letter from the editor
Dear Readers,
One of my favorite Disney characters is Merlin from The Sword in the Stone (1963), based on T.H. White’s book of the same name. In this version of Arthurian legend, Merlin experiences time backwards, and thus frequently confuses future events with what has already passed, living as a sort of expatriate in time. I’ve always really loved this, the touch of magic and tragedy. It’s my last fall semester as an undergraduate at Brown, and it’s easy to feel a little unmoored in time. I blinked and they turned Simmons into a giant pit, a third of the Thayer shops I swore just opened have been supplanted, and I’m no longer a bright-eyed first-year but already over a month into my senior year.
Still, when I’ve felt a tad overwhelmed by the passage of time, it’s been helpful to take a step back and breathe, draw out the little moments that comprise a season. When I chart how my fall has been spent so far, it’s: picking apples with loved ones (making apple fritters soon), interviews and unfortunately more interviews, boiling strawberries into syrup to make homemade strawberry matcha (we have Ceremony at home!), watching old Chinese comedies while nestled into our lived-in couch. Last night I played volleyball in the dark, guessing broadly where to set the ball as the light slipped away. In these moments, time feels longer, more lasting.
It’s a bit easier to connect with what and who matters.
This week in post-, our writers are exploring their relationships with connection—over time, place, language— as we move carefully through a busy and bright new semester. In Feature, AnnaLise reflects on transportation systems in different cities and relationships with the people within them. Also in Feature, Violet interviews ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner in an exploration of why we—the public—publicly shame. In Narrative, Katya navigates the risks and vulnerabilities inherent in language, urging us to use language intentionally to be seen fully. Meanwhile, Nina meditates on her experience of time in childhood and in the present. In A&C, Madison analyzes Normal People through the lenses of class and gender, and Sara celebrates the subliminality of pools in coming-of-age movies. Our Lifestyle writer, Liv, advises on staying healthy through the hustle and bustle of the fall semester. In post-pourri, April features a detailed anatomy of the specimen collegium discipulo sacco dorsali (common name “college backpack”). Finally, don’t miss a wonderful crossword by Lily!
I was walking home a few nights ago with a friend, and she commented that it feels like we’re currently living a very transitional period of our lives. I’m inclined to agree, and be a little sad about needing to leave a place in order to arrive at another one. But the time allotted to us is all the time we can have, and there’s so many places I still have to get to. So I’ll venture out bravely, with my first cozy sweater of the season and my tube of chapstick, and see what other little moments there are to love.
Looking both ways,
AJ Wu
A&C Managing Editor
in transit
on fiscal cliffs and other precipes
by AnnaLise Sandrich
Illustrated by sheryl lee
“Where are you guys from? Oh yeah, our rail system’s shit.”
When you get lost on the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, commonly known as “SEPTA,” there is no shortage of Philadelphians willing to try to direct you. In the span of one short misadventure (getting off a stop early at 30th instead of Jefferson), my friend Magdalena and I were approached by four different strangers offering directions. They had overheard us struggling to decipher a multitude of confusing maps and jumped in, likely out of pity.
Likewise, as the last and most helpful advisor exemplified, there is no shortage of Philadelphians ready to criticize the city’s transportation system.
I see it all over TikTok—videos sarcastically praising what a beacon of cleanliness and efficiency the regional rail is—as well as in casual conversations at the Haverford dining center, on walks to Wawa, in debates over whether or not it’s worth going into the city that day. SEPTA has its critics.
And yet, when two quintessentially disoriented college freshmen from the suburbs couldn’t find their way, one of the first things we were asked was where we were from—, the implication being that, because we didn’t fully grasp how SEPTA worked yet, we must be from somewhere else. Any true Pennsylvanian would already know how it all worked. While broadly disparaged, the utility of the city’s public transportation system makes its use so common that familiarity with it has become standardized. That’s not nothing.
By contrast, public transportation in the Bay Area (where I’m from) is far less convenient; though there are some options within San Francisco itself, transportation in and out of the city leaves something to be desired. The few buses that do run do so infrequently. Ferries, while comfortable and even pleasant, cost a hefty fare. Thus, the primary mode of travel for most residents living outside of the city becomes the car; yet, even for those privileged enough to have access to one, the bridge toll to commute from Marin County into San Francisco proper is now around $10. Pair that with the desperate and expensive search for parking, ever-soaring gas prices, and rush -hour traffic—well, let’s just say
that when I first discovered SEPTA, I was in love.
Suck it, Waymo.
Like most public transportation systems, on rush -hour days, sometimes all the seats will be taken and you’ll have to stand. Interestingly enough, in 2021, SEPTA introduced an online “Seat Availability Dashboard”—information about seats on SEPTA is so important that it gets its own tracker. People like to feel prepared. Perhaps the accurate management of expectations is just that critical.
In any case, there were not too many riders taking the Paoli/Thorndale line around 1 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, and so Magdalena and I were able to get a bench to ourselves. I like the concept of a bench on a commuter car. I’ve certainly seen plenty of individual seats on SEPTA where the divide between where one person sits and another is far clearer. But even these tend to come in pairs. Maybe, probably, it’s more space-efficient to design it that way. Yet I can’t help but extrapolate a little more— having two-person benches supports a more social way to travel. Transportation becomes pleasurable—I talk with Magdalena about how my classes are going, our love for a mutual friend, her recent artistic endeavors. Even if the benches aren’t designed with two friends or family members traveling together in mind, in a way, they still promote community.
And yet, at the same time, no one wants to sit with a stranger. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re sitting on a train that’s nearly completely empty, and a man you've never seen before in your life chooses to sit next to you. If you’re like me, your first reaction is something close to terror.
