Spawning Season

The Nass wakes up and it’s spring again. Time for making movies, holding doors, and generating power.

The Nassau Weekly

4 6 9

Spawning Season

Digging into Geo-Exchange

By

Alex Norbrook

Designed by Vera Ebong

La Jolie Sorcière

By Arrey Enow

Designed by Jasmine Chen and Hazel Flaherty

Door Holder

By Talia Czuchlewski

Designed by Vera Ebong

Speaking Japanese

10

13

15

By

Sabrina Kim

Designed by Vera Ebong

I Want to Become Who I Was: Reflections on Filmmaking

By Faith Ho

Designed by Hazel Flaherty

Books, My Old Flame: Reading, Regurgitating, and Reconnecting with Literature

By Madeleine Murnick

Designed by Jasmine Chen and Chas Brown

A Summer Unveiling Soviet

Dreams: Leif Haase on the Nass’s Journalistic Pursuits

By Jonathan Dolce and Leif Haase

Designed by Vera Ebong

Lullaby Loon

20

By Isabelle Clayton

Designed by Vera Ebong and Chloe Kim

When people say spring has sprung, they actually mean it has emerged from inside itself. Spring has ejected from its own abdomen through a lovely, vulvic little déchirure in the side. The whole thing sounded exactly like you’d think it would. A sloughing, whining sound then a slap. The spring’s lying there with its limbs in a heap. Steam drifting off its wet body.

It’s spawning season, baby! Here at the Nass, we’re all autopoetic. We generate ourselves from ourselves, which isn’t to say asexually because we do have sex. We bubble up. We cleave ourselves off mitotically. Then, we get lonesome until we meet a whole bunch of other little messianic autopoets. Must be a mast year. This pond’s getting crowded.

When I was very young, I had a fish bowl that housed a cunning little betta named Jim Beam, and he felt very despondent, so I bought a snail. They got along great until, in a moment divine, this solitary snail immaculate-conceived a million snail eggs that soon hatched close to a million baby snails. So I came to an ethico-ecological crossroads. Couldn’t release the snails because they were non-native and promised to explode populationally. So I didn’t do anything, and soon, all the snails died. Later on, so did the fish.

Love per usual,

Charlie Nuermberger, EIC

Editor-in-Chief

Charlie Nuermberger

Publishers

Isabelle Clayton

Ellie Diamond

Managing Editors

Sofiia Shapovalova

Julia Stern

Creative Director

Otto Eiben

Senior Editors

Frankie Duryea

Eva Vesely

Junior Editors

Ivy Chen

Melanie Garcia

Teo Grosu

Marisa Warman

Hirschfield

Mia Mann-Shafir

Alex Norbrook

Aiko Offner

Sasha Rotko

Head Copy Editors

Cailyn Tetteh

Sabrina Yeung

Design Editor

Vera Ebong

Art Director

Alexander Picoult

Masthead

Events Editor

John Emmett Souder

Audiovisual Editor

Mia Dedic

Web Editor

Abani Ahmed

Historian

Jonathan Dolce

Trustees

Alexander Wolff 1979

Katie Duggan 2019

Leah Boustan 2000

Leif Haase 1987

Marc Fisher 1980

Rafael Abrahams

2013

Robert Faggen 1982

Sharon Hoffman 1991

Sharon Lowe 1985

This Week:

Verbatim:

About us:

7:30p Drapkin Studio

Sisyphus, a new play by Jessica Lopez ’24

1:30p Ellie’s Studio

Hip-Hop with Buddha Stretch

2:00p Woolworth Princeton Undergraduate Composers Collective

4:30p Robertson

Lecture by Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet

Overheard in bar in Berlin

ProudIrishlesbian: “Are you also Irish?”

ShamefulAmericanlesbian: “No, I’m American…”

ProudIrishlesbian: “Oh, that’s okay, we accept you still.”

Overheard in Yeh

Star-crossedartist: “Born to paint in a small cottage in France. Forced to do COS126.”

Overheard in the common room

Roommate: “I have squeezed the ball, now I will touch the tortilla.”

Overheard in Lewis Library

ClearlyaNARP: “Sometimes I wish I were an athlete. It must be great to just run around a field occasionally and pretend you’re at war or something.”

8:00p Wallace Theater

She Loves Me, a Classic Broadway rom-com

7:30p Drapkin Studio

Sisyphus, a new play by Jessica Lopez ’24

3:00p LCA Forum

Opus x Penn Sforza (Chamber Music)

8:00p Drapkin Studio

Theater&...math, a reading of a play-in-progress by Cooper Kofron ’24

All Day Hurley Gallery Reproduction Production: Exhibition by Magnolia Wilkinson

11:00a Firestone Plaza Spring 2024 Campus Farmers Market

12:00p Wallace Theater The Radical Practice of Black Curation: A Symposium

Got Events? Email John Emmett Souder at js0735@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.

Overheard walking to Forbes

Largeathleticman: Astrology is just space racism!”

Overheard in our depraved, morally-bankrupt world

Depraved,morally-bankrupt girl: “Was Jesus a virgin?”

Pervert: “Mary was.”

Depraved,morally-bankrupt girl: “Yeah, virginity runs in the family I guess.”

Overheard on NJ Transit Studentstoryteller: “I was taking Advil PM and DayQuil and having them fight it out because that’s the only way I could get high at the time.”

Overheard en route to Jadwin

Confusedbasketballfan: “Is bounce-off at 8?”

Overheard in East Pyne

Slavicprofessor,probinghis studentsyetagain: “So I am the prof and I come in here and say you people are so immature. Okay, so, how do you get out of that? Because by trying to show me you are mature, you are going to prove to me that you are immature. Double whammy. I sort of imprisoned you in my set of concepts. It’s sort of like quicksand, the more you try to wiggle out of it the more you get stuck in it.”

7:00p Jones

We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 5 p.m. in Bloomberg 044! Fri Sat Sun Mon Tues Wed Thurs

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!

Through the Looking Glass: Slavic Animated Films (with subtitles!)

4:30p COS Building

Inside ChatGPT: Startups & AI With the World’s Most Powerful Company

1:30p Firestone Walks for Writers

For advertisements, contact Isabelle Clayton at ic4953@princeton.edu.

Overheard in Firestone

Student,hatingonprofessor: “He’s only tall if you measure in how much of a bitch he is…”

Overheard in Scully

Friend-turned-lover: “Kissing is like a poor man’s hanging out.”

Overheard one Wednesday night

Discerningroommate, counselingonmattersoflove: “He’s weird in an acceptable way.”

Submit to Verbatim

Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com

Read us: Contact us: Join us: nassauweekly.com

thenassauweekly@gmail.com

Instagram & Twitter: @nassauweekly

DIGGING INTO

to avoid the carbon emissions that choke us and our planet.

By ALEX NORBROOK

Water is all around me. It rushes through cheerfully colored, gleaming pipes on the way to be cleaned, heated up, cooled down, flung out to the opposite side of campus, and brought back to begin the journey again. I’m standing on the shop floor of Princeton’s new Thermally Integrated GeoExchange Resource building, or TIGER for short (of course). This is the heart of a circulatory system of energy that pumps water to heat and cool campus buildings. The smell of rubber greets my nose as I begin to walk through the whining blocks of machinery around me.

“Now, this isn’t brand new technology, but it is a new way of

using this technology,” Ted Borer, Princeton’s Energy Plant Manager, tells me as we tour the facility. Bright eyes peering through silver spectacles, sporting close-cropped haircut and a plaid shirt, Borer speaks with the enthusiasm of a young science teacher and the authority of a veteran in the power industry. He was hired almost 30 years ago to help build the fossil fuel power plant that generates electricity and heat for campus. He is now helping install a new system, dubbed “geo-exchange,” that is gradually replacing the older plant. For centuries, Princeton has heated campus with fire, fueled first by wood, then coal, then oil, then finally fossil gas in 1996. With geo-exchange, though, Princeton has begun to adopt water as a means of heating and cooling, a momentous shift. Like many other institutions, the university has done so for climate reasons.

