDITOR: Rosy Triggs Fitzgerald PHOTO DIRECTORS: Stuart Montgomery Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez ART DIRECTOR: Laura Wolfe LEAD ARTIST: Joanna Kleszczewski COLUMNS EDITOR: Sivi Satchithanandan VIDEO DIRECTOR: Emai Lai PODCAST DIRECTOR: Julia Press

to honor an abuser 2 Feature | By Alexandra Benjamin

telling our stories 6 Campus | By Issay Matsumoto

history isn’t hypothetical 8 Opinion | By Issay Matsumoto

the other side of the street 10 Campus | By Ann-Marie Lee and Nate Otte

12 formations of desire 12 Poetry | By Sonya Bhatia

13 Photo inset 17 ins tagram avatars Comic | By Nasrin Lin

18 confessions of a former gleek Arts & Culture | By Brittany Regas

20 “My batteries are low...”

News | By Erica Levy

22 Youth in our veins News | By Sivi Satchithanandan

24 the self-care obsession Arts & Culture | By Alice Hickson & Lilly Blumenthal

26 lin es for water Voices | By Chopper Carter-Schelp

28 Yolk Poetry | By Akbota Saudabayeva

PUBLICITY DIRECTORS: Nasrin Lin Sarah Park STAFF WRITERS: Issay Matsumoto Trina Sanyal Sonya Bhatia Muna Mohamed DESIGNERS: Richard Nakatsuka Brigid Cawley Daniel Jelčić Sofia Pretell Brenna Trollinger Emma Herdman Janie Ingrassia LEAD COPY EDITOR: Sara Barkouli COPY EDITORS: Kate Bowers Aidan Schaffert Leah Kirsch Lola Jacquin Mahika Khosla Akbota Saudabayeva EDITOR EMERITUS: Emmett Pinsky CONTRIBUTORS: Madison Haskins Audrey Falk Tati Doyle Sasha Hulkower Emily Taketa Olivia Herdman Karen Ruiz COVER DESIGNS BY ERICA LEVY TOC PHOTO BY CELESTE TENG

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to honor an abuser Why does tufts put prestige over people?

By Alexandra Benjamin CW: Graphic sexual violence

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n early 2018, a young, rising political star of the Republican party became engulfed in scandal and chaos. 44 year-old firstterm Missouri Governor Eric Greitens was accused of sexual assault and attempt at blackmail by a woman with whom he had previously admitted to having an affair. Later, he would also face charges for campaign finance violations. Missouri lawmakers immediately launched an investigation, and at first, Grietens vehemently denied the accusations, decrying them as “tabloid trash.”

Greitens clung fiercely to his governorship, despite serious calls for impeachment by the Republican legislature and other local and national politicians. But then, something strange happened.

In late May, Greitens suddenly announced his resignation. He did so as part of a deal for prosecutors to drop one criminal charge against him.

Though he was never convicted of a felony, Greitens’ political career was effectively destroyed. Many were shocked, considering his political golden-boy status (some had even claimed he would one day be the GOP pick for the White House), and the long list of accomplishments that preceded the scandal. Over the years, Greitens has previously been lauded for his achievements as a Rhodes Scholar, a Navy SEAL, and a best-selling author. In 2012, he received yet another recognition for these accolades when he was chosen as that year’s commencement speaker at Tufts University.

At the time, Greitens’ selection was widely praised within the Tufts community; one article in the Tufts Daily called him “the greatest commencement speaker that you’ve never heard of.” The same article even noted that, in that year in particular, Greitens was chosen not just by President Monaco and the Board of Trustees, but in a decision by the Tufts community as a whole.

But then, six years later, the allegations broke and outrage ensued. Both the Tufts Democrats and Tufts Republicans clubs called for the honorary degree Greitens had received for his

2 Tufts Observer march 25, 2019

commencement speech to be revoked. Another Daily article describes a petition circulated by the Tufts Democrats urging the University to rescind Greitens’ degree, which also called upon the then-Governor to resign. However, similarly to Greitens’ story itself, the campus hubbub around him vanished nearly as quickly as it had appeared. Soon, busy with finals and the end of another school year, the community appeared to forget about Greitens altogether.

Just as Greitens’ legal case never came to a conclusive end, the Tufts administration never publicly affirmed nor denied its support for Greitens and his degree following his resignation. In light of this, the Observer decided to re-investigate Greitens’ story to see what had changed in the past year, both at Tufts and beyond.

In both arenas, the short answer is not much. When the Greitens scandal first emerged, it was January 2018. The New York Times reported that a St. Louis television network had released a recording which “it had obtained from the ex-husband of a woman who had several sexual encounters with Mr. Greitens over a matter of months in 2015.” The woman’s accusations were numbered, each more disturbing than the last. Some of them came from the recording, others emerged only after she was subpoenaed to testify under oath by the Missouri legislative committee charged with investigating Greitens.

The woman, whose identity was never made public, said that Greitens had taken an explicit photo of her during a sexual encounter, and had threatened to use it as blackmail if she ever exposed their relationship. According to her testimony, before taking the photo, he had blindfolded her, bound her hands to exercise equipment, and pulled off her clothes. He spanked her and kissed her without consent. After she began crying, Greitens took her down and hugged her, but then took down his pants and coerced her into performing oral sex on him. The woman

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said she continued to see Greitens and have sexual encounters with him afterwards, some of which were consensual. But on other occasions, when Greitens asked her if she had been sleeping with anyone else, and she told him she’d slept with her husband, he slapped her.

When the Missouri state House and St. Louis Circuit Attorney began investigating Greitens, they charged him with invasion of privacy for the woman’s claims. At the same time, he came under an unrelated charge for tampering with computer data concerning charity donors that he was suspected of illegally using for political purposes. Amidst these charges, talk of impeachment began to arise.

Again, though at first Greitens staunchly denied wrongdoing, he eventually struck a deal with prosecutors to resign in exchange for the computer tampering felony to be dropped. The invasion of privacy case, meanwhile, was withdrawn due to what the St. Louis Circuit Attorney claimed to be a mishandling of the case by Greitens’ prosecutor. While the prosecutor’s treatment of the case is still under review, there was never a definitive ruling on Greitens culpability. This means that the privacy charges against him could still be refiled.

At the time of Greitens’ initial investigation, the University hesitated to reevaluate his degree, despite calls from students to do so. The Daily reported that Patrick Collins, Tufts Director of Public Relations, told reporters that the Tufts administration was “aware of and deeply disturbed by the troubling allegations against Gov. Greitens,” and were “closely following the legal proceedings in his case.” However, he added that they were “waiting for the resolution of the case before taking any action.” As the case was never settled, Tufts never reevaluated Greitens’ honorary degree.

He still holds one today.

Now, nearly a year later, Collins spoke to the Observer. In an email responding to questions about whether the University had reevaluated this position, Collins wrote the following: “Former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens is a decorated Navy Seal and former Truman and Rhodes Scholar who went on to become a respected humanitarian and an award-winning author. He was selected by the honorary degree committee of the Board of Trustees because of his achievements and commitment to service. Although serious and disturbing charges were brought against him, they were subsequently dropped.”

Most notable about Collins’ response is the fact that after being asked why the University chose not to rescind Greitens degree in light of the allegations against him, Collins immediately came to Greitens’ defense, calling him a “respected humanitarian.” The portion of Collins’ statement describing Greitens’ background and accolades is also nearly identical to the statement he gave to the Daily in 2018. Further, in saying that Greitens’ charges were dropped, Collins made no mention of the plea deal struck with prosecutors that excused him only on the condition of his resignation. He also failed to explain the mistrial ruling that led to the dismissal of the invasion of privacy charges. Before speaking with Collins, the Observer requested interviews with Tufts’ Commencement general contact, several members of the Board of Trustees, and three staff members of President Tony Monaco’s office, all to talk about Greitens and the nature of selecting Commencement speakers and honorary degree recipients in general.

Nearly all individuals contacted either failed to respond or declined to personally comment, deferring instead to Collins.

Many students have expressed their disappointment with the University’s response to Greitens’ case, both at the time and upon hearing of the administration’s reaffirmed support for his degree. Representatives from the executive boards of both the Tufts Democrats and Tufts Republicans confirmed to the Observer that they stand by the initial statements they posted on their respective Facebook pages, condemning Greitens and calling for the revocation of his degree.

Many felt that the emphasis of Greitens’ academic and professional accolades in Collins’ statement was inappropriate, especially in response to deeply troubling accusations of sexual assault.

When reading Collins’ response, first-year Izzy Essman, who is from St. Louis County and vividly remembers the stir caused in her community by Greitens’ accusations, said that Collins’ response “sounds like a Wikipedia page.”

“That’s very insubstantial,” Essman said. “And it’s so frustrating when students ask for real answers and real conversations on a topic and get back just the weakest responses possible.”

Essman also expressed dismay that the University insisted on waiting for a firm judicial conviction before cutting ties with Greitens, especially since they have not always followed this protocol.

Take for instance, another formerly celebrated public figure now infamous for sexual assault: Bill Cosby. Cosby was also awarded

to defend the honor of an abuser is a clear value statement, whether tufts wants to admit it or not.

march 25, 2019 Tufts Observer 3

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an honorary degree from Tufts in 2000. However, amidst allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, the University revoked his degree in 2015.

