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Whispers from the dust.  By Bohan Gao Illustration by Isabelle Oh Morior . The Latin verb for illustrating the opening maw of loss, the shape of solitude, the body’s gradual progression toward death. How does one word carry the weight of inevitability? My curiosity began with a comment from my Latin professor as we were studying Ancient Roman funerary inscriptions in class. He mentioned that Butler Library’s sixth floor collection was open to students, though he noted, almost as an afterthought, it hardly gets visited. The thought lingered: a collection of ancient inscriptions, steeped in history, resting in a building I passed by every day. I felt an acute sense of irony. Funerary memorials are timeless traditions, yet they have been forgotten on this campus.    Butler’s sixth floor is a profound excavation of the liminal spaces between history and modernity. It is an exploration within the rooms of life and memory, of life’s singular end, of the lineage of cemeteries. In this repository of long-forgotten fragments, one can feel the echoes of archaic texts, preserved against the odds of history. Yet it holds a sense of absence, as if inviting us to contemplate not only what has survived from antiquity, but also what has been lost.   Dr. Brett Stine, a Columbia professor in the classics department, offered insight into the selective survival of these texts. Before the invention of the printing press, the preservation of texts relied on the painstaking process of hand-copying. In the Roman era, manuscripts were commonly inscribed on wax tablets or papyrus sheets—materials especially prone to decay in humid climates. Their ephemeral nature has left much of what survives today more fragmentary than complete, with survival dependent on what was deemed worthy by audiences. As Stine noted, Cicero, Virgil, and Homer—whose works remain central to the Core Curriculum—are among the few names that have endured across centuries, due to the frequent transcription of their writings. “I think the only thing copied more than Homer in the ancient world is the New Testament,” Stine remarked.    This circularity is striking. The texts we read in class today have survived precisely because they were deemed important centuries ago. In turn, their prominence reinforces their preservation. This cyclicality raised questions: To what extent is what we study shaped by historical happenstance rather than an intrinsic universality?   Deeper in the archives, I found funerary inscriptions, ancient conversations with the dead. Stine noted that, unlike manuscripts, funerary inscriptions are formulaic objects. These monuments are about more than remembrance; they are negotiations of social and familial structures. In a sense, funerary inscriptions stand as enduring testaments to identities that resisted erasure. I was suddenly reminded of Sappho’s fragmented verses. In both cases—the intimacy of poetry and the gravitas of inscriptions—a delicate tension persists between presence and absence, permanence and fragility.    As I walked through these remnants of ancient writing, presence within absence took on a new significance. Each text bears witness to centuries of cultural memory, even if those memories reach us in pieces, already deconstructed. Stine viewed the holes within manuscripts as “a space for creativity and play,” noting that the gaps in Sappho’s poetry invite interpretations that would otherwise be closed off by a complete text. In Literature Humanities, students read  If Not, Winter , a translation of Sappho’s poetry by Anne Carson. This particular translation, Stine mentions, leans into the void left by history, utilizing the poetry’s fragmentary nature to produce a sense of longing. Unfortunately, these gaps are too often perceived as detriments to learning rather than additional avenues for it. We must understand that this loss, this absence, is part of its seductive fantasy—inviting us to imagine what history has left unsaid.   The continuity of ancient texts is in many ways a mirage. In truth, what survives of Cicero or Sappho is as much a result of their enduring influence as it is of chance and selective memory. The fragments of antiquity we have now are the result of countless chance occurrences—texts lost or copied, overlooked or cherished. Manuscripts attributed to Sappho or Homer are merely placeholders, attempts to fill the gaps left by centuries of decay. Libraries such as Butler like to present these remnants as part of a grand historical lineage, but in reality they are assembled from texts whose missing parts will likely never be recovered.    In our reverence for antiquity, we often overlook a critical question: Who decides the survival of history? We are awed by what we see on display, yet it is what we cannot see—the layers of absence and erasure—that forms the foundation of the archive. Between torn papyrus and broken lines, the artifacts speak, forcing us to confront those who once copied and cherished them, those who have been lost. The manuscripts in Butler’s sixth floor may be rarely visited, but they bear witness to centuries of collective memory. In the quiet of the library, the surviving pieces of Rome and Greece remind us that memory endures not in spite of what’s missing, but because of it.

A night at the planetarium. By Lily Ouellet The dome goes black, closing over us like an eyelid. I raise my hand in front of my face and it vanishes, existing now only as a shadow against the stars that begin to appear behind it on the planetarium screen. First, there’s only a handful, then a hundred, and as the presenter begins to speak in the center of the room, the stars grow by the millions into instantly recognizable clumps—a scorpion, a lion, a spoon. I forget the itchy theater seat digging into my neck—I’m in the middle of the Milky Way, alongside the speaking astrophysicist exploring the edges of black holes, orbits of exoplanets, and clouds of nebulae.    This isn’t any planetarium show, but Astronomy Live. Once a month, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History opens its doors after hours for astrophysicists to showcase their latest research by visualizing it on the famous domed screen. However, it differs from most research presentations in that the audience isn’t full of scientists, but students escaping from class, older couples in matching tweed coats, and tourists stumbling in for a rare moment of solitude. The only prerequisite for attendance is curiosity.   I first started coming to Astronomy Live as a freshman. I had gotten a ticket in a fit of frustration—sitting through Calculus lectures in the tailbone-crushing wooden seats of the Mathematics basement had drained me of all the enthusiasm for learning I’d brought to college. There was always a faint clicking sound and the smell of weed. No one ever talked, myself included. In these giant math classes, taking up class time with your own voice feels sacrilegious, an action underscoring the unspoken but sacred doctrine that underscores most undergraduate lectures: Professors talk and students write. Even in STEM fields that are purportedly about discovery, nearly every lecture, assignment, and jumble of office hours is solely concerned with jumping the next curricular hurdle. The varying passions we declare in our admissions essays are muffled, lost in a system where achievement, not curiosity, takes precedence.  llustration by Ines Alto When the show ends, the stars on the dome disappear, and the image shifts to Earth, zooming down onto the museum until we’re looking at it from above. It seems insignificantly small. The lights come up, and I rub my eyes, a bit dizzy. In the last ten minutes, the astrophysicist opens the floor for questions. They come from all directions—sharp inquiries about the existence of aliens, playful “what-ifs” about the multiverse, and probes into the accuracy of  Interstellar . To the astrophysicist, I suspect they’re all extremely trivial. Still, she answers each with contagious enthusiasm, untangling the most complex scientific theories with accessible analogies, comparing gravity to the interaction between a spider-web and a marble. The people asking questions, however, are what surprise me the most—they aren’t here for a connection or class, but because they’ve let themselves be drawn to learning for the sake of it, viewing their ignorance as a catalyst for wonder rather than an omen foretelling the doom of a B minus. Here, curiosity is more alive than I’ve seen it in months, in stark contrast to the structures I’ve been taught to value.    When I leave, I feel a little lighter, more connected to that initial spark that made me apply to Columbia. I realize how often I reduce my own learning to deadlines and grades (as much as I promised myself I wouldn’t), and more importantly, that celebrating my curiosity in its simple existence is a silent revolt against this. Astronomy Live is learning without expectations or demands. It’s a freedom that’s rarely remembered, but constantly missed.

Reflections on art-centered protest. By Rocky Rūb Columbia and its students are no strangers to protest. But amid the chants and locked gates that have become part of our everyday reality, recent art-centered protests and installations stand out for the way they make us both spectators and interpreters. However, interpretation may not be in the spectators’ hands at all. In her essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag describes interpretation as “plucking a set of elements from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation.” Many of us became translators after leaving campus last spring to a flood of questions from both loved ones and strangers, who wanted our testimonials to the narratives which played out on their screens. Sontag says, “To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.” As winter break approaches and we again return home to “restate” the images of our campus to our families, recollections of this semester’s art protests will decorate our collective memory as new scenes to be translated. ​ On Oct. 7, the Zionist student group Students Supporting Israel organized an outdoor art installation in memory of the victims of the Hamas attack one year earlier. Titled  Memory Lane , the installation was held on the west Butler Lawn, where the Gaza Solidarity Encampment had been six months prior. The exhibit was composed of many pieces of art created by a variety of artists, including a multi-campus traveling collection of enlarged milk cartons with the faces of Israeli and American citizens taken hostage or killed by Hamas. One of the most startling pieces in the exhibit was by Ezra Saragossi, GS ’24, who constructed scenes based on accounts of the attack with written descriptions, and placed them next to each other on a bright red carpet.  Illustration by Em Bennett Art, in this instance, left little to the imagination. Saragossi actually defied instructions from the Columbia-affiliated Jewish organizing groups and administrative leaders, by including fake blood and depictions of mutilation in his piece. Red paint is splattered across all the meticulously placed items, including women’s underwear, gagged and bound teddy bears, a battered child’s stroller, and burned cardboard homes. Saragossi wanted these images to be confrontational to both Zionist and anti-Zionist viewers. “From the Jewish perspective, [Jewish students] needed to feel stronger and needed something that could—we can pinpoint what hurts, and then we can get over it. And from the other side, I wanted to show people [the innocence of the lives affected], a lot of [whom] are dehumanizing Jews.” But the Jewish perspective is not married to Zionism, and some Jewish students on what Saragossi calls “the other side” have a different relationship with their faith. On the Math lawn, for a week starting on Oct. 16, a group of Jewish students constructed what they called a Liberation Sukkah. The goal was to create a space without Zionist affiliation to celebrate the Jewish holiday Sukkot, something they couldn’t find at Columbia-affiliated observances. According to the Torah, the Sukkah is a moveable shelter with at least two and a half walls and a see-through roof. This Sukkah was painted with symbols of Palestinian life and messages of resistance, like an excerpt from poet June Jordan’s “Intifada Incantation”: “I said I loved you and I wanted genocide to stop.”    A leading artist of the Sukkah who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the painted images were inspired by “scriptural connections between Jews and Palestinians that are brought forth by this holiday … about land and harvest.” For them, the holiday meant thinking about the “connection between Palestinians and their homeland and to the plants and vegetation that sustain them.” Art is an indispensable means of communicating the students’ message. “There’s been so many people who want to come and take pictures of the protests and say things like, ‘They’re anti-semitic, they’re pro-Hamas.’ So being able to have those [pictures] with the messages is important … to refocus on Palestine.”    Protest art offers itself as an already-interpreted object that amplifies a specific voice or ideology. Both artists that I spoke to described wanting as many eyes on their work as possible.  Memory Lane , which faced the center of the lawn for the engaged SSI art enthusiasts to browse, was almost turned around to face the outer hedge-lined perimeter for those walking by, and the Liberation Sukkah was constructed so that its largest painted wall would be seen by students flocking to the northern campus. Both demonstrations were staged for the passerby and seeped into quotidian campus commutes, bestowing their messages on familiar ground and suddenly becoming the centerfold to our visual landscapes. By using the visual arts, the demonstrator commits to preserving their message in its most accessible, visceral form, but cannot allow that shape to be freely manipulated by the unaligned. For protest, its art is already the interpretation, and the viewer must simply look.

