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By Shreya Khullar A young girl, armed with a camera and a red baseball cap, marches through a gentrified world. Her walk is split between neighborhoods in various states of disrepair and areas of shiny new development. Upon encountering a sign that reads “DANGER AHEAD,” she promptly, almost casually, rips it off its post. A violin concerto plays in the background. Illustration by Em Bennett Through the eyes of this child, Mariah Barrera, CC ʼ24, illuminates the devastating effects of gentrification in her 2018 short film, “A Southside Journey.” After confidently tearing down several other warning signs and tossing them to the ground, the film ends with the young girl facing an obstacle there seems to be no way to combat: an eviction notice plastered on her own front door. The pains afflicting this protagonist directly mirror ones that Barrera and her communities in Saginaw and Grand Rapids, Michigan, have braved. “A lot of the things that people probably see in movies is what my real life was,” Barrera said. “Gun violence was very normal. Drug abuse and selling was very normal.” But as she grew older, Barrera realized that the hypervigilance spurred by a turbulent childhood was, in fact, not the norm for most of her peers. Now, the community she comes from and the experiences she has faced are the inspiration for her films. The inherent wonder, confidence, and innocence of children have become valuable conduits for her stories, especially to those unfamiliar with the circumstances in which Barrera was raised. “It’s all about children being at odds with their environment. That’s really what the core of what my whole upbringing was. A young child will always be at odds with an environment that’s unstable, that’s unsafe, that’s scary.” The heart of her films rests on this juxtaposition; pulling viewers into this perspective is integral to her mission of humanizing families who are affected by poverty, violence, and drug abuse. Barrera recognizes, though, that these issues are not monolithic. They manifest in different ways, hinging on the particularities of the location—for her, namely, the urban Midwest. Her narratives are seeped in the details of her life in the Midwest and of her hometown in particular. The reasons for this are twofold: “Distinctive voices from the Midwest are so underrepresented,” she explained. More specifically, being a Latina from the Midwest can mean you are not represented at all. Exclusivity and the inextricability of the narrative from the location has led Barrera to elevate the importance of the Midwest in her stories. The “gritty inner city” functions almost as a character in the story, shifting forms and influencing the people interacting with it. “The residue of every story that I wanna tell is there on the ground in Michigan,” she explained. However, these films began as a form of escapism from this reality. Her beginnings as a filmmaker was as a young girl holding a camcorder, conducting “The Mariah Show,” an at-home talk show she hosted with her father and cousins. Continuing to make home videos, Barrera fully immersed herself in the filmmaking process, performing the role of writer, director, and cinematographer simultaneously. Though Barrera is the artist behind the camera, she also enlists the help of her family when producing her films. Since the narratives follow people in her community, Barrera asks herself how everyone collectively contributes to her stories. Because of this, a primary goal for Barrera is to depict individuals through a kind of radical representative lens instead of shoehorning people’s stories into the construct of “positive representation.” Rather than tell stories specifically designed to undo media stereotypes, Barrera wants to focus on stories that reflect people’s human experiences. “Ultimately, I think when you are focusing on exceptional stories, you’re still perpetuating a myth that our stories are only worth telling if they're exceptional … And so I think for me, as someone who comes from those experiences that people might see as stereotypical, I don’t wanna feel like I have to shy away from those, 'cause it’s my real life.” Alongside these memories, Barrera’s favorite artists and writers also sow the seeds of her inspiration. She listens to playlists of Kanye, J. Cole, and Brockhampton as she puts pen to paper, mapping out visuals and voiceover. The written word is the genesis of each of Barrera’s films. She incorporates elements of lyricism and poetry she learned from her father when creating a script. Each scene is imbued with a sense of rhythm and meter. With film as her medium, Barrera’s niche interests and proclivities combine to form a coherent whole. The beauty of film, she believes, comes from its colorful marriage of all the disparate art forms that interest her. Her poetic sensibility can be seen clearly in her more recent film, “My Brother’s Keeper” (2020). The viewers see an array of family photos and video clips as a voiceover plays in the background, reciting lines like “It shouldn’t have to take eloquently written prose for the lives of brothers like mine to be humanized.” In the film, Barrera points the finger at all of us—all the viewers, internet browsers, and film festival goers—to raise awareness of the effects of incarceration on families and individual psychologies. Barrera’s films take the form of experimental documentaries, a genre that is particularly equipped to carry out her vision. The camera movement and intertwining of poetry, film, and music suggest an artist breaking out of the confines of traditional filmmaking. She is interested in narrative but feels the revered three-act structure and hero’s journey don’t coincide with the stories she’s interested in telling. “Traditional filmmaking … has served to tell traditional stories very well. If I’m telling a non-traditional story, I think [it needs to be told through] non-traditional ways of filmmaking. I think it'd be a disservice to these types of stories that I wanna tell to try and put them in this traditional container.” Through her studies as a film major at Columbia, Barrera has been immersed in theory, and though she finds the tools learned from her coursework beneficial, they are just that: tools. Rejecting strictly linear narratives, Barrera doesn’t want theory to dictate the trajectory of her projects. “I started falling into that,” she reflected. “To over-intellectualize your practice, to over-intellectualize what you do, over-theorize, get so heady that you’re forgetting that in everything you make, the heart is what resonates with people. That’s the core of a story.” Though the industry still places an emphasis on a very “cut and dry” model of filmmaking, there are filmmakers working to challenge the status quo and make the documentary an avenue for non-traditional stories to blossom. “And I’m up for the challenge,” Barrera asserted. She believes this revolutionary space for storytelling will keep opening up for filmmakers to tap into its vitality; Her own innovative zeal has already brought her much accolade. Barrera’s films have been shown at several festivals, including the HBO-founded Urbanworld and the Cleveland International Film Festival, and she has been recognized as a YoungArts Alumna and Still I Rise Film Fellow. Her latest film, “Still Here” (2024), has finished its festival run and will be released in the spring through Still I Rise Films. At her core, Barrera is still that young explorer at the beginning of “A Southside Journey”: a pioneer marching through the world, tearing down all the stops.

By Victor Omojola Illustration by Jorja Garcia Casey Rogerson, CC ’24, doesn’t really work alone. This is not to say that the Bucks County-bred, Lee Bollinger-tethered, self-proclaimed (though perhaps reluctantly admitted) theater kid is not capable of creating art by himself. However, for Casey, the best part of acting, writing, and directing is getting to collaborate with others. A creative environment in which “everybody’s doing something different” is where he feels “most alive.” Casey is a major fixture of the acting scene on campus. He has starred in numerous student plays, is a member of Third Wheel Improv, and is—perhaps most famously—a two-time Varsity Show cast member. Last year in the 129th production of the show, Casey played Wilder, a fictional Columbia freshman; the year before that, he embodied Prezbo himself, ridiculous hair and all. In the weeks leading up to his taking on the latter role, Casey explained that it was “really hard for me to shake him after rehearsal.” That quip was made roughly two years ago, during a short interview for the cast bio that I wrote for the show’s program. It was also a time when Casey and I lived mere feet away from each other. In our more recent chat, Casey stressed the sentiment (which I share) that living together was an early highlight of our college careers. Placed randomly into a Carlton suite as a consequence of our dismal lottery numbers, Casey and I (and the 14 other students in the suite) somehow still seemed to have lucked out: Despite not knowing one another upon entry, Carlton 6A became extremely close. There was rarely a night the lounge wasn’t hosting an Oscars watch party (Casey’s initiative), a craft-making night, or just having casual conversation. Our majors were as disparate as electrical engineering and art history; our extracurriculars ranged from theater to race car building; our hometowns were as distant as Portland, Oregon and Kingston, Jamaica; and yet, somehow, as Casey and I agreed, “we all liked each other.” For Casey, the suite “was home and is home in some ways. Whenever I see anybody in that suite … there’s something so special that we share. And I think that having that foundation has made my time here so much better.” (He wasn’t exaggerating by the way: About twenty minutes into our interview, Dan, who lived in one of the rooms between Casey and me, passed by. The three of us chatted briefly and made plans to catch up before the interview resumed).) The sense of community that Casey speaks of—and played a large part in cultivating in Carlton– is present in most of his Columbia endeavors. He speaks fondly of the theater community, for example: “It’s like a giant extended family and then there’s like mini families within it,” he said. “Varsity has kind of become my mini family.” Indeed, it is hard to overstate just how much of Casey’s time at Columbia has been dedicated to creating the yearly event that is the Varsity Show. As a senior this year, he finds himself as its co-writer for the first time, alongside Julian Gerber, CC ’24. After he and Gerber created an outline for the script, the pair and the rest of V130’s creative team embarked on a retreat in the Poconos where everybody helped “fill it out.” When Casey and Gerber returned, they started writing. Despite my best efforts, Casey was secretive about the contents of this year’s show. Without disclosing any plot details, he said that the goal is for V130 to be a “celebration” of sorts, three years on from the pandemic during which “the tradition could have died” but didn’t. Along with creative writing, Casey majors in film and media studies. In Carlton, we often bonded over our mutual love for the movies as well as our mutual curiosity, for lack of a better word, regarding the film major at Columbia. I made sure to probe him once more on the well-documented academic orientation of Columbia’s undergraduate film program. “I’ve learned a ton from the film program here, but I have not learned how to operate a camera,” Casey half-joked. For someone like himself, who is just as interested in making movies as he is in theorizing about them, proactivity is key. Casey has learned to make connections with those who are better versed in certain areas of production. “Just stay near them,” he told me. Casey did just this when it came time to make his first short film, Terroir, this past fall. In addition to Columbia students, he enlisted the help of gaffers from NYU and a director of photography that he used to intern for. The short, currently in post-production, follows a group of friends on a haunted wine tasting tour. It’s an homage to the 90s slasher, which Casey claims was rivaled only by musical theater as his favorite genre growing up. “I feel like in elementary school you were only cool if you had seen scary movies,” he told me, chuckling. Some of Terroir’s cast and crew are also members of Third Wheel improv. After getting cut from the group following an initial audition during his sophomore year, Casey tried out again and “by some miracle” got accepted into the famously eccentric troupe. He, again, emphasized the comradery he has gained through his time with the improv collective. “Like the Carlton community or like the Varsity community, having Third Wheel as a sort of anchor for me has been huge.” … I find writing about creatives quite difficult, largely because I question how much of my own perspective to bring into the piece. On the one hand, I greatly desire for any profile to prioritize encapsulating the essence of whom I am profiling. On the other, however, a great artist often pulls you into their world in ways that are hard to simply disregard. When I’ve written such profiles for this magazine in the past, I’ve debated the issue internally before ultimately finding it impossible not to insert myself. For Casey, no such debate was necessary. Too much about the man as an artist and as a person begs you to engage. Our hour or so spent together in preparation for this piece re-illuminated this fact about him, reminding me of our Carlton days. Nowadays, Casey and I don’t share a suite, but we do live just a floor apart in East Campus. A couple of weeks ago, we walked together from our dorm to the Joe Coffee in Dodge, asking each other questions and catching up before I began to conduct my structured interview. Even as the official inquisition commenced (and after it concluded), Casey continued to bounce questions back at me. His face lit up as he recalled our suite in Carlton and expressed how much he hopes to all reconvene soon. He spoke at length about how grateful he is for the communities he has been welcomed into at Columbia: Varsity Show, Third Wheel, Carlton. As we spoke, however, I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that it is he who is the common denominator among all of these welcoming spaces. As much of a mark as Casey’s creative chops have made on the Columbia theater scene and its adjacent communities, I get the feeling that the ultimate mark he has made in Morningside Heights has more to do with his ability to make a space feel warm. That, and the Bollinger wig.

