Lyceum Fall 2021 Volume VII

LYCEUM

Volume VII | Fall 2021 1

Lyceum

A Literar y Science Magazine Co-presidents

Meheret Ourgessa Sierra Smith

Treasurer

Sumaya Ahmed

Editing & Contributing Advisors Nathan Chu (Text Head) Hailey Napier (Text Head)

Sam Bowden Zach Baker

Editing Team

Nathan Chu Gabby Rachman Meheret Ourgessa

Hailey Napier Rachel Tomasko

Design Team

Sierra Smith Rachel Tomasko Zach Baker Elise Minion Ansley Grider Meheret Ourgessa

Front Cover

Emilia Thompson

Back Cover

Nadine Richardson

Media Assistant Ansley Grider

Volume VII | Fall 2021 3

Editor’s Note Greetings from the Lyceum Team, Many of us have returned during this Fall 2021 semester still haunted by the specter of COVID-19. While we no longer live under the oppression of a novel virus, COVID has become an undeniable fact of life that we continue to grapple with on a daily basis. Still, this semester has also marked a period of incredible endurance and innovation. More than in any other issue, Lyceum has received more submissions with a broader array of themes.

It is with great pride that we are able to bring to you the seventh issue of Lyceum. Once again, Lyceum gathers the curious, the scientific, and the creative to bridge the so-called gap between STEM and the humanities. From the wry humor of Meheret Ourgessa’s “An Investigation of a Banana Bread Shortage Incident” to Marlena Brown’s pre-apocalyptic “Where the Children Play,” both the academic form and environmental awareness furnish the depth of our work. There is no shortage of inspiration from the scientific community, and many literary musings have found expression through empirical study.

This seventh issue marks the first publication Lyceum has made without its founding members. However, we are confident that we have produced something that would make our alums proud.

We owe a great deal to everyone who has helped make this issue possible, our editors, contributors, designers, supporters, and you, our reader. Enjoy!

Cheers, The Lyceum Team

Stephanie Nyarko 4

Table of Contents Editor’s Note............................................................................................................................4 Verses by Stephanie Nyarko........................................................................................................4 Cicada Summer by Bella Stevens.................................................................................................6 Coral Bloom by Nathan Chu....................................................................................................7 I’m Walking Slowly by Nathan Chu.........................................................................................7 Struggle for Existence by Katherine Crawford..........................................................................8 Landscapes by April Murphy....................................................................................................11 How to Love a Black Hole by Sarah Adelson...........................................................................12 Cyanotype I by Emma Banks...................................................................................................13 Flowers by Emilia Thompson...................................................................................................14 Bees by Natalie Connelly..........................................................................................................15 Leaflet by Katya Naphtali.......................................................................................................16 Banana Bread by Ourgessa et al...............................................................................................18 Poppy the Okapi by Thomas Kallarakal & Evan Dean..........................................................20 The Color Pink by Nathan Chu.............................................................................................20 Born to Run by Sierra Smith...................................................................................................21 Where the Children Play by Marlena Brown...........................................................................24 Bruce the Butterfly by Eva Hitt..............................................................................................27 Guttation by Chris Goodall.....................................................................................................28 Wood-wide Web by Ansley Grider..........................................................................................30 The Road Less Travelled by Aidan Biglow...............................................................................32 Painting by Numbers by Hailey Napier...................................................................................33 iNaturalist Contest Winners....................................................................................................35 The Movement of Nitrogen by Ansley Grider.........................................................................36 P20-colorized by Nadine Richardson (dedicated to Ali Fox)...................................................40

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Cicada Summer Bella Stevens

I’ve heard these camp songs a million times.

They sound wrong in my mouth, They sound new when you sing them.

We pick cicadas off our shirts, And hope they won’t fly into our hair.

The cicadas disrupt my life, But they are so beautiful.

I rescue them from the creek, Even though there is no point.

They will be gone in a couple weeks.

The forest will be quiet.

We will be the noise-makers again, But I don’t mind.

I will hear singing and laughter and plans being made.

I will See saturn and lost markers and folded paper.

On your last day You will say you only have one friend here, And I will think to myself But everyone loves you.

Bella Stevens

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Coral Bloom Nathan Chu

It’s fitting that my first piece for Lyceum was dedicated to fungus. A tree-growing fungus that gnawed on its host, pierced bark with silken strings, and bloomed like cancer.

I say this because my last year has also opened with a rash of alien growth.

Instead of returning from dinner, I was leaving for breakfast, and yet here was the same bloom. It burst from the tree on my right, an explosion of pale orange, a creamsicle crab crawling out of a sylvan stomach. It fanned itself in the muggy air and waved, proud.

Further down the road, I met its twin. It lay in a shallow bed of dirt, as if someone had taken a sand dollar shovel and scraped away the world’s skin to reveal dark flesh. I thought that maybe it had burrowed up from a root, maybe the same tree that I’d seen the first bloom crawl out of, or maybe even the tree from two years ago.

Was there a strand of mycelium straining across an underground branch?

And for a moment, I’m transported below, to an inverted world.

Lanterns hang from roots in the sky, stretching across the vast cavern ceiling, and mushrooms, glowing like fluorescents, dangle, swaying on electric threads.

On my way back, I spot another blush, a puff, a spore magnified. It sits softly on its bed of roots, decorated in ruffled piñata patterns. When the rain comes, it will burst open, all fizz and foam. A lance of water will pierce its depths, and like a pimple, it will pop, spewing white toxin into the greater world.

There’s a strange bud of anticipation in my heart. On TLC, there’s a show called Dr. Pimple Popper. Families across America gather in front of their TV sets to watch mounting pressure and traumatic rupture. A pearly bead of trauma set to explode. Do we crave the violence or the climax or the sullen mound that remains? The wounds we nurse with the echoes of pain.

A pearl is a kind of cancer, a foreign invasion. It starts when an irritant, sometimes sand but usually food, gets trapped within a mollusk. The shell wraps layer upon layer of crystals over the offender, smothering it in shining bone.

And after all this time, I must admit, I don’t know where to go. My college inducts and then evacuates my body in four short years. Will I burst into the air with a newfound freedom, like a spore on the wind?

