Kitsch Magazine: Spring 2015

In this issue: Inoculating for Individualism Cyber Shame and Instant Fame Fight the Fee

kitsch VOL. 13 NO. 2 | SPRING 2015

kitsch EDITOR IN CHIEF Nathaniel Coderre

design editor lead copy editor art editor zooming out

Karen Tsai Tia Lewis Michelle Savran Arielle Cruz Katie O’Brien BLOGS editor Kira Roybal

managing editor Aurora Rojer bite size Alyssa Berdie zooming in Aurora Rojer Natalie Tsay watch and listen Yana Makuwa Anna Brenner

WRITERS

ARTISTS Aurora Rojer Jin Yoo Maura Thomas Yana Makuwa Emma Kathryn Regnier Karen Tsai Thelonia Saunders Michelle Savran

Yana Makuwa Sydney Morin Kupono Liu Aurora Rojer Maura Thomas Kira Roybal Alejandra Alvarez Katie O’Brien Lucy Stockton Melvin Li Nathanial Coderre Arielle Cruz Alyssa Berdie Natalie Tsay Tia Lewis Melis Schildkraut Christina Lee Marisa Wherry

ADVISORS michael koch english | cornell university catherine taylor writing | ithaca college

LAYOUT ARTISTS Nathaniel Coderre Aurora Rojer Yana Makuwa Karen Tsai Michelle Savran Natalie Tsay

COPY EDITORS COVER ART

Michelle Savran

kitsch magazine, an independent student organization located at Cornell University and Ithaca College, produced and is responsible for the content of this publication. This publication was not reviewed or approved by, nor does it necessarily express or reflect the policies or opinions of Cornell University, Ithaca College, or their designated representatives.

VOL 13 NO 2 || SPRING 2015

Jael Goldfine Tyler Breitfeller Melis Schildkraut Christina Lee Yane An Christian Cassidy-Amstutz Jessica Afrin

CONTENTS Bite Size 4

Meet the Editors

5

Letter from the Editor

6

Music and Lyrics

7

An Emoji PSA

9

Fiction

Zooming Out 14

Opt Out

18

Locavorism

20

Zooming IN Co-Ops at Cornell

30

Fight the Fee

33

You Can’t Yell Fire

America in Wartime

37

22

Netflix in Cuba

IC Comedy Network

39

24

Cyber Bullying

On the Plaza

41

26

Apathy

WATCH AND LISTEN 42

Award Shows

44

The Rise of Ballet

46

Fresh Off the Boat

48

Satire vs. Misogyny

50

Salt-n-Pepa

52

50 Shades of Grey

54

The Cruel Fate of Fame

ARIELLE CRUZ zooming out editor YANA MAKUWA watch and listen editor

NATALIE TSAY zooming in editor

ANNA BRENNER watch and listen editor

KATIE O’ BRIEN zooming out editor

ALYSSA BERDIE bite size editor MICHELLE SAVRAN art editor KAREN TSAI design editor

AURORA ROJER managing editor zooming in editor

TIA LEWIS head copy editor

NATHANIEL CODERRE editor-in-chief

the editors

letter from the editor Online bullying? Educational inequality? Locally grown food? Who cares? Someone does, hopefully. I’m going to be honest with you—we don’t ever really get around to an answer. Yes, that’s mainly because it’s a vague, rhetorical question. But it’s also a pretty fundamental one, presented with a lot of conflicting evidence. Have the myriad of wretched, tragic, things we hear about completely desensitized us? We here at kitsch have asked ourselves about this in what has been a trying time for the magazine. We can actually ask this pretty sincerely because we honestly don’t know “who cares” about kitsch. We have no method for collecting data on you, dear reader, and since our online presence has slumped pretty badly, you, the person holding this copy, could be the only individual out there reading this.

And yet, recently kitsch has been given many reasons to believe that people really do care. Last semester, we had a funding snafu that almost prevented us from printing last semester’s magazine (look for it, it’s out there!). Thankfully, an outpouring of support from former kitschies, Cornell departments, and readers saved our skin. People who had never met last semester’s group of editors helped out. Even if we spend 60 pages accusing the world of being indifferent, at least we can say that we still have a core group of people who care about us.

That is the central tension in a lot of our articles. Lucy Stockton directly asks if the individualistic impulses of our society have eroded our sense of humanity.

Aurora Rojer echoes the calls of hundreds of thousands of parents who are attempting to take a more active role in improving the bureaucratic mess that is our public education system. And closer to home, Melvin Li digs into the history of student protest at Cornell..

According to the 2009 National Conference on Citizenship report, millennials have a 43 percent service rate for volunteering (compared to 35 percent for Baby Boomers). Are we getting more altruistic? How can we reconcile that statistic with our perception of our society as cold and apathetic? Do us Cornellians still have a socially active streak? They’re all questions without definite answers. kitsch’s “Who Cares?” issue is our attempt to elaborate on them, and perhaps, for every incomprehensible evil in the world there is a good person unwilling to look the other way. Enjoy.

Nathaniel Coderre

music and lyrics WORDS BY Yana Makuwa ART BY Aurora Rojer

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Spotify is an amazing phenomenon. For a casual music listener with varying tastes and just enough healthy snobbery, Spotify is the perfect way to access, organize, and discover a lot of music and listen to it essentially for free (I splurge on premium because I hate ads). Spotify is known as your go-to place for everything from Top 40 to 80’s hits to EDM and Dance music. But Spotify has a whole world of content hidden from the prying eyes of playlist makers everywhere. If you scroll down the genre page, past the Christian and Latino squares, you come across a speech bubble icon and the title “Word.”

Clicking on this icon places you squarely in Spotify’s eclectic and rather extensive spoken word/audio-book section. It is a hodge-podge of plays, poems, guided meditation, and guitar lessons. It’s an amazing collection, and I keep asking myself why this is such a well-kept secret. Does it make sense for a music platform to have content that is so drastically not music?

It is perhaps because Spotify, and internet radio in general, leans towards the musical. There are podcasts of course, and some radio stations make their talk shows available on the Internet (most notably NPR shows). The focus however, is still music; we listen to the radio for the catchy songs and we love Spotify because it has all our favorites stored in one place. We fixate on a real difference between words with music attached to them and words read off a page, unaccompanied. Listening to music is a passive activity: it’s a background activity while we do homework, talk with friends, have sex. It is also an incredibly emotional activity; our favorite songs can change our mood in thirty seconds, bring up repressed memories, or simply remind us why we love music.

So is Spotify’s Word “genre” transforming recordings of words without music into something like its other musical genres?

Are we supposed to put Russian Lit on in the background at birthday parties? Or are they picking up on the difference, maximizing the wide spread that they have and catering to a different type of listener? In the world of binge entertainment and couch consumption, maybe it makes sense to talk about binge-listening Langston Hughes or Hans Christian Andersen.

If it means I can knock out Shakespeare’s major histories in 53 hours of listening while I clean my apartment, then I’m definitely in.

WHY DOES NO ONE KNOW ABOUT SPOTIFY SPOKEN WORD?

An Emoji PSA

WORDS BY Sydney Morin ART BY Jin Yoo When emojis first started getting attention in, like, 2011(?), I didn’t know how to feel about them. I had just recently come around to adding “lol” to my internet vernacular. (To clarify: It started out as me using the abbreviation ironically, but then after ironically using it for so long, the irony turned into sincerity and now here I am as someone who still says it, lol). I didn’t know if I was ready to adapt to yet another ground-breaking internet trend.

I wasn’t aware of how many people used emojis initially. Honestly, I barely remember who first introduced me to them. Not many of my friends had iPhones, and those who did were merely “basic iPhone users.” By basic, I just mean that, you know, these people weren’t jailbreaking their phones—none of the people were basic. Probably.

You know how people always remember where they were for really monumental moments in their lives, or society, or whatever? I don’t remember where I was (hello, I have a smartphone; why would I ever look up from it?), but I remember exactly which emoji was sent. I opened the text I received— I’m almost positive my Mom sent it—and there it was: the poop emoji.

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“This is the future,” I thought, my eyes still stuck on the glorious poop. So, just like that, communication is changed forever? Now we’re able to express our immense range of human emotion with fucking adorable faces? Is there a way I can demonstrate my reaction in a clearer, but just as snarky way? Lol?

But then—my eyes still looking at the poop emoji, btw—I considered a whole new aspect to this magnificent new technology: What if using emojis was actually really weird and, like, detrimental to our longterm neurological development as a society? And then I got self-conscious. And I freaked myself out, and lost my excitement. “Cool,” I responded, in a text to my Mom.

Days went on. More people downloaded emojis.

Since I was a curious teenager, I also downloaded the emoji app. I convinced myself that I was only downloading the application ironically—I wasn’t actually succumbing to this fad.

Then the app opened. There were so many faces. And, um, not just faces—animals, plants, food, nouns, poop—the emoji keyboard was my oyster and I was so down with it.

Learning how to slowly integrate emojis into my texting vocabulary was not as easy as it probably should’ve been. It started off pretty low-key; I’d add a heart emoji here, a sunglasses emoji there, just the easy stuff. And since I was doing everything with the emojis ironically, none of it mattered and I didn’t care about anything (just like how everyone feels about everything all the time everywhere, lol).

But then I started using them a little bit more. I found myself replacing my “lol”s with emojis (as you can see, I have since learned how to love the “lol” again). It was a full on invasion. I sent an emoji with almost every message I typed. I even began pulling emojis from the other pages; I was sending the french horn emoji, the sweet potato emoji, and the Easter Island emoji YEARS before the general public knew about them. But enough about that—who even knows if I’m joking anymore? Are we human or are we dancer?

The veil of irony I wore when I first downloaded the app had dra-MAT-ically dropped. I was a completely different person and I genuinely liked the emojis. Who was I trying to fool anymore? I had never had the opportunity to express my multidimensional girl emotions so clearly before. I know what you’re thinking—how many times had I sent texts about a kimono and been frustrated that I couldn’t add a little picture of an orange kimono? So many times. An unthinkable number of times. And now I had won. I HAD A LITTLE ORANGE KIMONO IN MY PHONE!

But, actually, it was more like the emojis had won.

Just like what happened to me and “lol,” what started as a joke turned into a full-blown not-joke. It was real. I loved (and still love) using emojis. However, you should probably be careful with whatever the next crazy-at-first-glance-bizarre-butsecretly-life-changing trend or app or entirely new machine is.

I say “be careful” because, hypothetically, let’s say you ironically start feeding into a new trend. Then you start dedicating all your energy to that trend—but not seriously, since you’re being ironic. At some point, you’re going to start secretly and genuinely enjoying whatever it is that you’re only pretending to like—and that’s sort of sad! If you weren’t such a scaredy-cat initially, you’d probably be a better person overall, lol :).

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“I opened the text I received— I’m almost positive my Mom sent it— and there it was: the poop emoji. ‘This is the future’, I thought, my eyes still stuck on the glorious poop.”

Fiction & Poetry Counting Sheep,

or The Obituary of Scott Freeman

by Kupono Liu

Scott Freeman was an average, traditional fellow. He was five foot seven and married to his wife Lola. She was a housewife who Scott always prevented from working. He was a bed manufacturer on an assembly line. The family had three children— triplets, age fifteen. They lived in a small flat adjacent to a corner drugstore.

One catch. In my description of Scott, I failed to include his median salary. Based on the above, you might think he reels in an unremarkable $25,000. In another time you might have been right, but in this future, I’m afraid you would be wrong. Every day he is paid in five sleep cycles, which works out to seven and a half hours of sleep per day. This works out to be one and a half hours of sleep per sleep cycle earned. And, of course, being a parent in this future entails the same responsibilities as it did in the past—sacrifice. Scott and all the other working parents have to split their daily sleep cycles.

Yes. At this point in time, companies have commoditized sleep as viable currency. They have found a way around paying their workers in dollars. They figured that workers only use money for multimillion-dollar luxury homes. What is a home fundamentally built for? Sleep. When people are tired from a hard day’s work, they just want to sleep. So companies caught on and cut out the middleman, which was called money at the time. Workers used money to finance their sleeping spots. Companies thought they would save everyone the trouble by directly giving people what they really want—sleep.

Now back to Scott. At that time, he had to split five sleep cycles among himself, Lola, and their three children: Duermo, Duerma, and Duermita. Being a parent, Scott made sure his teens got the majority of the sleep. On average, he left himself about one-third of a sleep cycle every night—a mere nap of half an hour. He couldn’t sleep naturally even if he wanted to because he didn’t have enough sleep cycles. But he took up two more jobs to occupy himself during the night while his children and wife were sleeping.

He took up one job as an assembly worker in a pillow manufacturing plant. The other job was a blanket tester in a blanket manufacturing plant. Both the pillow plant and the blanket tester job paid three sleep cycles each. These side jobs paid less since the products were complementary to mattresses—the main product of society. With his three jobs, he now earned a total of eleven sleep cycles a day. While a little bit better, this was still not enough for a growing family, as everyone needs five sleep cycles a night to function normally. To provide for his family, this meant more jobs for Scott. More jobs for Scott meant less time with his family.

The day poor Duermita collapsed in the school cafeteria line due to a lack of sleep, Scott realized he hadn’t been working hard enough. So Scott picked up another job as a therapeutic sleep mask maker, which paid five sleep cycles a day. Sleep masks helped those who could afford to sleep but were haunted by nightmares of the past. With a sleep mask, people could sleep stress-free and experience the sweet dreams that they couldn’t afford if they were awake. That’s why wages were so generous.

Scott realized that if he worked all four jobs he had a chance of providing for his family. With the four jobs, Scott now had a total salary of sixteen sleep cycles a day (or 24 hours of earned sleep). The triplets and Lola could scrape by with four sleep cycles each (or six hours of sleep each). To get this salary, all Scott had to do was not sleep. He just had to continue working

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hard for sleep cycles all day. One day on the job, Scott closed his eyes and couldn’t remember the last time he had slept. He had not slept for one whole month. Lola called him at work and told him to sleep and spend his cycles, but he said in his usual way, “Feeling fine my love. Don’t worry yourself.”

…

On Christmas morning, Scott Freeman was found in bed, his head resting softly on a pillow, face blinded by a sleep mask, his body wrapped in a blanket. He did not move for hours. Lola and the triplets wondered how he could rest if he didn’t have the sleep cycles to pay for it.

Lola kissed poor Scott on the lips. She noticed that his lips were lifeless and cold. After a month without sleep, Scott had died of exhaustion.

He had lived the greatest irony that life could offer. He had devoted his life to earn enough sleep cycles to make his family happy, which he felt would consequently make him happy. However, he had worked so hard to accumulate sleep that he in fact lacked the free time to actually sleep. When Scott lived, he was a man of humble means who never saw his family. But when he died, Scott was indeed a rich man, with eternal sleep, watching his family from above.

Metastatic Afterimages

by Naroé

I was radiant worlds springs winters catastrophic creations I am dying I am all consuming passionate apathy I am a dying light I will cannibalize myself an explosion of white I am a dying star I am burn it all the brightest afterimage will haunt you in my wake exquisite pain residing behind your eyes behind your brain I am a supernova.

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Venom

by NaroĂŠ

I am not bitter I am venom acid that breaks down his skin his bones I entered through his rib like syrup I pulse slowly through his veins undulating up his spinal cord once I held anger now I hold release I hold his life breath stare once his gaze pinned me down his eyes now cannot find me I am behind them I am behind him I am behind everything I am your petty wrathful ancient small bursting just just god I require sacrifices in blood of the legs the breasts the womb that so willingly exhumes what has he given that he has not taken first he has so much he is fit to burst but I require offerings of blood I am not bitter I am venom and I swim through his veins

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Corduroy Brown

By Theadora Walsh

The thing called phantom vibration was one of the most common ways Corduroy experienced touch these days.

The racking on the subway, which he always holds his body against, pendulumed his thighs against knees pressed into his sides.

An older Jamaican woman to his left clutched a purse of stained peach to light blue capris. A round fat lower lipped man on his right had a freckled knee smashed tight into his calf. With a weak middle, Corduroy felt nauseous trying to steady himself against all the unfortunate touching. Physicality always only reminded him of his body, and the ugly space it takes up.

Something caressed his thigh. He spun towards the woman, his surprise touched less with accusation than warmth. She was still staring straight forward, her forehead rough with a grimace’s wrinkles. She’s too hardened to admit she needed to reach out to me, Corduroy thought, how sweet. His eyes made the mistake of panning down farther. Her hands were still knotted around her purse.

It must have been his phone, a false but already defeated reassurment.

Sliding the soft screen easily from thigh to palm, he found no new words. There were no words for him. Even though he personalized his phone’s interface to show all words made for him in his favorite font, myriad pro.

It got lonely. All of a sudden, on that train. Nobody wanted to cup their hands around the boniest parts of his knees.

He pulled the phone up into his arms anyways. Opening his snapchat, he pressed his thumb into moments of some others’ memories. Eyes see a bus smashing water all over the chase building, an urban wave, eyes see a slow scroll of a lake, all the water looked the same, eyes see a flower being bit by matches, eyes see a selected compilation of 10 second or less representations of the Westminster Kettle 2015 National Dog Show.

He closed it, reopened and ran his finger between the screen which held a representation of a camera and a screen which held a list of his friend’s usernames. Friends as a category decided by snapchat. He closed it.

Pushing his knee further down Corduroy’s thigh the enormous man beside him pressed his body up through thigh extension and made his way off the train. The doors slid shut with a strange silence, as if everyone was recognizing an abandonment. Leaving and not saying anything, not even giving a look to the man who he had practically been holding, caressing, rubbing against in the slow motion of a train.

The haunting of empty space and exposition of his thigh was interrupted when a girl, her hand sliding on the train car’s pole, spun into the seat behind him. The last thing to arrive was her high ponytail, the tips of which swung into his neck. She quickly collected her hairs and put them behind her neck proudly, a timed look of dismissal for Corduroy. He realized that soon, just like his previous seatmate, she would leave him. And, just as before, she wouldn’t look back.