By Sofia Pirri Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina A blown-up image of Sofonisba Anguissola’s self-portrait illuminates the dark classroom. I squint up at the screen, ignoring the slight glare caused by a beam of light peeking from below the pulled blinds. “What do you observe about this work?” asks my Art Humanities professor. She waits. We stare wordlessly into Sofonisba’s large, round eyes. It is a silence most of us know well. A professor breaks up their lecture by posing the class a broad question designed to keep us engaged. Sometimes, the usual eager suspects contribute their answers, and the rest of us are mercifully saved. Often, the awkward pause grows until it settles into a damp blanket of quiet from which it is difficult to emerge. What made my experience in Art Humanities feel particularly discouraging was that even when students mustered the strength to share their observations, every answer was met with the same vaguely affirming remark. Every so often, a student’s guess at the meaning of a motif—a wheel of cheese in a vanitas painting, for example—would differ dramatically from the analysis provided by the required reading—a symbol of prosperity brought by the flourishing Dutch trade—but the professor treated it as a viable interpretation rather than correcting the inaccuracy. I soon found myself questioning the effectiveness of discussion-based classes in general. I walked into Art Humanities having taken AP Art History in high school and having admired 17th-century art during childhood trips to the Norton Simon Museum. Many of my peers did not. Students at Columbia, particularly in core classes, come to the classroom from vastly different backgrounds. Professors should not assume that everyone has the experience or vocabulary to feel comfortable participating in such an open discussion. I may remember enough about Rachel Ruysch to contribute to a conversation about the vanitas genre, but some students may hear that contribution and slink back, fearing not only that they have nothing to say but that they would not know how to say it if they did. My intellectual preparation for seminars like these began early at a progressive college preparatory high school in West Los Angeles. There were frequent school-wide assemblies in our small but pristine gymnasium about “fostering an inclusive community” and “ensuring that everybody’s voices are heard.” This fuzzy atmosphere of social justice extended to pedagogy as well—as an elected student-faculty liaison, I learned that faculty were inundated with meetings and professional development workshops aimed at making the classroom a more nurturing, equitable space. The emphasis on inclusivity was not inherently misguided, but it was distorted among my peers—–the vast majority of whom were white and staggeringly wealthy. Efforts to make the classroom accessible for students of diverse backgrounds translated into cultivating an environment in which student comfort, as determined by the largely privileged students themselves, was the unquestionable priority. In practice, this meant minimal penalization for late work, never-ending extensions on assignments, and constant acquiescence to students’ furious contestations of their grades. (The situation was only reinforced by the school’s obsession with increasing enrollment and endowment). Students railed against teachers for asking them to complete homework on time, then complained that they weren’t learning anything in class and paid thousands of dollars for outside tutoring. Having come from a huge public school—and a completely different tax bracket—this behavior was baffling. Social justice became a progressive buzzword, with the true concept co-opted to facilitate a comfortable environment for privileged students. In the 1960s and ’70s, active learning methods rose in popularity as “activists in the civil rights, Black liberation, antiwar, and women’s movements understood education as a key battleground for transforming an unjust society,” argues SUNY professor Danica Savonick. In his foundational text, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian decolonization theorist Paulo Freire argues that the traditional model of education—–in which teachers recite facts and ideas while students passively memorize—is a tool of the oppressed. Instead, he favors a model in which students and teachers engage in equitable dialogue, resulting in both better learning and the dismantling of systems of oppression. This radical methodology resurfaces in contemporary discourse on education. It has recently been repackaged by educators Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis in their 2022 book The New College Classroom. Advocating for strategies like “think-pair-share,” when students share ideas with a partner before sharing with the class, and co-creating a syllabus with students, the book has become a popular manual for professors trying to navigate post-pandemic education. Studies consistently prove that an active learning approach both increases general student performance as well as narrows student achievement gaps. One study from CBE found that active learning interventions “worked disproportionately well for Black students—halving the Blackwhite achievement gap—and first-generation students—closing the achievement gap with continuing-generation students.” For some time now, active learning has been popularized as a solution to widening educational disparities as well as growing student malaise. But some scholars have begun to question its implications—and not just conservatives bemoaning the supposed influence of identity politics in education. This past January, English professor and Marxist cultural critic Anna Kornbluh published Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. For Kornbluh, the rise of student-centered learning both perpetuates and is symptomatic of the broader societal problem of “immediacy”: an aesthetic of realness, transparency, and instantaneity demanded by twenty-first-century globalized capitalism. She connects the boom of literary auto-emissions (memoir, auto-fiction, self-published work) with MFA workshops and freshman year writing seminars, which, according to her, privilege voice-centered and reflective writing. She believes that keeping students engaged by making course material immediately and personally relevant is done at the expense of learning the actual subject matter. The “egalitarian register” of the student-centered learning approach feels, in some respects, like a marketing technique. Is the ubiquitous call for centering student experience and ideas just an attempt to sell education rather than provide students with effective instruction? Criticism of student-centered learning comes from other sources as well. Recently, bitter debates over literacy education in elementary schools have turned public opinion against the once-popular progressive curriculum called balanced literacy. Columbia Teachers College professor Dr. Lucy Calkins has become the figurehead of the movement, and her group, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP), designed a balanced literacy curriculum adopted by public schools nationwide. Their philosophy models itself on university-level writing workshops, teaching various strategies for learning to read and emphasizing critical engagement with books from an early age. TCRWP seeks to cultivate not just literacy, but a love of and deep engagement with reading. This fall, after 36 years of curriculum development and teacher training, TCRWP was dissolved. The change comes after years of vitriolic pushback on her program, with parents and education researchers claiming that her curriculum does not incorporate enough phonics, the literacy strategy that teaches children to read by associating letters with their sounds. Criticisms of Calkins’ methods abound in The New York Times, Slate, and Forbes. A particularly scathing New Yorker article denounces the balanced literacy movement as “vibes-based literacy.” In May 2023, New York City schools dropped TCRWP’s curriculum, and several other districts have done the same. As an elementary school teacher, reading coach, and literacy specialist, my mother has spent years working with TCRWP’s program. She agrees that the curriculum’s biggest weakness is its limited phonics component, particularly before it was revised in 2016, but claims that it has otherwise been incredibly effective in her classroom. The key not only to engagement but to learning, my mother explains to me over the phone, is giving students multiple access points. Not every student will  get a concept from the same strategy, so you have to value different ways of learning. Balanced literacy’s strength lies in its ability to provide students these multiple access points–via phonics as well as other reading strategies. Critics of balanced literacy cite its supposed utter absence of phonics in favor of “guessing” strategies: Via “picture power,” children learn to deduce an unfamiliar word from an accompanying image, while via “snap word power,” children learn to recall frequently used words on sight. The author of the New Yorker article was horrified to find her kindergarten-age daughter using these strategies to make sense of the word “butterfly” instead of sounding it out phonetically: “bih-uh-tih.” What many parents do not realize, however, is that phonics is more complicated than matching letters to corresponding sounds. Letters change sounds depending on the other letters around them, and young readers familiar with the basics of phonics will still rarely be able to grasp words solely by sounding them out. Non-phonetic strategies like “picture power” give students other means of identifying a word when phonics inevitably fails. When The New York Times published a front-page feature in 2022 about the national shift away from Calkins’ balanced literacy program, many educators wrote letters contesting the depiction of TCRWP. One former teacher, principal, and superintendent in the New York City school system criticized the binary approach that has characterized the so-called “reading wars.” “Well-meaning parents and uninformed policymakers must not jump to an either/or curriculum,” she wrote. “Both a phonics program and a balanced literacy program are crucial for reading and writing success.” Including strong phonics education is particularly important when it comes to narrowing the achievement gap. The most justifiable criticism of balanced literacy is that it works better for students from high-literacy homes than from low-literacy homes. In my mother’s classroom, the children who need additional