You're Wrong

BUZZSAW OCTOBER 2016

Prohibition Over Rehabilitation pg. 6

Helping the Hungry pg. 26

DEAL WITH IT

Review: Prima Donna pg. 34

Buzzsaw presents...

EDITORS’ COMMENT

The You’re Wrong Issue You’re wrong. I’m wrong. We’re all wrong at one point or another. But some people are more wrong than others, and that is where we, your BuzzEds, come in.

When we decided on the theme for this issue, different editors had different reactions: Julia, our Seesaw co-editor, thought of her younger brother. John, social media editor, bemoaned “the entirety of cisgender men.” Lexie, Prose & Cons editor, couldn’t help but think of the election.

From stupid brothers to righteous authoritarian demagogues, we explore who’s blatantly wrong across the whole spectrum of ethics. Come join us in this issue, where objectivity is a lie and nothing means anything.

Despite being a two-time Olympian and a threetime Olympic medalist, Gabby Douglas still faces silly, gender and racially charged comments (Don’t Forget to Smile, p. 14).

Objectivity in journalism has become entrenched. But what happens when journalists prioritize objectivity over the truth? (In Pursuit of Truth, p.18).

The Kardashians are notoriously wrong about most everything. But what are they right about?

(More Than Just Half-Baked p.32).

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

Divider and Table of Contents Photography Elise Korfonta Elise Korfonta is a freshman Cinema and Photography major from Herndon, Virginia. The photos submitted are of her most recent work, all originating from different projects. Elise often layers two visually stunning pictures, finding beauty in their contrast.

BUZZSAW Alexa Salvato Michele Hau Evan Popp Sophie Israelsohn Ministry of Cool Lexie Farabaugh Prose & Cons Tylor Colby Sawdust Elena Piech Seesaw Julia Tricolla Olivia Cross Layout Alexis Morillo Tara Eng Claire McClusky Art Megan Banning Christian Cassidy-Amstutz Website John Jacobson Social Media Anna Lamb Copy Editors Christine Gaba Jordan Aaron Tatiana Jorio Mila Phelps-Friedl Alayna Vander Veer Annie Batterman Alex Coburn Katie Siple News & Views Upfront

Adviser

Jeff Cohen

Founders

Abby Bertumen Kelly Burdick Bryan Chambala Sam Costello Thom Denick Cole Louison James Sigman

Buzzsaw is published with support from Generation Progress / Center for American Progress (online at GenProgress.org).

Buzzsaw is also funded by the Ithaca College Student Government Association and the Park School of Communications.

Vanguard Printing is our press. (Ithaca, N.Y.)

Buzzsaw uses student-generated art and photography and royalty-free images.

Views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editorial staff or of Ithaca College.

Feedback and contributions should be sent to buzzsawmag@gmail.com.

Front cover art by Claire McClusky Center art by Claire McClusky Back cover art by Megan Banning

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Write Us

Our magazine exists to inspire thoughtful debate and open up the channels through which information is shared. Your comments and feedback are all a part of this process. Reach the editors by email at: buzzsawmag@gmail.com.

Table of Contents Seesaw ..........................................................4 Print media is dead, check out multimedia on the web.

News & Views .................................................5 Current events, local news & quasi-educated opinions.

Upfront ........................................................15 Selected dis-education of the month.

Ministry of Cool ........................................30 Arts, entertainment and other things cooler than us.

Prose & Cons .............................................38 Short fiction, personal essay and other assorted lies.

Satire threatening the magazine’s credibility since 1856.

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BUZZSAW News & Views

Sawdust .......................................................45

You’re Wrong: Multimedia (Photos, Videos and Interviews)

BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue

Pictured: “Sexual Assault,” “Black Lives Matter” and “Journalism Ethics.”

Not Pictured: “Free the Tampon,” “Perceptions” and “The Election.”

Contributors: First-years — Julia Bergdoll, Peter Champelli, Andrew Hallenberg, Elise Korfonta, Mystikal Scalzi and Audrey Warner. Second-years — Elena Piech and Julia Tricolla.

Visit: buzzsawmag.org/see-saw Subscribe: www.vimeo.com/buzzsawmag www.youtube.com/buzzsawmag www.soundcloud.com/buzzsawmag

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Admin Abandonment

Vacancies in the college cause anxieties about leadership

By Otto Bonk, Staff Writer

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Engagement. Various administrators have stepped down from their administrative positions in 2016 as well, including Benjamin Rifkin, former provost and vice president for educational affairs; Gerald Hector, former vice president for finance and administration; Keith McIntosh, former associate vice president of Digital Instruction and Information Services and chief information officer; and John Bradac, former Career Services director wrote Sophia Tulp for The Ithacan in an Aug. 25 article.

Chris Biehn, the college’s vice president of the Division of Institutional Advancement and Communications (IAC) said a culture of trust, collaboration, and shared processes and goals has always been something that he has strived for in his division.

At a recent bi-annual division retreat, those views were once again stressed during a team building exercise run by FranklinCovey.

FranklinCovey is a “global company specializing in performance improvement [that helps] organizations achieve results that require a change in human behavior.” According to their mission, the company has expertise is in seven areas: “leadership, execution, productivity, trust, sales performance, customer loyalty and education.”

The IAC has taken further steps to ensure that all of its over a thousand volunteers are getting training in diversity and inclusion. It brought in Craig Clayton, an executive consultant who specializes in diversity training, unconscious bias, corporate bullying and workplace respect, to work with IAC volunteers. While the IAC at least seems to be actively engaging a problem on campus, and appears to have been for several years, Pfaff said the same cannot be said for the rest of the school.

This presents the question of whether or not the team building exercises and attempts to create and maintain a culture of trust and collaboration will be effective.

Ben Dattner, a workplace consultant and an industrial and organizational

psychologist who founded Dattner Consulting, told NPR: “For years, companies and other organizations have gathered groups of employees for out-of-office retreats aimed at fostering closer ties. But these team-building exercises often have the opposite effect.” The FranklinCovey method might actually foster closer ties because it seems to avoid the critical mistake that Dattner told NPR such retreats often make, activities which “bring out hostility and conflict rather than building any sense of shared mission.” While “offsite events” can be good for short term interpersonal relations, “a couple of days after, people return to the workplace, [and] the impacts and the benefits are not usually enduring,” Dattner said.

Furthermore, in her article, “Why Team Building Doesn’t Work & How You Can Build Your Team,” Hildy Gottlieb wrote: “Team Building proposes that it is possible to build trust and engender positive working relationships among people who obviously aren’t feeling any of those feelings to start with.” Biehn said the deans of the individual schools are working with faculty in terms of increasing diversity and inclusion efforts, but the level of trust appears to be very low.

While the culture of trust, collaboration and diversity is something the IAC claims to promote, as Pfaff stated, it is not an explicitly stated goal of the institution as a whole. It remains to be seen if these team building retreats and other such projects will be successful in appeasing students, faculty, administrators and staff alike, and preventing any more people at the college from jumping ship. ___________________________________ Otto Bonk is a third-year politics major who is concerned about the absence of lessons being learned outside of the classroom. You can reach them at obonk@ithaca.edu

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News & Views

ver the last year, Ithaca College has faced a number of controversies and leadership failures that have greatly reduced the faith in the administration for both the faculty and the staff.

Several members of the Ithaca College administration, faculty and staff members have either stepped down or resigned in the last year, many citing a lack of support from the administration and a general lack of collaboration and shared goals.

One such professor is Thomas Pfaff, who will be stepping down as the director of the Honors Program at the end of the semester. Pfaff, who will be staying on in his capacity as a member of the mathematics department, said there already was some tension between the faculty and the administration. He said the failure of the Blue Sky Initiative last fall, both with the poorly handled racist comment during the initiative kick-off event and the general lack of input from faculty in the initiative, was the “proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“When you think about trying to build trust and collaboration, it is a cultural behavior,” Pfaff said. “Either you have it or not. I would say right now, we’re in the not. We’re not having anything.”

Senior culture and communications major Natalya Gioiella agreed, saying in an email, “I think that there is a lack of trust with the current administration and the president, [and that] from what I’ve witnessed, collaboration only occurs between members of the same department.”

Pfaff added he feels the administration is not presenting a clear strategy or goal moving forward, apart from President Tom Rochon’s continued focus on cost cutting, even at “the cost of quality.”

According to The Ithacan, Pfaff is one of two faculty directors who left their role of director along with Patricia Spencer of the Office of Civic

Prohibition Over Rehabilitation The new nonsensical alcohol policy and you

By Justin Henry, Contributing Writer

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

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et’s say there is a nationwide spike in caffeine-related injuries and deaths so there is now a college wide ban on coffee. The staff of residential life even required your resident assistant to check your room throughout the semester to see if you had any coffee lying around. But getting up for those morning classes still felt like hell and you needed some kind of pick me up. You hide a pack of Folgers in your pantry. And another student died from a caffeine overdose. What does residential life do? Prohibit the vessel which carries coffee: coffee mugs!

“No Mr. RA, sir, this isn’t a coffee mug. No, I drink my tea out of here.

No caffeine in lipton! No, sir. It’s a tea cup!”

Still, the drinking persists and we begin to wonder if college students drinking coffee and those who overdose on the substance is in fact the same issue.

The fact is, in addition to coffee, college students drink alcohol.

About $500 per year, according to the 12 Keys Rehab, is budgeted towards drinking alcohol. At Ithaca College, we are scholars surrounding ourselves in the liberal arts, and also young adults free from the outdated constraints of our parents.

College is a time when many begin to experiment with their own limits when it comes to drinking alcohol.

Roughly 60 percent of college students ages 18 to 22 experimented with alcohol according to the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The survey also found that only 20 percent of those surveyed met the criteria to be labeled “alcohol dependent”.

This trend has grown, not shrunk, with the presence of alcoholprohibitive measures in institutions of higher education. Even so, Ithaca College’s Office Residential Life just included two new alcohol prevention measures: one that prohibits empty alcohol containers for residents under the legal drinking age and one which prohibits “high-risk” alcohol paraphernalia. The policy defines “high-risk alcohol paraphernalia”

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as “including but not limited to beer bongs, beer funnels, and any drinking games.”

Several members of the college’s Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) Prevention Group, which consists of staff and administrative members from the Office of Residential Life and the Office of Judicial Affairs, stated that the additions to the policy make their discouragement of underage drinking more consistent and allow RA’s to provide support for any resident who is on the brink of alcoholism. Whereas students were previously not prohibited from having empty bottles of alcohol before the additions, now RA’s are required to report the student if they are found in possession of “high-risk” paraphernalia in their room.

But it seems there are some things missing from this list of “high-risk” alcohol paraphernalia. For example, I wonder if RA’s are required to document the presence of Dasani Water bottles, pint glasses and shot glasses — all of which are commonly used for drinking and sold in the bookstore at campus center, making them readily accessible for students to use.

Mike Leary, assistant director of judicial affairs, said the policy will not prohibit shot glasses because they are sold as merchandise in the on-campus bookstore. Since shot glasses and pint glasses are some of the most common receptacle used for alcohol consumption, there is no consistency in the policy’s methods of discouraging drinking. Basically, the college discourages them on the principle of our safety, but will still happily take our money for it.

For Aaron Champagne, a resident assistant in the West Towers, it is the honest conversations about alcohol consumption, rather than the strict policy, which makes the biggest difference with his freshman residents.

“I think that the policy puts students in a more scared position because there’s that whole double standard where in college you’re supposed to be incredibly studious but also have that time to party,” Champagne said. “Do I think that

it puts students in a scared place rather than a place where they can talk about this? Yeah.”

Champagne’s freshman in Towers might be scared, but upperclassmen, who have had more experience with drinking at college, range from indifferent to mildly annoyed because now they have more items they have to hide in preparation to their RA conducting room checks. I have spoken to several students who agree with me when I say that I am compelled not to end my days of drinking. Instead, I feel more compelled to stow away my alcohol for when my RA checks my room. This would be incredibly detrimental to my safety if I had an alcohol problem and needed help from the school’s counseling services.

Among the research AOD Prevention Group cited in crafting these policy additions was a study from the Harvard School of Public Health from 2008, which shows the average number of students who drink on dry campuses is lower than on colleges without policies against drinking. However, the study reports that students who abstain from drinking in college were less prone to drinking in high school.

The study reports that students who drank at dry campuses consumed about the same amount of alcohol as students who drank at college with no alcohol ban. Ithaca College serves as an exemplary case, since the study cites the northeast and north central region of the country as having the highest rates of drinking nationwide in their colleges.

Sure, alcohol bans discourage students from drinking, but only the ones who don’t have that much experience drinking alcohol.The goal of an alcohol policy should not be to lower the number of students who drink, but to reduce the numbers of students who are at risk of alcoholism or death. However, this study states that bans don’t have a significant effect on students who are drinking at this “high-risk” level.

Jake Agliata, regional director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) for the Northeast, Mid-

Atlantic Region and International Regions, said he has seen similar trends in his research.

“The younger you are and the less experience you have with alcohol, the larger amount of quantities you’re going to drink in a shorter amount of time,” Agliata said. “I don’t see an avenue for these policies as providing a way to help students.

All I see is another way for students to get in trouble.”

Additionally, Agliata said policies like the one recently instituted at the college have the potential of deterring students from seeking help for their drinking problem, as they now have more of an incentive to hide any traces of their habit.

Although the goal of the policy makers was to craft a policy which allows for greater outreach and education, they threaten to harm the very same people they had hoped to help.

Sophomore Thomas Horgan, president of the Ithaca College SSDP chapter, said a sensible drug policy focuses public health and safety rather than punishment.

“The new alcohol policy seems to stray a bit from a focus on harm reduction, and expands the platform for potential judicial consequences,” Horgan said. “I’d love to see a medical amnesty policy that expands beyond just one ‘freebie’, and protects both

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News & Views

residents.

Agliata said it has become the norm for colleges to enforce prohibitive measures because it has been done for so long and now it seems like “common sense.” It’s not as much a case of the administration or the residential life staff being old, out of touch fuddie-duddies; in order to remain consistent with Title IV, many private colleges and universities maintain strict alcohol and drug policies at the threat of losing government loans.

However, Title IV only requires colleges to implement alcohol prevention “programs” the wording of which Agliata said allows for schools to have more lenient drug and alcohol policies. In fact, Agliata said he has never seen a school lose money after enforcing more practical drug measures.

“I think it’s very naive of any administration of any college to think if they just tell students they’re going to get in trouble for it that they’re not going to do it,” Agliata said. “Some of the best schools that have the best drug policies out there have the same approach to all drugs that they have to alcohol which is, ‘We know you’re going to do it. reduce “Although the goal of the policy Let’s the harm makers was to craft a policy which associated with that use. Let’s allows for greater outreach and approach this education, they threaten to harm openly and honestly.’” the very same people they had P o l i c i e s hoped to help.” that prohibit any presence of alcohol parapher nalia and empty alcohol the caller and the person being containers won’t eradicate treated regardless of whether or their presence in the residence not they’ve been in that situation halls any more than policy before.” that prohibits the presence of Currently, the college’s medical alcohol itself. At Ithaca College, amnesty or “Good Samaritan” policy we don’t need more prohibitory allows students to call public safety policies that gets students in for help for a friend without the trouble and alienates them threat of themselves or their friend from their RA’s. The goals of undergoing punitive measures. the administration must be reWhere does this denial of college evaluated. The question of how students drinking come from in can we reduce the number the decision makers of our college? of students who drink must Several members of the residential change to how can we reduce life staff admit they have no illusions the number of students who about the drinking habits of their

Between a Democrat and a Demagogue Why not voting for Clinton doesn’t always mean voting Trump

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

By Evan Popp, Upfront Editor

After their candidate came so close in the Democratic primary only to fall short, supporters of Bernie Sanders are now faced with a decision in the upcoming presidential election. Do they settle for Hillary Clinton’s vision of incremental progress so as to defeat the bigotry of Donald Trump? Or do they hold true to their ideals and cast a vote for a third-party candidate who advocates for true progressive change, such as Green Party nominee Jill Stein?

Aware of the possibility of progressive voters casting ballots for Stein, Clinton supporters have argued a vote for anyone other than Clinton is tantamount to voting for Trump. In invoking this argument, Clintonites are claiming the spoiler effect — in which, in this case, a progressive third party candidate siphons support from the Democratic nominee — may lead to a Trump presidency.

Stein and the Green Party inadvertently helping elect Trump is a very real concern. And it should be obvious to any progressive voter that Clinton is far superior to Trump. But for progressive voters dissatisfied with Clinton’s commitment to a hawkish foreign policy, neoliberal policies and the politics of incrementalism, there is another option — one that circumvents the spoiler effect.

In the 2012 presidential election, the electoral votes of 42 states were won by a margin of five points or more.

A similar result is likely in 2016. As of Oct. 1, only 10 states — Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, Georgia, Iowa, and Arizona— are projected to be decided by fewer than five percentage points, according to poll-based predictions by the site FiveThirtyEight. The electoral votes of the other 40 states, and the District of Columbia, will be won easily by Clinton or Trump.

This means in those 40 states where the result will not be close, progressive voters dissatisfied with Clinton can vote for a left-wing third party candidate, such as Stein, and not worry about throwing that state’s electoral votes to Trump. In the remaining 10 states that are projected to be close, progressives should vote

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for Clinton to ensure Trump is not elected.

The advantage of this electoral strategy, known as safe state voting, is that a left-wing party like the Green Party gains increased viability by garnering more votes than it typically would when voters believe they must choose the lesser of two evils.

Additionally, Stein and the Green Party would avoid the moniker of spoiler that was hung around the neck of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader after the 2000 presidential election.

Clintonites may argue that polls can be wrong and deciding who to vote for based off them is risky. But in 2012, Nate Silver — the founder of FiveThirtyEight — was able to predict which state would vote for which candidate with 100 percent precision, showing that reliable predictions of electoral results can be made.

It is also possible that the Bernie or Bust crowd will dislike safe state voting since it doesn’t advocate voting for a third party or writing in Sanders’s name in all cases. It is true that safe state voting is not an ideal solution.

But the reality is that a Trump victory would set the progressive movement back decades. Safe state voting ensures that progressives voting for Stein won’t play a role in electing a racist demagogue while also allowing voters in 80 percent of states to retain the freedom to vote for the candidate they most identify with.

With that said, it must also be pointed out that safe state voting is not a sustainable fix to the problems posed by the two-party system and that it won’t lead to the election of a candidate outside that structure.