Ingenari Strategic Crossways was founded with stimulus money in 1998. Gertrude Mensel was inspired to create the company after her cupcake business went bankrupt because their automated answering machine went defunct and began recording hundreds of imagined orders. Her team worked overtime and sent delivery boys with boxes full of cakes out on bikes, buses, and even one by sailboat. All to be sent away upon arrival. She was left with thousands of unsold cupcakes and an emotionally damaged delivery staff, they all felt nervous for future deliveries having shown up unwanted at people’s homes all afternoon. Enraged, Gertrude ate her feelings. She got through 17 cupcakes before developing an acute sugar anxiety and committed to a week of bed rest. From then on she felt sick at the sight of sugar and the sticky density of a confectionary kitchen.

Determined not to move back to Indiana with her mother, she swore to never again allow a poorly programmed automatized digital communication to hurt anyone. She dedicated her company to the perfection of digital voice recordings. Now Ingenari employs over 40 people and the Chelsea office just installed a bocce ball court on the rooftop garden.

Corduroy dialed Ingenari. The perfectly toned and articulate answering machine asked his ID number so that he could be directed to his personal operative partner.

“Hello Corduroy” the voice of a young woman who might have just woken up, but, from some sweet dream, greeted him.

“Hello Mandy.”

“How are you enjoying yourself today? 19:32 Monday April 19 2017?”

“Fine.” Corduroy finally felt a little bit of relief on his long train ride.

“Are you ready to begin?”

“Yes”

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“Okay, super great. Please say: please in a nervous tone.” Mandy, whose voice Corduroy had been assigned to after answering a set of questions meant to determine his optimal compatibility, was often over enthusiastic.

“Please.”

“Please say: please in a sorrowful tone” “Please.”

“Please say: please in an aggressive tone” “Please.”

“Please say: please in a hopeful tone” “Please.”

“like what do you want,” the girl beside Corduroy spun around all full of annoyance.

“Sorry?” Corduroy felt violently ripped from the digitized sanctuary in which he’d sunk. Repetition like meditation, Mandy made him calm.

As the phone’s sensors were incredibly sensitive, Mandy whispered into his ear; “Excuse me Corduroy, I asked you to say Please but you said Sorry.”

“Sorry, Mandy.”

Disappointed, but not angry, never hateful, he could almost imagine Mandy shaking her head with a suppressed smile, “Corduroy, I asked you to say Please but you said Sorry”. In his mind, Mandy had red hair and a thin slightly slanted, perhaps once broken, nose.

The girl was still staring at him, not at his eyes, but indignantly at the space between his eyebrows. Self-consciously, he ran his finger over the center of his face and then lowered his phone to his lap, waving it gently at the girl on its descent.

“I was on the phone,” he muttered before letting his eye follow the path his phone had taken down to his lap. He slid the phone off, he didn’t want words he made for Mandy to be overheard by the girl who’d injured him.

He noticed the screen on his phone brighten before it even began to vibrate, he scooped it up eagerly. Trying to look as if receiving a call was a common and unsurprising—maybe even a bothersome—event, Corduroy raised his eyebrows indignantly at the eyeroll he imagined the ponytail girl making.

It was his mother calling. A few years ago Corduroy decided to replace “mom” with “mother” when referring to her because it made him feel like he was taller than he really was.

“Hey,” he was about to say mom, but caught himself, “hey there” he corrected. Mother isn’t really a name the way mom is, she had to be unspecific now.

“Corduroy, listen, as you know Jeffery had his follow up surgery today. The lepst lept onoscopy or letsonoposcy, I can’t remember the scientific name. And, they found something. We thought the little wire camera they insert would show us that we defeated the cancer, but, then they found it in the lymph nodes.”

She stopped talking. With the silence, the phone was telling Corduroy he had to say something.

“Oh, no, so, what did the doctor say?”

“We thought he would tell us we could put all this behind us, but now he is talking about further procedures and a strict diet and they’ll have to operate. And, you know that this weekend is Linda’s softball tournament. She was so excited for her father to support her and now I think I’ll have to rent a wheelchair to take him. Oh well, after the whole ‘not a real sport’ incident we’ll just have to make this.”

The train surfaced. Corduroy found himself as disinterested in the passing city scape as he had been by the dark walls of the tunnel. It was all just squares and grey if you rock your head back and forth while squinting anyway.

“So that’s the update. Now, will you be at Linda’s game this Saturday?

“I don’t think I can make it.”

“What? You know sometimes she asks me if having a half sibling means she is an only child.”

Corduroy wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be profound. It sounded like something she might have heard on the radio or seen on television and found some weight in. He imagined her behind the wheel of her Volvo practicing the words and feeling them fit nicely between her lips. The glasses she wore slimmed into something an Italian man might wear, her voice found a steadier harmony, and the thin scar beneath her chin folded and colored itself clear.

Because he had decided that she’d said this sentence only for herself, he felt no obligation to give a response.

“I’m sorry. I just can’t make it.”

She was quiet.

“I’m meeting someone.”

“A girl?” she asked, not even trying to mask her desire to knit tiny cashmere booties for some future structuring of time, “that Mandy?”

“It is for work,” embarrassed but not willing to correct her, and not able to let slip the Mandy who his mother’s mind held, he rushed the conversation to an end.

Though he had forgotten her, the girl to his side was still sitting beside him. The Jamaican woman had left him at some point.

His body was still there, his white shirt was not the same color as his white running shoes. The body of the phone was warm and his cheek where he had held it, felt touched.

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JUST SAY NO OPTING OUT OF THE TYRANNY OF TESTING Across the country, hundreds of thousands of parents are sending letters to their superintendents informing them that standardized testing has gotten out of control, and enough is enough. They are taking direct action in the form of civil disobedience: Their child will not be taking the new Common Core standardized tests.

In just New York State alone, 175,000 students have opted out of their tests. From 12-year-olds, to parents, to community groups, to Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the support for opting-out grows every day. But what are these tests? And what makes them so useless and unfair?

It all began in 1965, with President Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). As a part of his “War on Poverty,” the ESEA was intended to lower the achievement gap between high and low income students by providing federal and state aid to schools with a large portion of high-needs (poor, often minority) students. The most recent reauthorization of the ESEA was in 2002, and is more commonly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This new version of the act reframes the problems in education. Rather than providing assistance to high-need schools—which was the cornerstone of the original ESEA—NCLB instead emphasizes rewards and punishments for performance on new state-wide standardized tests administered in grades three through eight, and once in high school. The

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WORDS BY Aurora Rojer ART BY Aurora Rojer

sanctions—including replacing school staff, decreasing the authority of school-level administration, appointing private companies to take over the school, transforming it into a charter—increased each year schools failed to meet expectations, and if every child was not proficient by 2014, schools would be closed and their entire staff fired.

In 2009, President Obama’s executive initiative Race to the Top built on the NCLB framework. RTTT was not a law, but rather a competitive 4.35 billion dollar grant for education departments, dangled in front of states in desperate need of funds after the 2008 stock market crash. In order to receive money, and to avoid the penalties from not reaching NCLB’s unreasonable benchmarks, schools had to adopt certain educational policies including teacher and principal performance evaluations based on student test scores, and the adoption of common standards and subsequent common standardized tests.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were not technically required in order to receive RTTT funds; in principle, states could create their own standards.

However, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other wealthy philanthropists were funding the pricy creation of CCSS, and had already gotten the approval of the Department of Education at the same time that RTTT was announced. It was much easier for states to simply adopt the pre-written, pre-approved CCSS than

spend precious funds developing their own. Indeed, 48 states adopted these standards before they were even completed, ignoring the fact that the standards were written by testing companies and politicians rather than by teachers and education experts, simply because they needed the money promised by RTTT.

The Common Core State Standards have been criticized by many individuals of vastly different backgrounds, from Tea Partiers to socialists. Over 500 early childhood educators signed a statement on March 2, 2010, charging that the standards are developmentally inappropriate for the earlier grades from kindergarten to third. Furthermore, as Diane Ravitch, an education historian and scholar, explained in a speech to the Modern Language Association, there was no public participation, transparency, or even field testing of the standards before they were implemented, nor is there any process to revise them; the committee that wrote them no longer exists, and no other organization has the authority to go back and make changes.

But opting out is an indictment not only of the CCSS, but of the malignant tests that go with them, namely Smarter Balanced and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).

Administered entirely online, these tests consist of multiple choice and short answer questions. Remarkably, the essays are graded by computers. Unable to detect the meaning of language, the computers instead rely on length, grammar, and the use of direct quotations.

It would be asinine to believe that this is a promotion of critical thinking. In addition, Russ Walsh, the current coordinator of College Reading at Rider University, who has worked for 45 years as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, and curriculum director in public schools, evaluated the reading passages from the PARCC tests and found that “the passages chosen are about two grade levels above the readability of the grade and age of the children.� Furthermore, the passing grade for these tests was set arbitrarily high, so that about 70 percent of students are certain to fail. Parents and teachers protest against demoralizing students by first giving them a test that is complicated far beyond their capacity and then labelling them a failure when they perform as expected.

The tests are not only poorly designed, but also do not provide valuable feedback to teachers and parents. The scores come months after the tests were given, usually when students have already moved on to a new class. Further, the scores are a simple number; they

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“

These tests are predicated on the assumption that simply demanding more will lead to better results. But after over a decade of minimal results, we that is not Educationa is not a res or schools. r t i e

do not show where students did well and where they did poorly. A teacher who spent all year in a classroom with a child does not need a single arbitrary score to tell them how well that child knew how to read or do math; they give and grade homework, projects, presentations, quizzes, and tests in order to do that. Parents, if they were wondering about their child’s progress, could just pull out their child’s report card.

Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, claims another reason to have these tests is to have “an honest way to measure that you’re hitting those high standards and to have transparency across the country.” Perhaps being able to compare students in different states is a valid concern, but the fact is that the United States already has a way of doing this: It is called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and it has been measuring exactly that since 1992. The NAEP has no high stakes attached; its sole purpose is to provide valuable information. It also uses a sampling method, rather than testing the entire population, because as anyone who has taken an introductory statistics course knows, one can be 99% confident about trends in a population just from analyzing a sample of that group.

Statisticians know that testing an entire population is not only unnecessary, but ill-advised because it is so costly. PARCC and Smarter Balanced are no exception. Ravitch, in her MLA speech, explains that “the cost of implementing the Common Core and the new tests is likely to run into the billions at a time of deep budget cuts.”

Every school district has to buy new computers and bandwidth, since the tests are administered online, along with teaching and testing materials

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that align with the new standards.

Ravitch faults what many have called the educational-industrial complex for this, in which testing corporations, charter chains, and technology companies view public education as an emerging market rather than a cornerstone of our democratic society.

The tests are a waste of time as well as money. Schools have up to 20 consecutive schools days for testing each time the assessment is administered, according to the PARCC website, and that is twice a year. That adds up to 40 days of testing. Though students are not being tested all day for each of these days, testing disrupts the entire school schedule and most teachers cannot resume regular lessons until all students are done testing and the schedule has returned to normal. These 40 days also do not account for time spent preparing for tests, which, as will be discussed later on, is not insignificant.

Students are not the only ones being tested by these exams. Teachers and schools as well are judged based on Value-Added Measurements (VAMs), which “attempt to measure a teacher’s impact on student achievement — that is, the value he or she adds — apart from other factors that affect achievement, such as individual ability, family

environment, past schooling, and the influence of peers,” according to the Rand Corporation, a public policy think tank. But is this possible? The answer is no, at least not through these tests.

According to this system, all teachers need to be judged by their students’ test scores, even though the tests are only in math and reading. Science, art, and language teachers’ salaries, bonuses, and even jobs are on the line based on how their students perform in other subjects.

Further, students are not randomly distributed in classes. Principals will often give experienced teachers more difficult students, which will bring

down their VAM scores. Multiple studies have shown that teachers’ ratings are deeply affected by the types of students in their classes, despite attempts to control for these factors. And of course, students’ test scores reflect more than just their teachers’ skill. VAMs cannot truly disentangle whether a test score came down to if a student had breakfast or got in a fight with their friend that day. In a sample as small as a single classroom, a few skewed scores can have huge effects on the teacher’s evaluation.

When teachers’ jobs, schools’ funding, and the ability to remain open

are on the line, it is no surprise that the resulting stress manifests itself in a toxic learning environment. One response to the high-stakes pressure is illustrated by the Success Academies in New York City.

As described in a recent New York Times article, the entire school centers around passing standardized tests: “To prepare for the reading tests, students spend up to 90 minutes each day working on ‘Close Reading Mastery’ exercises, consisting of passages followed by multiple-choice questions. The last two Saturdays before the exams, students are required to go to school for practice tests,” and students’ scores are posted on the wall for others to see and judge afterward.

Schools that cannot bear to subject their children to Success Academy test prep need to find other ways to keep from getting shut down.

The recent testing scandal in Atlanta shows what happens when teachers and principals are driven to desperation: In 2011, 44 out of 56 schools in Atlanta were found to have cheated on the highstakes state test of 2009. The scandal implicated 178 teachers and principals, who manually corrected answers of students. On April 1, 2015, 11 teachers accused of being involved in the scandal were convicted on racketeering charges. Clearly high-stakes testing

with unreasonable standards forces educators to make impossible decisions.

These tests are predicated on the assumption that simply demanding more will lead to better results. But after over a decade of NCLB with minimal results, we now know that is not the case.

Educational inequality is not a result of bad teachers or schools. Dedicating all of our resources to fixing these problems ignores the larger issue: We have tremendous economic inequality in this country. A good teacher can change a life, but it is unfair to demand that teachers make up for hunger, homelessness, and neglect, particularly when we are judging them unfairly and paying them so little. If we really wanted all of our children to be educated, we would first make sure that they are all fed, clothed, and cared for. We would create jobs for their parents and ensure they could afford doctors’ visits. Setting higher standards and demanding better results is not going to change the facts— it’s only going to waste time and money and demoralize students and teachers.

For these reasons, parents everywhere are saying no. They are demanding that the testing mania needs to stop. The CCSS are flawed and their tests are destructive, and parents and students have found a powerful way to express their disapproval: by not taking the tests. Ira Shor, a professor at the City University of New York and parent of a public school student, exhorts: “Authorities count on our quiet compliance to cement their plans into place. We need defiance instead, for the sake of the kids and for the sake of the public sector without which democracy cannot survive. When we opt-out we rescue our kids, our public schools, and our society at the same time.”

f NCLB with now know t the case. al inequality sult of bad teachers Dedicating all of our resources to fixing these problems ignores the larger issue: We have tremendous economic inequality in this country.

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WORDS BY Maura Thomas ART BY Maura Thomas

THE GUILT TRIP OF LOCAVORISM A Non-Ag Student Tries to Understand Local Food I try to participate, as a matter of taste and convenience, in the habit of buying and eating food close to home—a practice called locavorism. In Ithaca, we find ourselves with ample sites to indulge: Greenstar Cooperative Market, the Ithaca Farmer’s Market, countless local CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), etc. A shock to those of us raised in the white fluorescent aisles of Stop and Shop and the A&P, these places dazzle us with row after sparkling row of products, showing off items that overtly promote lifestyles of honesty, health, and vitality.

Eating locally, engaging with knowledgeable and friendly vendors at farmers markets, and keeping a garden all make the mind and body feel so good. It’s nice to know when my bread comes from a friend who bakes in Trumansburg, and I like buying local apples from Cornell’s own orchards. In general, it’s the sense of doing something manageable and direct that is often flattering to one’s own self-image. Even if we know this terrarium world is smushed in on all sides by modern industrial agriculture and homogenized grocery chains, we have in the farmers market, CSA, or local brewing company, the taste of an idyll that lasts just long enough on the tongue to suspend the ugliness of it all—before dissolving.

Vitality. This is where most of us fall prey to the charms of buying sustainable, organic, local, and ethical. Cue woeful remarks about industrialism, urbanization, a choice Thoreau quote. As a theoretical issue, who would argue against its integrity? But when we isolate that one increasingly popular subset of these trends—locavorism—the debate gets complex and confusing. Locavorism deals specifically with the number of food miles a product travels from production to consumer. Locavores favor products with as few food miles as possible, with miles largely serving as a proxy for greenhouse gas emissions.

The merits appear natural (all natural?), but some are urging us to rethink. In The

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Locavore’s Dilemma, economic geographer Pierre Desrochers and analyst Hiroko Shimizu riff off the localist manifestos of food writers and activists like Michael Pollan in an effort to undermine and abate what they believe are the misconstrued benefits of locavorism. Basically, they argue that by fetishizing local agriculture we ignore the broader, more consequential (human, environmental, and economic) issues currently at play in a world dominated by global agriculture.

The authors identify five myths about locavorism— among them that it “heals the earth.” The list of really awful problems that face our environment today becomes dangerously long, dangerously fast. There’s global warming (the big one), deforestation, factory farming, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, urbanization, and overpopulation.

Locavores claim that the small-scale and localized agriculture, whose local products have few associated food miles, will both keep soil healthy and prevent needless resource waste in transport (whether by sea, air, or road). Desrochers and Shimizu, however, argue that some climates are especially suited to growing certain types of food; the increased efficiency in production in these areas often cancels out the associated transportation cost later. This way, transnational and international agriculture may end up with the same ecological footprint as less efficient, localized production methods. And what about overpopulation?

Some, like Desrochers, see locavorism as an “out” by which we curiously deal with overpopulation by invoking its opposite—a reinvestment in the small-scale and rural.

However, urbanization is the most efficient use of land for the almost nine billion of us (theoretically) sharing a defined area.

Excessive tillage and monoculture might be destructive, but are they more efficient? Do they ultimately feed more for less?

Locavorism also remains a practice (or ideology) much easier to enter into and sustain here, in a place like Ithaca, rather than elsewhere. Is it only viable in a “prime and diversified agricultural area in a temperate climatic zone,” and, I would add, to the middle and upper-middle classes. This idea finds its best caricature on Portlandia, when Peter and Nance (played by Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen) ask so much about their chicken entrée that the restaurant eventually provides the chicken’s dossier, on file. It wasn’t always so unnatural, though, to want to know exactly where our food came from. And some of the appeal, especially from millennials, may just be that we want some good ol’ community again—a taste of some ideal life, before we came along, and before our parents, too.

Before you all go “COOL,” throw up your hands, and walk away from the twenty kinds of carrots you’re choosing from in the grocery store, remember that locavorism is a choice, and a consumer one at that. I could make a different case for vegetarianism or veganism, but locavorism’s moralistic stakes are (for now) relatively low. Of course, the issues overlap. Buying eggs locally, for example, might ensure that you know conditions are humane. Yeah, sometimes the now infamous Portlandia line echoes in my head—“Is it local?”—when I’m looking at produce. I do still try to buy locally when season and price permit. While there’s no satisfying conclusion to be made, thinking about the practice, at least, is a good exercise in conscious shopping.

