Dead Beats

This week, the Nass learns from Patti Smith, mulls over pop stardom, and weighs the costs of “clean” energy.

The Nassau Weekly

Volume 47, Number 4 October 12, 2023

In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com

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October 12, 2023

Dead Beats Masthead 4

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Editors-in-Chief Assistant Art Director Sam Bisno Emma Mohrmann Sierra Stern Events Editor Publisher David Chmielewski Allie Matthias Audiovisual Editor Managing Editors Teodor Grosu Lucia Brown Charlie NuermWeb Editor berger Jane Castleman

Lessons on Greatness: Reflections On “A Conversation With Patti Smith”

By Lauren Aung Designed by Cathleen Weng and Emma Mohrmann

THE DISHES ARE NEVER DONE BUT GOOD LUCK

By Charlie Nuermberger Designed by Vera Ebong and Emma Mohrmann

Staff Creator Director Lara Katz

Taylor on the Mount

By Julia Stern Designed by Cathleen Weng and James Swinehart

By Alex Norbrook Designed by Hazel Flaherty

“What we Lose to Lithium”

by Alex Norbrook

Hey, Big Vape! Make These Flavors Next

Read more on page 10.

What We Lose to Lithium

By Ellie Diamond Designed by Cathleen Weng

It Looks Like Paris, If You Squint

By Tommy Goulding Designed by Jasmine Chen and Chas Brown

Ellie Goulding Stuns in New Interview

By Alex Picoult Designed by Cathleen Weng

Princewatch: The “Prince” Once Again Confirms That We Are All Losers

By Beth Villaruz Designed by Cathleen Weng

Like this year’s new-look magazine? The Nass extends special thanks to Joe Coraggio for his support improving print quality.

Director of Outreach and Engagement Ellie Diamond

Hannah Mittleman

Social Chair Kristiana Filipov

Trustees Alexander Wolff 1979 Alumni Liasion Katie Duggan 2019 Peyton Smith Leah Boustan 2000 Leif Haase 1987 Senior Editor Marc Fisher 1980 Lauren Aung Rafael Abrahams 2013 Junior Editors Robert Faggen 1982 Frankie Duryea Sharon Hoffman 1991 Isabelle Clayton Sharon Lowe 1985 Otto Eiben Sofiia Shapovalova Daniel Viorica Head Copy Editor Beth Villaruz Design Editor Cathleen Weng Assistant Design Editor Vera Ebong Art Director Hannah Mittleman

Cover Attribution

Historian Julia Stern

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Volume 47, Number 4

This Week:

Verbatim:

Fri

FALL BREAK

Sat

FALL BREAK

Wed

Sun

FALL BREAK

Thurs

Mon

4:30p Green The First Kings of Europe: An International Exhibition about the Prehistoric Balkans Overheard at Terrace Trite Terran: “I’m going to be the Isaac Newton of Musical Theater!”

Overheard in the Forbes Library Excited frosh: “First one to have sex in FLIB gets 1000 dollars from me.”

Overheard in the Campus Club Coffee Club Barista-humanist, to other barista-humanists: “Dialing in the espresso machine together is the closest I’ll ever get to Los Alamos.”

Overheard at dinnertime Dreamer: “My favorite meditations are the ones where I’m not conscious.”

About us:

Tues

5:30p Frist Zen Whispers– Meditation Classes with Chung Tai

Got Events?

Overheard while arguing about the definition of a pickle Proponent: “Hold on, let me pull out my strategic pickle.”

Overheard in Roma Allergy-ridden individual: “It’s the sound of screaming peanuts.”

Overheard during 7:30 p.m.

Lecture Disgruntled professor: “So, which image do you want to talk about?”

Disgruntled professor , after about 10 seconds of uncomfortable silence: “Okay, I guess democracy is bad then.”

5:00p Friend Photo History’s Futures: Stanley WolukauWanambwa and Lesley Martin 5:00p Green Caravaggio and the Echos of Figuration

6:00p Labyrinth

12:00p Louis Simpson Exploring the Link Between Urban Infrastructure and Human Well-Being Email David Chmielewski at dc70@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.

12:30p Chapel Afternoon Concert Series

Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis

8:00p Chapel Jazz Vespers

For advertisements, contact Allie Matthias at amm8@princeton.edu.

Overheard in seminar English concentrator: “They were stabbed in a very romantic way”

Overheard while planning a pregame Pre-med student: “I would do homework AT the orgy.”

Overheard while reflecting on origins “Well, when I was a gamete, I was fairly nude”

Overheard while viewing South Tower impact footage Viewer: “9/11 is my Roman Empire.”

Overheard during NCAA March Madness Delirious fan: “Hormones! Sex! Basketball! NBA 2K!”

Overheard while planning a pregame Incredulous girl: “Can you imagine THIS being your cousin, and being SURPRISED she’s a bisexual?”

Overheard while still arguing about pickles Detractor: “What’s the moral imperative for pickling a child?”

Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com

Overheard in the co-op Vegetarian: “I feel like eggs are a constitutional issue.”

The Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly news magazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are encouraged to attend meetings and submit writing and art. To submit, email your work to thenassauweekly@gmail.com by 10 p.m. on Thursday. Include your name, netid, word count, and title. We hope to see you soon!

Read us: nassauweekly.com Contact thenassauweekly@gmail.com us: Instagram & Twitter: @nassauweekly Join us: We meet on Mondays at 5pm in Bloomberg 044!

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Volume 47, Number 4 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG ART BY EMMA MOHRMANN

Lessons on Greatness: Reflections on “A Conversation with Patti Smith” “For Smith, poet and painter William Blake exemplified this approach to life. She remarked: ‘Despite the fact he had no proof from the world he was worth anything—he would have gotten 4 likes [on Instagram]—he did his work.’”

By LAUREN AUNG

“

A Conversation with Patti Smith” landed on the first day of fall, and a rain spell had swept into Princeton with the season.

Change—how steadily it comes and how to embrace it—was at the front of my mind as I gave a rainy Saturday morning debut for my coat, which had been shoved into my closet since April.

The talk took place in the Chancellor Green rotunda. Its stained glass gave off a gray glow, casting a haughtiness that Smith lifted as she entered the room with the two other panelists, Brigid Doherty and Hope Littwin. Smith, poet and staple of the 1970s punk rock scene, wore a relaxed black blazer and wide-legged jeans, not dissimilar to many of the students in the audience. At 77, the rock star is still stylish to a T. The event had no agenda or premise; it was simply called “A

Conversation with Patti Smith.”

Still, people of all ages filled the seats to hear Smith talk about anything, a testament to the endurance of Smith’s figure across generations.

in politics and dress, pursuing relentlessly the belief that art could defeat systems of domination—it is the stuff of cliches now, but all cliches have roots somewhere, and Smith had her hands in the dirt.

I was born at the turn of the century, decidedly after Smith’s height of punk rock fame, and came to the talk less out of reverence and more out of curiosity. What lessons did Smith have for young students, who met her art years after it was made, and for people who grew up with her? What experiences were of her moment, and what transcended?

Smith would be the first to admit that her artistic education at the Chelsea Hotel is no longer possible. Her own daughter, she related, struggles to make ends meet to live in the city. But while there is no roadmap back to the 1970s, Smith still imparted wisdom that transcended that time, wisdom not just for artists but for anyone seeking to live a good life.

Over the course of the hour, Smith let the audience peek into not just the fervor of the 1970s, but into her entire journey as a writer, setting forth a gently radical approach to writing and life that restructures the meaning of greatness; after all these years, she remains countercultural.