phonics instruction are unsurprisingly those who did not go to preschool. She is able to supplement her lessons with more phonics for those who need it, but this kind of differentiation is difficult to implement for our nation’s overextended public educators. A predominant curriculum should thus include a greater emphasis on phonics in the first place, and this was TCRWP’s critical issue. But the curriculum has its merits too, and its weakness regarding phonics is not cause to abandon balanced literacy entirely. Similarly, in higher level education, balance is key. Just as rigorous phonics instruction provides a crucial foundation for balanced literacy’s more engaging methods, basic instruction in the university classroom is necessary to ensure the efficacy and equitability of student-centered practices. The achievement gap does not disappear miraculously in college. Conducting a seminar under the assumption that every student can participate equally in discussion does a disservice both to students who feel their lack of experience or knowledge prohibits them from participating and to those who miss out on the opportunity to hear from their classmates. Professors can add structure to active learning methods by including the nitty-gritty of course material—–be it critical theory, mundane historical fact, or literal vocabulary— –and by more actively facilitating student engagement (yes, sometimes students are wrong, and that is okay). This structure gives every student a jumping-off point for participation, not just those who come to the class with prior content knowledge. Last semester, I took a senior seminar that incorporated the active-learning tactic of a flipped syllabus—–students chose the reading for each week and led a discussion on their selected texts. The result was mildly disastrous. Nobody ever did the reading, and each week’s discussion leader had to contend with discouraging and unrelenting silence. Outside of class, we would comment on how ridiculous it was to put on the farce of participation. In one seminar toward the end of term, my professor led an impromptu lesson, leading us to connect the ideological threads of past discussions. He waxed poetic about Marx’s critique of ideology, the forms of the real, and Deleuze’s portrait of Foucault, even drawing his own version on the whiteboard, glasses and all. Students’ eyes began to light up. Heads nodded vigorously. Discussion afterward grew infinitely more rich—–we now had a framework to analyze the texts that had previously left us stumped. I resist Kornbluh’s cynical take on the rise of student-centered pedagogy. Instead of attacking the pedagogy itself, we should criticize how it has been co-opted to create a false sense of equity in the classroom while alienating those whom it supposedly benefits. We must be more patient than we were with Lucy Calkins. Before denouncing active learning on the whole, let us make sure it is implemented correctly. If not, educators run the risk of corrupting a liberatory methodology, leaving it vulnerable to demonization by the very oppressive and hierarchical institutions it is designed to dismantle.

Reading Roberto Bolaño in New York City. By Maya Lerman “Drink up, boys, drink up and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.” — The Savage Detectives Reading for fun as a full-time student is hard. Books are displaced by the constant stream of barely legible academic PDFs, gargantuan library tomes, and that nagging feeling that you’re never doing quite enough with your time. Living in New York City has forced me to be picky with my reading choices—to favor the short, the punchy, and the relevant. The Savage Detectives was my exception: Written in the 1990s and set in the ’70s, Roberto Bolaño’s 650-page novel was not the easiest sell, but after a lively pitch from a bookseller on Broadway, I was convinced. The Savage Detectives is a novel in three parts. Part one is told from the perspective of Juan Garcia Madero, a teenage poet who falls in with the bohemian “Visceral Realists” led by Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, a vibrant duo of literary rebels. Garcia Madero’s experience with Visceral Realism is alive with passion; he finds himself instantly intoxicated by the air of possibility and youthfulness that Belano and Lima introduce to his life. This idyllic period is ultimately ephemeral, as the looming threat of violence from corrupt police and possessive pimps forces the group to disband. Many have speculated about the autofictional elements of Bolaño’s work. The enigmatic figure of Belano, who is central to The Savage Detectives, appears in multiple other stories and is widely considered to be an authorial insert. Like his characters, Bolaño founded an obscure poetic movement of his own, which launched his lifelong interest in writers and their legacies. With each section I read between classes or on subway commutes, The Savage Detectives became my escape. Through the endless potential of Bolaño’s autofictional youths, I lived vicariously, my infatuation building as I became increasingly immersed in their incessantly exciting lives. It was one of those rare works that made me want to put pen to paper—not because I was inspired by Bolaño’s technical talent alone, but because I was utterly enchanted by the undying convictions of the Visceral Realists. They fully embodied their literary ambitions, sustained only by their sheer dedication to poetry. It was fitting, then, when I learned of Bolaño’s obsession with another, real-life literary group that got their start here at Columbia: the famous Beat Generation. Throughout his life, and particularly during the decade that he wrote The Savage Detectives, Bolaño commented on the work of William S. Burroughs and even translated Jack Kerouac into Spanish—two figures who spent their young adult lives in Morningside Heights developing their poetic talent. Given Bolaño’s tendency towards thinly veiled autofiction, I cannot help but wonder if he may have modeled his Visceral Realists after the Beatniks, drawing inspiration from their countercultural ambitions and contagious camaraderie. I am also reminded of Bolaño’s preoccupation with place, which itself makes for compelling parallels: a quintessentially Latin American author whose work captures the unique revolutionary spirit of his homeland, perhaps drawing inspiration from the Beat authors, who are quintessentially American and quintessentially New York. The legacy of the Beats looms over Columbia, their personal letters displayed in Butler and their names boasted on lists of famous alumni. Understandably, the story of one of their closest friends committing a murder in Riverside Park is less widely celebrated. Lucien Carr—a close friend of Kerouac, Burroughs, and others—killed his much older acquaintance, David Kammerer, after the latter made a romantic advance. Carr then dumped Kammerer’s body into the Hudson, turning himself in to the police shortly after. What followed was a sensationalized investigation involving Carr’s group of friends, an event that many consider to be formative in launching the nonconformist and innovative Beat Generation as we know it today. While there’s no evidence Bolaño knew of Kammerer’s murder, I have no doubt it would have fascinated him. Bolaño was an author obsessed with the complex relationship between writing and violence that exists on the border between the fictional and, if I may borrow from Belano and Lima, the viscerally real. This materializes fully in part three of The Savage Detectives, entitled “The Deserts of Sonora,” which takes place immediately after part one and sees Garcia Madero return as the narrator. In the novel’s final moments, Garcia Madero recounts the ultimate confrontation between the Visceral Realists and their pursuers—one which culminates in an accidental murder that forces Lima and Belano into exile. The resemblance to Carr’s story is striking. While that fateful night in Riverside Park ultimately launched the Beats into literary stardom, Carr—after serving a short prison sentence—faded into relative obscurity. So too did Belano and Lima: The novel’s second portion takes place years after the demise of Visceral Realism and their subsequent disappearance from public consciousness. This section is told from the fragmented perspectives of people across the world who recall their brief yet powerful encounters with Belano and Lima during their time in the shadows. Illustration by Selin Ho As though his writing was prophetic, Bolaño’s legacy also faces the threat of invisibility that befell his alter ego: Twenty years removed from his death, pages and pages of his work remain hidden, kept private by his widow, Carolina López, who finds it too painful to return to her late husband’s writings. As long as the archive is kept closed, the chances of a biography are slim. There is an implication of agency assumed by the phrase “literary movement,” as if those who launch them are somehow “literary movers.” Contrary to this perceived agency, what Bolaño seemed most interested in when writing The Savage Detectives, and what struck me most about the novel, was the utter lack of control his young writers have over their work, their lives, and their afterlives. In Bolaño’s writing and in the lives of the characters he designs, the material forces of time and tragedy wear away the legacy of the written word. As the writers behind these words erode too, I cannot help but wonder what fate we younger writers face. Where will our entanglements with the city and its ideas leave us? How long will our invented words hold relevance? Visceral Realism fades, Bolaño doesn’t get a biography, the world moves on. Are these losses to be mourned? These musings accompany living and reading in New York City, a place haunted by the presence of literary ghosts. I feel nostalgic for a life I’ve never experienced reading letters from the Beats. I sense the presence of Carr and Kammerer while on walks in Riverside Park, a site tainted by the legacy of a Columbia student’s generation-defining decision. Like the tapestry of characters in part two of The Savage Detectives, I am constantly brushing up against the remnants of complex legacies, existing adjacent to movements of the past, present, and even future, with only a glimpse of my place in the overarching narrative. It’s a perspective that may seem bleak, perhaps even fatalistic. But, if I’ve learned anything from Bolaño, the Beats, and the ceaseless tide of New York intellectual life, it’s to cherish my time in this place—this moment of exhilarating uncertainty and fleeting youth—without dwelling on perpetuity.

