Search Results

An online weatherman puts the personal back in forecasting. By Anna Patchefsky Weather-wise, April 12, 2023 was unbeatable. The temperatures were in the high 70s with partly cloudy skies. There was a low dew point and a light breeze. “That’s it. It’s perfect. The vibes are immaculate!!” reported the viral account @nymetrowx on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Before signing off, John Homenuk—a meteorologist and weather consultant who has become something of an influencer with @nymetrowx— admonished his audience: “The lack of photos so far is mildly concerning.” He also excused all New Yorkers from attending any job, function, or event that afternoon. They would be spending time outdoors, not to be contacted or disturbed by the demands of their lives. Weather-wise, June 7, 2023 was precipitous. The temperatures were in the high 70s with some reduced visibility. The sky darkened throughout the day as the smoke blocked out the sun, causing the temperature to drop. “The vibes are…sort of surreal out there,” admitted Homenuk. Successive posts explain New York’s descent into photo-filter dystopia. Over the summer, the Columbia Emergency Management system reiterated an air quality alert for the New York City region. With a thick plume of smoke from Canadian wildfires drifting southward to the city, the air quality in New York would, in the following days, become the worst on the planet. With an AQI surpassing the “hazardous” designation at 480 parts per million, the University advised caution for all outdoor activities and encouraged the use of N95s when outside. Homenuk, with tanned skin, frosted tips, and a gold chain necklace, is a true weatherman, well-equipped to calmly guide his viewers through a summer of looming abnormalities. And there are visuals. In a wide-angle shot across the Hudson River, One World Trade Center is invisible. The sky is the same color as the base path at Yankee Stadium. And from my camera roll, the high vaulted windows in Butler Cafe peer into a bright orange sky. In a two-minute video , Homenuk, behind the camera and equipped with an appropriately urgent cadence, explains why the sky has enveloped the city. As the wildfires burn, their smoke is lofted into the jetstream. Vertical mixing forces the air down closer to the surface, casting New York in a visual obfuscation. Meteorology relies on a diverse array of technology in order to make predictions: satellites, radar, formulas, and computer simulations. Different weather models may each produce different weather readings. Forecasts go awry, however, when meteorologists use just one model or algorithm. Apple’s weather app is consistently criticized for being faulty and unreliable for this very reason: problems arise when data is pushed without human interpretation to qualify the caveats and reflect the range of possibilities offered by a probability. By design, weather apps generally ignore the crucial human component of a reliable forecast. When asked by Caitlin Lent of Interview Magazine if weather is a feeling or a science, Homenuk confidently replied, “Both.” Anticipating another top-tier weather day, Homenuk writes , “Source: Me.” His tweets proceed like a confession. He tosses his hands in the air as he admits the uncertainty and defeat of human forecasting: Even the weatherman isn’t right all the time. As Homenuk tells Lent, there’s a difference between knowing the weather and knowing what the weather is going to be like. New Yorkers don’t actually want to know how many inches of snow will be on the ground; they just want to know whether or not they will have to wear their Uggs. In the morning, I check Apple’s pre-installed weather app and then turn to Homenuk’s posts. This is a routine that is not merely a display of choreographed neuroticism, but also a shy testament to the fact that a holistic forecast requires human interpretation. There’s a famous scene in That ’70s Show where Mila Kunis’s Jackie complains that she is cold. Instead of giving her his jacket, Ashton Kutcher’s Kelso replies, “Well damn, Jackie. I can’t control the weather!” Jackie almost smiles at Kelso’s discourtesy. She did not want the leather jacket—just an acknowledgment of shared human experience. Like Jackie, we New Yorkers are forced to share the weather, but ours is increasingly bizarre and unpredictable. @Nymetrowx succeeds in putting humanity back into weather. Weather generally exists as a sanitized visual phenomenon, but Homenuk preserves the weather's natural position as a conversational, subjective experience. When climate change renders us speechless, we can still talk about the weather.

Animal rights activists go to new extremes. By Vivien Sweet Amid posters urging students to audition for sketch comedy groups and participate in a sustainable Halloween costume swap, an advertisement for a tasting hosted by Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat stuck out. Something was clearly amiss. Framed by a giant golden retriever looming over a tray of red meat, the event’s description was surprisingly laconic, indicating only “When: Oct, 5, 2023” and “Where: The Sundial.” Beyond a QR code to “visit the farm,” the poster bore few other details.    I’m sure that most passersby instantaneously realized that the poster was a cheap attempt at rousing attention by a veganism awareness organization. But their website took great pains to masquerade as an earnest family farm; I perused nearly half of the site before realizing that the organization was satirical. The giveaway? A listing under the “Vegetarian” section that led with: “Little known fact—pomeranians lay eggs.” (Prospective buyers, a dozen will set you back $1.51.)   Pomeranians don’t lay eggs; this I know. But the lie’s directness caught me off guard. Many parody projects will make claims so explicitly false that everyone can safely laugh at them, eradicating the hierarchy of joke-maker and joke-victim. The punchline of the “Birds Aren’t Real” campaign, for example, is that birds are in fact very real. And satirical organizations that do straddle the line between truth and fiction tend to avoid jokes with troubling moral implications. Yet Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat falls in neither category. Why would an organization fighting against animal cruelty labor to visit colleges, publish weekly articles, and create merchandise to promote a lie? Puzzled, I went to their free sampling in the spirit of investigative journalism.    There was no free dog meat. There was, however, a blow-up husky and eager spokespeople with shirts and hats branded with their choice slogans: “Mmm… PUG BACON” and “Delicious dog, since 1981.” Students remained impassive as they hurried by the stand, having long since tuned out the moral pleas of campus canvassers.    I was the perfect candidate to be wooed into veganism: a lapsed vegetarian, ambivalent about my meat consumption, a lover of both tofu and productive ideological sparring. I spoke at length with a young woman who told me that the advocacy group, founded in 1981 to promote veganism, is family-owned and operated. Although their website explicitly details the process by which the dogs on Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat Farm are (hypothetically) bred, killed, and eaten, they had dropped the act in person. Instead, Elwood’s representatives opted to urge passersby to go vegan for a singular day for the sake of their own dogs.   When I asked why they did not host any fundraisers to directly combat animal farms, she clarified that Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat was primarily a canvassing operation that had successfully converted a nebulous amount of college students to veganism. When I suggested that there were racist underpinnings to the demonization of eating dogs, she argued that all meat consumption should be demonized and helpfully pointed me to their online FAQs regarding accusations of “xenophobia.” (It reads: “Regarding the hurtful stereotypes around cultures that do eat dog meat: we do not condone them.”) We were getting nowhere.   “I’m sorry, I just don’t really see how spreading misinformation is a productive way to promote veganism,” I said.   “What are you doing to fight animal cruelty?” she retorted.   “You have a point,” I admitted.   I left the dog meat sampling perturbed and less inclined to consider veganism than when I had arrived. While walking away, I spoke to some similarly unsettled students—vegans and meat eaters alike—who expressed their frustration at the cruel, ineffective use of dogs in the name of the fight against animal cruelty. “They’re not changing anyone’s minds,” one vegetarian remarked. The merit of their advocacy was irreparably offset by the moral absurdism of their approach.   I was doomscrolling through their website’s FAQ section when I noticed that the rhetoric of Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat had lost all its dwindling earnestness that I gleaned from its canvassers in-person, shifting from an emphatic plea to consider veganism to an altruistic parody of the relationship between animals and humans. “If you were locked in a room with a live dog and an apple, which would you eat first?” the first question asked. In such a situation, I think I would ask to be let out.   “Don’t force your views on me!” another FAQ read. “Isn’t it my personal choice to eat animals?”   The response: “You can choose to be a racist or rapist or beat your children or dog. When you choose to intentionally and unnecessarily hurt others—or eat animals—you’re putting your choice ahead of theirs. Does that seem fair?” Perhaps not. But what is infinitely more unfair is the flippant whataboutism in equating eating animals  to engaging in sexual violence, racism, and child abuse. And the result of such callous, ambivalent rhetoric? Driving away their target audience—meat eaters, who didn’t like being equated to dog killers—and estranging their allies—vegans, who felt that the organization grossly misrepresented their cause.    As the day wound down, the purported dog meat-harvesters deflated their blow-up huskies and rolled up the “free sampling” advertisement that had originally caught my eye. The straggling stream of students had notably begun to swerve around the Sundial to avoid the canvassers, who were still haplessly passing out pamphlets. Without its shock value, Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat was not worth a second glance. Alienating meat eaters and vegans alike, the campaign was a classic case of satire gone horribly awry: a morbid joke taken too far accompanied by a moral imperative forced upon unwilling passersby. In John Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a “friend to man” says, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Perhaps that best explains why I found the falsehoods of Elwood's Organic Dog Meat to be so ugly.