Smith’s artistic education took place in the 1970s at New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel, where she formed serendipitous and generous mentorships with some of the most talented poets and artists of that time. Her account of New York City washed over me like a dream. Sitting in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel and smoking with Janis Joplin, basking in the counterculture that tied together artists

build with themselves. What is important for life—and thus for creativity—is to know one’s vision, and to work towards it, whatever that may be. It takes concerted effort to know oneself, and courage to follow that self-knowledge, particularly when that path does not align with external standards of reward and praise. For Smith, poet

This wisdom centers on the personal relationship people

This is inspired by Patti Smith’s drawings and her description in Just Kids of her first encounter with beauty when she saw a swan. I tried to think back on my first encounter with beauty but couldn’t quite think of what elicited such emotion for me at a young age, and the first swans I saw were inseparable from snapping turtles. I settled on this memory, frozen in a photograph, of fishing with my aunt in this random river in southern Missouri where my family went every year on vacation. Its where I experienced the most peace and beauty growing up.

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and painter William Blake exemplified this approach to life. She remarked: “Despite the fact he had no proof from the world he was worth anything—he would have gotten 4 likes [on Instagram]— he did his work.” He “channeled the angels in whatever he did,” even though the people around him were unable to see them.

Smith directly addressed the difficulty of self-assessment in the digital age. With external validation quantified in likes, it is easy to substitute other people’s opinions for one’s own.

Further, while the relationship with the self is perhaps the most important— and certainly the longest—relationship one keeps, the work that goes into it is not easily externally held.

You cannot point to or photograph a healthy sense of self. And in a culture that values what can be shared, seen, and evaluated, the work of self-knowledge and self-assessment is especially difficult. There is little room for work that goes unseen in a culture that fetishizes the eyes of others.

Smith continues to follow her own vision in the 8th decade of her life. This dedication was and is not easy. She marked the 1980s, which the media usually sees as a lull in

her life, as an especially difficult time to juggle her vision and life outside of art. Smith raised her two children during this decade, an accomplishment she declared as one of her proudest. As motherhood enriched her life, Smith continued to

me of the words of Joan Didion: “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” Here was someone who could sit proudly with the work they did, whether it

dynamics of success defined by external validation and reward. She is a walking, breathing, speaking vision of the capacity for people to pursue not just artistic greatness, but a great life in a much deeper sense. A greatness that abides in the unseen hours of early morning, in caring fully for the people around you, and in having the self-respect to know when you live in alignment with your values.

Greatness that shines when the world clamors at your name, and when the world has no place for your vision. By working anyways, you make a home for it all the same.

Many thanks to the McCarter and Debbie Bisno for making my attendance at “A Conversation with Patti Smith” possible.

CREDITS: Photos courtesy of McCarter. Talk Presented by: McCarter and the Humanities Council A Conversation with PATTI SMITH Moderated by Brigid Doherty (Departments of German and Art & Archaeology) and Hope Littwin (Department of Music)

pursue her vision, balancing duties to others with her duty to herself.

She adopted a personal practice of writing, setting aside 5:30 to 8 a.m. as time to create.

was on stage or changing diapers.

Here was someone who was able to take ownership over their life. As Smith said, “I assess myself by how I conduct myself in the world, was I a good person…by the work I do.”

As she described her daily practice of writing, which she continues to maintain, the ritual reminded

Smith’s outlook is quietly radical, one that usurps the typical

And in a culture that values what can be shared, seen, and evaluated, the work of Lauren Aung and the Nassau Weekly is especially difficult.

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October 12, 2023 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ART BY EMMA MOHRMANN

THE DISHES ARE NEVER DONE BUT GOOD LUCK “I might survive, and what if they get this great shot of I do? What if I swim through Chessler emerging from a slot the waters and eat and hide canyon and walking—actually stumbling, staggering—into from those raiders? And, the desert as this fat red sun god, what if I have to drink falls off the rim of the earth. my own urine?”

He’s a cowboy who’s lost his

By CHARLIE NUERMBERGER

CONTENT WARNING: MENTIONS OF SELF-HARM/ SUICIDE

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n the seventh episode of the second season, Cal “Wild Survivor” Chessler drinks his own urine. No filtration, no saran wrapped solar still, used one time in the first season. He drinks it from a plastic dish, the camera zooms in, and it’s dark yellow.

Chessler’s in the desert.

The Sonora, one of the weaker deserts, I think. It’s no Gobi.

No Kalahari. But it’s a brutally American desert, and as Chessler climbs over every scrubland hill, you get the sense he might come across a parking lot or a taco truck or some crystal suburban swimming pool.

He swallows his urine then lunges forward in this huge motion, so overstated you couldn’t miss it if you were in the middle of something and watching with only half your attention.

He gags, then turns to the camera and smiles. It’s such an easy beat to fake, with lemon-lime gatorade maybe, and when he flashes that hooked little smile, I am flooded with the relief that he hasn’t actually swallowed his own urine.

Near the end of the episode,

horse. A title card tells us he’s survived successfully. Then, the show’s over. Then, he sets out into some green wetland for the eighth episode.

Wild Survivor only aired two seasons, and none of the streaming services picked it up, but you can find whole, watermarked episodes online. In the comments, people—real idiots actually—write, “Thank you for the tips, Cal! This could save someone’s life someday.”

I watch Wild Survivor on my phone with complete attention, lying along the rim of my neighbor Mark’s swimming pool. He got it rechlorinated yesterday.

Dead leaves wheel on the surface. Dead frogs lie around the drain. The water’s green, but it’s hot enough that I wish I could swim in it. An early summer heat that isn’t comparable in any meaningful way to how hot it gets later in the season.

It’s June, and I eat frozen blueberries out of the bag.

This morning, I saw a video of a woman who lost forty pounds eating cottage cheese and fruit every day, and I don’t like cottage cheese, but I went to the Food Lion and bought every type of fruit I could find.

Grapes, cherries, peaches, apples, berries, fresh, frozen, all of it, and I didn’t realize how expensive they were until the cashier gave me this lazy-eyed

look that said I hope you can pay for these. I improvised a little prayer in my head. Ben’s debit card didn’t decline. I almost walked across the strip

mall to buy a new disposable vape. All three blue plastic Food Lion bags almost split open in the parking lot, which burned hot like our electric cooktops.

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At the pool, my back soaks up the heat of the pavement, all the way through my towel, which is patterned with less hostile yellow suns. My fingertips purple with melted blueberries.

The fruit becomes smaller and more sour the deeper I go into

the bag.

Beyond the phone screen, dark clouds verge on the tops of trees, and a dark wind blows.

Wild Survivor spears a frog with

a two-pronged gig he fashioned from a thorn bush. I mostly hate the eighth episode’s whole swampy green backdrop. I shut it off.

My eyes itch from looking at my phone for so long. I dip my feet into the green water until

they also start itching. I try not to think about those drowned frogs rotting. Microbes shedding from their flabby bodies, into that green water, floating

in between my toes.

I’m grateful Mark lets me use the pool during the summer.

During the days, he works some unknowable office job on the other side of town. He velcroed a home surveillance camera to his shed, and I don’t think he knows that I know the light blinks green when he looks at the stream from his little cubicle. The other day, I took a closer look at the unblinking camera and realized it’s actually a trail cam, for deer season.

I take my bong from the lawn chair, and the lighter won’t light in the wind. When it does, I finish the bowl, only cough once. The weed is old and turning brown. Ben is intent on setting up a hydroponic system in the closet, and he’s failed three times. The pH slid towards the pink end, the water clouded with mold, the light went out, and the whole ordeal has given me a new appreciation for our plug and his skittish little eighteen-year-old runner, who wears a different pair of shoes every time I see him. I gave him thirty dollars last week as a graduation present.

The money came from the last of my last paycheck, and Ben would probably yell at me or at least look disappointed if he knew. For a few months, I worked an office job, in comms for this textbook publishing company. I tried. There was a small rack of pretzels and granola bars in the break room, and according to my supervisor Andrea, “Coffee’s free. They say you should pay for the snacks.