Collins said that although Cosby’s degree was revoked, “before resolution of serious allegations against him,” the University was still “justified in doing so because [Cosby] had confirmed some of the allegations against him in a deposition that was part of the public record” and that “his confirmations presented a substantial basis to discredit the accomplishments for which he had been recognized.”

Essman was not convinced by this explanation. “You don’t always have to wait for there to be a conviction if something is credible,” she said. “The justice system does not always work the way it should or the way it’s supposed to.”

This has proven especially relevant to cases of sexual assault, which, by nature, are difficult to retroactively “prove” in a court of law, often becoming cases of one individual’s word against another. This challenge has been increasingly tested today in the whirlwind of the #MeToo movement, where countless women have spoken out about sexual assault. The movement has adapted the slogan “believe women”—a call to meet survivors of sexual assault with support and validation rather than skepticism or victim-blaming.

Junior Han Lee is the co-head of education and outreach for Tufts’ Action for Sexual Assault Prevention (ASAP), a group of students committed to “raising awareness of and ending sexual assault and rape culture on our campus, and promoting a culture of consent,” according to the group’s website. Lee feels strongly that the University’s continued defense of Greitens and his char-

acter, despite the accusations against him, bears damaging consequences for survivors of sexual assault on campus.

“It’s 2019, we’ve had all these movements, and I think Tufts has made a couple steps forward,” she said. “But by supporting men like Greitens all of that is dismantled immediately, because I think it shows pretty clearly that Tufts is willing to protect men like Greitens in the same way that they were willing to protect perpetrators on this campus for so many years.”

Junior Jen Kim, who leads the survivor support branch of ASAP, echoed Lee’s statement, saying “Tufts’ defense of Greitens’ honorary degree honestly just underlines what the University’s priorities are: public image and prestige, rather than believing survivors… It’s incredibly disheartening to see Tufts defend his honor.”

Again, Lee emphasized that much of the danger of Tufts’ stance comes from the implication that the justice system’s failure to convict Greitens inherently denies the credibility of his accuser’s story. Referring to Greitens’ accuser’s decision to come forward, Lee said, “I think that she made a very risky move, and no one does that for attention,” an argument often made to discredit victims of sexual assault cases. Again, in the Greitens case, his accuser was never publicly named.

Lee says that the idea of false accusations in assault cases is a significant topic of conversation within ASAP. “One of the questions we get most frequently is, ‘what about the crying rape statistic?’” she said. “But statistically, it’s not high at all.”

According to FBI data, only two percent of rape reports are ever determined to be false. The same percentage holds true for

TufTs is willing to protect men like Greitens in the same way that they were willing to protect perpetrators on this campus for so many years.

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other felonies. On top of this, it is estimated that around 60 percent of sexual assault cases go unreported to authorities.

“The fact that Tufts is willing to make a big deal over [that percentage] is not great,” Lee said. “It doesn’t look good for the University at all.”

Finally, Lee adds that even though she has observed some action taken by Tufts to improve response to sexual assault and support for survivors during her time on campus, she doesn’t always see those moves as being altruistically motivated.

“I think very much it’s to make this establishment look like it’s progressive, and like it cares about students, especially its students who are survivors,” she said. “But the reality of it is that once you make it onto this campus, once you see the statements Tufts is making, it’s pretty evident that’s not their actual stance.”

This is not the first time Tufts has been critiqued of taking taking selectively “progressive” stances only when they are easy or convenient. In fact, it’s a critique that has been notably relevant to other commencement speakers and honorary degree recipients in recent years.

Last year, for the class of 2018 graduation, Ellen J. Kullman (E’78), was selected as Commencement speaker. Kullman is the former CEO and board chair of the leading chemical company DuPont Inc., as well as a former member of Tufts’ own Board of Trustees. She has been named one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business, and was noted on Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women list. She was also the first woman to head DuPont in the company’s 200-year history. Collins called her a “champion of women’s progress in the workplace,” and said that “many students appreciated her thoughtful remarks,” during Commencement.

However, both upon her selection and up until the day of Graduation, many students expressed pointed critiques of the University’s choice of Kullman, some finding the move of supporting a contentious company like DuPont that has been complicit in environmental degradation outright offensive, while others called her selection simply “bizarre.”

On graduation day, a group of students chose to engage in a silent protest of Kullman’s Commencement speech, holding up signs condemning the ethical failures of DuPont, and turning away from her for the duration of her speech. The Boston Globe would later report on the protest as the header of its section on local college commencement.

Bianca Hutner, A’18, an activist for fossil fuel divestment and a co-president of Tufts Climate Action (TCA) during her time at Tufts, said she felt “a moral obligation” to participate in the protests against Kullman at the time. “[I] felt like I was standing for all these things during college,” she said. “And then I had this one critical moment where if I did nothing, it would kind of feel like ‘Oh, what was this all for?’”

Aside from her objections to DuPont’s history of environmental destruction, Hutner also expressed frustration at what she perceived as the University’s attempts to spin Kullman as a role model for gender equity and women’s leadership in justifying her selection.

“If you’re talking about gender equity, you should be talking about the effects and the harm [DuPont] has done by polluting waters… which oftentimes affects women.” Hutner cited,

for example, the links between chemical water pollution and infant health.

Similar to the critiques of Greitens’ defense, Hutner and other students who protested Kullman felt that her honorary recognition as a speaker was at odds with the values of the greater Tufts community. Again, these are not the only two cases of this discord; in 2016 other students critiqued the choice of speaker Hank Azaria, who is well-known for voicing many of the characters on The Simpsons, including Apu, who Azaria, a White man, voices with an Indian accent. Junior Nikhil Srinivasan criticized Azaria’s “role in propagating stereotypical depictions of South Asians in the media,” in a Daily op-ed. Srinivasan also expressed that Azaria essentialized both Hindu culture and South Asian people during his speech.

From Azaria to Kullman to Greitens, it is clear from student critique that the individuals Tufts chooses to uplift and honor bear significant consequences for the student body. When asked about the criteria on which Tufts selects these honorees, and what messages or values they wish to convey to students with their selections, Collins responded that “the [University] considers nominees for Commencement speaker and other honorary degree recipients who, at the time of their nomination, have a record of distinguished and sustained accomplishment in the varied academic, scholarly and professional fields represented at Tufts, including business and industry, the visual, literary, musical, and performing arts, or public life.” He made no mention of the consideration of the values these individuals are deemed to uphold or the example the University wishes them to set for students.

Even if the University denies that they make explicit value statements with their speaker choices and degree recipients, they must acknowledge that their decisions do not occur in a vacuum. To defend the honor of an abuser is a clear value statement, whether Tufts want to admit it or not. Additionally, to put a decorated speaker in front of graduating seniors about to enter the professional world makes another statement: this is someone you should emulate.

Lee emphasized the impact that a case like Greitens’ has on our campus’ survivors. “The thing [ASAP hears] even to this day the most often is that people are scared to report,” she said. “Tufts has a history of not handling these cases well.”

“The danger that Tufts is making here by not rescinding his honorary degree [is that] people feel like they can’t come forward.

You’re going to have less reporting, you’re going to have more survivors feeling isolated and alone.”

Essman agrees, adding that even if the University fails to see the substance of the allegations against Greitens, his character and integrity has already been sufficiently damaged by the many “uncomfortable allegations about him as a politician and a person.”

Both she and Lee said they don’t see what benefit it poses to Tufts to maintain its connection to Greitens. ““If I were the Tufts administration, I would want to reexamine my idea of what makes an allegation credible,” Essman said.

“And at what point it’s time to break ties with toxic individuals.”

The University may choose to portray their refusal to rescind Greitens’ degree as a passive choice. However, in officially and explicitly honoring a tried sexual assailant, Tufts actively chooses to prioritize prestige and politics over the needs of some of its most vulnerable students. This is unacceptable. march 25, 2019 Tufts Observer 5

Campus

Telling Our Stories ByIssay IssayMatsumoto By

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n 1978, over 30 years after FDR signed Executive Order 9066, ordering the incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans, more than 2,000 Japanese Americans rode National Guard buses, trucks, and cars from Seattle to the old grounds of the Puyallup Assembly Center. Advertised as A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE, the event gathered over 2,000 attendants to publicly recreate and commemorate the mass removals of the past, bringing together generations of Japanese Americans who lived through the trauma of concentration camps. As a community, they bore witness to each other’s truths by telling stories.

More than 40 years later, in 2019, these stories live on at Tufts through the love and labor of Asian American students. Japanese Culture Club (JCC) held our annual Day of Remembrance (DOR) in the Alumnae Lounge on Friday, March 1. Dating back at least 25 years, our event is one of the longest running annual college DOR events on the East Coast. We screened The Ito Sisters, an intergenerationally story of three sisters separated during Japanese incarceration.

We then held a panel with the film’s director and granddaughter of one of the Ito sisters, Antonia Glenn; the director’s mother, Berkeley Professor Evelyn Nakano Glenn; and Wellesley Professor Elena Tajima Creef.

The next Sunday, three JCC members told their family’s histories of incarceration in an open community meeting.