Who gets to tell their story, and what do they get to say? By Muni Suleiman From griots to gossip and Homer to hearsay, you come from a long line of stories that contour your perceptions now. As a field of study, oral history has often acted as a critical intervention, recording and valuing the lives of peoples ignored by traditional historians. From individual and diverse perspectives, oral historians take these threads of life to recall and reinterpret our broader social fabric. Illustration by Ben Fu Record-keeping and memory-making were never stable art forms. Hoping to diversify modes of historical documentation and protect existing written records threatened by new technologies, history professor Allan Nevins founded the Columbia Oral History Research Office in 1948. As the first institutional home for oral history in the world, Nevins’ Oral History Research Office eventually flowered into the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, the Oral History archives in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the Master of Arts in Oral History, the only program of its kind in the nation. CCOHR boasts “over 20,000 hours of recorded and transcribed interviews,” which include Black entertainers narrating the Apollo Theater’s legacy, a memory archive about the Covid pandemic from 200 New Yorkers, and an oral history of Nevins himself. While oral history as a practice relies on technology—the emergence of consumer tape recorders facilitated much early oral history—new developments in artificial intelligence, such as the potential for chatbots to replace human interviewers, threaten the very humanity that motivates the field. Through a public programming series titled “Experiments in Oral History Methodology,” OHMA attempts to answer these questions about oral history’s maintenance and innovation. Some of the program’s recent alumni and other esteemed oral historians are introducing AI to categorize oral histories, or exploring how oral history can chart rapid, climate crisis-induced changes in Indigenous lands. As an observer and occasional experiment participant, I was recently compelled by the inclusion of the Brodsky award–winning work of Rebecca Kiil, GSAS ’23, in developing “fantasy oral history.” Per OHMA, this “genre of speculative oral history that focuses on the past” imagines and reconciles questions from the past that can never be “factually” answered. Kiil’s work addresses the narrative silences within her family’s experiences during World War II. Kiil’s great-uncle and great-grandfather were disappeared during the first Soviet occupation of Estonia. Then, during the second Soviet occupation of Estonia in September 1944, the women on Kiil’s maternal side of the family were separated from her maternal grandfather, Harald Tuul, as they fled the country. Realizing that he would not be able to catch up with his family, Tuul, an army physician, discarded his identity papers and fled to Finland, where he was forced into Soviet custody and sent to a Siberian labor camp. Tuul wrote everything down in his diary until he was taken into Soviet custody, the reason that this part of the story remains. Yet it is necessarily incomplete after disappearances and generations of stories withheld. Over seven years, Kiil’s grandmother, in her 90s, uncovered these family histories. Conducting 11 formal and numerous informal interviews with her grandmother and other relatives, Kiil eventually developed her fantasy oral history. With her ‘grandmother’, ‘Tuul,’ and other absent relatives played by current members of her family, the fantasy oral history took the form of a staged, family conversation “set” in Estonia to bridge the gaps in the family story and give voice to Kiil’s family across generations. Kiil was once “angry as a proxy for her grandmother’s pain”—she now had a space for forgiveness where she could offload the many questions and stories that she once held alone. She also fulfilled her “one hope … through this whole project … to be able to hear [her] grandfather’s voice.” After Kiil’s family read excerpts from the oral history, Kiil asked viewers to interrogate the silences within their family narratives; many of the silences shared were also instigated by grief and sociopolitical violence. It is mind-shifting to consider gaps in family histories as silences instead of impenetrable mysteries. One participant even recognized that their great-grandparents’ experiences during Japanese-American internment remained a family mystery even after they were released, haunting the way they envision incarceration today. Kiil admitted that her archival work, family interviews, diary readings, photo albums, and memories “flowed” through her as she wrote Tuul’s answers to her family’s questions. “When I asked my last question and put down the pen that night, I felt as though Harald himself had connected all the dots for me and for us,” Kiil explained. “Logically in my brain, I knew that I had answered the questions. But my body couldn’t tell the difference, and my body felt at peace when I was finished.” As much as it is necessary to remember the truth of past events, the ways in which people interpret the past through oral history are just as, if not more, meaningful. It is important that memory is understood as a way of reconceiving and reconciling the past, impacted by their personal and external contexts. This is especially the case when the oral historian is an active character within said histories. Their own experiences and positionality inevitably color their methodology, too. Simply put, oral history is both what happened to someone in the past and how they make sense of it in the present. Oral history as a field wields a tremendous power to bring presence to absence, platforming the voices most intertwined with their subject of analysis. As reflected in Kiil’s “fantasy oral history,” it is also necessary to grapple with deliberate silencing and resistant vocalization, especially in the realm of sociopolitical violence. With temporal or geographical distance from those voices, the challenge grows in understanding the stories, why they are told, and what is and isn’t being said. Yet, perhaps through creative oral history practices and emerging technologies, temporal and geographic distance as hindrances to understanding and sharing stories seems to be closing.

Rethinking Greek tragedy in “Bacchae: The Immersive Experience.” By George Murphy Illustration by Derin Ogutcu It is twilight, and a party is underway. Elaborately dressed revelers howl and shriek, dancers gyrate to pulsating rhythms, and copious amounts of alcohol are consumed. But while this may resemble the average Columbian’s Friday night, it’s something very different—a scene from Euripides’ Bacchae, a fifth-century Athenian tragedy recently performed at the Glicker-Milstein Theater under the direction of Barnard alumna Izzy Bohn, BC ’23. I first read Bacchae last semester in Professor Nancy Workman’s Literature Humanities class, and I fell in love with it. Loving a play that you’ve never seen, however, is a dangerous game. As I was about to find out, there are some things that can only really be understood on the stage. A slight yet extraordinary play, Bacchae contains moments of both unearthly beauty and bloodcurdling terror, often at the same time. Its plot is relatively simple: The god Dionysus is angry at Pentheus, King of Thebes, so he makes the women of Thebes go mad and join his Bacchic cult. When Dionysus arrives in Thebes in disguise, asking for permission to spread his cult of worship, Pentheus promptly imprisons him. To exact revenge, Dionysus convinces Pentheus to spy on the women as they engage in cultic worship—Pentheus is caught, and he is torn to pieces by his own mother, Agaue. End scene! Needless to say, translating Bacchae to the modern stage is no small task. So when a friend of mine, the play’s stage manager, told me about the Columbia Performing Arts League’s new production, which reworked the play in the context of a modern nightclub, I was excited to see what they would do with it. When I arrived at the theater, it quickly became clear that the play had been billed as an “immersive experience” for a reason. I was given a green glow-stick necklace to signal to the actors that they could interact with me, led into the theater by an usher dressed as a bouncer, and handed a glittery fluorescent-blue mocktail by an actor-cum-bartender. 2000’s pop hits soon gave way to the action, and I found myself torn in two directions. On the one hand, I was impressed by the production’s zany set and engaging blocking, not to mention many compelling acting performances. Kai Joseph, CC ’26, played Pentheus with sinister aplomb, while Eden Johnson, CC ’25, gave the role of Agaue a startling gravity and depth. At the same time, however, I struggled to recognize the Bacchae that I had read and loved in class. For one thing, I hadn’t thought of the play as particularly funny when I read it, but in the Columbia production, gags took center stage. I also found the depiction of Pentheus and Agaue’s relationship somewhat uncompelling, due to the incorporation of some new lines in the script which make Agaue more sympathetic at the expense of turning Pentheus into a horrifying, mother-abusing monster. Joseph’s villainous portrayal of Pentheus was so successful that by the time he was swarmed by the chorus in the play’s climax (with papier-mâché body parts flying into the air), it was difficult to have any sympathy for him whatsoever. A few days later, I sat down with Workman. Right away, she disabused me of the notion that Bacchae is exclusively a tragedy. “Comedy is absolutely baked into the play,” she told me. Talking about Dionysus, she noted that “for him, all the events in the play are comic.” In fact, as it was originally staged, the actor playing Dionysus would have worn the smiling mask that’s now a symbol of comedy. Talking to Bohn further convinced me that the play’s comedic elements had emerged from the text itself. “There was no intentional thought that we needed to play up the funny parts,” she explained. “It just naturally happened.” She herself saw it as “the saddest play in the world,” and it was only through directing it that she realized that it was “deeply hilarious too.” Speaking with Bohn also made me more sympathetic to her approach to Pentheus—I agreed with her that the role of Agaue had been unfairly glossed over in the past, and that modern productions of the play should try to do her character justice. Yet I still wasn’t quite convinced that turning Pentheus into an abusive and antagonistic cad was the right directorial choice, given the ambiguity of his role in the play’s text. Regardless of textual quibbles, I think that in performing Bacchae on a college campus, Bohn and her team did essential work. As Workman told me, “Most people have had some kind of Dionysiac experience, maybe or even especially at age eighteen.” College, as we all know, is a morass of ecstatic experiences, unorthodox gender politics, and moments of unmitigated terror. It makes sense, then, that in reading and performing Bacchae we see reflections of ourselves. In those sublime moments of self-recognition, past and present become one and we all want to dance for the god.