I’m Walking Slowly Nathan Chu

I’m walking slowly today. I can feel the beat of my heart in time with my feet.

Clop. Clop. Clop.

Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.

Neurons fire, barking orders. My muscles seize then cease, one deep breath, then a deeper one. As my blood thickens, I plod along.

The feeling of being connected, being alive. I feel my heart in time with my feet; my synapses tuning my muscles, tightening like a violin string. Blood courses through my lungs, picking up and trashing all the lessons I can’t possibly remember from middle school biology.

All of my body strains to produce the miracle of walking.

Outside, the clouds have gathered.

It looks like it’s going to rain.

Senses and brain hand-in-hand deliver this revelation. The grey of the clouds, the humidity gathered on my skin, the scent of something, hanging, in the air.

The body is woven together. My heart in time with my feet. In high school, I pestered my gym teachers for stretches to alleviate neck pain. They taught full body routines, from calves to trapezius. Doctors in specialties refer to other departments.

All this blends together, and I wonder how long will I remember today.

Rose Cobb 7

Struggle for Existence Katherine Crawford

I trace the lines on the floor with my eyes. Like a tree, they split into smaller and smaller branches and never join back up. Each branch leads to an animal. Some lines continue for what feels like forever, and some are cut short. Extinct and extant, they loom around me, some bones and others fully reconstructed dioramas. All struggle forward through time, though some have already succumbed.

Branches in the tree have fallen off. Here, they are preserved and remembered, their legacy carefully catalogued, curated, and exhibited. But their branch has rotted and died.

Which branch will be next? Some are inevitable, their sickness and contraction severe enough that there is no hope of recovery, no matter what influence human conservation tries to inflict. A gene pool of five rhinos will always end in the dreaded extinction vortex. It pulls in, it pulls down, and no 8

one outside can grip hard enough to pull them out.

Glass eyes peer at me from within glass cases. Dust lingers on fur, fur that last emerged from its follicles decades ago. Eggs from now-extinct birds sit in cold nests, never to hatch; their contents were drained out through holes pierced in their bottoms. So many of these displays mimic how the animals would have looked in life, but they stare at me from white walls and with eyes containing no lens and cornea, only glass and dye.

Painted walls, fake plants from Walmart, and manufactured sand surround the taxidermied bodies of snarling hyenas, their foam skulls a mediocre mimic of flesh. Pinned insects decorate the enclosure, frozen in time. Their tiny bodies appear normal, but their exoskeletons hide what they used to be beneath. They are dancing a choreographed routine, try-

ing to recreate the complexities of an entire ecosystem within one small display. It all looks so simple from here.

Words are plastered on the walls around me, simplifying populations and ecosystems, condensing millennia of evolution into a short paragraph.

An elephant is labeled, “Do not touch.” It is a male who was poached by British colonizers, who was shipped and sold in secret, whose skin is peeling at the seams from being mounted on a foam body that is too big. The elephant is fall-

ing apart after years of misrepresentation.

These animals have been stolen from their lands, worlds away from where they actually lived—if that world still exists. I can walk through a whole continent’s worth of ecology in just one room.

I move past the rooms with human specimens, their mummified bodies and tools and religions. I feel sick in those rooms. Our branch of the tree is so convoluted and weakened by hacking away at it ourselves.

I am in a room of mammals and I gently brush my fingers along one of the hides I’m not allowed to touch. I walk beneath a mounted whale skeleton, its tiny pelvis and odd limb bones holding the secrets to its evolutionary past. Its skull, oblong and mostly jaw, in no way resembles what it looked like in life.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of this building, beetles gnaw on the thinnest layer of flesh. They are approaching the bone beneath. Elsewhere, there are massive freezers, stuffed full of stripped bones waiting to be cleaned by the beetles too. Crumpled forms with only traces of white ligaments and red muscles tuck their half-dissected faces against their chests. These beetles are carefully fed and maintained in glass aquariums, but they are the same beetles that live beneath the earth, that gnaw on carcasses in nature.

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We do so much to avoid these beetles and their gentle lives. We drain our dead of their blood and pump their veins full of carcinogens to prevent bacterial decay. We poison the Earth with these bodies instead of feeding it. Then we enclose our bodies within a coffin, plush and decorative. But before we’re lowered into the ground, we’re enclosed within a stone vault. It is watertight and it traps us within, below six feet of dirt. We become poison, surrounded by wood and stone and dirt, just to protect us from these beetles’ soft jaws.

Or we burn away. We put our dead in a furnace and all of their cells are released into the atmosphere as thick black smoke, all of their carbon destined to live a new lifetime— many times the length of our own—as dioxide.

I want to be eaten by beetles. I don’t want to shield my body from the Earth—I want to become it. I want my carbon to remain in the biosphere; I want my bones to break down with the help of animals. I want my veins to be encircled by roots and my organs to spill into rich soil. I want my life to feed more life.

The bodies in this building have been robbed of that gift.

There is a wall of skulls. It’s arranged in a wave, so the skulls flow across the expanse, beetle-prepared white bone against eggshell-white drywall. Each one was a whole being, an organism with progeny and a microbiome and maybe even a story. Now each is just a skull, a tree in a forest of white.

They are collected together, each unique in their own ways— cracks in the bone and diseased teeth paint the stories of their lives. But together they are one massive blank sheet of bone, all individuality lost. What would the brain that used to lie beneath the skull prefer? A place of honor, mounted on a wall, to be admired for years to come, or rotting beneath the ground—living on in the legacy of feeding more life? The beetles still feasted, but now the bones are polished and clean.

There are rooms with boxes of bones. This is an understatement. Most of the building is boxes, hidden away behind passcode-protected doors. Cabinets reach from the floor to the ceiling, crowding every inch of the massive rooms, drawers in each of them stuffed with boxes of specimens. Bones, feathers, bugs, hides—everything the preparators could salvage. Maybe once every few years, some bones are brought out from their boxes to be measured and put back away.

The human labor in these feats is immense. Millions of specimens, whether hoarded or preserved, require work.

Hours extracting grease from bones, years peeling hide from muscles, decades organizing and cataloging. In pursuit of education, of research, of a future with enough data. In pursuit of communication and connections.

The taxidermied animals, mounted in dioramas or unnatural displays, are designed to look as lifelike as possible.