First-year Richard Nakatsuka, who works as a designer for the Observer, says his parents told him the story of his great-grandfather’s incarceration when he was just nine years old. Nakatsuka’s great6 Tufts Observer March 25, 2019

grandfather was a Japanese immigrant who lived in Hawai’i and worked in communications for the Japanese consulate before he was incarcerated in Santa Fe, New Mexico. By fourth grade, Nakatsuka created an award-winning historical research report out of declassified FBI files unearthed by his father on his great-grandfather that predated the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Nakatsuka’s school commissioned him to teach fifth graders the history of Japanese incarceration. Learning and teaching this history from an early age strengthened Richard’s political resolve and helped him understand himself.

“On the outside, that might seem intense, but honestly, it saved me from a lot of cognitive dissonance in high school and college,” Nakatsuka said. “It saved me from a lot of emotional turmoil as well.”

First-year Makenzie Tomihiro also received early exposure to Japanese incarceration histories through her family’s involvement in the Japanese American community in San Jose, California. Her grandfather was incarcerated at Poston—a concentration camp forcibly built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation—and later released through his wartime service as a translator.

After attending Stanford University on the GI Bill, Tomihiro’s grandfather was unable to find employment in the private sector due to racism against Japanese people, and worked in the government for the rest of his life. In third grade, Tomihiro attended a Japanese American summer camp that taught incarceration history through art projects, like making concentration camp barracks out of popsicle sticks. By middle school, Tomihiro began to ask her grand-

father more about his experiences. By high school, she worked as a tour guide at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose.

During this time, she began to understand why her grandfather might have downplayed his hardships due to the culture of silence that ruptured Japanese American communities during and after incarceration. “That’s when I started realizing this was actually something that was really horrible,” Tomihiro said.

Sophomore Emily Taketa only began fully learning the implications of incarceration for her family in preparation for DOR this year. “It was always kind of a thing that we just brushed aside,” Taketa said. “I carried that mentality partly because when you talk to your parents or your grandparents you don’t want to make them sad, or infringe upon their privacy.”

But this year, impelled by student collaborations with United for Immigrant Justice at last year’s DOR and her grandmother’s recent passing, Taketa called her 96 year-old grandfather on his birthday to learn more about his incarceration at Camp Amache. Taketa was able to make greater sense of her family’s history, but was frustrated when her grandfather evaded her questions by laughing them off. She was conflicted, angry at the injustices her grandfather had faced, but at the same time did not want to push him to unearth histories he might have buried long ago.

“He just was like, ‘This is how it was, this is how you learned, and that’s it,’” Emily said. “So I was just sobbing in my room, by myself, just really frustrated. I muted the phone so they couldn’t hear me crying because I didn’t want to upset him. That

PHOTOS COURTESY OF EMILY TAKETA & RICHARD NAKATSUKA

Campus

was me being so angry at myself—the situation—that I didn’t know.”

At the open meeting, Taketa, Tomihiro, and Nakatsuka told their stories to a packed Eaton classroom of predominantly Asian American students. The setting was intimate and emotionally charged. For Nakatsuka, telling his great-grandfather’s story with JCC to the Asian American community was a supportive experience when compared to the time his school made him teach Japanese incarceration to fifth graders as a fourth grader.

“When I was telling this story in fourth grade, [I was] telling this to a bunch of White kids and none of them understood what I was saying,” Nakatsuka said.

“To have some kind of community backing you is really important and made it a lot easier.”

Although the storytelling process was nerve-wracking for Taketa, she found comfort in knowing the experiences of Nakatsuka and Tomihiro. “I was super excited—and wanted to cry because I was so nervous,” she said. “Especially after seeing Richard and Mackenzie go… I could feel like their stories were connected.”

After the presentation, Taketa immediately received hugs and text messages of support and gratitude from friends. One gave her a letter of encouragement and another gave her chocolate. Telling her grandfather’s story required immense levels of emotional labor—more than she believed

herself capable of. Taketa was proud to have told her grandfather’s story to a room full of friends and strangers with whom she now feels more strongly connected.

“I walk around campus and I see them now, and they know,” said Taketa. “It’s not some secret that I’m keeping to myself… because the hope of having all of these open meetings was that more people can know… things that we don’t want to happen again.”

Before coming to Tufts, Tomihiro had never been part of a community that did not know the history of Japanese incarceration—that a student body lacked this critical knowledge was a shocking realization.

Tomihiro saw the silence on these issues at Tufts as a result of the shortage of Asian American Studies courses offered and low retention rate for faculty of color; Tufts consistently offers only one Asian Americanfocused course per year during the Fall semester. Last year alone, at least 11 faculty and staff of color left the university.

“I think my high school had more Asian American classes than my college,” Tomihiro said. “The first step would be to find teachers—and Tufts is having problems with that already… Why are people of color the only people who care about teachers of color? It should be an entire student body-wide issue.”

Nakatsuka acknowledged that despite institutional barriers, he will continue to tell the history. “No, it should not be our responsibility [to teach the history of Japa-

nese incarceration],” Nakatsuka said. “But the reality is that it is… if you’re not going to educate, who is?”

More than 70 years after the concentration camps were closed, we are still educating Americans about their history.

At Tufts, the Asian American community bears the burden of histories told by Nakatsuka, Tomihiro, and Taketa. On our Day of Remembrance, the community bears witness to injustices against the living and the dead; and we do this in the spirit of resistance that brought communities together at the first Day of Remembrance more than forty years ago. A 1978 flyer states the intentions of the event: Remember the concentration camps stand for redress with your family By 1988, the Redress Movement culminated in a national apology and $20,000 in reparations for each surviving detainee; but above all, it brought communities back together. Stories were told across generations in the hopes that the future might be more just for all. Today, many stories remain untold. But at Tufts, students are fighting to break the silence.

“There are so many people’s stories, so many Asian American stories that are just burdens on people,” Taketa said, “but if you can talk about them and use them in a useful way… It’s not a burden, it’s more like a weapon.”

MARCH 25, 2019 Tufts Observer 7

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A

A follow-up: History Isn't Hypothetical

By Issay Matsumoto Note: the following personal narrative details events that, ironically, occurred during the weekend of Japanese Culture Club’s Day of Remembrance (DOR) events. The author has included this narrative to be printed alongside an account of JCC’s DOR in this week’s Observer’s issue in order to further readers’ understandings of the historical depth of anti-Asian racism at Tufts, on domestic and transnational terms. In writing this piece, the author hopes to contribute to ongoing discussions and actions among Asian and Asian American students to center their experiences with anti-Asian racism. Histories of antiAsian racism can’t be extricated from what happens within institutions like Tufts, an elite private research university with historical ties to oppressive regimes domestically and abroad.

8 Tufts Observer March 25, 2019

few weeks ago, against my better judgment, I went to the first meeting of the Tufts “Hypothetical Historians” club. “Hypothetical history,” also known as “counterfactual history,” is a genre of thought experiment used by historians and social scientists that changes a single variable in a historical narrative and tracks its effects on global trajectories through “evidence-based systematic analysis.”

I entered a room filled with students who had decided ahead of time that we would discuss a history in which the US had never discovered nuclear weapons technology. I didn’t know anyone in the room, but they all seemed to be friends with one another.

Naturally, the first point of the group’s discussion was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945: what would have happened in World War II if there were no nukes?

“I’d like to call to attention the existence of US Bat Bomb Technology,” one student announced. “During the war, the US was testing the use of timed incendiary devices strapped to bats that would be released from planes and fly down and nest in the attics of Japanese houses.”

“Just confirming what was said: these things are real!” another student on his laptop said. “Holy shit!” He could not contain his laughter.

“Japanese houses at the time,” the first student explained, “were made of wood and paper. So the bats would fly into these houses—unnoticed under the cover of night—and after a little while, boom, an entire city would go up in flames. Might this have been the alternative to nuclear technology that the US would have used to end the war?” A frightening energy filled the room. It came with the hoots and laughter of young men plotting the alter-

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nate demise of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people.

I wasn’t laughing. My heart was throbbing and I could feel the blood in my neck.

What kind of fucked up history club is this?

I thought. All I could hear was their laughter. The conversation began to escape me as I stared at the floor, drowning unnoticed in White noise. But soon, I struggled back to the surface and was able to speak.

“As someone whose grandparents were children in Japan during the war, and saw entire cities leveled by bombs, I don’t find bat bombs very funny,” I said.

My voice was quivering and I was shaking. You know when you’re trying to say something, and it feels like your voice is a person running down the stairs, almost missing its footing at each step, each step becoming more and more out of place?

That was the feeling.

As if to compensate for my lack of contribution to the discussion, I added, “And I think it’s important to consider what was said earlier about biological weapons tested by the Japanese—maybe the US would have used those instead of nuclear bombs?” By the end of my tiny speech, my voice fell down the entire flight of stairs, completely bruised.

The room went quiet. The first student who had brought up bat bombs had apparently gotten up from his seat on the floor while I was speaking; I didn’t notice him approach me. Suddenly he was right there next to me, patting me on the fucking shoulder.

“I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.” I turned to face him, startled. He looked really sorry.

(This next part of the story, I really don’t like.)

“It’s okay,” I said.

Despite my attempt to speak up and interrupt the “business-as-usual” of the moment at this stupid club meeting, I caved into the fragility of the people in the room. I’m a part of some really amazing communities at this school that have encouraged me to speak up at exactly these moments; but despite their support, it is still difficult to practice this in the day-to-

PHOTOS COURTESY OF EMILY TAKETA

day, on the “micro” level. These moments often flash past in an instant.