By Sofia Pirri On Aug. 26, 2023, Chambit Miller, CC ’24, was at a fried chicken restaurant in Lima. Surrounded by her Peruvian lover and his friends, she suddenly remembered a dream in which she died and felt herself being pulled into a vague light source. Boarding her flight home that night, Chambit convinced herself the premonition was real: the plane would surely crash. Under the influence of this dark conviction and her recent reading of Camus, she began to write. Thankfully, Chambit survived. Her journal of philosophical musings remains intact. I met Chambit several days before the start of freshman year, when we moved in together. In our dingy apartment, the neon pinks and purples of her incense-scented room created an oasis. My other roommate and I would gather like children on her bed, listening to her talk about film or regale us with absurd tales of her high school shenanigans. She can seamlessly weave her innate sense of humor with profundity. “If you don’t have humor, how can you survive in this world?” she asks. “You know, Sisyphus should have made a few jokes.” Others may know Chambit through her role as president of Columbia’s literary fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi. You might have seen her rolling a cigarette on Low in Tabis and an orange leather jacket, sharing the fruits of her labor with a small entourage. Or perhaps you’ve run into her in line at a club, where you waited for hours and she waltzed in with a few words to the bouncer. To some, her presence is beguilingly enigmatic. But Chambit rejects the label. “I feel like I’m an open book,” she explains. Minutes later, she opens her journal and unabashedly reads me her Lima doomsday entry. “I’ve really lived my life. The only thing I would be regretful about is not having experienced love and an orgasm.” She takes a beat. “You can put that in there.” Chambit’s frankness doesn’t detract from the enigma, it enhances it. How could someone so honest retain such a marked air of inscrutability? For starters, Chambit seems to be on the cutting edge of everything: indie film, hyper pop, edgelord memes, and the Brooklyn rave scene. Her extreme cultural awareness belies her own work as well. A recent painting called Hunter Biden Smoking Crack in a Sensory Deprivation Tank is a perfect example of the way in which Chambit doesn’t just have her finger on the pulse of the generation; she moves a beat faster. In addition to visual art, Chambit is also a filmmaker. She is producing a documentary tracking the effects of gentrification on three Lower East Side families. Chambit’s refusal to constrain herself to a single medium brings both anxiety and opportunity. Though she fears becoming a master of none, she finds comfort in a piece of advice from a friend: You live your life as your artistic medium. “I want to live a more project-oriented lifestyle,” Chambit tells me. Such projects include running a bed-and-breakfast and founding “the Miller Institute of Excellence—a private, for-profit education.” This seeming irony is underscored by an acute awareness of economic possibility. “You can do so much with money,” she explains. Therein lies the crux of the enigma. Though she has a strong desire for authenticity and creative autonomy, Chambit’s quest for tangible success compels her to commercialize herself. And she is surprisingly good at it. The first result of a Google search for “Chambit Miller” is her own professional website. Her LinkedIn has 500+ connections and details an impressive array of internship and student group experience. Her bio: “I do many things” (no punctuation). In short, Chambit has learned to commodify her vibe. I noticed a barely perceptible shift in her demeanor the moment I began recording. Upon a standard request for pronouns, Chambit turns her uncertainty into a bit: “She/her. Uh, she/him! Wait.” She lets out a raucous giggle. “On the low, I’m she/him because most times I am she/her but sometimes I am him.” When I ask if she considers herself an artist, she takes a long drag of her hand-rolled cigarette while pondering her response. Though this persona often borders on pastiche, it is indicative of her ingenious ability to mix the earnest with the delightfully satirical. I wonder if Chambit would defend her own ability to self-commodify. She is saddened by her younger brother’s dream of an easy-money job and disappointed by Columbia students’ lack of revolutionary thinking. “I thought people were going to want to change the world here.” Instead, Columbia taught her about consulting. While Chambit may disparage the more corporate strain of materialistic pessimism, she remains motivated by the fast-approaching doom of post-grad life. Chambit has found a way to navigate this paradox with a recent passion project: her collective production group Xenia, named after the Greek principle of hospitality. Recent events include a music video shoot with hyper-pop duo MGNA Crrrta and concerts with Xaviersobased, Clara Joy, and Frankie Cosmos. The last few times I’ve spoken with her, Chambit has been consumed with writing workshops, auditions, and rehearsals for Xenia’s Columbia debut: a three-act haunted house play based on research from ADP’s archives. Through the collective, Chambit has built a project to which she can devote herself professionally while also establishing her dream of a diverse, boundary-pushing creative community. Of course, no account of Chambit would be complete without examining her role in the literary fraternity itself. When I walked over to the 114th brownstone for a jazz night, I found her playing security guard on the stoop in a plaid robe, hoodie, and crocs, ushering a stream of students out onto the street. She told me the event was ending because several members were downtown supporting someone in legal trouble. Before I knew what was happening, she had already called an Uber to the courthouse. Why bother going so late at night, I asked. Surely no official court proceedings could take place at such an hour. She shrugged. “All of my kids are there.” The family she has forged within the society is perhaps the strongest testimony of Chambit’s capacity to create something tangible and lasting. Despite her propensity for leadership, Chambit constantly swaps her trademark brash confidence for self-doubt. After every inflammatory one-liner, she adds, “Wait, don’t say that,” or “Is that cancellable?”, and, ultimately, “You can write about this, fuck it.” Chambit agonizes over her legacy. Her morbid journal entry from Lima this summer makes sense given this underlying existential anxiety. When I ask Chambit what scares her the most in life, she bluntly confirms my suspicions: “dying with regrets.” During the historic 2022 European heat wave, Chambit walked the Camino de Santiago with zero physical preparation. She went to figure out the purpose of her life. Let’s hear it, I say, and she gives me a working definition. The temptation to share it here is strong, but I remember how quickly she changes her mind. No, I cannot put her ostensible life’s purpose in print. Chambit once told me, “I feel like I might be on the brink of something great, but also on the brink of something awful.” I suppose only time will tell.

On improvisation in the ever-eclectic Barnard dance class. By Molly Murch I could have been hypnotized. With a steady drum beat interrupted only by the occasional ring of a gong and the soothing voice of an instructor telling me to fold into a fetal position, I was in a particularly vulnerable mental state. Even with the nine curled-up dancers scattered across the floor around me, I’m certain I could have been hypnotized. On this early Friday morning, I am sitting in on Vincent McCloskey’s Modern I class. He begins class by pulling closed the floor-to-ceiling black curtain over the mirror. Vincent calls this “democratizing the space,” a move that he believes redirects the dancer’s hyperfixation from their body’s appearance to how it feels to move. I don’t know these nine dancers. I suspect that four are first-years completing their gym requirement, and two are former dancers returning to a lost passion. Perhaps one is a future dance major. The remainder might be burnt out seniors taking advantage of Barnard’s dance department in an attempt to craft a relaxing final year. And I bet at least one is a Columbia student who wandered across Broadway for a weekly escape from the Core. Despite their varying motivations, they have all found themselves in Studio 306. The dancers share the studio with two musicians: the class’s regular accompanist and a student following along. Both balance a pair of Congas and a mini gong, and they each grip a tambourine between their toes. The class has graciously opened up today’s session to an impromptu audience. Seated on the floor is a teacher of Afro-Cuban dance, a Ballet I student, and—desperately trying not to slip onto the floor into a slow fetal dance—me and my notepad. I found a similar open-door philosophy in my first two modern dance classes. The department demonstrates its commitment to accessible dance by welcoming both pre-professional dancers and the self-proclaimed poorly-coordinated alike. My Modern II course once even invited a Toddler Center student who had been caught peering curiously through the studio’s open doors inside to observe warmups. I wasn’t quite a toddler, but I remember my younger self being welcomed into my first Barnard dance class with a similar level of openness. McCloskey infuses his classroom with the same ethos that eased my nerves as a newcomer to the dance world. His patience for imperfection feels quintessentially Barnard: Dance becomes something approachable for someone entering the arena with what might be a restrictively academic disposition. Students who might fear slipping up in any other class accept the prospect that, in this class, they may fall short of immediate mastery. When dancers receive a personal correction, they take the advice in stride. When they sense Vincent in their periphery, glancing at their turnout, they respond with a cheeky giggle: a bit of endearing embarrassment tucked in between the classroom camaraderie. It was our ability to follow directions, our quick mimicry of standards that gave us each the keys to Barnard’s campus. They unlocked both desk-lined classrooms and sunlit studios. And yet, an hour long, one credit introductory dance class can shake our supposed steadiness and leave us weary, on the floor, and questioning ourselves. Dance improvisation is where my desire to conform is most harshly confronted. And trying to intellectualize the primarily physical exercise never serves me well. My instructors have made me realize that there is no correct approach to something so innately freeform. The task of creating with nothing but the bodies we have inhabited our whole life soon reveals itself as a challenge unique to each body. Even outside a dance studio, the mastery of our movement takes time. After a lifelong rehearsal of our own, specific walk, we might become confident: a lift of the shoulder, an extension of the leg. Transforming such ordinary, everyday maneuvers into synchronized, controlled artistry is where the crossroads between the physical and the cerebral becomes that much more difficult. If it can take a lifetime to master a walk, how long is needed to muster up what we might finally call a dance? Vincent asks his pupils to improvise in between plié warmups. He prompts them to swim, anticipate, and hit. “How many thought of hitting?” he asks. “How many thought of being hit?” I am reminded of the many devil’s advocates I have encountered in humanities seminars. One dancer responds. She compares the practice to a fight scene. Her words match the image my own imagination had conjured: a superhero battling their archnemesis. The group has morphed away from the disorderly oblong orientation it adopted for improvisation warm ups. They are now arranged in rows. All of their eyes are on McCloskey. I slip away just as they finish a technical exercise that asks them to cut across all planes. By now the dancers, like me, have certainly woken up.