Honor system. Sometimes, I’m really bad and take some without paying.” I quit after three weeks.

Ben graduated with a visual arts degree and did a year of Peace Corps. Now, he works as a server at a Greek place downtown, and it’s okay to hate him.

He paints with shitty acrylic, and he doesn’t paint much

anymore. The passenger seat of his little sedan rattles with empty whippet canisters. He listens to artists with grooming accusations without any guilty conscience about it. He calls himself a nihilist at parties, which is embarrassing for me. He gets very quiet when he’s high.

I stand up and realize I’ve crossed that old threshold of being high. My toes curl over the lip of the pool deck. That same dark wind blows, and I figure I should go check on Ben, who I mostly forgot about. I gather everything I brought to Mark’s pool, then unlatch the gate, and leave before his green trail cam light starts blinking again.

Last night, in the middle of the night, an angelic horsething fell into our backyard.

This storm front hadn’t moved in yet. The night was clear and even a little cool. The first summer cicadas stopped their chittering. Something shut them up. A huge, bright light.

A screaming, then a crying, like if a horse-thing was crying.

Sadder than you’d think, like if the child of this horse-thing had been stolen away by some malicious agent, or if it had broken its leg or something. I don’t know. I never saw it, but Ben stepped into the dark to check it out with this little twenty-two he keeps around because he doesn’t subscribe to those politics, politics in general, and really, he would like to think of himself as a gun-toting cowboy.

An important moment when he bought it. An estate sale.

I open the screen door and track some scummy pool water into the house, and Ben sits in the TV room, exactly where I left him. Still wide-eyed. Still red-eyed like he’s been crying, or like he hasn’t been blinking.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 13

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October 12, 2023 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG ART BY JAMES SWINEHART

TAYLOR ON THE MOUNT Taylor Swift is cool now. Get with the program.

By JULIA STERN

I

t wasn’t so long ago that Taylor Swift was, by all accounts, taboo.

She used to be the hush-hush scandal of girlhood, the shameful secret nestled in shoeboxes under beds. If someone asked if you were a “Swiftie,” you’d start sounding a bit like a nervous politician: “No! Not me! I did not have Spotify relations with that woman!”

Then, Taylor Swift became the poster child of being girly, and feeling good about it. Her music—the Red-blooded pop, not the sweet, “Love Story” strumming—became the soundtrack of a certain brand of 2010s female solidarity. “Yes, I listen to Taylor Swift, because I love being girly! And pink! And romance!” Suddenly, liking Taylor Swift was feminist, and disliking her was a depressing signal that you were stuck in the old ways of feminine self-loathing. She was untouchable, almost a Messiah, immune to the common pitfalls of

trashy celebrity life.

It seemed that the myth of Taylor Swift had cooled and solidified for good. Sure, she was a talented musician with a knack for good business decisions, but that was all beside the point. Taylor Swift had effectively become a litmus test for the state of America’s girls. All the perennial debates surrounding her, questions of whether love songs were outdated or empowering, or whether conventional femininity was burdensome or uplifting, were symptoms of the confused, fractured realm of the American girl.

Do I need pink? Do I need men? No one could figure out Taylor Swift, because no one could figure out where girliness fit in, and where it fell out.

Then, something weird happened. A wave of cultural amnesia seemed to roll over America, washing away the fraught myth of Taylor Swift and making her, well—cool.

She was no longer just the lovesick girl from Nashville, the princess of #girlpower, or even the Madonna of millennial women. She was no

longer just one thing. She remained a decidedly female phenomenon, but no one seemed to overthink it.

Liking Taylor Swift was neither a sign of weakness nor a sign of enlightenment. It was just something people did.

This amnesia, of course, was backlit by Swift’s year-long “Eras

Tour.” The tour is an undertaking of such unimaginable dimensions that even mainstream news outlets regularly report the numbers, as if it were a matter of military spending or budget cuts. “Tonight on the evening news…Taylor Swift has made $300 million…146 shows…5 continents…” She’s doing six shows in Singapore alone. For a marathon

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stretch of three hours, she takes the stage in front of crowds decked out in feather boas and glitzy cowboy boots, most of whom had forked over at least $150 to get in on the action. Fans drive off swearing it was the best show of their life.

Taylor Swift looks so grown-up when she performs, so beyond any allegations of vapid girliness.

It’s clear that her appearance is carefully negotiated; she is, of course—perfectly slim and perfectly blonde—the zenith of a timely beauty that is neither affronting nor easy to miss. But she’s come back with muscle and age, with a womanliness that hides no secrets.

She’s 33 now, shredded, and the big boss around these parts. She re-released her music with a razor-edge apostrophe, tagging them “Taylor’s Version.” She bought the rights to her brand. She gives out bonuses if she pleases, $100,000 to every truck driver on tour, and she handles the lights, the logistics, the money, a kind of P.T. Barnum turned Girl Boss. It does nothing

to compromise a sense of orthodox femininity that is kept very carefully intact. Swift’s womanhood is self-ownership.

And this newfound womanhood is more of the predestination variety than anything else—to claim that it’s a facade or a scheme is downright conspiratorial. Musicians go mad over trying to change with the times, but Taylor Swift simply had to grow up. Her fans are getting MBAs and flaunting high heels in the office. Why can’t she?

Girliness is gone, left in the 2000s.

Womanhood is here. Her womanhood is chic, slick, and gloriously nonchalant—Darwinian in the sense that it’s perfectly evolved, and readily overlooked. She’ll take care of it. She’ll make it happen.

Things are looking good for the fringe-cut Phoenix. It’s not astounding that she proved everyone wrong, but it’s astounding that she proved everyone wrong, and that no one seems to remember or care enough to say anything. Maybe, we

all know that it doesn’t really matter. That the noise of Taylor Swift’s career—whether she’s this or that, a cultural arbiter or a fleeting starlet, a white-washed feminist or the new voice of women—has been demoted to radio static, probably for good this time. Fretting over details seems so useless that even misogynists have grown weary.

The other day when Taylor Swift performed in Seattle, her threehour concert triggered seismic activity across the Puget Sound. She probably kept performing. If she’s amassed enough fans to rattle the lithosphere, no amount of squabbling will undermine her celebrity.

Taylor Swift is on top of the world.

Julia Stern was untouchable, almost a Messiah, immune to the common pitfalls of the Nassau Weekly.

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PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY

What We Lose to Lithium

How a lithium mine in Nevada is compromising Indigenous autonomy, and the danger of letting it go on.

U

By ALEX NORBOOK

nder a blazing summer sun in Nevada, bulldozers graze on precious sagebrush, kicking up smoke that curls skyward in their wake. Trucks race by, carrying workers on a mission. A line of barbed wire fencing slices through the expansive terrain. Here, a mine is taking shape, one that will extract and refine millions of tons of rock from the largest lithium deposit in the country. The operators of the

lithium mine are part of a lumbering national policy program aiming to provide battery materials for the nation’s energy transition. The Biden Administration hopes to deploy millions of electric vehicles (EVs) to slash carbon emissions in the transportation sector. For their mission, they need this mine.

Standing outside the fence, beside a “No Trespassing” sign, I peered into the mine site as part of my work on an internship that examined the push for lithium production. During two weeks of fieldwork, what I saw here and elsewhere worried me. To hasten the fight against the climate crisis, many policymakers are beginning to accept policies that will sacrifice a few to protect the

many—including at this lithium mine. Some sacrifices may be necessary, especially given our short time frame to act. This reality, then, presents us with some hard questions: How do we decide what, and who, to sacrifice? Who will we let decide the victims of these sacrifices?