A lot of questions remain, but they’re on the shopping list.

Urbanization is the most efficient use of land for the almost nine billion of us sharing a defined area.

Excessive tillage and monoculture might be destructive, but are they more efficient?

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YOU CAN’T YELL FIRE ON THE INTERNET

WORDS BY Kira Roybal ART BY Jin Yoo In late February of this year, Reddit announced its new privacy policy, which promises to remove nude pictures published without the consent of the photographed from the site. As first noted by Gawker writer Sam Biddle, the decision did not sit well with some Reddit users. One stated, “This rule is stupid and suppresses our rights,” and another wrote, “It’s a blurry world. Just because something is unethical and should be shamed doesn’t mean you can or should ban it.” A rather frustrated Redditor resorted to a low blow ad hominem: “It’s all thanks to Reddit’s slutty CEO that fucked her way to the top.”

What can we discern from the unhappy comments of these social media consumers?

Certainly misogyny and logical fallacies are still in vogue—at least in some circles. And people get very defensive over their first amendment rights. Although internet forums are great platforms for discussion and debate, they do not exactly come with a filter. You can start off watching a YouTube video of some amusing kid dancing around and end up reading an argument in the comments section over American education policies and the state of marriage. You truly get to read all kinds of opinions because everyone is an expert online.

Certainly everyone is entitled to their opinions. Freedom of thought is arguably just as important as freedom of speech, perhaps even a precursor to the exercise of free speech.

Americans are (for the most part) guaranteed freedom of thought, speech, expression, and the like, although we may sometimes have to face the consequences of our words and actions. For instance, if you yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater where there is no fire, you will face some sort of punishment. So why are social media users, such as these Redditors, upset over laws that protect the fundamental right to privacy on the internet? More interestingly, why do they feel that

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their right to free speech and expression are threatened?

America does not have any laws that specifically protect against hate speech—speech that is directed at historically oppressed groups and is used to belittle and even traumatize the receiver(s). Instead, we have the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from regulating such speech. The idea is that we, as a society, will have a discussion about free and hate speech, and eventually we will reach some kind of conclusion based on the ideas and arguments that everyone brings to the table.

Ultimately the hope is that hate speech will be overcome by more, rather than less, free speech. The only kind of speech that is not protected under the First Amendment is “fighting words” (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire).These are words exchanged between individuals that could provoke the person addressed to commit an act of violence.

Transmitting these measures onto the internet is a different story. Thanks to social media, millions of people can anonymously (or publicly) post their thoughts and opinions for others to read and comment on. Naturally this is a terrific breeding ground for some users to share their radical opinions—through, say, neo-nationalist, antifeminist Tumblr pages—and for other users to police the nature and diffusion of such unprogressive opinions.

One specific name for those who voice their opinions against social ills and the misdeeds of individuals online is “social justice warrior.” To some, SJWs are champions for equality and human rights. To others, they are a threat to American democracy and the bane of their existence. For example, the “humanist counter theory” and anti-feminist organization A Voice for Men warns its members of the destructive forces of social justice warriors by disclosing the five easy steps that feminists allegedly use to take over the internet: (1) infect popular forum or social network, (2) start complaining, (3) gain control, (4) silence and harass, and (5) destruction complete. SJWs are apparently out to ruin the internet for everyone with their man-hating ideology and insistent online presence... Well, not exactly.

Social justice warriors are not some cohesive organization; rather, they are just a loose collection of social media users and media outlet reporters. SJW is simply a term created through the workings of internet culture, originally meant to poke fun at the users who supposedly stifled others’ exercise of free speech in order to end racist, sexist,

“Freedom of thought is arguably just as important as freedom of speech.”

homophobic, etc. comments and posts. This is why some, like the Redditors angered over the new privacy policy, feel that their First Amendment rights are threatened.

The American government isn’t around for every post and repost to uphold their right to make neo-Fascist claims.

Social justice warriors—as well as any organization or policy that attempts to make the internet a more tolerant and regulated public space—are seen as a spectre of the far-left, haunting America. Their tactics are aimed against hateful language and comments, leading some of the opposition to worry that the political correctness found in real-life society may invade and overwhelm the internet as well. New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait, in his recent and much talked-about piece on the perversion of modern liberalism (“Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say”), defines politically correct (p.c.) culture as “a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.” In short, people on the anti-p.c. side of the debate believe that they and their opinions are unwelcome in discussion forums.

Take the case of Dr. Matt Taylor, who wore a softcore themed shirt during a live interview for the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Project landing late last year. Taylor was chastised online for his shirt depicting scantily clad women, and #shirtgate and #shirtstorm took over Twitter for a period of time. Many claimed that it projected an unwelcoming and misogynistic message toward women in (or aspiring to be in) the STEM career fields and that it was simply unprofessional attire. A few days later, Taylor issued a public apology.

He nearly burst into tears while making his statement.

Yes, today many try to be as politically correct as possible—and with good reason. Many of us do not wish to promote hateful language against historically oppressed minority groups, so we find that our best solution is to suppress the problem. Others use social media to attack individuals who are making a breach in the p.c. code, as was the case with Taylor’s shirt. This tactic is also rather ineffective because it does not get to the root of the problem behind hateful and marginalizing language (and imagery, for that matter). Leaving comments on a neo-Fascist’s Tumblr page telling him to stop being narrow-minded and arrogant will not bring an end to the neo-Fascist, neo-Nazi, anti-feminist online, (etc.) communities, nor will it tell us why such communities exist and persist on social media.

Can more free speech really end hate speech?

Ultimately, eradicating hateful comments from the internet will take time because it requires people changing their way of thinking and perception of the world. Outlawing hate speech and demanding political correctness may be a viable option, but I doubt many Americans will want to give up one of their most prized rights. Encouraging a discussion among those who post disrespectful comments about minority groups, those who chastise them, and everyone in-between is probably the best bet. Perhaps if far-right—as well as simply disgruntled and tactless— users come to realize their arguments cannot gain support and momentum, particularly in the mainstream, they will cease spreading biased and hate-filled opinions online.

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Next episode playing in... to be determined The future of internet in Cuba

WORDS BY Alejandra Alvarez The past few months have shown incredible changes in relations between the United States and Cuba. When the news broke of President Obama’s intention to lift the American trade embargo on Cuba, several Cuban-Americans believed the announcement to be a long overdue step in the right direction, moving the countries toward friendlier negotiations and a potentially normalized relationship. However, the news also produced resentment and a genuine sense of betrayal toward the Obama administration within some members of the Cuban-American community. Many of these people believe the announcement represents a certain American naïveté concerning the true nature and backwardness of the Castro regime.

The world is holding its breath in anticipation of the ongoing diplomatic negotiations and what the ensuing years will bring for US-Cuban interactions. Yet one American franchise has elected to get a head start on investing in the island’s impending

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financial value should positive relations between the two countries come to fruition. This franchise is none other than Netflix. Random, right? I agree.

In February of this year, shortly after Obama’s embargo notice, Netflix announced its plans to extend streaming services to Cuba. Whether or not Netflix was aware at the time of the sketchiness that is the Cubans’ unknown television consumption—an incredible irony emerges from the purported launch by Netflix of a service that almost no Cuban has the technology to access, let alone the financial capacity for subscription.

Those who are familiar with the technological reality on the island know that Cubans do not experience television in any comparable way to Americans.

Here in the United States, our access to television, film, and video is relatively unlimited thanks to the Internet. On the flipside, Internet access in Cuba is severely limited. As Cuban blogger Yasmin S. PortalesMachado and Cuba scholar Ted Henken explain in Vulture, most Cubans rely on “The Packet” to acquire their weekly fix of film and television entertainment.

The Packet is essentially a flash drive upon which distributors, otherwise known as “producers,” compile trending television episodes and Hollywood movies for circulation in both Cuba’s most populated cities and most remote towns. Circulation of these flash drives is illegal, as its producers, who evidently do have web access, rip the content off of the Internet. Each flash drive costs about five dollars, the equivalent of an average Cuban citizen’s weekly salary.

The Pa c k e t is enormously popular—some distributors have up to hundreds of clients, all anxious to keep up with anything from Game of Thrones to their favorite foreign soap opera. Its popularity is also illustrative

of the reality that Cuban citizens cannot enjoy free access to the Internet like Americans can—they must conduct the exchange of online entertainment illegally, independent of the strict parameters imposed by the regime upon their relationship with technology.

In addition to such covert methods of entertainment distribution as The Packet, Cuban people have founded and implemented several creative ways of getting their own content—be that blog posts, tweets, or articles—out into the World Wide Web. Cuban blogger Reyner Aguero describes his steps for tweeting without detection using the cellular service, Cubacel. The process entails sending the tweet’s content in an MMS text message to a Gmail inbox, which has its setup enabled by IFTTT (i.e. the computerized glue that holds cell phone, email, and Twitter together in this chain of information exchange). Due to IFTTT’s wiring, servers are tricked into identifying the message as Twitter compatible and thus, post it to the user’s respective account.

An incredible irony emerges from the purported launch by Netflix of a service that almost no Cuban has the technology to access, let alone the financial capacity for subscription.

Perhaps the most ingenious demonstration of the lengths Cubans have gone to attain the right to Internet access is represented by the creation of SNet, aka StreetNet. A story by the Associated Press describes how a small community of Cuban youths constructed a network of computers—around 9,000 in total—that operates using private and hidden antennas and Ethernet cables set up across the city of Havana. Though this network remains limited as it is disconnected from the global internet, it still enables these individuals to connect with people and share files cheaply and without detection. However, the broader problem remains: Only about 5% of the island has unmediated access to the real Internet and, according to Mashable, this percentage is primarily comprised of government officials, professionals, or journalists who can afford the access either because they have the money or because they are on the regime’s good side.

So how will Netflix, among other burgeoning global technologies, be able to have any sort of success

in Cuba given the fact that Internet is unavailable to most of the island—reserved as a luxury for mainly only tourists to enjoy—and a Netflix monthly subscription costs far more than most Cubans are able to afford?

Portales-Machado anWd Henken asked a collection of Cubans ranging in profession and race how they perceived Netflix would impact the island, if at all. Most commended Netflix on its commitment to quality and ability to expose viewers to new perspectives via the media it provides. However, all were in agreement that there would be no groundbreaking impact brought about by the introduction of Netflix to Cuba, at least not in the foreseeable future, for the simple reason that most Cubans cannot access the internet. No WiFi, no Netflix.

Cubans have a long history of improvising and making do under extremely difficult circumstances and with limited resources. The aforementioned solutions they use to connect with the outside world and access and share entertainment are only the latest examples. Yes, comparatively speaking, their relationship with technology is nothing like the one Americans have and it would be nice to offer them the same Internet experiences we enjoy—but this only works in theory. Critics of Netflix’s recent move to conduct business with Cuba call it insensitive, ignorant, even selfish. They believe it reflects a lack of understanding about the conditions in Cuba, and that it is merely a publicity stunt. Netflix has defended itself by saying it sees potential in Cuba’s financial future, and they only wish to be one of the first to invest in it. Putting both of these perspectives aside, the business venture is implausible in today’s Cuba.

Until conditions on the island change, unmediated access to the online world for Cubans will remain a dream just out of reach.

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Cyber Shame and Instant Fame Monica Lewinsky on Cyberbullying

U

WORDS BY Katie O’Brien

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ntil last year, I’d never really given much thought to what it’s like to be Monica Lewinsky. As someone too young to remember her original capitulation into infamy, “Monica Lewinsky” was just a name I heard sometimes in jokes, a symbol referring to Bill Clinton’s scandal and impeachment, a pop culture reference evoking an image of promiscuity. But last year, after about a decade of avoiding the public eye, Lewinsky started speaking out about her experiences and using her platform to condemn the toxic culture of public shaming on the internet. Now I have a lot of sympathy for Monica Lewinsky, the 24-year-old whose private life was made public after being swept into an affair with a man who happened to be the President of the United States. And more importantly, I have a lot of respect for Monica Lewinsky, the 41-year-old who is reclaiming the narrative that exploded beyond her control and using her experiences to talk about a pervasive issue in our culture.

In March 2015, Lewinsky gave a TED talk in which she calls herself “patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.” She explains how the story broke online in a media industry that was still mostly print-based, and how the scandal caused a response that was unprecedented in its speed and scope thanks to technology. She describes the mass of cruel and humiliating online articles, photos, comments and emails, in which she was “branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo and, of course, ‘that woman.’” This widespread scrutiny and humiliation sent Lewinsky into a spiral of depression that made her mother afraid to leave her bedside at night, and made it impossible for her to leave her house due to harassment. She shares these experiences not to pander for sympathy, but to give a backdrop for the devastating effects of the online culture of public shaming that started with her and has exploded ever since.

Lewinsky’s speech is an important reminder of the consequences of cyberbullying. Internet displays of private information, she explains, were not yet common when it happened to her, but now it happens everyday. In her speech, she points out that this can happen to people whether or not they have actually made a mistake, but focuses on situations in which the person in question had done absolutely nothing wrong. She references the devastating story of Tyler Clementi, a college freshman who took his own life in 2010 after his roommate secretly recorded and streamed online Clementi being intimate with another man, which led to public humiliation and ridicule

among his classmates. This example is the type of horrifying and disgusting situation where the victim did nothing wrong, but was targeted through cyberbullying regardless.

It is important that the spotlight stays on cases like these, and Lewinsky is definitely coming from a place that makes her qualified to bring attention to them. But she also makes the distinction between her case and Clementi’s— she recognizes that she made a mistake—which makes me think about the role of shaming when the public largely agrees that the shame-ee has done something heinous.

I read a New York Times article a little while ago about Justine Sacco, a senior communications professional who in 2013 posted a single tweet to her 170 Twitter followers that changed her life: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” We don’t need to talk about all the things wrong with that or speculate as to why someone who works in PR would think it was a good idea to post such a thing. That being said, the fallout that followed was crazy—a perfect example of the rabid culture of online shaming that Lewinsky condemns. The Times article describes Sacco’s landing in Cape Town after an 11-hour flight. As soon as she turned on her phone she was met with an influx of texts and notifications telling her that she was currently the number one trend on Twitter.

Besides thousands of angry and threatening tweets, she found that #hasjustinelandedyet was trending and that people around the world eagerly awaited her reaction, some even going to the airport to take pictures when she landed. I can remember reading about the tweet when it happened a couple years ago. My only reaction was “Wow, what a stupid thing to say,” and the internet fallout over it didn’t seem surprising or concerning. But in the aftermath, Sacco lost her job, continued to be harassed online and offline for months and even moved out of the U.S. for a little while. While her tweet was dumb, I don’t think she deserved to have her life ruined over it, and I don’t

“She shares these experiences not to pander for sympathy, but to give a backdrop for the devastating effects of the online culture of public shaming. ”

think we need to immediately condemn anyone who says something ignorant as a terrible person who deserves to be shamed and called out in the most public way possible.

But some instances are even more morally complicated. In the case of the recent viral video of Oklahoma University’s chapter of SAE singing a terrifyingly racist and violent chant, the attention garnered by the video caused the University to take swift action in dismantling the fraternity and expelling the student instigators. Online shaming certainly sent a message about what will and will not be tolerated, and the reaction to this incident showed that racist sentiments like that are zero-tolerance offenses.

When I think about the kids in the video, sometimes I think they got what they deserved, but sometimes I feel bad that they never got the chance to become better people on their own before being branded their own ignorance forever.

To use another recent example from the headlines, I find it impossible to muster even that shred of sympathy in the case of Ray Rice, who was publicly shamed when a video was released of him knocking out his fiance in an elevator. It became evident that the NFL only punished him for fear of bad PR, so the shaming was not only justified but had a beneficial outcome.

However, it had unintended consequences for his fiance, Janay Palmer, who became famous in a way she did not ask for, by the scrutiny and attention directed toward her.

That video of her unconscious in an elevator is forever attached to her own name, not just to her now-husband’s.

Maybe some things—like racism and abuse—are so toxic that they should be destroyed at whatever cost, even if that means ruining the reputations of a few people age 18 to 22, or forcing the victim of abuse to relive it repeatedly. But it’s hard to know where to draw the line. I think the ultimate difference between these cases and the ones Monica Lewinsky refers to in her speech is that offenses like SAE’s and Ray Rice’s evoke such strong emotion that it moves beyond mindless public shaming to genuine shock and outrage. In extreme cases, mass shaming could help make sexism, homophobia, and racism shameful and taboo things that will ruin the perpetrator’s reputation, not the victim’s.

What we need to be more conscious of are the instances of cyberbullying and public shaming where the perceived offenses are much more human and minor, or where there is no wrongdoing at all. In these cases, rather than checking truly bad behavior and instigating real desire for change, the internet backlash becomes just a petty game.

There’s some type of sick pleasure and fascination in reading about other people’s downfall and humiliation.

The media industry plays into this by posting headlines that shame individuals to garner clicks and views, and the related content and comments are attached to the shameee’s name forever—it’s the modern day equivalent of a scarlet letter. So I think Monica Lewinsky’s call for empathy and compassion is spot on. There is always a real person behind the screen who is being shamed and humiliated.

While it’s easy to gleefully latch onto someone’s perceived mistake and laugh at them, that doesn’t mean it is right to do so. Before joining in on the righteous bashing and stonethrowing, we should try to empathize with the victim, and remember that with one wrong move, it could have been us

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INOCULATING FOR INDIVIDUALISM

WORDS BY Lucy Dean Stockton ART BY Emma Kathryn Regnier

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APATHY IS UPON US The dissolution of our country is upon us, and our generation is the reason, or so goes the common discourse today. The narrative states that the gen-Xers are suffering from the proliferation of media, from a disrespect for our elders, and from going digital, thereby losing human connection. We are inheriting a world full of social injustice, political strife, global unrest, and climate change. We are forced to solve the problems, and at the same time are accused of being the problem. And we don’t even care. But the problems of our generation are nothing new; though aided by new technology, they are the result of centuries of inoculating.

Our society’s values contradict the basic premise of any society by emphasizing the individual over the group. As a result, many of us are indifferent to anything beyond our iPhone. I reason that in effect the problem is not the iPhone, but instead the intense individualism and indifference that the device allows us to exercise.