As Barnard rolls out medication abortion, student activists reflect on the past and future of reproductive healthcare on campus.  By Miska Lewis On Oct. 6, 2022, Barnard announced it would begin offering medication abortion in fall 2023. The news reached students through a schoolwide email, followed by articles from The New York Times, CNN, NPR, and NBC, which broadcast the new policy to a national readership. Pledging to “train providers in the provision of medication abortions” by the following year, then-president Sian Beilock and Vice President of Health and Wellness Dr. Marina Catallozzi were featured prominently in high-profile coverage about the historic move. Barnard is one of the only private universities to have initiated plans to offer the service on its campus, making its response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade four months prior particularly active.    In an email sent to the Barnard student body this August, Catallozzi announced that the rollout of medication abortion at Barnard’s Primary Care Health Service would be delayed to the spring. Dr. Sarah Ann Anderson-Burnett, who joined Barnard in 2022, obtained a grant issued by Project ACCESS, a program created through the partnership of Reproductive Health Access Project and Primary Care Development Corporation that facilitates medication abortion in primary care settings. The $5,000 will go toward putting “the necessary clinical, administrative, logistical, and financial systems in place to begin providing medication abortion as an option at Barnard College,” wrote Catallozzi.    That Barnard will imminently offer medication abortion—particularly when its effort is bolstered by abortion access organizations—is a definite victory. With 60% of abortions in the U.S. obtained by people in their 20s, college campuses are composed of a demographic with a need for reliable access to this procedure. Still, the postponements and prolongations feel familiar to the Reproductive Justice Collective, a subset of students who have argued for the necessity of medication abortion on campus since 2020 and have had an often strained relationship with administrators like Catallozzi. One glance at their website and Instagram makes clear the organization has been advocating publicly for medication abortion since at least August 2021.    When the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization hearings began in December 2021, RJC had already partnered with Elizabeth Platt, a Columbia lawyer, to hold information sessions on the state of abortion rights. They encouraged students to sign petitions insisting on access to abortion pills on campus, garnering over 1,300 signatures , and called out TFP Student Action , a Catholic organization that advocates against abortion, for their efforts to stigmatize abortion on Columbia’s campus. In April 2022, RJC directed students in a week of abortion advocacy, which included requesting medication abortion availability at Barnard and Columbia, fundraising for Buckle Bunnies, a reproductive justice organization in Texas, and raising awareness about online access to abortion pills. While focusing on their public programming, RJC attempted to set up a synchronous meeting with Catallozzi and her team. But once they made it to the same table, RJC was frustrated by Barnard administrators’ inability to share specifics about the timing of implementation or whether the school had decided to provide medication abortions at all.    Collective members were surprised by the rhetoric that Barnard eventually adopted. As Catallozzi put it in a recent email to me, medication abortions were a “natural step in caring for a population of college students who can become pregnant,” language that calls back verbatim to her remarks in a 2022 interview with The New York Times. For RJC, framing the decision as “natural” felt dismissive of their two years of advocacy and hard work. In the flurry of news coverage that followed Barnard’s announcement, Elle was one of the few outlets to substantially mention RJC’s advocacy and highlight campus activism as the reason Barnard has “long been part of the ongoing fight for reproductive rights.” The piece included interviews with now-graduated RJC members Maya Corral and Niharika Rao, who described the process of founding RJC in 2020 and their hopes to expand the Collective’s scope to New York City and the state.    Months before the Elle piece, The New Yorker covered that first meeting between RJC and Catallozzi in July 2022. In response to RJC’s demand for over-the-counter abortion services on campus, Catallozzi explained that students could access abortions at nearby clinics with “extensive expertise.” She also described the steps that would be necessary for Barnard to begin offering medication abortions, including “checking the scope of the university’s malpractice insurance and training medical staff in identifying ectopic pregnancies,” and said no decision had been made on the subject. In an email to me, Catallozzi wrote that “offering medication abortion was already on Barnard’s radar before any discussions with the RJC,” a statement that, at the least, erases ongoing communication with RJC since 2021. “Barnard’s statement was like, ‘This was our idea,’” said Ana Sofia Harrison, BC ’24. “How were news sources gonna know that it wasn’t?”     One may reasonably wonder why a student group—which has seen one of its major demands met—would expend effort on retroactively getting credit. For RJC members, an acknowledgment of their years of work is a necessary demonstration that Barnard recognizes students as change-making agents on campus and will take their other demands seriously. RJC wants Barnard to be an example of what it can look like for a college to actively and eagerly collaborate with its students. To view them as more than a vulnerable group to be serviced, but also as advocates who can partake in equal dialogue with the college, Barnard could expand on the conversations they foster through Fireside Chats with the college’s president, for example.   RJC has long emphasized the importance of PCHS working in tandem with student abortion doulas. They highlight the efficacy of the Wellness Spot , a cozy, lamp-lit room on the first floor of Reid Hall that was established by Barnard in 1993 and is staffed by trained peer educators. Students can access information on safe sex and mental health resources, or attend workshops on topics as varied as self-care, communication, and healthy eating. “The Wellness Spot is an example of how well peer-to-peer support works,” Harrison said. Independent of PCHS, the Wellness Spot models how a student-driven organization can collaborate with the Barnard administration toward collective goals. In the past, peer educators have accessed IUD doula training through the Wellness Spot; patients receiving an IUD can opt into student accompaniment during the short but often painful procedure. The success of this program is one reason RJC believes PCHS should consider staffing abortion doulas, trained by the Wellness Spot or RJC, when medication abortions become available on campus. Isabel Villa Real Saebra, BC ’23, who had an abortion while in college, believes a peer support network is crucial for students experiencing the same. She hopes Barnard will prioritize emotional support when providing medication abortions: “Feeling supported is not just infrastructurally speaking,” she said. “It’s feeling supported within the community where you are.” The emotional support and familiarity with the procedure that medication abortion doulas could offer would only reinforce  Barnard’s focus on multidimensional reproductive care.    RJC’s proposal of such programs to the Wellness Spot, in hopes that they will act as a liaison with PCHS, has been met with gestures towards logistical challenges. “They said any doula or chaperone work is subject to HIPAA, and, for a school, FERPA regulations,” Sydney Johnson, BC ’25 says. HIPAA, the federal law that preserves the confidentiality of patient information, and FERPA, which protects educational records, are invoked when student or patient data is shared without consent, typically by an authority figure such as a healthcare provider.“We’re not medical professionals in any way,” Johnson says, frustrated at the lack of clarity as to how exactly doulas would violate these regulations. They added that the Wellness Spot told RJC to “reach out directly to PCHS.” When I asked, Catallozzi avoided specific questions about RJC’s doula proposals, instead saying that “Some individuals may wish to consult with their peers or join peer support groups” but “that must be their decision to make.” This answer seems to misunderstand how trained peer support in the form of doulas may serve as a vital supplemental resource beyond what a friend may be able to offer.    In spring 2022, RJC began offering abortion doula training through a partnership with Advocates for Youth, a D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to sexuality education and health. The second cohort completed the training in spring of 2023, and RJC plans to host another session next semester. When, in early 2023, Barnard launched the Reproductive Health Grant , which distributed $25,000 to five proposals submitted by Barnard affiliates in “research, programming, and teaching related to reproductive rights in a post-Roe context,” RJC applied to fund future abortion doula training. Though they were ultimately not one of the recipients, Erin Donahue, BC ’25, received a grant to partner with Chanel Porchia-Albert from Ancient Song Doula Services to certify Barnard students as doulas. “They’re going to be full-spectrum doulas, which includes abortion doulas,” says Villa Real Saebra. “It’s amazing.” When RJC learned it did not receive the Barnard grant, the collective—acting on a long-held ambition to expand beyond campus—created New York Abortion Doula . The collective currently provides  “intersectional, community-centered abortion support,” and offers New York-based resources for abortion access and information with hopes of forming a more robust network of doulas across the city.   Barnard’s commitment to providing medical abortions underscores the role colleges can play in their students’ healthcare. Kylie McCombs, a junior at Bryn Mawr College and president of its Feminist Coalition, told me her school did not directly communicate with students regarding the ruling or its effects on abortion access. Barnard’s singular decision also reflects its unique position relative to other historically women’s colleges. Kylee Miller, a senior at Mount Holyoke College and member of its Planned Parenthood Generation chapter, noted that Barnard “sets the standard high for other universities with similar endowments; it’s a really great push.” At the same time, those universities serve very different student bodies. According to Miller, at Mount Holyoke “only about 13% of students identify as being straight,” so “a lot of people on campus do not have sexual encounters that could cause them to become pregnant.” Barnard’s proximity to Columbia and the city at large allows for a unique demographic makeup. Instead of offering medication abortions on its own campus, Mount Holyoke is turning to University of Massachusetts Amherst, a partner school with a significantly larger student body. “I was kind of surprised when I heard about Barnard’s news because of its size,” she confesses. “It’s really surprising that there wouldn’t be a very easy way for students from Barnard to access medication abortion through Columbia.”    RJC is focusing its efforts on exactly this. Pushing for Columbia to follow Barnard’s lead, they are aware that, come winter, one could “walk into a Columbia classroom and half the students would have access to medication abortion and half students wouldn’t,” in Harrison’s words. In the 2022 email announcing the implementation of medication abortion, Catallozzi noted that, previously, students could access reproductive care through “services in New York and particularly at CUIMC,” the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Indeed, in the past, Barnard relied on Columbia for reproductive care, prompting the question of why the University has yet to address RJC’s demands for medication abortions on Columbia’s campus.   The creation of the Reproductive Health Grant shows that Barnard is interested in what members of the community have to say about reproductive justice and is willing to fund a variety of projects on reproductive rights and access. These initiatives align with Catallozzi’s statement in her 2022 announcement email that her team values the “many conversations we have had about reproductive health.” It is, she wrote, “critical that we continue listening and learning from our community.” RJC wonders the extent to which the past two years of underwhelming, if not outwardly negative, responses to their advocacy indicate Barnard’s esteem of their efforts. “It’s really disappointing that Barnard has literally not acknowledged any of RJC’s efforts,” Harrison commented. “It has come to a point where they have avoided us in so many ways that it’s almost like they feel called out by us, that it’s a threat instead of a conversation. And what RJC has always wanted is to be in conversation with Barnard in terms of promoting reproductive health access and overall justice around campus.”  In addition to advocating for medication abortion on Columbia’s campus, RJC is also planning to increase programming oriented toward queer and trans healthcare, such as hosting queer sex-ed workshops. Now composed of 60 members, the Collective hopes to continue growing both in size and scope, enshrining an understanding of reproductive health that includes but extends beyond discussions about abortion. They see their responsibility as advocating not only for “students of elite institutions,” says Johnson, but for the principle of universal access to reproductive healthcare. This broad vision is not dissimilar from Barnard’s self-conception as an institution that is “leading the way in supporting reproductive rights,” as the subject line for the schoolwide email announcing abortion medication declared. These students are hoping to remind Barnard of all that that position entails.