The Vice President of Government Affairs and Community Relations Corporate Communications for Lithium Nevada, a man named Tim Crowley, wants to build a school.

Not just any school: 15 to 20 million dollars for sparkling classrooms, a brand new gym, a computer lab kitted out with the latest electronics, and new facilities for teachers. Lithium Nevada plans for the

school to replace an old building complex along the main highway that traverses Orovada, a small community in Nevada’s mountainous northern dry landscape.

The school is just one example of the community benefits that Lithium Nevada prides itself on providing while the company assembles what will be one of the nation’s largest lithium mines.

The mine is 25 minutes away from Orovada’s center, located in a sloping descent between two hills called Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh to the local Paiute Shoshone communities who commemorate two massacres there.

Lithium Nevada has continued construction without interruption since March, despite three lawsuits which proceeded through both state and federal courts. (The first lawsuit, put forward by local Indigenous tribes, alleged that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) failed to consult their tribes properly before approving the mine. A coalition of environmental nonprofits filed the second, claiming deep insufficiencies in the mine’s Environmental Impact Statement. A local rancher filed the third lawsuit, alleging that the mine will irreparably deplete the water on his ranch).

For centuries, mining has been a destructive activity.

Communities living near mines have faced challenges of pollution from chemically-intensive mining processes, violence from mine workers, and repression when they raise concerns. But Lithium Nevada claims its practices will depart from these long histories of harm. That involves consultation with their surrounding communities.

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Crowley seemed proud of his company’s efforts to engage local residents, despite much opposition from Orovada’s community.

In an interview, he went to great lengths to highlight the company’s deep and sustained consultation with nearby communities who will be affected by the mine.

“We’re working really, really hard to make sure that we actually provide a net benefit to the surrounding areas,” Crowley said. “We started with engagement over a decade ago, and that hasn’t stopped. It’s never gonna stop.”

Part of that dialogue, according to Crowley, involves providing benefits to the communities, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, living nearby. The school is one of many benefits Lithium Nevada wishes to implement. They’re also repaving and expanding the roads near the mine site to prepare for when the mine’s heavy-duty trucks begin to roll through Orovada. They’re bringing job training, a new community daycare facility, and a plant nursery to the nearby Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe. “At the root of all of this engagement is empathy,” Crowley told me. “If you can’t empathize with the communities and their needs, you are going to struggle to figure out how to accommodate them.”

This narrative, in which mining companies engage with and provide benefits to local communities, represents a broader shift in tone from industry and government leaders as they craft climate policy. These leaders see community-conscious policies as a way to modernize mining activity, as Biden recently alluded to when announcing new funds for lithium mines. He called on mines to benefit local communities and

“avoid the historical injustices that too many mining operations left behind in American towns.”

Lithium Nevada’s decision to build the new school in Orovada seems to embody Biden’s charge.

But what if the community didn’t want the new school in the first place? What would that say about how companies like Lithium Nevada undergo community engagement? heard

group, the company brought in Collaborative Decision Resources, a “stakeholder engagement and facilitation firm.” Sporting a ponytail that threaded through a camo baseball cap, Frey spoke with us in Orovada’s community hall, a corrugated metal structure that holds a bar and a few tables inside. She described a very different negotiation process around the school than the one Crowley narrated.

“The very first time that they drove through Orovada on the way

about Lithium Nevada’s mine when the BLM announced its Record of Decision approving the company’s proposal in the final few days of the Trump administration. A third-generation rancher in Orovada, Frey advocates on behalf of the community in the Thacker Pass Working Group, for which she serves as spokesperson. Lithium Nevada established the working group to facilitate communication, and resolve conflict, between Orovada residents and the company. To mediate the

to go up to Thacker Pass to view their area up there, they drove by this little school just right along the highway,” Frey recounted, hearing a story from Crowley and another company employee. “They said to themselves immediately: ‘Oh, we’re going to have to move that school.’”

That troubled residents; most did not want a new school. Multiple generations of Orovada residents, including Frey, her husband, and her children, grew up going to the school; they feel strong emotional

Susan

Frey

first

attachments to it. “There’s an air of nostalgia about that old school and they don’t want to see it go.

They don’t want to see it moved,” Frey said.

But the school’s location represented an obstacle for Lithium Nevada, one that threatened their plans to develop the mine.

According to Crowley, its gym was located far away from the main school complex, on the other side of the highway that cuts through Orovada’s center. He envisioned that with haul trucks speeding through Orovada to and from the mine, school children crossing the street would be in danger. “That was clearly not a sustainable plan from our perspective,” Crowley said.

A tense exchange between the company and the community followed. Lithium Nevada proposed closing the school and building a new one far away from the original.

They didn’t consult the Orovada community, who rejected their plan, according to Frey. “At that point, they just kind of completely dropped it,” she said. “[The company] said, ‘Nevermind, our bad.

We won’t bring that up again.’” But soon after, Lithium Nevada raised the question of relocating again, this time allowing the community to choose the location. Eventually, Orovada’s residents capitulated.

Lithium Nevada is now moving ahead with their plan.

“It felt like a bit of a consolation prize or a buyout,” Frey said. “Like if we played ball with this school, we wouldn’t have any reason to complain about anything.”

But Orovada residents didn’t really have a choice in the matter.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

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Volume 47, Number 4

PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

Hey, Big Vape!

Make these flavors next!

By ELLIE DIAMOND

1. Vagina Ice 2. Sweaty Ballsack Gelato 3. Razzmatazz Orgy Rush 4. Strawberry Strap-on Delight 5. American Spirit Blue Ice 6. Milk 7. Tyra Banks 8. Better Than Sex 9. Hard Boiled Egg Ice 10. Carbonara Lemonade 11. Black Mold 12. Blue Cheese Smoke 13. Chromium Alloy 14. Poop 15. Charisma 16. Uniqueness 17. Nerve 18. Talent 19. Lost Cherry by Tom Ford 20. Lime Pussy Juice 21. Chips 22. Candy 23. Eric Cartman Kush 24. Bacon Egg and Cheese the Ocky Way 25. Inner Peace 26. Clarity 27. Helen of Troy 28. General Tso’s Chicken Ice 29. The Nutty Professor 30. Arnold Palmer 31. Red Scare 32. Lady Gaga Sugar

Pop Glue 33. East India Trading Company 34.

CTE 35. Lavish Veneer Blush 36. Dog Surgery 37. Type 2 Diabetes Gas Glue 38. TikTok Tarot Readings 39. HBO’s Girls Rizz Blaster 40. Typhoid Mary 41. The 6 Train 42. Yellow Fever 43. Squirt 44. Pink Sauce 45. Cum 46. “Slopping down some pig shit with these fat fucks and I’m the fattest of them all.

If I died tomorrow no one would shed a tear.

Load my freakin’ lard carcass into the mud.

No coffin please, just wet, wet mud. Bae.” 47. Olive Oil Ice 48. Beef Wellington Buttsex 49. Hot Dog 50. Geometry Dash Dazzler

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Volume 47, Number 4

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 7

It’s dark in the ranch-style, so I take off my sunglasses—big things with plastic rhinestones around the rim. I have to pull my shirt on because the AC’s almost chilly. I put the bong on the formica, next to a bowl of apple cider vinegar, a few fruit flies floating in it. I ask Ben if he wants any blueberries. He doesn’t answer.

Our ranch-style echoes faintly with the sound of the TV, which I’d turned on to this show called High Jinks before leaving. In the show, a panel of hosts and usually one celebrity guest commentate on video submissions of people injuring or otherwise humiliating themselves. Most of the time, it’s horrific. You just have to trust they wouldn’t broadcast footage of people actually dying in these myriad horrific but admittedly funny ways.

And it’s miraculous all this is on video. And all the hosts are very high the whole time.