So weeks after the incident, I’m writing this as a self-addendum: no, what happened in that room was not okay, and no, I am not willing to take what was said at face value as unintentional “disrespect.”

To the student who apologized to me again after the meeting for showing lack of “verbal restraint,” I wonder: what really was it that you had to restrain? Was it your language? Or was it a structural violence that shapeshifts through centuries of historical contingencies?

To everyone in the room that day: was it Whiteness?

In US geopolitical terms, war, imperialism, and colonialism were and are pillars of anti-Asian racism abroad. As Ernie Pyle, a journalist on the Pacific front in February 1945 writes, “In Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches."

Anti-Asian racism enabled and obscured the incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “military necessities” against a racialized “subhuman” enemy. Any historian, hypothetical or otherwise, should know this—but navigating these forces is another story. More than 70 years later, they persist in rooms today, where laughter drowns the suffering of war dead, survivors, and their families.

As a student of History, I’m also trying to balance the responsibilities of an institutionalized power that can create historical objects out of its human subjects. History colludes with Whiteness to literally define and redefine the realities in this country, even in what it considers to be strange, foreign racialized worlds abroad. When we try to understand what happened back then (and over there), it is History with a capital H that mediates our understandings, amplifying or destroying them. History’s project is not innocent—it is hegemonic. Its project was something that I saw—and felt—play out through the racial

dynamics in that room that rendered me, and an entire nation of people, invisible.

It is for these reasons that I remain deeply troubled by the dangers that lurk in this contested terrain called History.

But I won’t surrender its subjects—some of them my own grandparents—to bratty, entitled, and racist “Hypothetical Historians” who get to set the terms of the debate before my people even arrive. I am not speaking hypothetically: our histories are not your possessions. Get the fuck out of my textbooks and stay the fuck away from my grandparents.

Recommended reading: Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice (Lisa Yoneyama) Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Ron Takaki) Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (John Dower)

MARCH 25, 2019 Tufts Observer 9

CAMPUS

800/mo not available

900/mo

975/mo 750/mo only 1 left

900/mo not available

H

ow often are narratives from nonstudent community members of Somerville and Medford centered in our discussions of displacement and housing justice? For the few thousand Tufts students who live off-campus, there are another few thousand community members being actively pushed out of their homes and neighborhoods. Tufts students are not necessarily responsible for the scope of this issue, but rather are a manifestation of the larger Tufts housing crisis that is exerting its pressures on renters and families of all backgrounds in the Somerville and Medford areas. Tufts Housing League (THL) was created by students, for students and local residents, to meet a need for organizing and mobilization towards a problem Tufts hasn’t adequately addressed. We want to take this opportunity, as a student member of THL and a Medford community member of THL, to highlight Tufts University’s housing policies and how they affect residents of Somerville and Medford.

The structural components of Tufts’s housing policies that affect community members most broadly are both the lack of beds available in Tufts housing and the scarcity of different types of housing available on campus. Tufts does not 10 Tufts Observer March 25, 2019

850/mo

have enough housing to accommodate its steadily growing student body—especially apartment-style suites for upperclassmen, forcing many juniors and seniors out into the local community. Anne Hall, a senior living in Sophia Gordon Hall, says “I’m very lucky to have secured on-campus housing my four years at Tufts. I like living on campus, as I’m spatially close to buildings I visit frequently and can easily stop by my suite during the day for meals, change of clothes [and] time to rest. I prefer living on campus than off campus for these reasons and also to not deal with the various responsibilities that come from renting a house.” Hall’s story is one of few; only 5.3 percent of polled juniors and seniors who applied to live on-campus were awarded housing.

It can be easy to fixate on how a lack of rooms and homes on-campus affects us personally as students, but it is critical that we remember the other side of this narrative. For each individual living in an off-campus house, rent averages between $800 to $900 per month, according to a report in the Tufts Daily. Considering the fact that approximately 60 percent of Tufts students are not on financial aid, and that many come from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds, the decisions

by these individuals to rent local homes puts an increased strain on the housing market. Students are already a transient population that is easy for absentee landlords to abuse and extract profit from.

And, since the average Tufts student can afford to pay the exorbitant rent cost, Somerville and Medford residents are continually displaced.

Consider for yourself the struggles of finding a room to rent in a quality apartment, and then imagine trying to do the same thing for a family of three with two dogs (a feat that one of the authors of this piece can attest to). Investor landlords— many of whom are large real estate corporations and firms—are moving into the area and purchasing homes for sale with the express intent to rent to students and make a profit. They price out families looking to move into the area, who cannot afford the exorbitant mortgages that large real estate firms can. According to the most recent US Census data, Somerville’s per capita income is $44,399.

The average annual rent cost in Somerville and Medford amounts to $10,000— equivalent to nearly a fourth of an average resident’s income.

In response, several local Somerville and Medford neighborhoods have

CAMPUS

The Other Side of the Street Local Community Members and the Tufts Housing Crisis

By Ann-Marie Lee & Nate Otte

their own neighborhood associations and councils; these neighborhood groups exist to battle the many aspects of the housing crisis seen both in direct correlation to Tufts and larger trends of Boston real estate. Edward Beuchert, a Somerville resident on Conwell Avenue and co-founder of the West Somerville Neighborhood Association, confirmed the rent disparity, stating, “The house across the street from me was sold by the older couple who lived there to an investor landlord who then proceeded to rent it to twelve Tufts students. With students paying approximately $10K per year for an off-campus bedroom, and having little choice to do otherwise, a landlord is able to charge students significantly more money than a family could afford.”

Meanwhile, Our Revolution chapters in both Somerville and Medford build coalitions and organize around community members’ rights in the area. Jess Farrell, a Medford resident and Our Revolution Medford community organizer, echoed similar sentiments to Beuchert.

“As a community member, I see the Tufts housing crisis as one of many pressures on the Medford housing market for working people,” she said. “But,” she continued, “it’s the one that can be most

easily addressed and the one that comes from an institution whose strategic goals purports to support social change as a core theme. Developers in the housing market don’t have that mission to hold them accountable to; we know that their core mission is to turn a profit, and it’s much more difficult for the community to overcome that.”

Activist residents like Beuchert and Farrell are mobilizing in a variety of ways to try to solve the gentrification Tufts is creating in its backyard. When asked about what fighting for fair housing entails as a community organizer, Farrell responded: “We need Tufts’ help in fixing the housing problem in Medford, and we know that Tufts is the best-positioned actor to make a huge impact right now. Building a dorm and taking other measures to provide students with what they need on campus will help keep working people in their homes, and Tufts has the power and responsibility to make this impact.”

Residents are more than aware of Tufts University’s rent-hiking effects in their cities and are more than willing to stand with students. “I want to stress it’s not the students [creating the housing crisis]. This is all about how Tufts decides to manage its business,” Katjana Ballantyne, President

of Somerville’s City Council and Ward 7 Councillor, said. Beuchert, Farrell, and Ballantyne all attended THL’s November march and rally, and Farrell and Ballantyne both sat in meetings THL members conducted with Dean of Student Affairs Mary Pat McMahon.

Ultimately, as students, we must keep in mind that building relationships with Somerville and Medford residents is necessary not just for pressuring Tufts to build more housing, but also for remembering that we are fighting the same struggle—and quite frankly, remembering to be more neighborly. We could go much farther as a community if we form closer student-resident bonds.

Opening our eyes to the crossover between our Tufts community and the Somerville and Medford community at large has never been more important.

It’s never too late to sign a petition or help shovel a sidewalk, especially when the Tufts housing crisis is affecting everyone in the local area. Beuchert’s parting words? “As long as there’s a housing lottery with ‘losers’ who can’t live oncampus as they wish, there is by definition a housing shortage… What we have now isn’t just a ‘shortage’—it’s a fullblown emergency!”

MARCH 25, 2019 Tufts Observer 11

Formations of Desire

By Sonya Bhatia When I first met you, I noticed your socks above your ankles and rolled down slightly.

The first word that popped into my mind: kindness The real beginning transpired out of a moment that should have been filled with pain (and it was).

Then I looked into your eyes: simultaneously, I was hurt and felt closer to you. *I still barely know you I think about you now on late night walks home (yes, I think about you, and I do not know why).

Somewhere the lines all blurred into one fleeting feeling, an ambiguous inarticulation—

the remnants of which morph into A deep desire: to be wrapped into your arms, lying in bed to wake up in the morning and see how the light from your window falls on your face and watch the shadows form on your body.

to lay my head on your chest

and hear your vibrations I am fragile (I rather stay ignorant than shatter).

So, instead, I will look at the morning light coming from my bedroom window until time works to fade and all that remains are shadows. *I will never know you like that

12 Tufts Observer April 23, 2018

ART BY MADISON HASKINS

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SASHA HULKOWER

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NASRIN LIN

arts & culture

confessions of a former gleek

By Brittany Regas

W

hen I was in middle school, I became obsessed with the TV show Glee. Along with millions of other “Gleeks,” the common nickname for “stans” of the show, I tuned in every week to watch a group of high school misfits perform overthe-top musical numbers and deal with issues such as body image, alcohol, and sexuality.