By Thaleia Dasberg Illustrations by Phoebe Wagoner “simmer”   over milkwashed fields plucking feathers off corn stalks bleeding I watch you steam you smoked thing boots freezing under a stomach hot with buried spring   “sarasota (next to walmart)”   home after breakfast and before dinner home after the 99 cent store became the dollar store home after my running shoes ran off for the last time you cupped my face like something small i am smaller than last week it’s true about bones in cold weather they shrink you cried into the sheets i washed earlier   you cried into night starved fingers dawn a swollen purple it was only this morning I left you it was only this morning I forgot you   “summered dusk”   decided to ride along the river phantom pedaling the water almost waved curving back like remote lights in hot pursuit freedom and the most loneliness i can take the river is my healing maybe that’s where my florida shines through: water soothes my eyes leaking and wind licking dry these days today merge into a blue raspberry stained tongue my hair suddenly feels feminine utmost fanning in shadows framing my shoulders reminding me beauty is in good music musicmuses free rides citrus craved (and fulfilled) annotations (smart) me.   I thought: Life is just one form of heartbreak after another. And then what we learn in between. How we shift breath patterns. Or learn to find peace in the rush. Grass takes root in our tooth gaps. We smile. We know we are beautiful.

by Miska Lewis Earlier this semester, pink flyers popped up across Columbia’s buildings advertising “Mother Tongue’s Inaugural Picnic: Columbia’s first and only literary translation magazine.” Kiley Karlak Malloy (she/they), BC ’24, co-founded the publication in mid-spring 2022 with Madeleine Lerner, BC ’25. At their first meeting on a warm Friday afternoon, the multilingual magazine staff sat cross-legged on Philosophy lawn. My roommates and I attended the picnic, excited to hear about the submission process and meet other students eager to translate a slew of languages. Kiley, reminding us several times that her homemade cookies were peanut-free, invited us to take from the pile of snacks in the center of the circle. Together with her co-founder, the two explained their dreams for the magazine, avidly encouraging us to submit. “We put out something last night,” Kiley tells me proudly over coffee in the 111th Street Community Garden a couple of weeks later, referencing a collection of poems translated into English from Russian. “It’s from a student who isn’t a native speaker,” she says, “there’s a lot of beauty there.” “Russian is really hard, and she translated them with a lot of grace.” Mother Tongue  hopes to release more translated works, compiling them into a finished online product at the end of the semester.  At the age of twenty-one, Kiley  is already en route to polyglottal status. Latin, German, and Polish make up three out of the four courses on her class schedule this semester. She’s also been learning French since high school. Growing up in a German-Polish family in Philadelphia, Kiley always knew she wanted to learn her family’s languages. Broaching the study of language in college, she is now the only living member of her family who speaks German. She is working to translate a letter that her grandmother wrote to her great-grandmother in German into English. Kiley hopes to turn her nostalgic curiosities into a larger archival project with her friend Clarissa Meléndez, BC ’24, who is translating family documents from Spanish to English.  Working with German, a language often stereotyped as angry or rough, Kiley finds joy in its simultaneous weirdness and beauty. She finds the language holds a kind of suspense that comes from verbs being placed at the end of sentences. The structure keeps you waiting for action. To push herself further, Kiley journals in German, hoping  to get to a place where she is living in the language, not just translating. “I’m always trying to get there,” she tells me. “It’s an exciting place to be.” While this is her first time working with family letters, Kiley is no stranger to the art of translation. During her sophomore spring at Barnard, she translated Vegan Africa,   an African cookbook by French-Ivorian author Marie Kacouchia . Kiley describes that spring as the busiest time in her life: for one month, she balanced translating the entire cookbook, acting in Circus Hamlet, and her schoolwork. When she wasn’t going over Shakespeare lines, Kiley would sit in a corner of the rehearsal room, translating spices from French to English and finding the best words to explain cabbage salad preparation.  When she works on a longer piece, Kiley lives and breathes the text, interacting with each word intimately as she finds the complementary version in English. She describes getting “so close to the small intricacies of the language that you are kind of inside it.” Inhabiting German has made translating her grandmother’s letters bittersweet. On the one hand, there is so much joy in getting to know the years of her grandmother’s before her son, Kiley’s father, was born; on the other, this intimacy is only possible through a written record, since Kiley learned German after her grandmother passed away. While her yearning for a deeper relationship isn’t entirely fulfilled through translation, Kiley can share pieces of her grandmother with the rest of her family, creating relationships between her and newer generations using the written word. Years after the letters were originally postmarked, Kiley transcends linguistic and temporal boundaries, in turn becoming her grandmother’s mouthpiece. .  Polish, the newest language in Kiley’s linguistic repertoire, is particularly sentimental. Having grown up in an area of Philadelphia where pierogies were found on every street corner and with a mother of Slavic heritage, Polish is home. Since she began learning the language, Kiley awaits a new world of literature; she explains that Polish word order is flexible, and thus naturally lends itself to poetry. According to a professor of Kiley’s, poetry is practically woven into Polish DNA, and with each word she reads in Polish, Kiley imagines translating the similes, metaphors, and allusions into English. During her time at Barnard, she has had the opportunity to discover a world of German poetry, and is now excited to do the same with Polish, connecting with her heritage through the form.  I’m amazed at how seamless Kiley makes language learning appear. Despite the tedious hours involved in figuring out where one word ends and the other begins, Kiley speaks of the process with enthusiasm and love. Doubtless, she will soon be translating from Polish, bringing her work to the pages of Mother Tongue . After she graduates in the spring, Kiley hopes to open a chapter of the magazine at her next stop on the long road of graduate studies ahead, which will perhaps begin at Trinity University in Dublin, Ireland. She is drawn to Dublin’s slower pace, the area’s history, and the possibility of working with texts translated from the Irish language. When I asked if she wants to continue translating from French or German in the future, Kiley is eager to elaborate. “I would love to do both,” she confesses, “I mean, I just want to learn as many languages as I can.” It’s a beautiful coincidence that the languages Kiley is most keen on learning are also the ones that are increasingly desired in the world of English translations. With Polish, German, and French under her belt, she is interested in making a space for herself in the over-saturated publishing industry by learning more unique languages, such as Romanian. Kiley is curious what similarities Romanian has with French, she says, as the “romance language that is the furthest East in Europe.” For now, as she enjoys a language-filled final year at Barnard, Kiley is working on translating Live Maria by Julia Kerninon, a story of a young girl moving from Brittany to Berlin who “has to advocate for herself in a language she doesn’t know.” Translating a novel opens Kiley to literary references which are fun “to play around with.” Kiley hopes to finish translating the French book soon and use it to draw publishers in, and say here’s my work, “you just have to edit it...”