Foam centers are covered with clay to mimic facial muscles, and veins are carefully constructed with wire to sit barely visible beneath skin. The seams holding together the tanned hides are hidden beneath thick fur, and light paint is used to make the faces more lively and prevent fading. It is art, 10

this preservation. It is art to preserve something as beautiful, complex, and important as life. With this work, they are alive again.

Something deep inside me wants to play a part in that. I want to become an artist of the flesh, to feed the beetles carefully prepared bones, to polish glass eyes to a shine. I want to create life from death, in one form or another. If these animals cannot feed the Earth, then maybe I can help them feed us, inform us, become part of the epic record of life.

This building and everything inside of it is a legacy. A legacy of life that used to be buried beneath the Earth, forgotten with no descendants, dug up and standing proud now. A legacy of invasions and poaching. A legacy of conservation.

A legacy of human-created extinction. Of colonialism and grave-robbing and black markets. Of the beauty of evolution.

The extinct animals once again stand tall. They are un-forgotten; they matter. Their branch of the tree is etched into the floor forever.

Groups of children are able to visit and learn about their place on Earth. Scientists can make discoveries and breakthroughs. We can work together to further conservation.

I want to feed these institutions. I want to immortalize these dead animals, give their skins and bones a place of honor, allow them to live on in this way. As these buildings preserve everything, I want to join them, to help them grow.

April Murphy 11

How to Love a Black Hole Sarah Adelson

Black Hole: A black hole is an area of space with a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light can escape it.

Hawking Radiation: The expelling of mass and energy of black holes through quantum radiation.

I want someone to tell me how to love a black hole, because sometimes I can’t tell whether I’m being sucked into one or if I am one.

You can’t see the world’s sincerity if light is distorted, if you can only see bending fractals of your own creation, because if you are a black hole, aren’t you a product of your own essence?

Or are you simply the result of entropy?

All must cease to exist.

You are simply perpetuating the inevitability of oblivion.

If I’m a black hole, am I destroying matter around me, or am I being destroyed?

Light and Hawking radiation are one and the same on the basis of oblivion.

Black holes usurp light, Hawking’s radiation vaporizes their existence.

I still keep myself up at night thinking about the photons that could’ve traveled the cosmos indefinitely, only to be pulled in by the obscurity of a melancholic siren.

Light exists until it doesn’t.

So again I ask: how do you love a black hole?

I can only surmise that to a black hole nothingness is a comfort, yet it is not a luxury.

Nonexistence is the default, and perception is but a nuanced form of the idyllic.

Yet one’s idyll is usually born of reverie, raised from the prototype of years past.

So, to a black hole, the bending of light is its eternal verity It is the norm and the idyllic.

Still - it is not love.

Try as I might, I cannot believe that a black hole is impervious to love.

Just as at times, I cannot comprehend the infallible properties of the universe, I refuse to believe in the destruction of photons after they inevitably submit to gravity’s summon.

Perhaps the judgment of oblivion is misconceived; endings are not wrought from a malevolent force but instead by an adoration of balance.

No matter the black hole’s perception of the photon, light does reach it.

It encircles it, with no discernable beginning or end.

After all, black holes are the derivative of fallen stars only to attract the very essence that was once their entire being.

What is nebulous and all-encompassing is but a beacon for what it yearns.

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Emma Banks 13

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Emilia Thompson

Bees

Natalie Connelly When I think of the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, my mind immediately jumps to Nike of Samothrace. During my one day at the Louvre, I would have been happy to stay in her room for hours.

My mother was bored after 5 minutes.

I can’t say what exactly drew me in. Someone who studies art would likely be able to describe how the pose, the framing, the skilled rendering, the symbolism, the movement, and a million-gazillion other things made it an objectively good sculpture. I can understand a textbook explanation of these things, but they don’t give me a satisfactory explanation of why I like her so much more than any other statue, or why my mother wasn’t nearly as impressed.

I guess some things are just individual.

When I took apart flowers petal by petal, I once more thought of Nike. If a student of art could develop an understanding of why she is so exquisite, could a student of ecology understand why flowers are? Trick question, not one person can really say what makes anything beautiful.

As I looked at the ovaries of a tiger lily I gained an appreciation for the complex intersection of functionality and beauty within them.

I saw the way that petals reflected the light to attract pollinators, imagined how spectacular it must be to weigh less than a dime and have a million UV patterns enticing you to alight. Still, knowing about the intimate details didn’t answer why I preferred the tiger lily to the rose.

Evolutionary ornithologist Richard Brum would tell you that beauty is formed of arbitrary preference, as animals evolve to reflect the sexual taste of their mates. Members of a species might just find a certain trait attractive even if it doesn’t signify any advantages or positive traits. This opinion has become accepted, to a degree, but the complex relationship between tastes, environmental factors, and evolution is not yet understood with complete certainty. For example, do female guppies in Trinidad like a flash of orange in the scales of their mates because they’re pretty? Because they signal healthy genes? Maybe it’s because they’re reminiscent of the oranges that fall to the water to make a good snack. Without a complete picture of the situation, it’s hard to get a full understanding of why male guppies developed their coloring. You can see why it might be a bit tricky to come up with any one reason why different traits evolve.

No matter why a species develops certain traits, we’ll all judge some to be prettier than others. There is no objective beauty in this world; it’s a dialogue, with one side making itself beautiful while another decides if it has been successful. In much the same way we cannot see the UV patterns on flowers, my mother cannot see the beauty in Nike, and I don’t see the beauty of a rose. This is fine!

The whole world is beautiful, including all of us, it’s just a matter of finding your bees.

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Bella Hatkof f 17

An Investigation of a Banana Bread Shortage Incident in a Small Liberal Arts College and its Implications for Future Banana Bread Production Meheret Ourgessa, Hailey Napier, Nathan Chu, Gabby Rachman, Yangyang Liu* First Published in The Journal of Essential Breads 234, pp.

10221-33142 on November 10, 2021 Abstract The banana bread is a popular dessert item in the Western World. Despite its popularity, concerns over its supply in US college campuses have recently dominated the media.