Renouncing fire makes it possible

We don’t usually think about the sheer amount of resources it takes to keep Princeton running. To some extent, that’s the point: we’re here, we’re told, to learn, not to worry about the more mundane infrastructure around us. Energy is merely at the periphery. In our time of climate crisis, this separation can be dangerous. Without understanding our energy sources – how they operate, how much they pollute and consume – it’s more difficult to discern exactly what is required to change how we manage energy at and beyond Princeton to combat the climate crisis. It’s also difficult to see the assumptions we hold about how to treat the land and resources we use to make that energy.

Borer and his team, though, have had Princeton’s energy front and center in his mind for three decades. As the university rolls out geo-exchange, he’s more excited than ever.

The system that geo-exchange will mostly replace, cogeneration, is already pretty efficient for a fossil fuel plant. Cogeneration generates both electricity and heat for campus using a combined combustion process, making it more efficient than the usual fossil gas plant. Nevertheless, the aging plant emits around 73,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to university reports. That’s around as much as 8,600 average houses a year. Plus, contained within the plant’s billowing exhaust are small amounts of unpleasant chemicals that escape engineering controls: carbon monoxide, nitrogen

oxide, and other volatile organic compounds, according to internal monitoring reports. Even if this air pollution has fallen within permitting limits set by New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), when combined with emissions from the other plants in the state, it can pose health risks for living organisms in the long run. In 2016, Princeton’s administration, feeling a new urgency to address the climate crisis, set a goal to decarbonize campus by 2046 (just four years before our government plans to achieve net zero nationally).

To figure out how to replace the cogeneration plant, the university hired engineering consulting firm Burns & McDonnell, and they eventually settled on an alternative: geo-exchange. “[Geoexchange] rose to the top because it had the ability to improve reliability, increase sustainability, reduce carbon emissions, and it was the lowest life cycle cost option of all the options to achieve carbon neutrality,” says Justin Grissom, a mechanical engineer at Burns & McDonnell who has helped manage the geo-exchange project.

Princeton got to work, breaking ground for geo-exchange in 2022.

On an engineering level, the geo-exchange system I find myself in is remarkably elegant. Like the heart of a circulatory system, massive heat pumps around me push water through a complex network of pipes, circulating heat instead of blood. To heat up a building, the pumps direct hot water to that building and drop off the water’s stored heat; the water, now cooled, comes back to pick up more heat from a hot water storage tank before rushing off to where it’s

The shop floor of TIGER is the heart of Princeton’s geo-exchange system. It houses hulking heat pumps, air-dirt separators, chillers, and other mechanical components necessary to heat and cool campus. Photo by Raphaela Gold ’26 Princeton’s newest way to fight climate change involves a lot of drilling. Are we ready for it?

GEO-EXCHANGE

needed. To cool campus down, the pumps perform a similar function with cold water instead of hot.

Able to regulate campus’ temperature across days and months, the geo-exchange system can also manage temperatures across seasons, using a huge array of deep subterranean wells that contractors are in the process of drilling. In the summer, the cold water which picks up heat may be pumped down one of the wells instead of dropping off its heat in one of the shorter-term storage tanks. As this now-heated water moves down the wells, its heat radiates out to warm up the surrounding rock by 15 to 20 degrees. Come winter, the same pumps will then run cold water down these same boreholes to collect the previously-stored heat and distribute it to the rest of campus.

The seasonal aspect differentiates Princeton’s project from other large heat pump systems like that of Stanford’s, which doesn’t require an extensive system of wells. “[At] Stanford, the temperature is pretty even all year,” Borer says. “Here, it gets really cold. It gets really hot… We need to be able to capture the heat from the summer and deliver it in the winter.”

While this all may seem like a simple process, its implications are huge. Most heating systems rely on devices that generate energy, converting the energy locked within, say, ancient, compressed plant matter into more usable forms. In that conversion process, a lot of energy gets lost: 20 percent in the case of Princeton’s cogeneration. Because geo-exchange transfers energy instead, it’s far more efficient. Borer tells me that early tests show that the system can use one unit of energy to make

four or five available – a so-called Coefficient Of Performance (COP) of four to five (cogeneration, by contrast, only has a COP of 0.8). And those are still early estimates, which Borer expects the system will exceed when finished. “I cannot dream of seven, but [COP] might be as high as six,” he says, grinning.

bored 1,000 holes, according to Borer. They now only have another thousand to dig before 2033.

In addition, Princeton must scrape up paths and roads to install another crucial part of geo-exchange infrastructure: 13 miles of hot water pipes to connect TIGER with the campus buildings it will regulate. So far, the University has snaked three miles of pipes through campus, according to Borer. Ten miles to go.

To translate those performance figures into reality has required a massive engineering project of drilling, digging, and piping that dwarfs almost every other geothermal project in the state, even rivaling the largest geo-exchange systems nationally. The university will need to drill 2,000 boreholes to heat campus adequately, each measuring either 600 or 850 feet deep depending on the location.

The whole process to complete one borehole can take two-anda-half days, according to a New York Times feature of Princeton’s project. Contractors have already

Geo-exchange uses fewer resources than its fossil fuel-based counterparts. At Princeton, the difference is striking. Because it’s a closed loop system, the geo-exchange network doesn’t require any constant inputs nor the sun’s heat, nor electricity from the grid (which will be net-zero by 2035 but currently still burns fossil fuels).

Compare that with the cogeneration plant, which each year

churns through around 110 million gallons of water (nearly half of campus’ total water use) and enough fossil gas to emit 73,000 tons of carbon dioxide. To get it up and running, the new energy system needs 6.6 million gallons of water, plus 800 gallons of water per borehole (according to university drilling permits) --- but no additional inputs; furthermore, it will only emit a relatively small amount of greenhouse gases.

Less resource consumption is still some resource consumption, however. For instance, although the university aims for geo-exchange to mostly replace cogeneration, fossil fuels will not fully cease to operate on campus. As part of a plan to ramp down the cogeneration plant’s use, Borer intends to replace its fossil gas turbine with diesel generators, which are notoriously polluting. “You might say, that’s the most polluting thing you could get. Why?” Borer asks rhetorically. “Because I never want to run it. I want to run it maybe 100 hours a year.” He reasons that he’ll only resort to diesel in extreme cases –when the grid is seriously stressed, when days of extreme cold strain geo-exchange’s resources, when there’s a storm that causes blackouts. All other times, he’ll stick to geo-exchange. Princeton’s vision, then, is one of fossil fuel phase-down, rather than phase out. “I will argue as much as I can that we need on-site, controllable power generation,” Borer said. “That pretty much means burning stuff.”

Heat pumps in TIGER move heated and chilled water around campus, keeping everything at the right temperature. Photo by Raphaela Gold ’26

La JolieSorcière

“As my eyes traced the fabric on the seat, I wondered what bébé Claude would think if he knew we were mingling with his murderer.”

By ARREY ENOW

My stomach belted as I glared down at the steaming bowl of ndole set in front of me. I pinched the lining in my pocket to keep from grabbing the spoon off the table and wrestling with the bowl. Sinking into the worn chair in Tata Anique’s dining room, I glanced around the

table, studying all four of my siblings’ faces, freezing when I landed on the empty chair across from me. As my eyes traced the fabric on the seat, I wondered what bébé Claude would think if he knew we were mingling with his murderer. With the village house being about an hour away outside of Yaounde, my family only made time to go in the summer, as the village’s vast, open landscape made the sweltering heat more bearable. Typically, I love going to the village-- the street suya and corn was better there, and I could play for hours without Maman bothering me. But the somber essence of the

trip cast a shadow over my excitement. The day prior, we’d buried my little brother’s body after his “mysterious” passing. Although, we all knew why he’d passed.