What happened to Columbia’s linguistics department? By Eva Spier The Columbia University linguistics major is a transplanted organ of sorts, currently embedded within the Department of Slavic Languages. This detail, its position within another department, is indicative of a period of absence. The last time it stood independently was in 1981, and its lively assembly produced the Columbia School of Linguistics, a renegade linguistic theory founded by the late William Diver. The department was small, as linguistics departments often are, but its students were eager and professors fervent. However, this all changed in 1981 when Columbia’s administration abruptly decided to suspend the department. During my attempt to understand the current iteration of linguistics at Columbia, I discovered that its predecessor was much like a snow globe: internally oriented, enchanting, and—unfortunately—very delicate.  The former department was organized by three senior faculty members: William Diver, GSAS ’53, Robert Austerlitz, GSAS ’55, and Marvin Herzog, GSAS ’64. Students were divided into separate streams to be advised by one of the three. They all antedated and consequently clashed with Chomsky’s revolution, the swift mainstream trajectory of generative linguistics, but their similarities ended there. Diver was concerned with language as a form of human behavior, Austerlitz dealt with Uralic and Altaic languages, and Herzog with Yiddish language mapping. These diverse interests pushed the scholarly norms of their time. In the late 1950s, Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures  was the shiny new toy that every linguist wanted to play with. His school of thought was quickly adopted by universities around the U.S. and soon became the predominant method of studying language. Chomsky proposed that language was the expression of innate grammatical structure in the human mind and that when language expresses irregularity, it is mere deviation from a true framework. For many linguists, the prospect of language exhibiting some kind of universal subconscious was a giddying one.  “If you were a graduate student, Chomsky’s way of doing linguistics was pretty much the only respectable thing to do,” reflected Joseph Davis, GSAS ’92, a linguistics professor at City College of New York and William Diver’s last student. Davis warmly agreed to detail the department’s waning days. “In 1982, Chomsky’s monopoly on linguistics was so great that I was literally warned against studying with Diver at other places,” Davis remarked in a small office overlooking the campus’s blazing trees and stone towers. He paused, amused: “They said, ‘Oh we’ve heard of him. Watch out!’”  Diver, a seasoned linguist at that point in his career, was not convinced by Chomsky’s newfound popularity. “In fact,” Davis smiled, “Diver was editor of the journal Word  at the time [...] he actually rejected some papers by Chomsky, because he found that they didn’t make any sense.”  Whereas Chomsky believed that language could be categorized by appealing to syntax, the structure of sentences, Diver was far more interested in semantics, how sentences express meaning. This might seem natural today, but at the time it was considered to be a controversial stance. Take the sentence: “He cut the cake with his wife.” Now, consider: “He cut the cake with a knife.” The meaning of the word “with” has shifted from conveying cooperation to conveying an instrument. Finally, consider: “He cut the cake with a smile.” The word has shifted once more to signify accompaniment. Alan Huffman, GSAS ’85, another one of Diver’s students insisted , “It is the shift from ‘knife’ to ‘bride’, not the putative polysemy of with  that effects the change in message.” In other words, communicative intent shapes the speech pattern, not a coexistence of meanings in the word with . Diver found inconsistencies in syntactic categorisations of language like this one, and condemned their dismissal as fluctuations of the language. These aren’t quirks in the language, they are  the language. The department’s intellectual independence drew in students who were disillusioned with their former education in linguistics. Anthropological linguist Ellen Contini-Morava, GSAS ’83, completed her doctorate under Diver’s advisory. She explained to me that Chomsky’s “idea of creativity was ‘I can create an infinitely long sentence by adding more and more parts.’ That didn’t seem like creativity to me.” When she took Columbia’s field methods course, the class learned the structure of Cambodian just by conversing with a native speaker. “That was so exciting to me. It was just so interesting to think about language that way,” she said. Davis echoed a similar excitement. He discovered linguistics in his final year of college, but only began to resonate with the discipline during his search for a graduate program, when he found himself talking to Diver for two hours despite not formally being his student. My conversations with Diver’s students led me to believe that these absorbing moments were the most remarkable part of the department.  Davis spoke of Diver favorably, telling me that there were often long pauses in his lessons. Diver conducted himself seriously and thoughtfully, letting his students sit quietly for long minutes if his lesson so provoked it. This contemplation proved fruitful as students’ curiosity flourished beyond class time within Diver’s informal evening seminars. Diver worked on his theory privately, so it took one of his students, Flora Klein, GSAS ’72, to propose the idea. According to Davis, she stopped him in the hall in 1968 and asked, “Professor Diver, I hear you’re doing some really interesting stuff. Would you tell us students about it? Can we talk about it?” The meetings originated as a way for Diver to communicate his work to the students, but soon students began presenting their own research to the group. These seminars often ran over three hours long, after which the students would relocate to a pizza place on Broadway and animatedly continue their discussions late into the night.  Students were invited to these Thursday evening seminars by Argentinian Assistant Professor Erica García, GSAS ’64, the catalyst of the department’s shift. Garc í a was fiery, charismatic, and outspoken—a legend. What made the most resounding impression on everyone I spoke with was her sheer intelligence. Davis recalls declarations from his peers: “‘She had a mind like a steel trap!’” In a similarly favorable manner, Contini-Morava remembers being intrigued by García’s teaching, “She went through all of these theories and trashed them all. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, what does she believe in?’” Finally, towards the end of the semester, García mentioned, “‘Well, if you want to know what I really think, then come to this seminar!’” In a series of recorded lectures  García gave at the University of San Juan in 1994, her charisma is palpable through the screen. Donning a white button down, grinning slyly at her students, she introduces herself by recalling a Russian myth of a fox and a hedgehog. The fox knows how to do many things, whereas the hedgehog only knows how to do one, but well. “I think, over the years, I am a hedgehog,” she says. “This is a way of, let’s say, glorifying ineptitude. I am a very limited person, I have very limited interests and ideas, and I try to sell them as if I were a hedgehog.” The next logical step for García was to apply for tenure, and so she did. But, of the three senior faculty, only Diver supported her incorporation. She was not hired for the position, a decision which students protested furiously. Davis remembered hearing that García’s rejection “was damning.” Contini-Morava and other graduate students became angry. “Our feeling was that the reason they didn’t accept her was that she was a woman who spoke her mind.” She continued thoughtfully: “She was abrasive, and they didn’t want to have her as a permanent colleague. And I think her abrasiveness might have been excused if she was a man.”  This marked the first fissure in the blossoming department. When García was denied tenure, it signaled to the administration that the department wasn’t hiring any new professors. In what followed, this stagnance added onto two other problems. First, the department wasn’t drawing in as many students as they would have liked, and second, the Columbia School of Linguistics sharply conflicted with schools of thought across the rest of the country. For the administration, the department seemed to be at a dead end. In a student interview  from 1989, Diver expressed frustration at the idea of the University eliminating a department it didn’t fully understand: “People outside the field are not in a position to judge us.” The Executive Committee admitted  two months later that they had “not consulted any outside linguistics experts for an objective evaluation of Columbia’s department.” With the information they had in 1981, the administration decided to suspend the department, leading García, as well as most of the senior faculty, to relocate to other universities. Students remember the department’s closing days as tense, but cordial. The administration continued to meet with the shrinking division, while its professors and students found safe passage to neighboring linguistics programs.  Professors are denied tenure all the time, and departments remain intact. The fact that García’s rejection had the impact it did reveals that there were already underlying tensions within the department. Gillian Lindt, GSAS ’65, then Dean of GSAS, contended  in 1989 that the professors’ specializations fragmented the linguistics department into separate streams, but Diver contested that specialization in small departments appears as fragmentation more than it would in a department with more professors. Departments may be formalized by blackboard-fronted lecture halls and neat curricula, but professors are the heart of every department. And professors cannot be standardized, not their lectures nor their characters. The linguistics department was run by real people, and therefore susceptible to personal disputes and differences in opinion. These aspects are characteristic of any healthy department, yet this one was penalized due to lack of relevant protocol. The University’s decision exhibits its astounding capacity to function as a business rather than as a place of higher education. Had a disagreement of the same nature occurred in the physics or political science departments, the administration would likely not have disbanded them so hastily. Fiscally, it tracks that when budgets shrink, the departments making the least amount of money should be cut. But is Columbia not first an organization endowed with the responsibility of preserving the liberal arts before it is a fiscal enterprise? The fate of the linguistics department foreshadows the attitude, persistent today, that anything other than a pre-professional subject is a mere embellishment in the world. According to this attitude, theoretical subjects, at their worst, distract from pre-professional ones, and at their best, supplement them. If this sentiment continues to take root, universities risk abandoning academia altogether while manufacturing employability with the efficiency of a fast food restaurant. But worthwhile causes have a funny way of resurfacing. The Columbia School of Linguistics lives on, as if the department branched off and continued independently, including the seminars where members regularly present their work. Students continue to show interest in the field; today’s “Introduction to Linguistics” taught by John McWhorter exposes nearly 300 students to the subject annually. He confesses his love for the subject in The Language Hoax , where he writes: “If you want to learn about how humans differ, study cultures. However, if you want insight as to what makes all humans worldwide the same, beyond genetics, there are few better places to start than how language works.”  Diver’s school of linguistics calls out instances where the natural order of language looks disrupted, refusing to simply dismiss it as clutter. It is similarly important that we call attention to and carefully examine the disruptive history of the linguistics department at Columbia lest we dismiss it  as clutter.  García told her students in a University of San Juan lecture, “Don’t ever forget, the text never makes a mistake, the text is always right.” The suspension of the linguistics department in 1981 is not simply a deviation in human behavior we can dismiss, it is an important indicator of how departments live and die. Garcia finished, “and when [the text] gives us bad results, then it is us who didn’t know how to interrogate.”