Peirce Dining Hall at Kenyon College, a small liberal arts institution in Gambier, Ohio, is the go-to dining location for ~1,600 students. As with other colleges across the country, we suspected that banana bread was in too short of a supply at Kenyon College to meet student needs. Therefore, we surveyed 50 Kenyon students to measure their satisfaction with the amount of banana bread made available to them. Our results showed that there is an extreme shortage of banana bread at Kenyon College that must be addressed in order to avoid catastrophic consequences.

Introduction Banana bread is a type of quick bread traditionally made from mashed bananas. It is usually moist and sweet, with soft crumbs and a cake-like texture. Although the nutritional value of banana bread differs from one type to another, it is generally accepted that banana bread is filled with nutrients, many of which are essential to human survival. Previous studies have demonstrated that banana bread is not only important for physical health, but also for mental well being (Liu et al., 2020; Ourgessa et al., 2020). Thus, media-reported banana bread shortages across colleges in the continental US are of great concern. These shortages should be investigated as soon as possible so that they can be addressed to prevent degradation of the physical and mental health of the US population.

Kenyon College is a small liberal arts school located in Gambier, Ohio. In the Fall of 2021, Kenyon’s total enrollment was 1,730 students. The student population is composed of young adults, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25.

In addition, to the best of our knowledge, all Kenyon students are also Homo sapiens (humans). Given the college’s isolated nature (which limits students’ dessert options) and that the college’s population mostly consists of adult humans, for whom limited consumption of banana bread is a special health concern (Ourgessa et al., 2020), the Kenyon student body was an ideal population to sample from in order to study whether US college students are able to obtain enough banana bread.

Banana bread is served on a mostly biweekly basis at the Peirce Dining Hall in Kenyon College, which has been described as “the destination dining hall for the Kenyon com18

munity.” The dining hall serves over 1,600 students and although it is not held in the highest regard by all, it is nonetheless the go-to dining option for the majority of the student body at Kenyon (Person, 1909). As such, it is important that Peirce is able to meet the Kenyon population’s banana bread needs.

Despite the banana bread’s undeniable superiority over all other desserts (Matthew 4:3, 2014) and its invaluable health benefits (Liu et al., 2020; Ourgessa et al., 2020), we suspected that it was not offered frequently enough to meet the demand of Kenyon College students. Thus, we set out to show that the supply of banana bread at Kenyon College was not anywhere near the amount needed by the student body.

To test this hypothesis, we surveyed a (mostly) randomized sample of students at the college.

Methods An electronic survey was sent to the allstu@kenyon.edu email address (a subscription-based mailing list to which any Kenyon student can subscribe and send emails), and the responses collected were aggregated. The survey asked three questions relevant to the study: how good the banana bread at Peirce Hall was (on a scale of 1 to 10), whether or not students agreed that banana bread was supplied frequently enough at Peirce (a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question), and any comments or concerns they had about banana bread at Peirce (a short written answer question).

To get the most attention from students subscribed to the allstu@kenyon.edu address, an efficient subject line for the survey email sent had to be developed. After analyzing hundreds of emails sent to this address and the student body’s response to them, we decided to use the subject line, “BANANAS! FILL OUT THIS SURVEY ABOUT BREAD! WELP! BREAD! BANANAS!!!” This subject line was thought to be an effective compromise between one that could be perceived as too spam-like and one that could get as much attention as possible.

The numerical (banana bread rating) and categorical (whether or not respondents agreed banana bread was supplied frequently enough) results of the survey were analyzed using R Studio and visualized using the RStudio package “ggplot2” (Wickham 2016).

Results The majority of survey respondents (69.4%) replied that they did not believe banana bread was offered frequently enough at Kenyon to satisfy their needs. Furthermore, respondents on average rated the banana bread at Peirce a 7.9 ± 2.2 out of 10, indicating that students tended to enjoy Peirce banana bread (fig. 1). Given that our population size was ~1,600 (approximate number of students dining at Peirce) and the number of respondents for the survey was only n=49, conventionally, our findings would not be generalizable for all of the Kenyon student body. However, using cutting edge statistical analysis, we were able to prove that our results can indeed be generalized for the whole population (fig. 2).

Figure 1. A pie chart showing a breakdown of responses to whether surveyed students agreed that the banana bread was supplied frequently enough at Peirce (a) and a box plot of the surveyor’s rating of Peirce’s banana bread on a scale of 1 to 10 (b). n=49 responses were aggregated for both questions.

Discussion As previously discussed, most students agree that the banana bread is not supplied at the frequency they desire at Peirce hall. Alarmingly, the extreme human consequences of such a shortage (Liu et al., 2020; Ourgessa et al., 2020) appear to be already manifesting as well with subjects’ responses to the third question of the survey reflecting their discontent and degrading states of mind. One user commented about their rising bloodlust, “I just can’t get enough of the stuff.

I don’t know why. I hate the taste. It’s just everyday at noon when I haven’t had my banana bread I feel the urge to strangle someone. Sometimes at night, I wake up and smell banana bread.” Reflective of the delirium that can result from not having ingested banana bread for too long, another respondent said, “I’m confused.”

The respondents’ rating of Peirce’s banana bread (7.9 ± 2.2 out of 10) also indicated that most students find the bread desirable. This shows that most students at the college are only experiencing the milder symptoms of banana bread deprivation, which can eventually result in growing distaste of the bread, thereby sealing an untreated subject’s fate (Ourgessa et al., 2020). We are therefore hopeful that, with immediate action, the well being of most of Kenyon’s students can be preserved.

Given that the survey used to measure demand for banana bread at Kenyon was not compulsory and only reached students subscribed to the allstu@kenyon.edu, it is very reasonable to expect that there is significant bias in our sample.

We expect that most students who answered the survey did so because they had an excess of time during their semester and chose to waste it filling out a survey. Such students, therefore, are less likely to be as stressed as the average student at Kenyon College (S 1999). Future studies should seek to address whether anxiety affects a subject’s preferences for banana bread and the frequency at which they desire the bread.

To investigate this question, we suggest these studies explicitly acquire and isolate a sample of college students.

Students in this sample could then be made anxious by the proper stressors: limited social interaction coupled with mandatory written assignments and limited sleep time has been shown to work well for these purposes (S 1999). Once subjects are exposed to these stressors, they should then be surveyed on whether they enjoy banana bread and how fre-

quently they desire it.