The last time we’d seen Tata Anique was during easter. On our drive up, Papa gave the same spiel on everything we couldn’t do when we entered the house, Lysette and I practically mouthing his speech along with him. We knew we were forbidden from touching any food or drink when we got there, and god forbid we let her know when we were traveling back home. Papa always says Tata Anique had despised him from the second she’d laid eyes on him. She could see he was special, and it didn’t sit well with her. But despite her wickedness, Papa claimed keeping a close

eye on your enemies was necessary. She’d been Papa’s father’s fourth wife and married him young, leaving school and an impoverished family behind to do so. Along with the marriage came her juju, and my grandpa was blind to it, building her the largest home out of his wives and dedicating far more time than he should’ve to a fourth wife. Papa always said that despite her beauty, her eyes were as black as the devil, nicknaming her “la jolie sorcière,” and avoiding her compound like the plague. Shortly after the wedding, Tata Anique put a hex on my Grandfather, as he stopped visiting his other wives and families, neglecting everyone else in his life but her until he died. Papa was sure she was a jealous witch that had come to take their riches and

ruin their family.

We were engulfed with the smell of Maggi spices and grilling meats when we stepped into her house. I could hear my stomach sulk seeing the feast she’d prepared for the holiday. But like usual, me and my siblings hugged our bellies like they were swollen, claiming we were too full to eat. While Papa attempted small talk with Tata Anique in the living room, my siblings and I sprawled our monopoly out on the table, hoping to pass the time we’d have to spend. Claude was still alive at the time, and too little to grasp the game, so all he could do was wander around the table playing with the horse monopoly piece. Glued to the game, we didn’t peer up to check him until we heard chewing from under the table.

“Abeg, what the hell are you doing?” my brother Girard roared, reaching over to rip the beignet from Claude’s hand.

In a hurry, I grasped his t-shirt and tried to make him spit out everything that was left in his mouth. But despite my efforts, we knew the bite had sealed his fate.

Hearing all the commotion at the dining table, Maman and Papa hurried over to examine the situation, gasping when they saw what Claude had done. Maman burst into tears, and Papa visibly angered as he stared at bébé Claude.

“We must go now,” ordered Papa.

We all rushed out the door leaving Tata Anique standing in her dining room with simulated confusion on her face and monopoly money scattered on her table. A month later, Claude got sick. He’d been a weak baby but had

got stronger over the years, so we were sure it was the beignet. We contacted doctors from all around Cameroon, and no one could diagnose or cure what was wrong with Claude. Tata Anique’s sickness spell had taken him six weeks later in his sleep.

Despite the dry climate breathing over the village’s grassland, it rained the day of Claude’s funeral. We went out into the bush and stood huddled on the muddled grass to bury bebe Claude among Papa’s father and ancestors. We’d stay in the village for two weeks, tending to bebe Claude’s skull. Maman brought him large pots of Jollof and fried banane plantain because they were his favorite. Me and the girls left out Sunday jewelry Claude loved to fiddle with, and Girard left some game pieces and Claude’s monopoly horse. Papa never visited bebe Claude during our stay in the village; he told us we needed to move on from Claude

and not let Tata Anique ruin our family anymore.

We left our grief and memories of bebe Claude’s meddlesome, vibrant personality behind in that village house. But even back in Yaounde for the fall, the spell still hadn’t been lifted. Listening to Papa, we tried our best to move on from the loss of our baby brother, avoiding his name as if it were the plague. Maman rarely left her bedroom, despite Papa’s wishes, and we could hear the sounds of her weeping as we crept past the room. Much to Papa’s dismay, Maman would still talk about bebe Claude to the house girls and elderly in the town, getting choked up when remembering his hugs or his laugh. Maman no longer greeted us when we returned home from school with a fresh plate of chin chin, and the sound of her praise and worship music faded from the kitchen. The four of us were sure Tata Anique had put a depressive haze

over Maman but whispered about it so we didn’t upset her further, with Papa always affirming our beliefs when she wasn’t around.

During Christmas that year, our cousins and Tontons decided they’d pay our family a visit. They pitied our loss, and they hadn’t spent the holiday with us since I was five, always choosing to go to the coast instead. The day was filled with loads of festivities, as we ate loads of Poulet DG and danced until the clock struck midnight.

Before opening our presents, Tonton Jacques requested he pray over the gifts.

“Dear Père Jésus, I pray that you cover the blood of Jésus on these gifts and these children. We thank you for bringing us all here today as a family so we can celebrate your birthday. I thank you for allowing this family to heal after the mysterious loss of their precious son Claude.”

Papa thanked him. “We know that Anique poisoned the boy, there is nooo-thing mysterious!”, he said.

Tonton Jacques just sat shaking his head, seemingly annoyed at Papa, but maybe that was just his reaction from the shock of hearing his nephew was poisoned. Maman instead rolled her eyes and shouted, “Can you just let my poor son rest in peace without your crazy wahala.” Despite Christmas being her favorite holiday, she left the den, retreating to her bedroom before she could even see us open gifts. It was shocking how strong Tata Anique’s spell was on Maman. Even after months the depressive funk continued to loom over her like smog.

Maman and Papa were never the

best of friends, but we used to see them spend time with one another, watching television and going to the local town events in tandem. Yet in the year after bebe Claude, Maman, and Papa grew more distant. Papa would stay out later and take more trips to the village, and Maman would remain in her bedroom, letting all the town events and holidays pass her by.

Every summer after Claude, we’d handle the Cameroonian heat in the bustle of the city rather than returning to the tranquil escape of our summer house. Except for Papa, of course, who still frequented the village throughout the year and during all of the solstice period. Me and my siblings would wonder whom he was going to see in the village, since our only living family still living there were Tata Anique and Grandmere, whom he wasn’t the fondest of either.

I had no plans on returning to the town until I heard my Grandmere was ill. Although Papa thinks it’s him, Grandmere has been my favorite in the family. She was the only one who would let me gorge on bonbons and treat me like an only child rather than overlooking me among my swarm of siblings. So, while my siblings protested the visit, I happily obliged.

As I walked into her bedroom, she welcomed me with a smile. “How’s my namesake?”, she asked.

I sat on the side of the bed and nestled beside her arm. “I’m doing good. Are you feeling better, Grandmere?”

“I’m not, but it’s ok. I’m old, and god has let me live a long life,

mon amie,” she said, stroking my braids.

“I know this is Tata Anique’s fault; she’s so wicked.”, I shouted, with tears welling up in my eyes.

Grandmere gave me a muddled look and asked, “What does that woman have to do with anything?”

“I know she’s a witch; Papa told us she married Grandpere to try and destroy our family.” “Abeg, he’s still telling that wahala,” Grandmere sighed. “He’s been making up stories about Anique since André married the woman. I used to pay that girl to watch Tonton Jacques and Alexis when they were babies, and we all knew your father admired her since they were only a year apart in school. He’d follow her around while she watched the kids and used to sit for

hours listening to her stories and folktales. Then she left to marry my husband, and your father never let it go. I can’t believe he is still insisting that that woman is wicked; he’s been married to Sylvie for years.”

I soured my face in confusion, stretching my arm out to gauge the state of Grandmere’s illness.

Patting my arm, she said, “Ashia darling, Anique is not a witch. She’s a good woman and takes care of me out here in the village. She even brings me food, unlike your useless mother.”