By Kate Sibery I had been looking for a hole in the ocean— so I decided to walk over to the East River but when I got there every person I’d ever known had gathered to yell at the clouds  who just hung there indifferent, and waiting to fall down as rain while I, distracted by the people  and the yelling,  gave up my search for the ocean and took up my part in the chorus singing away the threat of meaning,  choosing instead that hollow ache, dull, and wordless. Illustration Phoebe Wagoner

You had to be there. Alice Tecotzky Two floors above 108th Street and Broadway lives a gray-blue couch, shaped like an L, adorned with a few square pillows and one round pillow that I hold on my lap whenever I sit down. Though I don’t own this couch—it belongs to four of my dearest friends, in their shared apartment—I love it very much. Its fibers are woven from my tears (joyous and painful), my whispered secrets, my spilled wine and beads of sweat. In the fabric live my most benign college moments, the ones that have stitched me, forever, to the women sitting on the adjacent cushions. My friends’ lease ends in July. I don’t know what they’re doing with the couch, or where and to whom it will go. Like college, it will disappear abruptly and almost cruelly, pulled out from under our crowded butts and suddenly a figment of memory alone. Annie Poole On the corner of 7th and Avenue C is a bar with the tagline “Bring your parents, get right in.” It seems fitting that I first got into Joyface because of my dad and his partner Kevin. “Make friends with the bouncer, the bartenders, and the owner, so we don’t have to help you next time,” they said.  Following their advice, my college friends and I returned to Joyface, again and again. Despite constantly saying we needed to try somewhere new, we returned to Joyface for Halloween parties, finals celebrations, two of my birthdays, and the 21st night of September (yes, we remember). Donna Summer, Whitney Houston, ABBA, and Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” (played when the clock strikes midnight and the disco ball turns on) became our frat party anthems.  My favorite Joyface night took place the weekend of our senior year homecoming. Four friends and I brought all of our parents and got right in. After taking tequila shots and dancing on tables, our parents still beg us to bring them back for graduation. Part of becoming an adult is realizing your parents may have had more fun back in “their day.” Joyface, my homecoming on a night out in college.  Becky Miller It’s a dungeon, really, but with the wall decor of a SoHo gallery, the music taste of your dad’s weekly poker game, and the mellow charm of a pub somewhere mellow and charming, like London’s outskirts, maybe. In the underground domain of Arts and Crafts, we have feasted on many a mustard pretzel when the L-shaped tater tots run out. We have nursed many a Cigar City (#22), and ogled many a female portrait’s exposed breasts—you know the one, tucked in the corner, drawing eyes from across the bar with a magnetic pull. I ache to remember the rainy nights I spent writing down there, or the afternoons spent interviewing hopeful bartenders, or the pregame pints that went too fast. Safely subterranean, entering A&C feels like following a trail of memory crumbs, where we laughed until we peed.  Anouk Jouffret I spent a gloomy week in late January aching to see the ocean. When I told my friends, “I think I’m going to go to Coney Island on Friday,” they were amused: “What are you doing there?” I didn’t really know.  The boardwalk was empty when I arrived save for a few runners, parents pushing strollers, and groups of men gathered around boomboxes who waved to me as I walked past them. I waved back. I put my fingers in the cold ocean water. I sat on the pier railing. I listened to “Coney Island Baby” a couple times and took pictures of the stone chess tables. I thought of the scene in Paper Moon where Ryan O’Neal tells his daughter Tatum to “drink your Nehi and eat your Coney Island” and thought of my own dad and when I watched that movie with him.  My freshman year, 2020, was marked by isolation. Solo excursions were a chore. That had changed. I could savor my time alone. Texts rolled in as I made my way up and down the promenade: “did you make it to your misty pier?” and “how’s it going love?” I smiled as I read them, feeling no urgency in replying just then.  Henry Astor It took me two years at Columbia before I finally visited the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I was on a tour with my history seminar, an eclectic course called The History of the End of the World, taught by Cold War scholar Matthew Connelly. Given my un-Christian upbringing, I had no idea that St. John the Divine was actually the author of the biblical Book of Revelation and that the whole church is a monument to the Eschaton. Beyond the obvious, like the seven-pointed windows for the seven seals of the rapture, Connelly pointed out something on the church’s exterior that I never would have noticed. Over the central portal is a carving of the Twin Towers with a looming mushroom cloud in the rear. Adjacent is a Final Destination–like scene of the Brooklyn Bridge mid-collapse, with cars and school buses flying every which way. Across the way is a rendition of Bohr’s atomic model, seemingly in reference to nuclear apocalypse. The spirit of an elderly Met docent now takes over me whenever I pass by St. John the Divine with a group of friends as I rush ahead of them, beckoning at the faux-Gothic facade with a “Get a load of this shit, guys!” The world has ended so many times since we’ve matriculated at this school. It can’t hurt to have a good laugh every once in a while.   Madison Hu At the entrance of my apartment is a badly drawn donkey that sprawls across the backs of five sheets of old, freshman-year handouts.    I drew it last fall and it took probably 30 seconds—a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game, my roommate and I decided, would be a great addition to our housewarming party. Upon arrival, all our friends, from freshman-year dormmates to recent class buddies, were welcomed by him, and even if they didn’t play his game, they remarked on his uncanniness, which was enough for my roommate and I to keep him on the wall.   A few months after its conception, he found a home: a too-small ornate gold frame that my roommate found on the street. Since then, we have accumulated a small gnome balancing on top, courtesy of my roommate’s white elephant gift exchange; numerous birthday cards from our birthdays and friends’ birthdays we’ve hosted alike; and a red envelope from our Lunar New Year dinner, where I cooked two Peking ducks and only set off the fire alarm twice.   Everyone who comes into the house sees the frame upon entrance and has to be careful not to move too quickly past it, for risk of the gnome, birthday cards, and red envelope flying off (we are too lazy to secure them). When they do, I’m happy to put them back on, and appreciate what has become a shrine to my last year of college. Miska Lewis I watched the sun rise over the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the morning of April 17. Having arrived on the lawn and set up tents at a speed only camp counselors can achieve, over 80 of us sighed with relief as we watched the navy blue sky turn purple and pink over Low Library. For 32 hours, the cluster of green tents became our home while our voices grew hoarse demanding our university disclose financial investments and divest from genocide. For 32 hours, I watched dozens of my friends and classmates gather at the picket line, chanting in solidarity to protect those of us on the inside.  Watching Palestinian flags wave in the blustery night, I stepped back to look at the crowd singing “Your people are my people, our struggles align.” I looked up at Butler Library, feeling sure that we would either force the University to divest or raise hell until we graduate and beyond. As I write this, hundreds of fellow students have occupied the West Lawn, making sure our message rings loud in the ears of administrators and on college campuses across the country. I can hear the chanting from my dorm on 116th and Riverside. Opening a tent door to light rain and call-and-response on Butler Lawn wasn’t an expected addition to my senior year, but it’s one that I welcome. Victor Omojola If you venture to Lerner’s fifth floor and head for the lounge at the end of the western side, you’ll find what is officially a suite of Undergraduate Student Life. Encircled by administrative offices that take all the windows (and natural light) for themselves, the area is officially a suite of USL, but my friends and I have taken to simply referring to it as Lerner 5. For the past three years, we have used the lounge as a default space when we have nothing better to do—or when we have a lot of better things to do. Spare time between classes: Go to Lerner 5. Need a place to eat a Ferris quesadilla? Head to Lerner 5. Exam, final project, or thesis deadline rapidly approaching: Get your ass to Lerner 5. The lounge, which we also refer to as the third bunker (there are two similar suites one must pass to access it), has been a makeshift cafe, library, dance studio, game room, book club, movie theater—in short, a sort of modern-day Black salon (minus the intellectualism). As I write this from Lerner 5, it dawns on me that there is going to be a final time that I sit here, surrounded by pals, drowning in laughter, and devoid of vitamin D. Within a few years, Lerner 5 will only exist in the minds and memories of my friends and I (and perhaps the USL staff who occasionally have had to ask us to bring down our noise levels). Like Rome and Linsanity, all great things must come to an end. Muni Suleiman In October 2020, my New York City was bound by the dimensions of a John Jay single. I was once surrounded by fields and gardens for miles, and I yearned to experience some semblance of my Southern life. The Conservatory Gardens inadvertently became a second home. Whether I perched myself within the flourishing floral pergola of the central Italian garden, lounged by the waterlily pond in the south English garden, or shared whimsy with the Three Dancing Maidens  in the north French garden, I’ve felt a sense of peace unreplicated anywhere else in the city. I know that I’m not alone in cherishing the gardens. I’ve had the accidental honor of witnessing engagements and feeling the secondhand revelry of birthday picnics. However, my reasons for visiting were always comparatively mundane: writing essays, occasionally tying myself up in another thought experiment, and people-watching. With home-making often comes relationship-building. So, I’d wake up a friend on a Saturday morning, summon them to Hungarian for a coffee and an almond croissant each, and let our conversation meander like our feet en route to the gardens. Friends and family have walked through these perennial-lined paths with me many times: This doesn’t feel like New York , they’d say. Recently, I returned to the Conservatory Gardens alone. Since the winter of 2022, different parts have been undergoing restoration, and each trip has come with a sigh:  It just doesn’t look how it used to. The  Three Dancing Maidens ’ dance floor is now dirt. The Italian pergola is stripped to its tall, steel bones. The serenity of the waterlily pond is often interrupted by irrigation replacements. I stayed for three hours anyway. Much like seasons of life, I could finally accept that the Gardens have, naturally and necessarily, changed since my first visit almost four years ago. And I had too. Sam Hosmer If you or anyone you know is an architecture major, there’s a good chance you’ve spent time on the fourth floor of Barnard’s Diana Center. That’s where we take our first studio classes, exhibit our work at the end of the semester, and trim and extrude our digital models until our eyeballs smolder and our frontal lobes melt out our noses. At any given hour of the afternoon, night, and morning, Diana 404, home of the intro studios, wheezes with exasperation and fatigue, students cursing uncooperative tools, broken models, opaque concepts, unhelpful truisms, dollars burned at Janoff’s, assignments perceived as insufficiently specific, too specific, or both. The intro professors, many of whose reputations far precede them, guide students through the same famous and infamous syllabi in their own famous and infamous ways—and though courses may share the same names, no two are ever alike. Bonds between peers at this point are cast in Rockite. Overhead, at 2 a.m., the lights turn themselves off; somebody grunts and turns them back on again. A few short hours later, the sun starts to rise over campus to the east. These toughening introductory rites bond our thin but mighty ranks. At one point or another, though it happens differently and at different times for everyone, an anomaly strikes: at someone’s studio desk, the fog has cleared, an idea has caught fire, and the hours have turned into days. When this happens, work output multiplies. The student’s desk crowds with models and sketches and scrawl, and the studio around them fills with the smell of freshly cut basswood. Those in this phase appear clinically insane.  And then, come the crit, a jury of our professors and their (often strange) colleagues, in front of everyone, judges our work. Some of us, understandably, find this to be confrontational and discouraging—but by this point, most have stuck around, because, usually in some inexplicable and vaguely pathological way, we’ve realized we adore it. In here, where everyone has just found something big and beautiful to love, how could we not? Claire Shang Just about two years ago, I managed to pack only half an egg salad for lunch, and my phone was lagging quite substantially from the 90-page Google Doc containing this very magazine’s May issue, and because I was somewhere underground on my three-train commute to work I looked up from my phone, defunct as it already was, and it hit me, then, just how lucky I was. From exigency, revelation. One semester into my year-long term as Blue and White  editor-in-chief, I realized I had to savor what was left. I would have to know when to dive in and, also, when to look up. Editing my peers and friends taught me the beauty and challenge of volunteering to do anonymous work bearing no byline, of having had to be there, of believing in the potential of an idea, of seeing something through.