Progressives, and others dissatisfied with the two party system, cannot be content with simply casting a protest vote every four years and relying on a safe state voting strategy to ensure the results of the election don’t skew toward conservative candidates.

Instead, progressives should use safe state voting in this election, but prepare to build the political strength needed to never have to use it again.

They must mobilize, maintaining the momentum and political activism spurred by the Sanders campaign, and get involved in politics — from the

presidential race all the way down to their local elections. Every race, from the school board on up, should include a progressive candidate advocating left-wing solutions to the problems facing society. Progressives should also prepare to put political pressure on Clinton if she wins the presidency. They must ensure that the pledges extracted from her during the primary by public opinion and the pressure of the Sanders campaign are honored.

Ultimately, though, the solution to the box the two-party system puts leftists into is not just to organize progressive political energy, but also to put that political power toward reforming a system that allows a third party candidate to “spoil” elections in the first place. Implementing instant runoff voting is one example of a change that would ensure the spoiler effect is not a factor in elections to come.

But the sad reality is that such a reform, and others like it, are little more than pipedreams at this point.

Democrats and Republicans would never let these kinds of measures go through, as to do so could lead to the destruction of their monopoly on political power.

So until progressives can mobilize enough of their own political power to enact the needed reforms, we’re stuck with half solutions like safe state voting. But in the situation we find ourselves in now, stuck between a neo-liberal and a neo-fascist, it’s the best option we’ve got. ____________________________________ Evan Popp is a third-year journalism major who’s glad to live in a safe state. You can email them at epopp@ ithaca.edu

Donald, Duke, and Democracy?

There should be no white supremacy in a democracy

By Christina Tudor, Staff Writer

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banning Muslims from entering the United States is more appealing to white voters than we think it would be.

In the campaign video, Jared Taylor, editor of white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, explained that Trump’s closed-borders worldview is “very appealing to a lot of ordinary white people.”

A report on racism and Republicans on Salon states: “Donald Trump is not an outlier or aberration […]

Donald Trump’s supporters have enthusiastically embraced the Republican Party’s racism towards people of color, in general, and against black Americans, in particular.” We would like to think that Donald Trump is an anomaly, but really he is just a product of his party and our culture.

A recent Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll shows that Trump supporters possess extreme hatred of black people. The antipathy present in both the Republication and the Democratic needs to be examined.

Statements like: “Voting against Donald Trump is really treason against your heritage,” that were present in the campaign video do little to change the status quo. Instead, they uphold this idea white America was once great.

Trump faced criticism in the past for initially refusing to disavow David Duke’s endorsement right then during the interview on CNN, even though Trump and his campaign have repeatedly disavowed Duke since. It should still mean something that the KKK believes that Trump supports their work and ideologies regardless.

Clinton is now being attacked for “going too far” by conservatives or that this is a desperate attempt to get votes.

While Clinton may need to do a better job addressing race in the campaign — it was entirely too easy for this video to be put together, as it was comprised of clips that already existed.

But this is Trump’s attempt to convince voters — that he isn’t the racist he’s made out to be and that it’s actually his rival who is the real racist.

“Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees

people of color only as votes,” Slate reports. However, Clinton does have more work to do when it comes to race, reconciling past policies that informed immigration laws and the prison-industrial complex.

She does not have the following that Trump has and we should look at who’s going to be worse for the country. A scary alt-right movement — a conglomeration of modern-day white supremacists and neo-Nazis — has emerged among Trump’s following.

Some Tweets from the hashtag #AltRightMeans include: “#AltRightMeans physical removal of homosexuals and other undesirables, so to speak” and “you recognize that all civilizations pillaged and conquered, and don’t feel shame because your ancestors were better at it.”— and that’s only naming a few.

What’s even worse, Trump’s success at scapegoating minorities throughout his campaign, has shown white supremacist that they can be successful in political arenas and they’re getting involved — campaigning, knocking on doors, and posting on social media—giving these groups more of a voice in politics than they’ve ever had before.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “Trump’s surprise rise to become the GOP presidential nominee, built largely on a willingness to openly criticize minority groups and tap into long-simmering racial divisions, has reenergized white supremacist groups and drawn them into mainstream American politics like nothing seen in decades.”

With Nov. 8 approaching, we need look at not just what Trump stands for, but who is standing with him. ___________________________________ Christina Tudor is a fourth-year writing and politics double major who is so over writing about Donald Trump. You can email them at ctudor1@ithaca.edu

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News & Views

t the end of August, the Hillary Clinton campaign released a controversial video advertisement tying Donald Trump to the Ku Klux Klan, a racist group that has historically attempted to block civil rights and perpetuated obscene amounts of violence against black people. In modern times, it is a relative fringe group, but the KKK and other white nationalist groups still have as much of a presence today — more than we would like to think. And as Trump’s campaign proves, so do racist and xenophobic ideologies.

This is especially significant because “white nationalist leaders who once shunned presidential races have endorsed Trump, marking the first time some have openly supported a candidate from one of the two main parties,” the Los Angeles Times writes.

The campaign ad opens with a David Duke, prominent KKK leader saying: “A lot of what he believes, we believe in.” This notion is echoed throughout the ad.

Duke is also taking these claims into politics himself. His motivation and inspiration to do so is clear: Donald Trump’s success. Duke even told the Los Angeles Times, “The fact that Donald Trump’s doing so well, it proves that I’m winning. I am winning.”

Democracy Now! quotes an interview that showcases his similar beliefs. Duke said: “Unless massive immigration is stopped now, we’ll be outnumbered and outvoted in our own nation. It’s happening. We’re losing our gun rights, our free speech.

We’re taxed to death. We’re losing our jobs and businesses to unfair trade.

We’re losing our country.”

This is the kind of rhetoric the Trump campaign supports and perpetuates;it’s validating.

The main premise of his immigration reform policy is building a wall for which the U.S. makes Mexico pay.

Deportations, securing borders, and

Only 4.2 Light Years Away Possibility for life on Proxima B

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

By Ari Ashby, Contributing Writer

Researchers have officially confirmed the years-in-the-making discovery of exoplanet Proxima B, a roughly Earth-sized planet that orbits Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star that is 4.2 light years away from our own solar system, which is close on the cosmic scale. What is most exciting about this discovery is that Proxima B is orbiting in the “habitable zone” of Proxima Centauri. This has led to many hopeful and curious inquiries about whether or not the planet could hold forms of life.

Scientists have been searching for planets orbiting Proxima Centauri for over 15 years. They do so by using equipment called Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) and High Accuracy Radio Velocity Planet Researcher (HARPS), both of which are installed on telescopes run by the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

These instruments detect shifts in star’s movement caused by gravitational pulls of orbiting planets which can alert scientists to new planets. The first signs of Proxima B were found in 2013 but the data was not convincing enough. Due to this, scientists launched a publicly funded research campaign called the Pale Red Dot. It was dedicated to focusing on the confirmation of this planet’s existence. This team focused HARPS on Proxima Centauri every night from Jan. 19, 2016 through March 31 of this year. This new data combined with previous data led to official confirmation of the planet.

The data indicates that Proxima B is only about 1.3 times bigger than Earth, which suggests the planet to be a rocky one. The planet is only 4.7 billion miles from the red dwarf Proxima Centauri and it completes an orbit every 11.2 earth days. Due to this fact, it is likely that one face is constantly facing Proxima Centauri.

Our own Earth is 93 million miles away from the sun. Due to its tight orbit, the planet is within the

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habitable zone of the star because red dwarf stars are relatively cool.

The habitable zone is the area surrounding the star that would allow for water in it’s liquid state to exist on the planet’s surface.

This could mean that there would be a possibility for life but the likeliness of habitability is hard to say and many astronomers remain skeptical. Ithaca College Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Shoshe Cole believes that there is are “almost certainly” no intelligent forms of life on this planet. This could be possible as Proxima Centauri is still a relatively active star that emits flares of radiation. These bursts of specifically x-ray radiation then hit Proxima B, which could hinder life as the flares create an obstacle for all forms of life. One issue with such issue with waves of radiation is it leads to the possibility of atmospheric erosion. Lisa Kaltenegger, Director of

“The data indicates that Proxima B is only 1.3 times bigger than Earth... The planet is only 4.7 miles from the red dwarf Proxima Centauri and it completes and orbit every 11.2 days.” the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University commented, “If [the planet] has an ocean, then the best bet [for life] is in the water.”

Despite this problematic factor, Cole has a different method of arguing against possibilities for intelligent life on the planet.

“Modern humans have only been around hundreds of thousands of years and modern radio has only

very roughly been around 100 years,” she said.

Since it took so long for humans to evolve on earth, which had seemingly “perfect” conditions, it would only be logical to say that it could take intelligent forms of life elsewhere at least as long, if not longer, to evolve as well. Therefore, this decreases the possibility of intelligent life on any other planets.

That doesn’t mean that she doesn’t think it’s possible for other forms of life to inhabit the planet though. “If there were were life, the chances are they would be single celled,” Cole added.

For such organisms to exist, the amount of radiation that the planet gets would be a problem to be solved.

One way this could be avoided is if the planet had a very strong ozone layer. Otherwise, adaptations within the life forms would be the most likely to occur. An example of such an adaptation would be to remain underground for long periods of time. If the planet had an ocean or any body of water, then this would be a likely area for life as it would provide adequate protection for some life from harsh radiation.

NASA scientist Paul O. Hayne, who works within the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, also agrees with this opinion as he finds that what they know about the host star wouldn’t allow for intelligent life. Proxima B is almost certainly “tidally locked,” he said. “It points the same face to its star all the time.

That would lead to very extreme temperature gradients between the day and night hemispheres. The planet should also be quite cold due to the small size and low brightness of its host star.”

One of the best ways to determine whether life exists on the planet would be to visit the planet with probes.

Earlier this year, Breakthrough Initiatives announced its project “Starshot.” It aims to send miniature probes to Proxima Centauri and

Image by Scarlett Roy, age 11

now with the recent discovery of Proxima B, scientists are even more eager to launch it. The project plans on sending thin probes at a speed 20 percent of the speed of light.

Such probes would be equipped with thin sails which would capture energy from a powerful earth based laser. This laser would accelerate the probes and allow them to reach

“If the planet had an ocean or any body of water, then this would be a likely area for life.”

takes leadership and the investment of a large group of people to make something like that happen.” ___________________________ Ari Ashby is a second-year writing major ready pack up and move to Proxima B. You can email them at aashby@ ithaca.edu

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News & Views

Proxima Centauri in 20 to 25 years.

The full scale apparatus still needs to be built and is at least 20 years off. While it is unclear how much information the probes would be able to send back as they are so small, any data taken would require

an estimated time of 4.22 light years to reach earth again. It is difficult to predict what type of technology would exactly be on the probes as technology will likely continue to advance and continue to get smaller.

Cole seemed skeptical such advancements in the near future would be futile though. As Cole explained, “We wouldn’t be able to send them commands once they got there (which is more or less how we direct the robotic probes we send to other planets in our solar system) because it would take our signal 4 years to get to them, so they would need some way of figuring out where to aim their instruments on their own, which is feasible with the technology we already have.”

While she thinks it would be very inspirational to see photographs of Proxima Centauri’s solar system, she believes that not a lot of data would be able to be sent back to Earth because of how much power it would take to send a strong enough signal back to Earth.

Hayne, however, has a much more hopeful view regarding innovation and advancements. He believes that if we invest enough in technology such issues can be overcome. He states it “[...] just

Budgeting Brazil How hosting the Olympic Games changes a nation

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

By Isabella Grullon Paz, Contributing Writer The Rio Olympics have been deemed a total disaster by some, and an accomplishment by others.

The games came to a close with the impeachment of a president, the displacement of thousands of families and the installation of a public golf course. It was the first time a South American country hosted the Olympic Games, which is a merit in itself. but the timing of the Games, as well as their infrastructural execution, was just wrong.

It was a fairy tale beginning in 2009 when Rio won the bid to host both the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. Brazil was going through an economic boom; it was an investor’s paradise and it seemed to hold all the cards to pull off the double whammy that is hosting the biggest sporting spectacles in the world. While building the infrastructure that would hold up the World Cup and the Games, their economic bubble burst, leaving Brazil with a shaky foundation that eventually toppled over, taking social and political stability along with it.

It would be unfair to say that the Olympics were the sole contributor to Brazil’s current condition, but they did contribute to the general unrest in the country in a great way.

Brazil already had the reputation of displacing millions of low-income families to build venues and malls since their hosting the Pan-American Games in 1963.

The construction of new venues and structures for these events “have not benefited the [poorer population] at all,” said Fernanda Verri, a PhD Candidate at UCLA in Urban Planning, in a Skype interview.

According to Verri, it is customary for those who cannot afford to buy or rent a home to occupy certain parts of the city without property titles, but many of these people have lived in these areas, which we know as favelas, for more than ten years.

“The state provides them with two options as an alternative to [being displaced]: first, [the families] can receive money to buy or rent another home,” Verri said. “The second option

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is to opt to obtain social housing.”

She added that most of the time, the money received in exchange for a family leaving its life-long home is usually not enough to live anywhere within the city. The location for most social housing is on the outskirts of the city, usually far away from where many of these people work and have made their relationships.

“Imagine, they already have financial problems, so they have to try to live near their place of work because they cannot spend a lot of money on transportation. When you kick them out of the city, they have to spend more money to get to work, and might lose their job because they won’t arrive on time,” Verri added.

According to an article in The Washington Post, approximately 60,000 people in Brazil lost their homes due to the Olympics between 2009 and 2013. The government never told those who live in lowerincome neighborhoods that venues would be built on their homes. As Verri, explained, the government simply gave the families option one and option two and expected them to leave.

Brazil declaring a state of financial disaster before the Games also contributed to the tension between Brazilians and their government.

“The timing was terrible as state revenues from oil royalties had plunged along with the private of crude in the run-up to the Games, depriving authorities of billions of dollars in anticipated revenue,” Russ Mould, AJ Bell’s investment director, said in an email interview. AJ Bell is one of the biggest investment ventures in the world based out of Manchester.

“Some of the costs of the Games were borne by Brazil’s federal budget and some by the city of Rio,” Mould added. What this essentially means is that Brazil was running out of money, and had to budget what it had between social spending and the Games themselves.

According to the Council of Foreign Relations, Brazil was facing, and still is facing, its worst recession in decades. The recession contributed to the financial crisis in the Rio de

Janeiro state government which is responsible for public services such as hospitals and the police in the city of Rio. The city required a bailout that would cover not only the building of the venues but that would also pay for the drastic security measures the city had to take during the Games. Emphasis on during the Games.

On the bright side, Brazil is one of the few Olympic cities not to overspend their budget by an absurd amount. Mould pointed out that “the average overspend on every Summer and Winter Games since 1960 [is] at 156 percent — so at least in that respect Brazil’s 50 percent overshoot does not look so bad.” Other cities like Montreal have overspent up to 750 percent.

Compared to other Olympic Cities, Brazil is in the “second-category” of Olympic success stories according to Marty Conway, professor of Sports Management at Georgetown University and advisor for “megaevents” such as the Qatar World Cup. “[Rio] is not like London, not like Barcelona [and] not like Sydney where [the city] flourished after [the Games],” Conway said. For cities like Barcelona, the Games were a coming out party in a lot of ways, and it ultimately became a go-to tourist destination in Europe as a result. “Rio is going to be in that secondary category, overall lesser benefit.”

Rio, Athens and Montreal are examples of how the Olympics are more costly than profitable.

According to The Guardian, it took 40 years for Montreal to pay a debt of $1.6 billion from when it the hosted the games back in 1976. Athens’ Olympic venues look more like ruins than the buildings that have existed since the Greek Empire, and Athens has been an economic funk ever since. Right now, Brazil does not look like it will flourish any time soon.

But will Brazil be in an economic meltdown? In immediate hindsight, yes, but according to Conway, “it takes four to six year to look back on the use of [the] facilities after the

“The Olympics have insofar been almost exclusively held in developed economies, mostly because of their high cost. These countries have been able to pull through the years of debt and the struggles of infrastructure.” be reserved for what Conway calls “developed economies.”

The IOC is in trouble. Only two cities bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics, because so many cities have ended up in insurmountable amounts of debt. Olympic Agenda 2020 seeks to make the Games a more accessible goal as well as a more profitable one.

Olympic Agenda 2020 aims to subsidize some of the bigger venues, and insist on creating temporary locations for events to happen.

Temporary locations are venues that can be torn apart easily or that can be built in a way that can later be dismantled and sold to other countries or professional sports leagues that need more venues.

Conway emphasizes the fact that a lot of countries do not have significant professional leagues to take over the stadiums built for the Olympics. Creating temporary venues, such as the beach volleyball courts in London, could be a costeffective way of dealing with making large infrastructure that will never be used again.

For the London 2012 Olympics, the volleyball courts were set up in the Horse Guards Parade, making it easy to break them apart later because the U.K. does not have a successful beach volleyball league.

Another example is how Qatar is building their stadiums for the World Cup, which they will be hosting in 2016. They do not have a large soccer league within the country, so they are building stadiums that they can dismantle and then sell elsewhere for the purpose of making a profit and helping countries cut down on cost and materials themselves for their new stadiums. Recycling is fun, right?

The Olympics have insofar been almost exclusively held in developed economies, mostly because of their high cost. These countries have been able to pull through the years of debt and the struggles of infrastructure: some have even benefitted from the games. Rio was the first country in

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News & Views

events are over to really get a full picture of how effective the facility planning was.”

Most of the time, when venues for the Games are created, the city has a plan-of-action of what to do with the venues when the Olympics are over. The infrastructure benefits flourish from the practical use of these leftover stadiums, fields and complexes. For example, the Olympic Village is to be adapted to function as a luxury condominium.

But will this happen? A good sign is the re-utilization of venues, like taking the golf course made for the games and making it public. That will allow lower and middle-class peoples to have a space to culture golfing talents and golf culture.

Never mind the fact that they have been displaced to the skirt of the city. It is the efficient use of these venues that help qualify a city as an Olympic success or an Olympic disaster.

All this takes time. As Mould also pointed out, since 1992, “the countries hosting the Summer Olympic Games have seen an average increase of 25 percent in their local stock markets in the years following the Games,” but this overturn does not happen right after the Olympics pack up and leave town. There might be hope for Rio after all.