Luckily for me, I was able to share my passion for the show with a thriving online community. I created an account on a website called the Glee Wiki, which currently contains over 1,700 pages of information describing the characters, episodes, and songs of Glee. One of the many features of the website is a chat room which, at any given point during Glee’s run, hosted dozens of users of all ages and nationalities. For a year, nearly every day after school, I would log on to the Glee Wiki, enter the chat room, and Gleek out with other users. Each week, I spent hours talking to my newfound Internet friends about Rachel’s new boyfriend or Blaine’s most recent solo. We would often participate in group video chat sessions; every Friday afternoon, it became my routine to Skype with one of my Glee Wiki friends for hours and chat about the most recent episode or events in our personal lives. Although I continued to spend time with “real life” friends and family, I sometimes felt as if I lived a second life, a secret one, spent entirely on the Internet with my fellow Gleeks.

As a collective, Gleeks were notorious on the Internet. The fandom was divided into several factions, each revolving around a certain character or “ship”—a term short for “relationship” that is used to describe a romantic pairing of characters. As the show continued, the fandom became more and more polarized along party lines. In a 2017 post, Tumblr user twelveclara described the Glee fandom as “hell.” She wrote, “we turned on each other… character vs. character, ship vs. ship, blogger vs. blogger, we all 18 Tufts Observer march 25, 2019

fucking hated each other.” In an interview with Slate, the author of the Tumblr post described a typical day in the Glee fandom.

“We would watch the episode. Something inevitably would piss off some subsection, or some character would fight with a different character,” she recalled. “Because of that, it would just be a bombardment of their fans on Tumblr yelling at each other… just non-stop harassment from every side.”

When I entered the online Glee community, these arguments were everyday occurrences. It was not unusual for users to be banned from the Glee Wiki website for using hateful language during fights with rival factions of the fandom. At the time, I was deeply invested in these debates and felt genuinely hurt when someone insulted my favorite character or ship. Looking back, I agree with Tumblr user twelveclara’s statement that there is “no history [of the Glee fandom], only rage and pain and regret.”

In an interview, Tufts Film and Media Studies professor Tasha Oren gave insight as to why she believes so many people are drawn to fandom, as well as why its cultures sometimes turn ugly. “[Much] of fandom, at its base, is simply the connection and community of people who share some cultural aspect that they love… and feel like-minded and connected through it,” she said.

At the same time, “like any other social interaction, the current online culture seems to facilitate hostility and argument as much as connection and support,” she continued. “[A]nd anonymity [on the Internet]... makes such interactions easier to engage in with less repercussion.”

Although fandom culture has certainly evolved since its invention, fandoms themselves existed long before the Internet.

The earliest modern fandom was actually one that was popular during the late 1800s—the Sherlock Holmes fandom. Fans of the detective series eagerly devoured each new Holmes story that Arthur Conan Doyle published, and some even wrote spin off stories about Holmes and Watson—early versions of what we call fanfiction today.

Although fandom culture thrived throughout the 20th century, it became closer to its modern form in the 1960s with the airing of the now-iconic sci-fi TV show Star Trek. When the series was cancelled in 1968 after just two seasons, fans started a letter-writing campaign that incentivized the network to renew the show. The fandom only continued to grow from there, spawning fan conventions, homemade zines, and lots of fanfiction. The Star Trek fandom paved the way for the growth of new fandoms, and later in the century, with the ever-increasing integration of the Internet into everyday life, members of fandoms were able to communicate more easily, as well as share their fanfiction and fanart. Online discussion boards and forums also began to pop up within TV fandoms. Within these mediums, fans could discuss at length their favorite characters, episodes, and ships in addition to airing their grievances about particular storylines or plot points. Producers and writers of TV shows began to peruse these online forums to gauge how their fans were reacting to new developments in their series. Fans were starting to influence the content of the media they were ravenously consuming.

Professor Oren also spoke about the connection between the TV industry and fandom. “[T]he industry itself has been working hard to facilitate fandom,” she said. “[T]o me, that’s been the most problematic aspect of fandom, not only because it skews towards celebrity-centered practices, but also as it tends to sup-

arts & culture port certain, majority kinds of fandom that become their own orthodoxy.”

Glee was notoriously influenced by its very large and extremely vocal fandom. Especially in the later seasons, its staff wrote in several storylines to appease fans—most notably, the double wedding of two queer couples in the final season was written partially to mitigate tensions between fans of each ship.

Glee even broke the fourth wall on multiple occasions to directly address its fandom. For example, after one much-maligned fourth season episode featured the breakup of a beloved lesbian couple, Brittany and Santana, the writers had Brittany mention that “angry lesbian bloggers” were upset about her breakup with Santana a few episodes later. This was a direct reference to the real-life Glee fandom. This comment offended many queer fans, who were upset at being reduced to an unflattering stereotype.

In other cases, fandoms have pointed out harmful trends in the TV industry, particularly relating to queer representation on TV. For example, in 2016, fans of the dystopian sci-fi show The 100 drew attention to a media trope referred to as “Bury Your Gays,” in which queer characters die at rates disproportionate to their straight counterparts. In The 100, a lesbian character, Lexa, was shot by a stray bullet intended for her female lover and died in a scene that almost exactly mirrored an equally controversial scene in Buffy the Vampire Slayer from almost 15 years earlier.

The fandom was outraged and in response, organized a fundraiser for the Trevor Project, an organization dedicated to suicide prevention services for queer teenagers. In the end, The 100 fandom raised over $170,000. They also inspired several TV show writers and producers to sign The Lexa Pledge, promising the LGBTQ+ community that they would make a conscious effort to improve queer representation on TV. As a queer woman, fandom played a big role in my comingout journey. When I started watching Glee at age 11, I had never seen queer characters portrayed in the media before, and I didn’t know any gay people in real life. So as I began to question my sexuality over the next couple years, Brittany and Santana were the only examples of queer women in my life. In middle school, the thought that I could be gay terrified me; on most nights I cried

myself to sleep because I worried that liking girls was wrong. But when I watched Glee, for the first time, I saw characters on TV who were like me. Whenever I was sad or scared, I thought of Brittany and Santana and remembered that I wasn’t alone.

During my time as an active member of the Glee fandom, I spoke to many people online who were experiencing similar struggles with their sexualities. My Glee Wiki friends were the first people that I came out to—the anonymity of the Internet allowed me to feel safe enough to finally tell people that I was a lesbian. And because of the affirmation I received from my Internet friends, I eventually worked up the courage to come out to people in real life. By 15, I was out of the closet completely.

Today, at age 19, looking back on my middle-school era gaypanic is amusing. I am now very vocal about my queerness. I have a giant sticker on my laptop that reads “useless lesbian.” So it’s easy to laugh at my middle school self and be embarrassed about the time and energy I devoted to Glee. Still, Professor Oren validated my former Glee obsession, saying, “[A]ll of us know the experience, the enormous pleasure of finding stories or characters or worlds or artists that speak to us, that make us feel something, that click and resonate, and our natural next impulse is to share that pleasure with someone else, connect over it and enjoy it as part of a community of like-minded people. At heart, that, is what fandom is.” With Glee and with Brittany and Santana, I had found a story that spoke to me. I will always be grateful for that story and for the people I was able to share it with. march 25, 2019 Tufts Observer 19

news

“My batteries are low

By Erica Levy

I

n 2003, the Opportunity rover was sent to Mars for a 90-day mission in hopes of finding evidence of water, alluding to the possibility of life on the red planet. It landed on the opposite side of the planet from its twin rover Spirit, equipped with the tools to explore rocks and soil and to take photos of the alien landscape. Both robots far outlived their planned missions—Spirit’s life ended in 2010 when it got stuck in a patch of sand, angled so that its batteries couldn’t recharge, and the robot lost communication with Earth.

Opportunity went on to break the record for the longest distance driven by any offEarth wheeled vehicle, crawling a recordbreaking 28 miles.

One of NASA’s longest and possibly most successful feats of interplanetary exploration, Opportunity’s journey brought to Earth lessons about the possibility of habitable landscapes and life elsewhere, of engineering perseverance, and of intrepid innovations. There’s no way to refresh your tool set once you’re on another planet, so Opportunity’s team back on Earth had to innovate to keep Opportunity climbing and learning for many years. Clever repurposing made new discoveries possible—when Opportunity lost use of its right front wheel, engineers found workarounds. The rover travelled backwards for some months before the wheel finally returned to a driveable state. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory housed multiple 20 Tufts Observer March 25, 2019

and it’s getting dark.”

Mars-like sandpits that scientists used to test ways they could drive the rover across a real sandpit. Once Opportunity began to age, each pit, crater, and hill became a treacherous obstacle.

Across its marathon-length traverse, the rover uncovered hematite, a mineral that forms in water, shown in the falsecolor images NASA released to the public.

And in the Endeavor crater, Opportunity detected suggestions of a water system similar to the drinkable water of Earth’s ponds and lakes. The discoveries made

by Opportunity and the dedicated team of scientists behind it demonstrate the similarities between Mars’ landscape and Earth’s, pointing towards the possibility of life on Mars.