Neoliberalism is inextricably connected to “American values.” As a nation that freed itself from colonial rule, our forefathers fought and lost lives for independence, for free enterprise and property rights, for democracy and for social, political, and economic freedom. The authors of our constitution were people who had already succeeded in society, and created a country that benefitted people like themselves. They argued that anyone who worked hard enough in this country would succeed, implying focus on the individual and what they alone can do to improve their status. The American Dream, older than neoliberalism, is about an individual (you) rather than society, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps means you are inevitably leaving someone behind or stepping on someone’s back to get there. How does this neoliberal emphasis on the individual over the group affect us as a society? We become apathetic to what is beyond our individual selves, making us blind to the problems that affect others and our sense of collective responsibility.

This “selective apathy”—the choice to ignore things that do not benefit or directly affect us—is not just sad, but threatens to destroy the very foundation of society. Neoliberalism ignores oppressive social structures and rests on a foundation of obliviousness and ignorance, in pursuit of the “equality” afforded to us in the American Dream. However, neither this equality nor this freedom to compete exist because there are social barriers to success.

This reliance on the individual, and the apathy towards actively improving the lives of fellow citizens, results in the institutional privatization of services and an increasing reliance on the market to provide for the well-being of individuals, often at the cost of social programs. It ignores the sociohistorical and political constructs that hold entire groups of people back. As this individualism saturates our worldview, we blame the individual (woman, person of color, LGBTQ) for their failure to assimilate to the “norm” and for their failure to “succeed” in our society.

The rise of neoliberal ideology in this country was swift and strong, and rather than being a new concept, it actually capitalized (ironic!) on the pre-existing framework of individualism and capitalist gain. At the turn of the 20th century, we saw a gross exploitation of U.S. citizens with the rise of factories, corporations, and cities. The union movement that was born out of resistance to companies in mining towns, in cotton mills, and in factories grew into a political movement and led to an era of more socialist policies. Socialist policies, while never fully achieved in the U.S., include things like free education, universal health care, and mandated vaccination. These policies focus on the well-being of the group over the individual, and collective social responsibility before individual achievement. From the late 1800s to the ’80s, economic and social inequality in the U.S. were on the decline as people fought for social equality and economic rights. During this time, citizens saw the danger of the free market system and its inability to provide for all people equally. However, as the economy boomed in the ’80s, we as a society redefined what was important. We voted for Reagan and other conservatives, and allowed our government to slash public services, further increasing our dependence on the market to provide equal opportunity and livelihoods for all citizens. Around the world, globalization and global markets redefined the world’s sociopolitical landscapes, transforming diplomacy from bilateral relationships to multilateral agreements and later, to market-based coordination between nations.

The failure of markets was catastrophic on a global scale, particularly when the hugely detrimental Structural Adjustment Programs were devised by international governing bodies. These effectively blamed entire countries for market failure, hurting the poorest the most.

As the economy boomed, sovereignty deteriorated and political participation declined in tandem.

Today, neoliberal economic policy is not the only site of apathy. Rather, we see this selective apathy everywhere. In a global framework, the developed world

The choice to ignore things that do not benefit or directly affect us is not just sad, but threatens to destroy the very foundation of society.

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I have seen some of the most intense apathy of our generation on our own campus. This school is the site of dramatic privilege and in a place where education is here to make us question things, students are instead apathetic. is ignorant, oblivious, obsessed with their own profits or selectively apathetic to the plights of developing nations. It glares out at us from the eyes of angry white males declaring affirmative action is not necessary now that we live in a “color-blind” society. It haunts the halls of shuttered public schools, closed because they were deemed failing. It rears its ugly head in the revival of some of our most dangerous diseases as parents choose to not vaccinate their children.

Here, on Cornell’s campus, it is made poignantly clear in our disinterest in campus politics, in national inequality, and in our interpersonal relationships. Apathy, therefore, is a social, individual, and economic problem.

Some of these trends demonstrate individual neoliberal ideologies while others illustrate what institutional neoliberalism looks like. For example, vaccination is one of the greatest achievements in human history, improving our ability to fight disease, to improve the human condition and, in some cases, allowing society to advance. Before vaccination, and in places where vaccines are not present, disease can ravage entire populations of people, and may decimate populations. Some diseases affect certain people far more than others, and if people who are infected do not experience symptoms, they are carriers for the disease. Carriers are dangerous to society as they can unknowingly affect dozens more people, especially those who are not immune to it. Vaccines can essentially eradicate disease by immunizing both those who would be infected and would-be carriers. When people choose to forgo vaccines, they place themselves and other vulnerable people at risk.

Increasingly, parents have chosen to forgo vaccinating their children because they fear things like autism and other dangerous side effects. The result of the anti-vaccination movement that has been gaining momentum in recent years, has shown how quickly disease can spread, and how diseases that were previously eradicated in the U.S., such as polio and the measles, can come surging back. The American Pediatric Association, federal government, and American Autism Foundation

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have all discredited the relationship between autism and vaccines. This makes a parent’s personal choice to not vaccinate their child on the basis of questionable evidence, selfish and dangerous. The decision exemplifies extreme individualism, and suggests that we have the personal freedom to choose for ourselves at the risk of others, thereby valuing one person’s potential well-being over the lives of many others. This is not only the moral reasoning for ideologies like libertarianism, but it is also intensely individualistic and apathetic to the plight of others. When we believe that our freedom of personal choice is worth more than the lives of others, we begin to degrade the foundations of society.

This same individualism can be seen through market and public forces in the rise of charter schools, recognizing the intersection of the two in privatization.

Charter schools, which are publicly funded but operate on a market-based system, rely on the idea that they will inherently be more efficient than publicly-managed schools.

The reliance on the market to educate our children sends a message that we do not trust each other to enlighten and educate our youngest citizens. It says that we would rather base their achievement on test scores than their holistic growth, and ultimately that we would prefer to capitalize on the success of our children while privatizing our public services at the risk of other students’ futures. In a market system, someone has to lose. Charter schools are the epitome of educational commodification, in which schools and scores are the product and parents must compete with each other to consume the best one. Rather than looking at the most important experience, and making that holistic education available to all students, we see instead the illusion of choice as a better replacement for democracy.

Schools, unlike other products, can’t just close and open at the will of the market. Opening and closing schools hurts kids, forcing them to readjust. In the case of rural schools, it may even detach them entirely from their community.

We cannot blame parents for encouraging their child to go where they will have the brightest future. We must reform

the system so that parents do not have to compete with one another.

I have seen some of the most intense apathy of our generation on our own campus. This school is the site of dramatic privilege and in a place where education is here to make us question things, students are instead apathetic. This is not meant to discredit the presence of mental illness, to condemn the work of student activists aggravating for a better campus by challenging the administration, or the countless Cornell citizens who actively engage in their communities.

At Cornell, it seems to students that it is “cool not to care” about their communities or about attending an interesting lecture series. In my experience at Cornell, I have seen again and again that people are more concerned with getting a degree and getting to Wall Street than with bettering our society, alleviating poverty, or fighting dramatic inequality caused by the same systems in which they hope to participate.

It is impossible to separate the two: the extreme wealth and privilege at one end, and the deprivation for the rest of our society on the other. Though we cannot break the connection between the two, we can ignore it. Cornell students in particular seem to care very little about our environment, our social inequalities, and what we can do to be kinder to each other.

The general tendency in the media to look at politics through a cynical or negative light, encourages people to detach from politics. Cornell students are not particularly interested in politics beyond their internships and the courses they take, and surprisingly are not very interested in the politics of this institution. As #FightTheFee and so many other movements on campus have taught us, it’s difficult to mobilize people, even for issues that they should care about. When discussing climate change, sexual assault, and local Ithaca politics, students seem theoretically concerned, but unwilling to commit a few hours of their time to telling other people about it, to writing up Cornell legislation, or to demanding institutional change in the university. Even the very basis of our relationships and the strong tendency toward hook-up culture demonstrates the apathy of Cornellians. It can be empowering for some, but is nonetheless hugely individualistic.

While these first seem like highly disparate examples—vaccination, the news, and our very own Cornell— they are closely interrelated through a theme of apathy and carelessness. The biggest problem our generation faces is not the iPhone, but rather the way we use it to tune out the world around us. The largest threat to the cohesion of our nation is not racism, but our unwillingness to acknowledge or work to change it. The greatest danger to economic equality in our country is not capitalism, but is our anti-union sentiment and our historical narratives about individual success. Individualistic ideologies and apathy are slowly disintegrating the moral fabric of our nation and undermining the social cohesion that holds it together. We need to reclaim public services for the public domain, and ensure that our government isn’t run by our economy. Socialist policies, like more investment in public schools, worker’s rights, and an emphasis on equitable public services, are the answer to—not the cause of—social problems. If we want any of these policies to become realities, we need to start caring. We need empathy, not apathy, and ultimately, we need action.

It glares out at us from the eyes of angry white males declaring affirmative action is not necessary now that we live in a “colorblind” society.

It haunts the halls of shuttered public schools, closed because they were deemed failing.

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sitting on the couch Excerpts from a chat about co-ops at Cornell

WORDS BY Nate Coderre

Aurora Rojer Nate: I’m not sure what the format is going to end up being. Do we keep it a dialogue? Or an interview with pointed questions?

day of Mosey and we never stopped hanging out. Look at that, we’re all great friends. The whole Mosey process was awesome and lifechanging. And you?

Aurora: I’m not sure it matters. As long as we hit all of the points. How did you find out about the Co-ops?

Aurora: I knew about Co-ops because my sister was in a Co-op at another school, so I had an idea that I wanted to be in one. Freshman year, I realized I didn’t want to be in the dorms. I couldn’t cook, I felt like a bit of a child.

I made like one good friend. Then I went to a party at one of the Co-ops. It was an Odyssey party, and it was so much more fun than any other party I’d been to. There was a live band and dancing, and not the creepy fratparty type of dancing -- actual dancing. It was so fun and free. The kitchen was so cool. I looked online and figured out when Mosey was.

Nate: I guess… Hmmm…. So my second half of freshman year, my friendship group got kind of splintered. So I was worried, and I didn’t know what my living situation was going to be like. Me and two friends just sort of happened on a sheet in Appel that had info about Mosey.

We were somewhat lukewarm about it until it started, but it was pretty obvious how special this place was. I honestly think I might have considered transferring out later on if I hadn’t Moseyed.

I had it narrowed down to Watermargin, 660, and Von Cramm. I only got into Von Cramm. There was this awesome Mosey event that was supposed to be about board games, but it devolved into strip never-have-I-ever and then a shower party. That would never would have happened this year, for whatever reason. The people who left the year I came in were kind of crazy people.

There was also a big event at Watermargin one of the last nights of Mosey. It was great because I’d met about 40 to 50 new people during Mosey, and they were all together in one room. They were all together and impossibly friendly. It was an entirely new social life for me. My friend Jaeda and I met this girl Martie on the first

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Now, how about we talk about how Co-ops are run?

Nate: Sure. So as the name suggests, Co-ops are cooperatively run on-campus houses. We’re officially part of the school’s housing, which can be both good and bad.

We get to call them any time there is a problem, but we also have to follow their rules. That being said, we have no faculty or staff living in our house, and we get to dictate how our house is run in a more general sense.

At Von Cramm, we have group of seven house officers; one president, two house managers, two stewards, a treasurer, and a secretary. The president is in charge of the people, the house managers are in charge of the building, and the stewards are in charge of the meal plan.

What’s it like at Watermargin?

Aurora: We have a president, VP, treasurer, two house managers, two kitchen stewards, two education chairs, and two social chairs. Kind of a lot of positions, now that I’m listing them. But yeah basically the same division of labor. We have house meetings once a month to talk/ argue about whatever people have to say, whether it’s begging people to do their dishes or planning a party.

How about we expand on the meal-plan now?

Nate: The most important part. Because independence and collective-living are emphasized, we cook and clean completely for ourselves. The stewards organize us into “cook groups” and plan meals. You wouldn’t expect the food to be much of anything, but our dinners are sooo good. Have you ever had our chana masala? It might be my favorite meal now. The stewards use recipes that housemembers over the decades have left us with, so we have an amazing variety of foods.

Aurora: Our meal-plan works similarly. We have house dinner Sunday-Thursday and everyone is on a cook team one night per week. Half the team cooks, the other half cleans. We also stock enough food that we can make our own breakfast, lunch, midnight snack, etc.

I think that your comment about how recipes start to add up brings up an important point about why living in a co-op is so great. The house is filled with memories of old housemembers. We recently met the guy who built our porch swing! He lived here like 35 years ago! It was cool to be able to connect a face to something that’s been in our house for so long.

Nate: I love that kind of stuff. The Cramm has kept some pretty good albums of old house photos, so we can see how the house and the people have changed. And also how they’ve stayed the same.

Aurora: That’s pretty cool. I was talking to one of my friends the other day about how older Watermarginals use stories for this sort of social conditioning. They tell

Watermargin lore. There’s totally a mythos, a morality.

The upperclassmen share tales of long gone house members to show us what living here is supposed to be like and what values someone who lives here should have.

Nate: You know what that reminds me of? As part of a push to find more Crammie stories, we’ve actually been getting a lot of emails from old Crammies, telling us about how the house was built, why it turned into a Coop, and all sorts of other great stuff. We got an email from an alumnus who joined in 1961, and we actually pulled out a quote, and are going to use it on a t-shirt.

It’s something about throwing in our lots with a bunch of scruffy beatniks. Apparently his father couldn’t quite appreciate how awesome we are.

Aurora: So what makes Von Cramm so awesome? Not all Co-ops are the same, after all.

Nate: Good point. How Von Cramm is special? We’re the coop with the most international students. We have some sort of special relationship with this civil engineering program in Spain. Every year, we get a couple of residents from there, and their friends from the program that don’t get in still end up hanging around the house. So we basically get to cheat and have a couple of extra Crammies that don’t actually live with us. They hang out in our living room until like one in the morning.

Spaniards are all amazing because they bring energy to everything. They want to talk your ear off, especially about how their American college experience is different from their expectations. Apparently, the example they use is still American Pie. Von Cramm is quite a bit different than American Pie...

We also currently have students from Sweden, Singapore, a bunch of people from Italy, and a South African law student. The amount of time that they stay here varies, but we get a chance to get to know all of them. Now you should talk about why Watermargin is so cool.

Aurora: We have a pretty big activist tradition… we were founded 1947 by a group of World War II veterans who

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were pissed off that they could fight and die alongside black peers, but couldn’t live with them in a house when they got back to school after the war. Our motto is “all folks are family,” and I feel like we all take that pretty seriously. We have a bunch of education events, and in the past have had some crazy-awesome speakers, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X (in a debate with James Farmer over segregation), and Howard Zinn.

Nate: Wait, what? That’s crazy. Von Cramm has some catching up to do…

Aurora: Get on it, man! And last week we had a tango lesson. Professors attended. Basically, we rule.

Nate: How do we position ourselves in relation to Frats? I hate comparing ourselves to them (it can get judgmental fast) but we sort of have to, because that’s the social living arrangement that everyone thinks of.

Aurora: From what I can tell, when you join Greek life, you’re joining a club that’s people who live in a house. It’s not as much of a home. In Co-ops people care so much about each other and about the house. We’re cooking and cleaning for each other and our friendship is very much grounded in the space.

Nate: I completely agree. Although I do sometimes still have trouble getting people to do their chores. I also think that we rely on individual contributions to the community more so than the organizational structure.

Frats have a pretty well fleshed out schedule of events.

We have three or four major things per semester, but otherwise we rely on people being passionate about the house to painting murals or building porch swings or

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baking bread for their housemates.

Aurora: Man, I wish all of the Co-ops hung out more. Our intercoopular relations are weak.

Nate: Yea, I think it’s hard to have good intercoopular relations, because so many of us are so wrapped up in our own houses and also somewhat scatterbrained.

There’s no great way to organize things. We just sort of have to rely on the personalities that we have instead of organizational structure.

Aurora: Yeah, but that’s good, because fuck organizational structure. Another cool thing about Co-ops is that our Mosey processes are random (or partially random, in Watermargin and Whitby’s cases) meaning that we really do get a diverse spread of people. I talked to this guy in a frat once who was telling me how during Rush, you have to pick your “little” because you need someone to hold the exact role that you hold now. I think his exact words were “someone to pay your rent when you’re gone.”

That was his version of diversity. But like ew. That is not diversity.

Nate: Nooooooo, that is not. I love that the culture of the house changes every year. Some recent graduates might say we’re pretty tame now, but I think we’re closer. There’s much less drama now. We’re more of a family.

Aurora: Yeah. I think that family is really the only way to describe Co-ops.

Nate: Uh huh. We bake, give pep talks, help out with homework, whatever we can to help each other out. I don’t think there’s another place like it at Cornell.

One-Fight-Oh! Celebrating 150 Years of Protest at Cornell WORDS BY Melvin Li ART BY Karen Tsai For many people around the world, February 2015 marked the start of the Year of the Sheep—a time of peace, promise, and prosperity. But at Cornell University, that month turned out to be something else altogether.

On February 5, 2015, President Skorton sent a lengthy email to all Cornell students announcing that, beginning in the fall, any student not enrolled in the University’s Student Health Insurance Plan (SHIP) would have to pay an annual fee of $350. Skorton said that the new fee would help pay off massive debts incurred by Cornell’s Gannett Health Services.

Four days after Skorton’s announcement, a large group of around 300 students gathered in Willard Straight Hall as classes ended at 12:05 p.m. to protest the new fee. After distributing pamphlets and making a few speeches, the protest leaders rallied around 150 students and marched them directly to Day Hall. Only 40 managed to enter the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost on the third floor. The rest of the protesters spread out and made themselves comfortable, setting up camp in various hallways and offices throughout the building. They took selfies, messaged friends, gave speeches, ordered pizza, blasted music, and most importantly, refused to leave until Skorton had heard their grievances. The protesters vacated the building after four hours, but since then, the fight has continued with teach-ins, demonstrations, and meetings with the administration.

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“

As we look back and celebrate the Cornell’s 150th birthday, we must realize that our beloved university wasn’t a familiar pla today. From program h

This year’s Fight the Fee protests are the boldest demonstrations against University authority in recent memory, but they are neither the first nor the largest. Student protests have transformed universities all over the world throughout history. Cornell, with its own lengthy past, is most certainly no exception. In honor of Cornell’s sesquicentennial, let’s examine three of Cornell’s most important student protests of the 20th century and see how each of them helped build the campus we are familiar with today.