The International Olympic Committee recognizes that hosting the Olympics can be a disaster, and they know it is partially their fault for requiring the venues and the infrastructure they do. Because of this, the IOC has instituted a plan, a plan that seeks to get people to actually want to host the games and not have $30 million in debt as a result. We see you Montreal, and we feel your pain. Olympic Agenda 2020 is the name of the project; it seeks to make the economic burden of hosting the Olympics, less of a burden. The plan aims to make the Olympics a more affordable project, not something that would

South America to host the Olympics and although the immediate future does not look promising, the Games might shed a new light on the possibility of a “developing economy” to host a mega event. Brazil opened the floodgates of everything wrong with hosting the Olympics, but at the same time it has created a possibility for the Southern Cone to host mega games.

Rio has been one of the first host cities to hold the Games without going severely over budget; they were also the first games to have refugees compete. The Rio Games were a true example of Olympic spirit. No other games had a viral picture of two athletes from North and South Korea, or an image of athletes from the so-called West and Middle East going at it in beach volleyball.

Humanity and sportsmanship were seen in the way athletes built each other up, one positive among the many problems Rio faced during the 2016 Olympic Games.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------Isabella Grullon Paz is a third-year journalism major who has Gold Medal in writing about the Olympics.

You can reach them at igrullon@ ithaca.edu

Don’t Forget to Smile

Gabby Douglas faces the wrath of racism and sexism in the Olympics

By Tatiana Jorio, Contributing Writer

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issuee

D

uring the Rio 2016 Olympics, the women’s gymnastics team, coined the “Final 5,” was given a lot of notice, like women’s gymnastics are every summer Olympics. Two members of the Olympic team this year were on the London team, the “Fab Five,” in 2012,” Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas. Gabby Douglas has received immeasurable scrutiny by the media; her Olympic talents were reduced to a collection of memes. Douglas was criticized on everything from her hair, being “salty,” and when it came down to the medal ceremony, during the national anthem Douglas’s hand was not on her heart. This resulted in an all time peak of criticism, and critics on Twitter referring to Douglas as unpatriotic.

It’s hard to ignore that Gabby Douglas faces more pressure than her two-time teammate Aly Raisman. I doubt that the conversation would have been the same had Aly Raisman forgot to put her hand on heart. The conversation was not the same, Shaun King Points out in his article “Three Olympic National Anthems, No Hands Over Hearts — But Only Gabby Douglas Draws Outrage” when two days later athletes two athletes, Ryan Crouser and Joe Kovacs, during a medal ceremony forgot to put their hands over their hearts. These athletes were not trending on Twitter or Facebook the next day; in fact, I didn’t even know who they were until I read King’s article. These are two Caucasian athletes, and that is why we are not talking about them, because forgetting to put your hand on your heart during the national anthem does not mean you are unamerican — if you’re a Caucasian male, anyway.

There is already an immense amount of pressure on these gymnasts, who from their late teens to early twenties are expected to perform gracefully on the world stage, and stick it. These girls risk their

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lives on floor, beams, vault and bars when they do these elaborate routines — but that is what they love to do. Unfortunately, because they are female gymnasts they are expected to do all of this while looking sparkly, beautiful, peppy, outgoing and of course, smiling. Not only are these girls experiencing a once in a lifetime moment, but the whole world is analyzing the way they react to a win: Are they happy enough? Are they disappointed? While they all face an immense amount of pressure, some face more than others, and this year Douglas took the heat.

Being a female athlete is already an immense amount of pressure, but being a female and African American gymnast adds more pressure.

“When they talk about my hair or me not putting my hand up on my heart or me being very salty in the stands, they’re really criticizing me, and it doesn’t really feel good,” Douglas stated at an event. “It was a little bit hurtful.”

While Douglas has every right to be hurt, and feel like the criticism is unfair, because it is, she also has to do something else. She has to apologize. In order to avoid being perceived as an “angry black woman” Douglas has to apologize for things her teammates wouldn’t, she has to apologize for what isn’t true but for what others think is fact. She has to apologize for not seeming happy enough for her teammates. Douglas can’t be upset or appear competitive when she doesn’t do her best, at least not on camera: she has to smile.

When Mckayla Maroney made an unimpressed expression on the podium while winning silver, she was an internet sensation, celebrities redid the face and it became a lighthearted joke.

“I didn’t want people to think of me as someone who wasn’t impressed with a silver medal, because obviously that’s a huge accomplishment, and I was so happy,” Maroney said. “It was more about me just

being not impressed with falling at the Olympics in my last event.”

While Maroney is allowed to be unhappy when she doesn’t compete at her best, when Douglass didn’t seem happy cheering her teammates on the bench for an event she came so close to qualifying for, she is seen as salty and unpatriotic. The difference in treatment is so blatant that it is impossible to ignore.

Image by Kate Nalepinski

Douglas apologized for not having her hand on her chest during the ceremony, and explained it was not intentional, Douglas also may have reason not to want to put her hand on her chest and appear patriotic.

In 2015 more than 100 unarmed black men were killed; this summer more unarmed black men were killed for being black, and yet nothing has severely changed in our police system. America has not put black lives at the forefront, it has not yet truly showed what we know to be true: that Black lives matter.

While Douglas cares enough to apologize to her critics, and reassure people that she is not antiAmerican, I wouldn’t blame her if she was. The media coverage on Douglas was not just bullying; it was racist.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tatiana Jorio is a second-year film, photography and visual art major who is done with double standards. You can email them at tjorio@ithaca.edu

PFRONT. UPFRONT. UPFR

Upfront

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Profiting From Pain

How big pharmaceutical companies endanger our health

By Anna Lamb, Staff Writer

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

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his year, one-in-six Americans will decide to go without life-saving medicine, according to Consumerist.

And according to a 2015 Wall Street Journal article, last year 10 percent of U.S. blood cancer patients stopped taking their prescriptions due to heightened cost. The culprit? Big pharmaceutical companies that are hiking prices and putting citizens’ health at risk.

Mylan, the producer of the EpiPen, recently made headlines after becoming the latest pharmaceutical company to dramatically raise prices. Fortune magazine reported the company increased prices 500 percent to a list sum of $608.

The increase has already impacted Gillian Clowes, a sophomore at the University of Delaware. “I’m facing the possibility where I just may altogether stop carrying an EpiPen because I don’t know if it’s financially worth it to pay for something that they will administer to me in a hospital when I inevitably end up there,” Clowes said.

So how do pharmaceutical companies get away with it? One way is through patenting their products.

After pharmaceutical companies discover a new medicine, “the drug is covered under patent protection, which means that only the pharmaceutical company that holds the patent is allowed to manufacture, market the drug and eventually make profit from it,” Dr. Ananya Mandal said in a News Medical article.

Mandal said these patents last an average of seven to 12 years; afterward, generic drugs, copies of brandname drugs, can begin manufacturing. But during the patent’s lifespan, the manufacturer has a monopoly over the drug, Mandal said, which allows companies to demand any price for prescriptions.

Timothy Holbrook, a professor of Law at Emory University, said the process of introducing generic drugs is slowed not only by the patent system but also by the Food and Drug Administration. “The patent system is only about creating and incentiv-

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izing new innovations,” he said. “I may discover a new drug, but the patent system doesn’t give me any right to sell it. That means you have to get approval from the FDA for any type of drug, a new drug or a generic drug.”

The problem is, as Sydney Lupkin of Kaiser Health News found in July 2016, “the FDA had 4,036 generic drug applications awaiting approval, and the median time it takes for the FDA to approve a generic [drug] is now 47 months.”

Backlogged drug approval could be solved soon, though. The FDA has begun charging user fees to generic drug companies to raise revenue. Lupkin explained in her article that technology improvements and increased hiring have also helped.

But until that backlog is solved, it creates an issue. Holbrook said the U.S. economy, and the drug industry, is based off free trade. Prices are driven by competition, making costs more affordable for consumers. Without a wide availability of generic drugs stimulating the market, and providing that competition, big brand name drug companies can raise prices for their own benefit.

Patents and the FDA aren’t the only things putting patients at risk, however. Not only are drug companies monopolizing markets, they are also failing to be transparent. In a study, New York University professor Jennifer Miller found the results of many phase two and three clinical trials — which distribute pharmaceuticals to large groups to ensure safety and effectiveness — were not published. Additionally, only 20 percent of final trials were posted to the official trial registry ClinicalTrials. gov. Disclosing results is not legally required, so many companies don’t take the risk of being transparent.

Because results are not readily available, doctors prescribing drugs could be inadvertently harming our health. In 2015 alone, there were several multimillion dollar lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies for causing bodily harm to patients.

For example, Drugwatch wrote that lawsuits forced Takeda Pharmaceuticals to settle for $2.4 million when their Diabetes drug Actos caused bladder cancer. Takeda put their

product on the market even after tests showed a 40 percent increased risk of the disease, according to Drugwatch.

Not only are companies withholding vital information about products, they may also be actively pushing the prescribing of brand name drugs — drugs that were the first to receive a patent — for the sake of profit. An investigation by ProPublica found that doctors who received more than $5,000 a year from brand name drug companies had an almost 10 percent higher rate of prescribing those companies’ patented products instead of generic versions.

Because so many Americans are affected, grassroots efforts to combat Big Pharma’s abuse of the system have started to crop up. One group, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, organizes students to speak out against big pharmaceutical companies. Alexandra Greenberg, a spokeswoman for the organization, said that Americans have a right to most pharmaceuticals because they were created with taxpayer dollars. EpiPen in particular, she said, was developed completely through a Department of Defense grant.

“It actually is a taxpayer funded invention, in that the government provided the necessary money to develop,” Greenberg said. “And now, down the line it has eventually fallen into the hands of Mylan.”

Whether through FDA improvements or citizen activism, only time will tell where the future of pharmaceuticals will lead. For now, issues still remain with the companies that are in control. But Clowes, the University of Delaware student, said she hopes the EpiPen scandal creates awareness of the issues within the system.

“I’m hoping that this will bring to attention the problem there is with healthcare in America and the apparent problem with people not being able to afford medical treatment.” ___________________________________ Anna Lamb is a second-year journalism major who is seriously thinking about switching to “alternative medicine.” They can be reached at alamb@ithaca.edu.

Megan Banning

Break a Leg

Representation and equity in the arts

By Berellyn Alberca, Contributing Writer

A

were Asian performers, 3 percent were Latinx performers.

Seeing people of color on stage or does not necessarily mean that the work available evenly distributed among performers of different races. Though diversity on screen and on the stage is becoming more and more noticeable, there is still a massive gap in opportunity between white performers and performers of color.

“I’m not really surprised by this,” said Hoppe. “But I do think it’s getting better than it was ten years ago and we definitely changed a lot from 20, 25 years ago where almost no people of color were in any show.

They’re getting what they deserve.

They’re getting what they worked for.”

Cobbins adds, “Honestly, I wish I could say that I was surprised and it’s really sad. As a Black man it’s going to be harder for me to find any kind of work. A white guy going for the same has so much more to choose from, but me, I don’t have so much.”

In response to these statistics, Ralph Lazo, a musician, poet and educator expresses the broader meaning of these numbers.

“The core practices and values of America in its foundation were genocide (both physical and cultural), land dispossession, labor exploitation and sexual assault,” Lazo said. “The institution of mainstream media is a powerful mechanism in the conditioning required for white supremacist-capitalist-cisgender hetero-patriarchy to persist, and it continues to function as such.”

Nikesh Shukla is an author and creator of the Shukla test which is used to indicate the portrayal of characters of color on screen. “I realized that white people think that people of color only have ethnic experiences and not universal experiences...that really annoyed me,” she said. “I’m not just eating mangoes all the time with my aggressive mother.”

“I completely agree,” Cobbins said.

“Last year at the Golden Globes, Taraji P. Henson, phenomenal actress.

She won the Golden Globe for Empire and she was saying how it’s crazy how for her to win a Golden Globe, it took for her to play an ex convict who escaped from prison. I love that he said and it’s so true. Cut the stereotypes. Stereotypes are stupid. You’re gonna be exposing the young people of color in this generation.”

Cobbins also discussed the fact that the lack of representation limits the possibilities for people of color.

“It’s very important because if you’re a person of color and you don’t see yourself being represented, it makes you feel like, okay, maybe I can never do that. Maybe someone who’s Black or Asian or Latino or Native American can’t be a superhero...For a child, imagine how that unlocks your mind and the possibilities.”

“To have that representation for young people who look like them will give them the motivation to do what might be deemed impossible for their race and go out into the world and do good things.” Cobbins said.

Lazo also argues that representation might not mean equity on its own.

“It’s part of a social solution that leads to equity,” he said. “I think what is probably more important that us seeing a broader range of representation is the development of a collective critical consciousness that allows us to deconstruct the messages we receive through representation.” ___________________________________ Berellyn Alberca is a first-year chemistry major who knows for a fact that the entertainment industry, despite their best efforts, can do better. They can be reached at balberca@ithaca.edu

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Upfront

little over a year after its Broadway debut, Hamilton’s tickets are still selling out at outrageous prices and this year’s Tony Awards surely took note with the Lin-Manuel Miranda hit taking home 11 out of the 16 Tony Awards it was nominated for.

Lorina Rebecca Hoppe, a musical performance student from the University of Colorado Denver and aspiring voice lesson teacher praises Hamilton for its style.

“More than half of the soundtrack is rap and hip hop and it’s a lot more of what people want to hear these days,” Hoppe said. “It’s just so wonderfully done lyrically… Hamilton definitely deserves the attention it’s getting.”

Its outstanding soundtrack is not the sole reason that Hamilton is gaining attention. The hit musical was faced with criticism for an apparently racist casting call when it was released with the show demanding “non-white” performers to play the founding fathers.

“A lot of performance music has been run by white people for a while so I feel like we don’t necessarily have an issue with [representation],” Hoppe said finding little to no preexisting situations in which a role would not be available to white people.

However, Tyree Cobbins, a Brooklyn-born actor and model who currently resides in Binghamton, NY, has had a different experience.

“As an African-American actor, I remember being a kid, there was a time where there weren’t a lot of diverse role models on television and the media in general,” Cobbins said.

“I think it’s important to have that.”

Without any surprise, a study performed by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC) found that 77 percent of Broadway major roles from 16 of Broadway’s most prominent theatres in the 2006/2007 – 2010/2011 seasons were given to white performers, while 16 percent of the roles were given Black performers, 3 percent

In Pursuit of Truth

Why objectivity at all costs hurts journalism

By Ana Borruto, Staff Writer

O

bjectivity is one of the pillars of traditional American journalism.

Reporters are told they must report dispassionately and without bias when writing a story, along with seeking the truth and being accurate. However, some believe objectivity is an outdated model and doesn’t necessarily lead to a story that adequately informs the public.

Proponents of this view point out that some of the best works of journalism have shunned the traditional model of objectivity. Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate coverage and The Boston Globe’s exposé of sexual abuse within the city’s Catholic Church — recently portrayed in the film Spotlight — all included a distinct point of view by the writers.

So how did this obsession with being objective and unbiased come to permeate most of the mainstream media we consume today?

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

The history of objectivity Michael Schudson, a journalism professor at Columbia University, said objectivity has gradually become normalized in American journalism. He said during the 19th century, journalists were hardly ever objective and reporters often had a political agenda in mind.

“The job was supposed to be a partisan cheerleader for the party the paper was affiliated with,” Schudson said. “That’s a different model, and what I see as the progress of journalism [is] journalism has become less of a political instrument and more of a professional pursuit.”

The power of the partisan influence of journalism has been shown in history time and again. For example, Schudson said during World War I, the news media was crucial in shaping public opinion. He said journalists were pieces of propaganda and openly sided with the allies and labelled Germany as the aggressor in the conflict.

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Issues with objectivity Today, however, journalism’s commitment to objectivity may have gone too far. David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the biography “The Making of Donald Trump,” said journalists are selfcensoring themselves in order to be objective. Oftentimes, he said coverage of politics seems to advance the interest of politicians rather than improve the public’s knowledge.

“When we come to matters of politics and long, ongoing stories, I think that journalists should assert their authority and say ‘this is what’s important and we’re going to talk about this’ and give less coverage to what the politicians think is important,” Johnston said.

Additionally, Johnston said journalists are too focused on the accuracy of their reporting in terms of quoting sources correctly and spelling names right. He said journalists must go beyond these basic aspects of reporting and make sure all the facts are truthful.

Schudson agreed, saying even when reporters are being completely objective and simply describe events that took place accurately, they could be doing a disservice to the public and abet the spread of misinformation.

Schudson puts it this way: In a debate, candidate A says the world is round, while candidate B says the world is flat. We know the earth is not flat, but Schudson said if the reporter covering this debate reports these two sides of the story equally and leaves it at that, then the reporter has been completely objective but has also aided in spreading misinformation.

“They haven’t objected their own views into the story,” Schudson said. “Is that enough for journalism?

If that’s what objectivity is, then that ... is a very impoverished notion.”

In cases like these, Schudson said it is journalism’s responsibility to recognize candidate B is mistaken and set the record straight.

This issue often comes up when journalists limit their stories to containing just two sides. What hap-

pens if, as in the case of the flat earth example, one side is presenting inaccurate information? Too often though, journalists include that perspective anyway and it becomes legitimate to the audience.

Steve Buttry, director of student media at Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, said for this reason the “he said, she said” concept objective journalists tend to follow is flawed. “[That approach] isn’t enough if one of them is lying, or just honestly mistaken,” Buttry said.

Schudson said he sees problems come up with this kind of journalism in coverage of the Republican Party’s denial of climate change. He said it’s troubling when political officials refuse to believe scientific facts, but that it’s the journalist’s job to state each side’s stance and to refute an inaccurate one, such as the GOP’s position on climate change.

“That’s difficult for journalists to do because they’ve grown up thinking we’re all reasonable people,” Schudson said. “Well, in this case we’re not all reasonable people.”

Overall, Schudson said a journalist needs to do more than just present two sides to the story.

“You have to be more analytical, you have to invoke your independent judgement, you have to base it on other independent sources,” Schudson said.

Objectivity and the human condition Another reason objectivity in journalism is problematic is that it’s difficult to achieve. Journalists are, after all, human beings. They carry baggage with them, which can include personal connections with stories or strong opinions on certain issues. This often makes it unrealistic to expect a reporter not to be biased in some way when telling a story, Buttry said.

“The simple truth is we are not objects, we are people, and that’s both good and bad,” Buttry said. “We’re imperfect and we have opinions.”