In 2018, a storm was brewing on the edge of Mars’ brutal winter season. The storm engulfed the entire planet in thick dust, effectively suffocating Opportunity’s battery recharging technology. Opportunity went into a kind of hibernation, but without any energy to spark its onboard heating, the rover’s internal hardware was at risk of simply splitting in the cold. By June, Opportunity ceased communications with NASA. In dust storms like these, as long as the rover can keep its parts intact, it wakes up when the sky clears to continue its mission.

But even with the dust settling and sky clearing, NASA’s attempts to contact Opportunity were met with complete silence.

The dedicated team kept reaching out, but after almost a year of stillness from the lost robot, NASA declared the robot, and its mission, officially dead.

When Opportunity died, many turned to Twitter to publicly mourn and grieve. #ThanksOppy began trending almost immediately after the announcement of Opportunity’s death. Young artists shared comics and drawings and paintings of the beloved rover. There was a tangible sense of sorrow as this long standing connection to the cosmos was severed. These rovers seem vibrantly alive—consistently collecting and communicating data from a place humans never experienced before. Opportunity provided a line of sight, extending our common consciousness onto another planet; in a way, the rover’s death felt like a threat to the opportunity to explore space itself.

NASA engineer Scott Maxwell—Twitter user @marsroverdriver—has said he viewed the rover as a constant, capable joy in his life. For more than a decade of life on Earth, Opportunity was still steadily rumbling along on Mars, and with it, the lives of hundreds of scientists. When Opportunity officially died, Maxwell tweeted: “I drove Spirit and Opportunity for nine years. My cat died. My dad died. I got divorced. And I met the woman I would marry, now the mother of my son. Through all the ups and downs, Opportunity was there.” Opportunity has weaved its way into the identity of many people touched by its existence.

ART BY ERICA LEVY

news

For professors like Samuel Kounaves of the Tufts Chemistry Department, the loss of a rover means something different.

In 2003, Kounaves’ proposal to NASA for a robot with chemistry capabilities to “taste” the Martian soil was accepted. Within four years, the Mars Phoenix Lander was launched, and the lives of Kounaves and his students became tightly bound with the life of Phoenix. “It was exciting for all of us,” Kounaves told me as we sat in his office. His walls are plastered with posters about the planets and cosmic chemistry, along with printed photos of smiling students in his lab. The office reflected joyfully on a time of shared learning, of students being part of something a whole planet away from this campus.

Kounaves refers to the Phoenix Lander with affection—“our Phoenix,” he calls it as he discusses the processual death of a robot on Mars. He recounts the story of Phoenix’s last days, as the robot repeatedly tried and failed to reboot, narrating its efforts along the way. When robots communicate like this, it’s easy to anthropomorphize their seemingly valiant efforts.

There’s a sense of painful strain against the aging process, with the rovers alone on another planet, narrating their own demise.

But even for people who aren’t so closely connected to spacecraft, humanizing these rovers can be easy. Opportunity’s two camera “eyes” and puppy-like body are immediately reminiscent of movie characters like Pixar’s WALL-E. The dedicated and charming animated rover is extremely close in design to Opportunity, making the comparison almost effortless.

Other movies, like Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, position the rover as sole protector of a lost landscape. And Opportunity inevitably recalls Star Wars characters like R2D2, whose charming shape and endearing beeps make the rover out to be more of a companion than a cold robot.

Susan Napier, Tufts professor of cinema and Japanese culture, points to otherness and the uncanny valley to explain the attraction many feel for Opportunity. The uncanny valley is the uncomfortable space between stylized and realistic. The term is often used in the context of humanoid robots: when their appearance nears but doesn’t reach realism, these robots appear uncanny and eerie. Rather than falling

into the uncanny valley like other peculiar, metallic bots, the Opportunity rover’s squat body and tiny head makes it seem endearing and sweet. Opportunity doesn’t feel like a distant, android other; instead, it appears just close enough to pop culture icons to be cute. And when things are cute, people care about them.

Besides Opportunity’s cuteness factor, science writers and news media also humanize elements of spacecraft, often sensationalizing stories to attract the general reader. Opportunity’s poignant last words—“my battery is low and it’s getting dark”—aren’t really the same as the coded signal data that the rover sent before it lost contact. The phrase originated when a Twitter thread by science writer Jacob Margolis went viral. In reality, Opportunity’s transmission was no different than the strings of information sent from any other rovers, but this anthropomorphization of its transmission served to elevate human empathy and brought people to care intensely about the death of a faraway robot.

Scientists themselves sometimes utilize this empathy to help publish their findings—the aforementioned hematite minerals that Opportunity found were nicknamed “blueberries” after NASA assigned them a blue hue on the images released to the public. NASA often manipulates the colors in photos from Mars, and the blue hematite “berries” played a role in promoting the discovery. And Kounaves accidentally publicized his team’s Phoenix Lander findings by stating, at a 2008 conference, that you could grow asparagus on Mars. He was referring to the acidity of Mars’ alkaline-heavy soil, which is comparable to the typical environment for growing asparagus. Mars is not nearly at the watery gardening level required to actually

grow any vegetables, but the press took this soundbite and ran with it, just as the public did with Margolis’ poetic translation of Opportunity’s last words.

This easy humanization of space exploration helps us to forget the great costs of the projects it supports. Marisa Cohn, an anthropologist from Copenhagen, points out in her research that technological infrastructures, like the conglomeration of analytical tools and teams of experts that make a Mars rover, do not approach death as a natural byproduct of time’s passing. Rather, the death of a rover is seen as the end of a careful negotiation of workarounds that reflect our own concepts of aging. “Repairs are made in an effort to decay ‘gracefully’ rather than break catastrophically,” resulting in lifetimes spent on upholding a robot in decay.

In the face of space missions like Opportunity’s, which lasted 14 years and cost a massive $400 million, Kounaves hopes for space exploration missions that are cheaper and more inclusive. “I just wish more students could have that experience,” he says, referring to the flurry of exciting planetary research completed by his students while working on the Phoenix Lander. Inclusivity is a problem in any STEM field, but the inherent expenses associated with space exploration makes involvement in a cosmic project typically limited to a select few. NASA’s Scout program, an initiative for smaller, lower-cost spacecrafts, is what allowed Phoenix to launch and a generation of students to participate in an field otherwise dominated by White men and senior professionals. Space exploration is exciting—the learning experience of working with rovers like Opportunity is an opportunity that more young, ambitious students should have access to.

Opportunity’s death signals more than the loss of a rover. Opportunity extended our line of sight across the cosmos, and even though the rover really was just a robot, the messages it sent from Mars were infused with meaning and sentimentality as its discoveries spread through the public sphere here on Earth. Its journey and life remind us of the very human capability for compassion toward others, and demonstrates that even machines and objects have histories deeply intertwined with culture and collective consciousness.

MARCH 25, 2019 Tufts Observer 21

news

Youth in Our Veins: O

n February 19, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a puzzling statement cautioning consumers who were seeking blood transfusions from young people. The statement references the rising popularity of startups that claim to have found the key to unlocking the fountain of youth. Drawing on “inspiration” from research conducted on mice, these startups inject the plasma from the blood of young people between the ages of 16 and 25 into people over 35.

The companies are utilizing research from the early 2000s, when a group of Stanford researchers connected the circulatory systems of young mice to old mice in a process called parabiosis. The idea was that the young mouse’s blood would pump into the old mouse’s circulatory system, and rejuvenate the aging mouse.

Blood transfusions are not a new concept.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), there are more than 9.5 million blood donors in the United States and a total of 14.6 million transfusions per year. Typically, people need blood transfusions after a traumatic event in which they lose significant amounts of blood or because they have a specific illness like hemophilia or cancer. But the Stanford experiment introduced the concept of “young blood” as a 22 Tufts Observer march 25, 2019

By Sivi Satchitchanandan potential anti-aging procedure and influenced startups to explore its use in humans.

More specifically, young blood startups are looking to exploit the science of plasma. Plasma is the liquid portion of blood that contains proteins vital to a person’s overall health. It also contains compounds whose compositional levels change as a person ages. With age, tissues become stiff and lose mass, making blood vessels rigid. This is coupled with a lower blood volume and reduced production of red blood cells. Younger blood, however, carries compounds that promote cell growth and repair.

Jesse Karmazin, the founder of the plasma transfusion startup Ambrosia, told New Scientist he believes that “whatever is in young blood is causing changes that appear to make the aging process reverse.”

Karmazin has gone so far as to say that the procedure “comes pretty close” to “immortality” and that “it’s like plastic surgery from the inside out.” He also said that “[it] reverses aging. We’re pretty clear at this point. This is conclusive.” These bold assertions helped Ambrosia attract clients.

Since August 2016, Ambrosia has been transfusing people 35 years and older with young plasma. They have treated 70 people so far, all of whom paid $8,000 to be participants in Ambrosia’s study. Their results imply that the transfusions could reduce the risk of several major diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.

However, the trial did not have a placebo group, which could have skewed its results. Tufts biology professor Mitch

McVey, who teaches the class Biology of Aging, says that “the gold standard for any therapeutic intervention is a double-blind clinical trial, including a placebo…I’ve read about clinical trials for plasma infusions being started, but they don’t sound controlled to me.”

A double-blind clinical trial means that both patients and researchers do not know who receives the placebo and who gets the treatment—a process Ambrosia did not follow. This double-blind trial is important, as it allows for dispassionate and unbiased results and analysis. Despite the questionable nature of the experiment, Karmazin continued to support his company’s goals; he says the next step for Ambrosia is to target the aging populations in places like New York, Los Angeles, and Florida.