1958: Showdown at Sage

Here’s a story for all the Thirsty Thursday fans out there who stumble to their dorms at two in the morning. In the ’50s, the concept of open parties and mixers off campus as we know them today was essentially nonexistent at Cornell. Compared with other universities, Cornell was rather slow at responding to rapidly changing sexual norms in the decade following World War II. Female students in particular were not permitted to attend unchaperoned parties off campus and had to observe a 12:30 a.m. curfew at night. With the inauguration of the socially conservative Deane Malott as Cornell’s sixth president in 1951, it seemed like this would never change.

But the restrictions on offcampus parties were becoming very unpopular with students. According to Cornell: A History, 1940-2015 by Cornell professors Glenn Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick, President Malott was furious that the Faculty Committee was relaxing restrictions on unchaperoned apartment parties and seized control of it in May 1955, beginning what Altschuler and Kramnick call “Malott’s moral crusade.”

After the accidental death of an intoxicated student on May 11, 1957, the President’s Committee declared

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that from 3 to 7 a.m. on Saturdays and 4 to 8 a.m. on Sundays, students of different genders could not be in the same room both on or off campus.

Student opposition finally exploded in May 1958, when the Student Council was informed that the President’s Committee was seriously considering a full ban on off-campus parties. On Friday, May 23, history major John Kirkpatrick Sale ’58 and engineer turned English major Richard Fariña ’59 rallied 1000 students at Willard Straight Hall and led a march around the Arts Quad that ended at Day Hall to confront Malott, who managed to leave before they arrived. The students were disappointed, but Sale swore they would prevent female students who lived in Sage Hall from observing curfew that night as a final message to the administration. That night, the protest continued as promised outside Sage Hall, where 100 female residents broke curfew to join over 3000 male protesters, bringing flares, torches, firecrackers, and even an effigy of Malott that they hanged and burned in a nearby tree. Although Sale tried to stop them, about 1000 students proceeded to march to Malott’s residence where they trampled his lawn, smashed his windows with eggs and stones, and even set off a smoke bomb.

Sale and Fariña were suspended for the

protest and were eventually placed on parole, but the protest put a decisive end to Malott’s moral crusade, costing him crucial support on the Board of Trustees. Malott’s conservative executive assistant Lloyd Elliot was replaced with the progressive John Summerskill, who immediately restored the faculty to power in the Faculty Committee.

In the fall of 1958, the deans of the seven undergraduate colleges concluded that “the University cannot undertake to act in loco parentis, if this means maintaining concern for and supervision over all aspects of the student’s life—social, moral, religious as well as intellectual.” The responsibility of writing student behavior codes was soon given to a student governing body.

Altschuler and Kramnick believe that the “apartment riots” of 1958 not only ended a ban on off-campus parties at Cornell, but also triggered a wave of similar protests throughout American universities that eventually ended curfews and social behavior restrictions on most college campuses. So the next time you collapse into bed after making (or perhaps in the process of making) questionable life choices off campus, whisper a little “thank you” to Sale and Fariña—the two students who made your night out possible.

1969: W illard S traight H all Occupation Ever wonder how Cornell’s program

houses came to be? The story of some of these residences began with drastic student action. Almost a decade after the small army marched to Malott’s house, Cornell stood as one of the most racially progressive universities in the United States. Under President James A. Perkins, who succeeded Malott in 1963, Cornell became the first of major universities to aggressively recruit minority students. This particularly benefited African Americans, who had been attending Cornell since the 1880s in only negligible numbers.

But as racial tensions intensified throughout the ’60s, many black college students across the nation began demanding that their schools create independent black studies programs.

The tensions that led to the Willard Straight Hall occupation had been brewing for over a year. Cornell’s AfroAmerican Society (AAS) had long complained about what it saw as a lack of adequate progress towards a black studies program at Cornell. Although Perkins and the Board of Trustees had actually authorized such a program just days before the occupation, many AAS members were still in favor of direct action, recognizing the structural nature of the racial issues at Cornell. This recognition was heightened throughout

the semester, when African American students were punished for various protests while their white classmates were not. The last straw fell on the morning of April 18, when a group of white students burned a cross on the porch of Wari Cooperative, a house for black women students. According to protest spokesperson Tom Jones ’69, the AAS voted that evening to carry a full-scale occupation of Willard Straight Hall the next day. Although Jones was against any building takeovers, “the majority thought it was necessary to do something that would shock the University, grab its attention. Parents’ Weekend would be a perfect time.

The Straight would be a good target.”

According to Donald Alexander Downs’s Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University, the first AAS members began filtering into Willard Straight through the back door at 5:00 a.m. on April 19. They scuffled with food preparation employees for the keys to the building, and within 30 minutes, rounded up the Straight’s custodial staff. At 6:15, shortly after releasing the custodians, the students took hold of the Cornellian-run Ithaca radio station, WVBR, so that AAS president Edward Whitfield ’71 could announce the takeover to the community. Around the same time, the students forcefully evicted the people sleeping upstairs—who were mostly visitors in town for Parents’ Weekend.

Whitfield originally planned to continue the occupation for just a few hours to send a message to the administration.

But at around 9 a.m., 25 white Delta Upsilon brothers entered the Straight through an unguarded window on the south side to confront the AAS, only to be driven back through the same window. Soon afterward, the AAS decided to smuggle in the rifles they purchased earlier to defend themselves against future attacks, beginning the

always the ace we walk m parties to houses, the Cornell we know was slowly hatched over the course of a century and a half with the help of student action.

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first armed occupation of a building on an American college campus. Outside, the Students for a Democratic Society formed a defensive picket around the building in support of the occupation. Altogether around 80 AAS members barricaded themselves within Willard Straight for 36 hours.

Vice President Steven Muller and Vice Provost Keith Kennedy helped negotiate a peaceful end to the occupation on April 20, which included amnesty for all occupiers and an investigation of the Wari House cross burning. Tensions rose on April 21, when the faculty voted to nullify the University’s agreement with the AAS and punish the protesters. This vote, however, was reversed two days later, sparking a deep rift in the faculty that culminated in the resignation of several professors and Perkins himself within weeks. As part of the agreement, Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center was created that year at 320 Wait Avenue. However, the building burned to the ground on April 1, 1970, in the midst of heightened racial tension.

The ASRC was temporarily relocated to Low Rise 8 before being moved to its present day location on Triphammer Road. In 1972, Ujamaa, a residence hall celebrating the lives of black people around the world, was created in Low Rise 10—one of Cornell’s oldest program houses today.

1993: Four Days at Day Hall If you’ve ever felt tempted to carve your name onto the strange glass needle that stands on the Arts Quad, be glad you didn’t. The vandalizing of public artwork caused a fourday occupation of Day Hall in the fall of 1993. The Johnson Museum of Art had collaborated with the Hispanic American Studies Program to expose Cornell’s campus to the work of Latino artists. Eight large pieces of artwork were temporarily installed across campus as part of an exhibition. One of them, created by Daniel J. Martinez and called, “The Castle is Burning,” proved very controversial. The piece included several tar-covered wooden walls about eight feet in height, set up along the paths across the Arts Quad, forming small rectangular “castles” and dividing the quad into many parts.

Standing on top of these walls were two feet tall letters which spelled out messages including: “In a rich man’s house the only place to spit is in his face.” In November, a number of vandals drew a swastika and wrote racial slurs on one of the walls before tearing down several of its panels and letters.

Many Latino students were outraged by the vandalism, and when no University action was taken to identify the perpetrators, the students decided that they needed to protect the artwork themselves. On Friday, November 19, around 100 students, most of them Latino, formed a human barricade around Martinez’s entire installation. Protest leader Eduardo Peñalver ’94 eventually marched the group to Day Hall to speak with President Frank H. Rhodes about what they felt were longstanding issues for Latino students at Cornell.

Tensions between Latino students and the University had been steadily growing long before the vandalism took place.

At Day Hall, the protesters presented administrators with a list of nine demands, requesting that the University devote more courses to the study of Latino-American history, purchase more library resources on Latino-American culture, host more Latino guest speakers and visiting professors,

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recruit more Latino tenure-track professors, and finally, create a special residence hall devoted to Latino culture.

Larry Palmer, Vice President for Academic Programs and Campus Affairs, quickly phoned President Rhodes, who was in Philadelphia attending the 100th football game between Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. Rhodes told Palmer to set up a private appointment between him and the students on December 3—the last day of the semester. The students, however, suspected that the administration wouldn’t keep promises made behind closed doors and demanded that Rhodes discuss the matter with them in public. Led by Peñalver, the protesters refused to leave Day Hall until they could meet with the president and the senior administration.

The sit-in at Day Hall lasted for the next four days. Immediately after the employees left on November 13, Cornell Police blocked off all entrances to the building but made no attempts to remove students already in the building. A crowd of supportive students gathered around the building that night to hold a candlelight vigil in honor of the protesters inside. The crowd eventually stormed the main entrance, forcing the officer guarding the door aside.

The next day all phone access from Day Hall was cut off, preventing students inside from calling local media outlets.

In response, a second group of students with fresh supplies pushed their way through the main entrance, injuring an officer and hospitalizing another. Rhodes was forced to cut his Philadelphia trip short and returned to Ithaca on November 21—the third day of the occupation. On November 22, the students finally vacated Day Hall after Rhodes agreed to a series of meetings with protest leaders.

Because the protesters were unarmed and made no threats against the University, suspension charges against Peñalver were dropped. On March 19, 1994, the Board of Trustees approved the creation of the Latino Living Center on West Campus. In 2000, the LLC was moved to Anna Comstock Hall on North, joining program houses such as Ujamaa (1972) and Akwe:kon (1991). On March 18, 2014, almost 20 years after the takeover, the University announced that Peñalver would be serving as the 16th Dean of the Cornell Law School, making him the first Latino dean of an Ivy League law school.

The Result of Action Before the 2014 Homecoming laser light show kicked off, I and thousands of others around me were shown a brief video of two students traveling back in time and visiting the University immediately after its founding 150 years ago. While it’s a cute idea, I doubt such a visit would be as enjoyable as it was shown to be. As we look back and celebrate Cornell’s 150th birthday, we must realize that our beloved university wasn’t always the familiar place we walk today. From parties to program houses, the Cornell we know was slowly hatched over the course of a century and a half with the help of student action. The three student protests I have just described and the many others I haven’t mentioned have all helped to forge the university we know today. So as you enjoy Charter Day weekend, remember the alumni who surrounded Sage, stormed Willard Straight, and sat down in Day. 150 years is a long time—let’s strive to give those who arrive in another 150 more to celebrate.

WORDS BY Arielle Cruz

AMERICA IN WARTIME MUSINGS OF A MILLENIAL INSPIRED BY JESSICA WILLIAMS

Jessica Williams said, in the middle of her comedy performance in Statler Hall, that our generation has grown up in wartime. That’s a kind of old timey phrase, “wartime.” It makes you think back to the ’30s, and rations, and women and children smudged with dirt, going to the factories for work to make weapons and appliances. It reminds me of films I watched in high school history that are nameless in my memory, but seemed to feature a lot of white haired men repeating the phrase “wartime.” Regardless of the connotation, that’s when we grew up—in a time when our country was at war. Our country’s longest war. And that identity has shaped us deeply, like it has shaped every other generation that has come of age in times of American bloodshed in far-flung countries across the globe.

Unlike other generations that have brandished this label, we are not mostly manual laborers, we aren’t gung ho fighters, we aren’t angry and weren’t drafted against our will. Instead, we trusted and then distrusted the government to take vengeance for a terrible act. We are apathetic about the effectiveness of our politicians. We are technologically savvy, well-connected to one another via media, we are egocentric.

Or at least, those are our stereotypes. We are activists, or we want to be, but a decade too late and for issues that have little to do with foreign policy. We are just recently reinventing activism in the scope of our new Silicon Valley-driven world, and we are using our power to defend social issues that date back to the Civil War and suffrage.

We are an odd generation. Books will be written about us; many already have been.

We never really think about our generation in the scope of the war. We think about

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it in the scope of everything else—technology, relationships, living at home, healthcare for the baby boomers—but not war. However, the War on Terror and its resulting effects have had a gigantic impact on how we view the world. In a recent article in The Atlantic, Ron Fournier explains one of these major effects—that Millennials are becoming more negative and cynical about politics and our political processes as a whole. According to the article, there are four things you need to know about us as a generation: “Millennials, in general, are fiercely committed to community service. They don’t see politics or government as a way to improve their communities, their country, or the world. So the best and brightest are rejecting public service as a career path. Just as Baby Boomers are retiring from government and politics, Washington faces a rising-generation ‘brain drain.’ The only way Millennials might engage Washington is if they radically change it first.”

I hate to indulge most articles that talk about our identity as “Millennials,” but this is one of the few that have ever made sense to me. I can’t disagree with any of these points. I don’t have a single friend who has any desire to go into politics, and if any of us insinuated that public office was one of our goals, I think we would all laugh. It’s a running joke. In theory, there is nothing wrong with going into politics. These jobs are necessary, and they should be held by the best and brightest in our age group—but they probably won’t be because many of these individuals have lost faith in the government.

A lot of this loss of faith has to do with the events leading up to the general distrust in our political system. In a study

by The Harvard IOP, the “Survey of Young Americans’ Attitudes Toward Politics and Public Service,” a third of Millennials agree that “political involvement rarely has any tangible results.”

Much of this has to do with feeling that our government has worked against us. We’ve been through scandal after scandal: From the middle east having weapons of mass destruction and then never having them, to the party gridlock that has stopped progress over the past few years, to Edward Snowden’s document leak informing the public that our government is pulling a 1984. Each of these are events stemming (pardon my generalization) from the events surrounding and following those on September 11, 2001. The Patriot Act was written to handle terrorism threats, after all.

Though the war in Iraq has officially come to an end, it has clearly shaped our political views, and our views about how to get things done. After all of the mess that takes place during any war, we have revolted. We have a no-nonsense policy when it comes to inefficiency, and are intent on serving our country and the world through the private sector and non-profits, instead of contributing to the Washington processes that many of us see as outdated.

We have dissented and there is no way to gauge how it will affect the future. No other generation has responded to inefficiency in quite the same way, and perhaps that is one of the results of our modern level of information access.

No matter how you slice it, we are the modern children of wartime, and in many ways it has meant being the modern children of political inefficiency. When our kids are in high school maybe they will watch videos about us in high school, and men with white hair will be calling us the kids who grew up in the wake of the War on Terror. Maybe its just another label we can place on “Millennials.” There’s no way to tell but with time.

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We are apathetic about the effectiveness of our politicians.

We are technologically savvy, wellconnected to one another via media; we are ego-centric.

Or at least those are our stereotypes. We are activists, or we want to be...

The ic comedy network AN INTERVIEW WITH ITHACA COLLEGE’S OWN COMEDY DUO WORDS BY Alyssa Berdie Online comedy networks such as CollegeHumor, Funny or Die, and Above Average are becoming hubs for great comedy content and breeding grounds for discovering new talent.

For instance, many hit series on major networks, like Key & Peele and Broad City, began as independent web series. The Internet, social media marketing, and free video uploading and streaming have increased the popularity of web series.

These factors have paved the way for comedians to create great content that audiences want, without the need of financing from a major studio or television network. The trend is only growing and is quickly becoming the new norm when it comes to how networks and executive producers find concepts and talent for television and film.

An Ithaca College senior and an alum from the Roy H. Park School of Communications spent many semesters creating online comedy content together and decided that rather than try to get the attention of established networks, it would be better to create their own. I talked with Kyle Vorbach (the senior) about his start in comedy and what led him and John Horan (the alum) to create their own network.

When did you become interested in comedy?

Back in middle school, my friends and I used to make stupid little videos for the fun of it. One day, this girl came up to me at school and told me she really liked the video I put up the night before (on MySpace, of all places). So the Pavlovian association was formed between being funny and people liking me. The idea of doing it professionally really came about when I started doing standup at Comedy Club here.

What inspired you to do comedy?

Back in middle school, just as my body was undergoing a period of rapid change, so was the media landscape.

People like The Lonely Island (Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg, and Jorma Taccone) and Derrick Comedy (Donald Glover) were transcending from web comedy into actual, “real” work like Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock. I wanted to be them. I still do. I promise, this is the last question where my answer begins with “back in middle school.”

When did you meet John?

Back in middle school, I wrote for a late night show on an Ithaca College Television (ICTV) show my freshman year here (Ithaca College), and John was pretty much the only person who would laugh at my jokes. We kind of hit it off at IC Comedy Club because we have this bizarre, 4th grade sense of humor—and we’ve been happily married ever since.

So Kyle and John, both media production majors, started creating content together with John and Kyle Do Everything—their first original series about two best friends, John and Kyle, who try to do every single thing there is to do in the world. With the success of their series, which they produced independently, they expanded their idea into a 30-minute short film for John’s senior thesis (and what became Kyle’s junior thesis).

How did you come up with the idea of John and Kyle?

We went to a party one night, and after stumbling back to his dorm at 4am, we were like “WE SHOULD MAKE AN ICTV SHOW!” and we came up with this whole idea. The next morning, we immediately decided that the idea was God awful, and then came up with John and Kyle.

Did you think John and Kyle would be become a short film?

We had absolutely no foresight on that web series. John was going to LA for a semester after we finished it, so we thought it would end there. Then we realized that John still had a thesis film to do. The end result was a 30 minute John and Kyle film and entire semester of my inflated ego.

Once you started working with John, was creating a comedy network something you two always envisioned doing, or did something else spark the idea?

It felt weird putting all this time and effort into what we believed to be a really funny show and then just walk away from it. I got the idea one night after John graduated. All of my friends are so funny and talented, but they were putting their things up all over the place on the Internet – all these different accounts, with no real promotion effort. I thought that it would be so cool if we could unite everyone under one roof and make awesome content together. I pitched John the idea, and he was all like “YO THAT IDEA IS HELLA DOPE YO. SWAG SWAG SWAGGGGGG $$$$.”

Where did the name come from?

We wanted a name that was just as cocky as humanly possible. We’re your Future Boyfriends. Also, we could be each other’s Future Boyfriends.