Re-reading Federico García Lorca’s “Poet in New York.” By George Murphy “There has been no more terribly acute critic of America than this steel-conscious and death-conscious Spaniard, with his curious passion for the modernities of nickel and tinfoil and nitre, and for the eternities of the desert and the moon. He hated us, and rightly, for the right reasons.” - Conrad Aiken, “Homage to Lorca” Illustration by Derin Ogutcu Ninety-five years ago, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca arrived in New York, a city which made no sense. He was in some senses a fugitive—from love gone wrong, as his seven-year affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén had just gone down in flames, and from the suffocating fame caused by the success of his first major poetry collection. To occupy himself, he enrolled at Columbia, intending to learn English and write a book about life in the New World. Lorca was excited by the heady promise of American society—he had a deep love of Walt Whitman and was especially interested in New York’s burgeoning theatrical scene. However, Lorca quickly became disgusted with the city, writing that “New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world’s greatest lie.” This distaste for America was reflected in his poetry. Over the course of his time in the country he would write a collection of poems titled  Poet in New York , which would express that disillusionment in surreal and surprising fashion.    My first encounter with  Poet in New York  was a puzzling experience. I had been in New York for less than a year and was still so swept up in the novelty of urban life that I could not imagine being disillusioned with the city. At first, I couldn’t even get past the first section of the collection, titled “Poems of Solitude at Columbia University.” Lorca’s vision of the city seemed almost like a photographic negative of my experience—where I saw light and color, he saw darkness and decay. Then, of course, President Shafik testified before Congress, the first encampment began, and things started to come apart at the seams. Daily life steadily became more and more surreal, and the lines between my New York and Lorca’s started to blur.    One night in late April, during the interminable period of campus lockdowns, I picked up  Poet in New York  and opened it to a random page. I found a poem called “Danza de la Muerte” or “Dance of Death.” It captured the strangeness of the moment:  I was on the terrace fighting with the moon. The thigh of night was riddled with swarms of windows.  The sweet cows of the sky were drinking in my eyes and the long-oared breezes  were tapping the ashy windows of Broadway.    The blood-drop was searching for the star-yolk’s light … And now cobras will hiss on the highest floors.  And now nettles will shake patios and terraces.  And now the Stock Exchange will be a pyramid of moss. The poem depicts a metropolitan apocalypse—everything returns to nature, with the only signs of contemporary New York being ashy windows and hulking structures hidden by moss. Of course, the University’s crackdown on the protest was not literally an apocalyptic moment, and the city continued to function as usual. But it was an ugly moment, a moment that I couldn’t make sense of. And as campus became a labyrinth of locked gates and security checkpoints, I kept coming back to Lorca’s visions of snakes curling out of windows and nettles creeping through the woodwork.  Even on the days when I was able to escape from the fortress-like atmosphere of campus, I was unable to avoid a vague sense of unease. It was like I suddenly had double vision. On one level, I was seeing the New York cityscape that I’d come to love, and on another, I was watching power exert itself in ways that I had never seen before. In particular, I started to notice the University’s ungainly tentacles of growth into Harlem more than I ever had before. Just then, I discovered a poem called “El Rey de Harlem,” or “The King of Harlem, ” in which Lorca writes “¡Ay, Harlem disfrazada! ¡Ay, Harlem, amenazada por un gentío de trajes sin cabeza!” (Ay, Harlem disguised! Ay, Harlem, threatened by a throng of headless suits!). It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to learn that the gentrification of Harlem was noticeable even in Lorca’s time, but it was. I hadn’t realized the extent to which displacing the local community was one of the longstanding features of institutional growth in New York. At first, I was surprised that Lorca had seen that trend so clearly. But that, I realized, was the point of Lorca’s project in  Poet in New York : to see through exteriors, to look beneath the standard triumphal story of the city, and locate the dark strangeness within. This election season the critique of American society in  Poet in New York  seemed more relevant than ever. I wasn’t sure how to make sense of Lorca’s visions of an America on the verge of breakdown, but as the presidential campaign wore on, they seemed to exert a magnetic pull. I paid more attention to the poems in the collection that decried the injustices prevalent in American society. And when the election culminated in its Trumpian finale, America itself started to seem just as surreal as Lorca’s poems: directionless and fragmented and amoral.  ​​​​ Out of a vaguely masochistic desire to see what Lorca might have thought, I started aimlessly paging through the book once again, though I was sure he would just confirm my pessimistic thoughts about the nation’s trajectory. The poem I eventually came to was called “Ciudad sin sueño” or “Sleepless City,” which moves subtly from insomniac paranoia to an encounter with the monstrous:  Nobody sleeps in the sky. Nobody, nobody.  Nobody sleeps.  The creatures of the moon sniff and circle the cabins.  They’ll sell live iguanas to bite the men who can’t dream and he who flees brokenhearted will stumbles at the corner on the incredible quiet crocodile  beneath the tender protest of the stars.  The Spanish word “sueño” can mean both “sleep” and “dream.” In referring to New York as a “ciudad sin sueño,” Lorca may have been simply writing about “the city that never sleeps” (as the cliché goes), but it seems more likely that he was describing New York as a city that can’t dream. What does it mean to live in a city where we can’t dream, can’t find a better way out, a way to escape from the maze? Lorca always had a way out, he could go back to his Andalusian countryside, back to his mystical poetry about moonlight and desert sands—I do not. My dreams are American dreams, for better or worse, if only because this is a country that I want to live in, to grow with, to improve, and to love. I cannot reason away the weight of American history, and cannot wave away the American sins that Lorca sharply articulated, but I want to dream of something new.   Reading Lorca teaches you that love is a dangerous thing. He loved the antiquated country romances of Spain at a time when they were not fashionable, and it cost him the respect of his peers. He loved a man deeply for years on end, and it cost him a decade of happiness. He loved Spain so much that he refused to flee when the Spanish Civil War broke out, and it cost him his life. And despite all that, love is the theme that he never tired of in his poetry, as in my favorite poem of his, “Living Sky”:  I fly cool as always over empty beds.  Over groups of breezes and beached ships.  I trip unsteadily through hard fixed eternity and dawnless love at last. Love. Visible love! Maybe it’s senseless, maybe it’s dumb, but I like to believe that Lorca’s right. Even though we live in a uniquely cynical moment, when the mythologies of both the nation and the University seem to be crumbling before our eyes, life goes on—and so can our dreams of working toward a world in which love for everyone is visible at last.

Remembering an old friend. By Sagar Castleman Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner The summer after my senior year of high school, a group of friends and I went to the beach for a few days. One evening, I joined Jonathan Nalikka, SEAS ’26, on the deck, where he heated up the grill and started flipping burgers. I don’t remember what we talked about, and I barely remember the scene—I think the sun was setting, but maybe it was cloudy. We probably heard the ocean. There was a vague excitement in the air for what the night might bring; later we would probably take shots that tasted like hand sanitizer and swim under a red moon. But what I remember clearly from that dusky moment on the deck was the two of us laughing really,  really  hard, and Jonathan saying, “We’re gonna have so much fun next year.”   It’s strange the way memory works: You and an old friend will talk about something you did together many years ago and find you remember it completely differently. Talking with high school friends about Jonathan during those first dumbfounded hours after receiving Dean Chang’s email, everyone had different stories. But they all spoke to the same qualities in him that had always been there, but which I strangely felt I could only verbalize after he was gone: his constant cheerfulness, his startling intelligence, his seeming inability to say anything unkind.   Most of my concrete memories with Jonathan, like with most people, are gone. What is left is an odd, brightly-colored montage: him leaning over my desk in high school STEM classes explaining problems to me, a pencil behind his ear and a finger on the worksheet; him doing the dishes after a dinner party wearing long yellow gloves and cracking jokes; eating lunch with him on some lawn on move-in day freshman year, basking in relief that I already had a friend here. In ninth grade English, we were told to write a poem in class. Most of us wrote free-verse monstrosities—Jonathan read aloud a perfect sonnet about original sin.    A month ago I would have accepted, maybe a little sadly, that these final few recollections would also fade. But now they were imbued with a new importance. The knowledge that, along with some photos and texts, they were all I could ever have of Jonathan made me want to replay them in my head, tell them to other people, write them down—anything that would help me hold on to them.   Since that Sunday, that clichéd “I could have done something” feeling has hit me harder than I thought possible. Why did I let our friendship flicker out? Why did I only have one brief conversation with him this semester? Whether these questions were logical was beside the point; they were feelings that overwhelmed me, saddened me, and made me feel a strange new sense of doom. I didn’t know what to make of these feelings, or of talking and writing about myself when, speaking honestly, it had been years since I had had any role in his life. And even then, I had hardly ever been more than a minor character. I asked myself again and again, why, if I was so sad about his absence, had I not reached out to him for two years?    But in the end, of course, this story isn’t about me. If you knew Jonathan, then you know all this: you know his deep laugh, his faux-strut, his jokes that were sarcastic but never harsh, his endless willingness to help others. It’s easy to feel like there’s some larger injustice going on, that someone must have done something wrong for us to be here—maybe Columbia, but maybe some of us. I don’t want to hear another person tell me that there was nothing I could have done. What I wish is that just once, during one of the dozens of conversations Jonathan and I had over the last seven years, I had said something that would have told him how much he meant to all of us, how much we were rooting for him even if we didn’t always get the chance to say it, how much we would have helped him if we had only known he needed it, and how hopeless we would all feel without him, when small despondent groups of us came together to talk about everything he had been and done and everything he would have gone on to do. His senior superlative was “most likely to win the Nobel Prize.” I like to imagine the parallel universe where he’s won it and we’re reading about it in the news and we’re all so, so proud, but not even a little bit surprised.   Rest in peace, Jonathan.