After seeing Tata Anique’s latest victim, I never stepped foot in that village again.

In the following years, as my siblings and I matured, the roar of our compound would continue to fade

into a distant memory. Papa preferred the serenity of the village to Yauonde’s bustle and Maman was most fond of her comforter and her bedroom’s four walls.

One day, Papa would end a month-long stretch outside the city, bringing home one of the village house girls rather than suya. Despite my mother’s fervent desire for us to remain a Christian household, Papa explained to her the need to add another wife, informing her of the upcoming wedding in the weeks to come. With my siblings and I sitting huddled in the sunroom over scattered monopoly pieces, I couldn’t help but hang my head as we overheard the news. In disbelief over that witch’s latest triumph I pondered, muttering “He must’ve tried her ndole.”

DOOR HOLDER

“Discovery number one of the evening: there are a lot of ways to hold a door.”

By TALIA CZUCHLEWSKI

It’s Saturday night. My job is Door Holder. My job is Door Holder. This is because the fire department took all the doorstops off. So. Holding the Door. Ok, doesn’t seem too hard. Not too physically demanding. I experiment with a few different door-holding postures. I stick my right foot out and configure the rest of my body in a sort of sentinel position. I lean my whole weight on the door, hands clasped in front. Then hands clasped in back, cushioning myself against its sharp corner. Maybe leaning on the door looks too slack, not attentive enough. I try moving to the side and using just my arm to hold it, trying to look inviting. Discovery number one of the evening: there are a lot of ways to hold a door. Hold the door hold the door hold the door. I think I’m doing a good job at it. I’m getting quite acquainted with this door, actually. I run my fingernails into the grain of its wood, I sway back and forth a bit to hear the squeaks that the push bar makes. I rest my head against it. No, that’s definitely not a good posture. I try staying completely still and not shifting so much. That’s no good either. I look a bit bored.

Now an audience member wants prNow an audience member wants programs – oh no. That means I have to leave the door and grab some for them from the desk. I’ve gotten kind of attached to the door by now. It needs me in order to stay open; how could I abandon it? As I move away to help them, it begins to swing closed. The door is

unlocked, for goodness’ sake, I remind myself, feeling a bit silly for how sad leaving it makes me.

Someone else has gotten them their programs, phew. I catch the door right before it shuts.

Another reason I don’t want to abandon my post: I have a good vantage point from here. This is a central door, and everyone passes by as they make their way to their seats. I keep a smile plastered to my face and keep holding the door, but I’ve forgotten about the presence of it. We’re friends now, door and me. We’re familiar with each other’s shape. Now, I can watch people. I watch parents dragging their kids to mooorre classical music (and a few kids dragging parents). I make note of everyone’s umbrellas as they pile them against the wall, watch the puddles they’re making on the carpet start to dry, and think about how I’ve never stayed in one place long enough to see water drying. My mind starts wandering down door-holding fantasies, imagining what I would see holding the door to my dorm building open, the door to my class, the door to the coffee shop. I could make a project of it, I could write a door-holding novel, I could –

My thoughts are interrupted by the five minute warning. People keep filing past. Some make eye contact as they go through my door. Most don’t. Some say thank you, obviously impressed by my painless and effortless door-holding abilities. As they do this, I remember my coveted position as “door holder” from elementary school, the long train of “thank you thank you thank you thank you” I received as the class filed past. Coveted, because I’d end up at the back of the line, the farthest away

from the teacher. It was a serious offense to not say thank you to the door holder, reserved for when you were really mad at someone.

And now I’m thinking about who designed the door. It’s pretty. It has a nice stained glass window; solid, thick, wooden frame. The myth is that Richardson was designed by a student for his architecture thesis but was flunked. He later said he’d donate the money to build the auditorium only if his design was used. It’s just a myth, but still. Funny to think that with enough cash, you too can get back at everyone who didn’t like your weird designs.

Hold the door hold the door hold the do –

Ok, places, the call comes. And then the hall is empty, and they want me to lock the door. Reluctantly, I do.

“Do you want to take a break, Talia? We have a while before intermission.”

“No, I’m ok,” I answer. I stay right by my door, just in case.

The Nassau Weekly has gotten kind of attached to Talia Czuchlewski by now.

Speaking Japanese

“These days, learning a language feels particularly significant and necessary. Learning a language: a small multiplication of life in a world of multiplying death.”

By SABRINA KIM

For James Li

“Much of love is about asking, ‘Do you mean this? Am I correct?’ It is trying to find that particular lingua franca. How do you speak? Why do you speak it? How do we speak this third language together?”

—Jai Hamid Bashir

1. How we brought ourselves to the feet of another language.

One of my friends, C, is also a Korean American who didn’t grow up speaking Korean. When I had dinner with her two Novembers ago, she had studied Japanese for a couple years. She was self-studying Korean to prepare for a year of teaching English in Korea on a Fulbright, but she didn’t know much more than the alphabet. We talked about what it would be like for her to learn Korean after learning Japanese—in a way, learn Korean from Japanese, because the languages are so similar that one can provide a foundation for the other.

Over fifty percent of Korean and Japanese words are derived from Chinese, meaning many words between the three languages sound similar. A few years ago when I became friends with E, a native Chinese speaker from Taiwan,

he was taking Japanese 102 and I was taking Korean 102. We talked about the word library.

Túshuguan,toshokan, dosogwan.

E got his PhD in math and left for his postdoc in Switzerland last fall. He speaks English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese, and a little bit of Greek. He has gotten really good at Spanish recently because he loves someone from Mexico. They met on the last day of 2022 in France, where they were both traveling alone. He spent last summer with her in Mexico City working at a ramen restaurant. He was a big help because he could translate a bit between Japanese and Spanish—sometimes he spoke English with patrons, too. He is kind and funny and I admire the way he lives. So mobile, so secure in movement and affection, so serious and unserious. I think we kept each other alive and functional in the winter of 2022. And thousands of miles apart, now, we text each other passages from books we like, mine in English, his often in French or Spanish.

Another one of my Korean American friends, S, has a Korean girlfriend she met while studying abroad in Seoul. S’s girlfriend is learning Japanese, which bothers S slightly. She accommodates her girlfriend by speaking Korean, which she isn’t fluent in, but her girlfriend doesn’t speak English. Her girlfriend is excited about learning Japanese but apathetic toward English.

Don’t you want to know me in my language?

Many Koreans speak Japanese.

When my mom was growing up in Korea, they taught Japanese in some public schools the way they teach English today. An activist friend told me that in the 1980s, South Korean leftists were reading Marxist texts in Japanese or in Korean translated from Japanese. Later, in the 90s, there was a shift toward English.

Of course, the language you are studying, the language you are speaking in, the language you are forgetting are political matters. Language classes don’t really deal with that fact, nor are they responsible for it, but I have been acutely aware of it ever since I started learning Japanese in September. As a diasporic Korean, learning Japanese often feels like remembering a language I used to know, especially when I see a vocabulary list full of cognates or learn a grammar structure that parallels Korean. It feels like I can claim a certain relation— like that of exes with a complicated history of love and damages—to Japanese language through the fact of my ancestors’ colonization by imperial Japan, and I feel no reverence or responsibility toward the language.

My desire for agency and small joys in my postcolonial body brings me to Japanese. And these days, learning a language feels particularly significant and necessary. Learning a language: a small multiplication of life in a world of multiplying death.

In class today we practice casual speech, which is difficult because we learned polite speech first, which you use to show respect to people like elders, teachers, or strangers. Casual speech is for friends and family. Polite speech

creates distance; casual speech closes the distance.