Researchers who conduct experiments in this field stress that the results seen in mice are not directly applicable to humans. “It’s important to remember that what works in a mouse or [an]other animal often doesn’t work in a human,” McVey cautioned.

Along the same lines, another startup, Elevian, is urging people not to over-hype the current research. As a regenerative medicine startup, Elevian focuses their research on developing drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, coronary heart disease, and muscle dysfunction. They recognize the potential of this procedure to prevent agerelated diseases and believe proteins in plasma could be a viable solution to numerous medical issues in the future. But they acknowledge that this claim requires more research and review.

Currently, there are still inconsistencies in the research being done on mice.

In 2014, Elevian released two promising papers in the world-renowned journal Science, suggesting that the injection of a parART BY JANIE INGRASSIA

News

ticular plasma compound would strengthen older mice’s muscle function, increase the brain’s blood flow, and improve memory. However, researchers at the pharmaceutical company Novartis published a conflicting report which found that high doses of the compound caused muscle atrophy in mice.

In response to Ambrosia’s young blood claims, the FDA stated that “there is no compelling evidence in its efficacy.”

The FDA is also “concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies.” Since then, Ambrosia has “ceased patient treatments” in accordance with the FDA statement.

Even though this particular method garnered enough popularity to warrant a statement from the FDA, there are many other anti-aging techniques that haven’t.

The medicalization of aging has a long history of fad treatments, from the vampire face-lift, to microneedling, to epidermal growth factor facials, and many more.

Though injecting young plasma into an older person is a more recent experiment, the obsession with anti-aging has existed for centuries.

Human mortality and aging are inevitable, yet an industry predicated upon helping people achieve the image of youth has grown exponentially. Crow’s feet, wrinkles, and stretch marks have all been deemed unsightly signs of age, prompting a multi-billion dollar industry to emerge.

This industry monetized skincare, tricking people into thinking that it is affordable— preventing the body from outwardly aging has become a capitalist order.

As the industry transitions to more invasive treatments like young blood, skincare becomes a function of wealth. But still, the general piece of advice that magazines, blogs, and celebrities frequently dole out is to stay hydrated and avoid dairy— visible all throughout women’s magazines and websites. If you apply the right product and live a healthy lifestyle, according to this advice, you will regain the signs of youth. Ironically, this advice typically comes from the wealthy, specifically celebrities, who have access to the best treatments and products possible.

Even tycoons in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with aging. The National Academy of Medicine’s Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity is an organization that has $25 million to give out for breakthroughs in the field. According to the New Yorker, the organization’s kickoff party in 2017 hosted Nobel prize winners, actors like Goldie Hawn, entrepreneurs, and tech billionaires like Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin. All of them gathered to discuss not only how to prevent death but how to halt aging as well.

Joon Yun, a doctor and healthcare hedge fund owner, donated the first two million dollars to the challenge. He believes that if someone can “crack the code of aging,” they “can end aging forever.”

Again, this quest is nothing new. In 2013, Google launched a unit called Calico that focuses research on “the challenge of aging and associated diseases.” In 2011, a company called Unity Biotechnology was founded to “extend the human healthspan” and unburden people of the “disease of aging.” Unity Biotechnology is backed by venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

While the wealthy use dermatologists, estheticians, and now research labs to delay aging, they tend to avoid talking about the costs associated with doing so. The media emphasizes lifestyle choices and glosses over the access and ability to pay for thousand dollar creams. But leaving out the connection between wealth and antiaging has socio-cultural ramifications.

Sarah Pinto, Chair of Tufts anthropology department, said that “access to therapies that are oriented toward longevity, beauty, and in some cases even health depends on disposable income, not to mention time and other aspects of access.”

And beyond access, even lifestyle changes are connected to wealth. Only certain people have access to fresh foods or even clean water. Even if Ambrosia’s young blood trials were eventually FDA approved, only those with thousands of dollars to spare will have access to their promise of renewed youthfulness.

This evasion of information can become dangerous when it starts turning to medical procedures. The young blood technique might be able to stall aging, but as the FDA warns, if not done properly, it could also lead to allergic reactions, circulatory overload, or infectious disease transmission.

Young blood is new, but anti-aging treatments are part of history. “Anti-aging fads are definitely nothing new, and I imagine that just about every civilization in the world has gone through multiple iterations of them,” Tufts history professor Alisha Rankin said. She went on to cite the fact that some alchemists claimed to have created an Elixir of Life and pointed to the historic use of hot springs to reverse the effects of aging. Amidst the constant barrage of anti-aging treatments, it is important to know how to spot the promising from the consequential.

Today, Professor McVey warns that potential fallouts of young blood transfusions “might not be apparent for years,” meaning that it will take several years of rigorous research before the FDA or any regulatory health organization approves it as a safe procedure. Rather than seeking anti-aging methods from promotional sources like women’s health sites or Buzzfeed, McVey suggests that “the best way to know if a lifespan or healthspan-promoting intervention may have real benefit is to look for studies about it in the peer-reviewed, primary biomedical literature.”

As people age, skin becomes one of the most visible sources of proof of a person’s lifestyle, and increasingly, it is also becoming evidence of their wealth. But, no matter how much young blood or trendy youthpromising product they get their hands on, the wealthy will inevitably grow old––just like the rest of us.

MARCH 25, 2019 Tufts Observer 23

arts & culture

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any have said that the millennial generation has been one consistently defined by obsessions. Whether it’s memes, avocado toast, or Instagram, millenials are always on the move to the next fad.

But there’s one obsession that has recently taken over and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon: self-care. The Oxford Dictionary defines self-care as the deliberate “practice of taking an active role in protecting one’s own well-being and happiness, in particular during periods of stress.”

But anyone with an Instagram account can tell you that doesn’t tell the whole story.

For millennials, self-care takes many forms: journaling, attending a spin class, or doing a face mask, to name a few. But while these are all common modern forms of the practice, the idea of self-care existed long before millennials co-opted it as their own.

Many trace the origin of self-care to Ancient Greece, originally an attempt to create a population that was likely to care for others as well. In the 1960s and ‘70s, self-care was redefined in the US as a way for people with emotionally taxing occupations to better cope with stress. Social workers, EMTs, and trauma therapists all had to learn to properly take care of themselves before they were able to care for others.

Then, during the era of second-wave feminism and the Civil Rights Movement, the discourse surrounding self-care suddenly became politicized. In Alondra Nelson’s book Body and Soul, she discusses how, because the US healthcare system has historically and systematically failed women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people, these groups decided to take it upon themselves to create their own support systems. After Trump’s election in 2016, the interest in self-care sharply increased, with the Google searches for the term reaching a five-year high. Only recently has self-care

24 Tufts Observer march 25, 2019

the self care obsession

By Alice Hickson & Lilly Blumenthal

ART BY KAREN RUIZ

arts & culture

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been adopted into mainstream culture as celebrities and influencers have started to advertise and consumerize this new brand of wellness culture.

In 2008, actress Gwyneth Paltrow kick-started her brand Goop, whose tagline is “make every choice count.” The company sells beauty, fashion, and wellness products at a steep cost. Likewise, Jessica Alba’s brand The Honest Company markets its personal care products as “Happiness, Delivered” playing into our generation’s obsession with the idea that happiness is something that can be bought.

According to the Pew Research Center, more millennials reported making “personal improvement commitments” than any generation preceding them. In 2015, they spent twice as much as baby boomers on self-care essentials such as workout regimens, diet plans, life coaching, and apps to improve their personal well-being. Entire businesses have created complex marketing strategies that speak to self-care to sell products, contributing to the now thriving $10 billion self-care industry.

“The genre of people that partake in self care [is] heavy consumers,” first-year Rhea Lieber says. “We are the demographic that will buy workout classes, face masks, and go to brunch. Social media influencers are also this demographic.”

The boom of self-care Twitter bots has also added a technological component to the self-care movement. But what should really qualify as self-care?

Searching “#selfcare” on Instagram turns up over 12.9 million posts, mainly composed of lifestyle bloggers doing yoga poses, bathing in bubble baths, or eating gluten-free berry-based frozen yogurt—all of which reflect how the #selfcare movement has become a type of status symbol.

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What millennials understand as selfcare typically aligns with aesthetically pleasing activities not necessarily geared towards self-improvement. Is this movement really striving towards emotional health, or is it simply an expensive, capitalist, and consumer-driven act disguised in kale smoothies, yoga mats, and Lush face masks?

The practices of self-care advertised by mainstream media reveal a very narrow depiction of what life is like. And, for most, this image doesn’t quite fit that bill. Large consumer-driven self-care and “wellness” movements tell people that the best and even only way to care for oneself is through buying expensive items, like Goop’s $570 silk pajamas. In reality, this is a privilege that only the wealthy can afford.

But, according to senior Elana DeSantis, self-care doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive; it can come in many different forms, whether that’s changing into freshly laundered clothing, relaxing, or eating healthy food. Even though some of these things are still underlined by the privilege of class, there are ways to forgo investing in consumer-driven self-care products and still be kind to yourself. “[Self-care] is just attending to self and understanding what you need; it does not need to be fun in the moment,” she said.