However, Buttry said he is not

Megan Banning NPR rarely published the word “torture” because they believed using it in articles demonstrated bias.

In this year’s election, in which Trump could potentially win the presidency, Johnston said journalists are failing to vet and look deeper into Trump’s agenda and are letting him get away with outlandish claims.

Johnston said journalists need to exert more confidence and be more aggressive when seeking out the truth, especially during this year’s election.

“Tell people that which they wouldn’t know, and explain to people what the story is about in [a] way ordinary readers will understand,” Johnston said. “Secondly, get some back-bone.”

What needs to change and who’s ahead of the curve? altogether dismissive of the idea of objectivity because he believes it is sometimes possible for journalists to keep their opinions out of their work. Twenty years ago, he covered abortion for the Omaha World-Herald and he said he had to gain respect from extremists on both sides, which meant not revealing his opinion on the issue.

However, Buttry said he has run into conflict with being objective in his reporting. In 1996, he did a story on the 25-year anniversary of the championship title of a women’s basketball team and how this team impacted their small town and women’s sports in general. He had two personal connections with the story: one of the players was his sister-inlaw, and he ended up interviewing her sister.

In this case though, not being objective helped him tell a better, more informative story.

“My history helped me get some interviews and tell the story well,” Buttry said.

Overall, Buttry argued that it is difficult to remain objective, even for those at the top of newsrooms. He said when editors make decisions on what is newsworthy and what isn’t, those decisions are influenced mostly by their own opinions.

Objectivity and the election

Many independent media outlets have already — for the most part — abandoned objectivity, and they are still producing excellent pieces of journalism. For example, Mother Jones, an independent magazine, published an in depth, investigative piece looking at the startling problems in private prisons. The reporter spent four months undercover as a prison guard and exposed the harsh reality for those within the system.

In his reporting, he refused to hold back his opinion on the deplorable conditions he found. Other independent media outlets are also producing groundbreaking stories without, and sometimes because of, their refusal to adhere to the traditional edicts of objective journalism.

Buttry said abandoning the constraints of objectivity doesn’t prevent journalists from producing quality work. Buttry said there needs to be continued discussion about objectivity in journalism. As a professor in the field, he said he doesn’t tell his students to be objective or not objective. Instead, he said he challenges his students to think about the concept as a whole — warts and all.

“I think we need to be honest about the flaws of objectivity,” he said. _________________________________ Ana Borruto is a third-year journalism major with biases, just like everyone else. They can be reached at aborruto@ithaca.edu.

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Glenn Greenwald, one of the founders of The Intercept, has been a long-time critic of objectivity in the media. And during this election cycle in particular, Greenwald has criticized other journalists and cor-

porate media for using “faux objectivity” when reporting. In his article written in March of 2016 titled “The Rise of Trump Shows the Danger and Sham of Compelled Journalistic ‘Neutrality,’” Greenwald wrote that media outlets are doing very little in expressing the threat Trump represents because of the traditional model of objectivity they have pledged to follow.

“Under this framework of corporate journalism, to denounce Trump, or even to sound alarms about the dark forces he’s exploiting and unleashing, would not constitute journalism,” he wrote in his article.

After Trump received the Republican nomination, the mainstream media has been more aggressive in criticizing him. However, the criticism seem to be too little too late, as the media failed to sufficiently take Trump on before he secured the GOP nomination.

Greenwald argued that this idea of faux objectivity isn’t new. He said during the presidency of George W. Bush, major media corporations censored themselves and failed to sufficiently investigate and criticize the United States’ involvement in the “War on Terror.”

“Most large media outlets suppressed journalistic criticism of things like torture and grotesque war crimes carried out by the U.S. as part of the war on terror, and even changed their language by adopting government euphemisms to obscure what was being done,” Greenwald wrote in his article.

This attitude can be seen in the fact that outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post and

Gender Testing or Biological Sexism?

The history behind justifying discrimination in athletics

By Mila Phelps-Friedl, Contributing Writer

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

S

ince the modern Olympics began and women were finally allowed to compete in the 1900 Olympics, there have been certain standards implemented to level the playing field for all athletes. At the forefront of these guidelines is that men and women are not allowed to compete against each other, as there are definitive differences in physical characteristics between the two sexes.

However, there is a stark difference between “leveling the playing field” and denouncing the advantageous qualities in some women that allow them to excel while celebrating the same qualities of male athletes.

Seen on the surface as sexist media coverage, this bizarre societal dynamic ran rampant at the Rio 2016 Olympics where Gold Medalist athletes like Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles were praised for being the female counterparts to male Olympians instead of applauded for their own dedication and accomplishment.

This issue goes much deeper than seemingly sexist media coverage at the Rio Olympics. The point of origin lies with the process of gender verification testing. This is a genetic test that is aimed to investigate athletes that don’t fit many of the stereotypes regarding femininity and performance that are projected upon female athletes. While this may seem like it goes along with the guidelines of keeping the playing field fair, in the past 48 years that this practice has been implemented, it has repeatedly targeted female athletes who seem to perform a little too well athletically. Gender verification testing creates an environment where equalizing the playing field has transformed into a form of biological sexism propagating the idea that

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strong, athletic women don’t occur naturally and should be questioned.

The suspicion of gender fraud in these huge athletic events first originated in the 1936 Olympics when, as reported by The New York Times, female runners Stella Walsh of Poland and Helen Stephens of the United States were accused of being male for their stellar running times and somewhat masculine physiques.

Only two years later, Dora Ratjen, a German high-jumper, was forced to return her gold medal because she was found to have male genitalia.

The Olympic committee eventually updated its humiliating techniques for testing gender, namely stripping in front of a courtroom, and adopted more scientific measures for gender verification testing in 1968. Since then there have been three highly publicized cases of female athletes who were investigated based on complaints that their performances, or physiques were in fact too masculine.

As reported by Matt Slater of the BBC, Maria Jose Martinez-Patino, a Spanish hurdler, was suspended from competing for three years in 1985 after being identified as an XY female. Her condition, Swyer syndrome, occurs when the Y chromosome only affects the functioning of

the ovaries and usually doesn’t present any advantageous male traits.

Martinez-Patino had to fight for all three of those years to explain that her lack of estrogen production did not mean that the naturally high levels of testosterone in her system gave her any advantage in competition.

In April of 2011, the International Association of Athletics Federations implemented a new set of rules regarding the amount of testosterone a female could have in their bloodstream before they qualified as “masculine.” In agreement with the International Olympic Committee, the committee mandated that this qualified as “anything above the bottom of the male range, 10 nanomoles per litre (nmol/L) of blood.” A test could be administered if there was any suspicion of gender fraud based on appearance, or the possibility that the athlete in question could be doping. So what’s wrong here? Testosterone is not merely a male hormone, though it is typically associated with masculine traits.

This narrow scale especially loses its grounding in light of the strides we have made in regards to our understanding of hyperandrogenism and other genetic sexual abnormalities.

In many cases high levels of testosterone have very little effect on these

“Gender verification testing creates an environment where equalizing the playing field has transformed into a form of biological sexism propagating the idea that strong, athletic women don’t occur naturally and should be questioned.”

profile female athlete who, at age 18, knocked 7 seconds off of her PR in the 800m, breaking the South African record and setting a dazzling precedent for her future competitors.

Instead of being commended for this accomplishment, as BBC journalist Matt Slater wrote, “The IAAF felt “obliged to investigate [Semenya]”, if only to rule out doping.” Semenya was found to have high levels of testosterone in her bloodstream and consequently was barred from competing for several months while the International Olympic Committee decided if this had been the reason behind her outstanding performance. A common theme in all reporting on Olympic athletes is the noticeable double standard when it comes to skilled performances.

Sloot said: “To be an Olympic athlete is to be somewhat outside of the norm. To be competing at the Olympic level you’re already outside of the norms, but naturally in the sense that that’s just what your body does.

Except for when you’re female, and this is why it’s so important that we [the IOC] define gender.”

That’s why athletes like Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, who are biologically gifted with advantages like a tremendously long wingspan or high functioning fast twitch muscles that are key in sprinting, are celebrated, while in the case of Semenya, it’s thought there must be something illegal happening for her to be so good.

The most recent and most influential case of gender testing took place in regards to Dutee Chand, an Indian sprinter who amazed the running world with her championships in the 100m and 200m runs.

She failed a series of grueling gender verification tests and was prohibited from competing altogether in 2014.

Chand ended up going to court over the unjust regulation of testosterone in female Olympic athletes versus the lack of any such regulation in males. As New York Times journalist John Branch reported in late July after the court ruled in Chand’s favor, “The final appeals court for

global sports further blurred the line separating male and female athletes on Monday, ruling that a common factor in distinguishing the sexes — the level of natural testosterone in an athlete’s body — is insufficient to bar some women from competing against females.” The IOC and the IAAF finally admitted that they were wrong and this was a huge win for Chand and other athletes like her.

It allowed them to compete for the next two years while the IOC and the IAAF examined the regulations that are necessary to keep an “equal competition field” between the sexes, since testosterone is not an accurate unit of measurement.

But if all of this is supposed to ensure a level of equality, there’s something wrong with the fact that biological inequalities seem to be the only thing addressed when it comes to Olympic athletes. “There really isn’t the same type of popular conversation about the other kinds of inequalities that might distinguish athletes from each other,” Shostak said, “like what kind of training/facilities did these athletes have available in their youth?”

It’s very interesting that, at least in the field of athletics, we, as a society, are still so focused on physical and biological forms of equality while the wide range of athletes’ backgrounds hold no real merit as long as they can perform. So be warned — if you’re a female who performs well but doesn’t fit the feminine stereotype, you may have to undergo gender verification testing, no matter how wrong that seems. ___________________________________ Mila Phelps-Friedl is second-year journalism major who will tackle anyone who thinks gender testing is a good idea. You can reach them at mphelpsfriedl@ithaca.edu.

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athletes’ performance.

Judith Peraino, faculty member of Cornell University’s Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies department, said “Any ‘gender testing’ is invasive and inherently biased to norms, and I think that as a broader spectrum of gender expression becomes recognized, sports organizations will need to figure out new ways to classify the abstract physical capacities of bodies to ensure fair competitions ...

These need not be tied to gender in any essential way.”

This impression was echoed by Vanderbilt University professor John M. Sloot, author of Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture.

“The problem that I see, or the one we need to talk about, is there have been standards for how we define gender, and yet they are always shifting. In creating these rules we, and by we I mean the IOC, have to be consistent, transparent (explaining what meets the standards) and most importantly, we need to acknowledge that this definition is not natural, we need to remember that these are social constructs — made up, just like the rules of the game.”

If all of these rules and guidelines are meant to level the athletic playing field, why has there never been any coverage of male genetic testing? Perhaps it has something to do with the stereotype of femininity still pushed upon female athletes. Sara Shostak, associate professor of Sociology at Brandeis University, heavily questioned the specific expectations set for female athletes. Shostak said they are being pulled in two different directions in regards to what their sport demands of their body, versus what society demands of their gender in line with stereotypes.

“It’s interesting how much of the focus is on the alleged lack of femininity in these athletes; can we imagine an athlete who’s very stereotypically feminine in her appearances and performs as well as Castor Semenya, would she get gender tested?” Shostak said.

Caster Semenya was another high

Left Out

How the political spectrum shuts out progressives

By Hannah Crisafulli, Contributing Writer

“

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

ficulty running against ‘Big Money’ Democrats” in the current political system.”

Svart said the two party system relegates many progressives to voting for the Democrats even when the Democrats aren’t representative of those voters’ views.

“Democrats [have] suppressed their own left flank,” she said.

Proof of this can be seen in the result of this year’s Democratic primary. When Sen. Bernie Sanders entered the race he was a “fresh face” for politics: a man who refused to be influenced by big money, wanted to take down Wall Street, actively supported the LGBTQ+ community, advocated for the legalization of marijuana, voiced a distaste for current wealth distribution, aimed to raise minimum wage and fought for the social equality of minority groups.

For voters, especially millennials, this self-proclaimed democratic socialist was seen as the solution to the country’s domestic and economic flaws.

But in the end, it was Clinton who was victorious in the primary.

And one of the reasons why Sanders supporters have been so frustrated with Clinton’s nomination is that Sanders’s views are far to the left of Clinton’s. Her nomination has increased the viability of the theory that we don’t exist on a left-right political spectrum, but a center-right one.

This is because Clinton, the supposedly liberal candidate of the two major party nominees, has taken a number of less than progressive positions during her presidential campaign. For example, during the

primary, Sanders and his supporters criticized Clinton for accepting donations from Super PACs and large corporations. According to The Washington Post, Clinton has accepted $141.3 million in campaign funds from PACS. In comparison, Sanders accepted no donations from any sort of PAC or large corporations.

Additionally, according to a Fortune magazine article from September of 2016, Clinton has said she wants to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour rather than Sanders’s proposal of $15 an hour, and has proposed taxing the top income bracket of Americans under a 50 percent rate rather than over 50 percent. Clinton also does not support the full implementation of universal healthcare, does not advocate for the legalization of recreational marijuana and wants to maintain a military presence in the Middle East — all positions eschewed by progressives.

And as The Intercept reported on Sept. 30, in a private conversation with campaign donors, Clinton herself described her views as spanning from “the center-left to the centerright” of the political spectrum. In July, Clinton has also said, “I get accused of being kind of moderate and center. I plead guilty.”

The centrist position that supposedly “liberal” politicians like Clinton take in the U.S. has been criticized by left-wing politicians who feel marginalized by the limits A center-right spectrum of the spectrum, such as Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

Maria Svart, the national director of “The two party system isthe worst-case the Democratic Socialists of America, scenario,” Stein said in an interview said, “Left-wing Democrats have difwith The Intercept. “In my view, the worst horror of all is a politi“When left-wing American voters hit the cal system that tells us we have choose between two lethal oppolls in November, many will be compro- to tions.” mising at least one of their political views, Professor Richard F. Bensel, Gary S. Davis professor in the Desomething that occurs far less frequently for partment of Government at Cornell University, agrees with the voters in multiparty systems.” notion that the U.S. leans toward a more center-right approach to I’m voting for one candidate because I’m afraid of what the other is capable of.”

You hear something like this almost every time you have a discussion about the 2016 presidential election; people are not voting for a candidate, but rather, voting for the lesser of two evils. With Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton having won the nominations of the two major political parties, distaste toward our current political system has skyrocketed.

According to Gallup, as of August 2016, 52 percent of Americans view Clinton unfavorably and 62 percent have the same opinion about Trump.

By these numbers, more than half of American voters dislike the two major party candidates in the election.

So why is it that regardless of the opinions of a majority of Americans, voters are still only provided with just two options that have a realistic chance of victory? The superficial answer: the two party political system.

From the problem of the two party system emerges another issue, however. Namely, that one side of the political spectrum is not being represented by the two major parties. Because even though the Democratic Party has moved left in recent years, their views still constitute more of the center of the political spectrum while the Republican Party represents the right wing.

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.

“In a private conversation with campaign donors, Clinton herself described her views as spanning from “the center-left to the center-right” of the political spectrum. In July, Clinton has also said, ‘I get accused of being kind of moderate and center. I plead guilty.’”

politics in some respects.

“I do think that the United States generally is to the right of most nations with respect to economic issues,” Bensel said. “I also believe that the United States is to the left of most nations with respect to cultural and social issues (especially compared to nations outside of Western Europe).”

But if a voter holds progressive viewpoints on both economic and social issues, to fit within the confines of what the political spectrum offers, they often have to sacrifice their economic viewpoints to vote for someone who fits with their social views.

What happens next?

ty system and the limited political spectrum it produces, the anger that has been caused by the nominees of the two major parties is beginning to expose the negative aspects of the system.

So, the next time someone says that they’re voting for one candidate because they are the lesser of two evils, remind them not to blame the candidate as an individual; blame centuries of an engraved centristright, limiting political system. ___________________________________ Hannah Crisafulli is a first-year history major who is considering starting her own third party. They can be reached at hcrisafulli@ithaca.edu.

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When left-wing American voters hit the polls in November, many will be compromising at least one of their political views, something that occurs far less frequently for voters in multiparty systems. Norman Solomon, co-founder of the online activist group RootsAction.org, said, “The options for leftist voters in the general election are quite circumscribed.”

Solomon agreed: “Electoral politics in the United States leans in a centrist-right direction,” he said. But he said overall, the country as a whole is more center-left.

Both Bensel and Solomon agreed that despite the increase in popularity for America’s minority parties, the 2016 election is not the potential end to the two party system or the center-right political spectrum.

“The Republican party will change quite a bit, but the ‘name’ will remain the same and that, at least, will survive,” Bensel said. “The Democrats will probably change very little in the next few years.” Solomon agreed that “the two party system remains quite entrenched” in the politics of

the country.

Svart said one reform that could address this problem is moving to a parliamentary system. In countries that feature a parliamentary system, “political compromise” comes with a much lighter connotation than in the U.S. In Canadian politics, for example, there are 21 registered political parties that align with different viewpoints, each of which is active in the country’s political process.

Svart said a multiparty system would provide the opportunity for numerous parties to form coalitions and establish leftist policies that would not be created otherwise.

This would provide individuals with the opportunity to vote for a political party that actually represents an individual’s ideology.

While most Americans aren’t clamoring for a move to the parliamentary system, the general idea of reforming the two party system would have the support of the majority of Americans. A Gallup poll from September 2016 showed that 57 percent of Americans think a third party is needed, up 11 percent from 2012.

But despite this, even at the state level, it is extremely difficult to get third party identifying representatives into office; the two exceptions out of the current members of Congress are Sanders and Sen. Angus King, both of whom identify as independents rather than an official third party.

Nonetheless, candidates like Stein have brought attention to the options on the left outside of the centrist part of the political spectrum occupied by Democrats. The attractive qualities of candidates like Stein show that although academics and activists like Bensel and Solomon speculate that the 2016 election is not cause for the end of the two par-

Protecting Perpetrators

How society looks out for the wrong people in rape cases

By Morgan Diegel, Contributing Writer

B

y now, many people know the story. In January of 2015, Brock Turner — a white, Stanford athlete — raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. He was only stopped when two bikers witnessed the attack, chased Turner and tackled him to the ground, restraining him until police arrived.

The prosecution in the case argued for Turner to be given six years in prison.

Aaron Persky, the judge in the case — and a former Stanford athlete — instead gave Turner six months in jail. In the sentencing transcript published by The Guardian, Persky explained his reasoning for the lenient punishment was that a prison sentence would have “a severe impact” on Turner. In the end, Turner only ended up serving three months in jail, getting out early for “good behavior.”