Korean is similar to Japanese in terms of the degrees of formality. I have memories of meeting people from Tinder in Korea, and an hour or two into talking, they would say Now that we know each other a little, why don’t we talk comfortably? Or, If it’s uncomfortable, you can speak informally to me—it’s hard to speak formally, right? Then I would tell them that polite speech was actually easier for me, because, like Japanese class, my Korean class learned polite speech before casual speech.

I like polite speech. To allow distance to exist in a conversation means earned, built closeness may also exist, somewhere down the line. To always end words in -masu or -desu in Japanese or -yo in Korean is to say I want to honor that I don’t really know you. Or perhaps more precisely, that we do not belong to each other in a close and casual way. We are not responsible for each other in that way. But we could be.

Shibata sensee calls on me to convert tomodachi to hanashimasu—I talk to my friend—into ca sual speech, so I change the last two syllables and say tomodachi to hanashiteru.

Shibata sensee says my pro nunciation is totemo kirei. means very, and kirei means pret ty; clean; neat.

A guy I met in Korea two years ago told me he knew a little bit of Japanese. We were having beer and dried squid and I asked him to say something in Japanese. He said anata wa kireidesu and told me to look it up later.

You can call a house kirei

person kirei or the way someone says something kirei.

Shibata sensee’s praise means a lot to me. A lot of what happens in Japanese class means a lot to me. I don’t know if it’s because it’s what my ancestors were doing a hundred years ago—speaking Japanese—or because speaking with my classmates in the present is fun. So small and so real, this joy. Laughing. Asking about my classmates’ weekends. Conjugating verbs with classmates: most of them first- or second-gen immigrants, Chinese and Sri Lankan and Palestinian and Uyghur and Bengali.

How did we end up in Japanese class together? I have my own history behind me, and they have their histories—layers of migration and empire and language, media, and culture under empire— which brought all of us to the US, to Japanese class in Princeton, New Jersey. But I only ever ask the question in Japanese—doushite nihongo o benkyoushimasuka? so our answers are very simple. I like anime. I like Japanese food. I want to travel to Japan. As we sit together forming single-clause sen

2. At the feet of memory, we tell each other again that we do not know.

Lately it has been hard to go to class. It is March and all I am is grief: grief for Palestine, grief for Korea, grief for all of us in the past and future. Getting deeper into my thesis—poetry about diasporic loss and memory—hurts, but I know it is good and necessary to meet my history in rage and grief. It is a good fire. And my suffering is small, I know—it is a single grain of sand—and it still injures my whole body. It is a good injury, I think, and tending to it brings me close to my loved ones. They teach me rage and resistance and poetry.

Japanese goes on as usual, but now the classroom is a space of grief. Japanese is the language in which we lost you. A language to which Korean, too, was almost lost, during imperial Japan’s campaign of cultural genocide and linguistic imperialism in Korea and other territories. The language hurts to learn these days. I tried to drop the class, but admin told me that I need to stay in it to be considered a full-time student and graduate in May. This language, its loss—I need some distance from it, and distance is impossible with class and new vocabulary and grammar points every day. But if I think of learning Japanese as a way to spend some time with you, to remember and appreciate you, the language feels safer. I remember that sometimes Japanese feels like remembering.

When people gathered the day after February 16th, we sat in a living room too small for all of us and sat in silence. Every once in a while, someone spoke, their words

bloated with breath and grief.

Many people brought up your smile. Your orientation leader talked about making jokes to see you laugh and a photo she has of you smiling in a group photo. A classmate in your writing seminar mentioned how you sat at the same end of the table every class and how going back to that table would be difficult. My classmates from Japanese talked about how you talked about anime and gaming in class, where we frequently introduced ourselves and talked about our hobbies.

Someone said, I think the one word that characterizes how everyone is feeling is regret.

Is that true?

The word regret, perhaps because it deals with memory in ethically questionable ways—revising, revisiting, claiming responsibility without redressing—is strange to me. Its intention is to impose something from the present, which is already too late, onto the past, which has passed. It comes after the grief that gave rise to it. Grief, which feels like fact. Grief, which feels like the most honest thing we can offer to the public from our private selves.

Regret says, If only…; grief says nothing at all, not in any language, not in any universe.

If I have regret, it is that this body is too small for all the grief it would hold if it could handle it. Because if I could hold all of it, maybe I could also do something as massive in the opposite direction.

But the people I love and I are doing small things in the opposite direction of grief, and I think we are trying our best.

Sometimes I use past and present tense in the same sentence in class, and sensee corrects me. I do the same in English even though I know better. Can my body tell the difference between past and

present when they are as blurry as two languages derived from the same other language? Can my body tell the difference between yesterday and today’s grief?

I would like to insist that tense is irrelevant as I write to you, even though I know that it is precisely the before and after of my time in Japanese class that brings me to write to you. Writing is only a representation of loss too large for me to see the beginning and end of, and languages are blurry, and my memory of you is not blurry, making past more present than the present, so what I mean to ask is: I can write to you in all tenses, yes?

When I think of you, there are two words which come to mind: kaerimasu and wakarimasu. I heard you say the word for going home, kaerimasu, a few times because when we were paired for speaking exercises, I asked you what you did over the weekend and what you did over break. Your home was close to school so you went home often, kaerimashita. You went home for winter break, kaette, and spent time with your family.

Rather than kaerimasu, which is present tense, I imagine you saying kaerimashita, past tense. In my memory you are someone who went home many times.

Wakarimasu, or I don’t know, comes to mind because I am bad at Japanese and I give up easily, so sometimes I asked you how to say things. Sometimes you told me, sometimes you said watashi mo wakarimasu. I also don’t know. I also don’t know. I still don’t know.

Even now, I wonder if I am handling grief ethically. Am I entering collective memory responsibly? Do I represent it with care? I worry that I appropriate a narrative not my own for beauty, or for the sorrow I would like to make beautiful.

Even when I am not writing, I wonder if I am remembering responsibly, in a way that is not just for my own desire to feel and narrativize. I wonder if that is something I owe to others.

Our next grammar lesson is on present continuous tense, so it describes actions that are ongoing; things still becoming; things that live on after the sentence. The textbook reads,

Mr. Ishida is eating. Mr. Ishida is drinking tea. Mr. Ishida is reading. It is raining. The wind is blowing.

I wish to know you in present continuous tense, to practice with you in class tomorrow. We would take a quiz and I’d get at least a couple things wrong, and sensee would say ohayo gozaimasu. We would do some speaking exercises to warm up. Then sensee would explain the new grammar point and give us time to practice speaking in present continuous tense. And we would ask each other silly questions to practice language, to practice grammar we take for granted in this language, and we would say things to each other like,

Li-san, what are you doing?

I am eating. I am drinking tea. I am reading. It is raining. The wind is blowing. Is that so.

Kim-san, what are you doing?

I am eating for you. I am drinking tea for you. I am reading for you. It is raining for you. The wind is blowing for you.

I Want to Become Who I Was: Reflections on Filmmaking

By FAITH HO

Last August, I flew from Singapore to America to start college in a new country.

During the first week of college, I watched Shirkers, a 2018 documentary film by Singaporean filmmaker Sandi Tan. I never expected a Singaporean film to be assigned for my documentary filmmaking freshman seminar, so of course I was prepared to love it—and I did, but I didn’t expect it to connect to me so uncannily.

Shirkers is about Sandi’s reflection on creating an “atmospheric” thriller movie in Singapore one summer in the 1990s when she was nineteen. Upon the completion of shooting, all the footage disappeared with her film mentor, only to be rediscovered decades later when he died. In the film, she examines what it meant to create a movie as a stubborn idealistic teenager, the struggles of the process, and the emotional havoc upon its disappearance, trying to figure out: what happened? It’s part detective story, part nostalgia, part attempt at meaning-making.