By understanding our own needs, we build a sense of what others may need as well. However, DeSantis’ perception of self-care differs from what is often depicted by mass media influencers, celebrities, and even our college peers. DeSantis highlights the importance of working towards caring for oneself, while Instagram influencers emphasize indulging oneself. We should start asking more questions like, does a $250 floatation tank therapy session

for 45 minutes of “zen” really guide us toward self-care, or towards self-indulgence?

As sophomore Owen Lasko put it, “Face masks don’t lead to emotional intelligence.”

Psychologist Guy Winch gave a TED Talk in 2015 emphasizing how human beings tend to favor their physical needs over the emotional ones almost all of the time. “We’ve been taught physical hygiene since we were five years old,” he said.. “But what do we know about maintaining our psychological health? Well, nothing. What do we teach our children about emotional hygiene? Nothing.”

Essentially, Winch is saying that selfcare has become the means by which we are taught to tend to our “emotional hygiene.” Whether self-care takes the shape of spending 10 minutes to meditate every day or attending a group fitness class, many find it beneficial to do “things for yourself that allow you to be more successful as this will allow you to succeed in other areas in your life,” Lieber pointed out.

Lieber’s preferred method of practicing self-care is going to CorePower Yoga to feel “grounded and refreshed.” When asked whether she foresees CorePower as being her consistent means of self-care in the future, she responded, “It will probably die out, and when it does, I will also probably be tired of going.”

The way in which people practice self-care ebbs and flows with pop culture’s current obsessions. As millenials, we often latch onto these trends in pursuit of living an aesthetic advertised by our favorite icons and celebrities. But as the concept of self-care becomes more integral to the mainstream conversation, it is important to recognize that practicing self-care often revolves around leisure, and an assumption of privileges that is only afforded to some groups.

march 25, 2019 Tufts Observer 25

voices

Lines for water I was born early and impatient near an undeveloped beach, where ponies are still wild. My dad always tells the same story about this beach. When I was five, or maybe seven—before I knew anything about American Spirits or the various uses of peanut butter sandwiches—I ran away into the dunes. My dad wanted to leave the beach, he told me later, to go and get help.

My older brother refused to move from his spot in the sand.

Luke is the reason I was found, that I am okay, my dad says, because he refused to leave. Because I eventually came running back, blond and wild. I didn’t understand anybody’s tears. I explained to them both that I hadn’t lost sight of the ocean, so I wasn’t lost at all. There’s a picture of my brother and me from when I was that age.

He’s eating the crust off of my sandwich, looking somewhere away from us. I’m wearing red, smiling at the camera.

When I lost my brother I couldn’t move. Instead, I conquered death with games in my head. I wouldn’t fall for another trick of the light. Touch the doorknob forty times and my mom won’t die in her sleep. Don’t step on sidewalk cracks and my best friend won’t get cancer. Switch the light on and off ten times before I fall asleep and my dad won’t get another concussion. Some nights, I didn’t sleep at all, going up and down the stairs to make sure the stove was turned off and the house wouldn’t burn down. I didn’t have the language to articulate it, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder. I was still and silent.

24 Tufts 26 TuftsObserver Observer March March25, 5, 2018 2019

Try speaking in the language of stones.

It’s a very quiet language. Like if the pores in your face opened up and wanted to talk.

—Sarah Ruhl, Eurydice When my symptoms began to surface, I was convinced there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I thought God was mad at me or found me undeserving—my brother had been baptized, I was not. I developed a fear of death which became warped by my knowledge that I was not clean from my original sin. I compulsively pulled out my eyelashes. I knew that people would die suddenly if I didn’t police my own body exactly right. When I first got my period, I thought I was dying, but like my eyelash-pulling, I knew it was something I had to keep quiet.

When I am 19, my best friend and I learn the differences between red and white wine and wash our clothes with too much Tide detergent. I am blond again, this time unnaturally. I learn that it is absurd to fear enormous loss for missing a crack in the sidewalk. I know to write off

my conspiracy theories about losing everyone—everyone hating me—everyone realizing I’m a bad person—as irrational, that I should confine them to a faraway place in my head. Still, my mind loves to play in those tricks of the light. One night, I tell her, my best friend, how afraid I am of that corner of my brain. I tell her I’m afraid of that grey, where everything and nothing is true, where naked memories surge like riptides and leave me feeling like my body is no longer mine. She nods, she understands. She tells me she has OCD, too.

Don’t you feel crazy when—are you ever afraid—are you ever afraid you’re crazy?

Our lunacy makes sense to each other, and it makes it feel harmless and light. Dissociation and panic are just words: we still go to class, still have whole, unharmed bodies, still brush our teeth twice a day, go out with well-mannered boys, and never do drugs. We laugh for hours. I drink more wine. We f a l l a s l e e p, e n t a n g l e d a n d i nv i n c i b l e .

ART BY SOFIA PRETELL

voices

by Chopper Carter-Schelp

in December where I buy my first pack of cigarettes at a gas station with a neon green OPEN sign. On the way home, the sun sets over the bridge. It is a very, very cold day.

The beginning of my junior year I begin to realize that I was not, as I’d thought, bisexual, which had for a while allowed me to perform a cute and carbonated strawberry femininity of Good Girl with an Edgy Side. I was a lesbian.

This discovery precludes me from womanhood at all (bucha is a word like a stone) and my obsessive-compulsive disorder becomes a monster in my head. It can no longer be relegated to a small part of my mind, because my entire mind and body feels wrong. During winter break I am debilitated by my fear that my friends and family would abandon me because my newfound lesbian identity makes them profoundly uncomfortable—makes me profoundly perverted. I analyze every text message and change in tone for signs of abandonment or discomfort. I feel like a noxious ghost, sunken in her eye sockets and kneecaps. Every word I speak is in response to some hypothetical catastrophe, some undeniable theory of violence and disgust. A friend and I drive to the ocean

Months later, I watch a house burn down at the base of the mountain. I am not myself. Sichle told me once that when the fog rolls over the mountain, the Devil and a fisherman are having a smoking contest to win the fisherman’s soul. Tonight, we create the fog ourselves, daring the motherfucker to come and strike a deal with us.

Lungs, souls, who gives a shit anyway, every dyke has made a Faustian bargain already. The childless mother, the fatherless daughter, the brotherless sister: maorocoti.

The city is surrounded by ocean and still people wait on street corners for water. I fail all of my classes, but go to one exam anyway. I trace my handprint and write an apology to my professor. I quit my job and forget to call my boss. I become a sonámbula.

The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate.

—Genesis 3:12

I am five months into recovery. I am blond again. I learn how to do school again, how to read and write and give a shit. Recovery is taking a walk with my mother in the winter. It is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. It is grueling, enormous, and kind. It is Pammy always ordering the same sandwich. Recovery is Claire on the phone and Kriska on the dance floor and Mikaela coming with me to Dollar General and my abuela in her new guiso. It’s stupid pills and only cleaning your room because you lost your Juul but you know what you cleaned your goddamned room. It is lavender growing in a bombsite.

When I woke up in the hospital in September, Claire and Rosa were there.

Rosa tells me later she cried on her walk over in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and on that day I love Our Lady more than anything for sending these two to me. I love her for sending all the queers and dykes and mothers along the way, for giving us our language. The hospital room is ugly as fuck and Rosita blesses it anyway. It is Rosh Hashanah that day, and a new year.

Gather around us, heroic women of Haddam. Gather around us and put us under your silken wings. We are here, we are here, we are here, won’t someone take us across the sound together.

—Daniel Handler, Adverbs MARCH5,25,2018 2019 Tufts TuftsObserver Observer 27 25

Yolk

By Akbota Saudabayeva This afternoon is some hell: The sun, a proud prick, wears high-tops and catches in my eye. An egg cracks in my mind, glaire spilling over into my tear ducts. My fists clench. A sour wave springs to my stomach, acidic as an apple core.

I’ll admit the following: it was this afternoon and none of the others. Some thrill from the jut of the hip. The soft neck. The powerful jaw. Half-crumpled notes in the roof of the mouth, careful in delivering the verdict. That blinding scent of old newspaper. I’m contained, a yolk of yellow yearning.

Fork it over. The pink quirk of the lip. The cold, pointed nose. The fingertips.

I’m not afraid of love.

I’m afraid of a forced smile and a rusty laugh trapped in the throat. A nervous, open door and white-hot lights on the stage. The heavy blue blanket covering my legs.

I’m afraid of jumbled limbs and kneaded dough. Bitter Jamaican blue coffee in the morning that coats the throat and sticks there all day.

You know what it looks like: The reddish-yellow lump of romance, heavy in the heart and stomping 17 Tufts Observer march 25, 2019

ART BY OLIVIA HERDMAN

in the arteries. The virgin is here to tell you all the short-comings of space. About the conversation between bodies, the touching of two shadows on the pavement. A hand to hold and moist dirt to eat. Listen, I’ll admit the following: it was this afternoon and then all of the others. The same sun, with chapped lips and gaudy sneakers. The same ruddy reddish-yellow of my cheeks. Have me on the back-burner; I can stagger on the edge of a moment and savor it forever—

—After “Do You Speak Virgin”

by Analicio Sotelo

march 25, 2019 Tufts Observer 18

Feature

Fair contract now!

MARCH 5, 2018

Tufts Observer

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