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Future Boyfriends is an independent comedy network and platform featuring original web series such as John and Kyle Do Everything, High Science, and Goodnight, John as well as sketches, satirical articles, and listicles with contributors in both New York and Los Angeles. How did a recent college graduate and current undergraduate gain bicoastal contributions and attention? The answer is simple: Kyle and John are currently running this network from two different coasts. What isn’t simple is the actual process of creating content together. They make it work by writing via Skype, and establishing small crews on both coasts. Then Kyle edits everything—even if it means sacrificing sleep or school work—because, as he said: “I am a control freak. For better or for worse.”

On the east coast, Kyle is currently working on producing and directing High Science, “a comedy web series in which a weekly “scientist” guest smokes up and attempts to explain complicated scientific concepts,” which he created with IC senior, Sydney Morin, and co-produces with IC senior Alyssa Berdie (hey, that’s me!). He is also producing and editing Goodnight, John all while directing photography and editing his senior thesis film.

Over on the west coast, John is currently starring in and coproducing Goodnight, John, a web series about those stupid conversations you had at sleepovers, as well as working as a standup comedian in Los Angeles, opening for the likes of Marc Maron and Amy Schumer. With the obvious geographical limitations, Kyle and John brainstormed ideas for a new original web series that would be easy to shoot.

Eventually John came up with the idea of a show similar to CollegeHumor’s Jake and Amir except right before bed. It made Kyle “laugh out loud,” so they began writing episodes.

The early success of Future Boyfriends is undeniable, with 926 likes on Facebook, 6.1K followers on Twitter (@ FutureBFz), and 58k views on YouTube to prove it. High Science’s first episode garnered 4k views on YouTube in one day. These two clearly have a knack for comedy, finding new talent, and marketing/distributing their work. Kyle hopes that Future Boyfriends can expand into something even larger like, “a shadow organization that secretly influences world

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The Internet, social media, & free video uploading have paved the way for comedians to create great content. events to further its own mysterious political agenda.” But if not, Future Boyfriends is looking to “bring more people on and make the stuff that makes us laugh,” at the very least.

Future Boyfriends’s success didn’t come easily or randomly.

Kyle and John, with the help of exceptional producers, talent, and crew members, have worked hard to produced the highest quality and funniest content possible. With more ideas for new series, articles, and sketches, it’s clear that Future Boyfriends won’t be a project that ends when Kyle and John “get real jobs,” but instead shows promise to become the “real job.”

My final question to Kyle was to elaborate on anything from his workflow to marketing and distribution plans, but in typical Kyle fashion all I received was, “If anyone wants to hang out, let me know. I’m free all day, every day. Honestly, even saying hello in the hall would be great. You don’t even have to say it. I can say it, you just have to promise not to say, ‘Who are you?’ or ‘Why are you dressed like Batman?’

It’s because it’s my birthday and it makes me feel special.”

What is something you feel like you should care about

but really just don’t?

“The government. The environment is just way more important.”

-Abby Brown “My career.”

-Naudia Shebaro “Prelims. And just school in general.”

“Exercise, staying fit.”

“The health, wealth, and good fortune of my parents. I should probably call them.”

“The welfare of people far away.”

“Water conservation” “Overpopulation.”

“The environment.” x7 “Cornell politics. Like seriously, what power do you have?”

“The environment, if I’m gonna be honest.

Like composting? Yeah.”

“Waking up in the morning.”

“Doing the readings for class.”

-Corey Moss “Sleep.”

-Alanis Yu “My republican cousins.”

-Josh Barber

“School spirit. The sesquicentennial. And the fucking chimes.”

-Anna Nino “Fracking, GMOs.” “Myself.”

“CORNELL!” -Clarrie Schultz “The humanities. And Kitsch Magazine.”

-Trevor Samson “David Skorton.”

“Showering.”

-Aurora Rojer “The homeless. Also that I’m ruining my future because of indolence.”

-Colin Phillips

“Cuba. North Korea. Corporate slaughter. Ethically produced clothing. Outsourcing of labor.

Patriotism. Fossil fuels and electricity. Diesel gas. Car emissions. Putting less butter on my popcorn. The price of movie theaters. Hilary Clinton.”

-Jin Yoo

*Some apathetics preferred to remain annonymous

ON THE PLAZA

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AWARD SHOWS WORDS BY Yana Makuwa ART BY Aurora Rojer

Awards season is the best time of the year for people who engage in frequent small talk. The first two months are sprinkled with a series of pop culture conversation grab-bags.

If there’s ever a lull in the conversation, you can strike up at least five minutes of talk about nominee (or winner) speculation and criticism in any number of interesting categories. Awards shows have been around for so long that they are practically a part of American consciousness. But while we know the most intimate details of the beautiful people on the silver screens, hardly anyone knows or even thinks about the people behind the scenes, sitting at mahogany conference desks and secretly manipulating our casual conversation, bar trivia questions, and (gasp) our personal opinions.

In the world of awards shows, there exists the pretty obvious big three: the Grammys, the Emmys, and the Oscars.

These shows can be organized in a series of odd-one-out patterns. They happen at the beginning of the year (except the Emmys, which are in September), they have a parent network that broadcasts their show (except the Emmys again, which has a rotating slot on CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox), and they end in the letter Y (except the Oscars because they were tired of the Emmys always being the special one). The Golden Globes are often confused with the Oscars even though their names clearly describe two differently shaped statues (It’s likely due to the fact that they give awards for television and movies).

This discussion could go on forever, and I could explain how the Tonys, the MTV Music Awards, the Kid’s Choice Awards, and even the fictional “Soapys” (spelling debatable), all fit into this strange matrix of similarity and difference. Suffice to say that for all their individual quirks and specifications, the main awards shows have enough essential similarities that it is possible to treat them all as phenomena. For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to draw my examples from the first four that came to mind.

Each of these shows (Emmys, Oscars, Grammys, and Golden Globes) started out as insiders in each industry wanting to commend their peers for innovation and excellence in the fields they care about. According to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’s website, “When Syd Cassyd, its founder, first conceived of the organization, he envisioned a serious forum where all aspects and concerns of the fledgling medium could be discussed.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was the brainchild of Louis B. Mayer (of Metro-GoldwynMayer), and was supposed to bring the different branches of film creation together. Following suit, the Recording Academy self-proclaims their cause for existence to be “to positively

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impact the lives of musicians, industry members and our society at large.” The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the little-known bestowers of the Golden Globes) was an organization of foreign journalists who wanted to commend the creators of the work they were reporting on. All of these associations are focused inward; they’re tight communities congratulating their members on the specific talents they share.

So how come the general public discusses these semiself-indulgent awards, at least to some extent, as though they were the deciding measures of high artistic quality and esteem?

There is even published evidence that the entire system of voting behind these awards is not at all based on some precise, elaborate rubric with objective judges and profound criticism.

This year, a writer for The Hollywood Reporter, Scott Feinberg, included in his in-depth coverage of the time leading up to the Oscars a daily “conversation with an Academy member— who is not associated with any of this year’s nominees—about [his or] her ballot.” These raw and anonymous peeks into the minds of voters are enough to completely disillusion the staunchest of awards show supporters. Comments include not voting for Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Whiplash because he didn’t believe that the main character wouldn’t have confided in his father about his abusive teacher, and voting for Patricia Arquette because she deserves “a bravery award” for “having no work [i.e. cosmetic plastic surgery] done during the twelve years.” Some members didn’t even bother to finish watching the films they were supposed to vote on.

It’s quite clear that these awards weren’t intended to be public guides at the outset, and today don’t resemble in the slightest an awards show idealist’s image of an averaging of excellent critical reviews that leads to the one true winner of society’s esteem. Since this is the case, we are still left wondering what the draw is. And this is by no means a new question. Many media fans of all ages understand that the actual value of art is incredibly difficult to determine, and definitely can’t be allocated categorically by a committee. Even artists themselves (and not just Kanye) recognize that receiving one of these awards, while honorable, is not the same as knowing the real worth of their art.

So many people have contemplated this problem that Google has an autofill for it. In the Internet’s secret drawer titled “Why do we have awards shows,” there are at least three articles, one from CNN, one from pajiba.com (a satirical media site), and one from Boston.com, all with variations on the same title. Although each article took a slightly different stance on awards shows, from condemning their outdated self-indulgence

Telling us what to think since the Birth of AUdioVisual Media to admitting them as communally enjoyed guilty pleasures, they all pinpointed similar aspects that draw us to the shows.

The articles focus on the act of watching the shows as the main source of enjoyment. We watch them as a group, whether we throw Oscars parties or spend half the time staring at our social media, awards shows are a shared experience. The second main reason they say we enjoy these shows is the pleasure of observing celebrities. The live shows mean that actors are playing themselves and directors are in front of the cameras, and we love pretending that we’re watching the stars be themselves.

While we can all agree that watching celebrities with our friends is fun, I would argue that there’s more to our obsession with these awards and their shows. The awards shows exist in a weird space between high and low brow culture. On the one hand, these are prestigious awards given by groups of successful art creators and critics. The technical professionals are acknowledged, and people with really specific skills and information can discuss whether the decisions made match their well-educated conclusions. Those same people can also join everyone else in a merciless critique of the clothes, attractiveness, and personality of their favorite and least favorite celebrities, and a rehashing of the best moments from that year’s big blockbuster. This extraordinary in-between-ness of awards shows perhaps explains their staying power—they let our inner snob come out and play with our inner fangirl.

As for the awards themselves, as Americans we all have a weakness for pseudo-democratic systems and pretend meritocracies. From preschool to politics, we’re taught that if you get enough of the best and smartest people together and let them talk until they reach a consensus, what they come up with could be nothing but the best ideas and solutions to the most important questions and problems. Whether or not this is true or even achievable in practice, awards shows mimic this. They indulge us in our fantasy that somewhere beneath all of our subjective opinions about the popular art we consume, there is an objective truth that separates the “good” from the “best.” The academies let us believe that if we let the right groups of people (them) discuss it long enough, the difference will become clear and they will announce it for all the world to see. As unrealistic and idealized as that is, it’s a fantasy that many take comfort in.

The various academies and associations have prestige oozing from their names, and it is so easy to let that authority become real. Even a person who knows how flawed the voters are can easily forget that and believe that some higher power is revealing to them the definitive Best Album or Best Actress

of the Year. And the second we forget the flaws of the present academies, we’re making it easier for future generations to forget the work that doesn’t get recognized by them. It is comforting to leave the (perhaps unnecessary) burden of choosing superlatives to some presumed all-knowing group, letting them decide what will be remembered down the line. On top of that, the presence of this authority gives us an impersonal higher figure for our personal opinions to interact with. If your choice matches that handed down by the authorities, you feel validated and can rely on the strength of the award to support your view. If you disagree, you have a set of ideas to fight against, resulting in a sort of reverse validation that comes from defending your point of view. Either way, the outside authoritative opinion gives your own opinion something on which to sharpen its claws.

In the end, we want awards shows to tell us something about our own tastes by justifying them or forcing us to defend them. We want them to introduce us to new good things and tell us what we should remember forever. It’s perfectly valid to wonder whether this setup will last in the new Internet age, when everyone’s opinion seems to matter and we’re all more concerned with what the multitude thinks than what a higher authority says. Public polls, up-votes, and the general tone of comment sections are encroaching on the space of Academy-approved awards, and almost everyone agrees that we could do away with them if we wanted to. But deep down, I think we know that our input via the open Internet only holds its importance when we can favor it above some alternative. In the end, awards shows give our opinions power.

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The Rise of Popular Ballet DANCE IN MEDIA

WORDS BY Natalie Tsay ART BY Patrick McDonald

Ballet has always had a very specific reputation: fruity, prissy, proper, stiff—many other adjectives that, frankly, don’t even begin to take into account the incredible scope of the whole art form called ballet. It is not all smiles and tutus. It is blisters, sweat, and strength. It is mind-numbing dedication. It is grace under pressure. It is unlike any sport or art, and the world is finally starting to pick up on that.

Years ago, ballet hardly got any attention in the media. Though there were a few select movies about ballet (good ones, that is), a non-dancer had almost zero chance of running into an image of a ballet dancer on TV or in the movie theatre. Aside from the typical nod to ballet, usually consisting of what I’d call a cringe-inducing, laughably poor imitation of dancing, ballet had no presence in the real world whatsoever.

However, that all started to change with the startling success of the 2010 film, Black Swan. The dark, psychological thriller starring Natalie Portman undoubtedly put ballet in the spotlight, especially because her dance double was Sarah Lane, a member of one of the most prestigious companies in the country: American Ballet Theatre. Representation for ballet dancers wasn’t the only thing the movie accomplished—it also revealed a different side of dancing. Black Swan showed the public that ballet could be sensual, powerful, and scarily intense.

Following Black Swan’s success, a series on the CW, Breaking Pointe, and a film featured at Sundance called First Position gained wide popularity inside and

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outside the dance world. Breaking Pointe followed dancers in the Utah-based company Ballet West, and ran for two seasons in 2012 and 2013. From a dance perspective, it was met with both enthusiasm and mild disappointment. On one hand, finally! A series about dance that features good, real dancing! Hallelujah! On the other hand, it tended to focus on relationship drama, leaving us dancers wanting more “action” sequences.

Breaking Pointe was more successful with dancers than non-dancers according to reviewers, and it presented the darker side of ballet by showing the sheer amount of work and commitment a dancer’s career demands.

The film, First Position, is a documentary about the Youth America Grand Prix, a major international ballet and contemporary competition based in New York City that advertises itself as “the world’s largest global network of dance.” First Position features six young dancers preparing to compete in the final round of YAGP. The film was later released in select theatres, and while I can’t say how many non-dancers have seen it, I can tell you that almost every serious ballet dancer out there has. I can also tell you, having participated in the 2013 final round of the competition firsthand, that the movie did an excellent job of capturing the spirit of the months of preparation leading up to the event. First Position gave a firsthand look at a young dancer’s life: a life filled with ballet and not much else. It showed audiences just how hard it is, specifically for ballet dancers, to willingly surrender oneself to an art that can

totally break you physically, mentally, and emotionally, all for a dream that ultimately might not pan out.

Ballet’s newfound media presence didn’t stop at TV and film. In recent years, major companies have increasingly embraced using the many dimensions of ballet to create novel advertisements. Though it was truly abominable in every way, Free People’s commercial featuring a “ballet dancer” demonstrates ballet’s new mainstream status. I use quotation marks because it is clear they didn’t bother to hire a real dancer—the young woman could have snapped her ankles in the pointe shoes they put her in, and her dancing was nothing but a poor imitation of ballet.

The company’s blatant choice not to hire one of the many dancers looking for work garnered a huge wave of dancer outrage, causing the company to yank the ad.

Though you wouldn’t necessarily put the two together, Under Armour pulled off an excellent advertisement using ballet. Their commercial featured Misty Copeland, an American Ballet Theatre dancer praised for her incredible combination of grace and strength. She is known for being the first AfricanAmerican soloist with the company in the past 20 years. The minute-long commercial featured shots of Copeland’s incredibly toned legs, high extensions, tight turns, and explosive jumps, while a recording of her reading a rejection letter from a training institution played in the background, listing all of her physical flaws. Though short, this campaign, titled “I Will What I Want,” was incredibly moving and serves yet again to prove to the public that ballet is not for the weak.

One last example of ballet’s new visibility in the public eye was the viral video for Hozier’s “Take Me To Church,” starring dancer Sergei Polunin. It racked up 7 million hits in just a few weeks and was shared by sources such as the Huffington Post, Today, and US Magazine

under sensational headlines. The primary reason for this video’s massive success is that Polunin breaks the ballet stereotype. He dances, tattooed and shirtless, to the dynamic song, showing off his athleticism, flexibility, and power, and proving that ballet has a sensual, gritty side.

The world is finally starting to catch on—ballet is so much more than tutus and toe shoes. Classical ballet is upright, poised, and controlled, but that doesn’t mean it’s stuffy and confined solely to that. Its recent spike in popularity indicates that people are finally becoming interested in what ballet can really be.

So, is this a good thing? The obvious answer would be yes. Isn’t it great that people are starting to give ballet the credit that it so rightly deserves? Isn’t it fabulous that ballet dancers are being legitimized and lauded? Isn’t it cool that a young dancer can finally watch TV shows and movies about good dancers? If my friends’ opinions represent others in the dance community, then maybe not. Sure, it’s nice that people are taking ballet seriously—or at least more seriously than they did before. But at the same time, it’s like some secret has been spoiled. The dance world has always been mysterious to outsiders, and with all of the attention that ballet’s been getting lately, it feels like dance has been infiltrated by unwelcome guests.

There is some hesitation from within the dance community about the rise of popular ballet, but I’d say that on the whole, it’s a welcome change. Even if non-dancers are no more knowledgeable about ballet now versus a decade ago, at least it’s more likely that they’ve seen it cast in a different, truer light. For people to understand what ballet is really about, we need TV shows, movies, and advertisements that depict it as more than just prim and proper. We need media that displays it in all its sweaty, powerful glory to show everyone what it’s really like to be a ballet dancer.

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FRESH OFF THE BOAT

A few weeks after Fresh off the Boat’s February premiere, amid endless praise on Tumblr and a slew of B+ ratings from the formal review circuit, I asked my Chinese mother what she thought of the show.

She paused. “I don’t know... It’s okay.”

Disappointed by her brevity, I pried for more of an answer. “What about the mom character? I heard she was really funny.”

At that, her doubt faded quickly. “Nah, I don’t like her—she’s too stereotypical.”

Her critique of Constance Wu’s character (Jessica Huang)surprised me. After watching Tumblr praise the representation and humor of the new ABC comedy without a stitch of critique (although with the one-sided social justice community on Tumblr, it’s hardly a surprise when it’s unreliable), I hadn’t expected my culturally passive mom to have such a staunch opinion on something focused so heavily on Asian-American culture.

If anything, her critique made me even more curious about the show. Who had I been hearing all of the praise from? White “social justice warriors” who loved the sound of their own righteousness more than the actual issues? Or an Asian community so desperately hoping for any form of representation that they’d take anything that didn’t slander them? The Internet had set my expectations for the show unbelievably high, and my mom had just dashed them all in one sweep.

WORDS BY Tia Lewis ART BY Thelonia Saunders

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When I watched the show for myself, I finally got some clarity.