Given this alarming discovery of banana bread shortage at Kenyon College, it is also important that more studies be conducted to determine how widespread this phenomenon has become throughout the country. Immediate action may be required to preserve the physical and mental health of the US population.

Conclusion From the results presented in this study, it is clear that there is a severe deficit in the supply of banana bread at Peirce Dining Hall at Kenyon College. Banana bread is the most superior dessert ever created by man, with nutritional value that is unrivaled by any other dessert or food item in existence (Matthew 4:3, 2014). Our findings suggest that banana bread production at the Peirce dining hall at Kenyon College is grossly limited and needs to be urgently increased.

A boost in production and frequency at which the bread is made available at Peirce is necessary to avoid catastrophic consequences to the student population’s physical and mental health.

Acknowledgements We would like to express our gratitude to the willing participants of this study for taking time to inform us on their views on the Peirce banana bread supply and the Kenyon community at large for their support of this study. Addiction to inhalation or drinking of diethyl ether is commonly referred to as etheromania. The effects of ether consumption are similar to that of alcohol, but at higher doses, ether consumption can lead to disoriented drinking, euphoria, and visual/auditory hallucinations. I personally have never used ether and do not know anyone that has. Additionally, we would like to thank the editors at the journal of bread for their help in the authoring of this paper. Lastly, all praise goes to the banana bread, master of the universe and benevolent god to us all. Praised be the banana and praised be the bread. Amen.

References • • • • • •

Liu, Y., Payne, M., Castillo, A. (2020). On banana bread’s sanity preserving effects in H. sapiens: a thorough review. The Journal of Bread. 510(50), 117-143. doi:10.2231302/1556-3758.1202.

Matthew. (2014). Matthew 4:3. In The holy bible: King James Version. Hendrickson Publishers. https://b23.tv/DMNhKji. Ourgessa, M., Liu, Y., Grandma, U. R. (2020). The long-term and short-term health benefits of consuming banana bread. The Journal of Bread. 210(50), 1231-1234. doi:10.2231232/155-3758.1202.

Person, H. P. (1909, March 19). Peirce Dining Hall. AVI Foodsystems, Inc. Peirce Hall For Kenyon. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from https://aviserves.com/kenyon/peirce -hall.html.

S (1999, January 10). S. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from https:// www.nyan.cat.

Wickham H (2016). ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis.

Springer-Verlag New York. ISBN 978-3-319-24277-4, https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org.

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Poppy the Okapi Thomas Kallarakal & Evan Dean Poppy the okapi Is a distinct- looking animal He looks like a mix between A giraffe and a zebra, two fellow mammals Poppy lives in the dense rainforests of central Africa at a high altitude, Surrounded by his predators Who want to use him as food Poppy works hard every day in order to survive His body has adapted, and now he can thrive.

In the African heat it can be hard to stay cool Poppy’s tongue is so long There’s no need for a pool When he feels too hot No need to fear His tongue will start licking From ear to ear A key to survival comes from his diet But with difficult terrain, he must be compliant His foods in the mud and in the trees With a long tongue for reaching And small hooves for traction He is able to eat whatever he may please But when food becomes tough, Things can get tricky Poppy’s many stomachs Can digest food in a jiffy

His ruminant system can break down the toughest of food He will even re-swallow, after foods been chewed Adapted and ready to eat Poppy must be ready for those who want to make him a tasty treat With predators looming Poppy must hear well His oversized ears work real swell His interesting color and pattern make him hard to spot He blends into shadows and vegetation Without a fear of getting caught His striped limbs break up a visible outline And his dark fur makes him one with the night A slight hint of red will give no sign He blends into the mud while having a bite Poppy can make a special sound To talk to his family, who are spread all around Poppy’s predators cannot hear this noise Because they lack this very adaptation that Poppy employs Poppy has very cool hooves Which he doesn’t only use for when he moves They can produce a smelly oil Which helps mark his territory in the soil When Poppy was born it was even harder to hide.

It took him close to two months to poop So there was no smell to find Once he was bigger and he could fend for himself He used all his unique adaptations Without needing any help!

TheNathan Color Pink Chu

I dislike the color pink. People always ask me if it’s because it offends my masculinity or if I think it’s a weak color. Of course, the answer is always no. Have you ever seen a hot pink marker? The color pink unnerves me.

It’s the telltale sign of inflammation, of swelling, and pain, and tenderness. Long nights spent sleeping in cramped positions to avoid applying pressure to my bruises or delicately holding my body to keep a jacket from scraping against my skin.

In pink, I see the pain that people often overlook. The beginnings of a bright purple bloom or a raw throat lie in pink. It’s rough and sore, and people never take it seriously because “it doesn’t look that bad.”

But I know pink hurts.

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Cut along lines!

Born to Run? Sierra Smith 21

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Where the Children Play Marlena Brown

The driveway smells like withering tomatoes and sticky summer air and Lydia’s late again. It’s early evening, sunlight cutting blood-orange stripes across the dash. The sky is doomsday red; heat rolls over me like someone slurring their words. I crank up the AC, even though I’ve got the windows down. The car door opens and clicks shut. “Come on, Vivian, what are you waiting for? Let’s get moving.”

I roll my eyes, pretending not to smirk. “Eleven minutes late.”

She wrinkles her nose and buckles her seatbelt. Lydia is tan, with a darker smudge under her left eye, a birthmark. It squishes when she makes that face.

“At least roll the windows up before we go,” she says. “The air is full of ash, they say it’s awful for your lungs.”

She’s right—for three days, the air’s been faintly sweet with smoke blown in from miles away, where wildfires rasp their devil’s tongues over the land. My mom had rolled her eyes at the newscaster on TV, like that would put an end to the fires. This is how it is now, she’d said.

“We’re all gonna die anyway,” I say dryly, putting the car into reverse.

She presses her lips together and looks at me. Another smirk makes its way to my face. “Fine, fine.”

The windows squeak on their way up. Lydia’s face is painted in red, but on her it looks like the setting sun. I can tell when she catches me watching her. Lydia smiles out the window. She puts her hand out, palm-up, and I take it.