There are many elements to the film, but the one that struck me most intensely was what my class readings called “self-reflexive,” Sandi’s “thoughts, doubts and self-examination while filming” (Rabiger, 2014). Shirkers is an exercise in memory: an excavation of both the film and what it meant, the process of the filmmaking, and a reflection on the filmmaker

herself.

It’s a film not just in that moment (gorgeous pastel-hued shots of Singapore’s streets in the 1990s) but of a moment—being nineteen and making a movie.

When I was nineteen, after the end of Junior College (Singapore’s equivalent of high school), I made a short film. Ostensibly for a short film competition centered around the theme of mental health, the real reason I wanted to make something was a burning desire to concretize those blurred days. It was supposed to capture this strange in-between state of life and be a time capsule of a country that changed so fast I feared that, when I returned, I would come back to an unfamiliar land.

“It’s more than a physical time capsule. It’s not just scenery and disappearing buildings, but it’s also people in those places.” (A line from Jasmine, Sandi’s best friend in Shirkers)

In my foolishness, I decided that it was entirely feasible to make a film despite extremely limited experience. I borrowed all my equipment (including the camera), enlisted vaguely skeptical but very supportive friends, and used my tiny network to find my two lead actresses. Frenzied morning writings materialized as four days of shooting, which would become a month of editing, and a fifteen minute film. I carried my friend’s giant tripod through the oppressive humidity of Singapore, reshooting each time we got interrupted by an enthusiastic crow or an inconsiderate bus.

For the last scene, I picked the reservoir near my home. That narrow band of land circling the manmade lake held years of angst-fuelled runs, pensive rainy walks with friends, and family picnics at dusk. The first time we shot there, the SD card malfunctioned and all my footage was lost. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. This time, the sky behind the actresses

Singapore, Sandi Tan’s Shirkers, and making a movie at nineteen

melted into a stunning sunset, golden rays melting into pink and fading into a blue-orange hue. When we wrapped up filming, I took a final video: the five of us holding hands as we ran down the slope, as if we were running into eternity.

In the end, I didn’t win the competition; I had just narrowly missed getting shortlisted. Evidently, it wasn’t phenomenal work. But it was mine, and my team’s.

There were many parallels in the process of making Shirkers and of making my own film: creating a film at nineteen, a summer, a group of friends who were slightly skeptical perhaps, but helped anyway, capturing a time capsule of Singapore. Lots of differences too: Shirkers was a movie, it could have revolutionized Singaporean film, it disappeared before it was complete. Mine was complete, but it might simply disappear.

It was deeply personal in the same way that Sandi’s Shirkers was to her, not necessarily because of the plot or the story, but the person we were when we made it. The fierce ambition, drive and utterly ludicrous hope—for what can I call it but the thing called hope?—that we could pull this thing off. She reflects on a self from decades ago. I reflect on the self from this past summer, but already this “me” is a foreign being. I look at her and wonder: Who is that bold person?

Because the other thing that unites us is failure. Hers’ is far more “real”, the complete loss of all her footage and with it her efforts and hope; mine, its fate of not being screened and fading into oblivion. But they both fall short of that hope for film: to be seen.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever do something like that again; if I’ll have the time, energy, friends, and most importantly, the audacity to jump into a far-fetched project.

But Shirkers has reminded me of dreams. Sandi remembers that naive nineteen-year-old she was, realizes that what drove the

project might be naivety, but also a dream. Doing something, although it’s crazy, although it’s absurd, although it might not lead to anything, because we want to and because we dare to. Dreaming is: dripping with sweat while helping tourists in Chinatown take pictures because they see you filming something; waiting for the clouds to pass overhead in the Botanical Gardens; cursing at the fifth bus that interrupts an emotional scene. Dreaming is also: creating a film that will forever hold a part of my life.

I want to be that version of nineteen-year-old me, who did something simply because she could.

Because isn’t that what this film is really about? Shirkers is about

memory, remembering the self we were and the self we wanted to be. It’s not about nostalgia; it’s about remembering something for long enough that it becomes part of our narrative of our past self. It’s about recognizing that who we were is who we can be.

“I had the idea that you found freedom by building worlds inside your head. That you had to go backwards in order to go forwards.” (Sandi Tan, Shirkers)

The Nassau Weekly is part detective story, part nostalgia, part Faith Ho.

Books, my old flame

Reading, Regurgitating, and Reconnecting with Literature

A Nass writer sets out to repair an estranged relationship with reading.

By MADELEINE M URNICK

As a child, reading was magical to me, in a figurative and literal sense. When I was 8-10 years old—my prime as a reader—I immersed myself in the charmed worlds of The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Land of Stories. I relished the brightly colored landscape of Wendy Mass novels. In those two years, I read maybe every Joan Bauer story about a 12-year-old girl with a special hidden talent. I devoured Rainbow Magic and Magic Treehouse books with a concentration I have been unable to emulate since. I wanted to move to Narnia and I couldn’t get enough of Turkish Delight.

I remember the feeling: being in a vacuum, hearing the silence of outer space in my ears and the cacophony of characters in my mind. My dad would shout from upstairs and I wouldn’t even flinch. My mom would walk up to where I was sitting and stand in front of me for minutes without me realizing she was there. My brother would grab my book from my hands and I would erupt in violent anger. I knew already that books could be weapons, and I would hit my brother hard in the stomach with a copy

of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in order to scare him away for an hour of uninterrupted reading time.

Nowadays, my phone buzzes and my eyes jump instantly from the page. I hear a door slam three rooms down and lose my place in a paragraph. I wish I could pinpoint what exactly tore me away from my former focus, but I don’t know. I got busier, I guess. I got distractible. I grew up. Short-form media took over my generation’s imagination. Somewhere between the TikToks and the Pomodoros, I forgot how to lose track of time.

Around the beginning of 2022, I realized my old favorite hobby had deteriorated to a point of personal crisis. I started the long process of rebuilding my broken relationship with reading.

I began with a small goal: I decided I would read at least 22 books in 2022, 23 in 2023, and 24 in 2024. So far, I am on track. In these books, I write down anything distracting me from what I’m supposed to be reading in order to deal with it later. That is why you can find water bottle, sweater, rug—a list of things to bring to college—in between my notes on a passage of The Man Without Qualities, a list of summer internships in my front cover of The Trial by Kafka, write your discussion post at the top of a chapter in City of Ladies by Christine de

Pizan, and in big letters on the title page of Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson, CALL MOM.

Eventually, I hope to get rid of this scaffolding and read for pleasure again. Is this process simply a vain attempt to regain my childlike sense of wonder? Maybe. But reading teaches me more than anything else that I don’t have to give up perpetual novelty as an adult.

I love to read. I do. That is why I am determined to teach myself to read again. To coax the child within me to come out and look at the scary sentences which she does not yet understand. Not in the same way my mom taught me to read, a hilarious saga in which we would scream at each other daily over Bob Books. (Ultimately, it worked and I’m grateful.) Instead, imbued with a little flavor of that strict discipline, but mostly with a lot of patience, I intend to raise my adult self to be a reader because reading is how I practice compassion.

Define “practice,” not as “do,” but with the same meaning it holds when we say “practice piano” or “practice suturing.” Fiction (and history, and autobiography) is the controlled, artificial environment in which we can practice empathy, if we read with an open mind. Like any skill, this takes time and repetition. In the meantime, individual books can change our lives.

For me, it started with Harry Potter. This is trite, but true, and

the more I read (and write) the more I understand that unoriginality is not the worst sin, and that aiming to create something unique can be hugely hubristic.