Fresh Off the Boat is far from perfect in more ways than one. When it comes to American television, any shred of Asian representation is astounding and progressive, but that doesn’t mean the show is actually all that praiseworthy in its content. It didn’t take me long to realize where my mom’s ambivalence came from: Fresh Off the Boat is not really aimed toward the first generation Chinese immigrant, like my mother—it’s for their American-born kids.

Based on chef Eddie Huang’s memoir also called Fresh Off the Boat, the series strives to represent one of the most underrepresented communities on TV—the Asian-American family. Coming from the point of view of Eddie, who is only 11 years old on the show, it offers a look at how a Taiwanese kid of that age, born in the U.S., may see his parents and siblings. In that way, the exaggeration of a crazy mom who hits teenagers with her car and is unsatisfied with her sons getting straight A’s is not all that unbelievable. It’s from a little kid’s memory—it’s supposed to be exaggerated and silly from time to time. While my own mother may frown at how her television counterpart is portrayed, I see a lot of Jessica Huang in how she behaved toward me when I was a child.

That said, I think the fault in Fresh Off the Boat lies in a different kind of misrepresentation. Where my mom saw Jessica Huang as too extreme, I don’t see her as quite “extreme” enough. To put it simply: This Asian family is way too white. If a real Asian-American family were represented on television, white audiences would probably drop dead with shock.

To any child with truly Asian immigrant parents, especially Chinese or Taiwanese, it is clear that the Huang family is unusually Westernized in their behavior. The dad is as soft and gentle as a typical white dad, emotionally open and intimate with his kids in a way that makes it seem impossible that he could have been born anywhere but the United States. Plus, the parents don’t speak Mandarin to each other or to their kids, which is by far the most unrealistic thing about the entire show. I don’t know any child of immigrants who does not have heated phone conversations with their parents in their family’s native tongue.

However, most interesting, to me at least, is the fact that the Huang children (Eddie especially) are filled with an unreasonable amount of daring. They have the nerve to speak out against their parents in a defiant tone and not expect a hard smack on the head or a ten minute lecture screamed in Chinese. The whole idea of “respect your elders (or fear their wrath)” seems entirely removed from the show, even though I think it’s one of the biggest parts of Asian family culture.

On the YouTube channel “Off the Great Wall,” personalities Dan and Michael discussed the scene where the Huang parents defended their son at the principal’s office. Off the bat, Michael declared it unrealistic: “Like in a typical Asian family, you’d get the snot beat out of you if you get in trouble at school. It doesn’t matter [why] you did what you did... No! None of that matters, you go home, you get the snot beat out of you.”

Even the real Eddie Huang himself expressed frustration over this element of Asian-American family life being left out of the show’s narrative. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, he said, “As a kid, when you are

beat at home, it affects you, and that is a really big part of my experience... It’s not about throwing parents in jail and legislating, it’s about understanding the relationship between parent and child in the 21st century. This is a big idea, and I feel like if we are going to talk about Asian families, it’s something we should discuss and think about how we can address.”

It is understandable, of course, that Disney-owned ABC must bend toward a more innocent and squeaky clean image, but it’s a shame that a show meant to focus on a TaiwaneseAmerican family must forgo a notable chunk of the culture it’s meant to be representing in order to not scare white audiences. In this way, by excluding the “less-desirable” aspects of Asian family life, Fresh Off the Boat is almost bleaching clean what could have become the start of a very real discussion.

The whole point of representation is for kids to be able to look up at the screen and see themselves—not a whitewashed version of what their lives and issues are really like.

Of course, including this kind of clearcut discussion of family politics could easily lead Fresh Off the Boat into several tedious directions. If it isn’t done right, the show could come off as supporting corporal punishment (and the slippery slope toward child abuse), which I’m sure ABC does not want to do.

Or it could end up pushing an equally harmful stereotype of Asian parents as cruel and abusive. While an episode arc on corporal punishment could be an incredibly progressive, huge step forward for the Asian viewer who sees the habitually raised hand at home, it does push the boundaries of what I think television is currently ready to do. Still, by completely avoiding the controversial, Fresh Off the Boat comes off as flattened, and only representational on the most basic level.

Nevertheless, this “basic level” is still undeniably a step up. The last time an Asian-American household was the main focus of a network series was 20 years ago with All-American Girl featuring Margaret Cho. Asians are classically erased from most forms of media, almost never appearing as main characters in shows, films, or theatre unless they are there only to put their Asian-ness on display. That’s why Selfie was such a huge deal before it was canceled—Asian actor John Cho got the lead in a show that had nothing to do with him being Asian.

He was just another lead male, no different from a white man in the same role. Now, in the age of tackling race issues and cultural differences upfront with shows like Black-ish, an Asian family storyline was exactly what was needed for American media to check off that last box of minority representation.

It’s hardly a strong step, but it’s still one in the right direction.

Fresh Off the Boat is not a bad comedy—it gets laughs here and there and tries to represent Asian Americans truthfully without being offensive. It is too careful in that regard, to the point of paling out what could be the most distinctive and interesting parts of the show, but its noble effort to merely exist offers promise that more Asian protagonists may get their heyday on TV and in film. And it is a heyday that Asian actors have been missing out on for far too long. The truth of Fresh Off the Boat is that it is not dangerously stereotypical, but it is not poignant or culturally aware either. It falls short of controversy and falls short of making a good point, and it settles right into the area where Asian audiences will praise it because even airing it is such a huge step. It’s sad to admit it, but at this point, we’ll take anything.

THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION 47

Male writers,

your “feminist Satire” bores me Why screenwriters should stop writing stereotypes and start writing people WORDS BY Alyssa Berdie

After the undeniably hilarious and very successful, female-driven 2011 comedy, Bridesmaids, there came an influx of female-led comedies opening in theatres.

On the surface this seemed like a win-win for women: more female-driven comedies and the recognition from Hollywood that such films aren’t “just for women,” that they can be popular and successful with a broad audience. However, recent examples such as Tammy (2014), The Other Woman (2014), Sex Tape (2014), Walk of Shame (2014), and Identity Theft (2013) did not perform nearly as well as Bridesmaids. In fact, I can’t think of any mainstream female-driven comedies that did as well as Bridesmaids, and I believe I’ve found the cause.

All of the aforementioned films have incredible female comedic actors like Kristen Wiig, Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, and Megan McCarthy, but the glaring difference is that, with the exception of Bridesmaids, all of these movies were written and directed by men. On the surface they seem refreshing and unique with their female leads, but when you really deconstruct the narratives of these women, you find that they are simply sexist stories written by men, that happen to star a woman. The Other Woman and Walk of Shame both center around men and not acting “lady-like.”

The characters get revenge on a cheating husband and lose a career opportunity over partying and random sex. Identity Theft and Tammy both star Megan McCarthy and typecast her, once again, as the overweight, unattractive, loose canon.

These comedies aren’t helping women in Hollywood in any way. Instead they are continuing to keep female characters

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in two categories: hot and looking for, trying to keep, or obsessing over a man, or fat, crazy and never the love interest.

These movies are a nice effort from the white, cismale writers who dominate Hollywood and, of course, get far more opportunities to write blockbuster movies than female writers. For example, both Obvious Child (2014), which was written and directed by a woman, and Frances, Ha (2012), which was co-written by a woman, are female-centric, comedy-dramas that received critical acclaim and film festival awards and nominations. However, they did not receive the same support from major Hollywood studios as the comedies written by men, which received few positive reviews.

The issue here is obvious: Hollywood again proves itself to be a sexist industry (among other shortcomings), by attempting to be more diverse in content while still only giving the creative opportunities and support to men. This is not to say that men should be barred from writing comedies centered on women, in the same that women should not be barred from writing male leads. However, these male writers are not held accountable for the fact that they are writing the same sexist movies about stereotypical female characters and hiding behind the guise of “satire.” Ty Burr of the Boston Globe summarizes The Other Woman perfectly, “’The Other Woman’ is one of those loud, cringe-y female-empowerment comedies that feels like it was made by people who hate women. It’s about a trio of heroines who free themselves from their three-timing man by obsessing about him constantly and plotting revenge with laxatives in his cocktails and Nair in his shampoo. It’s as though [the filmmakers] conspired

to come up with a movie specifically designed to flunk the Bechdel Test: 109 minutes in which the women do nothing but talk about a man.” If male filmmakers actually thought deeply about the female characters they’ve created beyond the fact that they are women, in the same way they create personality and backstory for their male characters, they might actually be able to write a non-stereotypical woman.

But again, no one in Hollywood is saying that this isn’t okay, so why put in the effort if they’re still making money?

I’ve witnessed this in my own screenwriting courses. Syllabus week always means the diversity talk, “stop writing all white, straight, male characters,” is always the main takeaway. The need for a “diversity talk” is always met with eyerolls (and sometimes laughs) by the women and people of color in the classroom followed by countless questions from the predominantly white male students— questions that are sometimes borderline racist or sexist.

The following week is the beginning of pitches for our screenplays, and of course, many of these same male writers desperately pitch movie ideas with female leads, making sure to point out any characters of color, LGBTQ characters, or female characters—the screenwriter’s equivalent of “I’m not racist, I have a black friend.” They go on to explain these characters as a female spy who uses her sexuality to achieve her goals, the funny lesbian best friend who exhibits all of the characteristics of a womanizing man, or the professional who sleeps with all of her clients but really just wants a boyfriend. The worst parts of the screenplays are the sections that only further illuminate the fact that these protagonists are still as two-dimensional as they were when they were only supporting characters, male characters calling women cunts, or ditzy main characters exhibiting exaggerated sexist stereotypes. These writers defend their work in the name of “satire,” when these types of comedies actually just perpetuate racist and sexist ideas. My professor, a man, made an excellent comment to my class in response to a particularly problematic set of pages from a male writer claiming exactly what I’ve explained: You can write misogynistic characters, but make sure your actual writing is not misogynistic. Your character and their dialogue can be sexist, since sexist people exist in this world, but the actual narrative, theme and tone of the film shouldn’t contain sexist elements unless you are setting out to write a sexist movie.

I definitely agree with this notion, but at the same time what is really the difference? At the end of the day the same tired and outdated narratives are being produced and reproduced continually. It’s not only frustrating but boring. It’s the same story over and over again; who cares what gender the lead is? I am clearly not alone in my opinion; the reviews for these types of movies speak for themselves. It’s not just me, feminists, or women, but broad audiences of people who are simply over it, with women being shoved into only two categories for comedy. Women and men share a lot of the same experiences in America at least—careers, families, education, hobbies, sports, etc. So speaking technically, any movie with a male protagonist could have a female lead instead. However, the ways women and men actually experience these situations are vastly different because of the oppression of women and societal gender roles in America. This oppression has given women a very different

“Writers defend their work in the name of satire, when they just perpetuate racist and sexist ideas.” path through everyday situations like relationships and careers, and this difference actually makes these female protagonist much more dynamic. In an ideal world, men and women would have had equal experiences, but this isn’t the world we live in. Yes, you can swap a male protagonist for a female protagonist, like so many of these new female-driven comedies have clearly done, but when you actually take that female protagonist and give her a realistic storyline that addresses the different experiences that women face in our world, then as a male or female writer, you have found the key to writing three-dimensional female characters. And not just female characters who are perfect feminists, but characters who are flawed, growing, changing, and experiencing life, just like all of the male protagonists of every (good) film.

There is a serious disconnect between the “diversity talk,” and what students are writing. They are hearing that they need to be more diverse so they attempt to write female characters and typically fail miserably. All of my screenwriting professors say, “Write what you know.” It’s a pretty simple concept: Writing what you know will typically be your best writing because you’ve experienced it. Simply meaning, it is easier to write about a relationship that ended in infidelity when you’ve experienced it because you know the emotions, what was said, and how people acted and reacted both verbally and physically. Real experiences become the base for many writers to create stories that ultimately end as fiction. What these students are missing from this talk is that being asked to write diversely is not asking them to write outside of what they know. They are being asked to write supporting characters that are threedimensional—for example, women who have more to talk about than the male characters of the film would suffice. The bad reviews for these female comedies written and directed by men speak for themselves, just as the rave reviews and awards for female comedies written and directed by women do. It has been proven again and again that writing what you know will produce some of your best work (if you’re a good writer, that is). And if you are planning to venture beyond writing what you know, do your research. There is nothing worse than a writer whose only research consists of a mass-produced idea of what it is to be a woman in America.

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SALT-N-PEPA

WHO THEY ARE AND WHY THEY MATTER

WORDS BY Melis Schildkraut ART BY Emma Kathryn Regnier If you haven’t heard the song “None of Your Business,” released by female rap stars Cheryl “Salt” Renee James, Sandra “Pepa” Denton, and Deidre “DJ Spindarella” Roper in 1993, I urge you to put down this magazine, pull out a pair of headphones, and tune in. This song has been a part of my repertoire since junior year of high school; my best friend, Ilana, and I would blast it in her car on our way to gatherings when we were sick of the sexless drawl of our conservative, suburban town. Four years later, you can still find me blasting this and other Saltn-Pepa tunes on my way out of the house before nervewracking first dates—and, admittedly, often while retrieving books from the Olin stacks during my job as a circulation assistant. Fortunately, no one has caught me dancing yet.

WHO THEY WERE

An odd sequence of events led to the members of Saltn-Pepa joining together. The group was founded in 1985

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and continued producing records until 2002. Salt-n-Pepa forerunners Cheryl and Sandy met while working at a Sears Retail store in the Bronx. Both women were telephone clerks, and they worked selling warranties on washing machines.

When they weren’t on the phone with customers (and they were hardly ever on the phone with customers), they used their phones to connect with each other during work. In telephone clerk solidarity, Cheryl and Sandy developed a close friendship.

Ernst “Hurby Luv Bug” Azor was also an employee at Sears, and he fell in love with Cheryl while on the job. I always envisioned Salt-n-Pepa as a self-made, completely female-dominated trio, but it was actually Hurby who pushed the group to get together. While enrolled in New York’s Center for the Media Arts, he asked the rambunctious Sandy and his girlfriend Cheryl to help him record a track for a school project. At the time that the group was conceived, Cheryl and Sandy found it hard to believe that a single project would turn them into hip-hop sensations.

In a video interview of the group’s members, Sandy speaks

“ What is so significant about Salt-n-Pepa’s music is the stance they took toward sexuality during a time when the hip-hop scene was monopolized by men.”

about how the first time she and Cheryl heard themselves playing on the radio, they immediately stopped their car, jumped out onto the street, and began to dance.

While Cheryl and Sandy were the group’s MCs, they needed the help of a female DJ to make their track. The group employed two different “Spindarellas” throughout their career. The first was Pamela Green, a 19-year-old from Queens.

Pamela served as a decent DJ for the first two years, but she was let go when Cheryl suspected her of having an affair with Hurby. Soon after, a 16-year-old from Brooklyn by the name of Didi Jones became the new, permanent Spindarella.

WHY YOU CARE

When Salt-n-Pepa was established in the ’80s, the members were among the first female rappers to ever hit the hip-hop scene. They were preceded by Roxanne Shante, a 14-yearold girl from Queens. In 1985, Roxanne released her first single, titled “Roxanne’s Revenge.” When Roxanne released this track, she began a new movement within the largely male-dominated hip-hop scene. However, as Roxanne’s popularity quickly died out, Sandy, Cheryl, and Didi took over.

What is so significant about Salt-n-Pepa’s music is the stance they took toward sexuality during a time when the hip-hop scene was monopolized by men. Though they were popular in an era when women were generally less sexually autonomous than they are today, Salt-n-Pepa were not afraid to rock their bodies in tight jumpsuits, occupy the stage of a male-dominated profession, and rap about explicitly sexual topics from a strictly female perspective. The lyrics of “Shoop” say it all:

S and the P wanna kick with me, cool (uh-huh) But I’m wicked, G, (yeah) hit skins but never quickly (that’s right) I hit the skins for the hell of it, just for the yell I get Mmm mmm mmm, for the smell of it (smell it) They want my bod, here’s the hot rod (hot rod) Twelve inches to a yard (damn) and have ya soundin’ like a retard (yeah) Big ‘Twan Love-Her, six-two, wanna hit you So what you wanna do?

What you wanna do?

Mmmm, I wanna shoop

In the lyrics of this song, MCs Sandy aWWd Cheryl use the word “shoop” as a euphemism for sex. They unabashedly rap about their own sexual desire, challenging the idea that men can talk about women in a sexual way, but women should not talk about themselves in such a manner. Sandy, Cheryl, and Didi make it clear that they are in charge of their own sexuality. By producing songs like this, they created a new dialogue, opening up the genre of rap for later female artists such as Lil’ Kim, Queen Latifah, and Mary J. Blige.

DEVELOPMENT By no means did Salt-n-Pepa’s lead members reach this point of sexual confidence painlessly. Sandy, at age six, was assaulted by her friend’s grandfather in Queens. She lost her virginity when she was 13, with a 17-year-old boy who

seduced her as a neighborhood prank and deserted her after the event. In her recent book, Let’s Talk About Pep, Sandy reveals that, in order to regain confidence in her sexuality, she remained celibate for a few years. She realized that she was using her sexuality as a crutch, and wanted to change that.

Cheryl and Didi both suffered romantic losses while touring with the group. Hurby, the group’s manager (and a bona fide asshole), was Cheryl’s boyfriend from the start.

However, he constantly cheated on her and co-opted most of the group’s musical decisions. Eventually, the group split with Hurby in the mid-’90s. Didi suffered a terrible loss and heartbreak when her first boyfriend AD (who had originally taught her to spin), was shot to death while she was on tour.

All three girls grew up within the boroughs of New York City, and all lived in poverty for most of their childhoods.

DEMISE AND REUNION In 2002, Salt-n-Pepa officially disbanded. After suffering from a bout of internal turmoil, Cheryl called Sandy one day and announced that she was done. The band had been slowly disintegrating since its split with Hurby in the mid-’90s. They were upset with Hurby’s management and dissatisfied with the royalties that he was paying them. Salt-n-Pepa went on to produce one more album, Brand New, in 1997, but followed a general path of decline since going solo in 1996.