Lydia and I pick up Liz and Antonio. They squeeze into the back seat and whine about how loud Lydia and I like the music, how hot the car is, how it’s too stuffy with the windows up. Nobody’s on the roads lately, with the ash and the freaky sky. It’s mostly other kids—we’re all too bored to care, I think. I tear up and down the busiest roads in town, in the mood to skirt red lights. Last week, my mom and I got into a fight about how fast I drove when we went to the grocery store. It’d only been two weeks since grandma had died, and I think she just wanted somebody to yell at.

She told me she was going to get an app to track my driving.

I told myself not to go to the grocery store with her anymore.

“Hey, put on some Yusuf, would you?” Lydia shouts over the music. “I’m in the mood for classics.”

I switch one of his hippie Seventies songs, and Lydia fakedrums on the dash.

“Can we get food?” Liz leans forward.

“We’ll get takeout, how about that?” I say.

We pull into the little takeout place we always go to.

It smells like fry-oil, with a neon sign that reads, “La rana 24

morada. The Purple Frog,” and another, “Abierto! Open!”

The sign casts Lydia and I in crimson, splicing the back seat into velvet shadows. She winks at me before climbing out of the car.

“Get us Diet Cokes!” Antonio calls after her as she disappears into the little restaurant.

I almost don’t say anything, but change my mind.

“Aren’t they full of cancer, or whatever?”

“And what am I supposed to do about it?” he says.

“So,” says Liz, unbuckling her seatbelt to settle in.

“How’s that all going, Vivian? With Lydia. Her birthday’s coming up.”

I feel myself frown. “I know that.”

Liz grins and rolls her eyes, “I know you do, but what are you getting her? It had better be good, because I’m getting her something really good.”

“Oh, me too,” says Antonio. “I got her The Goldfinch, it’s supposed to be really good.”

“I got her a couple bars of this really expensive chocolate,” says Liz. “But what did you get her?”

They look at me; my cheeks are already burning. I’d gotten her some pretty sketchbooks and pencils, because everyone knows she likes to draw. It’s a fine gift, but she already has sketchbooks and pencils. It isn’t good enough.

Not for Lydia, with her smile like a secret, with the way things matter to her: big things like the ash, but also little things—gifts, small gestures. The things I’m bad at. I keep trying to come up with something good, something sentimental, something that would mean a lot to her. But every time I do, I get all panicky. I keep picturing her unwrapping pink wrapping paper smothered in hearts and thinking, Jesus, she likes me way more than I like her...

“It hasn’t come in the mail yet.” I shrug.

“What?” breaks in Liz, and I wince. “But her birthday’s so soon!”

My face is plastered in pink. “No, I know, it’s coming. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“But don’t you care—” says Antonio.

Lydia opens the door, and he falls silent. I shift uncomfortably in the seat. She opens up the greasy white bag of food and passes around sandwiches and fries and regular Cokes.

“Sugar is better than cancer, I figure” shrugs Lydia.

“What did I miss?”

“We were talking about your birthday,” says Antonio, and Liz shoves him.

“Oh!” says Lydia. “Vivian, I was gonna ask you.

My family’s going on a beach trip in two weeks, and they said that since it’s my eighteenth right before, I can bring a friend. Do you wanna come?”

Yes, I think. Yes, I want to spend a whole week with the Suns. Yes, I want to spend a week with Lydia, her head in my lap while she reads on the beach, tangled around each other while we sleep under blue moonlight by the sea. Yes, yes.

But Antonio is looking at me, and Liz is looking at me. They think I don’t even have a gift for her birthday.

How can I say yes, when they think I don’t even care about her birthday? They’ll think I just want a free beach trip.

She’s so heartless, they’ll say. She’s just looking for a getaway from her psycho mom. They’ll take their whispers to Lydia. Are you sure about how Vivian feels about you? She’s not. Does she ever tell you how she feels? I don’t.

“Uh, I don’t really know,” I say. I shrug. I look away. “It’s kinda last minute. I’ll have to ask my mom.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Liz and Antonio glance at each other, but I keep my eyes on Lydia. Please understand, I’m begging her. I’m sorry, I’m telling her. Her smile is stuck in place. I want to smooth out the tightness around her eyes and mouth with my thumbs.

“Oh,” she says. Her voice is a little too high. “Okay.

Just let me know.”

I don’t see Lydia for two days. During that time, the sky wanes to a muddy color, then a dim blue. My mom has work and then business dinners after work, so I can’t drive to Lydia’s house. It’s wildly boring at home, and I’m trapped in there with all of my grandma’s old stuff. The news drags on about the heat and the wildfires and the storms. My summer reading for school is The Sixth Extinction, which talks all about how the frogs are dying. I guess “La rana morada” will be a dumb name in fifty years. When I text Lydia about all of this, she sends, “Ok.” On the third day, in the early evening, my mom comes into the kitchen while I’m making myself a quesadilla. “I found these in your room,” she says, sticking two books in my face. They’re library books, two and a half weeks overdue. They’re also from my nightstand drawer, where I keep my diary, and notebooks for personal writing, and the picture book grandma made of baby me.

“Yeah, whatever. I see them. Could you maybe not look through my stuff?”

“Don’t give me attitude. I own your stuff.” She drops the books on the kitchen counter. “It’s not my fault you’re always forgetting things. Return those tomorrow.”

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter. I turn back to the quesadilla on the stove. My mother sits in silence at the kitchen table, thumbing through an article about the wildfires on her tablet. I eye her before starting, “You don’t have another work dinner tonight, right? Because I could use the car.”

“No, you’re sorting the attic,” she says curtly, swiping through the article.

“Wait, but why? Does it really have to be tonight?”

“I called your dad earlier. I told him you were too upset

about your grandma to do what I asked and sort through her things,” she says. “And he agrees with me that you should; it might make you feel better. So you’re going through them tonight.”

“Woah,” I whip around. “You told him what?”

“Well, I assumed that’s why you weren’t sorting through the attic,” she says, not looking up from the tablet. “Because I know you wouldn’t ignore what I asked on purpose. So I told him, and we both thought it might be nice.” She turns to me. “It’s not healthy to keep it all bottled up, you know.”