On memory, silhouettes, and other people’s houses. By Gabriela McBride Illustrations by Kathleen Halley-Segal  Kathleen sat on my blue carpet, a patchwork of tattered fabric held together by white string carried in a bag from my grandparents’ house in Brazil. She was telling me about her grandmother, Lore Segal, who had passed away earlier that day. A few hours later, a building manager knocked on the door of Lore’s apartment, asking when it would be empty. “100th Street” Kathleen called it, over and over, as if it was a figure of her consciousness. The apartment on 100th street and Riverside: where Lore moved after escaping Nazi-occupied Austria on the Kindertransport, where Kathleen’s father and aunt were raised, and where she and her brother spent much of their childhoods. But with Lore’s passing came the end of the rent controlled lease and a lucrative opportunity for the building owner to “correct” the price.    When Kathleen tried to convey to me the kind of person Lore was, she kept returning to 100th street. “This apartment is just so her,” Kathleen said. Throughout her lifelong career as a novelist and translator, and while teaching Creative Writing at Columbia, Lore opened her apartment to both her graduate students and members of the local 92nd Street Y. The apartment is covered in art, Kathleen told me. “She’s the reason I’m an artist, too. She’s the one who showed me art to begin with.” We sat in a suspended moment of silence, and I thought about what it means to lose a muse, a mentor, and a home in the same moment.     “You should come see the apartment, if you want,” said Kathleen.  …   Two days later Kathleen told me it was best for me to visit while her family was sitting shiva, since they would have to start packing up the apartment soon after it ended.    Kathleen pushed the front door open into a short hallway adorned with picture frames and letters. She pointed to the very first one, a vibrant childlike watercolor, and said proudly, “I made that.” Every room I saw was full of people in gentle conversation, many making rounds about the apartment. Kathleen’s father and Lore’s son, Jacob Segal, noted to me later, “She was there for 61 years. A long term resident. A lot of people in the building who came by during the Shiva were focused on that sadness, that the apartment couldn't stay with us."   The windows were wide open, and their long white curtains danced toward us. A cool October breeze, the kind that comes around when the sun is going down, brushed my sweatered skin. Against the window stood a grand piano, and atop it, a large vase with a collection of sticks bound together like a tiny tree. Handmade ornaments hung on the branches. “What's this?” I asked. Kathleen explained that a large tree grew in the living room for most of her life, but died earlier this year. Although a new tree took its place, Lore saved branches from the original tree and bound them together. I loved the way the interspersed branches collected together preserved the idea of the tree, though its roots and wick insides were gone.    Kathleen’s mother, Jean Halley, joined us, and drew our attention to a black and white photograph of a large family hanging next to the piano. Jean pointed to a little girl in the photo, Rosa, Lore’s grandmother. She noted that Rosa’s daughter and granddaughter, Lore, would be two of the few in the family to survive the Holocaust. After leaving Austria alone in 1938, Lore lived in foster homes in London—Other People’s Houses, which would become the title of her first novel. She eventually left London for the Dominican Republic, one of the only countries in the world willing to take in Jewish refugees. By the ’50s she was able to come to New York City, and by 1963 had moved into the apartment on 100th street.    Beyond a home, the apartment was a refuge—a final harbor where Lore could build her life and start her family. At the same time as Kathleen's family began in an apartment next door, Lore's mother, Franzi Groszmann, lived in another apartment on the first floor. "Four generations … lived in this building at  once," Jean said with pride. "Kind of amazing, isn't it?" The weight of the tragic loss of the lineage in the photograph felt held up by the apartment, then. Its black frame hung alongside the paintings on the walls, in a room stirring with family and plants and life.   The living room had jagged edges: In several places, the wall protruded out to small platforms that housed abstract sculptures. These sculptures, like most of the art in the house, came from a person Lore knew closely. Artists flowed through her home. Clement Meadmore, the creator of many of the sculptures, was in a romantic relationship with Lore years ago. In the entryway hung a painting of a playful and intimidating creature, almost as tall as my torso: a portrait of Lore made by Maurice Sendak before writing Where The Wild Things Are.    I wondered what would happen to the juts in the wall when new tenants moved in. I enjoyed the thought of Lore’s imprint on the physical shape of the apartment—how she built her life into the walls in order to cradle the art and artists who passed through. What would the apartment look like a year from now? Would the landlord tear out the built-in shelves and repaint the walls, to photograph the space for resale?    Kathleen brought me through an entryway lined with bookshelves. On the side of each bookshelf, from top to bottom, hung a dozen or so dark black objects: little sculptures, old watches, a pair of shears, and a collection of what looked like pliers, each with little crafted feet sticking out of the ends. Every piece sat just-so, in a geometric relationship with the object next to it. The black steel silhouettes juxtaposed with the white paint of the bookshelf. “I associate these trinkets so much with her,” said Kathleen. She later sent me a collection of paintings she made of her grandmother, and I saw the same pairs of pliers floating in the foreground.   We made it to the kitchen, ducking through conversations and around a wooden dining table brimming with food. The entrance was a small doorway, unfurling into a rounded hallway of shelves and cabinets. At the end of the hallway was a small window through which I saw the tops of red brick buildings and old scaffolding remains that stood steadfast on the horizon. I told Kathleen how it reminded me of the kitchen I grew up in: a brief corridor to a window, barely large enough for two people to cook back to back, the efficient use of vertical space. A quintessential New York kitchen. Along the right wall, I noticed a break in cabinetry, and in its place a white wall covered in evenly spaced holes. From the polka-dotted surface hung kitchenware: a ladle, a magnetic strip of knives, an apple slicer. I took a step back and pointed out a set of peculiar, round blades hanging in a row, which Kathleen told me were purely decorative. Each tool, sharp, dark, and angular, seemed arranged on the wall like a gallery display. It struck me that Lore turned a tiny gap into a piece of art, even if it meant losing precious kitchen space, because she found something interesting in the most quotidian of objects.​​​​​​ We wandered down a hallway to Lore’s bedroom. Light poured through the windows, brightening its navy blue walls. Silhouettes floated in a painting above the dresser, playing with the white background. There it is again. Books abounded in the bedroom, some which Lore read and some that she wrote. Kathleen and I flipped through a children’s book of hers, Tell Me a Mitzi, which featured a mother recounting everyday stories of the family’s life to her children, Jacob and Mitzi. The view from the window of her bedroom was strikingly similar to the cover of the book: rows of brownstones lining an Upper West Side street. The apartment felt wound up in the telling of the story like a cat's cradle.   We sat down on the bed, and Kathleen and I talked about how Lore’s stories felt crafted by the same artistic voice that was all around the apartment. To celebrate something like a kitchen knife or a garden tool is “just like her writing,” Kathleen said. Lore’s last book, Ladies’ Lunch described a group of friends meeting for lunch in an apartment to discuss aging, mortality, New York, and the Holocaust. As Kathleen put it, “She had a way of looking at things, and seeing situations, and then … thinking, ‘I can make art about this. I can find a way to reflect on this in a way that's beautiful.”   Throughout the room sat boxes of files, a few accordian folders, and bigger boxes of papers and cutouts. Kathleen brought one out, laying pieces of paper out on the comforter, recalling how she and Lore used to sit together and discuss the images. The folder in her hand was sorted into several sections. One said “Architecture,” another “Faces,” another “Skyscapes,” and within each were collections of images, postcards, and magazine cutouts that related to the label. My favorites were the more eccentric categories like “Angel Music,” which contained a set of photos that Lore thought evoked the feeling of hearing angels sing. As we flipped through the folders, the old papers felt brittle and grainy on my fingers. It felt like a pathway into Lore’s mind, her way of thinking, how she sorted things and imbued them with meaning. “I think Lore had an admiration of the detail and choice that art requires,” Kathleen told me. Lore’s artistic voice surrounded us throughout the apartment, its blacks and whites, sharp edges and open windows and pasted cutouts; an enveloping of her, closing in on a silhouette. Somehow, sitting there, I got a sense of her shape in that room, or rather, the shape of her thoughts.    Walking back uptown, I felt a strange lack of a person I had never felt the presence of. A new sense of closeness soaked in permanent estrangement: an understanding that I could only uncover Lore through negative space, the indentation of her life on others, on Kathleen, her paintings, and the apartment on 100th street.    When life leaves, space holds onto traces of a person. When the space is packed up or taken away, the precious traces are passed down, and the outlines of people they built erode and disappear. I walked around Lore’s apartment on 100th street, swaying through the push and pull of absence, presence, and the ephemerality of material memory. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget.