By Avery Reed Auburn, New York, 2022 It’s Sunday afternoon and you’re knitting again. The oxygen machine whirs and you swat the air as a fly passes. You remember how to knit but you don’t remember much else these days. Your fingers know the stitches but when I ask you to hold my hand you look confused, as if this steps out of bounds somehow, or you can’t remember the significance of this gesture. It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m reading a book about another, more complete, love story. New York City, 1963 When you found me, I was called Rayan, but ever since, I’ve been Ray. It must have been nearly one in the morning in a dark club in downtown Manhattan. I lay there on the floor covered in thick wet dance, when your stiletto pinched my finger between the concrete and my eyes stung for a second until they met yours. You smiled your apology. I saw your teeth and knew I would need a new name, as if my old identity was perhaps too lazy to entertain such extraordinary company. New York City, 1963 I didn’t see you again until two weeks later on the night shift at the zoo. You worked the Birds of Prey and I cleaned the cages in the Himalayan Highlands. That night, my foxes were sick so I asked the walkie talkies if anyone had extra pine or cedar shavings. You said your birds had some to spare. Then you picked me up. “No way! Ray, right?” We walked the length of the zoo, up through World of Reptiles, down Tiger Mountain, up and over Congo Gorilla Forest, and back to the Himalayan Highlands. The animals paced, their tongues lashing. We lay down in the cedar shavings and laughed until morning. Auburn, New York, 2022 You let me hold your hand tonight on the way to dinner. I tell you about the time we took our lunch break to kiss in front of the tropical birds. You laugh. You say you wish you’d been there to see it. You were there, Vera. New York City, 1967 In November you told me I was “forceful.” Or, more accurately, that I “forced you to get the canaries.” Looking back, I agree it was not a good decision, but in the heat of a very dull moment in our relationship, I had no idea the canaries would escape, or that you would cheat, or that I would be left standing in the living room with an empty cage and nothing to say. Yes, of course I would stay with you. No, I did not want to know the details. Yes, I knew who Tori was. No, I did not care that she was “an artist.” I’ve kept a meticulous record of our arguments. My lines are always the same, but yours keep getting faster and more complex. Auburn, New York, 2022 We walk the same path every morning. Some of the other couples have walkers, some have large rubber bands tying them together at the wrists so they don’t get lost. You and I walk just far enough apart from each other that our hands don't brush. We never get lost. But today, you were gone. After hours of searching, I found you in the field, alone, surrounded by a flock of small yellow birds. From a distance, it looks like you are frantically beating the air, threatening to snatch their wings. Your legs are bent but your face is turned upwards. You’re screaming. As I get closer, I realize you aren’t screaming, but singing. You’re reaching for the birds as if begging them to stay. I stare until you hold my face and point to the birds. “I told them you were coming. I found them, Ray.” I don’t know how you remember my name. When the birds are gone, you let my hand drop. Our bodies are limp and far enough apart to tell me the moment is no longer happening. There is, very rarely, a moral to this story.

By Madison Hu when the light turns red, he will go home in the meantime, three friends walk arm to arm the baby is on his father’s shoulders and it is nothing he can’t defeat yet later, he will only recognize digital turns the last time the signs were this block-red someone else knew what it meant; he replays sinking desperation swirling in the laundry spinning out the dirt accumulated from knee scrapes he will rely on his bones instead the face he owns melts softer than when he was a baby and the woman who fell in love too long ago sometimes forgets sweet things in the end the light will turn red and the couples upstairs will housewarm every year to ad infinitum and the community garden will bloom in the winter. in the meantime, cracks in the brick of Apartment 4C let in light (and other particles)

Affirmative: By Dominic Wiharso Word travels fast. If you don’t want something spreading around, it’s in your best interest to lock that shit down. Not a peep. See, I’m only six degrees of separation away from Kamala Harris—it’s no biggie, or whatever—and apparently my Twitter presence is a serious “liability” to her campaign. That is to say, you better be two steps ahead of the skeletons in your closet. Those secrets might bite you on the ass later on. Look, I know. Greed got the best of me and I compromised my morals. I can’t believe who I’ve become. No, Dominic, I tell myself. You did the right thing. Anyone in your shoes would have done the same. Ignore me, let’s get back to the scandalous story at hand. It’s late November and Riverside is a shadow of its summer self. After I finish my nightly ritual of exchanging witty banter with the raccoon colony—and smoking the mysterious weed left on the ADP pool table by some undergraduate “interdisciplinary artist”—I return to the notorious coed frat, descend the rickety basement stairs, and cozy up under my hand-dyed Etsy duvet. Josh, who by this time is usually sound asleep in his Snoopy PJs, is nowhere to be found. I relish the peace and quiet. You know how Josh likes to talk talk talk. Usually, it’s fine, but God, some nights, he won’t quit yapping about whatever the IFC was showing that week. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I don’t care. I fall face-first onto my bed, inhaling the lingering musk. Mmm … boysmell. Our room, well yeah, it kinda smells like boy. So what? We’re two virile young men, of course our room smells like something. It would be weird if it was sterile. We wear deodorant for God’s sake, just not to bed. Who even does that? It would be a waste and I don’t know about you, but I’m balling on a budget. Wait, what did you ask? Oh right, the secret! I had to go looking for him—I realized, already in my pre-REM-ASMR-rain-sound stupor, that Josh had forgotten to take his cholesterol medication. Me and his mom have this secret little arrangement. Josh is a busy boy. He has a lot on his mind. Between editing a literary journal and, I don’t even fucking know, raising money to build homes for homeless elephants in Thailand or something, he doesn’t have a lot of free time. He also has pretty bad chronic cholesterol (from his dad’s side, obviously) and has to take his pills before 11:59 p.m. But what makes matters worse is that he hates swallowing pills whole. His mommy used to hide it in his food, but now that he’s moved out, well, it’s up to me. Exactly two weeks and four days before moving in, I got an email with the subject line “URGENT.” Apparently, his mom emails all of his roommates before move-in. In exchange for her peace of mind and the health of Josh’s cardiovascular system, she pays me a royal fuckton. Let’s just say it covers my portion of work-study and then some. Also—and this has to stay between you and me—but she lets me use her timeshare in Turks and Caicos. There was a lot at stake for me, alright? Don’t give me that damn look! You would have done it too. Anyone would have done it! Have you seen how white and soft that sand is? No one will take that boho-chic seaside villa away from me. Not even a runaway Josh Kazali. So now I was in the business of tracking down a missing person: a 5’10” Wasian with a penchant for meandering. How was I supposed to tamp down the wanderlust of a 20-year-old English major? Put a leash around his neck and walk him to Book Culture? God, I can’t even believe how I found him. It’s embarrassing really. My olfactory senses, if you couldn’t already tell, are quite strong. I’m like a bloodhound. I follow his scent (the aforementioned boysmell) around campus with a glass of water in my right hand and the Duane Reade pill bottle in my left, hoping to God I don’t lose my only source of income. Strangely enough, the aroma trail loops back to our basement dorm which was sold to us as “Timothée Chalamet’s former dorm … see, here’s a picture of him hosting a party in there … lowkey for the size it’s not a bad double.” At this point in the night, I’m fuming. I slam the door open … lo and behold there he is. Smug and without a care in the world. Time to let the cat out of the bag. Negative: By Josh Kazali You think I have time for secrets? No, I have no time for such trivial things. Not when I’m on the dawn of my greatest breakthrough. Oh yes, I know about my little Dom’s charade with the pills. He thinks they’re for cholesterol, the imbecile. No, no, my dear mother had me taking them since I was a child, because the doctors feared for the multitudinous dangers I posed to society. But mommy isn’t here anymore. I switched them out for sugar pills months ago, and now my mind is sharp as a blade. At last, without those damn pills, I’m free from my intellectual shackles. Without that pill dulling my cognitive processes, I can finally stretch my mental limbs. I can actually feel the gray matter of my massive, muscular brain flexing when I think. Its tendons are taut and supple and eager to work—do you know what that feels like? Of course you don’t. While Dom sleeps in his cheap, flea-ridden twin XL, under his shabby, unwashed duvet, I am awake, unraveling the rich mysteries of the natural world. The philosopher’s stone, the secret to eternal life and death itself—all are within my grasp. Dommy has bought my English major schtick, can you believe that? Those foolish articles for The Blue and White are my playthings, little notes I jot on the toilet between my experiments. I’m almost insulted. He hasn’t seen the plans laid right beneath his nose. The basement room—you really think I was enticed by that ridiculous story they spun about that little malnourished boy? No, no. The subterranean location, free from greedy little undergraduate eyes, and drowned in the blaring music of ADP jazz night, hides the sound of buzz saws and drills and chemical explosions: It’s the perfect place for my secret lair. Sometimes I can’t help but smile at my own genius, hiding my creation under the smelliest literary fraternity this side of the Hudson. No one has noticed the festering odor rising through the floorboards from my laboratory, deep beneath my room on 114th St.—the byproduct of my experiments. It’s comical, really. He thinks it’s body odor, the poor thing. I almost pity him. Each night, I imagine waking him from his innocent slumber to show him where boysmell really comes from. It would blow his mind. Yet my neurological capacity is reaching its apex—my synapses can no longer handle the speed at which my thoughts move. I have stopped attending my classes entirely, and hardly sleep or eat. My skin grows cold and pale from the harsh lights under which I pore over microscopes; my eyes are bloodshot. You speak to me of news? I haven’t seen the sunlight for weeks, I haven’t felt the soft touch of the breeze since September. Sometimes, I dream of living a regular life above ground: returning to the ranks of my peers, hearing of the trivial, minute dramas of daily life, eating a slice of pizza in the pouring rain. But the work must be done. Soon I will shuffle off this mortal coil, and my mind will rejoin with the heavens, embracing the atomic assemblage from whence it came—but today is not that day. No, today is the day of my greatest achievement. I have made a discovery that will make Robert Oppenheimer look like a toddler playing with wooden blocks. Today will be the day that everyone knows the name of Joshua Kazali—a name which henceforth will strike fear into the hearts of mankind. The calculations are final; the cauldron is ready for its marvelous task. It only needs one thing: a human sacrifice. That, of course, is where my old friend Dom comes in. In many ways, I’m sad to see him go. He was an old friend of mine, from back when my senses were being dulled by the damned pill. We laughed, cried, and shared stories. He was a good roommate. But science isn’t forged on friendship. It’s forged through sweat and blood. This is what I tell myself as I scale the ladder and return from the laboratory, collapsing on my dusty, unused bed. It’s only a matter of time before Dom returns, and we meet our fate. Oh look, here he comes now. He slams the door. He’s holding the glass of water, and the pill he thinks will stop me. I can’t help it. I feel my face contort into a cruel smile. Whatever little knowledge he holds in his brain—whatever insignificant scrap of information—nothing can save him now.