My chest is burning. “What the hell? You can’t just go assuming shit, and making up things to tell dad! Maybe I just don’t give a shit about grandma’s stuff.”

My mom stands up. “Don’t you dare swear at me, Vivian.

All I want is to do something nice for you, and you act like such a brat!” She stalks towards me. “You know how much I loved your grandma. But you’re so above that, right? You don’t care about your family, right? Well, you don’t have to sort her things, then. I’ll do it all by myself, and then I’ll pack them up and stuff them away and you’ll never see her things again. Just how you want it!”

My eyes sting with anger and with shame. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I want.” I say through gritted teeth. “Perfect.” I shove the pan off the stove and leave her there.

I crash into my bedroom and grab my umbrella and keys.

My phone flashes a severe storm warning expected for the next two hours, but I’ve made up my mind. I message Lydia, “I’m coming over.” By the time I’m outside, the rain is pounding. It soaks my hair as I run to the car, where I smash the ignition. The car starts up and I speed out of the driveway.

The storm is screaming like it’s the end of the world. I send up sparks of rain behind the car. When I pull onto Lydia’s street, there’s a puddle spanning the asphalt, sloshing over the curb. When I look, the street is lined up and down with dips filling with rainwater. I slog through pool after pool, smashing my way towards her house.

I’m halfway across another puddle when there’s a violent crack of lightning. At the same time, my steering gives out.

“Oh shit, oh Jesus,” I say, twisting the steering wheel.

The car starts to sink. I slam on the gas to try to get traction, but it’s all water and mud. Then, there’s a lurch as the tires cling to solid ground, and the car careens through the flood.

I wrench the wheel, but it’s too late. I hurtle into a ditch.

I try the gas, but the car only groans. I’m digging myself into more mud. When I let go, the car heaves a sigh and sinks into the slop. I rip open the door, grabbing the floor mat.

The wind is howling and tearing at my hair. I’m shoving the floor mat beneath my back tire, swearing, when I hear, “Vivian?” through the storm.

God. Of course, of course. I stand up, pushing wet hair out of my eyes.

Lydia’s standing there, gray t-shirt drenched to black, her dark hair stuck to her face and neck. Beads of rain run down 25

rivers on her cheeks. I want to take her face in my hands and trace riverbeds with my thumbs. Lightning cracks again, and everything lights up in blue.

“My car’s stuck,” I say lamely.

“I know,” she says. “Let me help you.”

“It’s fine,” I say, looking at the car “I’ll figure it out—” “Please, Vivian?” she asks. “Just let me.”

I finish shoving the floor mat under the tire while she climbs into the car. It takes a few tries for her to ease the car out of the ditch and onto the road. When she climbs out of the car, I don’t really know what to say. The wind shrieks.

She’s standing there and she looks so cold, and I want to wrap her in my arms.

“Why don’t you want to go on the trip?” she asks.

“I do.”

She stares at me. The sky sucks in a breath.

“I was embarrassed,” I say, after a minute. “I didn’t want everyone to think—I don’t know. I didn’t want them to think that I wanted it too bad. The trip. Or you, maybe. I’m too used to not caring.”

“You do that a lot,” she says. “You can’t just pretend you don’t care about me, Vivian. Or about anything. I’ll start to think it’s true.”

“I know,” I say. “I just don’t like feeling so… so exposed.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while. She tucks her chin a little, like she’s thinking, or working up her courage. Water trickles down her jaw and drips off.

“Can you try?” she asks finally. “To be a little...a little vulnerable, sometimes? To care?”

I can. But my heart’s in my throat, so I reach out and pull her into my arms. The rain is christening our shoulders. My knees feel like they’re giving, so I lean into her. Her heart is a living thing against my chest.

“I can,” I finally murmur into her shoulder.

In the attic the next day, the air is heavy and cluttered with white light. My mom had cracked open most of the small windows, and the unseasonal heat is spilling into the room. The storm passed last night while I slept over at Lydia’s house and my mom called six times. This morning, I apologized and explained why the car is splattered with mud. I’m not allowed to drive for three weeks. My mom wasn’t actually as mad as I thought she’d be, though. Her voice was stony over the phone, but when I asked if Lydia could help me sort grandma’s things that morning, she just sighed and said alright.

I can’t tell if the pressing heat is why I’m tempted to run from the room. Everything is smothered in choking dust and stuffed into boxes. There’s a bowl of marbles. Frilly baby clothes. I pet a little ceramic horse on a shelf. I used to play make-believe with it as a kid; I was always the sheriff or knight riding in to save the day. My grandma used to play with me, sometimes, and even my mom. The horse leaves a soft layer of dust on my fingers. My throat aches.

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“This stuff is cool,” says Lydia from the corner, bent over a box of cassettes. “It’s like a time capsule. Her whole life.”

“Mmhm,” I say. I wipe a little sweat from my forehead with my sleeve. I’ve reached a box of my mom’s old artwork. A lot of it is finger paintings from elementary school, but it’s also got a few pretty good paintings from high school, even college. I pick up one of her self-portraits. She looks strange: my mother, softened in youth. She’s not smiling, but it’s like she’d be ready to, if you asked. I’d like to meet this person.

“She’s so pretty,” says Lydia, who has walked up behind me.

“It’s weird to think she used to be my age,” I say.

“You’d think she’d get what it’s like.”

“She was alright this morning, though, right?” she asks, walking amongst the boxes.

“Yeah, actually,” I say. “Usually she’s so angry at everything. I kind of get it, though.”

“What do you mean?” asks Lydia, slightly muffled.

She’s stretching over boxes to try to push one of the windows further open.

“It’s not supposed to be 92 degrees out today, you know? Or like that storm; that wasn’t normal. It just kind of feels like everything’s gonna go up in flames.”

Beside the box of paintings is a box of dolls. I recognize one of them, a plush doll with black yarn for hair. My grandma would always say it was my mom’s favorite as a kid, while my mom would smile and roll her eyes. I shake its soft little hand. Something else in me aches.

“I think about how my mom was always this little kid, right?” I continue. “And then she got older. And it feels like one day she just woke up and said, today I’m mad at the world. And then she was like that forever.”

Lydia snorts, and her birthmark wrinkles up.

“Come on, really?”