Barnard’s reckoning with what it means to be “well” this semester. By Cecilia Zuniga On the first floor of Barnard Hall, the Francine A. LeFrak Foundation Center for Well-Being has been slowly unveiled over the past year in half-exposed construction zones. Barnard students spent the fall semester peeking behind dusty vinyl curtains, itching to catch a glimpse of the College’s newest promise to us—a “signature space on campus” dedicated to the “body, mind, and soul.”    Since opening its doors on Oct. 30, 2024, the Center has been bustling with students, eager to take advantage of Barnard’s “centralized hub” of physical, financial, and mental wellness. It is home to a  4,000-square-foot  fitness center, locker rooms, dance studios, communal meeting rooms, spaces dedicated to financial and mental well-being educational programs, and the Ethel S. LeFrak and Samuel J. LeFrak Theater. With its robust programming and state-of-the-art facilities, the Center intends to send a clear message about the College’s priority of “ holistic well-being .”    But “well-being” at Barnard is an elusive word. In the aftermath of last semester, an air of distrust and disillusionment continues to pervade campus. Many students, faculty, and staff are fearful to politically mobilize on a campus which remains locked down and under heightened surveillance. While simultaneously suppressing dissent, the administration has ostensibly utilized a discourse of community wellness and healing. What it means to be “well,” however, remains contested.  ​ … At 4 p.m. on Sept. 23, a lively chatter replaced the typical Monday malaise on Barnard’s campus. I left my two-hour seminar ready to beeline straight home, bag slung over my tired shoulders. But as I rounded the corner of Barnard Hall, I stopped to marvel at the sight of about 30 faculty members who had congregated on the steps.    My fellow students and I found ourselves herded over by the 4 p.m. rush. Our professors, cloaked in their colorful graduation regalia, smiled at the crowd amassing in front of them, brightening with each familiar face they spotted. Friends clumped together, waving enthusiastically at their major advisers and department chairs. Facing a sea of  200 students , the professors unfurled a large black banner: “Barnard Community in Crisis: A Faculty Teach-In.” Its loud white letters demanded to be seen.    The teach-in was a direct rebuke of Barnard’s new  Expectations for Community Conduct . Created without student or faculty input, the guidelines were issued in an  email  from President Laura Rosenbury sent on Sept. 11. The Barnard chapter of the American Association of University Professors subsequently released a  statement  condemning the guidelines in the “strongest possible terms.” In its statement, the AAUP characterizes the expectations as a “pretext for a dangerous infringement on freedom of expression and academic freedom” which may be weaponized “to discipline community members.”    The guidelines, however, are not formal policy. Rather, they are a set of “examples and explanations of community expectations,” and thus are not regulated by Barnard’s Policy for Development and Revision Process for Barnard College Administrative Policies. In other words, the Expectations for Community Conduct did not require  community  input to be published.  ​ One original guideline, for example, prohibited professors from posting signs on their office doors that “support a geopolitical view or perspective.” Another violation of the community expectations included: “Messaging from the president of Barnard College or from any division or department of the College supporting a political viewpoint or perspective while denigrating or remaining silent about an opposing political viewpoint or perspective.” These two guidelines have since been removed from the Expectations for Community Conduct after the Sept. 23 teach-in.  Professor of Africana Studies Celia Naylor commenced the event with a stark condemnation: “Our community is in crisis.” In her speech, she expressed urgent concerns about the community expectations, citing their potential to “control, curtail and police academic freedom and freedom of expression at Barnard.” In the face of Barnard’s slow dismantling of collective decision-making processes, Naylor demanded an urgent need for connection. “We are becoming feckless, fractured, and fearful,” she declared, highlighting the need to heal the widening rift between the administration, faculty, and students.    Naylor was joined by seven of her colleagues, all of whom are current Barnard professors—Maria Hinojosa, BC ’84, Frederick Neuhouser, Najam Haider, Gale Kenny, Shayoni Mitra, Taylor Carman, and Elizabeth Bernstein. Expanding upon the AAUP statement, the professors framed the Expectations for Community Conduct as a dangerous pretext for student surveillance and policing. Each speech evoked a new layer of concern. Taylor Carman, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, underscored Barnard’s ongoing violations of the  Chicago Statement of Free Expression , arguing “that is not just a limitation of free speech, that is dictating speech. That is dictating content.” Maria Hinojosa, Barnard Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, harkened back to her own time at Barnard as a student protester. She declared powerfully, “Do not force anything on Barnard because we won’t take it sitting down.” Students cheered, her words electrifying the crowd. A common thread, however, remained clear: Barnard’s erosion of administrative oversight has facilitated its increasingly punitive disciplinary policies. Frederick Neuhouser, also a Professor of Philosophy, noted that Barnard’s punishments for the  1968  student protests were “far less vindictive” than those of 2024. Fliers circulated throughout the crowd, among them a fact sheet on student discipline. “All interim/suspended students have lost access to campus housing, meal plans, student health insurance, and Furman counseling,” it asserted. It also highlighted the fact that the suspended students are all “queer, non-binary, Muslim, first generation low-income, or students of color.” Barnard’s suspended students infamously were given only 15 minutes—timed exactly by CARES responders—to gather their personal belongings upon eviction and escort from their dorms. It was Shayoni Mitra, a senior lecturer in the Barnard Department of Theatre, who best articulated Barnard’s harsh measures: “There is no rational reason for a policy implementation like that, except for a deliberate sort of callousness towards student wellness.”    Mitra is not alone in her concern. This past April, an unnamed CARES responder resigned due to the University’s “insanely racially violent” decision to allow the NYPD to arrest students at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.  In a since-publicized  email  to Barnard administrators, the CARES responder was specifically horrified by the College’s mass eviction of students on interim suspension—a uniquely punitive measure taken by Barnard’s administration and not Columbia’s.    Regarding the 15-minute policy, the responder pleaded with the administration to reconsider its “ridiculous and rude timeframe,” while also demanding “concrete information” about how the College planned to support its evicted students. “This is my last day working at Barnard,” the responder signed off the email. “It is absolutely shameful that this school refuses to learn from its own history and decides to treat its most vulnerable students in such a blatantly risky and discriminatory manner.”    The Sept. 23 teach-in took place less than  two weeks  after 85% of the Barnard faculty voted to restore all privileges to students on interim suspension. Mitra has tirelessly assisted students in drafting suspension appeals and attending proceedings. She shared specific details about the disciplinary process at the teach-in. Characterizing Barnard’s role in the hearings as a combined “prosecutor, judge and appellate court,” Mitra noted that the College has deliberately diverged from more transparent or equitable disciplinary practices. “This is not a consultative, collaborative process,” she explained to me later on, “but rather, it’s a very top down one, opaque by design.”    Although not explicitly articulated at the teach-in, “wellness” stood at the forefront of the conversation. Distinguished alumna Cynthia Nixon, BC ’88, read a testimonial from an anonymous student, who shared the brutal nature of their arrest, suspension, and eviction from Barnard housing last spring. “The only reason that I’m okay right now,” the student had written, “is because I’ve been able to fully rely on my community when the institution has not only failed me, but is actively trying to harm me.”  The crowd grew especially quiet. I look up towards the glass doors leading into Barnard Hall, at the plastic vinyl curtains and the plush lounge chairs inside. Facing an imagined wellness mecca, I feel a profound sense of dissonance as Nixon continues to her final line of the student’s testimony. “Everyone needs to wake the fuck up and realize that the institution will never love you back.”   Illustration by Kathleen Halley-Segal “Love you back!” Mitra repeated to me in disbelief, weeks after the teach-in. She let the words hang in the air as she tightened the scarf draped around her shoulders. “That’s what is so heart wrenching about it. It’s not love you, it’s the love you  back .” Mitra confessed that she holds a rather pessimistic view of the administration and continued, “When you are unhousing students, when you are pushing them into food precarity, I cannot believe it comes from a position of care.”    “Care” also frequents the lexicon of the Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Elizabeth Bernstein, who chairs WGSS at Barnard, spoke on behalf of the Barnard AAUP at the teach-in. There, she demanded that we must “fight collectively for the right to keep talking.” Bernstein later expanded on her sentiments regarding the Barnard administration’s infringement on political speech: “They are stifling our collective political imagination about how the world  could  be. To articulate that, you need to be able to speak freely.” Envisioning well-being cannot occur in a vacuum, nor can it be disentangled from political and global context. If  language —including political language—is the medium in which we define collective well-being, the ability to speak to each other is a prerequisite. “How do you aspire to wellness when we can be disciplined at any time, at any moment—when students are living amongst a culture of fear?”    Like Mitra, Bernstein seemed skeptical about institutionalized definitions of care. The self-care industry, she told me, has transformed wellness into a “vehicle for neoliberal self-maximization.” To her, it’s been co-opted, depoliticized, and commodified. But against a backdrop of global militarization, policing, and surveillance, Bernstein argues that no “constellation of individualized consumer choices” can heal us. Holistic well-being will not take root as long as there is a stubborn, yet deliberate, focus on the self rather than the collective.    Bernstein’s words take on a new meaning in the context of last spring’s  unprecedented surveillance measures , most of which remain in place today. The University has only ramped up its security efforts this semester with limited campus access,  increased cameras , and the looming threat of private investigators. Yet as the institution continues to propagate a culture of fear, many students have overwhelmingly looked inwards, seeking refuge in mutual aid, peer-to-peer care networks, and a “we keep us safe” mentality.    …   I turned my attention to another space dedicated to student “well-being”: the Wellness Spot. I entered the Wellness Spot on a Tuesday evening around 7 p.m., greeted by a familiar face and the insistence that I take a snack. Tucked away in the first floor of the Barnard Quad, you can find condoms, dark chocolate, and a listening ear all in the same cozy, low-lit room. Barnard students, such as Isis Contreras Pérez, BC ’26, staff the Wellness Spot as peer wellness educators. Contreras Pérez has frequented the Wellness Spot since her freshman year, becoming well-acquainted with the space before joining the staff as a junior: “If I can have an opportunity where I can just be in the space and be able to help someone out, why not do it?”    Her role as a peer educator is to “guide students towards resources on campus,” which entails anything from accessing birth control to settling roommate disagreements. This year, though, the Wellness Spot looks different, with chairs stacked and boxes strewn across the window ledge. The warm-toned lamps have been packed up and traded temporarily for overhead fluorescents. “It doesn't usually look like this,” Contreras Pérez explains. “We’re moving.” The Wellness Spot will find a new home in the LeFrak Center for Wellbeing.    Alongside the physical move, Contreras Pérez explained that there has been a significant amount of staff turnover at the Wellness Spot. There have been three different directors of the Wellness Spot in the past year, alongside a new “LeFrak team,” as Contreras Pérez put it, that the Spot now reports to. “There’s more bureaucracy now than there used to be,” Contreras Pérez told me. “It feels more corporate.”    The LeFrak Center for Well-Being, however, is not going for “corporate.” I spoke to Dr. Marina Catallozzi, Barnard’s Vice President of Health and Wellness, who is also tasked with “envisioning,” as she put it, the construction of the Center. The project’s interior design has been largely inspired by the natural beauty of Barnard’s lush campus, featuring “lots of wood, blues, and greens” in its color palette. Beyond aesthetics, Catallozzi explained that the Center intends to create places for students to be in community. “One of the things I noticed when I first got to Barnard [was that] lots of people were just sitting on the floor in hallways, and students didn’t have places to gather.” Through the addition of the fitness center, conference rooms, and open student lounges, the Center for Well-Being focuses on the creation of shared spaces to solidify a sense of community. Catallozzi said that she hopes that the Center’s design will reflect that “people want space to be able to  be .”    Contreras Pérez also described the importance of simply having a place to “be.” Despite her skepticism of an emerging bureaucracy, she seems hopeful. “I mean, for sure, wellness is a commodity,” Contreras Pérez said nonchalantly. But for every student stumbling into the Wellness Spot, wellness gets redefined on their own terms. As a peer educator, Contreras Pérez’s aim is not necessarily to decommodify wellness, but rather to make it “an open space, a place that anyone can approach and it will be okay.”    It seems that beauty of the Wellness Spot lies in its critical self-awareness, knowing its limitations within an institution that may never  love you back . It is a space where students greet students, and whether in need of an informational pamphlet or a hug, a community is there to catch them.  …    Nearly a week after the Barnard Hall teach-in, I refreshed my inbox and braced myself as Rosenbury’s “ Taking Time to Reflect ” appeared in the subject line. The email begins with an acknowledgment of “how challenging the past year has been for our community,” alongside a brief list of support services, including Furman Counseling Center, Primary Care Health Services, and the Wellness Spot. “Now, more than ever,” she closes the email, “we must demonstrate care and compassion towards each other and play our part to help heal our fractured world.”    It’s the first email of the school year in which Rosenbury has used the word “heal,” and I can’t help but wonder  who  is included in her invocation.    Perhaps the Francine A. LeFrak Foundation Center for Well-Being is a start to institutional healing. The opening celebration on Oct. 30 was a joyous occasion, with green smoothies flowing and giddy students touring the Center. For many, the space symbolizes a remarkable step forward for Barnard’s community and commitment to “holistic well-being.” Yet for some—especially those whom last semester’s police militarization, eviction, and suspension remains a palpable reality—the very notion of “community” at Barnard feels tenuous.    As Naylor closed her speech on Sept. 23, she slowed down and looked out over the crowd tenderly, “ This  is our community. Remember we are in this together.” Students erupted into proud applause, as her fellow professors nodded in agreement. She was not begging to be loved back, but instead proposing a definition of collective well-being that does not forget the most vulnerable among us. It was a refusal to allow administrative hostility to fade quietly into oblivion. Naylor’s words will linger on the steps, echoing in the halls of the LeFrak Center for Well-Being. And they will demand to be heard.