Sea creatures, magic shows, and inner spirits By Sona Wink I came to know Joan Jonas amidst unusual circumstances: We sat side by side for two consecutive Thanksgiving dinners, during each of which she read a poem, I cried, and our food went cold. We came to those meals to celebrate the life of our mutual family friend, Sekeena Gavagan. We sat alongside Sekeena in 2022, while she was undergoing chemo, and we mourned her absence in 2023, shortly after she died.  Sekeena was a defense attorney. She would often print out Supreme Court decisions for me to read so that we could discuss them together; she was the only person who I ever witnessed defeat my stepdad in a political debate. She was whip-smart, deeply principled, and immeasurably warm. She was only 56 when she died. Her daughter Lila and husband Eddie outlive her.   Joan and Sekeena were next-door neighbors and dear friends. Sekeena lived in an apartment where Joan used to make her performance art before she partitioned her loft into smaller spaces. During the lighter moments of our Thanksgivings, Joan and I talked about American history and Greek art. It instantly made sense to me why Joan and Sekeena loved each other: they are fiercely intelligent and confident, with gravitas that emanates from them. I admire them both so fiercely that it cuts through me.  Joan is 88 and sharp as a tack. Interviewing her was, frankly, terrifying: she does not suffer fools; she does not mince her words. Since the late ’60s, she has pioneered the genre of performance art (a term that she dislikes, as I learned during our conversation). Her storied career, which spans half a century, was on display in a sprawling exhibition in MoMA from March to July 2024. Joan’s work can take many forms: for example, naked people shuffling mirrors around a room, crude drawings of fish, or footage of Tilda Swinton superimposed upon an Icelandic hot spring. These seemingly random components are, in fact, carefully planned by Joan and grounded in her vast knowledge of literature, art history, and folk tales.  Ghosts were on my mind as Joan and I meandered through the cobblestone streets of SoHo on a warm evening in June. I pictured the mythic rough-and-tumble New York of Joan’s young adulthood, which contrasted sharply with the hyper-commercial sprawl that surrounded us. Joan and I spoke only briefly about Sekeena, but I felt the undercurrent of her loss throughout our conversation. As the sun set, casting pink on the brick edifices, I walked Joan home to the loft where she has lived since the ’70s, where Sekeena used to live. I imagined the unique loneliness of outliving your young friend in a neighborhood that never stops changing. We spoke about the energetic traces that linger. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity. . . .  The Blue and White:  Do you remember any “aha” moments you had at Mount Holyoke, any specific books, paintings, or artists that mattered to you?  Joan Jonas:  I mean, I read everything I could. What can I say? … I loved Jacometti, and then I discovered Agnes Martin in my last year … I wrote my thesis on, believe it or not, Picasso. Well, he’s a genius. Now I wouldn’t go there. Matisse is another favorite.  I was particularly interested in early Greek art, Minoan and Mycenaean art … I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Minoans and the women dove with the fish, with the porpoises. It’s interesting, it’s a kind of ongoing theme in my work, the fish. That was why I went to Crete, but that was after college.  BW:  We are a Columbia Magazine, and you are a Columbia alum—   JJ:  What did I learn at Columbia?   BW :  Yeah. JJ:  In those days you got your masters in one year, if you can believe it, at Columbia. Studios were in the rotunda of [Low] Library … It was a very small group of us. Our teachers were, I hate to say it, second-tier abstract expressionists. I took a class in modernist poetry, I took a class in ancient Chinese bronzes … The modernist poetry class was really important to me in relation to my work and what I was thinking about.  At that time I wanted to switch into a performative situation … That was my transition period. Columbia was pretty important, even if it was for one year. BW:  How did you get introduced to the downtown scene?  JJ:  At Columbia they didn’t teach anything about what was going on downtown. It was really separate. That was in the ’60s. But I knew there was a whole scene downtown … I got a job at a gallery on 57th called the Green Gallery and it was a job as a receptionist, which I was terrible at. I learned everything about what was going on in contemporary painting and sculpture. After that I got other jobs in galleries. Every time I worked in a gallery I learned about the artists in the galleries. It was part of my research, working in galleries.   BW:  What was SoHo like when you moved here? JJ:  Just factory space. BW:  Empty?   JJ:  Mostly empty, but there were people moving in. There was a group called “Fluxus,” a group of artists. There were different groups of artists down here … There was a guy in Fluxus, George Maciunas, who was buying lofts and selling them to artists. All these places that were empty, factory spaces, were slowly being bought. At first by artists, and later on it became incredibly commercial. My first loft I bought through that, paying very little.  BW:  What did you pay?   JJ:  My first loft I paid $2,500.   BW:  To rent it? JJ:  No, to buy it.   BW: Oh my god. JJ:  Really. Then I sold it and bought my second loft—I won’t say how much—for very little. BW:  Wow. And that’s the same place as today. What initially drew you? JJ: The idea that you had a space to work, to live and work.  BW: I once had a teacher who lived in New York in the ’80s, and she often talked about how it was cooler back then, how you could get away with anything. She spoke of it in romantic terms. JJ:  I never talk that way about that period. You know why? I don’t like to tell students or young people that it was better then than it is now. It doesn’t make sense. And who knows? But the fact that it was cheaper to work then, as I just told you about, and there were a lot of places you could perform in. And then the galleries came in and things moved uptown. So, it was a very exciting period. Everybody, you know, Richard Serra, whatever, we all felt like we were on the cusp, but we weren’t calling it the most important moment. It was an exciting moment in that it felt like you were on the cusp of happening, of new ideas. But I don’t think any period is better than any other period because you never know. BW: That’s refreshing, because sometimes I fall into feeling wistful about the New York I never got to see.   JJ:  One should never feel that way. One should look at what’s here now. I’m sure there’s many interesting things now—it’s just harder now, much harder. It’s not so easy for young artists in New York. It’s awful, actually. The rents are so high.   BW:  What do you think of the neighborhood now?   JJ:  Well, I think New York is being ruined.   BW: Oh! By what? JJ:  By developers. You know, there’s no architects anymore. There’s developers. They put up these incredibly tall buildings, which are ridiculous. The tall buildings that sway in the breeze. Who would want to live there? I mean, some people do. What was your question? BW:  Do you still feel connected to this neighborhood, having lived here for so long? JJ:  I mean, this is my home. And of course I feel connected in that it’s so familiar, and I still have friends here, but not as many as I used to.    BW:  Let’s turn to your MoMA exhibit. Can I describe my first experience going there?   JJ:  Yeah.   BW:  I think, subconsciously, I went in with the naïve approach of trying to decipher it. I would read the plaque on the side and try to look for those themes in the work. Then I’d get frustrated and disoriented because there’s a lot of sounds, a lot of different images, a lot of which are often uncanny or challenging.   JJ:  Yeah.   BW:  I went twice, because it took me a while before I finally felt like I understood how I was supposed to be in the space. JJ:  What was that? BW:  Embracing disorientation. Submitting to the work, letting it be exactly what it was. I stopped trying to think about it or use words to explain it, which is what I’m often taught to do, as a student. JJ:  Right. That sounds good.   BW:  I’m curious how you think your work ought to be approached.   JJ: I mean, that would be what I would say to somebody: Just look at it and don’t try to understand it or make judgements. Just look at it and enjoy it, if you can, and absorb it. That’s all. I don’t try to explain my work to people, except if I’m teaching a class. But of course, it’s not just that … It’s my work. And there’s a meaning to it. I try to make it as clear as possible. Some people have trouble with my work because it is obscure. It’s based on art history, references to myth … My interest, always, when I was beginning was: How do things begin? How does Minoan or Mycenaean, those are Greek, that’s Western art, how did it begin? Well, it began as ritual. That’s how I began, was to look at the history of art and how things began. BW:  You’ve described your work as ritual-like; I’m curious what makes a good ritual.   JJ:  I can’t say what makes a good ritual. But for me … I’m looking at my mirror performances and I think they look like rituals. It’s moving very slowly, so the audience gets into that contemplative space and follows the visual. My early research was all about magic and ritual … That’s what interested me. I grew up with magic shows. My stepfather was an amateur magician. I went to magic shows. We couldn’t afford it, but my schoolmates always invited magicians to come and do magic tricks. So that was one of my sources, magic shows.   BW: What does it feel like for you, in your body and your mind, when you perform in front of a crowd?   JJ:  What does it feel like? There’s an energy that happens between the crowd and the performer. They exchange energies, in a way. For example, if I’m doing a bad piece, I know I’m doing a bad piece. If it’s going well, I know it. BW: How do you know? JJ:  Well the thing is, I don’t always know. It’s intuition.   BW:  Or, what does it feel like to know? JJ:  Well, when you perform, the time feels very different. Time goes very fast. All of a sudden it’s over. There’s no time; it’s over. On the other hand, I’ve had experiences where I thought it was awful and people come up to me years later and tell me it was the best thing they ever saw. So I don’t think you’re always the best judge of your own work. Those are my experiences.   BW:  I was curious about how, on the one hand, your journals were on display, and I could tell you put a lot of thought and structure into your work. Yet at the same time, the videos of you moving or drawing seemed quite visceral or playful, they seemed to be spontaneous. I’m curious how much freedom you allow yourself, and how you go about—   JJ: I choreograph everything. BW: Really? JJ:  Yeah. Everything. I mean, I edit everything. Yeah, because I don’t want bad work to get out there. You could say on one level I’m a choreographer. I choreograph my own work … I’m very careful about what I show. You don’t just show everything. You have to edit it, take things away, put things back. All the work you see here has been chosen, edited.   BW: What role does spontaneity play in your work, if anything?   JJ:  In the making of it … To develop a work you improvise, in other words, you decide what you’re going to do, you find things, you put them together … You have to make a piece! How do you write a novel? How do you do anything? Somebody has to choose. How do you do a beginning and ending, and all that?   BW:  I have a strange question. JJ:  What’s that?   