I half-smile, too. “I know. But I’m weirdly worried it’s gonna happen to me. I don’t wanna be mad at everything the way she is.”

Lydia nods and looks out the window. The sky is cloudless, sharp and ruthless in its brightness, but her hair looks so pretty lit up like that.

“I know what you mean,” she says, turning back to me. “But we can only do our best, right? We have to live our own lives.”

I nod. I’m over by the box of cassettes now. Lydia pulled a few loose while browsing, and they sit scattered on top of the neat rows. They click together as I leaf through them.

One of them is Tea for the Tillerman, one of Yusuf’s albums from back when he was called Cat Stevens. On the back are some songs I’ve heard Lydia play: “Wild World,” “Father and Son,” “Where Do the Children Play?” I think the last one’s about saving the planet.

I slip the cassette into my pocket; it’ll look nice in some pink wrapping paper.

Bruce the Butterfly

Eva Hitt 27

Chris Goodall

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Wood-Wide Web In early ecology, it was thought that plant species only interacted in negative ways through competition and predation. However, later studies began to reveal that plants, and in particular trees, could actually help each other. Through what is known as the “woodwide web,” trees form mutualistic relationships with underground mycorrhizae fungi, which can branch out and connect multiple trees together, even trees of different species. Through these connections, trees can exchange carbon, nutrients, and water. This was a breakthrough in ecology, and it changed how we thought of plant communities and species interactions. In particular, this discovery showed how important diversity is for ecosystem health, because diversity allows plants to work together for mutual survival.

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Ansley Grider 31

Aiden Biglow 32

Painting by Numbers Hailey Napier

I met Judy Holdener in her office, a small room on the third floor of Hayes Hall that would pass for an art studio if not for the shelves of calculus textbooks behind her desk.

Countless artistic pieces adorn the walls, from a sculpture composed of Sierpiński triangles (a fractal pattern of triangles), to the earrings Holdener is wearing, which she 3D printed herself.

After telling me about her graduate training in algebraic K theory, Holdener gestures to a large square painting hanging on the wall above my head. “That’s a painting that’s sort of literally colored by number,” she explains, “because the colors of each of the little squares depend on a number theoretic function at a particular integer. That function is relevant because it’s critical for one of the oldest problems in mathematics that dates back to the Greeks.” She’s referring to perfect numbers. Every number has an abundancy index: the sum of a number’s divisors divided by the number itself.

Perfect numbers (such as 6 and 28) have an abundancy index equal to two. If a number’s abundancy index is less than two, it’s known as a deficient number, and if it’s more than two, the number is an abundant number. Holdener studies these perfect numbers and has published academic papers on them. Using art, she forces the perspective change necessary to chip away at questions that are thousands of years old. In this painting, aptly titled “Abundancy”, Holdener paints de-

ficient numbers in lighter yellows and greens, and abundant numbers in blues and purples. “I’m trying to understand this function from a visual point of view,” she tells me. “I’m trying to think: what if I could see it? Would that make me understand it better?”

Holdener’s passion to view her field differently extends to her teaching, where she hopes to inspire others to shift how they think about their work. In 2016, Holdener and Karen Snouffer, a studio art professor, developed a class called “Math in the Studio” at Kenyon, which they co-taught during the spring semester of 2017. Students completed problem sets typical of a math course in which they were introduced to mathematical concepts, and then applied those concepts to create artistic pieces such as fractal wallpaper designs and tessellation tilings. The resulting course offered learning opportunities for everyone involved, pushing math students to express the patterns they studied in ways they weren’t used to and exposing art students to new ways of viewing the world. Holdener even began implementing some of the art class’s teaching strategies in her math classes, having her students critique each other’s proofs when there are multiple ways to come to the same conclusion.

Holdener’s innovative teaching style is more than simple fun; she views it as one of the most important aspects of her job. “I feel like my contribution to society is my teaching,”

“Abundancy” by Judy Holdener Acr ylics on canvas 33

David Hilber t by Judy Holdener 3D printed plastic on foam board she explains. “By getting students the skills that will help them after they graduate, quantitatively, logically, and developing analytical thinking and problem solving. Students can take those skills and do more with that.” Teaching provides Holdener with a feeling of direct positive impact on the world, whereas research may be just as important, but more difficult to see immediately. She continues: “I sort of rationalize the fact that I’m playing in an academic sandbox, in terms of working on problems that I enjoy, by the fact that I contribute to society in this other way. Even though I do completely believe that the problems that I work on feed a general body of knowledge. There’s a lot of things in number theory that were developed by people who were just playing.”

To demonstrate her point, Holdener takes out a couple of Ziplock bags containing what appear to be squares made of black plastic squiggles. These squiggles, she explains, are 3D printed versions of the Hilbert space filling curve. “David Hilbert invented this curve for fun,” Holdener tells me.

“Now it’s used in computer science a lot, and to make things like antennas.” She pulls up a picture on her computer, it’s a 34

portrait of Hilbert entirely made out of the same 3D printed squiggles I hold in my hands, glued onto a huge piece of white foam board. Holdener tells me that to create it she wrote a Python program that determines the thickness of the curve’s lines based on the darkness of groups of pixels in the reference image: “It takes a picture and it reads in the pixel data and if the picture is darker there, the curve is wider, and if the picture is lighter, the curve is thinner.” This process produces a portrait of Hilbert that emerges from the curve he invented.

As I look at Holdener’s portrait, I’m struck by the beauty of math. Holdener’s work is admirable, it breaks down the barriers that keep many of us from recognizing this beauty by presenting it visually, making mathematics not only more interesting, but also more accessible. “I see my field as more of an art,” she tells me as I pack up my notes, “I prefer the form over the function. But I’m very happy that my field is also viewed as functional.”

iNaturalist Photo Competition This fall we hosted an iNaturalist competition where we asked the Kenyon community to join our iNaturalist group and identif y interesting species of plants and animals. We then picked our favorite ones to share with you in this issue!

Wheel Bug (Arilus cristatus)

by Ethan Ashbrook

Large Milkweed Bug (Oncopeltus fasciatus) by Rachael Tomasko

White Dapperling (Leucoagaricus leucothites) Ansley Grider 35

By Ansley Grider

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