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

What’s wrong with this picture?

People might answer that question with any number of responses blaming the judge, the justice system, white privilege, or Turner himself. But one of the biggest issues is that this kind of “punishment” isn’t isolated to Turner. So much attention has been brought to the Turner case (and rightfully so) that it is difficult for people to understand that there are countless Judge Perskys out there giving lenient sentences to rapists because they care more about the impact punishment will have on the attacker than justice for the victim.

Any person with an Internet connection can quickly find examples similar to the Turner case. David Becker, charged with two counts of rape in 2016, was given two years probation. If he doesn’t violate probation, his charges will be dropped and he won’t have to register as a sex offender.

Austin Wilkerson, who was convicted of a 2014 rape, was sentenced to two years of night jail while he attends school. Ma’Lik Richmond, one of the assailants from the Steubenville rape case in 2012, was out of jail and back to playing football for his high school team within a year.

These are just a few of the cases that have received national publicity. Furthermore, most of these are assailants who were not only brought to trial, but

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successfully convicted. The majority of sexual assault cases don’t even get that far. According to Department of Justice statistics from 2010 through 2014, only about 34.4 percent of sexual assaults are reported to the police and even reporting the assault doesn’t mean the assailant will be convicted.

Tiffani Ziemann, Title IX coordinator at Ithaca College, said that in her experience, only a very small amount of sexual assault cases go to court. “People think it’s hard to prove, and there’s so much responsibility on the victim to prove it,” she said. “Survivors give up because the process is so difficult. The accused will plea down [to a lesser charge]. There’s a culture of ‘We don’t want to ruin someone’s life over this.’”

But the idea of “not wanting to ruin someone’s life” doesn’t take into account the life that has already been severely and permanently changed: the victim’s.

In the case of Turner, after hearing about his sentence, the unnamed survivor read a powerful letter discussing the “severe impact” the assault has already had on her life. This letter caught national attention and spurred responses from thousands of people.

One such person was Yana Mazurkevich, a junior at Ithaca College and photographer of two photo sets about rape and rape culture. The second series, “It Happens,” was purposely released the same day Turner went free after his three-month jail sentence. The intense images depict many settings of sexual assault, leading up to the last photo of a woman lying behind a dumpster — a very obvious reference to the Turner case. Mazurkevich said, “When I found

the second series is not centered solely on Turner. Mazurkevich wanted to draw attention to the issue of sexual assault in its entirety, and how people view and handle it.

“We’re not looking at sexual assault as a big [problem]. I feel like people are dismissing it,” she said.

Why aren’t people taking sexual assault seriously?

Well, for judges and juries to convict and sentence rapists properly, for prosecutors to put forth a solid case and for survivors to even come forward and persevere through an investigation and trial, a certain attitude about sexual assault has to exist. Currently, there’s a trend to blame the victim for the attack.

For example, the survivor in the Turner case was asked by investigators, “What were you wearing?” and “How much did you drink?” This not only downplays the significance of the assault, but also completely shifts the blame away from the perpetrator.

Much like rape itself, victim blaming is not uncommon. A survey published in 2015 by the UK’s Telegraph News reported that more than 25 percent of the overall public thought rape victims were “at least partly” responsible for being assaulted if they were drunk, and 31 percent thought so if the victim had been taking drugs. And there are more judges than just Persky not taking rape seriously. In 2014, Canadian judge Robin Camp asked a rape victim in court “why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?”

“Survivors give up because the process is so difficult. The accused will plea down [to a lesser charge]. There’s a culture of ‘We don’t want to ruin someone’s life over this.’” out that Brock Turner was being released, I decided to shoot the last image, which is “It Happens.”

However, aside from the last image,

And as seen in the Turner case, people often raise concerns over how punishment will hurt the assailant. That leads to doubts over whether consequences are

Claire McClusky and non-coerced “yes” for true consent.

At the moment, affirmative consent is the mandated standard in very few states.

Ziemann said a change in the attitude about consent will “shift how we feel when [consent] is violated.”

That could lead to more victims willing to report their assaults, because the blame will be on the accused and not the accuser.

The Turner case was not unique, but it could be the case that garners enough outrage to unite people against letting another rapist slip through the cracks. Or as District Attorney Rosen put it in an interview with Mercury News, the Stanford survivor deserves more than sympathy.

“Let’s give her a legacy that will send the next Brock Turner to prison.” _______________________________________ Morgan Diegel is a first-year writing major with a minor in calling out systemic societal issues. They can be reached out mdiegel@ithaca.edu.

really necessary. After Judge Thomas Rooke gave David Becker probation for rape charges, Becker’s attorney said that the “goal” of his sentence was to not interfere with Becker’s education and “college experience.” The standard thought process is that the rapist was young. Maybe they were drunk. They learned their lesson. Is it worth “ruin-

dent Joe Biden wrote a response to the survivor of the attack. Jeff Rosen, the district attorney in the case, sponsored legislation to close the loophole in California law that allowed the judge leeway on Turner’s sentence. California state law requires a mandatory three to eight year prison sentence for rape with force, but this somehow does not apply when the

“Becker’s attorney said that the ‘goal’ of his sentence was to not interfere with Becker’s education and “college experience.’ The standard thought process is that the rapist was young. Maybe they were drunk.” ing their life” over this? Many people don’t seem to understand that rape and sexual assault have a severe impact on the victims’ lives. Shouldn’t the punishment of rapists reflect that?

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victim is unconscious. So there is a push for change, but what has to be done?

Ziemann said an important step is just how we as a society talk about sex and consent.

“I think that’s the core,” she said.

What comes next?

“There’s so much onus on the victim or survivor to have done something to stop There was clear outrage over the the assault … the shift needs to be tooutcome of the Turner case. Over a wards [affirmative consent.]” million people signed a Change.org Affirmative consent is a twist on the petition to remove Judge Persky from “no means no” movement, the idea behis position on the bench. Vice Presi- ing that the absence of a “no” isn’t good enough; there has to be an affirmative

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Helping the Hungry The fallacies of food aid

By Catherine Colgan, Contributing Writer

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P

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

W

e’ve all been through this ordeal before, ready to scrape halfeaten leftovers into the garbage only to be halted by that same dreaded scolding: “Finish your dinner, there are children starving in Africa.”

But lack of food in developing countries is more than just a guilt trip designed to make us finish our own meals. According to the World Food Programme, 12.9 percent of the people in developing countries are undernourished, with sub-Saharan Africa the area with the highest prevalence of hunger.

In some cases, situations of famine or war demand urgent intervention. Thus begins the practice of offering food aid — a practice the U.S., and other wealthy nations such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan, are particularly well-versed in, but one that has a plethora of unintended consequences.

According to the online news site The African Economist, food aid is the practice of providing developing countries with food assistance to alleviate poverty and hunger. By this definition, it is meant to relieve suffering in communities unable to provide for themselves. In some cases, this aid is necessary and has saved thousands of lives. For example, after withstanding a catastrophic earthquake in 2010, the American Red Cross provided Haitians with food aid. Countries like Ethiopia, Kenya and Pakistan have also been provided with food relief in emergency situations to help alleviate hunger in the communities affected.

In 2010, the U.S. invested more than $2 billion into food aid and assisted 65 million people, according to Oxfam — an international confederation of charitable organizations.

It appears the U.S., and other countries that provide food aid, respond to poverty and hunger in a proactive and effective manner. So what’s the problem here?

For one thing, in providing such aid, countries like the U.S. and other aid providers may not be acting altruistically. Given the imperialistic history of these countries’ involvement in foreign affairs, it is not unreasonable to think that a similar motive may be behind the practice of providing food aid as well. Johnson Makoba, a sociology professor at the

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University of Nevada-Reno with a specialization in third world development, concluded countries that can benefit providers of food aid in some way are often prioritized over others.

“Countries are held to different standards,” he said. “If a country is strategically important … Western countries are willing to provide aid without asking a lot of questions.”

There are clear examples of this preferential treatment in U.S. food aid practices, as such aid has been distributed in territories that hold tactical interests to the U.S. — such as Afghanistan or Egypt — Makoba said. This means other countries that may have a greater need are less likely to receive food aid.

As one of the world’s most powerful democratic nations, Makoba said the U.S. may also be using food aid in order to establish democracy in other countries. Cultural Survival reports that this tactic can be employed for a number of reasons: to prevent the adoption of a non-capitalist form of government or a government with a one-party ruler, to facilitate cooperation between nations of like governments or just to act on a genuine desire to improve life and give a voice to a wider range of people. However, these efforts are usually unsuccessful.

“The democratization process really doesn’t go anywhere,” Makoba said.

He asserts that the purpose may be lost when local governments fail to take the means necessary to promote democracy.

“In most cases, the local elite will pretend they are going through this process to hold elections and such,” he said. “But the participation and education to involve more people is

questionable.”

In addition to the less than charitable motivations behind providing food aid, there are also several underlying ramifications that can cancel out the benefit of such support.

One such issue is that the food delivered to developing nations often does not measure up to the nutritional needs of the country receiving it. A study conducted by Tufts University from 2009 to 2011 raised concerns over the quality of the food being provided to countries, concluding that more often than not, food aid recipients are given cheap provisions that are unsustainable for a long term diet.

This could be because food aid is sometimes used as a means of ridding a wealthy country of surplus food. This is known as “food dumping.” With food dumping, wealthier countries deliver extra food supplies to poorer communities. Oxfam cited food dumping as a prominent flaw in food aid because it guarantees a lack of consciousness in what provisions are provided. Countries may receive supplies or food that are not suited for their situation.

An additional problem with food aid is that it has often left receiving countries at a severe economic disadvantage. Generally, food aid is provided to undernourished countries at a price under the cost of production, Oxfam noted. Oxfam observed that this undermines local production because farmers cannot keep up and go out of business, resulting in agricultural depression and causing poverty and famine to worsen.

Many developing nations are at an economic disadvantage in their relationship with first world countries.

“There are clear examples of this preferential treatment in U.S. food aid practices, as such aid has been distributed in territories that hold tactical interests to the U.S. — such as Afghanistan or Egypt.”

insurgents in Afghanistan were reportedly seizing food aid and using the resources against U.S. forces stationed in the country at the time.

Yale Alumni Magazine also reported that rebel groups have been known to broadcast the starvation of local communities in order to reap the benefits of the assistance given.

Food aid from countries falling into the wrong hands means such assistance can actually end up creating conflict rather than solving it.

A study by economists at Harvard and Yale found that for every 10 percent rise in the amount of food aid to developing countries, there was an increased chance of conflict in the region it was delivered to.

Additionally, some countries that receive aid also have unstable and corrupt governments that prevent the food aid from reaching the general public. In particular, Forbes reported that severe manipulation of food aid in Zimbabwe has led to an investigation of the president, Robert Mugabe, and The New York Times reported in 2010 that over half of Somalia’s food aid was stolen by corrupt contractors. Many other recipients of food aid experience similar corruption in their government, often negating the possible benefits of the assistance.

Dambisa Moyo, an international economist, global affair analyst and author, said the aid offered to these corrupt governments helps solidify their control.

“A constant stream of (resources) is a perfect way to keep an insufficient government in power,” she said. “All the government really needs to do is court and cater to its donors to stay in power.”

Overall, whether providing food aid is actually an attempt to help starving communities or just an effort to fulfill our own democratic agenda, few benefits have been elicited from either situation. The various drawbacks of food aid demand a further exploration of alternative means of tackling poverty and hunger.

One such alternative idea is the concept known as “food sovereignty,” a movement by developing countries — independent of interference from food aid providers — to produce their own food in an effective and substantial manner.

Rather than submit to international economic arrangements, food sover-

eignty addresses the local needs of each individual community.

According to the Czech non-governmental organization Glopolis, food sovereignty involves resisting participation in the world trade market and recognizing local agriculture as the primary means for income and food, rather than relying on other nations. To achieve this, local governments must be revised to be able to act independently from countries providing food aid. And according to Glopolis, correcting flaws within the system of imports and exports of food and not relying on intervention by other countries are essential steps toward food sovereignty.

It is clear that despite all foreign efforts made, both wealthy and impoverished nations need to address several glaring shortcomings in the practice of food aid. And if this is to happen, food aid providers will likely have to give up their current idea of what helping developing nations means.

As Slate Magazine put it in 2012, when it comes to food aid, “We need to engage in exactly this sort of painful calculus, equipped with a fuller understanding of how we’re affecting those on the receiving end of our good intentions.” ___________________________________ Catherine Colgan is a first-yearexploratory major who thinks countries should buy local when it comes to food. They can be reached at ccolgan@ithaca.edu.

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Upfront

The pressure to maintain a primary source of economic income through participation in world trade has driven many countries further into poverty. Countries are often forced to focus time and energy on harvesting specific goods to export to first world countries as opposed to selling them domestically, explained the website Global Issues. Sub-Saharan Africa, which receives the most food aid, has particularly suffered from this issue.

According to the Journal of Economic Perspectives, many countries in this region supply the rest of the world with goods such as fish, coffee, fruits and other products that could potentially benefit their own hungry communities. Producing food to feed their own populations becomes subservient to the drive for profit, perpetuating the need for food aid.

William Schanbacher, whose PhD research has included the study of the ethics of the global food system, said the psychological dynamics of such a dependent relationship with providers of food aid are important.

He said societies live in a constant exchange of one service for another.

According to this concept, developing countries are hugely indebted to the first world countries who constantly intervene and provide food aid. “To have to rely upon another culture for your very livelihood … creates a problem with the self-identity of these third world countries,” Schanbacher said.

As if these issues weren’t enough, the distribution of food aid has also presented problems in the past. According to the magazine Foreign Policy, food aid is often delivered without proper regulation to a number of communities, including refugee camps, drought-stricken areas and the endemically poor. The lack of supervision over what happens to the food once it arrives in the targeted country means that those in need may lose out to illicit practices; the food may even be intercepted and sold illegally in markets. The Herald Tribune noted in 2011 that packages marked with U.S. and World Food Programme stamps have been found for sale in Mogadishu, far from the communities they were intended to serve in Somalia.

The Guardian reported that food aid can be intercepted by anyone, from thieving businessmen to insurgent groups. As Slate Magazine noted in 2012, the Taliban and other

L. MINISTRYofCOOL. MI BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue

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Arts, entertainment and other things cooler than us.

Beyond Acceptance Speeches Recipients advocating for issues that matter

By Amber Raiken, Contributing Writer

E

diminished and ignored for their work and for what they have to offer. Since Williams’ unexpected speech achieved multiple standing ovations at the BET Awards, it’s safe to say that the aftermath of it consisted of a great deal of positive feedback as well. On Twitter especially, celebrities have spoken up, like Zendaya who tweeted “I have no words...eloquent, moving, spot on & perfectly put.” Orange is the New Black star Uzo Aduba quoted Williams in his speech and tweeted, “The burden of the brutalized, is not to comfort the bystander”- Jesse Williams, and Williams’ co-star Debbie Allen quoted him on Twitter as well.

Miranda presented a speech supporting the phrase, “Love Is Love” at the Tony Awards. This sonnet was a major tribute to his wife for making him the person that his is today. He reflected upon how much he loves her and that the love they have for each other is encouraging and keeps him going. “Love is love, love cannot be killed or swept aside.” This line from his speech explains that it doesn’t matter what gender you love and that people truly deserve to be in love because it’s something so rare and special that it should be held onto. According to Vanity Fair, the speech was a reaction to the Orlando shooting and was created to show support to those who were lost and victims for just being in love. Another thing Manuel said in his speech is “now fill the world with music, love, and pride.” He’s explaining that everyone has the right to express their love for another person, and they shouldn’t have to be stopped from doing that just because of what society thinks about it being “wrong” or “inappropriate” when it’s really just being in love. After expressing his true impressions of the concept of love, Miranda obtained very popular reactions to his speech, just like Williams did. ET Online writes about how the speech brought the audiences to tears since it was so meaningful. USA Today also calls his speech a sonnet for the way it can move people just from watching it. Williams and Miranda brought the social issues out in the open, as a way to prove that a change was needed to come.

More celebrities are refusing to sit still while the world continues

to go downhill. Their course of action and mindset shows what they want to bring to the world. They’re encouraging other people to have a voice like they are, since so many people look up to them. Celebrities want to be role models and set a good example for those people who admire, which is exactly what they’ve done by speaking up for minorities. Despite the lack of support different races, gender, and the LGBTQ community obtain, multiple celebrities want these people to know that they have someone on their side. From Williams, to Miranda, and to so much more, they’re taking a leap in speaking so society as a whole can later achieve more by doing. ______________________________________ Amber Raiken is a first-year writing major who knows the difference between storytelling and exploitation. You can email them at araiken@ithaca.edu.

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Ministry of Cool

very day we see the issues within society grow, and luckily, there have been individuals trying to speak up for society as a whole.

Discriminating against someone due to their race, sexual orientation, and gender presentation has been a very prominent social issue within various forms of media and businesses, which is why celebrities are stepping in. Some celebrities refuse to let others be put down by society’s expectations, and they continue to give people more of a voice in the world. Within the past five years, multiple celebrities like Ellen Page, Kerry Washington, and Anne Hathaway made public announcements that brought support to gay marriage and the LGBTQ community. According to The Hollywood Reporter, one move Hathaway and her husband made in 2012 was they sold their wedding photos and donated some of the profits to marriage equality advocacy group.

Within social media as well, celebrities have put an emphasis on Black Lives Matter and Gender Equality. The most recent and well-known speeches were by popular Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams at the 2016 BET Awards and famous broadway playwright and star of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda at the 2016 Tony Awards. They spoke up for the efforts of Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community respectively, at an extremely public event as a way to represent the change these celebrities intend to bring.

Williams gave a unique and outstanding acceptance speech at the BET Awards. Williams made sure to give thanks to the black women of society for all the work they’ve done, as a way to show respect towards them and Black Lives Matter. He also related to the Tamir Rice case and how if it was a white child playing in the park, the police wouldn’t have felt the need to bring out guns. Williams acknowledged the actions of the police in Rice’s death and how it shows how racism is becoming more of an issue.