BW:  It’s a longer question.   JJ:  That’s ok.   BW:  I took a class where we read Elective Affinities  by Goethe. In the book, there was a scene where characters reenact paintings by standing perfectly still and wearing costumes. The onlookers feel delight at first, but then they start to feel ill at ease. It’s a moment of diffuse anxiety: the feeling of looking at life that is still in a deathlike way. I was reminded of this scene when I was sitting watching your Organic Honey  performances because I find that mask really disturbing, and it really gives me this feeling— JJ: Really? BW:  Yeah, like diffuse anxiety. I’m curious what drew you to that mask, and what the Organic Honey  persona involves for you.   JJ:  The Organic Honey  persona. When I began to work with video, I’d been in Japan where I bought my first video camera. I was very influenced by Japanese Noh theater, where they use masks. Because I was not a performer, I did not feel at ease in front of the audience. It took me a long time … This was in 1972.  I didn’t want to be Joan Jonas. I wanted to transform myself into another performer. And so I found the mask. I liked the erotic aspect of it. It was the opposite of me at the time … I wasn’t this erotic seductress, but I played it. I think it had a lot to do with the technology of video—it brings up eroticism.  I had a jar of honey on the table. I named it after that jar of honey, Organic Honey  … I wanted to transform my persona, so I dressed up in different costumes, I wore the mask, I wore a headdress. I wasn’t Joan Jonas. I didn’t want to be. I still don’t want to be. Although now I don’t really disguise myself anymore, but maybe I will someday. That piece was during the Women’s Movement. So in part, that piece is about exploring female imagery. In the late ’60s early ’70s, during the feminist movement, people were talking about, “is this female?” Sticks are male, the moon is female, the sun is male. I was exploring that idea. BW:  I have another long question. You mentioned in an interview for your 2015 Venice Biennale: “Video projections will tell fragmented ghost stories, which … function partly as a reference to what remains and what is lost.” I was very struck by that. I also was struck by how, in your work, you often repeat the same action over and over—it reminds me of exhausting something out of your system. I’m curious if you’ve felt haunted by anything. JJ: I was always interested in the idea of ghosts, and I always wanted to experience a ghost but I never did. I found it too scary or too disturbing. However, I’m very interested in ghost stories and in the supernatural … Interesting, it’s very seldom that I talk about this—how we are involved with the invisible side of things. It’s magic; by that I mean that it’s not like the everyday. Art comes out of something else. It comes from the everyday, and it comes from the inner spirit of people, which is not describable. Why do artists make what they make? It’s based on dream and fantasy in many cases. Anyway.   BW:  Does your artistic practice connect to your sense of inner spirit?   JJ:  I hope so. That’s all. I mean, I hope so. Everybody’s does. Whatever one’s inner spirit is … it does connect. But it’s very hard to translate it into the world. It’s about translation. How do you find the form? You have to find the form.  For me, installations are a form that I deal with … For a long time it’s been about the form of video installation. It’s a three-dimensional, multi-layered work. They call it “multimedia.” I mean, they always have to call it something. So it’s “multimedia.” Somebody came up to me today and said, “I do multimedia.” They didn’t have that when I went to art school.    BW:  Do you like the term multimedia?   JJ:  I don’t like any of those terms, even “performance art.” BW:  Do you have a name for it? JJ: I’m an artist. A visual artist. It’s okay. I think it helps people to name things. But also, I get worried about naming certain research of animals because it means that people are doing research and going into a situation in which they might destroy. I’m talking about the present situation. BW: Which situation? JJ:  Well, whatever situation where they do, say, research about birds or about whales. They’re going to put machines in there, they’re going to take pictures and find out where they are.   BW:  What do you think of the putting of those machines? JJ:  I think it’s invasive. But it’s also part of our culture, we have to find out. Researching how animals communicate requires listening and recording with machines.   BW:  Your dogs are a clear through-line throughout your work, and the later rooms in your exhibit revolve around marine life especially. JJ:  Well, dogs are very important because they were part of my life. I included dogs because they were there … Have you ever had an animal? BW:  Oh yeah.   JJ: So, you know, you communicate with the dogs, in a different way. Which I do. I speak with my dogs. I’m sure many people do. I was commissioned to do a piece about the oceans, but I already had curiosity about the oceans. At MIT I had a class called Action Archeology of the Deep Sea. I had my students do research in relation to their project on a subject they chose … That was some years ago, since then a lot of research and knowledge have been accumulated about fish and animals in the sea which they didn’t have before because it was unknown territory. I started working with this marine biologist David Gruber, who was a diver and has developed cameras and lenses to photograph animals in the ocean, deep sea animals. Things like luminescence that we can’t see with our naked eyes that he has found a way of photographing and recording. And now he’s doing a project about whales. He contributed his footage to my work. That’s the way I work with him, to put his footage into my work as backgrounds. You can see it.   BW: Yeah. And then you would draw on top of it, if I remember correctly.   JJ:  I would draw, but I didn’t alter it … I also had figures in front of it. I also did a lot of shooting. I went to aquariums and recorded the fish. Whenever I went to a new city I had my camera and I went to an aquarium. So a lot of that footage is in there too. During this period of working with the so-called ocean, I learned a lot about fish.   BW:  What did you notice about fish? JJ:  Well it’s not about me, what I notice. Fish are sentient beings, you know. They have feelings. They have another kind of intelligence that they’re exploring. In the research about whales, whales have an alphabet. They’re more intelligent than we think. We don’t know anything about them. They have diphthongs, which I didn’t even know what that was.   BW:  Oh my god! That’s amazing. I think those are all of my questions. Is there anything else you would like to say?   JJ:  Well, I can never think of anything else. What else would you like?

The evasiveness of Columbia Dining about its food sources . By Phoebe Wagoner Last year, Hewitt’s “Activism Is About the Journey” mural and the televisions that play simultaneous Bob Ross and MasterChef  videos gained some new friends: two large glass cases filled with plants in terracotta pots. Purchased from Brooklyn-based startup Farmshelf, these cases add a cyber-farm aesthetic to Hewitt’s decor. Another television on the opposite wall plays a never-ending loop of Farmshelf ads, time-lapsed baby greens sprouting again and again. In theory, the Farmshelves supply fresh greens to the Hewitt kitchen, their soil and plants monitored by a Farmshelf-exclusive app. However, the cases are often populated by overgrown, wilted plants, usually garnishes and herbs.  In the past two decades, as college ranking metrics like those of U.S. News , Forbes , and The Princeton Review have begun including lists  of the most sustainable campuses, colleges and universities face pressure to advance their sustainability measures. Many colleges—including Columbia and Barnard—have established Offices of Sustainability and hired sustainability coordinators and directors. Initiatives like Farmshelf enhance the visibility of sustainable agriculture on campus, but they come at a cost: Barnard Dining paid a sticker price of $9,900 (plus a $109 monthly subscription for the app) for two shiny but seldom used e-agriculture cases. It would be cheaper to buy the herbs from local farmers. I’ve come to see Farmshelf as nothing more than a pretty face; it might produce a few basil leaves each week, but its contribution to Hewitt is mainly aesthetic. Like the flashy Farmshelf boxes, Columbia and Barnard’s respective food-sourcing websites construct a sustainable persona for their dining halls. Each website  lists five to 10 farms with refreshingly quaint names like Mountain Sweet Berry Farm and Old Maid’s Farm. A Google search of these farms led me to charming websites that tell stories of small-scale family farming. However, there are no statistics showing how much produce actually comes from each of Columbia’s partner farms, and such small-scale farms would be incapable of supplying more than a small proportion of Columbia’s total food supply. One of the farms closed in 2023 , though it is still listed on the website as a partner. These farms are the poster children of sustainable dining, and all other farms are absent: Columbia lists no factory farms and no farms outside of New York or Connecticut. At a glance, Columbia Dining is clean, green, and aloof. Curious to see what local farmers might have to say about this, I paid a visit to the Columbia Greenmarket, hosted weekly on Thursdays and Sundays. My questions proved unanswerable: I learned from the employees operating the stalls that they are New York City residents who got their jobs on Facebook. Most have visited the farms that employ them once or (more commonly) not at all. Even at the farmers’ market, I couldn’t find any farmers. Growing up, I knew where almost everything I ate came from. My parents are small-scale farmers. (We have a website that isn’t so different from those of Columbia’s partner farms.) I regularly ate dinners made from ingredients I had helped harvest earlier that day. Some of my earliest memories are of helping bring produce to market every Wednesday after school, where I would chat with our customers and play games with their kids. My childhood meals and social life orbited around farming. Now that that immediacy is gone, I find myself feeling both far from home and full of wonder at the food around me. Big piles of strawberries at Ferris: Where did they come from, who grew them, and how did they get here? They may have come from one of the palatable farms on the website, or they may have come from thousands of miles away. Perhaps the Farmshelf aims to ease this feeling of disconnect by giving students a glimpse of food production, but it is too artificial and ill-kept to succeed.  Even if Columbia aims to create a sustainable campus and invest in local produce, the odds are stacked against them. The U.S. farm industry is becoming increasingly reliant on mega-farms, and there simply are not enough small-scale farms to support food needs: Only 18% of U.S. food production in 2021 came from small farms, according to the USDA . Columbia seems to think that obscuring this reality is the best way to promote a sustainable image. However, I’m sure that I'm not the only student hungry—literally—for a connection to the food I consume. Columbia could feature more mid-sized partner farms, which are sustainable alternatives to factory farming, even if their websites are less aesthetically pleasing. They could invite student participation and feedback in food sourcing. By letting go of its manicured veneer of sustainability, Columbia could foster something far more valuable: student knowledge, curiosity, and excitement about food production.