What do you value? By Vivien Sweet It is perhaps a given that an English professor contains multitudes. But Frances Negrón-Muntaner, the Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities,, wears more hats than the average academic. Beyond the classroom, she is a documentarian, poet, author, curator, and sometimes actor. Yet her artistic practices indubitably permeate the classrooms she inhabits. During her seven year tenure as director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, she founded the Gallery at the Center, adorning the walls of Hamilton 420 with skateboards designed by Apache artist Douglas Miles and Ethan Hawke, and film photographs of New York in the ’70s. The posterity of Latino media is of paramount importance to her, and accordingly, she curates the Latino Art and Activism Archive at the Rare Book Manuscript Library. During our conversation, Negrón-Muntaner admitted that at times she worried that focusing on a single practice would have allowed her to “do more.” I suggested a quip from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or that often brings me solace: “My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.” We both laughed. Maybe, she mused, she would have produced 12 films if she were only a filmmaker, or she would have written seven books if she were solely an author—though it is worth noting that she has, so far, directed seven films and written and edited four books, as well as a litany of articles for outlets like the New Yorker and the Washington Post. The artistic and scholarly selves of her imagination are not entirely at odds with Negrón-Muntaner as she is. It was the night before Thanksgiving, and there were pies to bake and turkeys to baste. But as the clock neared 10 p.m., Negrón-Muntaner was explaining to me how to turn a 400-pound ATM rightside up to wheel it around the streets of Puerto Rico and later New York. Over four successive 40-minute Zoom sessions, we spoke about the evolving legacy of West Side Story, decolonial joy in Puerto Rico, and the neverending plight to become legible. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. . . . The Blue and White: You’re currently writing an intellectual biography on Arturo Schomburg, an Afro-Puerto Rican activist. You wrote an article in 2016 that was titled “Why Do Americans Find Cuba So Sexy—but not Puerto Rico?” in which you expressed frustration at an editor who refused to consider publishing a biography of Julia de Burgos because it wouldn’t sell. He said, “I’d publish a biography of Cuban poet José Martí because he comes from a sexy country.” Did you experience similar pushback when you were trying to pitch this intellectual biography of Schomburg to editors? Frances Negrón-Muntaner: If I was going to write that now, it would be the reverse. I would say up to Trump’s presidency, U.S. culture—popular culture and even scholarly spaces—were much more interested in Cuba. Cuba was the largest island, the closest to the U.S., one that had always been an object of desire for American elites of different kinds, whereas Puerto Rico has always been considered small, backward, not containing as much wealth. Trump’s presidency really broke from that tradition of Cuba as an object of desire. Trump was totally uninterested in Latin America in general. I mean, he was also the one that called Haiti “a shit country,” right? When disaster struck Puerto Rico with Hurricane Maria, he also showed tremendous callousness towards the people of Puerto Rico. While Trump was disparaging Puerto Ricans during this time, the press was very interested in covering Puerto Rico. There is definitely a before and after this moment for perceptions of Puerto Ricans. Before this, there were still a majority of Americans who did not know that Puerto Ricans were born U.S. citizens. Interestingly, also, the popular culture scene exploded into the global sphere. For a couple of years now, Bad Bunny has been the most downloaded artist in the world. Whereas before, in 2016 … we were still in the era where Cuba was the “sexy” country object of desire and Puerto Rico was an afterthought: something that we have, but we don’t really care about. Now, I would say that Cuba has receded. There’s very little public debate about Cuba, there’s very little promotion about its artists. So the question then becomes, how did Puerto Rico become sexy? B&W: You’ve written extensively about the cultural phenomenon of Puerto Rico in the U.S. You’ve written about West Side Story and In The Heights. What would you consider more adequate or holistic representations of Puerto Rico in the U.S.? FNM: I wrote quite a lot about and spoke during the release of Spielberg’s version of West Side Story. Although I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and I think in some ways, I see things from some of those perspectives, I’ve been living in the U.S. a lot longer. I contextualize West Side Story as not having that much to tell us about the present in its shape and in its structure and its logic. In the remake, the question of turf or neighborhood is central. Some of the changes that they made was to put more attention that the real enemy of both the white gang and the Puerto Rican gang was gentrification. What’s fascinating about that in this current context is how American millionaires and real estate corporations and other economic agents are moving to Puerto Rico and distorting the housing market to an extreme degree that is making it impossible for Puerto Ricans to live in Puerto Rico. So if I were going to make a movie about Puerto Ricans right now, I wouldn’t put this question of gentrification in the far past. In this period in the ’40s, and ’50s, most of the Puerto Rican migrants were of working class or peasant origin that had been displaced to the city. Some scholars have called that the exportation of a class of people, whereas one of the characteristics of the current migration is that it’s more or less proportional by class structure. That means that the current Puerto Rican experience will still have people that are working class, or people that are living in neighborhoods that are deprived of resources, or suffer gentrification, or have racial tensions with other groups. But that would be, now more than ever, one of multiple different experiences that Puerto Ricans are having as migrants. B&W: There’s a multiplicity of representations in media that are not solely, say, West Side Story that have expanded the image of the Puerto Rican diaspora and Puerto Rican culture in the current American popular imagination. I was wondering about your relationship to these so-called subcultures of Puerto Rican culture. FNM: Like what? B&W: The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, for instance. FNM: I’m both too old and too young. Too young to have been part of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe or the Nuyorican movement—I migrated to the U.S. in the mid 1980s as a teenager, but in my late teens. And I’m also too old to be part of subcultures. I want to back up with the notion of subculture because I wouldn’t call Nuyorican cultural institutions or productions subculture. I think they were part of a movement. Before that movement, Puerto Rican communities were not only impoverished, they were also considered politically and culturally dispensable. But the Nuyorican movement changed that by producing works: in literature, in arts and film, in everything. It did it by having very robust social movements that changed everything from how to treat drug addiction and other health issues to access to college and higher education for people of color in the city. You can see it by the legacies that they had in existing institutions and issues that affect all New Yorkers. For instance, El Museo del Barrio is one institution produced by the Nuyorican movement. It’s an iconic museum, but one of the important things about it is that it was a museum that began by conversations between parents and teachers about the importance of having education in the arts. That the museum has a relationship to the people that live in the neighborhood—[those] were not ideas that were commonly held by museums in the U.S. Institutions like El Museo del Barrio not only serve the community but really represent another model of what's possible. And the same could be said in the Lower East Side about the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe began in the apartment of Miguel Algarín, according to him, because he wanted to get all these noisy poets out of his house so he could sleep, because he was the only one with a job—he was a professor of English at Rutgers. But whatever the origin story that we believe, they created an institution that provided a stage and a space for working class brown and Black and other poets to be able to share their work and cultivate an audience. B&W: One of your ongoing projects is “Art in Catastrophe.” Tell me more. FNM: I started it as an essay, and what I was interested in understanding was the world of art in the disaster. In the case of Puerto Rico, the two big disasters I was talking about were the imposition of austerity as a policy and the effects of Hurricane Maria, not only as a “national phenomenon” but as a political phenomenon. Because what happened—nearly 5,000 people died—did not have to happen. B&W: Could you elaborate on that? FNM: I mean, there’s many reasons that I don’t think natural disasters are necessarily natural. Certainly a Category 4 hurricane is formidable anywhere. However, there are many circumstances that make that force be met with equal force or not. Puerto Rico infrastructure had deteriorated significantly because of its lack of investment, and that lack of investment is related to the U.S.’s extractive relationship to Puerto Rico. Look at the significant rates of poverty; almost half of the population lives under the poverty line. The U.S. administration failed to provide assistance in a timely manner and denied that there was anything serious happening for weeks. In fact, in this case, it was very striking and stunning that civilians, doctors, nurses, members of [the] community, even entertainers, organized to move supplies on personnel to Puerto Rico and arrived and were working weeks before the government did. And people were without access to electricity [on] most of the island for nearly a year. These things are not natural. What is the infrastructure? What interest does it serve? Why is it in that state? I mean, these are all questions that we need to ask. B&W: I know you wrote, nearly 25 years ago, “The Radical Statehood Manifesto.” How have perceptions of sovereignty in the Caribbean changed since you wrote that? FNM: It was never a manifesto. People called it that, but it wasn’t really a manifesto. It was a document that a group of intellectuals and artists drafted as a way to call attention to what we saw at the time, which was that those countries in the Caribbean that were independent fared worse in many ways than those that were in more open relation—even of subordination—with their metropolitan states. In some ways, it was an anarchist document that was trying to suggest the ways that struggles of labor, of women, of Afro descendant, of LGBTQ+ communities that perhaps had more terrain to advance under a relationship that was more openly incorporated than covertly colonial. Puerto Rico today in some ways is worse off than in earlier periods. In “Emptying Island,” which is a piece about how to understand this mass migration