“Freedom is always coming in the hereafter… the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now.” This line from Williams’ speech shows how much people deserve to live freely and how black people are constantly being

More Than Just Half-Baked Things the Kardashians get right

By Alexis Morillo, Staff Writer

BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue

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hether one would wish to admit it or not, the Kardashian family is an integral part of popular culture in the United States. However, it wasn’t always like this. Their rise to stardom began long before the existence of their social media following, cosmetic lines, modeling careers, or family reality show. The Kardashian name became more well known when Kris Jenner’s first husband (and Kourtney, Khloé, Kim, and Rob’s father) Robert Kardashian gained attention for defending O.J. Simpson in his notorious 1994 murder trial. After his death in 2003, his ex wife Kris and the Kardashian children inherited his wealth and slowly started to inch their way into the spotlight with Kim working as a personal stylist for celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and as a closet organizer for Paris Hilton. Although one of their most well known claims to fame (or notoriety), is the leak of Kim’s sex tape with singer Ray J in Feb. 2007, the same year, just eight months after the leak, their reality show Keeping Up With the Kardashians was announced. Since then, they have appeared on television screens and tabloids everywhere and are constantly under the public eye. Their fame, though it may not be possible to pinpoint the exact reason they became the big public figures they are, has led them to be judged on each move they make but has also given them the platform to have their opinion on important issues to be heard. It’s fair to say that even if their mistakes are reported on more often than not, there are some things that the Kardashians really aren’t wrong about.

1. The dialogue they promote about the Armenian Genocide The Armenian Genocide, which took place from 1915 to 1918 was the mass killing of the Armenian people in Turkey by the Ottoman

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Empire during World War I and was continued from 1920 to 1923. Years later, although the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide characterized genocide as the “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, because this definition was accepted thirty years after the Armenian Genocide took place, the mass execution of Armenian people that took place is not globally accepted as a genocide. The Kardashians, who identify as proud Armenians, do not shy away from this controversial topic and even dedicated an entire episode of their show to outline their travels to Armenia for the first time to learn about the harsh history of their people. Kim even published an open letter with Time Magazine that talks about her experience in Armenia writing, “The whole point of remembering the genocide is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. A million-and-a-half people were brutally massacred, and a country can just pretend like it never happened? I don’t think that’s right.” The family also took April 24, 2015, the commemoration date for 100 years since the genocide took place, to post photos on their social media accounts paying tribute to the victims. Just recently on Sept. 20, Kim continued her outspoken advocacy for the formal recognition of the genocide by purchasing a full page advertisement in the New York Times in response to an ad posted in The Wall Street Journal that denied the genocide, merely referring to it as a “1915 tragedy” between Turkey and Armenia. Although their publicized stances on all political controversies may not be correct, this one they’ve got totally right.

2. Kim’s stance on body positivity.

Body positivity is a topic that is constantly talked about and analyzed, and as public figures, Kim and Khloé Kardashian are leading

by example. Kim, who is known for her selfies, some of which get deemed risque, owns her body and decision to share photos of herself without the expectation of getting objectified. She even published a book, Selfish, which was made up of nothing but photos she took of herself. Even with all of the criticism leading up to its release, it still sold 32,000 copies in the first three months. Kim also faced backlash this past March, after she posted a nude photo censored with tasteful black blocks and the caption, “When you’re like I have nothing to wear LOL.” This isn’t anything too out of the ordinary, seeing as Kim has done nude photo shoots in the past, the most well known being her full frontal shoot with Paper Magazine.

She promotes messages of body positivity by being comfortable enough in her own skin to pose for these photos even with the high likelihood of fellow celebrities not agreeing with her. Among such celebrities are Piers Morgan and Bette Midler, both of which she called out on Twitter when they made jabs at her March photo. On the other hand, young female starlets find Kim’s openness about her body to be encouraging an open dialogue about the sexism that occurs in Hollywood. Ariel Winter of Modern Family stood by Kim’s decision to share this photo. According to E! News, she supported Kim in an interview with an Australian radio show. “I think that everybody’s body should be celebrated no matter what it is and I think that it’s great that she’s so comfortable with herself,” said Winter. “She’s able to post out there what she wants to post and if she wants to post a nude selfie, she can.”

3. How Khloe promotes her fitness routines.

As for fitness, Khloé constantly promotes routine exercise and healthy, nutritional choices. Unlike some of her sisters, she made this lifestyle change for personal reasons and to improve her own quality of

their way into the business world, not just television entertainment. Kourtney, Khloé, and Kim started DASH clothing boutique in 2006, but after about seven years of minimal profit with renovations and relocations they have three physical locations, an online store, and an infant clothing line. The boutique came to fruition after an idea Kourtney, the only one of the sisters to graduated college, had to help give Khloé something productive to do to cope with their father’s death.

Since then, they have found ways to promote their brand nationally and globally, and their international promotions have been outlined on their show. The family constantly finds ways to reach their audience while making bank, an example of this is the way Kim’s mobile app, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, blew up. Kim made an estimated $45 million off of the game alone, as reported in her Forbes “The New Mobile Moguls” cover story. Along with the game, Kim launched “Kimojis” — Kardashian themed emoticons — for people to download onto their smartphone keyboards. In the coming month, she plans to make physical “Kimoji” merchandise for her fans to purchase.

The way the Kardashian family weaved themselves into the forefront of American popular culture is intriguing — how they have used their platforms to promote some positive change and remained relevant after all these years is impressive. With a total following across all social media that easily reaches billions, it seems as though their relevance will be upheld for quite some time.

And as long as they do more good than harm, is that so wrong?

Alexis Morillo is a second-year journalism major who thinks reality television is a large-

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Ministry of Cool

life along the way. She has admitted that her love for working out started as a coping mechanism for her problematic relationship with ex-husband Lamar Odom. Since then, it has become part of her daily schedule, and she posts photos and videos of her exercising for all of her following to see. One such video was posted on Instagram about two months ago with the caption, “If I can do it. You can do it. It all starts with day one! It’s a lifestyle now.”

4. Kendall has broken into the modeling industry on her own.

Breaking into the modeling industry is hard when you’re an unknown face, although it may be harder when you have a preconceived reputation before walking into meetings with any potential employers. For Kendall Jenner, the latter was a reality, and in an interview with Entertainment Tonight she explained how her family name did not always give her the upper hand when looking for modeling opportunities. In fact, more often than not, it had the opposite effect. “You have no idea how many doors closed on me and how many adults were either initially reluctant to take a chance working with me or who outright laughed at me,” said Jenner. In 2011, she was the face of ads and runway shows for smaller brands like Forever21 and Sherri Hill but since then she has broken into the high fashion world, working with designers like Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, and Calvin Klein. Her resilience in trying to make it in the industry has paid off, quite literally, and according to Forbes she was added to their comprehensive list of highest paid models in 2015 ranking at number 16 out of 21. It is thought that her large social media following makes her prime model material for campaigns and advertisements since she can post about them on social media with the guarantee of millions of her fans seeing them.

5. They remain relevant through their entrepreneurship.

Even if the origin of their fame cannot be pinpointed completely, they remain relevant on their own.

Their show Keeping Up with the Kardashians is now on its 12th season, but the family has also made

RAW SAW

Vince Staples

FROM THE

Prima Donna

Album Review Tylor Colby

Frank Ocean

BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue

Sawdust Editor

Endless/ Blonde Album Review Haley Bissell

Contributing Writer

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“This little light of mine/ I’m gonna let it shine…”

Vince Staples sings the lines in monotone, his own melancholic rendition of the famous children’s gospel song ending with the bang of a firearm. This ends the intro track to Staples’s newest EP, Prima Donna, an opener that serves as excellent foreshadowing to the atmosphere listeners can expect from the release as a whole: brooding yet hazy, slight yet entrancing. While the record is in many ways underwhelming, it has a few moments where it transcends its sleepy presentation and highlights some of the ways Staples has found his own artistic fingerprint.

As skilled an emcee as he may be, Staples’s lyrical gymnastics are far more restrained as they have been in previous releases and collaborations, the focus being largely on creating a particular mood in the overall EP. The second track, “War Ready,” opens up with a relentless verse by Andre 3000 followed by Vince’s more laid-back set of bars. Underneath these clever, slow moving rhymes is a highly intricate, ever-changing drum and keys beat with its own nonrepeating melody. To have this underneath bars of rapping, while being subtle enough not to overpower the lyrics (see Tyler, The Creator’s “Cherry Bomb”), is an impressive feat. On top of that, the song’s chorus is also catchy.

One rather tedious quirk of the EP is the repetition of monotone song lyrics or phrases at the end of every track. What begins as a haunting aesthetic quickly becomes bland after the third song, serving as a far too heavy handed impression of Prima Donna’s themes of isolation and depression. What

really drive home this mood in an elegant way are Staples’s lyrics, blunt and insightful as usual.

His lyrics shine in the track “Smile,” which narrates his complex feelings of emptiness and guilt following his recent successes, commercially and financially. He raps: “Money come and go so money not my motive no more/ I made enough to know I never make enough for my soul.” Staples goes on to explain, by chasing his dreams of becoming a big name hip-hop artist, he’s removed himself from that which he loves the most. It is a truly tragic song, but is then underpinned by the two closing minutes of the song, Staples again mumbling his way through some lines about wanting to give up, about wanting to kill himself. It is open and heartfelt, but comes off poorly executed, especially when set against the backdrop of six other highly similar moments of the EP. In terms of production, lyrical content and structural organization, the track “Pimp Hand” stands out to me as the strongest on Prima Donna. This is a testament to the overall feel of the record, despite its ability to pull off an interweaving of different styles and rhythms in individual tracks, the song that ends up hitting the hardest is one that lays out a straightforward yet unique sonic foundation, noisy yet simple. In other words, the rest of the release feels comparatively meandering and pedantic. Vince has surely come into his own since the release of his debut album, Summertime ’06; one can only hope that it won’t take him much longer to get back to the explosive beats and poetic proclamations that landed him on the map in the first place.

It’s like a whole lifetime has passed since Frank Ocean released Channel Orange. The whole world waited with baited breath for his next album. There were several false release dates, outrage by fans and so. many. memes.

Finally, a la Beyoncé, Frank dropped a visual album entitled Endless and there was a collective sigh of relief and then a gasp the next day when he released a different full-length album entitled Blonde.”

Endless is a black and white 45-minute video of Ocean building a staircase to his new music. It’s oddly peaceful watching this event take place while Ocean’s signature ethereal tunes play in the background. However, it is Blonde that really steals the show.

Seventeen songs and one hour long, Frank Ocean is on a journey through each song. In “White Ferrari,” he croons over a slow melody about the end of a love. Electronic artist James Blake (“Life Round Here,” “I Need a Forest Fire,”

“Retrograde”) assists and suddenly the song is over and Ocean has loved and lost all in the span of four minutes and eight seconds. It’s an unsurprising feeling from the same artist who wrote “Bad Religion.” Ocean has this amazing ability to evoke emotion in the course of a single song. The end of “Self Control” swells up so quickly that it’s impossible not to feel every word.

It’s no surprise that this album has that sort of feel as Ocean collaborated with Om’mas Keith, the same producer he worked with on Channel Orange. Channel Orange and Blonde draw many similarities in the style of music and the stories being told. Growing up, coming into yourself and falling in and out of love are all themes that can be heard on both albums.

Ocean also had a motley crew of well-known artists working with him this time around. Beyoncé, Tyler the Creator, Andre 3000, Kendrick

Glass Animals How to be a Human Being

Album Review Lisa Laffend

The Hollars

Staff Writer

Film Review Tyler Obropta Staff Writer

While the American alternative scene is slowly being consumed by folk and singer/ songwriters, artists in Europe are channeling all the psychedelic vibes they can get.

Glass Animals, an indie rock group from Oxford, England, created a sonic wonderland on their Aug. 26 release of How to Be a Human Being, the follow-up to their 2014 release Zaba.

Glass Animals sounds like the lovechild of Alt-J, exemplified in their experimentations with noise, and The Neighbourhood, primarily in the vocal aspects. Dave Bayley has a fascinating voice with a very round sound capable of conquering both the soft, sweet, and seductive as well as the big and bold, without sounding like he’s simply showing off. Whatever his voice is doing, it’s constantly calling you closer, begging you to hang onto every word. It drips like a juicy plum as he carefully emphasizes each word in the “Poplar St.” chorus: “I am a true romantic / Free-falling love addict, yeah.” Matched up with the intriguing textures bubbling up from the rest of the band, it’s a dark paradise.

The first track on the album, which was also the first single, is “Life Itself.” This track kicks the album off with bright xylophones before diving into tribal drums, twinkling tambourine, and an exotic horn melody. “Season 2 Episode 3,” the third

As director, Krasinski does a wondrous job of navigating his actors through the emotional ups and downs of the Hollar family’s predicament, and he does a fine job of pacing the jokes in between. There’s not a wasted moment in the movie, and the script lets every cliché become a new opportunity to get a laugh. His long and vivacious career on “The Office” pays off here, where Krasinski feeds his cast with plenty of hilariously awkward exchanges and blank stares into the middle-ground.

But he’s also really careful with the film’s –more tender scenes and moments. Jenkins is outstanding as a father figure who crumbles before his wife’s eyes into a blubbering heap of a husband, and Martindale’s ability to control her character’s shaky emotions and channel them into bravery is amazing to watch.

And while the cancer angle might make this movie ripe for tear-wringing moments, The Hollars never veers down that path.

Krasinski’s intelligent direction and Jim Strouse’s smooth screenplay serve up the self-awareness and attention to comedy that keeps this film away from emotional manipulation. Never before has a dramedy so embraced the conventions that define the genre while it works so hard to tear them down and make you laugh alongside these pained and troubled characters.

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Ministry of Cool

John Krasinski must be the most likeable guy in Hollywood. For his second feature film The Hollars, Krasinski has assembled the largest, most ridiculous cast of celebrities outside of one of Jack Nicholson’s wild, drug-fueled L.A. parties.

In The Hollars, Margo Martindale and Richard Jenkins play mom and pop to Krasinski’s John Hollar and his brother, Ron, played by Sharlto Copley — a wonderful departure from form, as Copley has been on quite the run of playing lunatics in The ATeam, Elysium, Hardcore Henry and next year’s Free Fire.

The estranged family is brought together by the old parent-gets-surprise-cancer cliché when Martindale’s matriarch collapses one afternoon with a curling iron in her hand. Returning to his quiet hometown after years trying to make a living in the Big Apple with his pregnant girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick), Krasinski’s John is reintroduced to his high school crush Gwen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her husband Jason (Charlie Day).

Yet the movie still has enough time and energy to throw in Fresh Off the Boat’s Randall Park as Mrs. Hollar’s doctor and Josh Groban (because why not, really?) as a cheeky but well-meaning reverend who’s moved in with Ron Hollar’s ex-wife. Either Krasinski has dirt on every actor in the industry or everybody just really, really wants to get into John’s Krasinskies.

track, is wallpapered with all sorts of bubbling tones and poppy videogame-esque beets. Track five, “Mama’s Gun” lightly waltzes with a fairytale flute and haunting symphonic atmosphere. The penultimate track “Poplar St.” takes a dirty, greased-up bluesy route with a marching drum and slippery electric guitar bends.

Every track on the album vividly profiles a character or situation, real or fictionalized. “Pork Soda” coolly vents about a dying relationship — “Why can’t we laugh now like we did then? / How come I see you and ache instead? / How come you only look pleased in bed? / Let’s climb the cliff edge and jump again” – while “Mama’s Gun” depicts a woman slipping into madness who killed her husband – “In the summer / Took my gun / And made him go to Neverland / He was something / My old husband / He was all you’d ever want.”

Meanwhile, “Season 2 Episode 3” describes someone strung out on visual media: “Lazy, you’re lyin’ on your belly / With a super porp cola / Lookin’ at your phone in clothes / You’ve work for three days over / With a cookie as a coaster” – while “Take a Slice” explores a lustful mind – “Sitting pretty in the prime of life / I’m so tasty and the price is right / Stewing in the black dope / I’m filthy and I love it.” Clearly, being human is a fairly complicated process.

Southside With You BUZZSAW: Dunk Issue

The Thermals

The visual retelling of a presidential romance before the subjects have even vacated 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seems daring at best and a parody at worst. Boy meets girl, girl refuses to date, they get ice cream and fall in love — it’s a good story, sure, but the audience knows the outcome already. Southside with You, beautifully directed by Richard Tanne, starring Tika Sumpter (Gossip Girl, Ride Along) and Parker Sawyers (Zero Dark Thirty), somehow captures the magical atmosphere of a perfect first date while showing two young people who would grow up to become the President and First Lady of the United States.

The film opens on a sunny day in the summer of 1989, as we see a young lawyer (Sumpter) getting ready for an outing she insists is not a date. The new kid at her law firm (Sawyers) has other plans. The shots of Barack Obama driving to pick up Michelle are downright exciting; he smokes, he listens to Janet Jackson, his car is falling apart but he doesn’t care: he has a date. She agrees to go only to attend a comFilm Review munity event together as colleagues — soon realizing Barack has planned an afternoon together beforehand. An art exhibit nearby leads Catherine Wells to conversation about a mutual favorite artist Contributing Writer and common values. Barack gives a speech in his old neighborhood from before his Harvard days, showing Michelle and the audience a

No Man’s Sky Video Game Review

Hale Douthit Staff Writer

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glimpse of how the golden boy turned into the powerful public speaker he became.

Tellingly, Michelle and Barack were often antagonistic yet compatible; even as they fought like two lawyers, one could see how much they challenged each other to be their best respective selves and hints of their future America’s dynamic duo. The other dramatic tension comes from danger of higher ups at their law firm seeing the two on a date; something that seemed a little too Shakespearean to be true to life. They finally get to the movie — a showing of Do The Right Thing.

Beside the Aristotelian time frame (sort of: he thought drama should take place in one day, with one plot, in one place), many of the elements that made Richard Linklater’s 1995 Before Sunrise a masterpiece are used to Southside with You’s advantage. Before Sunrise follows two strangers who meet on a train and walk around Amsterdam. The excellent performances of the enigmatic leads truly anchor this film; no small feat when portraying public figures without falling into caricatures. Even ordinary small talk is enchanting because of the pair’s on screen chemistry, and speeches that could seem grandiose for the movie are grounded by Sawyer’s delivery. He loves pie, she loves ice cream.

I haven’t played No Man’s Sky in about three weeks, and to be honest, I haven’t really noticed whatsoever. To be fair, No Man’s Sky isn’t a bad game, it’s painfully mediocre. It’s a game without any purpose or reason. You’re dropped in the middle of a massive, uncaring, unfeeling universe and forced to survive and advance. Had the game been an epic meditation of existentialist attitudes, it might have somehow worked.