When I left for the pool, the celebrity guest was an Olympic snowboarder. Now, it’s this unrecognizable guy, and their short-lived conversations between clips don’t reveal anything insightful. He starts freestyling, and the performance seems more horrific than anything from the preceding clips—lots of dirt bike collisions. Ben doesn’t react to any of it, even a video of this girl miscalculating her rope swing trajectory, falling, dragging her body through the mud.

Probably breaking a few bones.

When the horse-thing fell through the night, Ben took his gun and a flashlight into the backyard and only came back with the gun. I never heard it go off, but the muzzle smoked faintly in the porch light. He stumbled through the screen door with this freakish wide-eyed look. At this point, only halfway catatonic. He sat in the chair by the TV and said “harbinger,” then, “like a horse and an angel.”

I guessed it was a “BE NOT AFRAID” situation. A visitation.

Ben spoke about the harbinger, and it took the form of this long story that collapsed and fell all over itself: “a second flash”; “lying in the gully”; “I fell down the slope”; “mostly gravel all run through by erosion”; “on my ass”; “afterglowing blues and reds”; “eyeshine”; “resonance”; “the gun went off without me firing it”; “and my teeth, they chattered like machine-gun fire”; “fiery sound”; “then, this kind of throbbing arrhythmic speech all the way though my organs”; “and more stars than I’ve ever seen.”

He takes one breath. “Lo”; “the angel-horse”; “there”; “caught in the pricker bushes that make our gully”; “opening”; “more like unfolding”; “more like unenveloping”; “six fingers on every hand”; “rings”; “blood like milk from ten thousand wounds”; “leaking, glowing, love-like”; “a lot like my mom”; “I went to touch it”; “tongue to the battery”; “visions of water”; “a lot of it.”

“And, eastwards”; “a holy city on a hill”; “we can always be rescued”; “if the horse-like lord sees fit.”

He falls silent, and the early

summer cicadas resume their nighttime chitter.

Then, the first of what turned out to be a series of dark winds began to blow against the low walls of the ranch-style.

I took him, almost carried him, and sat him in the big chair by the TV. He stared at the ceiling. Finally, importantly, and almost lucidly, he said, “The world might end tomorrow.”

In the morning? Do we have a trying few hours left? What will it feel like?

I sort of thought, “Well, what am I supposed to do?” Actually, I thought, “I wish I had one of those plastic disposable vapes,” even though I hadn’t had any nicotine in a year and a half.

One time, we went to a house party, and I wanted to leave. I kicked around the porch with this nameless guy, and inside, Ben did a line of something that was probably ketamine. It took him three hours to pull himself from that total emptiness. When he did pull himself out, he still wanted to drive us the twenty dark minutes home. I remember sitting on this horrible plaid couch, wondering if he was ever going to wake up, wondering if I was going to have to take care of him until one day I don’t, and he chokes on some corn slurry I didn’t mix enough, and nobody says anything. This is like that.

After the ket, he was listless and mostly empty the whole next day.

And it made sense the world was going to end like this, without making any real contact with us.

Passing us by. We ate fruit in the morning.

The High Jinks hosts welcome a

third celebrity guest, and I don’t stick around long enough to hear who they are. I take a shower, but the water pressure is lower than usual. When the power goes out, the ranch-style stops echoing with the really obnoxious laughter of the hosts. I think about the certainty of the word “might.” I take my time in that shower in the dark in the afternoon.

Getting out of the shower feels like waking up. I start coming down from my high. And I almost slip on the bathmat, which is furry and populated with mildew.

Ben still hasn’t moved in the TV room, and I walk through every room of the ranch-style in my bathrobe until it becomes something you could call praying.

The rain starts falling. A hard rain, hitting the ranch-style like .22 pellets, which are really like beebees or small rocks. The big arc of the sky stones us, and we only know why in a smaller, voiceless part of ourselves. A reptilian area of the brain that sticks around like a guy who never knows when to leave the party.

I drink a RedBull very slowly.

Mark might be heading home soon. Our other neighbor is this woman Asia, and she yells at us sometimes, but after her house, there’s a guy named Ron, and he owns a canoe. That same small part of me says, “A canoe might come in handy if you want to make it out of here.” I think about it until the drink corrodes my teeth and decide suddenly— surprisingly—I do want to make it out of here.

So I put on a shirt and find an old umbrella, which doesn’t end up helping. The canoe hangs on

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Volume 47, Number 4

PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG

ART BY EMMA MOHRMANN

a rack in Ron’s backyard. I climb the fence and unlock the gate and drag the thing behind me because, even though it isn’t as heavy as I thought, it’s too heavy to move any other way. Nobody sees me take it. For the shortest second, I wonder if there’s anyone left .

When I get back to the house, Ben sits on the roof in the rain, looking outwards. The ranchstyle roof isn’t high enough to see anything meaningful, but he keeps looking. I stow the canoe away in the TV room. Then, I pack another bowl into the bong and smoke it before going to try to get Ben down from the roof.

A couple years ago, I came to the sudden conclusion that smoking at least a few bowls every night from my resin-clouded bong probably had some consequences for my health, so I tried to get off it. I had a different, more beautiful bong then that I eventually broke, knocked it off a dresser. My roommate—this girl named Jana—said she got off weed in high school by replacing it, temporarily, with those menthols in turquoise boxes. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have trusted her because she often joined me in those evening sessions and, with some reliability, lit her menthols. But I tried her method, and I never kicked weed, and it took me six months to kick the vape, which I was eventually very proud of.

The rain calms itself briefly before starting back up again. I manage to pull Ben down, and he

comes loosely, as if inflated with air.

The sun sets fully, undramatically, and we can’t really see it behind this storm front. We can’t see the moon. The ranch-style pools uneasily with rainwater.

When I was a little, crisis-filled teenager, I used to suffer from horrible insomnia. Real misery.

But tonight, I sleep easily and dreamlessly in our bed.

The floodwaters wake me in the middle of the night. They’re higher than our bed, which doesn’t mean much because we don’t own a frame or box spring.

The power is still out, and I wade through the ranch-style, and all the fruit I bought yesterday has rotted. The canoe floats in the TV room like it’s waiting for a pilot and her passenger.

And I guess we’re headed east.

I guess we’re paddling towards a hill, mostly we’re just paddling out of here.

A new sadness. Many uncertainties tonight. Many memories of times fallen far behind me. I push the canoe into new silent streets. Ben reels between its two walls.

In high school, my best friend’s brother got drunk and smashed his car against the interstate guardrail. My uncle got torn up by throat cancer. Three guys I knew in college killed themselves, one month after another in a particularly brutal winter.

I first loved this guy named John, who wrote sappy poetry with lots of fruit metaphors,

but when he wrote about me, he dropped the fruit and talked about the moon. I was a glowing, sliver-like, mostly nocturnal thing. Always the second most lovely thing in his life. You can say whatever you want about Ben, his shitty paintings, and whippet intake, but I’ve always been the most beautiful thing he has ever come across. I’ve always pulled the waters out from under him.

I might never see anyone named John until the end of days, which might be tonight.

John might drown among these floodwaters or starve or get shot through by raiders all adorned with human skins—these guys who should appear on the scene any second now. I might survive, and what if I do? What if I swim through the waters and eat and hide from those raiders? And, god, what if I have to drink my own urine? Frog-eaters, piss-drinkers, guys in human skin regalia.

The water sits with a strange stillness, but above us, dark clouds slide across the night, and thunder yawns open, and lightning shoots out just quickly enough to light up all this water.

Ben has this story from Peace Corps. He was commissioned to the Philippines but knew this African guy named Joni, like Joni Mitchell. He said the game warden at this park in Africa saw how well the elephants were doing, so they relocated a bunch of the older ones to a different park across the continent. Mostly mom and dad elephants. Everything’s fine for a while. Then, the bodies of

rhinos start piling up. Soon, the wardens realize they haven’t been killed by poachers, who use these huge, high-caliber rifles.