By George Murphy I can only write to you at night, Yana. You only feel real in these early-morning moments, when city lights glint outside, warm air whispers its way through the radiator, and I can cocoon myself in blankets in front of the computer, waiting for your messages to whistle their way out of the ether and into my life.   In class, in the library, at night when I’m lying sleepless in bed, I keep going back to the first moment, the moment we met. Yana. I was a little high, I think. I can’t remember. We were all in Amy’s room, with the blue string lights that she’d put up and the glowing star decals on the ceiling. I remember entering, being engulfed by the bluish darkness and the smell of vodka and flowery perfume, snow sliding blue past the windows. And I remember you lying on Amy’s bed, staring at the plastic galaxy on her ceiling. Did we talk much that night? I think we were introduced, but that must have been it. I wanted so badly to go up to you, to talk to you about something—but then Dave pulled me away to meet someone’s friend’s boyfriend and two shots and twenty minutes later you were gone.    After that party, I kept trying to track you down. I asked around, but no one seemed to know you, as if your presence had hardly registered to them. Even Amy, who made a point of knowing everyone, had few insights. “She’s international—Russian maybe?” Amy told me over a dubious meal of dining hall seafood. “And she goes to Barnard, so she’s probably either gay or dating a rich European grad student.” I hadn’t yet considered the idea of you being with someone else, but once faced with it, I had to admit that it was entirely possible, even probable. I didn’t know you at all.    I don’t know if you remember the second time we met. It was very cold that night, with sharp winds racing through the dark streets around campus—the arctic sort of wind that steals under your clothes, under your skin. And I was at another party, in a brownstone on 114th, hopelessly separated from my friends, sitting on a couch and watching as the strobe lights changed moment to moment. They were fading from red to purple to blue, and then I looked over my shoulder and everything fell away for a moment because you were suddenly sitting right next to me. I don’t remember how we started talking exactly, but I remember talking about music and our classes and the weather, about how it was so much colder where you were from. Where were you from? Somewhere far away, you said, with that lazy smile of yours scrawled across your face, and I didn’t press the subject.    I asked for your number and you said that you didn’t have one, but that you’d give me your email instead. I hadn’t met anyone without a cell number before, and the idea of communicating solely through email seemed appealingly retro. Even now, writing to you on the beat-up laptop that I’ve had since ninth grade, there’s something freeing about thinking in full sentences for once. We abbreviate too much these days, as if you could abbreviate real life. When I woke up the next day, the first notification on my phone was a message from you— “Would you like to get coffee?”    What were we, Yana? I have a way of getting tangled up in other people’s expectations. When I was with Owen, I never knew how to act, how a relationship between two men ought to work—and so we spun out of each other’s orbits, and that was that. We were something else though, Yana. Maybe it’s the way you would snap me back to reality. Do you remember that night when we were coming back from Brighton Beach on the train, how you told me that I was entirely self-centered, but in an endearing way? I couldn’t help but laugh, because of course you were right. Even in this letter it’s all about me, me, me—but the thing is, I am trying to understand you all the same. And to understand you, I need to tell the story of us through the prism of myself. I can’t find another way.    We spent a lot of time together as winter set in. Often enough, it seemed as though we were the only two people in the city who weren’t hurrying from one place to another to escape the cold. you always insisted on going out and exploring, even when I was happy to sit around and revel in central heating. And so we’d go out, to tiny restaurants deep in Queens, to the Japanese bookstore near Bryant Park, to the Cloisters, where you’d stare at little icons and silvery tapestries until the museum closed. Some days though, when we were too lazy to leave campus, we’d talk for hours in one of our rooms or just lie on my bed, listening to music. But when we grew silent I’d suddenly realize that I didn’t understand you at all.  Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner One day we were talking about Anna Karenina, and I mentioned that my favorite scene in it was when Anna’s on the train back to Petersburg and suddenly she has the revelation that she’s in love with Vronsky. You laughed at that, and then said that you’d never had any sympathy for Anna and her all-consuming pursuit of love, which startled me a bit. Did you really not find Anna’s desperation for love at least a little bit compelling? Not a bit, you responded, and then told me that in any case Tolstoy would have agreed with you. I wasn’t entirely sure about that, but I also wasn’t entirely sure what Tolstoy would have thought about anything, so I let the point stand.    I never really know the weight of a moment until it’s long in the past. If I had done something differently on the night you left, would things have turned out like they did? There’s no way to know, but I keep going back to it anyway. That night, we went out with Amy and her friends to that one club in Bushwick. The weather said that a nor’easter was coming but we didn’t care, took the subway down to Brooklyn in an electric rush, found ourselves submerged in shuddering synths and kaleidoscopic lights before we knew it. I didn’t know what to do with myself until you took my hand. Maybe I’m just as foolish as Anna on her way to Petersburg, but when we danced together in the heart of the storm I knew where I was for the first time. Yana, what do you see in me? I want to be what you need, to find our way out of this maze together.   At the end of the night we found ourselves back on campus. Everyone else had slunk off in twos and threes and so it was just us, going down College Walk as flurries of snow swept in. The wind had picked up, and it was hard to see more than a few paces ahead. When we reached the place where our paths diverged I looked over at you, and you were staring right at me, as though you’d never really seen me before. You reached your hand out to me, but before I could take it, you were dissolving into a girl made of light, of little feathery crystals of snow. I tried to catch you, to hold you before you were swept away, but my arms passed right through where you should have been, and it was unbearably cold. The last thing I saw before I was swallowed by darkness and snow was the blue gleam in your eyes, like a reflection of a winter from long ago, a winter I forgot.    The story people told was that you’d had to go home because of a family emergency. After a few weeks of being coddled and humored, I shut up about you and your disappearance. Then, sometime in the middle of March, an email from you arrived. There was no text, just a song from one of the Russian indie bands you liked to listen to some nights, when there was nothing left to talk about but we didn’t want to go to bed. I looked up the lyrics, translated them word by word. Без тебя останется только, я—without you remains just I. Is it wrong to wait for you, Yana? I have faith in you, you know, and so there’s nothing left to do but wait. I’m waiting for you every day, waiting for winter, waiting for snow.

By Dominic Wiharso Illustration by Li Yin As I launched into a lengthy question, Renee Morales, CC ’25, gently interrupted me, apologizing as she lifted her phone to capture a moment. We were perched on a bench in Riverside Park, sipping overpriced Blue Bottle coffee, when a corgi—her favorite dog breed—ambled over with a comically large branch clenched in its teeth, looking up at her as though she were its rightful owner. Renee basked in the fleeting intimacy of the encounter, snapping a photo before resuming our conversation. I was struck by the grace of her focus—her attention to both me and the park’s rhythm felt so harmonized that I realized we likely experience the world through entirely different frequencies.   A multi-hyphenate artist-poet-philosopher, Renee inhabits a rare attunement to the world's subtle rhythms—a sensitivity that the world reflects back to her. This perceptiveness shapes her writing—thoughtfully cogent yet disarmingly visceral. As she spoke about the sensorial delight of the park at dusk, she reflected on her own state of being: “I’m feeling the bench. The wind is blowing through my hair. And I’m sitting with you. And the temperature is perfect. And I feel very calm and very happy and very full. Or if I feel rage, I feel it fully. And it’s kind of an erotic rage—I feel it on the tips of my toes, or the scabs of my legs, or something like that.” She paused, laughing as though she’d gone too far, but even in her restraint, her words carried the lyrical sensibility she lives by.   For Renee, poetry is a vessel for the erotic—a term she approaches through Audre Lorde’s expansive framework in  Uses of the Erotic . Lorde reclaims eroticism as embodied knowledge, creativity, and emotional depth, challenging its reduction to libido. This redefinition, steeped in Lorde’s identity as a Black woman, critiques how patriarchal systems have historically erased the emotional and sensual intelligence of marginalized bodies. Renee’s work emerges from this lineage, weaving the erotic into the fabric of her writing.   Lorde’s intersection of the erotic and racialized identity deeply resonates with Renee. She described the inescapability of her body as a racialized entity, yet also the transformative solitude of inhabiting it away from the world’s gaze. In that liminal space, she reclaims pleasure as an everyday ritual. “Imagine yourself,” she said, “pleasuring yourself in this room. I’m having a relationship with my body. Pleasuring yourself can also be like physical and sexual, but it could be like, I'm watching my favorite TV show.” For Renee, self-pleasure is expansive—both sensual and nurturing, encompassing comfort and touch. It’s about feeling deeply and resisting the impulse to over-define those sensations. Her poetry, she explained, eschews static mind-body binaries, capturing a fluid stream of consciousness.   This philosophy extends far beyond the bedroom. The library, she mused, is another “deeply sexy space.” “It’s full of bodies who don’t want to be there, but who are there anyway. It sucks, but it’s beautiful to catch someone’s eye across the table, size each other up, and then go back to what you’re doing.” These fleeting, unspoken intimacies counteract the oppressive expectations that dominate daily life. For Renee, even the most mundane spaces can hold a brief, grounding pleasure, reminding us of tender, unspoken connections.   In Renee’s poetry, the grammar of pleasure is refracted through the prism of the “I.” When I asked her about the works currently shaping her thoughts, she named Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal, a collection that reimagines Caliban from  The Tempest  to confront the politics of Caribbean sexuality and familial violence. Renee highlighted how Sinclair centers the self, “asserting the ‘I,’ asserting the racialized and feminized ‘I.’” She reflected on the fragility of this pronoun, asking whether the “I” in poetry represents the poet, the reader, both, or something more elusive. For Renee, the “I” is never fixed but a site of negotiation, constantly shifting its contours.   Who is the authorial, biographical “I” in Renee Morales’ poetry? Raised in Hialeah, Florida—dubbed the most Cuban city in the U.S., with over 80% of its population tracing roots to Cuba—Renee grew up immersed in a rich Caribbean cultural landscape. Her mother, who immigrated to Miami from Cuba in the early 2000s, instilled a deep connection to her heritage. As third-culture children, Renee and I found common ground in the struggles of navigating public school systems that often demanded we reshape our voices to align with rigid academic expectations. She recalled a pivotal moment when her AP English Language teacher sat her down to explain the semicolon, describing her early writing as a stream of unbroken run-on sentences with little punctuation.   Renee described her approach to conventional grammar as both playful and deliberate. “There are elements of conventional English grammar that I want to repurpose—or that I just enjoy repurposing,” she explained. Renee reflected on how the fluidity of language shapes her poetic practice, pushing back against rigid conventions. She recounted moments when people criticized her for using words “incorrectly,” noting how fickle and ever-changing the English language is. “We’re constantly inventing our own ways of understanding each other,” she observed. For her, poetry serves as an invitation to redefine words and phrases. She takes pleasure in spelling words wrong, capitalizing letters in unconventional places, or making adjectives into verbs, fully aware of the discomfort it can provoke in readers. What happens to a poem when pretty is transformed into: “I do pretty; I am doing pretty”?   Even the ellipses in her poetry are imbued with personal meaning, drawing inspiration from her mother’s text messages, where ellipses often replaced commas or question marks, trailing off into pauses pregnant with meaning. “It’s really fun starting a poem with an ellipsis,” Renee said. “I'm making the reader experience this absence of language. I'm making them sit with me in this space before I actually start talking.” These choices are more than stylistic—they are an invitation to engage with the silences and ruptures that shape her voice.   When pressed about the role of time in her writing, Renee revealed a deeper preoccupation with its passage, particularly in the context of ancestry and generational ties. She spoke of the “slipperiness” of these connections—how someone could be bound to her through lineage yet exist in a time before hers, their life overlapping or influencing what follows. Poetry, she explained, offers a unique form through which to manipulate and play with these concepts of time. She finds punctuation—commas, ellipses, brackets, and parentheses—particularly evocative in shaping temporal flow. Brackets and parentheses, for instance, serve as interruptions, moments where she asks the reader to pause before returning to the narrative. Renee is especially drawn to the symbolism of a half-parenthesis—an open mark without closure—representing time or ideas left unfinished, lingering in the space of possibility.   Renee crafted a poem that blended multiple tenses, deliberately mixing them to explore time’s malleability and her own tendency to write in the present tense. “I’m writing about a memory in the future tense,” she explained, “saying ‘I will do this’ and what that means of thinking of something that's happened to you in the future and what can change.” This approach reflects her fascination with revisiting memories or stories she has been told, not simply to recount them but to reimagine how they might have unfolded.    I wondered if Renee’s perspective was rooted in a spiritual dimension—if there was a link between her reflections on time, ancestry, and faith. Central to her poetic vision is Santería, a syncretic religion born from the fusion of Yoruba spiritual practices and Catholicism during the era of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. Growing up in Miami, Renee witnessed the fraught perceptions of Santería among white Catholic Cubans, many of whom dismissed it as “demon worship,” a reaction she identified as deeply racist. For her, Santería is not just a religious practice but a vital cultural force that shapes Cuban identity, especially as a means for Afro-Caribbeans in Cuba to maintain their identity amidst oppression. The religion’s embodied rituals—music, dance, and communal celebration—serve as both a release of pain and a way to preserve cultural memory.   Musicality, especially rhumba, plays a central role in her creative process. Renee described how the controlled chaos of Cuban rhythms inspires her writing, particularly in a poem she crafted after the rhumba song  La Gozadera  by Yoruba Andabo. The song’s layered rhythms and messages of self-reliance mirrored the tension she sought to capture in her work. She described the poem as “me trying to write in a controlled way to mimic an uncontrolled experience.”    To close, I turn to what often precedes Renee's poems: the title. One title that influences her work is Morgan Parker's  Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s , which masterfully creates an incongruence between the title and the poem’s content. In her creative process, she asks herself, "Where does this poem start? Where does it end? And how do I invite someone to begin reading it?" If I could, I’d give this article a similarly expressive title, but Renee Morales’ name alone is enough.