However, the constant hinting of a magical end all at the center of the universe and how it’s your destiny to fly to find it destroy any attempt at a deeper theme than “Minecraft in Space.”

That isn’t to say the entire game is a waste of what little time and energy we have in this world. The technical presentation of the game is nothing short of incredible. The beautiful sprawling vistas painted by the graphics engine are nothing short of breath taking and the lack of load screens build a cohesive universe that is totally within your realm to explore. These achievements are even more remarkable when one considers the horrible difficulty Hello Games has as they made No Man’s Sky. From floods to mass delays and com-

puter crashes, the fact that No Man’s Sky was finished is a grand feat, and they should be commended.

However, the question is: why bother? The planets all look the same and have the same resources on them. The animals and plants you discover are all the same. Even the space stations are pretty much formulaic. But, alas, that is the problem of procedurally generated worlds. Because you are using the same template and art assets to build the game, everything will tend towards sameness and mediocrity. The true power of procedural generation comes from how we as players interact with the vast possibilities the algorithms generate.

For example, the beauty of Minecraft was the limitless things one could do in Minecraft. All the game’s resources and art assets were the same, but the player could endlessly use those resources to do whatever one could with them. However, the best thing you can do in NMS is get a space ship that doesn’t look like a giant penis.

Compared to Spore that preceded it, No Man’s Sky makes great aspirations to epicness without the motivations necessary.

Around Town Anonymous and goosebumps began to appear on my legs. I looked down and realized I was bare below my waist. A chill trickled down my spine. I tried to recall how I couldn’t have noticed that I lost my skirt during my swim.

My male companion and I searched the beach for nearly an hour looking for them, but we knew that they were long gone. Luckily, my partner for the night was tall and gave me his shirt which extended down just above my knees.

The clock ticked closer to 4 a.m. and we decided that our night of spontaneous adventure was over. We both had work in a few hours and we were both exhausted. We tried calling a cab, but none were running until 6 a.m. We agreed to walk the 96 blocks home. The walk became tremendously boring. We were still damp from the water and our bodies were tired from dancing all night. As the sun peaked we passed a picnic table that was next to a concession stand on the boardwalk. My mind, numb by the cold and the lack of conversation, quickly turned to him and confidently asked, “Wanna do it here?”

The rest of the morning was spent eagerly picking strange, and just wrong, places to have sex. Locations ranged from the picnic table, the beach, to the elementary school basketball court and almost (we decided that we had some morals) in close

proximity to a place of worship. It was like being on a road trip and holding the map in your hands and picking out the most famous and interesting places to visit. We were more than halfway done with our walk home when the sun was fully risen and illuminated light on our situation; we still had at least 30 more blocks to go and I was still not wearing pants.

We decided to end our adventure and get a cab home. Goodbyes were exchanged as I exited the taxi and walked into my house. As I entered my quiet and empty house, I smiled, then cringed, thinking about all the public places my butt had come into personal contact with. I immediately got into the shower and washed the night away.

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Ministry of Cool

Just how all summer love stories begin, it was a hot, July night when I had the most exciting sexual experience of my life. It was the night of my 19th birthday, and I was looking forward to the bittersweet year of underage drinking and responsibility.

I had just gotten off from work. My shorts were clinging to my sweaty thighs, and I was thirsty for a cold beverage. I showered and put on a simple outfit, a shirt and a skirt, and got ready for a night at the bar. My three best friends and I piled into a friend’s car who would not be attending the festivities for that night.

We entered the bar and were immediately enclosed in hot, sticky air.

The music drifted in and out and the DJ surprised me with a happy birthday annoucement.

The night got rowdier and the clock ticked towards 3 a.m. The friends I came with had a cab waiting outside, but I was still eager to take on my newfound nineteen years of experience. I had been talking to one of my guy friends for a long time, and when talking no longer became talking, our lips enmeshed. We decided to leave the humid bar and go for a long walk on the beach, romantic right? We walked down to the water. Waves crashed upon the shore, and against our better judgement, we decided to go swimming. The water ran cool down my body and I felt a cool breeze skimming my thighs,

BUZZSAW: Dunk Issues

SE&CONS. PROSE&CONS.

38

Full Disclosure

By Katie Siple

By October of my sophomore year of high school, I had gotten my first real boyfriend. His name was James. James made me feel pretty and needed all the time. We would text every day, hold hands in the halls, kiss, and go out places together. It was the first time I had a real “serious” crush on any boy before so I didn’t really know what I was doing or what a relationship was. No one had ever found me pretty before so I was extremely eager to dive right into this whole thing head first.

We had French class together and we would put our desks together in the back of the room.

The summer before, he had written a note in my yearbook in French telling me how much he liked me and that he wanted to be my boyfriend.

I had to use Google translate to figure out what the note said. I thought it was the sweetest, most romantic thing ever, that he would never hurt me and that’d he would always be there for me.

I trusted him too much.

One day in class, he decided to slip his hand up my skirt and caress my thigh. I let him because it felt nice and I didn’t really think there was anything wrong with it. Soon enough, he was taking my hand and putting it on his crotch. He would put his book bag over his lap so no one would see. He asked me to rub it, said it felt good, and I did it for weeks because I thought it was normal. I didn’t really know what I was doing because I had never had a sex ed class in my life.

Soon enough I grew tired of his little game and tried to stop. James didn’t like that I stopped. He got so angry at me and stopped treating me with respect.

He said he wouldn’t be my boyfriend anymore if I didn’t continue doing what we had been doing before. I was so confused as to what was right and wrong. I got scared because I thought I was going to lose him so I continued doing it. I thought it was our little secret.

I never really defined what happened to me as sexual assault until years later.

You can find the complete piece online at www.buzzsawmag.org.

Prose & Cons

39

under the pink lights why have all these extensive noises started penetrating these sound cancelling expensive toys around these ears and hear these conversations with subtle coy the pink lights fade the gloss & blush of those two in tubetops fade the stubble & dark eyes of those two in tanktops on their way to drunks who feel a little hurt from their earlier in the day breakups perhaps the party will play a sympathizing drake a throwback thirsty thursday a synthesized 808s & heartbreak kanye nah it is thursday but they ride the ride like it is the weekend so the weeknds thursday could also make an appearance why care so much about a party under the pink lights see an older couple in the far east holding large seating are feasting on each others words arguing easily under the pink lights why is this person struggling to stand with seven wegmans bags wedged in badly fingers slowly grasping heavenly hemoglobin the backed in reddened flow will be thoroughly disrupted maybe you shouldn’t have wrapped them around your wrists as your melancholic gloom blooms in the pink

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

under the pink lights a pastor without choir or congregation requires conversation with black and red words fulfilling the nonsinning desired relation without marriage with a higher creation under the pink lights all the fucks to be given when the bus driver listens and listens but never submits an idea except that when exiting stay clear from the front of the shuttle a stop at the pizzeria and entering here is the perfect couple with a cuddle certain to attract the attention of the nonapprehensive crowd just because your arm is around now does not mean in a few hours you will still make each other smile

public transit mk. V remix [the pink lights] by hakeem anthony under the pink lights all these relationships displayed and I can’t help but play with my imagination creating scenarios like texting closing or conclusive emotions on a phone in the moon-ruined ocean afloat on wreckfage for a few moments, then decide to send a text message check listing the brain with mind the womb with child the sky with star the earth with mars under the pink lights listen to the music of 3000 wounded or so humans looking for alcohol to rub their internally bruised organs why do many think they are foolish to think doing that will be useful in the future under the pink lights can the transient characteristics of glass jarred cannabis be on par with an omniscient asgardian guardian of martian backyardigans starring in a story where all the glory of life is about partying with roly poly oly cyberchasing baby pac-man Mario Karting with other cartoon beings in starry gardens & rainbow roads farther in an artist’s pen thoughts like those only a few adjacent there was placed substance in the stomach inescapable shared second hand blazing and when the high got amazing these eyes were pinking & reddened while this mind was thinking & extended and this mouth drinking & deadened kept little depressions since conflicting additives were in the mix under the pink lights staring at buses staring at busts staring at butts under the pink lights it is lonely in this seat so once the leave is taken there’s hope some folk saw this sole human observing the internal movement writing a note and leaving it on the seating with greeting of please read & good night under the pink lights will they recognize this letter as the only thing in that seat that was ever alive as an unpublished transcript under pink-lit public transit

40

In a Machines,

Room Or None

walked on water and could heal her with a flick of the wrist.

I didn’t think she was dying, until she was. And then I was scared.

My transition into middle school was spent in Long Island, New York, packed into a dimly lit hospital room with my disconnected and estranged extended family. We spent odd hours of the week huddled around the bed of my frail and delicate grandmother, chilled by the radiator and memorizing the rhythmic beep of her heart rate monitor, tuning out the robotic breaths of her oxygen mask. My summer break was spent savoring those last moments of my grandmother’s life instead of the sunshine, studying her face, trying to memorize features of her that I can’t bring myself to picture six years later.

I was scared to see my grandmother hooked up to all these different beeping machines, making loud, disruptive noises, and displaying graphics that didn’t make sense to me. I was afraid of the deep redness of blood, afraid of the trays of needles that the nurses carried with them in the morning.

I couldn’t make sense of the big words the doctors were throwing at my parents, the secret conversations they were having, and why my mom cried when she thought I was asleep. I was afraid of the woman I recognized more as a cyborg than my sick grandmother, unable to comprehend what had become of her, intimidated by the whirring of the machines monitoring her every breath and heartbeat. As more and more wires appeared, I spent less and less time in her room, but my family stayed longer. And it was for that reason that I stayed with her only five minutes the day before she lost her battle.

Or, at least, that’s how I wish it went.

At what point do we look fear in the eye?

It’s true that I spent my summer at North Shore hospital — but not overwhelmed by the sickly smell of antiseptic or the looming Grim Reaper. When I was entering the sixth grade, I wasn’t quite old enough to comprehend the permanence of death and the stages of grief that came with it, or the unrelenting viciousness of cancer. I wasn’t familiar with the emotional way it tears people apart.

If I could relive that summer, I wouldn’t want it to be anything but quiet, gut-wrenching sadness. I would trade brick walls for bare hospital rooms, sidewalk chalk for my grandmother’s delicate hand, summer sun for clunky air conditioning. My ideal summer would have been to spend every last second in that room with my grandmother and my family, alienated from each other, but brought together by Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

I spent my summer right outside of North Shore, pressed up against the brick wall in the sticky-hot rays of the sun, drawing stick figures on the pavement in sidewalk chalk while my grandmother quietly passed away inside. Death still loomed over me, but not in the way that it should have.

Three years later, doctors pointed to a tumor in the black and white images of my father’s abdomen. The thin sheets of film revealed a rare, beautiful monster, 5.6 centimeters in diameter, fastened to the end of his large intestine begrudgingly. My family gathered in a different dimly lit hospital room, closer to home.

Despite the beeps, tubes, and wires, I clung to his side every second of the way.

41

Cons Prose & C

I didn’t understand that my grandmother wasn’t invincible.

I didn’t understand that doctors weren’t superhumans who

by Tara Eng

I

remember my grandmother mostly for her battles against varying types of cancer. I can’t recall a time when she wasn’t sick; she was twice a survivor, but ultimately succumbed to the malignant cells diffusing within her. She never gave technology a chance to breathe life back into her translucent body, and at the time, when her signature gave power to a DNR, I didn’t understand the technicalities of such a medical order.

With At All

Sunspots

By Mila Phelps-Friedl

I

remember this one day when I really saw you, as we sat beading coral paints onto tiny pinky toes and exclaiming when the drips hit the porch deck — the tang of nail polish remover raised the hairs at the back of my neck. You sat directly in front of the sun, parts of your mousey hair lit by streams of light that covered your face, and I couldn’t tell if you were looking at me. That’s when I realized; I could never tell if you were looking at me. But we’d only been friends for two years now, so feeling somewhat kept at arm’s length must be totally normal, right?

We’d shared the same social space for so long now, our names rolled off tongues like maple syrup, and I’d counted you among my best friends since that first hello, and yet — looking at you in the sun, I could feel the rough wood of the deck under my legs more than I could feel you wanting me to be there.

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

With us, no matter the situation, there was always a point at which you pushed me away.

The six months that *Stella was abroad, I breathed in deeply like the calm after a storm. I shook water weight from my limbs and without guilt, I breathed in the space. She was one of our best friends, and the space she left was hard to look at, but she’d always been closer to you, and so while I was sad, a part of me hoped that finally I would be allowed to be your friend without sunspots dancing in my way. I was wrong. Instead of turning to me, you turned me aside and filled the gap with more and more people until I struggled to form sentences around you as I felt like the dimmest one in the room. Where I’d once breathed in space, I longed to feel supported and surrounded again by something other than the foundation of salt it seemed I was standing upon.

*Names have been changed.

all the things I wanted to do and be over the crumbling existence of whatever I’d once seen in this friendship — and it was that act of defiance that changed everything.

“What did I do wrong?”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“No. I’m done waiting for you to tell me. What did I do?”

In a moment of bravery or cowardice, I’d confronted you over the illuminated keys of my computer and you’d waited an hour before sending me a list.

A. list. of. everything. I. had. done. wrong.

1

You never tell me what’s going on with you.

2 3

a. Well I would if I felt like you cared. b. or would tell me anything I didn’t have to feel like I’d earned.

You’re far too self involved.

a. Says the 16-year-old to the 16-year-old

in a world that currently revolves around the drama of wanting to be your friend a little too much apparently.

You stopped really trying to be my friend.

a. I never stopped, I just realized that I was hurting myself more than I was gaining ground or traction or air to breathe, or any response to make me think that you wanted me to be your friend.

Three years now of being your friend, and I was as expendable as nail polish, only traces of the color that I used to be, and that wasn’t enough for me. So that summer I broke out, laying down a foundation of

42

You can find the complete piece online at www.buzzsawmag.org.

Whenever I’m stuck at a restaurant by myself I always feel like the waiters think I’m weird. “Does this ever happen to you?” they say in infomercials. “Does this ever happen to you?” I always think all the waiters are staring at me and that they must think I’m pretty weird to be eating alone. Because no one eats alone, right? I’ll walk in with my eyes glued to the floor, completely convinced that everyone there is talking about how strange I am. I’ll take out my phone to pass the time (pretend I’m engrossed in a deep and involved text conversation), and when the server brings my food, I’ll nod faux-absentmindedly and thank them in my best independent New York twenty-something voice. I put on all these affectations even though I know that in the end, they probably don’t care as long as I tip 20 percent.

It’s in these alone-at-a-coffee-shop moments that I think about who I am

as a person. I tell myself that I’m generally good despite a few major personality flaws. For example, I talk way too much, and I’ve never gotten over my annoying childhood habit of interrupting. I play with my hair. I worry about what people think. I say overly dramatic things like, “I’m going to pass out,” every time I’m under even the least bit of pressure. And worst of all, I jaywalk. I mean, come on, jaywalking? Do I want to be hit by a car and have my limbs tragically flung across street? But anyway, I tell myself that I’m generally good. And I tell myself that because I’m so generally good, the waiters probably don’t think I’m a total oddity.

They probably just think I’m a teenage girl sitting alone at a restaurant which, of course, I am.

Lately, I’ve been relishing the moments when I can detach from it all. I

love the idea of walking alone in the rain down a city street while holding a cardboard coffee cup with some slogan like “Respect your local baristas!” on it. I love the idea of bumping into someone I used to know, of the slight squint of the eye when I ask where I know them from, of the light laughter when they tell me. I love the idea of seeming beautifully detached from the world. I’m trying too hard, aren’t I? It’s just sort of funny, you know, how I love the idea of all these things but I feel horribly awkward when I put them into practice. Maybe I’ll never be the type of person who feels genuinely enjoys eating at restaurants alone, but I’ll always love the idea of it.

The Art of Eating Alone

You can find the complete piece online at www.buzzsawmag.org.

43

Prose & Cons

By Alex Coburn

“You just aren’t good enough...

You need to start carving away, Chiseling chunks from your body.

This is a job best built for landscapers, Removing hills; returning flatlands.

This is a game played by somebodies, Where everybody who is anybody Breaks apart their bodies.”

I’m burning bridges Burning calories.

I’m moving mountains, Not destroying them.

And someone is not the sum of Some immeasurable slate of skin.

Maybe it’s time to Break these boundaries that contain me, Break the barriers that say “You can’t be anybody if your body’s any size,” Be the beacon that begins the wave Of people stepping forward, saying

BBUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

You’re Wrong.

A Game Played by Somebodies

By Kirsten Poulos

44

Sawdust

WDUST. SAWDUST. SAWD

Satire threatening the magazine’s credibility since 1856.

45

Trump Card

Presidential candidate replaced with re-runs of The Apprentice

By Olivia Blees, Contributing Writer

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

A

hesitant knock is heard on a large, golden door, then silence for a beat before the door slowly opens a crack and a bald head appears, glancing into a lowly lit office.

“Mr. Trump sir? I came to check on you. You’ve been cooped up in your Trump Tower office for a week now and well...people - I’m worried about you.”

The sound of static fills the room faintly then a voice with a thick Queen’s accent overpowers the room, “Just keep pushing and pushing ‘em, you don’t want to drive them over the edge but push them as far as you can.” The assistant nods to himself, while he slowly approaches Trump’s desk. His eyes nervously flicker around the gigantic room as he takes in the mess of papers scattered everywhere.

“Right, of course, you’re the businessman and our next President, only you know how to deal with people the best.” More static is heard then, “Manhattan is a tough place.

This island is the real job. If you’re not careful, it can chew you up and spit you out. But if you work hard, you can really hit it big, and I mean really big.”

The assistant pauses in his walk to Trump’s desk and fidgets with his hands. “I know that better than anyone here sir. I’ve worked for you for what? Ten years now. I understand what kind of cruel place Manhattan can be.” Awkward silence permeates the air, the assistant clears his throat nervously, makes a move towards Mr. Trump’s desk again and begins to ramble, “You’ve helped me through hard times Mr. Tru -” “Sit down.” Trump’s voice is almost three times the normal volume of his voice and the assistant tries to cover his hears from the assault while taking a seat in front of Mr. Trump’s gold desk.