By Maya Lerman and Ava Lozner Affirmative I still can’t believe I’m here at Columbia, my dream school! To stand here on Low Steps, in the greatest city in the world, with Ivy League tier opportunities at my fingertips… I need to make the most of this moment. NSOP is coming to a close and I’m still getting the hang of things here—everyone’s so busy, and I’m scared I’m not doing enough. But no matter! My semester plan is rock solid. I will achieve a perfect blend of productivity and social life, and  maintain 10 hours of sleep every night. Let me walk you through how. First off, whose bright idea was it to stifle the great minds of our generation with a course credit limit? It’s ridiculous! But don’t worry, I’ve already spammed my advisor into oblivion until she let me over enroll. It’s just that I’m so passionate about learning that I can’t choose a mere five classes, much less pick a major. My tentative schedule is Organic Chemistry, Advanced Programming, a class or two in the Physics department, Calc XXXII, and of course, Columbia’s Core Curriculum. But out of all my classes, my favorite has got to be Feminist Furniture: Rethinking the Chair. It’s exactly  the kind of phil-o-sofa-cal exploration of the household that I hoped to find at Columbia.  It goes without saying that I’m running for Columbia College Student Body President. I’m excited to represent my class and make real, meaningful change at our revolutionary and avant-garde institution. And, I think I have a good chance at winning. When I was campaigning, one guy told me that my enthusiasm “borders on mania.” That must be a good sign. Oh, and who can forget about all the extracurriculars I’m planning on joining? I’m in a couple dozen clubs for now, but the most important is obviously The Columbia Daily Spectator . Okay, technically I’m not on Spec  yet, but when they see the results of my groundbreaking personal investigation, they’ll accept me for sure! I don’t want to reveal too much yet, but let’s just say when my piece is published, Katrina Armstrong will resign faster than you can say “Minouche Sha-fucked!” As much as I love Spec , I will say their “ethical journalism” guidelines are a bit of a pain. According to their editorial board, being a journalist doesn’t excuse “stalking” and “breaking the law.” Personally, I think they’re overreacting. How am I supposed to get the scoop of the century if I can’t trespass on private property?  I know I have a lot on my plate already, but I need to make sure I maintain my healthy habits despite the busy schedule. I’ll go to Dodge for at least an hour a day and eat three meals a day at Ferris—gotta keep up the physique! I’m here to strengthen my mind alongside my body: I’ll read every Lit Hum book cover to cover, go to every  available office hours appointment, get a campus job, and in my free time, explore all the Big Apple has to offer. I’ll go to a museum at least once a week, become a street-style fashionista, volunteer at local non-profit organizations, and maybe even dip my toes into the New York techno-rave scene. I’m going to be my best city-girl self this semester, and nothing can stop me!  But I’m not all about the self-improvement grind. I’m also here at Columbia to find love; after all, isn’t that what college life is all about? As soon as I moved in, I downloaded Hinge and Tinder, and all the other apps for good measure. Needless to say, after a couple blind dates, Sidechat DMs, and some stalking on the Columbia2028 Instagram page, I think I have some promising options on my roster.  First, there’s this girl Lucy. She was in my NSOP group, and we really hit it off when we were the only two people to show up to the “mandatory” social and emotional learning session. Since then, we’ve spent every waking moment together. She even said “I love you.” Afterwards, while we held hands, she told me she wants to keep it “casual” and that it’s “not that deep.” Since Lucy is so adamantly against being exclusive, I started talking to this upperclassman named Damon. He’s in something called the John Jay Society. He says it’s Columbia’s oldest and most prestigious debate organization, which sounds great to me. Finally, there’s Beelzebub, an international student. I couldn’t quite catch where he’s from since his accent is so thick; I think he said Nether-something? The Netherlands, maybe? Anyway, I’m really into him, but my friends say his blood-ingestion kink is a “red flag.” The way I see it, it’s my freshman year in New York City, and I’m here to try new things!  Unrealistic, you say? Pfft. I got into Columbia. I can do anything. Negative Ok, so I was a bit … ambitious. I’m just a girl!  You may have noticed earlier that I forgot to mention a certain scientific requirement when I first introduced my extensive schedule. It seems that while I was busy maintaining my C average, I simply forgot to attend a single Frontiers of Science lecture or discussion section. But would you believe that even after my extremely apologetic email, my discussion professor still refused to let me make up my 43 missing assignments? Whatever happened to women in STEM?  Don’t even get me started on Feminist Furniture—Fem Fur if you’re with it. My chair-building final went up in flames when the professor claimed my chair wasn’t inclusive enough for people with GG breast size and above. He said the chair “lacked back support.”  Unfortunately, the adversity didn’t stop there. Although my campaign for Columbia College Student Body President debuted flawlessly, I was quickly plunged into a PR nightmare. I think I can best explain the situation with a segment of the apology email I sent out while I was being canceled earlier this year:  I’m sure by now we’ve all seen the video of me that has recently gone viral. I would like to sincerely apologize to all of you for the video’s contents. This video was taken at the very start of the year, before I understood the Low Steps Bottle Flipping Man to be an integral part of our campus community. I was in the middle of a dark moment, having just taken a tumble down the top of Low Steps, and took my anger out on an innocent bystander. I have been informed that, upon inspection at Mount Sinai Hospital, it was found that the blow to his groin burst Mr. Bottle Flipper’s left testicle. We have come to a settlement to avoid a trial and I am committed to earning back his trust over time. I will take this experience as an opportunity to better myself and become the leader that the students of Columbia University deserve.  I think it goes without saying that my bid for Columbia College Student Body President was unsuccessful. But nevertheless, she persisted! The end of my campaign was really a blessing in disguise, as it allowed me to throw myself into my work as an investigative reporter for Spec . I was truly inspired to go hardcore in my exposé of President Armstrong when I found out University Hardware was having a sale on binoculars. Let’s just say that from my perch at the top of a tree in Morningside Park, I became intimately familiar with Armstrong’s daily routine through the windows of the President’s House. During my week-long stakeout, I gathered loads of compelling footage. However, upon bringing my evidence to the Spec  higher-ups, they seemed less than pleased. Apparently, I was “tarnishing their reputation” as I was never given clearance from Spec  to “pursue that lead,” and I should have “stuck to my assigned piece on the Ferris lunch specials.” Safe to say that was the end of my professional partnership with The Columbia Spectator . It’s all water under the bridge, though, as the true highlight of my year was finding my person. Of course, it didn’t work out with Lucy and Damon. Lucy and our whirlwind romance is nothing but a faint memory now. I should have known it wouldn’t last when she refused to introduce me as anything more than her “NSOP buddy” to her friend group despite claiming to be madly in love with me. I eventually said good riddance to her and decided to give things a go with Damon. Things started off a bit rocky when he invited me to a meeting of the John Jay Society (NOT my crowd), but I decided to see where things went. However, I soon realized that our differences were too steep a hill to climb when I walked in on him in a very compromising position—I won’t say too much out of respect for his privacy, but let’s just say it involved a Ben Shapiro TikTok edit, red LED lights, and a furry butt plug. After the whole Damon situation died down, Beelzebub invited me for lunch. I haven’t looked back since. Although I was a bit hesitant at first, I’ve never known a love this all-consuming (I did give the blood ingestion thing a try). I am forever thankful to Belly for introducing me to the Father. After getting through the boring housekeeping stuff—small-scale animal sacrifice, a quaint soul-selling ceremony, etc.—I really got to the bread and butter of worshiping the Dark Lord. Not to brag, but since Belly is a pretty big deal in the church, I’ve been let in on a few secrets that not all disciples get to know. And trust me: some of this stuff would blow your mind (two words: Beyoncé Morningstar).  I really don’t know why I let the stress get to me at the start of this year. Everything seems to have worked out for me. I’m especially excited because I’m visiting Belly’s home country this summer. Although he claims that once I get there, I “won’t have to worry about enrolling for classes for the fall.” Whatever that means! Anyways, Hail Satan!

By George Murphy No city lights scrape away our stars here. The wind comes and goes in darkness, and owls softly boom, as small creatures rustle through the dew. The piney crushed-flower smell of the world at night wafts through the window. When I look out I can’t see anything,  except for fireflies, and a tiny slip of crescent moon.  When my eyes adjust everything glows,  and who can say where the stars end and the fireflies begin? We walk to the beach in the last blue of dusk,  lie tumbled on the sand, and trace movements in the sky. Each night now Saturn is closer to the horizon, the moon coalesces and we will be gone as soon as it’s taken a new phase. How many crescent moons will you remember me for?  I want to be your wandering star, but I’m afraid that I’m just a meteor streaking through your atmosphere,  never to be seen again.  Soon enough the sand that we’re lying on will be washed into the depths,  the wind will carry away our breath and we will spin out of this orbit,  we’ll wake up in the morning and leave all this behind.  But we don’t care tonight, we are freer than falling stars,  because when we run back it’s as though we’ll run forever, and when you take my hand it’s like you’ll never let go.