By Josh Kazali and Sona Wink Affirmative:    HARK! Do ye seek Santa Claus? Aye, I’ve seen the white beard. Sit down, ye shivering boy, and I’ll tell ye a story which shall drench thy cheeks pale to the bone. Quick, to the fire! This be a story more chilling than the iciest winds of the polar North. Have ye stockings? Have ye cocoa? Look about and tremble, for here be the story of that damned Saint Nick and his sack laden with hellish holiday cheer.   ’Twas the night before Christmas. Aye, that hallowed night which fast approaches us now, a frosty night not so unlike this one. My mighty vessel, The Bwequod, was deep in the arctic circle, seven months since leaving the safe shores of Manhattan. Not a creature was stirring, not even Mouse, my best harpooneer, whose lazy snores shook the ancient oak planks. The crew had turned in to sleep through the polar winds and rough waters, and visions of sugar shrimp danced through their flea-bitten heads. (What? Never had sugar shrimp? Briny prawns boiled hot in sugar water—a delicacy of the open sea.)   Thy captain, however, was not slumbering that night. From my telescope in the captain’s cabin, I was searching the northern skies for any sign of my sworn elfish enemy. My rugged sailors falsely believed that our voyage was in search of that renowned purple dolphin, Toby Blick. Nay, that plum porpoise bore no import to me—not compared to Kris Kringle, the jolly imp of the North Pole.    Since I was a boy I had heard of his mythic deeds: his sack filled to the brim with priceless loot, his mighty sleigh pulled by eight tremendous steeds, his pearly white beard which so cloaked him like a fur. Many a cold December eve I kept vigil until the wee hours, waiting for the arrival of the great sooty man. And year after year, I fell victim to that damn sandman of sleep, only to wake and find that Santa Claus had swindled me under my very nose. Blast! He left his gracious gifts, and, as if mocking me, munched the cookies and drank thirstily the glass of milk which I had set to entice him. What greedy generosity is this!    Yet, more than simple childish fantasy, it was my unquenchable desire to interrogate that sooty sleighman for the unknowable, unthinkable, most delicious and devious secret: the meaning of Christmas. Aye, here be my innermost motive, that which fuelled me to brave the dark night of Christmas Eve. If any man knew that hidden truth, it would surely be old Father Christmas himself, trapped somewhere in that mangled knot of a white beard.    A noise suddenly jolted me from my wandering thoughts—the rumbling noise of hooves. To the window I flew like lightning, and there beheld that mighty sleigh and the eight reindeer of legend. I reached for my harpoon—for no man knows what vengeance Saint Nick might lash upon his onlooker—and dashed for the quarter deck. Like a great tempest, I stormed onto the deck to find my foe standing there, just below the main mast, in all his rotund majesty.   His eyes—how they twinkled! His dimples, how merry! Aye, ’tis true, the droll little mouth to that laugh, the belly like a bowl full of jelly—thy rumors are confirmed. Most of all, that prodigy of plumage, that beard of pure milky white, of whiteness which fell in droves from the chin. I tell ye, lad, it froze my blood. I was in no mood for laughter. I roared with righteous wrath: “Santa Claus! I know ye, and I do not fear ye! Tell me, thou mammoth, monstrous elf: What be the meaning of Christmas?”    Father Christmas, the lily-livered, spineless lord of the North, said nothing. He winked at me with shining black pupils, paralyzing me in trembling ecstasy and fear. Carrying on with his work, he filled my deck with presents from his great peddlers pack. To spite me, he left great bundles of gifts for me and my crew—an excellent pair of wool socks which I wear as we speak. Yet, though I stood shaking with fury, Saint Nicholas looked at me with glee and placed a single finger to his nose. What secret knowledge did this simple gesture contain? What private significance did he intend to convey? I know not. Santa shot up the mast to the top of the crow’s nest, where his magnificent barge of the sky lay in wait.    I climbed up the mast with reckless abandon, vaulting to the crow’s nest. I screamed into the winds, “Since the meaning of Christmas cannot be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned Santa!” In desperation, I threw my harpoon with fiery wrath at his magic sleigh. It clattered harmlessly off the vessel’s wooden side.    I felt bitter, hateful tears sting my cheeks as the jolly man gave a whistle to his reindeer. The polar winds whipped hard against my flesh, roaring in my ear and blowing salty snow into my battered eyes. Kris Kringle had left me forsaken once again. But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight: “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”   Curse you, Santa Claus! I have seen ye, and I do not wish to see ye again.  Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina Negative:    Dear brother,   A fortnight has passed since our crew touched off aboard The Bwequod & I fear I may never see home again. I doubt, dear brother, that this message will ever reach you. I oft think of the long evenings I spent at supper with you & Jane, evenings of revelry, discussing all sorts of wondrous things, and the hilarity of discovering little Tim stuffing his face with lard in the pantry-room, thinking himself alone—O, what laughs we had!    Alas, those warm days are behind me. I write to you from my “quarters,” which, I quickly realized upon boarding The Bwequod, is a storage closet. I sleep on a pile of empty barley-flour sacks & write upon a barrel. Sometimes the men need the sacks in the middle of the eve & toss me from my “bed” & take the sacks. I believe that at first they did so out of a genuine need for sacks, but have since begun to harass me for entertainment. For they know I will not put up a fight—as you know, from birth I have had a fragile constitution. The Men, a gang of rogues, put me in a sack and swing me around until I shriek (& I inevitably do). Sometimes they take me to the kitchen and pretend I am barley-flour (for the sacks once contained barley-flour); they put me in a cast-iron pan and sprinkle salt on me. Smee, the wittiest, calls me “flour-boy” (I do appreciate the wisecrack). Mouse, a roguish harpooneer, calls me “the silly fellow we put in a sack” (he is not particularly imaginative, nor fine with words). I know, in my heart, that they commit these cruelties because they are fearful for their future, as I am, for the Captain is a RAVING MADMAN.   I was told, after setting sail, that the Captain sought to kill an infamous dolphin. This was all well & good for my purposes—I sought to catalog the natural wonders of the arctic circle. On land, the Captain was congenial. He told me he was happy to have a Man of Science like myself aboard the ship. He promised me a lofty, comfortable bedchamber (a pompous lie, I came to learn). We were to cast anchor Dec. 1. When I asked if we would be back in time for Christmas, the Captain let out an eerie chuckle and whispered, “Oh yes ... I’ve never forgotten Christmas.” I left our meeting with an abiding sense of dread.    On board, it quickly became clear to me that the Captain was not, in fact, seeking the infamous Toby Blick. We tore past dolphin sanctuaries day after day; the Captain was reckless with his direction. He stood red-eyed and unblinking at the wheel, his beard frosted, day in and day out. His blue lips formed a steely, trembling line. He referred constantly to his compass, and made every effort to go North, North, and further North (despite the fact that dolphins prefer warmer waters). This was a man on a monomaniacal mission.   The situation deteriorated on Christmas Eve. My “bedchamber” lay below the Captain’s quarters. That night, I was adjusting the barley-grain sacks into a sleep-nest, as usual, when I heard Captain dash, heavy-footed, across his quarters and toward the deck. I threw on my jacket and rushed to the deck to see what the fuss was about. There I saw the disheveled Captain standing, fully nude, shouting nonsense. He was irate at someone, yet there was not a soul on the deck besides himself & I. He began to weep. Snot poured from his red nose; his pale body trembled. Suddenly, he grabbed a harpoon and scurried, like a devilish lobster, to the crow’s nest, from which he hurled the instrument toward the black sea with a furious cry. (The wind was so strong that his flesh-harpoon flapped between his legs like a flag at half-mast.) I scurried back to my sack-nest, desperately seeking to avoid the man. It is where I write now.   What I do not understand, dear brother, is what I heard him scream from the crow’s nest: he cursed the name of Santa. All I know is that I saw no Saint Nicholas on board—just a shivering, flaccid lunatic.    As the icy sea breaks upon the ship’s hull and the captain cries profanities into the bleak night sky, I feel prone to honesty, for I doubt that I will live to deliver you this letter. I will admit to you, dear brother, a secret I have long harbored: My longtime bedfellow, Sebastian, was not merely my friend. Our friendship was Special. It was Special in the sense that we engaged in frequent butt-fucking and other acts that I lack names for. & I love him.    I will never see my dear Sebastian again, nor you, because I am trapped at the whim of a raving madman. So much for the Christmas spirit.    Sincerely,  Your adoring, ill-fated brother.