politically and otherwise, one of the things that I argue there is that Puerto Rico has been subjected to three colonial projects. The first colonial project was agricultural, the second colonial project was industrial, and the third colonial project, which is the present, is neoliberal. I would say that the current colonial project might be the most dangerous to the future of Puerto Rico, because what they’re trying to create is a society where a lot of U.S. millionaires live, not paying most taxes. You have real estate interests coming in, luxury markets exploding. There was a house that was sold for $35 million years ago that broke a record—there had never been something so expensive for a private home. The entire logic of the economy is to sustain and serve these millionaires, which means that all goods and services are extraordinarily expensive. And that it serves very dangerous experiments like cryptocurrency. There were a number of people involved in the cryptocurrency industry that have moved to Puerto Rico to avoid taxes. There’s a lot of groups in Puerto Rico addressing a range of things that are affecting the population. And I feel [that] people at this moment in time, given the neglect and abuse that the island has received, have more faith in some of those efforts. B&W: Speaking of alternative forms of government and local forms of knowledge, I wanted to talk about your project “Valor y Cambio,” which you started in 2019. I just think it’s absolutely ingenious. It’s this combination of art and digital storytelling, and enacts what you have called a “just economy.” Using an ATM, you circulated a community currency with bills featuring six prominent Puerto Ricans to be used directly at local businesses and organizations in Puerto Rico. FNM: It struck me that Puerto Rico has never had a currency or any say over monetary policy because it’s been a colony for its entire modern history. I had learned about community currencies and how they tend to emerge during economic crises, and how artists almost always have a role in that process. In a debt crisis … you don’t have enough resources and you have to decide what’s most important. Well, in the Puerto Rico case, education was suffering, pensions, healthcare. The money was really going into hedge funds and banks. So I wanted to create an environment where people who had never been consulted about what you value and where you think resources should go would have the opportunity to think about it and share. The second [goal] was introducing this idea of community currency. In Puerto Rico that would be a useful idea because we have high levels of education and high levels of unemployment, which means that a good number of people have knowledge and skills that are not incorporated into the mainstream economy. The third thing I wanted people to experience [was] what it would feel like to be in an economy that was not colonial. So we came up with six bills. The bills told stories of people that met these values or that their lives and their work embody one of these values. We got 42 vendors and organizations to accept this money. If you came a few times [to the ATM] you could have a hundred dollars in your hand. What happened was that yes, many people came—hundreds and hundreds of people. But next to no bills were used. And the other thing was that I started noticing that people sometimes cried when they got the bills—of joy. When I put those two things together, I first thought we had failed because I thought, “Okay, we were trying to change the economy a little bit. But if people are not entering into exchanges, if that’s not what was happening, we’re failing.” But then I started asking people, “Why are you crying? Why are you so happy? Why are you not using [the bills]?” That opened up this whole other level where I learned so much. We chose this old-fashioned way of money, which is bills. But having that object in their hands made them feel like another world was possible. Interacting with the machine, which asked you some questions and asked you to tell a story, clarified people. Many people told me, “I had never thought of that question.” The first question the machine asks you is, “What do you value?” And I was also surprised that people would say that is such an intimate question, such a personal question. I never thought about that as such a personal question. Eventually at the end of the project, it became a repository of all these stories. Like a walking book and also an ethnographic bin, you know? B&W: I think it’s so interesting that in your attempts to make this decolonial project, you made an even more decolonial form of monetary exchange in which nothing is exchanged because people really valued the physicality of the currency—seeing, as you said, this other world that is not possible without having this bill. FNM: I didn’t know that then, but I learned that the ATM was actually invented in a way to break down labor in banks in England. The idea was that the banks wanted people to work more hours without paying them extra. The response was the ATM, which now would allow the bank to function for 24 hours. So one of the contradictions, or one of the complex genealogies, of the project is that this machine that we rescued was given to us, but it was old and it had nothing in it. We had to re-outfit it. B&W: Oh, I thought you created an ATM from scratch. FNM: We thought about it, but it was going to cost us $25,000. I mean, $25,000 is more than the per-capita income of Puerto Rico. So we were absolutely not going to do that. We started calling around and we found a donor to give us the ATM machine. It was very mysterious. He didn’t want to give us his name, and he told us to meet in an abandoned lot in an abandoned Walgreens in another town. And I thought we were going to die, but after a two-hour wait—and it was night—two guys in a van came and they gave it to us. We programmed the computer so after you answered the questions, you would get a bill dispensed. And that would begin this exchange chain, which was you gave us a story, we give you a story [through the bills]. Then I wrote a piece called “Decolonial Joy,” which tried to describe what I was witnessing, which is this happiness, right? Well, it’s not happiness. In the essay I do acknowledge that there’s a lot of work by Sara Ahmed, for instance, about the happiness industry and the problems with that. I gravitated more to the notion of joy, which is collective, which is political. When I asked people, “What are you so joyous about?” what they answered was decolonial. They said, “It makes us feel like a world without racism is possible, a world where we’re not a colony is possible.” B&W: I was wondering if you would consider picking up this project again. I feel like one of the beautiful things about it is how tied it is to local communities, local folks. FNM: After this Puerto Rico run, we came to New York and we were here for several months. That was quite eye-opening. In Puerto Rico, when I described to someone what a just economy could be like and how a community currency could be part of that, people understood in seconds. But when I tried to have the same conversation with people in New York, it sometimes took me 45 minutes. It was hard for people to wrap their head around a currency that wasn’t the dollar. Why would you want to have money that you couldn’t accumulate or profit from? Our hardest day of this whole project was when we took the machine to Wall Street, and it was completely ignored. When we tried to recruit people to tell their stories, people got aggressive with us. It was not a pleasant experience. The question of the future of this project has actually given me a lot to think about. Once you’ve planted these seeds, does it ever really end? This conversation itself is an example of how, in a way, it never ends. B&W: What would a community currency in New York look like? FNM: The whole process of coming up with an idea for a community currency is a very clarifying process because you have to identify needs, you have to connect to each other, [and] you have to develop some joint policies. For some communities, if you have a lot of talents that are not being tapped, and there’s a way to recognize, identify, and organize them, and figure out how people can exchange what they can offer, you can save hundreds of dollars a month. In New York, it might mean the difference between your child getting guitar lessons or other needs that you might consider a luxury. B&W: Something I gathered from “Valor y Cambio” is that one of the reasons why it was so touching to people was because it presented a vision of a society that unfortunately—maybe I’m just a pessimist—is still decades away. FNM: Well, it depends on the scale we think about it. If we think about people’s responses, then it’s already here. B&W: You’ve mentioned five or six projects that you seem to be working on concurrently, and you also teach Video as Inquiry and have taught other CSER courses in the past. I was wondering how you balance being both a professor and a documentarian, but also an artist. Maybe they’re all the same thing. FNM: All my work really is asking similar questions in different forms. The reason that I find it important to ask these questions in different forms is that if my main interest is dismantling coloniality, that coloniality is manifested in media. It’s manifested in visual culture, in the knowledge in institutions, in what we teach, in how we teach. In each of these spaces that I inhabit, I never really bring all my selves to it. When I am more [in] the film world, I bring some of my selves there—similarly at Columbia, given my appointment. Maybe one of the things to create better conditions in the future is whether there’s a place where I can bring all of those together. Sometimes it can be exhausting, and sometimes you can feel that you don’t quite belong anywhere. B&W: It’s a sacrifice, right? FNM: It’s a sacrifice. You’re kind of illegible in some ways, and maybe you don’t get the same kinds of support sometimes that other people get—or recognition. For instance, you asked earlier about the future of “Valor y Cambio”; I accept that I never was able to raise any money for “Valor y Cambio.” The art sources would tell me it was “artivism,” not really art. And the activists would say it’s more art, it’s not activism, or it’s not scholarship. It really found no funder. At one point, the museum [in Puerto Rico] said, “Well, maybe we can expand the project,” and the one funder they proposed was a bank. B&W: Oh, no! FNM: I said, I’m sorry to say, but I cannot accept that. It’s going to turn this into promotion for their bank—I know it. It would have been very complicated. B&W: Do you think that putting together the “Valor y Cambio” film helped consolidate the emotional impetus behind why you were doing the project? FNM: At some point about seven years ago, I tried to implement this decision that when I took a project like this one, that it would have different components. “Valor y Cambio,” when the film is out and the book is out, [is] going to become a multimedia project. In the book, there’s going to be almost a manual part of it, so if you want to do this, these are some things to consider. In that way, it can sprout other ones. People sometimes ask, “How do you choose your project?” I don’t choose projects. I’ve had conversations with people and they say, “Oh, I don’t know what to do next. I want to think of ideas.” My problem is that I have ideas till I’m 105.