All these rhinos have been gored in the belly. The killers: young parentless bull elephants. When Ben tells the story, he plays up the bloodiness. He goes on for too long about the stand-off between the game warden and the elephants at night, on these golden plains, at the edge of the world.

His telling is really overstated.

It’s a bad story, and I don’t think he even gets it.

What if this is the edge of the world? What if we fall off the rim into still darker waters? Tonight.

These waters.

When my grandma on my mom’s side was around, my family would pile into the minivan and go to church every Sunday, then just Christmas and Easter, and then not really at all. I never knew what the pastor—a round-bellied man who I always imagined as god when I prayed—meant when he said, the firmament.

But if the moon was more visible, it might give me some direction. Shining signs of movement off the water. I have miles to go before I sleep. Many miles to go before I sleep.

Charlie Nuermberger gags, then turns to the Nassau Weekly and smiles.

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Volume 47, Number 4

It Looks Like Paris, If You Squint

PAGE DESIGN BY JASMINE CHEN ART BY CHAS BROWN

“She told me she was a writer, and when I left she gave me three books in French, on Proust, Vienna, and magic. It was a sweet thing to do, because our conversations had been mostly in English, and we tried French together like friends failing to be lovers.”

By TOMMY GOULDING

W

e entered the arcade, one shadow after another.

It was still organized on a nineteenth-century logic: Gaslight or faux gas-light was burning against the glass ceiling panes, hanging over us like a greenhouse roof. Our footsteps echoed dully against the marble floor. The shops were tasteful, sleepy, antiquated.

There were old booksellers (the books, the shops, and proprietors: all were old), independent movie theaters, an upscale French restaurant. The furniture and fixtures seemed to have been left behind by the vanished bourgeois strollers of the previous century, hiding here

from the rain, ambling through the labyrinth of commerce. What was left behind: the remnants of a historical rapture. We wandered through their dark halls and under their gold-lettered signs. We ate in the ruins of their shops, meticulously maintained, among their ornaments, their splendor, their pretensions.

We were greeted by a French waiter in shirtsleeves, smiling and solicitous. Twenty years ago he would have been an asshole, I’m sure, but he was comfortable switching to English, discussing how Venmo was used in Paris, his nightlife as a twenty-something in the city. Christopher spoke to him in French. I used French for my order and English for more particular questions. Christopher ordered us wine, something French and red and moderately expensive. It came out five minutes later, slipping into our gold-tinted glasses, meeting Christopher’s lips, prompting an approving nod to our waiter.

Outside, you could see the traffic on the rue Vivienne in the late afternoon brightness, the cars on their way around and past the statue of Louis XIV nearby, haughty and rearing on his German-stomping horse. We were alone in the tables set in the passage. Christopher asked me what I thought of Sieyes.

He wrote What is the Third Estate?, our reading in class that day. I answered that I found him eminently reasonable (as in, he is an eminence), reformist, and a bit dull. There’s a dullness to all this Enlightenment writing, with its earnest belief in proper nouns like Citizen, Reason, Justice, its credulity in the simple solution, in the immediacy of the reformation of humanity. There’s no gleam of the modern in it, no sense of irony or

hopelessness, no game between the author and reader. Everything is what it seems.

Christopher smirked.

- Yes, the criminality is all on the surface.

Christopher was lazily, and probably ironically, a royalist. He hated the Revolution for its excesses but more so for its drabness, how it disenchanted history. He thought of himself, again quixotically and ironically, as some fat, ceremonious archconservative, some Metternich or Guizot, turning purple and mounting his horse at the mention of revolution. In reality he was slim, smiling, welldressed, sophisticated. His step and perhaps his voice still bore traces of his time as a dancer; both had a certain lightness and a certain caution. But there was also about him a forthright rudeness of the changing room, a brusque throwing aside of the elegance written into his features and his bearing as if onto a nearby chair.

He was ten years older than me, though we were now in the same year at university. Those ten years were a mystery to me, and whenever he shared some fragment of his life as a professional, things were only murkier.

Every conversation with him was a dance. Whether the two of us were dancing a coordinated fairy-song on a stage-set, as he had in far-off Kansas City and San Francisco, or whether he took me in his domineering yet soft hands in some long-gone Imperial waltz, I could not decide. At some moments we seemed to sparkle with mutual understanding. He would call the Jacobins terrorists, I would mock Napoleon and his Imperial court, both of us conscious of our present-day political differences

but enjoying the conversation of someone else who worried about the nineteenth-century details.

But sometimes his brow furrowed at a remark of mine, and I knew I had failed him.

I walked back across the Seine and past the booksellers closing up shop on the Quai. Parisians were walking by me, back to real homes and real lives; I still felt as if I belonged to a kind of filmy, American layer on the surface of actual, Francophone Parisian life.

We were almost parasitic, this summer cohort of Americans.

Language and life and history flowed around me in this city, and I felt sure that I was killing them all by my presence. Paris, a theme park for lifestylers and enthusiasts, tourists and history cranks.

In the Monet exhibit a woman took photos of herself in front of the water-lilies, and I looked at her and hated her, and neither of us saw the flowers floating in the mist.

In Denfert-Rochereau, by the cafes and golden Parisian parks, there is a traffic circle. A snarling bronze lion sits in the center on a pedestal above the circling cars. There’s no real way to get out there unless you dodge between cars and climb over the encircling black-iron chains. The inscription below the statue reads: A LA DEFENSE NATIONAL. And beneath: 1870-1871. The war against the Prussians which the French lost and then the war against the workers and socialists of Paris who were shot in their hundreds beneath the sleepy dogwoods and gravestones at Pere-Lachaise.

In the years that followed the massacres, the Impressionists painted the sunny leisure of the

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Volume 47, Number 4

French in their suits and dresses in the countryside, in the parks of the city and at the ballet, the same French who had bled and shot and informed on and murdered each other, living now in delicate cultivation. The Commune burned half of this city to the ground, exposed the savagery that lay under the salon-and-theater nineteenth-century Paris, and people managed to forget and go on living. They replaced the ideals of the Communards with decadence and industry, tourism and war.

Sometimes I think people will forget anything, or anything important at least. I walked past this proud French lion in the summer evening. Absolving pinks and yellows glowed in the clouds behind.

You have to force yourself to imagine the barricades that literally tore these streets up, the blood that ran even and especially in the richest districts, the dream those dying men and women represented. It’s not a part of the national myth, the slideshow of slim steeples and guillotines and Bonapartes and neurotic writers and painters, cancans and the Tower and Nazis and cigarettes and existentialists that the word France drags out. If you don’t remember them, probably no one here will.

In

January

my

Airbnb

hostess used to make us breakfast in the mornings before my class.

She had partitioned off a guest room full of French novels for me, where I lived out of my suitcase and watched Netflix specials in the evening. I knew her name and then I forgot it and then one day while reading a book I came across it and remembered it belonged to her: Marianne. She put out orange juice and bread and butter and we ate together in the mornings.

It was winter in Paris, and I was learning to be again after I had forgotten how. Marianne was older than my mother but younger than my grandmother. She told me she was a writer, and when I left she gave me three books in French, on Proust, Vienna, and magic. It was a sweet thing to do, because our conversations had been mostly in English, and we tried French together like friends failing to be lovers. She seemed fixated, though, on whether my studies were happening in French, and she asked me about this several times, in both languages.

These classes, they’re in French, no?

I had to explain, stupidly, that I was studying in either English or Latin, in a course on Medieval Latin and Paris, and that French didn’t enter into it at all, but that I had studied French, and that I would study French in the south, later that month.