On the 2025 Met Gala Exhibit and Black dandyism. By Ava Jolley Illustrations by Emma Finkelstein For over 75 years, the fashion world has awaited the first Monday in May with bated breath, anticipating the annual Met Gala. Hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the evening brings high fashion into pop culture as celebrities walk the carpet in extravagant, themed outfits. Next year’s Met Gala theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” centers Black men’s style from the 18th century to the present. It will be a night of firsts—the first Met Gala in two decades to focus on menswear, and the first ever Gala to focus on Black designers. The historic board of co-chairs includes Colman Domingo, A$AP Rocky, Lewis Hamilton, and Pharrell Williams, with LeBron James as honorary chair—a board of all Black men.   Barnard Professor Monica Miller, Chair of the Africana Studies Department, is the guest curator of the Gala’s accompanying exhibit. The Met Gala theme takes inspiration from Miller’s book, written in 2009, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Fashioning of Diasporic Identity. Born in the 18th-century coterie of European gentlemen, dandyism is both a style and a performance, defined by exaggerated attention to refinement and sophistication of one’s physical appearance. With a collection of garments from the 18th century to today, Miller’s exhibit explores how Black men embrace, ironize, and play with dandyism to create new forms of self-expression. As curator, Miller marks another first: She is the first guest curator for a Met Gala exhibit in eight years.   Trained as a literary and cultural scholar, Miller focuses on fashion history. Her work spans the 18th century to the present, and her recent research focuses on Afro-Swedish studies. No categorization—temporal or spatial—seems to constrain her studies. In our discussion about fashion and culture, Miller moved between time and space, putting otherwise disparate Black dandies into conversation and telling their stories with vividness, reverence, and intimate care.   Miller’s insights into Black dandyism are increasingly important given the conversations about cultural appropriation that have shadowed this year’s Gala theme. Slaves to Fashion begins with an 18th-century painting of an enslaved boy, dressed in a bright red jacket, gold collar, and padlock around his neck—a violent image of “dandified ‘luxury’ slavery,” in Miller’s words. By no means is this an easy fashion history to approach.   When I first read Vanessa Friedman’s New York Times  article  announcing the 2025 Met Gala, I was struck by how the article approached the violent history of 18th-century Black dandyism. The Met Gala theme takes its name “Superfine” from a phrase in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, an autobiography written by a formerly enslaved man. In the book, Equiano writes, “I laid out above eight pounds of my money for a suit of superfine clothes to dance with at my freedom, which I hoped was then at hand.” Yet in her article, Friedman does not name Equiano; instead, she simply calls him an “18th-century enslaved man” and facetiously paraphrases his words: “Essentially, in your face with my outfit!” Friedman erases Equiano’s agency. Her treatment of him feels indicative of the appropriation and the erasure of violence that haunt any complicated history entering mainstream.  Will white celebrities wear the fashions of Black men designers with sensitivity? How will they navigate and address the often violent while also liberatory histories of Black dandyism?    When asked how white celebrities would engage with the theme, Miller explained that as a guest curator of the exhibit, she had little to do with the Gala itself. Still, it’s an unsettling and important tension that we must consider as the high fashion of the Met Gala often trickles down into the clothing trends of everyday Americans. As Black dandyism enters mainstream culture, my conversation with Miller illuminates the joyful potentials and violent histories of what we may be wearing next fashion season.   This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.   The Blue and White:  Can you define Black dandyism, and how its definition changed from the 18th century to now?    Monica Miller:  When I think about Black dandyism, I don’t want to create a hierarchy, because Black dandyism and dandyism actually occurred simultaneously. People think that the first dandy was a man named Beau Brummell, a middle-class Englishman who, through his incredible hyper-attention and discipline to his dress, became very famous for his style. However, his style was not flamboyant or over the top—it was just precisely tailored. There were all of these rumors about Brummell. People would come to watch him get dressed, because it was such a ritual—this beautiful act of washing his face, doing his hair, and putting clothes on.  He would tie his neck cloth in a very particular way, and if he didn’t get it right, he would throw it away and start with a new one.    When this discipline and dress became popular in England and then France, Black people got caught up into the style. Sometimes, people would dress their servants in really fancy dress and treat them as objects of conspicuous consumption. The enslaved people who were put into those positions understood very quickly that they were being objectified, and that part of that objectification had to do with this fancy dress. What’s fascinating to me about the racialized version of dandyism is that knowingness. As soon as Black enslaved people were dressed up in this clothing and understood the clothing as an attempt to change their identity, they understood that clothing was really powerful—the ability to style oneself, the ability to self fashion, the ability to use clothing as a tool or strategy.   One of the men in my book is from 18th century England named Soubise. He was one of these dressed-up servants. He got it right away. Having been dressed up, he came to fully occupy that position. He started doing outrageous things in society: He would book a whole box for himself at the opera, he filled his room with all of these hothouse flowers, he had a really expensive coach that he rode in. At the time, many of the coachmen were Black servants, but he had white servants.    What’s important is what his understanding of that meant for how people were thinking about Blackness—about race, gender, sexuality, and class. It destabilized all of those categories. Black dandyism becomes a strategy to understand the hierarchies in society, and it is sometimes able to manipulate those hierarchies. It’s a visual and performative way to say something about who you think you are.    B&W:  Do you think performance is essential to dandyism or Black dandyism? Or can dandyism just be about the clothing that you wear?   MM:  It’s both. For some people, it’s an identity. And sometimes, that identity has to do with discipline. At the end of my book, I talk about a number of artists, some who think about dandyism as an art practice, and others  who are living and breathing it.    It can be an aesthetics, in terms of how you’re dressed. Traditionally in the 18th century, dandies would have had very particular tail coats. They had top hats, canes, neck cloths, and watches. I think it can also be about politics. There are some people who will dress out of their station, trying to get at and poke into those categories of identity that we tend to take for granted.    B&W:  Did white Europeans understand Black dandyism as a form of subversion?   MM:  Yes. Being a dandy was really controversial. It was men, for one of the first times, paying way too much attention to how they looked. That was for women. Being a dandy brought with it accusations of excessive femininity, which led into questions about sexuality. Dandyism is about breaking boundaries—people didn’t know where to put them.    B&W:  Right. I’m curious, there seems to have had to be a shift from Black dandyism as a form of objectification into this form of agency. Do you think that this is through an excess of dandyism?    MM:  I don’t think so. But the movement you’re describing is absolutely right. It’s a movement from being fashioned to self-fashioning. From a sense of captured immobility, a kind of stasis inside of a category, to a sense—occasionally, not always—of freedom, liberation. Sometimes there’s a joy. For some people, some of that excess could be related to joy.    One of the dandy artists describes dandyism as being the form of deliberate intelligence in the face of boundaries. It is more about attitude than it is necessarily about the costume. I’ve described other moments in my book—not necessarily moments of dandyism, but dandy-like activities—which would include one of the things that enslaved people would do. If they could find or appropriate buttons, ribbon, or something kind of special, they would put it on their standard-issue clothing. That’s not dandyism. But that’s somebody who understands that a button can distinguish you. Something that small can change that drab shirt or dress into something. It helps you to be an individual.   B&W:  There’s a New York Times article that references the origin of the Met Gala’s title “Superfine,” but does not mention Olaudah Equiano’s name or the title of his book. Do you think that this article is indicative of some of the dangers of appropriation that threaten Black dandyism?   MM:  I don’t know if I would put it that way. In Slaves to Fashion, I look at Black dandyism in moments of societal transition. The first moment is within the slave trade and imperialism.  I look at the relationship between slavery and emancipation in the 19th century. I look at it in the early-1920s Harlem, during urbanization.  These are moments where social conditions are changing and when the dandy appears, because it’s a figure that has all of these anxieties: How are we supposed to think about Black people now? And Black people are like: Well, I’ll show you.  The dandy pops up right when things are being destabilized and has these moments of visualizing different kinds of possibility.   B&W:  How do you see the messages of racial and gendered identity having changed from the 18th century to now? What does Black dandyism say about racial identity today?   MM:  One of the things we’re hoping to show in the exhibit is that dandyism is something done for and against different audiences. Sometimes Black dandies style or self-style because they’re trying to critique the white gaze. Sometimes dandyism is for the self—it can happen in front of a mirror. Sometimes dandyism is for a particular community that somebody might be a part of.    The question that you’re asking is, how does dandyism change over time? After emancipation,  there’s much more freedom for black people to be styling for each other. One of the hallmarks of the Harlem Renaissance is artists visualizing, for the first time, what it meant for a Black community to be looking at itself. Black dandyism changes over time because there is more and more possibility.    B&W:  Something I’m trying to pinpoint is the distinction between Black dandyism and Black fashion.   MM:  That’s fascinating. Dandyism is about style. And style and fashion are related, but they’re not the same thing. Style requires this deliberate intelligence in the face of boundaries. Style is about that creativity that is not at all dependent on fashion. Fashion is a system. Fashion, I think, is much more tied to consumption and capital. It is its own industry and economy. Style is for everyone.    B&W:  Most of us are familiar with the Met Gala, but less so about the process of exhibit curation behind it. You are the first guest curator in eight years, since the start of Met Gala curator Andrew Bolton’s tenure. How were you tapped? Did you have an exhibition planned?   MM:  No. A couple of exhibitions ago, there were two exhibitions at the Costume Institute about American fashion. In both, you couldn’t tell the story without Black fashion designers. Andrew had been thinking about the ways in which he could further develop some of those exhibition’s stories. At the same time, the Met had been working to diversify its exhibitions: There have been quite a few exhibitions that handle race and Blackness.    Unfortunately, Vogue editor André Leon Talley passed away in 2022. Andrew was wondering how he could do an exhibit related to Leon Talley, but the Costume Institute rarely does exhibitions on a person who is in the media industry. And then somebody gave Andrew my book.    However, the exhibition has to also be true to the Costume Institute’s collection. So, while the Costume Institute may not have a lot of work by Black dandy designers specifically, they do have dandyism within the collection. They’re better positioned to do—and Andrew would say this himself—an exhibition on dandyism of any kind than they would be on hip hop or street style. So, he read my book, talked to some people, and then he called me.    B&W:  Wow. And do you watch the Met Gala every year?   MM:  Oh yeah, every year. And the thing is, I had been consulting on some other exhibitions: I had worked with the curatorial team at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology for many years, and I’d been a consultant for two exhibitions at the New York Historical Society. It’s not as if this was something completely out of the blue. But it is a very different thing to interpret a book I wrote years ago—to go from text and visual imagery to garments and objects. That part has been amazing.    B&W:  Do you have a favorite garment in the exhibit?   MM:  I have some things that I’m really excited for people to see and to think about. The  Costume Institute’s research assistant Kai Toussaint Marcel managed to find some garments and accessories that were worn by Frederick Douglass.   B&W:  Oh, wow.    MM:  Right? A top hat, a beautiful monogrammed shirt, a coat, a pair of pants, a comb, and sunglasses. I had never before thought of Frederick Douglass wearing sunglasses. These objects take up a lot of space in the exhibition, because they’re really asking people to think about how this particular Black man in the 19th century wanted to present himself to the world. He’s the most photographed man in the 19th century, of any race. He understands profoundly the stakes of his appearance, for both Black people who were looking to emulate his dignity, and white people who he needed to convince that Black people “deserved” freedom.   But there are also contemporary garments I love. Some of them are really playful. We have a section that’s based in the seventies—it’s when Black male fashion starts to take on aspects of femininity: ruffles, sequins, and tight silhouettes. There’s this pair of green, sequined pants pants from a young New York designer named Theophilio. The model who wears them on the runway is bare chested. He is just loving himself. It’s a moment of joy, of completely being in your body.   B&W:  Are there any women in the exhibit? Or is it solely focused on men’s style?   MM:  It’s primarily focused on men. During the slave trade and enslavement, Black women at the time—and this is the profundity of it—were so much more curtailed in their movements, and in their ability to have choice, that it was harder to see them in history. Black men were easier to see in the historical record. But women are there all along.    One of the stories that we’re excited about is William and Ellen Craft: an enslaved couple who race- and cross-dressed their way to freedom. Ellen had a very light complexion, and they realized that she could probably pass for a white man. So she dressed up as a man, and her husband pretended to be her servant. She crossdressed race and class and he, in some ways, played himself.   B&W:  But not really.   MM:  Right. Because he was playing a servant to this fictional character. She bought this white beaver top hat that we have an example of in the show. She had to hide her face because she didn’t have any facial hair, so she put this bandage around her face. Then they got on a train, and once they got off, they went back to their typical normal dress. Clothing literally moved them from one status to another.    We have another couple of women we were thinking about: Grace Jones and the beautiful way she takes on androgyny, and Gladys Bentley, a lesbian blues musician in the 1920s who wore a white tuxedo.  Janelle Monáe is hopefully writing for the exhibition catalog. So, we’re thinking about particular stories that are about women when they adopt “female masculinity.” How does that push against these categories of freedom and liberation? What do you think you know about gender anyway? What do you think you see? Are you seeing sexuality? How are you seeing that? It’s all about asking those questions.   B&W:  I’m so excited to see the exhibit. Who are you most looking forward to seeing walking the Met Gala carpet?   MM:  Everyone, but especially Colman Domingo, whose style is fierce and fabulous.   B&W:  And are you attending the Met Gala?    MM:  I believe I am.   B&W:  Do you know what you’re going to wear?    MM:  I do not know. It’s wild. And nothing I ever anticipated.