Which I was, as a third grader. I scoffed at the wizarding craze, biting down my desire to join fantasy games on the playground in order to maintain my superiority to the crowd.

Harry Potter humbled me.

I read one chapter from the middle of the fourth book over my friend Molly’s shoulder, and by the end of the day, I was asking my dad if he still had the copy of the first book he had offered me months before. After that fateful day, I sat next to Molly on the low wooden wall surrounding my elementary school playground and we read together during recess. We were two bookish blondes, ignoring the bell at the end of recess because we were too wrapped up in the quandaries of Luna Lovegood and MadEye Moody. In those days, we were inseparable and indiscernible.

Molly McMahon. Maddy Murnick. When I was fifteen and my brother eleven, I read Harry Potter aloud to him. Those books were truly magical because somehow, the electric blue tome of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was privileged above the Nintendo Switch. To this day, each time I open any of the copies, I see my father’s name written in ballpoint

pen on the top right of the title page, reminding me that I am holding a gift. Something that both of us have now read as adults but which makes us feel like kids again.

Through Harry Potter, reading became something I shared with other people, and something that could surprise me. The series now forms the foundation of a fairly large stack of books and stories that have changed my life.

A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle changed the way I think about God. Felicity, a book of poetry by Mary Oliver, made me notice grasshoppers. The Aeneid taught me to love Latin, and to read things in their original language whenever I can. Also to read slowly whenever I can. Emma humbled me again, though for different reasons than Harry Potter did,

and then became embedded in my life as a comfort novel. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson forced me to take pictures in books seriously. The Best We Could Do, a graphic memoir, taught me to take books made entirely of pictures seriously. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien made me rethink the purpose and craft of fiction writing. It taught me that even a fictional story must be true, and that truth does not have to be factual. Stoner by John Williams showed me how books can be eerie and reassuring at the same time, when they seem to reflect your own life too accurately. Giovanni’s Room changed the way I think about stigma, and loneliness, and men. Silver Water by Amy Bloom helped me understand a lot about mental illness, specifically the way it strikes only some people, and the way life

writing down what it feels like I already know. This reservoir of intuitive knowledge is man-made, picked up from other books. So, the borders between my reading and writing are messy. Since I was about 12, I have copied my favorite lines from books into the back of my journals. I also write in my printed books. As well as lists of things not to forget about, I include essay ideas, important page numbers, exclamation points, stick figures, and sad faces. Most of my annotations are not strictly necessary, but the action of scratching something onto the page is enough. It is a physical process reflecting my ownership of the words, the way I will make them my own.

continues around it. Le Roi se Meurt, by Eugene Ionesco, reconciled for me the randomness of existence and the need for meaning in life, which used to feel like a great philosophical quandary, but all I had to do to figure it out was just sit there, reading.

There are books and stories I’ve read that didn’t transform me, but many, many of them have. Honestly, it doesn’t take much for a book to change my life, to slightly nudge my perspective half an inch wider or to alter the course of my life a quarter of a degree to the left. If a book can make it through the labyrinth of starts and stops in my distractible mind, it will probably stay there.

Creation is regurgitation, and I regurgitate what I read. I do my best writing when it feels like I am not inventing anything, but simply

I read every day. I read music. I read magazines. I read movie captions and billboards. I read the back of cereal boxes and the front page of newspapers. I read online articles, and text messages from friends, and the Hyundai Owner’s Manual. I read the room (sometimes incorrectly) and I read the expression on my friends’ faces. I read the instructions on the tags of my clothes which tell me how to launder them. I know I will never forget how to read, but sometimes I forget its magical power to make time go away.

Every book that has changed my life is a good reason for me to repair my relationship with reading. Every half-decent piece of writing I produce following their example is another good reason. So, I’m determined to go back to my oldest love, the printed page, and figure out where we went wrong. I’m not giving up on us. I couldn’t if I tried.

The Nassau Weekly teaches Madeline Murnick more than anything else that she doesn’t have to give up perpetual novelty as an adult.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4

Princeton’s geo-exchange project is part of a much larger shift toward a more sustainable future. To reach that future, we could move down several pathways that each rely on different decarbonization methods. The assumptions about how we consume energy may narrow the types of pathways we can take. For instance, most sustainable energy analysts assume that middle- and upper-class individuals will continue to consume the same amount of energy (if not more) as they do now – which is already far higher than in most regions of the world. In this path, few politicians prioritize reducing consumption to more sustainable levels. Instead, they have foregrounded

electricity-based heating systems like geo-exchange as the best chance to quickly discard the fossil fuel infrastructure that’s killing us.

As in Princeton, so too in New Jersey. The state has set out ambitious goals for building out geothermal heat pump systems like geo-exchange. It plans to help convert 90% of buildings to electric heating systems like geo-exchange by 2050. Governor Murphy recently set a goal of electrifying 400,000 residential properties and 20,000 commercial spaces by the end of the decade.

But warning signs that have emerged in Princeton’s geo-exchange project indicate that New Jersey may struggle to support the rapid expansion of geothermal projects in the future. Let’s take a look at permitting first.

Asking for permission to shape the contours and contents of a

landscape can be a philosophical, spiritual, or even religious practice. Within the neoliberal state, the process is a more spare affair. To gain permission to poke 2,000 deep holes into the ground and tear up thousands of square feet of land on Princeton’s own private property, all the university had to do was apply for a few drilling and construction permits.

Relative to cogeneration plants, geo-exchange projects trigger less regulation. That’s partially because, according to Director of Engineering at Princeton University Thomas Nyquist, geo-exchange is a more “benign” system than a fossil fuel plant, meaning they have fewer hurdles to clear. The technology doesn’t require air permits (it doesn’t emit anything when operating), groundwater permits (it doesn’t need much replenishment, beyond the water needed to fill the pipes and storage tanks), or noise permits (the sound pollution from the heat pumps falls below New Jersey thresholds, according to Nyquist).

But large-scale geo-exchange also has fewer regulations because the infrastructure is still rare. “It hasn’t become ubiquitous enough to really get enough visibility to get a lot of regulation,” Grissom said.

The main permit Princeton had to obtain was a site-wide drilling permit for its drilling activities. They received approval from DEP after some exchanges with the department and local regulators. According to Borer, regulators hadn’t had to deal with such a large project before, which led to some confusion among, for

instance, regulators overseeing horizontal pipe construction versus those overseeing vertical well construction.

Moreover, the size of Princeton’s project highlights potential gaps in New Jersey regulation. State law does not require drilling projects to involve third-party oversight to make sure that nothing goes wrong. With the smaller projects that make up most geothermal projects in the state, this doesn’t pose a problem. But because Princeton’s drilling has involved multiple drilling companies working in tandem on thousands of boreholes over years, a State Advisory Board of drillers realized in 2019 that some oversight would be important. Seeing that there was “no way” DEP themselves could monitor this drilling, the Board recommended that a certified third-party inspector oversee the project– which Princeton enthusiastically accepted. A deft improvisation, this move also represents a stop-gap measure. regulators may have to craft a standardized procedure to determine questions like when an overseer might be necessary or what type of accreditation that inspector would require.

Second, while geo-exchange and other ground-based heat pump systems seem to be one of the most attractive sustainable options for large-scale facilities like Princeton, the geothermal industry in New Jersey is too small to quickly install systems at this scale. In Princeton’s case, the university couldn’t find any local drilling companies large enough to

Two stout tubes bend into one of the machines in TIGER. Photo by Raphaela Gold ’26

meet their requirements. “We had to look all over the country to find people who had the right equipment, and the competence with that equipment, and enough of that equipment,” Borer said.