So you will study French soon then.

On New Year’s Day she asked me, over breakfast, how my night

had been. I told her we had hung around the Eiffel Tower for a bit, but then bought a bottle of champagne and met our friend at the Cité Universitaire dorms before midnight. We got drunk and saw the fireworks outside the window to the north and we cursed 2021 and welcomed 2022 and heard the other students doing the same. I was drunk on cheap champagne, and by 1 a.m. a girl from class and I were wrapped around each other and looking out the fourth-story window. Baron Haussmann’s clean and razor-straight streets were lit up below by yellow streetlights. The cream walls and blue metal roofs of the nineteenth-century apartment buildings were fading as the lights in the windows went out. The construction projects which we had earlier walked past lay dim and dormant, their jarring orange neutralized by the dark. From beneath my shoulder, she said It still looks like Paris, if you squint.

We left and pretended to forget

about this brief embrace the next day. The metros were free that night and the turnstile gates stood open permanently. I opened the apartment door quietly, so as not to wake Marianne, and collapsed into bed.

Marianne told me the neighbors from the courtyard of the apartment all came over, and that one woman cried when midnight came “because she is dépressive,” and they sang the songs that the French sing.

She smoked, cooked three meals a day, loved her cats, and had a man over who I think was a boyfriend or a lover. She was surrounded by Oriental rugs and French novels (to her they were just novels) and books of medieval and Renaissance art, and wrote in the afternoons. She had a queer independent streak, though, no matter how cultured she may have been: She supported the protests against lockdown measures (by that January, quite minimal), and was skeptical of the vaccine. Her cynicism, which I found so charming when turned towards her cats, her neighbors, or American novelists, was twisted into something perverse, something outside polite discourse among educated Americans: a rabid attachment to liberté.

There’s no gleam of the modern in it, no sense of irony or hopelessness, no game between the Nassau Weekly and Tommy Goulding.

17

October 12, 2023 PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

Ellie Goulding Stuns in New Interview

Never meet your heroes.

I

By ALEX PICOULT

n a recent 60 Minutes interview with Ellie Goulding, viewers were captivated by the singer-songwriter’s apparent lack of common sense and general human knowledge. Interviewer Lesley Stahl released a statement two days after the episode aired urging the public to be considerate of Goulding’s comments: “She has only ever had to sing,” the journalist claimed.

The taping of last week’s episode began at 2:00 p.m. on a Saturday, and Goulding urged the producer to end by 2:15 p.m. Upon learning that the segment was really 60 minutes in length, she expressed confusion regarding the format of the show, asking: “Wait, this is really gonna take an hour? I thought, like, 15 minutes—max!” Producers

soon realized that Goulding was not commenting on the maximum amount of time required for the interview, but was instead calling for her agent, Max, so she could have another Xanax to “calm down” for the longer-than-expected taping.

“You know, like the Taylor Swift song,” she laughed.

Goulding then suggested that Stahl discuss The Masked Singer with her, which perplexed producers who contacted the singer weeks prior to agree on the topic of social media’s influence on the rising popularity of 2000s rock. She insisted on analyzing the dynamics of the vaguely popular reality television program, wondering: “I thought they meant COVID masks?

I know if I had to sing in a furry costume I wouldn’t be able to see the lyrics on my phone.” This caused fans to question the singer’s

ability to remember short stretches of words and phrases, prompting Goulding to address the controversy on her Instagram story: “Guys, I promise I can read,” clearly misinterpreting fans’ concerns. Singer and Broadway actress Lea Michele attempted to defend Goulding’s reading abilities online, but was only able to produce a series of emoticons.

When Stahl attempted to change the subject, Goulding became visibly distressed and said she had to take a break from filming for her mental health, yelling, “I just have a lot going on right now!”

Her mouth allegedly opened so wide when shouting that the crew noticed four more Xanax under her tongue that she was “saving for later,” as well as a lower lip tattoo that read “adulting.”

After the outburst, Goulding disappeared for several minutes.

Producers later found her curled up in a restroom bathtub using a full-sized desktop Mac to research the 2021 incident involving the Thai soccer team that got trapped in a cave. “I know I wasn’t there, but this couldn’t have happened,” she claimed. As staff members coaxed Goulding out of the bathroom and back to the set, they asked why she thought the cave incident was so improbable: “I assumed the cave they were in was like the moon pool in H2O: Just Add Water. Like, you can swim out whenever you want.”

Once Goulding was led back onto set, she spontaneously started pitching a new show concept to CBS. The only specific detail that she included was that the show needed to have Jack Black in it. “I haven’t really thought of the rest, but I think he would be funny in it.” A producer denied

Goulding’s request for a four million dollar loan to get the show up and running, so she proceeded to attempt assault. Chaos ensued, as the crew quickly realized she was armed with a lipstick taser.

Stahl was perplexed by this development: “I was under the impression lipstick tasers only existed in the Despicable Me cinematic universe.” Goulding was escorted out of the building immediately but, in protest, unhooked her bra and used it to tie herself to a lamppost outside the studio. To the singer’s surprise, fans did not come to her aid on the street, despite her singing the entirety of Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell as a cry for help. She asked, “What else can a girl do?” As it turns out, a girl can do more than that, because Goulding proceeded to fully undress, at which point she was arrested for public indecency.

These striking events have caused widespread unrest around the country. We as a community hope to God that no souls are harmed by Goulding’s concerning level of intelligence. Sources (Reddit) say Goulding is now in stable condition after being forced to remain clothed. Other sources, mainly Grimes’ private Twitter accoxqunt, have postulated that Goulding is unfamiliar with her surroundings due to her Martian origins. This is an important point to acknowledge because, as always, we here at WatchMojo take conspiracy theories very seriously.

After the Nassau Weekly, Alex Picoult disappeared for several minutes.

18

October 12, 2023 PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

While Lithium Nevada managed to get the community to accept their proposal, the latter at least got a new school out of it.

But because the company is under no legal obligation to gain community approval, they can use their power to impose more difficult decisions with far more severe consequences to residents of Orovada. First and foremost: the construction of a man camp.

Man camps are housing facilities to shelter workers, who are predominantly male, while they work on a construction or development project far from home.

Often associated with fossil fuel industry pipeline projects, man camps are a hot button issue for frontline communities. The men in the camps are brought in from outside the local area, and, without the social conventions and obligations common in most communities, they can, in many cases, cause harm. In particular, if a company builds a man camp in the vicinity of an Indigenous reservation, rates of missing or murdered Indigenous women (MMIW), girls, and two-spirit people skyrocket, according to a National Inquiry conducted by the Canadian government.

Lithium Nevada initially told the Orovada community that the company would not build a man camp, according to Frey. Especially with the Fort McDermitt Indian Colony less than 30 minutes away from Orovada’s main street, locals, especially Indigenous leaders, saw that a man camp could be dangerous. Frey tried to hold Lithium Nevada accountable to their statement, crafting a proposal

for them to agree to not put any company-sponsored housing in or around their Orovada properties. In response, Frey recounted that Lithium Nevada began to backtrack on their earlier statement, claiming they had the legal right to build some lodging on the land they purchased from the BLM, then saying they might build a small RV park next to the mine.

“And we said, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That sounds a little bit too close to a man camp to us,” Frey said.

Since then, Lithium Nevada has proposed plans for a “temporary housing lodge” for the hundreds of workers involved in the mine’s construction in Winnemucca, the closest town to the mine, and another shelter next to the mine for senior management, according to Crowley. “We’re quite pleased with and proud of the efforts we’re going to do to make sure our workforce has a safe environment to live in,” he added.