Do you think it’s a myth? By Shreya Khullar Illustration by Selin Ho Wang’s fiction is infused with liminal tension. I found my way to her work the summer after my freshman year of college, listless and in an unfamiliar city, asking myself the same questions her characters always ask: What am I doing here? What do I really want? Wang writes about people stuck between cultures, career paths, and romantic prospects. Her characters often struggle through experiences that mimic her own.    Thinking she would become a doctor, Wang earned her B.A. in chemistry. After a doctorate in public health and an MFA in creative writing, she published two novels, and her fiction and essays are frequently featured in The New Yorker. She teaches creative writing at Barnard and the University of Pennsylvania, and her forthcoming book Rental House will be out in December.    In our conversation we spoke about the problem with the model minority myth, innate creativity, and the science of writing.    This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity. The Blue and White:  After studying chemistry and public health at Harvard, how did you come to writing as a craft and later as a profession?   Weike Wang:  I sometimes wish I didn’t enjoy writing so much. I feel like I would’ve been much happier following the route I did in college. I was pre-med at Harvard. I took the MCAT. I went the interview route. I think it’s just much more straightforward. Then I went to public health research, cancer epidemiology, wondering if I could compromise. I really enjoyed the humanities as an undergrad, but that was just not a viable route for me in terms of the expectations set on me. But inevitably I had to find my way back to writing. I love it. I don’t want to say it's a calling, but I always felt that I could do more with writing than I could have done in medicine or epidemiology research. I care a lot more about writing.  B&W:  I understand what you were saying about the perception of writing not really being a “real” job, and, on a certain level, it’s not, because you’re not employed by anyone. You’re not working for a company. You’re in your room alone most of the time trying to make something. It can be hard to explain to people why that has value.    WW:  It’s hard. I think my parents have no idea why I do it. None of my doctor friends have any idea.   B&W:  What do you tell them if that question comes up?   WW:  They don’t change. I try to avoid the topic. I’m never gonna change their mind. My parents grew up under Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution. That’s a formative 10 years of their life in which culture and art were not important. My generation are the children of immigrants who believe that STEM education is universal and can get you a high paying job. That’s true. Being able to code, engineering, doctors, those are skills. My parents and my community don't think writing isn’t a skill. It’s just that they don’t value art. And something that I believe very strongly about Asian American representation in this country is that if you do not get involved in the culture or the art, you have a very little voice. You are invisible. If you want a voice in this country, you can’t just be doctors and engineers. You have to be artists. You have to inject your culture into mainstream American culture. And art is one of the few ways to do that.    B&W:  In a New Yorker article, you mentioned thinking that the model minority myth is not really a myth—   WW:  Definitely not a myth.   B&W:  What do you mean by that?   WW:  Do you think it’s a myth?    B&W:  Could you explain what you mean by that? That it's not a myth?   WW:  Would someone like your dad exist if the model minority were a myth? Or my parents? Would they have existed if that’s a myth? A myth means they’re not real. They’re not true.    B&W:  There are actually people [for whom the myth is] their way of living. I guess.    WW:  I’ve never thought it was a myth. To say that diminishes a lot of people who allowed us the opportunities to do what we do. I’ve always been against that term. I don’t know what it means really. If it means compliance, another way to think about that is following rules can be helpful. Maybe you shouldn’t drive on the wrong side of the road. If [being a] model minority means learning science, and math, and having no creativity, that’s reductionist. I gained so much confidence in myself from STEM. I think it’s a tag word that people say.    B&W:  My understanding of why it was a myth was along the lines of [being the way our parents are] isn’t necessarily innate to them as individual people, but more so that culture or economic necessities cultivated them to be that way.   WW:  I agree with that.    B&W:  But I understand what you’re saying that it is a reality.    WW:  There’s a lot of attributes of that stereotype that I feel like this country could benefit from. This country glorifies bad behavior, you know? And I don't know why we punish good behavior.    B&W:  Oh, what do you mean glorifies bad behavior?   WW:  Well, Trump’s president.    B&W:  …   WW:  There's a shamelessness to it.   B&W:  To switch gears into teaching, there’s a lot of discourse about how much of creative writing can be taught and how much is innate within the writer. Do you think that these conceptions of artistic ability are true?    WW:  No, I don’t think artistic ability is innate. I’m always telling my students that talent is really not that significant. James Baldwin believed this—although James Baldwin was very talented—I don’t think it’s innate. Saying it’s innate cheapens the idea of learning, teaching craft, and revisions. So much of writing is perseverance, following through with the idea, and making it a habit.    B&W:  Do you think all of writing can be taught?   WW:  Yes. Just like all of science can be taught.    B&W:  That’s interesting. I haven’t heard that before.    WW:  I mean, I didn’t learn English from my parents. I learned reading from school. I didn’t enter college with a very strong cultural capital. I don’t come from a family of readers, so I kind of have to believe that it is teachable because that’s how I came to be.     B&W:  You have a book coming out in December. What is the beginning of the writing process like for you? Do you know what the end of the novel is when you start writing?   WW:  No, I probably know the end halfway through. A lot of that writing process is exploration. It’s research. If you’ve ever done research in a lab, you start with a question and then you’re exploring that question for many years. It’s really the same thing with writing. There’s so many similarities between basic science research and writing. You’re given this vast ocean to explore. It’s up to you as a writer to select pieces that you want in this book or in this project. You have to make choices. You have to answer questions. You have to problem solve.    B&W:  It sounds like you see writing in a similar framework that you see research and science.    WW:  Yeah. There’s a lot of similarities I think STEM people and humanities people don’t really want to admit. You’re exploring a question that you don’t know the answer to. The best writers ask the right questions, but they’re not giving you all the answers.    B&W:  Yeah. The main character in your novel Joan is Okay is a doctor, and her identity revolves pretty heavily around her occupation. My father is a doctor and I feel connected to that world through him, and it seems to me that intense interconnectedness of personal identity and profession is something that’s particular to doctors. I was wondering if there is something about their profession, or the psyche of doctors in particular, that interested you?    WW:  I started shadowing hospitals since I was in middle school, so that’s a world I’m pretty familiar with. That identity is almost like a master identity. It just takes over your whole persona. I think it’s because the training is so intense. The selection bias is so intense. It’s very skill oriented. Medicine is one of these things where the occupation does change cognition. I see that with my friends who are now attendings. They just think very differently than they did when they were in high school or college. There’s something immersive about that world.   But, I also say the same thing about art. Becoming an artist, or doing art, has also changed how I think about the world. I used to be much more black and white, because I was a coder, so it was just, is it running? Is it not running? Is it significant? P-value less 0.05? That was where my mind was operating. I think if I stayed in that field, that’s how my mind would operate. I’m fascinated by that. It’s like when you get into college admissions people ask are you a pointy person or are you a rounded person? Doctors are incredibly pointy. That’s what makes them fun to write about. Maybe not necessarily to hang out with, but they’re just interesting people. They’re just so pointy. They have so many quirks and idiosyncrasies.    B&W:  What advice do you have for emerging writers?    WW:  Oh gosh. I think if you really wanna do it, you have to really want to exist on the page. The best part of you has to be on the page. That’s how I feel—writing has always been the best part of me. Only go into writing if you feel like that’s where you’re at, otherwise you want to think about why you want to be a writer. Do you want to be a writer because you like the aura of a writer? I actually hate being a writer. I love writing. I hate being a writer. So if you just like the aura of being a writer, maybe there’s something else, like an editor or being in publishing. You have to really love writing, because all the other stuff can be kind of annoying. I always just ask my students, “Is there anything else that you can see yourself doing?” Because a lot of my friends who complained about being pre-med love it now because they have a stable job. They can go on these fancy vacations. They’re totally happy. So I’m always like, “Is there nothing you would love doing?” And I know that sounds discouraging but I’m not trying to discourage them. It’s a really hard road. If I loved it less, I might’ve done something else and not have so much existential angst over my choices.