One drilling company, Midwest Geothermal, comes all the way from Michigan, according to Princeton’s well permit applications. “It wasn’t like you went down to Trenton and hired five contractors,” Grissom said.

Of course, Princeton had the money to ship this Michigan company to New Jersey. But many other facilities hoping to install geo-exchange don’t. In the meantime, they have no choice but to wait for more local contractors to appear.

Finally, uncertainty about the cost of geothermal can potentially

delay its rollout. Nyquist and Borer hesitate to estimate the cost of Princeton’s geo-exchange system beyond saying that the university spent “hundreds of millions of dollars.” That’s because they simply don’t know how much money Princeton will be awarded from the Inflation Reduction Act, a massive climate bill that has given geothermal systems a whopping 30 percent tax credit. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has issued broad rules and guidelines outlining what qualifies for the tax credits, and now entities seeking those subsidies have begun to apply for them. But now, the IRS must evaluate whether each applicant’s proposal fits their parameters, a process which Grissom says may take a few years. In the meantime,

Borer is left wondering: will the heat exchangers that transfer the heat from geo-exchange’s pipes into buildings count for subsidies? Will the far-flung mechanical room or nondescript connecting pipe count? Considerations like these may increase or decrease the overall project cost by as much as 40 percent.

“Even a tax professional can’t guarantee anything yet, because nobody’s gone through the whole process yet,” Grissom said.

Until enough projects have moved through IRS considerations to give a sense of what components of a geothermal system can be subsidized and what cannot, no one can be fully certain about how much projects will cost, which may discourage potential geothermal adopters.

These factors all contribute to New Jersey’s current predicament. With regulation suited for much smaller projects, a miniscule large-scale well drilling industry, and unclear federal tax credits, geothermal is off to a sluggish start. Princeton may be leading the way, but only because it has the resources to do so.

On TIGER’s shop floor, surrounded by pipes of water, I see the decarbonization path that Princeton is charting along with the rest of the state. Through technologies like geo-exchange, most facets of everyday life, including energy consumption, can be kept the same, but with less climate impact. Although it will require mass construction on levels no one is prepared for,

this path won’t require people to renounce the familiar comforts of industrial society. In some ways, that makes everything easier, because in the ideal scenario, no one will have to give anything up.

But choosing one path to travel down limits the scope of what we might otherwise do, or what assumptions we might challenge. The current path that involves geo-exchange might not be enough to address the ideological assumptions that undergird the origins of the crisis. Could there be other pathways to a sustainable future that, for instance, think differently about New Jersey’s sky-high energy use? Could we think differently about private land, nuancing its current status as an inanimate resource to be torn up, drilled into, and shaped for human benefit?

As I bid my farewells to Borer and walk away from the boxy industrial structure, these questions linger in my mind.

Are technologies like geo-exchange enough?

But choosing one path to travel down limits the scope of what Alex Norbrook might otherwise do, or what assumptions the Nassau Weekly might challenge.

TIGER, the central facility operating the new geo-exchange system, is located at campus’ south-east corner, past Powers Field. Photo by Alex Norbrook ’26.

A Summer of Unveiling Soviet Dreams

Leif Haase on the Nass ’s Journalistic Pursuits

Reflecting on the magazine’s since defunct Soviet Studies department with a Nass alum

By JONATHAN DOLCE & LEIF HAASE

In the summer before his sophomore year at Princeton, Nass Trustee Leif Haase traveled to the U.S.S.R. documenting the lives of its ordinary citizens. Though the entirety of his 1984 piece titled “Public Faces, Private Dreams: Meeting the People of the U.S.S.R.” cannot fit in the margins below, his closing interaction encapsulates a profound image of the aspirations of the Soviet people despite the lack of understanding Americans and the Soviet people had of each other. In a recent email about the piece, Leif wrote:

“Though based on personal observation, this period piece from some forty years ago engages in national stereotyping and

messier personally and politically, a story which remains to be told. I think that the article holds up as a report from a time gone by, with implications for the present day.”

—Leif Haase, 2024

With the tone set, what follows is an excerpt from Leif’s piece. Though a product of its time, this firsthand documentation holds enduring relevance as we continue to grapple with mutual misunderstanding and human longing:

“I met Peter Rodenko (not his real name) in a small museum in one of the cities we visited. He asked softly if I was an American, then added, “My brother is now in the United States. I would like to speak with you outside.”

night of freedom. It was filled with idealized stars, rivers and mountains. I was astonished that he could divulge such personal feelings to a near-stranger. What drew us together was a shared need for freedom. While Peter intensely desired the individual liberties of the West and longed to see his brother again, I held the plane ticket to return to New York.

After a long silence, Peter said, with a kind of wry despair, “Ah, life.” I was reminded of Socrates’ lines in the Apology which begins, “[T]he hour of departure has arrived...” As I left, for the first time in my life freedom became more than an abstract notion.

generalizations about the United States and the Soviet Union that were more in vogue at that time. They reflect a world that in 1984 was still bipolar, organized around U.S./Soviet rivalry, and in the final stages of the Cold War, though we didn’t know it at the time. The Internet didn’t exist, personal computers were still in their infancy, and global travel was far less common than it is today. Fear of nuclear war was strong, and the sentiment prevailed that if we could just know one another as people the antagonism between states would dissolve.

This kind of liberal universalism has been battered from all sides in the interim. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has rekindled, sadly, lots of the concerns about disinformation, exile, and war that are the backdrop to this piece.

Though I didn’t fully realize it then, I was making selective narrative choices to create a kind of propaganda for peace, which I don’t regret. My actual journey was far

I joined him and his friends outside the museum. Peter was a large, athletic-looking man in his early thirties, with short hair and penetrating eyes which reminded me of pictures of Andrei Sakharov. He wore a loosely-woven sweater and Nike running shoes.

As we visited his friends’ flat, Peter told me his story. Several years before, he had tried to escape to the West through Finland, as did his older brother. His brother succeeded and is now living in New York; Peter was captured and spent eight months in a Soviet prison.

Earlier that day, I had asked Peter why he wanted to come to the United States. He answered, in part, by describing his countrymen: “They like the system alright, but they are unconscious. They are without dreams, you understand.”

When I recall the looking-glass of Soviet society, though, I no longer see the immigration officer, my first impression. Instead I remember individual names, faces and aspirations: Volodya, Sasha, Irina, Others with names like Natasha, an aspiring jazz pianist; Oleg, a tennis player; Vasily, a crew member on our ship. Their dreams are not my dreams or Peter’s dreams, but my Russian friends do have dreams.

—Leif Haase, 1984

We talked over a meal of fried eggs, tomatoes and brown bread. My host put on a Talking Heads record (which he said cost fifty roubles on the black market) to ensure that our conversation would not be overheard. We also listened to a Schubert symphony. “Since I returned from prison,” Peter said, “I have appreciated classical music much more. Art and culture, I think, are greater than politics.”

Peter showed me pictures of his home and family. From under his bed, he brought out a notebook of pictures he had drawn on his last

Lullaby Loon

by ISABELLE CLAYTON

If you find yourself forgetting how to breathe, do not be afraid.

Leave the stones in your throat and learn to rise with the croaking loons, drifting as they do and as they have since the beginning of time.

Or since the beginning of this lake. When the land parted and stones dropped down the cleft of the trench, coursing tube of your throat.

It was all natural, the hardening and the breaking of the earth.

It is all natural because the loons are still here and the money tree on the porch still twists up and up.

Up in the ether larks are flying as they always have, singing with the loons, breathing just like you.

This heaviness in your throat makes you wonder if you cannot escape the end of breath — but let your eyes your gentle eyes let them gaze upon a world where stones will fill your throat and where loons will sing their ugly songs until you understand you cannot escape death but that maybe you can escape its warning.