Speaking with Crowley, he seemed shocked at the idea that

his project might perpetuate the historical and now well-documented violence associated with man camps. When I brought up the correlation between man camps and missing or murdered Indigenous women, he responded definitively, “Oh, that, that’s just… that’s just unacceptable. To suggest that we would support any of that for a moment is offensive.” When I asked him about whether it might be a risk for workers in man camps to be in the vicinity of Indigenous

communities, he appeared to downplay the potential, saying, “It’s a risk at the McDonald’s down the street.”

To Frey and the community she represents, the announcement that Lithium Nevada decided to build man camps came as a blow.

“From the beginning, we didn’t feel that they were being truthful with us about it. We don’t want any kind of man camp here,” she said. Frey recounted that after the company’s reversal, her working group cut off relations for a few

weeks, not sure if it was worth it to keep working with Lithium Nevada. Crowley denies that this happened.

But the community eventually returned to the bargaining table, because the working group saw communication with Lithium Nevada as the only way to protect their community as best they could. “If we left the table entirely, we would lose that opportunity,” Frey said. Without regulatory agency or formal processes in place to help residents protect their home, communities like Orovada don’t have much choice but to negotiate with mining corporations.

For all its consultation, Lithium Nevada never actually had to earn a more fundamental seal of community approval: their consent.

This produces an imbalanced relationship. “Any consultation process that doesn’t have the duty to obtain consent as part of it, is almost inherently coercive,” said Wyatt Gjullin, Staff Attorney at the environmental justice nonprofit EarthRights International. If a community has no right to say no to a mine, Gjullin explained, all the community can do is: 1) engage with the mining project and legitimize it by their participation, or 2) refuse to engage and lose out on any benefits they might otherwise have won. Frey’s story evoked this relationship in Orovada, and it holds true across the country in virtually every mining project nation-wide.

That’s because the laws that undergird mineral extraction in the United States, some centuries old, allow private companies to violate the consent of communities they impact.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), lauded as a hallmark of environmental regulation

19

when it was passed in the 70s, is a chief example. The policy sets standards for pollution and requires that any project with an environmental impact, like a mine, must consult with surrounding communities. But that’s all they have to do: consult. So long as an environmental regulatory agency approves the company’s consultation process, the mine can move forward—even if the community doesn’t accept their proposal.

Ian Bigley, a mining justice activist who works at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks, argues that NEPA falls short because it takes the perspective that a mining company’s proposal represents the best use of the land.

“They’re not having to defend that there should be a mine there,” Bigley said. Instead, “they’re trying to defend this is the correct plan for a mine in satisfying the other environmental laws.” In other

October 12, 2023

words, companies don’t have to prove the importance or necessity of their mines—EPA already assumes that. All a company needs to show to regulators is that their mine meets certain safety criteria, and that they have undergone some form of consultation.

The 1872 Mining Law is the most powerful legal framework that elevates mining companies’ power over communities. Still used today, it’s the main force facilitating the current explosion of lithium mine proposals in the United States. Congress passed the law to support westward expansion and settlement at a time when Manifest Destiny was at its peak, according to Bigley. It first designated mining as the “best and highest use” of public land. To claim land for a mine, all someone has to do is walk onto public land, hammer four posts into ground under which they have found mineral

deposits, and then file a mining claim with the federal government (at a shockingly low price). Once approved, the prospector then owns that parcel of land.

The mining law’s potency cannot be overstated. Mining companies, by default, have priority over every other possible activity on public land—including the functioning of an otherwise flourishing community nearby.

Worse still, to hasten the energy transition, Democratic lawmakers are attempting to expand the powers of the law to allow mining companies more leeway as they claim land. In response to a recent legal decision that limited where mining companies can dump waste rock, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) proposed a law declaring that mining companies would no longer need to prove valuable minerals exist on land they claim. If passed, a company could stake a huge swath of public ground, file a mining claim, and take exclusive control once approved—even without knowing if the land contained minerals. The Senator justified the bill explicitly on climate action grounds, saying that she promoted the bill to “drive our clean energy industry.”

Senator Cortez Masto’s bill fits into an emerging consensus among environmentalists, described by prominent legal scholar Michael Gerrard as a “triage” mentality when it comes to combating the climate crisis. In his essay on the subject, Gerrard writes that with such limited time left to act on climate change, and at the slow pace the United States is moving

toward decarbonization, we must enter “an era of triage, where we save what we can but recognize that there are things we’ll have to give up.” Gerrard is entirely correct: Lawmakers and corporations don’t have the time, or the appropriate legal apparatuses, to protect everyone and act comprehensively enough to stop the worst effects of climate change. So what comes next?

Near the end of my fieldwork, I sat at a coffee table in Pasadena, CA, with John Hadder, director of environmental watchdog Great Basin Resource Watch (GBRW).

The next day, we would attend a hearing of the lawsuits against Lithium Nevada at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, including one suit brought by GBRW. Hadder, a veteran environmental advocate with sharp blue eyes and a silver ponytail, mulled over the consequences of the Cortez Masto bill as the sun sank toward the horizon.

“There is going to be a demand for materials—and we’re not gonna completely obviate that need,” Hadder told me. “But what are we losing along the way?”

That troubled Alex Norbrook; most did not want a new Nassau Weekly.

20

Volume 47, Number 4

PRINCEWATCH:

The “Prince” Once Again Confirms That We Are All Losers

PAGE DESIGN BY CATHLEEN WENG

A triumph of data analysis or a sick project of perversion?

By BETH VILLARUZ

W

ell, folks, the Prince has done it again. The annual tradition of the “Frosh Survey” has made itself known to the class of 2027, urging them to surrender their financial aid status, course of study, and ROTC participation to the grubby hands of Prince staffers.

The “About” section of the Frosh Survey takes great pains to portray the survey as ethical and thorough, or at the very least transparent. They laud the “months-long” process of compiling data from the 60% of frosh who filled out the survey, the offering of a “decline to answer” option on more sensitive questions, and the dedication of the 24-person data team (which, by the way, includes at least one person this author made out with in the Charter basement, showing questionable judgment on all sides). Despite the Prince’s insistence that they used “discretion” in presenting the data, the four graphics chosen to represent the Frosh Survey on their Instagram are as follows.

“Sex by AP Classes.” Rude at best and perverted at worst. A statistic only creeps or my very Catholic mother would care about.

“Fitting In: At my high school I felt… (1: Like an outsider to 5: Like an insider).” Could also be phrased as: On a scale of 1-5, how much of a loser were you? Tsk tsk, Prince— it’s as if you anticipated that the

frosh were extremely unlikable.

Projection, perhaps.

“Age of first smartphone.” This is just uninteresting.

A pie chart depicting percentage of frosh who have had some, none, or all of these illicit activities/substances recreationally: sex, alcohol, weed, tobacco (analog or digital), hard drugs, or a fake ID. What are you, Daily Princetonian, cops? Or worse, narcs? I mean, I knew that, but I didn’t expect you to reveal this to the frosh so soon. Also, who cares?

Despite the claims that the Frosh Survey is published for the purpose of “initiating dialogue for the greater Princeton community while preserving the stories of this consummately unique class,” the Prince’s “hope that it is, and continues to be, a whole lot of fun” is far more evident in the way they present the survey to readers (and/or Instagram followers). Who, after all, doesn’t want to be privy to the sex lives and high school bullying of 18-yearolds? The obvious answer is most anyone 19 years or older, although maybe I overestimate the maturity of Princeton students. I think the Prince is really seeking confirmation that frosh are still sacrificing as much fun as we did in high school. Year after year, their suspicions that Princeton students are boring virgins are confirmed by the Frosh Survey and masked by lackluster attempts to market it as a serious reflection on demographics. Don’t we all have better things to do than revel in our own increased coolness? Seriously, get a hobby. Or better yet, conduct a study that includes sex by years of participation