If there’s one thing that irks me most about Salt-nPepa and their career, it’s that they could not manage to stay afloat without the help of their patriarch, Hurby. The “I don’t need no man” vibe that the girls gave off seems negated by the fact that it was a man who brought and kept them together. However, the girls did manage to reunite in 2005, and they are currently on tour. They may no longer be the forerunners of the female hip-hop scene, but they will be forever ingrained in the minds of hip-hop fans. So, the next time you jam out to Azealia Banks, Nicki Minaj, or Missy Elliott in your car, remember the women that they owe their voices to.

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WORDS BY Christina Lee ART BY Karen Tsai

I remember when Fifty Shades of Grey first became a national sensation. I was a mere high school student then, trying to keep myself from drowning in AP classwork. I hadn’t the time or the interest to dive into a trilogy of erotica, or so I thought. I vividly recall the first day one of my friends brought the silver-covered novel to the lunch table. My other friends and I looked at her incredulously. Five minutes later, we were picking random passages to read aloud.

First, we tested the rumor that there was sex on every page. The myth went un-busted, and the more we read, the funnier the sexual prose got. The lunchtime readings were my first and most expansive experience with the novel, until a couple of years later when I asked to borrow my mother’s copy of the book. She warned me that I would probably hate it. I agreed with her, but I was willing to give the novel a second chance. Plus, I was interested in how it became so wildly successful. I got through about five pages of Anastasia’s musings before I had to put the book back down. She had barely spoken to Mr. Grey, and I already found myself unable to stand reading such poorly written junk.

It was then that I swore off Fifty Shades for good; I wouldn’t be caught wasting my time on the trilogy any longer.

Years later, it was announced that Fifty Shades would be made into a movie. Reminded of my disgust for the books, I initially stood by my plan to never touch the story again. However, worn down by the constant advertisements, rumors of a great soundtrack, and (repeated) guarantee of seeing Jamie Dornan’s abs, I gave in.

There I sat, armed with microwave popcorn and a fully charged laptop, ready to embark on a cinematic journey

Thoughts on 50 Shades

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that I expected would end poorly. I imagined the characters would resemble the leads of the Twilight movies: Anastasia would be quiet, flat, and submissive while Christian would be domineering and creepy. I was half-right. Christian was both domineering and creepy; in fact, he was worse than I expected. Having never finished the book, I was surprised by the degree of possessiveness he achieved by the end of the film. He constantly followed Ana around despite her requests that he stop. When Ana announced that she was going to visit her mother across the country, he became unreasonably angry and demanded she stay with him. After she disobeyed, he followed her to Georgia. This stalking is one of the many signs of abuse throughout the movie. Christian proves to be nothing less than a robotic, controlling jerk. Some critics suggest that the character’s machine-like nature can be attributed to Jamie Dornan’s acting skills. However, Once Upon a Time fans (such as myself) can attest that he is a fairly expressive actor, so the stiffness must come from somewhere else, like the writing.

Anastasia, on the other hand, is a dynamic protagonist constantly caught up in a web of sexual and romantic desires. Although she wants Christian to take her out to dinner and act like her boyfriend, she also wants to satisfy his sexual desires as well as her own. She wants to escape Christian’s tyranny, yet she cannot imagine her life without him. She evolves from a naïve sweetheart into a conflicted character with whom the audience can empathize. She is nothing like the wishy-washy, monotone girl I envisioned.

However, Christian and Ana’s abusive relationship is plain to see in the movie. Although we are not able to hear Ana’s thoughts, as we are in the novel, we can see how negatively affected she is by Christian’s domination over her.

Not only does he constantly stalk her, but he manipulates her into doing things she is uncomfortable with as well.

Christian states that he is used to getting his own way and this is obvious in the way he treats her. He expects her to change for him but refuses to adapt to her desires. One notable exception is when Christian allows Ana to negotiate the terms of the relationship contract he has created for them.

Ana, having done some research, makes fairly well-informed cuts. Before the contract is signed, however, Ana and Christian begin engaging in BDSM practices. She isn’t bound by his rules, yet he acts as though she is. The dominance he exerts over Ana is unhealthy and common in abusive relationships.

One of the things that kept this movie engaging was Ana’s constant fight against Christian’s abuse, and I was very glad that she escaped him in the end. I felt the most compelled by the film when she was empowered, especially in the final scene where she finally leaves Christian. However, I know there are two more books, so there are at least two movies left and I anticipate a fairly long struggle is yet to come.

The abuse disguised as kinky sex in Fifty Shades is a misrepresentation of BDSM. I, like Ana, did some research on the subject before I formed an opinion of it. Personally, it’s not my cup of tea, but when performed healthily and safely, there is nothing objectionable about it. For those who don’t know the acronym, BDSM covers all sexual practices involving kinky activities, such as bondage. These methods, when employed in bed, are intended to add intensity to the sexual environment. Many people actually experience a heightened sense of enjoyment when pain is put into

play. A Kinsey Institute study revealed that 55 percent of women and 50 percent of men gain sexual pleasure through experiencing voluntary pain while involved in sexual activity.

BDSM practices range anywhere from being tied up to using paddles and various other sex toys. The wide scope of activities that fall under the BDSM umbrella show how varied it is, and statistics show that it is not as uncommon as popular stigma implies. BDSM is always a consensual act, and both parties are expected to give an enthusiastic “yes” before and during activities in which they take part. Additionally, safe words such as “pineapple” or “red” are required so that the couple will be aware of their own limits. When one person is reaching the end of their tolerance level, they will give a warning with the word and it is expected that the other will stop whatever is making their partner uncomfortable. After intercourse, those engaging in BDSM also engage in what is called “after care,” a process by which both participants are psychologically and physically comforted by the other.

These healthy processes of BDSM are seen only to a certain degree in Fifty Shades. Christian and Ana do establish safe words; however, there is never any after care. Christian does not comfort Ana after intercourse and refuses to sleep with her. This is a psychologically damaging relationship not condoned by the BDSM community, and is one of the greatest objections the group has toward the film.

Additionally, many protest the movie’s portrayal of the dominant and submissive. Fifty Shades places Christian in the role of the dominant, or the person in the couple who has complete control over the situation. Christian fits the stereotypical definition of dominant: he is possessive, controlling, and comes from a difficult background.

Ana, on the other hand, is a virginal princess, constantly clad in white. These polar opposites are not how BDSM relationships are defined. Christian’s abuse is atypical in the BDSM community, and his actions are considered by some to fall outside the realm of those practices— Christian doesn’t practice BDSM, he practices abuse.

For this reason, I am upset by the movie’s (and novel’s) prevalence in popular culture. E.L. James created a storyline that uses BDSM as a device to portray Christian’s controlling character, and this storyline was made widely available through her bestselling novel and now well-advertised screenplay. Rather than just creating an abusive relationship and romanticizing that, James throws in BDSM and gives the entire set of practices a bad rep. Now please, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s awesome that erotica is being discussed and opened up to the public. I think it’s healthy that more people are becoming open about their sexuality. However, this movie hinges not on healthy sexuality, but a stereotypical and poorly portrayed dominant-submissive relationship.

As much as I enjoyed Ana’s character, the killer soundtrack, and Jamie Dornan’s abs, I would not watch Fifty Shades again, and I would not recommend that others watch it either. I do not support the romanticization of abuse and poor portrayal of sexual practices. If you want erotica, look for healthier and more consent-filled literature. If you want to know what BDSM is really like, do some research.

That will give you a more accurate definition than this movie ever will. Also, you don’t need Fifty Shades to enjoy Dornan’s physique—just google it. You’re welcome in advance.

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The Cruel Fate of Fame SEXUAL FREEDOM AND FALLACIES WORDS BY Marisa Wherry ART BY Aurora Rojer Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Brown, Dylan Sprouse, Rihanna, Scarlett Johansson, Vanessa Hudgens, Pete Wentz, Snooki, Prince Harry, Blake Lively. Other than fame and fortune, what’s the one thing these celebrities have in common?

Nude photos. Not naked pictures taken for a magazine cover, or naked scenes from movies (although plenty of those exist, too). All of these celebrities have had their personal, nude pictures leaked all over the internet.

Often when celeb photos are leaked, it’s because hackers got into the person’s iCloud account or bitter/ bored ex-girlfriends and boyfriends decided to have a little fun. Celebrity reactions range from indifference to outrage. Chris Brown shrugged it off, while Pete Wentz was considerably angrier over the exposure of his photos.

When speaking with the Guardian, Wentz said, “I think that any time you go into someone else’s private area, and you take something from that, it’s theft. I don’t know how you define it as far as what kind of crime it is, but it seems like there should be certain human decency that we share. You have to understand that celebrities are still human beings. You still have to treat people with the barest human decency. You don’t have to love somebody, you don’t even have to like somebody, but hacking into their phone and taking pictures of theirs is just ridiculous.”

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Jennifer Lawrence had a similar reaction to her nude photos being placed on a website called “The Fappening,” which targeted many other female celebrities, including Ariana Grande and Kate Upton. Lawrence did not call the invasion of privacy a theft, as Wentz had, but a sex crime.

The Hunger Games star did a Vanity Fair spread in November of 2014, in which she posed for partially nude photos and discussed her private pictures blasting around the internet. When her nudes became the most popular topic on the internet, she said she didn’t know how to react. She began writing a statement for the public, “but every single thing that I tried to write made me cry or get angry. I started to write an apology, but I don’t have anything to say I’m sorry for. I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he’s going to look at you.” And why should she, or anyone, have to write a public apology for something that was supposed to remain private? Personal expression of a person’s own body should be considered normal in today’s society, and the privacy involved in sexual freedom should be respected.

Lawrence brings up an interesting point: She was in a long distance relationship and sent the nudes to her boyfriend, a seemingly harmless action. Leaked photos are often meant for one’s boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, or husband; an understandable practice, since celebs often travel for their work. But what about celebrities that haven’t been monogamous to one person when they sent or took nudes? Should they receive less sympathy and more criticism than someone privately sharing photos with a boyfriend or girlfriend? Hardly, because they still sent the pictures to someone in confidence.

Another question that was often raised after Jennifer Lawrence’s victimization was: What’s the difference between celebrities exposing themselves for magazine or film shoots and taking personal photos that later go viral?

Privately taking pictures entitles anyone, not just celebrities, to complete secrecy. Pictures taken for magazines involve an intense amount of planning: the outfit, the amount of exposed skin, and, most importantly, the celebrities feeling in control of the photo. Even if someone isn’t apart from their loved one, they still may take a couple of quick nudes just because they feel like it. It’s a private form of self-expression and should be valued as so.

Celebrities are not the only people who take nudes—they just run a much greater risk than the average person of having their photos exposed to mass amounts of people.

What about those who have never snapped a naked selfie? Do they reserve the right to hold judgment over celebrities who have willingly or unwillingly shown off their bodies to the masses? Humans are naturally drawn to sex and things revolving around sex, like nudity, and why should we try to discourage that? Oftentimes, people who criticize famous nude celebs are the ones who spend time looking at them. So who are the real hypocrites: those who gawk at celebs’ bodies and then label them slutty or promiscuous, or celebrities who are angry because they want, and are denied, some semblance of privacy?

Female celebrities are often slut-shamed for posing nude, while male celebs enjoy more sexual freedom

without the negative repercussions from the media and the public. Keith Urban has posed nude for Playgirl magazine, along with Kevin Bacon, Michael J. Fox, Chevy Chase, and Mark Wahlberg. People don’t call Keith Urban a slut, but just google any of the girls who posed for Playboy with the word “slut” and you’ll get pages of results on women like Kim Kardashian, Drew Barrymore, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Cindy Crawford, and Pamela Anderson.

Undressing for the cameras doesn’t mean that celebrities have frequent casual sex with many people.

Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima, who has been working for VS since 2000, remained a virgin until 27 years old on her wedding day. The amount of clothing a person chooses to wear doesn’t define their sexual history. Furthermore, remaining a virgin or choosing to participate in casual sex doesn’t change a person’s personality or moral compass. So even if Adriana Lima did have sex before her wedding day, who cares? She should remain just as respected, regardless of choosing to participate in sex or remaining a virgin.

Pre-existing notions ingrained in American society dictate judgment of feminine and masculine sexuality and nudity. Celebrities receive massive amounts of attention when their nudes are released or when they pose for magazines. Women are targeted with cruel labels when their bodies are exposed. Society needs to step back from their computer screens where countless people’s bodies are wrongfully exposed, to look away from Twitter where people fling the words “slut” and “whore” at women like Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus. When a screen exists between someone’s words and the person affected, this disconnect negates all responsibility that the twitter user or blogger should feel, producing insensitive reactions to celebrity nudity or perceived promiscuity.

Those surrounded by paparazzi know that their actions and exposure will gain attention and criticism, and they live every day with the knowledge that some will support them and others will tear them apart. They know that they will receive good and bad reviews, but it’s a different matter when celebrities are criticized for revealing images that they posed for, especially if those pictures were meant to be private.

As Pete Wentz said, we need to remember that celebrities are human beings. Just like anyone else, they don’t want to be called whores for showing body parts that they are comfortable with, and they don’t want their personal pictures exposed to billions of people. American society needs to stop acting like Vanessa Hudgen’s breasts were the first nipples they saw, and they also need to stop feeding into the hype around celebs’ unfairly exposed naked pictures.

If Blake Lively wanted everyone to see her unclothed body, she could have posed for any number of magazine spreads.

A thoughtless internet search of her nudes defies her wishes, diminishes her control over her own body, and further normalizes unwanted sexual attention. The web has placed nudity in the public sphere, which would be okay only if the naked people in these pictures were willingly celebrating their bodies and their sexuality, publicly for all to see.

Don’t feel guilty about picking up a copy of Vanity Fair’s spread featuring Jennifer Lawrence, but do feel guilty for googling her nudes. I doubt she would ever flip through your leaked naked pictures while on the set of Mockingjay.

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a heartfelt

thank you to

Joe Shelton, our Cayuga Press Liason The COMM and the PMA Departments, for helping us out of a jam Our Advisors at Cornell and IC, Michael Koch and Catherine Taylor

SAFC and

to our readership Without you, kitsch would not be possible 56

From one generation of Kitsch to the next!

When we created Kitsch magazine as freshman more than ten years ago (!), we hoped that the home we were making for feature journalism, humor, and irreverence would live on beyond our time at Cornell. It is thanks to the generations of editors that came next – starting with Rob Ochshorn, Evan Mulvihill, Peter Fritch and Rachel Ensign – that Kitsch has cemented its place in the Cornell media landscape.

Thank you to everyone who has played a role in Kitsch from its thin inaugural issue in 2003 to today, for breathing new life into the magazine while honoring its founding ideals. We’re so proud of each issue and so excited to see what’s next.

(And to the Kitsch editors of 2023, we are working on creating your freshman staff now!)

Samantha Henig and Katie Jentleson Kitsch founders and editors-in-chief, 2002-2006

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FALL 2014 JOHN S. KNIGHT INSTITUTE FOR WRITING IN THE DISCIPLINES AWARDS

ADELPHIC AWARD

GERTRUDE SPENCER PRIZE (CONT.)

Winner QIAN WANG (CALS) “Queer and Bold” Instructor: Kaelin Alexander (ENGLISH)

Hon Mention KATHRYN QUIZON, student (CALS) SARA KEENE, instructor (DSOC) “Reworking Welfare: Shifting From Familial to Societal Responsibility”

Hon Mention LINFENG SHEN (AAP) “Thalidomide Tragedy: How to Improve Animal Testing” Instructor: Christopher Hesselbein (S &TS) THE ELMER MARKHAM JOHNSON PRIZE Winner YIHENG HUANG (A&S) “Sewage Systems in the United States—Tracing the History of a Mundane Artifact” Instructor: Chris Hesselbein (S &TS) Hon Mention ZACHARY DE STEFAN (ILR) “Female Passivity and Flawed Protagonists in Frankenstein” Instructor: Stevie Edwards (ENGLISH) JAMES E. RICE, JR. PRIZES Winners AOHAN DANG (A&S) “Autism: The Neurobehavioral Disorder” Instructor: Nicole Baran (PSYCHOLOGY) ALEXANDER MAISEL (A&S) “Douglass’ Declaration of Independence: The Schism between William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass” Instructor: Margaret Washington (HISTORY) Hon Mention MATTHEW GHARRITY (A&S) “Free Persons” Instructor: Stevie Edwards (PHILOSOPHY) SPENCER PORTFOLIO AWARD Winner KATY JO HABR, student (ILR) CAROLINE ZEILENGA, instructor (ENGLISH) “Home is What We Carry Within” Hon Mention ERICA RESNICK, student (HUMEC) ANNA WAYMACK, instructor (MEDVL) “Erica’s Fairy Tale Portfolio” GERTRUDE SPENCER PRIZE Winner ELIZABETH GORMAN, student (CALS) KATHLEEN SEXSMITH, instructor (DSOC) “Missing From the Milk Carton—The Hidden Reality of Migrant Workers in the VT Dairy Industry”

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THE KNIGHT PRIZE FOR EXPOSITORY WRITING, ENGLISH 2880 Winners ALLESSANDRA DICORATO (A&S) “Choosing an Objective” Instructor: Lauren Schenkman (ENGLISH) Hon Mention TIMOTHY VHAY (ENG) “Samantha Baker to Ferris Bueller” Instructor: Lynne Stahl (ENGLISH) NEIL LUBOW PRIZE Winner KELSEY MOLLURA (ENGINEERING) “The Right to Work: Dissonance between Federal and Local Perspectives on the Undocumented Workers of Los Angeles” Instructor: Kendra Bischoff (SOCIOLOGY) WRITING IN THE MAJORS AWARD Winners ISMINI ETHRIDGE (CALS) “Executive Briefing Paper: Immigration” Instructor: Christopher Barrett (AEM) MARIA SMITH (CALS) “The Role of Social Learning in Development of Anti-predator Behavior in the Moustached Warbler (Acrocephalus Melanopogon)” Instructor: Walter Koenig (ORNITHOLOGY) Hon Mentions KAREN CEBALLOS (A&S) “Arts and Acacias: The Savanna’s Very Own Action-Adventure Medieval Drama” Instructor: Alex Flecker (BIOEE) LILY CICHANOWICZ (CALS) “An Inventory of Being” Instructor: Lori Leonard (DEVELOPMENT SOCIOLOGY) BUTTRICK-CRIPPEN FELLOWSHIP Winners JOHN FOO (BIOLOGICAL & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING) “Engineering Marvels Deconstructed” WHITTEN OVERBY (ARCHITECTURE) “Theme Parking”

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