The usual static begins again, “Hey look, you claim to be like me, the dif-

46

ference is I work hard. You’ve been lazy, you’ve been nothing but trouble, and now you cut them off as they’re fight each other for who should be fired.” The assistant wears a shocked expression, “Mr. Trump what are you talking about? I’ve been the most loy -” “Michael, Michael...you’re fired.”

The assistant wears a blank expression, before lunging at Trump’s chair, yelling, “my name isn’t Michael you burnt hash brown!” The assistant whips Trump’s desk around, ready to smack him, when he sees that Trump isn’t sitting at his chair.

In Trump’s place is a small, vintage TV playing the credits of The Apprentice.

Suddenly, a ringing is heard. The assistant opens a drawer in Trump’s desk and locates a clunky, old cell phone. He picks the phone up and presses the answer key. “Huuuge!

That’s what Mexico is! Huge boobs, huge butts, huge bottles of tequilla!

It’s like the best casinos in Vegas, owned by me of course! Makes me almost not want to build a wall! Almost! How’s business back home Trump Jr.?”

The assistant’s hands tremble as he stutters, “M-Mr. Trump, this is not your so -” The dial tone is heard as the line suddenly goes dead. The assistant drops the phone and pivots to the door, rushing to alert someone about the discovery he has made, only to stop dead in his tracks when he sees four looming figures blocking his exit.

It is four of Trump’s kids that stand in the doorway. Trump Jr, Ivanka, Eric, and Barron. Trump Jr. steps into the light of the office, “I was very, very, very impressed with the fight that Frank put up.” Trump Jr. steps back into the shadows only for Eric Trump to set forward, “you know my world is a very complex world.”

Eric steps back and Ivanka takes a step forward, “And, I’m all about, all about, taking every advantage you can, but you crossed the line.” Ivan-

ka steps back, and Barron Trump, the youngest, finally steps forward. “I win, you lose peasant.” Barron hits a button on his wrist, and his siblings’ heads slump forward. “You’re in my castle now bitch.”

The assistant, too shocked for words, falls to his knees. Barron continues smugly, “You’re speechless right? Of course you are, because I’m the best. The best son, best brother, best friend, and best campaign manager.” The assistant frowns at the campaign manager part, confused.

Barron smirks, “What? You never thought a selfish, hot-headed tenyear-old kid who thinks girls have cooties could run a campaign for a selfish, hot-headed, grown-ass man who thinks women have cooties? Well surprise loser!”

Barron makes his way over to the assistant, “Since Pops had been in Mexico for the past week, he hasn’t been able to make public appearances. Lucky we have reruns of The Apprentice, basically the same thing as a real Trump. People are so dumb!”

Baron finally stops in front of the cowering assistant. “But now you know too much, and you might try to alert the liberal media about all this... so I’m going to have to turn you permanently into a TV with re-runs of The Apprentice, just like my siblings over here.”

Barrons motions with his thumb to his siblings, who still have their heads slumped, and the static channel playing in their eyeballs. “It’s nothing personal, just the art of the deal dude.” Barron presses a button on his wrist, and his siblings wakeup and move robotically toward the assistant. “No please I won’t tell anyone! NOOO!” The assistant is knocked unconscious by Trump Jr., and is never heard from again. __________________________________ Olivia major ing to email

Blees is a fourth-year TVR who has given a new meanthe term “idiot box.” You can them at oblees1@ithaca.edu.

Tom Rochon Love Poems Verses for a dearly resigned IC prez I. I had a dream of Ithaca in bloom last night your words and my lips “step down on me Tom Rochon”

IV. Wanna ride you like a glass elevator.

Even when it's covered your white privilege.

No floor is too sticky to hold back our love.

Please help me fix my email I just want our orgs to sync

II. Your hair, skin is fairest I can find I dream of a kick-off event for you blue eyes I thirst for you savagely

I think sometimes I can hold my feelings back Held down under lock and key Your words And the names I call you Behind your back Pappa Roch These Feelings Aren’t Real No confidence

III. They say you're not a man of action But my legs are open to your dialogue

No Means Yes?

-Anonymous

Men across Ithaca think women mean opposite of what they say

By Jourdyn McQueary, contributing writer

ently than ours. Our ways of communicating and processing information aren’t the same,” one local doctor shared through his research. “It’s like we use two completely different languages, but women expect men to be bilingual.”

Women, on the other hand, have taken to town meetings and City Hall. With protests beginning to happen almost daily, many women in Ithaca are expressing their frustrations with the excuses men have given them.

“It’s not hard, you know,” a student at Ithaca College explains, “to communicate with another person. Girls can do it, so why can’t guys? There’s no reasonable explanation for what’s happening and it’s a threat to our safety which is why we’re protesting.”

Several Cornell students staged a sit-in during an important football game, causing their team to forfeit. These students are facing misconduct charges from local

authorities.

In response to women being vocal about their frustrations, many men in Ithaca have come together to form a coalition for The Protection of Men’s Safety (PMS). Their newly announced president, who wished to stay anonymous for his safety, explained the coalition’s view on the matter: “It’s not a man’s fault that a woman can’t be clear enough. If her ‘no’ sounds like a ‘yes,’ then it’s a ‘yes.’

There’s nothing we can do to change that.”

One woman stated, “It’s a good thing that their president decided to remain anonymous,” in hopes that the men in the coalition would hear the opposite and name themselves. ___________________________________ Jourdyn McQueary is a writing for film, TV and emerging media major who knows that if you have to ask, you’re probably wrong. You can email them at jmcqueary@ithaca.edu.

47

Sawdust

Women throughout Tompkins County have begun reporting a strange phenomenon. Their husbands and boyfriends don’t listen to a single thing they have to say. One woman, 37, called the Ithaca Fire Department after her husband supposedly heard the opposite of what she told him: to not burn the house down while she was out.

“I told him,” she told the police, “jokingly, might I add, to not burn down our house while I was at the market.

Then I came home to no home at all.”

When questioned by authorities, her husband explained that he had heard her ask him to set fire to their home.

“I don’t think that I would have misheard that,” he argued.

The men of Ithaca have attempted to explain this phenomenon away with psychology and neuroscience.

“Women’s brains are wired differently than ours. Our ways of communicating and processing information aren’t the same,” one local doctor shared through his research. “It’s like we use two completely different lan-

Everything You Eat Will Kill You

Real science on how to have a healthy diet by Dr. Richard McCob

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

By Alayna Vander Veer, Contributing Writer The articles “Nothing you’re eating is healthy,” “Food Ravages the Body,” and “Throw that Shit Away,” expound on the perilous relationship we have with food, but it is time to tell you about food’s homicidal side. It is Nutrish’s job to educate the public with new information.

What food will do to the body is perfidious. There are hidden hazards in everything you eat.

Considering the pretentious venoms lurking within every morsel you put to your mouth, you should know Vitamin C causes baldness and Calcium creates cellulite. All food contains harmful free rationals — insidious little molecules — that enter and destroy cells. Food that’s vibrant green causes skin to loosen and fall off, and food found in nature causes instant liver failure.

Popular foods such as packaged food, especially packaged food, contains hydrogenated oil, which is fat with some hydrogen molecules in it.

This can cause build up in the arteries and lead to a heart attack or cardiac arrest, and bowel obstructions. Common in popular tasty food items is Monosodium Glutamate which can cause headaches, stomachaches, nausea, weakness, weight gain, shortness of breath, and make you blow up… and die. Polysorbate 60 is practically poison, and E405 is asking for death. Don’t get me started on sugary glucose and whole wheat. They will make you increase pant sizes twice in a week!

If for some outlandish reason you don’t believe me when I say, “Everything You Eat Is Going to Kill You,” well then — here is news from the best, brightest, intellectual, nutritionist and dietitian in the world!

Dr. Phil O. Springer has been an expert in his field of study for over 30 years. The esteemed clinician has recently completed research on how food has betrayed the human body.

Dr. Springer studied 23 individuals’ diets and any problems they had ex-

48

perienced throughout the trial. He found 14 of the 23 individuals had trouble sleeping, while 9 individuals had a difficult time waking up in the morning; five suffered nausea, one was diagnosed with gout, and 18 of the 23 were unhappy with their lives.

Not to mention that 20 out of the 23 were over the weight recommended for their height. Dr. Springer found, overall, conditions of the mind and body were adversely affected by food.

When the participants in the study were asked what they were eating, they responded that they were eating healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables. How could this happen then? The participants had no clue what food was doing to them. Even “healthy” food will kill you.

Alkalizing vegetables, which have been called the miracle “feel-good” food in years past, are now dangerous and cause forgetfulness, aggression, and rapid age degeneration.

Lemon and cucumber popular for “detoxing” actually make the body hold involatile particles, which make it difficult to process anything you consume.

New research declares bananas, whole wheat, fish, pork, lettuce, carrots, bell-pepper, and plums, to only mention a few, are awful for your precious self. Food will inevitably destroy you, placing deep wrinkles upon crepey sagging skin on your bone — how can one expect to be happy when the body and mind are in a slow decline toward oblivion?

So here is the problem, you can’t eat anything that won’t, inevitably kill you. The solution? Spaxx!

Spaxx, a new designer diet bar, is specially crafted to support all your needs. It tastes great and it is prepackaged for freshness. You won’t regret buying it and it won’t kill you to eat it either. The beauty of the bar is that it comes in a variety of flavors ranging from grandma’s homemade apple fritters, carrots and celery, spaghetti, to chicken teriyaki.

Spaxx won’t make you gain any weight; you can stop worrying about how much of what you are eating. And don’t fret over eating something that will kill you, Spaxx is completely benign because it made from nothing… that will kill you... seriously, Spaxx is created with nothing.

Order Spaxx now! The order form is attached at the end of this article.

Please send to 666 Golden Hill, Northern Gemmemonie, U.S.A, with an address, credit card information, bank account number and $200. Plus $59.99 for shipping.

Richard McCob fully endorses this product.

“I eat it everyday. I’ve already lost 30 pounds in just three days. I haven’t felt this great in ages and I have a ton of energy!”

Kim Kardashian has this to say about Spaxx: “Anytime I crave something to eat I just grab a bar of Spaxx.”

And Tom Cruise: “Yeah, um Spaxx is great, uh especially ‘cause it feeds the poor and needy.” ____________________________________ Alayna Vander Veer is a first-year english major who grows their own organic big macs. You can email them at avanderveer@ithaca.edu

A Stone’s Throw Away

Mineral enthusiast scoffs at Christian family

By William Cohan, Contributing Writer

The arguments between Christians and Atheists has been very prevalent in recent years. However, there is another side of this conflict of ideals that has not been explored.

Rita Green is one of the many firm believers in the spiritual properties of gemstones. When asked about the abilities of what she called, “healing crystals,” Green replied that the crystals have mystical energy that have accumulated over time and when the stones come in contact with her body, they transfer their healing energy.

Green explained to us how these crystals are incorporated into every aspect of her life. She wears a piece of rose quartz around her neck so that she can absorb the healing energy even when she isn’t at home.

Around Green’s house, one can see a variety of crystals in different places, such as the coffee tables and bookshelves. This is so the spiritu-

Portable Sobs

al energy of the stones is constant throughout the house. Green commented that meditation is also very important to her routine, saying that she concentrates on a crystal each day before meals and going to bed.

Green shared with us her collection of healing crystals, which included: agate for easing pain, bloodstone for increasing creativity, and garnet for getting rid of hangovers.

Green also believed that healing crystals were superior to other forms of spirituality. She told us about Christian families she’s met and their chaotic way of life. “Not a crystal to be seen!” Green commented in shock as she poured crushed amethyst into her tea. She also didn’t understand why Christians always wear a crucifix around their necks and thought it was a little creepy that they have pictures of Jesus all over their houses. Green discussed her confusion at the Christian prac-

tice of praying before meals and sleeping. “What are they possibly getting out of it? It’s just all in their head,” she commented.

Green expressed frustration about how these families pray to a deity that is not related to gemstones, claiming “this Jesus fellow they keep raving about probably never even saw a healing crystal so why are these people so confident that he can guide their lives? Not to mention that he’s been dead for 2,000 years.”

According to her, praying to a higher power is pointless when the evidence of crystals was right in front of us.

Rita Green was very helpful in giving an idea of the lifestyle of someone who uses healing stones. Before showing us out, she said that we looked a little tired and recommended putting some pieces of amber in our shoes to give us more energy. ________________________________ Will Cohan is a second-year cinema and photography major who always keeps a piece of amethyst in their left sock for good luck. You can email them at wcohan@ithaca.edu.

College student’s tears converted into Water to ends drought

By Tylor Colby, Sawdust Editor

for her device, which she calls the Tear Ducts. Less a contraption than an installment, the Tear Ducts would be filters made of and attached to the air ducts of buildings where grads and soon-to-be grads reside. When the subsequent crying erupts, sensors on the ducts detect an increase of salinity in the room, and begin to suck up the tears from the air, before they even have a chance to hit the floor. The tears are then run through a filter made of polyamide fiber, which separates the salty sadness from the sweet hydrating water we’ve all come to know, love and so desperately need.

The device hasn’t been crafted yet, but Chopra’s blueprints are gaining attention in academic and entrepreneurial communities alike. Local entrepreneur Chet Kalinowski said the young inventor can make “a lot of money,” provided she could come up

with the necessary funding.

“A college town like this, in 2016, is probably flooding with existential angst,” Kalinowski said. “And when life gives you lemons, you turn those lemons into liquid gold.”

Update: A few days the meeting, Sawdust staff caught up with Chopra, who said her plan was unfortunately not approved by the county board because there were apparently not enough engineers fit for the job. _______________________________ Tylor Colby is a fourth-year writing major who, after graduating will have plenty of fuel for the Tear Duct as well. You can email them at tcolby1@ithaca.edu.

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Sawdust

The town’s water department issued a warning earlier this year, encouraging locals to conserve water resources as much as possible, saying Ithaca had only 30 days left of useable water.

This has continued to cause concern amongst locals and students alike, but one Cornell University graduate said she has a solution. Drawing from her extensive research in bioengineering, Kalyani Chopra claimed to have come up with an invention that converts the tears of students and unemployed college graduates into potable water.

“I got the idea when I thought of the sheer amount of student debt I am going to pay over the course of the rest of my life,” Chopra said. “At first, the idea made me cry, but then I thought of how I could use these tears to my advantage.”

Chopra then drew out blueprints

Buzzsaw Mohawk

Buzzsaw Magazine relinquishes artistic morals

By Jordan Aaron, staff writer

Dear Reader, We would like to inform you of some changes coming to Buzzsaw Magazine.

As you know, our industry, which we call journalism, is undergoing a lot of changes. We’ve seen many newspapers, websites, and magazines take big steps to address the change in content their readerships desired. We’ve seen more video journalism, more twitter, more blogging, and many other changes.

We’ve also noticed some desire for change from our readership too. Below is a poll we took last year from our readership to see what you wanted us to publish more of.

BUZZSAW: You’re Wrong Issue

The results were shocking. We were surprised that, in an age of social and visual media on the rise, so many of you wanted us to shift our format to that of a 70s punk rock zine. This comes from a landslide vote too. We did not expect punk rock to beat out nudity by more than 50 percent, though we should have seen it coming after Playboy’s shift to a no-nudity format.

So with these results in mind, we are formally announcing our magazine’s new format: Our first change is the name of our magazine. Buzzsaw has been the name of this prestigious organization for many years, but we are aware of one fact that is true. As David Bowie said, “Time may change me, but I can’t chase time.”

And so we won’t. Our new name will be Buzzz. We don’t only believe that this new name will change the face of our magazine, but that it will also give the sound of sharp political commentary that came from the 70s punk scene in New York and London.

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The next change you’ll be seeing in the next month is going to be our content. Far away are the days where this magazine published articles about important issues such as gender and racial inequality, American politics, and independent films only four people have seen. By the time our next issues comes out, Buzzz will be covering subjects like “Top 37 Sex Pistols Lyrics” and “Were the New York Dolls Even From New York?” Imagine Buzzfeed if 60% of their articles were about the Clash.

Now, we at Buzzsaw are still aware of the other percentages of people who wanted different subjects from our magazine and we are taking strides to make this publication one that you will read as well. This is what we plan to do for the other groups of people who wanted different things: For the 16 percent of voters who want nudity, we will be making sure that every picture of a punk band in this magazine has all musicians completely nude.

That means that it will be difficult to turn the page without seeing at least one punk rock penis.

For the 12 percent that want information on how to build car bombs, we have turned your profiles into the FBI and NSA for further background checks. This is very concerning.

And for the four percent of voters who wish to keep the good ole fashion news in our magazine, we are pleased to inform you that we will still devote the last two pages for news and social and political commentary.

With these changes on the horizon, we can ensure that we are meeting the demands of our readership and also push boundaries.

We couldn’t be more excited about the future of Buzzz.

Sincerely, Your Buzzsaw, and now Buzzz editors ____________________________________________ Jordan Aaron is a third-year writing for film, TV and emerging media major who will do anything a pie chart tells them to. You can email them at jaaron@ithaca.edu.

BUZZSAW ASKS WHY…

Do we go to school?

“Get up! You’re gonna be late for school!” The childhood words trigger an immediate response by most: the familiar pang associated with having to wake up at an absurdly early part of the day, to get on the bus and head to a big building full of equally disgruntled preadolescents. Unless you went to one of those new-age schools that focus on student creativity and innovative team-building curriculums, you probably dreaded this weekday morning ritual as much as I did. And so at one point, if you are in that majority group, you probably asked the question yourself at one point or another.

For me, much has changed since those days, and yet nothing has changed at all. Thanks to school, work, art, and all the other milestone experiences of life, I have definitely become a more intelligent, well rounded person. But I still drag myself out of bed every morning, partially against my own will, asking myself what I am paying for and why I am paying for it. The biggest difference is that I am making a conscious choice. Whether by familiarity or by desire, I get on that bus every morning regardless.

I guess my only conclusion is that I go to school because school is what I know best. I’m still being made to jump through unnecessary hoops, but they are hoops that I know how to handle; no matter what, life will always be filled with the feeling of being dragged out of bed, and the only difference is at least now I’ve gotten very good at getting what I want out of that experience as well. To summarize: I have no freaking idea why I’m in school, and why I will likely continue to be in school, but I’m pretty happy, so that’s enough of an answer for now.

Your deeply rooted Sawdust Editor, Tylor Colby

WE EXIST

ONLINE

WWW.BUZZSAWMAG.ORG

@buzzsawmag

Sawdust

www.facebook.com/BuzzsawMagazine

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