Moreover, there are two sets of tiny black plastic rectangles on the edge of each bench— easy to miss, if you aren’t paying attention. Sometimes people will leave their SEPTA cards there so that the ticket-checker can come around and scan it without ever having to truly interact with the commuter. If you don’t have a SEPTA card, when your credit or debit card is scanned in its place, the ticket-checker leaves your exit receipt in those tiny black rectangles. SEPTA seats are literally designed with infrastructure to mitigate interaction with strangers.
We crave socialization and avoid it out of well-warranted fear all at the same time. Seats on SEPTA represent exactly what Philadelphia hasdoes: the contrast between American
individualism and a biological, almost primitive need for connection. We depend on and fear each other. We sit next to friends and strangers on the rail. Philadelphia’s reputation as crime-ridden and dangerous clashes violently with the phrase, “city of brotherly love.” Strangers give unsolicited but useful directions to lost college students.
Regardless, when the inhabitants of Southern Pennsylvania bemoan the endless faults and shortcomings of SEPTA, I like to think that it’s in the same way a husband might refer to his wife as “the old ball and chain”: derogatorily and ungratefully, but not without the subconscious knowledge and appreciation of having such a dependable anchor; and, one can hope, not without at least a little underlying love.
I did love Haverford, but I had to go. No more fencing team, Green Engine Cafe, Blue Bus shuttles to Bryn Mawr. Eventually, no more Elizabeth. Instead → Providence.
Municipal and regional public transit agencies throughout the country are in an era of crisis. Ridership (and with it, fare revenue)
hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Federal COVID aid, which managed to keep trains and buses going through the early 2020s, is now running out. Add that to aging infrastructure and rising maintenance costs, and the impending fiscal cliff becomes clear.
Today, SEPTA faces a $218 million deficit. A Democrat funding bill failed to pass, as did a Republican-backed plan to use the Public Transit Trust Fund. Routes were cut. Philadelphians expressed their devastation. Losing train and bus lines means commuting to work gets harder, especially for those that work odd hours. Attending classes gets harder—52,000 Philadelphian students use SEPTA to get to school. Losing train and bus lines means losing parts of your own city. Walls might as well sprout from the places tracks used to line. The world gets smaller.
On September 8, 2025, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation approved a one-time use of state capital funds to cover daily operations, but failed to reach a longterm solution. On September 14, previously cut service came back—and brought with it a 21.5% fare increase. The fate of SEPTA remains up in the air.
I still have a SEPTA card even though I haven’t been back to Philadelphia since November of last year. It’s got $40 on it. I still have my OMNY card from my summer in New York, too. Less money on that, though—. $10, maybe. There’s an unused LIRR ticket somewhere in my backpack that I really should’ve reused; the
conductor never collected it. I thought I might use my SEPTA card some more on trips to Haverford, but I only went back once, primarily to visit Elizabeth. I took the Amtrak to William Gray Station, and then uUbered from there to Ardmore. I spent the five-hour train ride back to Providence crying. She called me a day later, and I acted surprised to hear that it was over even though I’d known it was over before I even transferred. I haven’t been back since. I won’t throw away the card. There are certain things you do to romanticize your time in a place you don’t love. In New York, the greatest city in the world, I turned to crowd-favorite media pieces depicting the glamour and excitement the city never sparked in me: Sex and the City, How I Met Your Mother. Music, too. “Summer in the City” by the Lovin’ Spoonful, at my dad’s recommendation. Chappell Roan’s “Naked in Manhattan,” and of course Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York.” It was hard not to feel like a tourist with “Empire State of Mind” playing through my AirPods, but I played it anyway, maybe every other commute to Penn Station from the Upper West Side. “Breaking in Brooklyn” for the first time I took the C to visit a friend from Haverford’s luxurious DUMBO high- rise. I spent most of my summer missing California. I didn’t spend that Fourth of July sitting on the rooftop of the Civic Center watching the fireworks go off over the county fair, like I had done the year before. But I did watch them go off with former teammates over cobbler and liberal -arts -school gossip. Sparks fell from the Brooklyn Bridge like golden rain. The whole city unfolded before us.
Chappell Roan’s “The Subway” happened to come out the one summer I happened to be in New York happening upon my first Brown University breakup. It felt like fate.
After the fireworks ended, my Haverford
friend took me and the others to a party at a different skyscraper, where, coincidentally, I ran into two people I knew from Brown. One of them was friends with Matthew (newly minted Subway-byChappell-Roan-ex-boyfriend). The other, I’d met on a backpacking trip when I was still long-distance with Elizabeth. Haverford and Brown, New York and Philly (and Providence, probably, if you really looked for it), all at that party in Brooklyn. I can’t remember what Elizabeth’s perfume smelled like, but I remember what it felt like to rip up the letters she scented with it. I’ve lost my SEPTA card, but I know I still have it. Fallen in the bottom of my backpack, somewhere beside my LIRR ticket, somewhere beside the note Matthew sent me with the flowers he got for my birthday, somewhere under an a cappella flyer someone handed me freshman year, somewhere beneath post-it -notes with words of encouragement my Haverford teammates would write each other before tournaments.
I’ve got $10 left on my OMNY card. I’m not throwing it away.
New York is so huge it’s almost incomprehensible, like a blue whale. Incomprehensible things are difficult to love. How to wrap your head around something the sheer magnitude of which you’ve never seen? And then, how to wrap your heart around it? New York: an interlude, a main-character city relegated to a minor role in my life. But I did feel in awe of the subway. My beloved Bay Area’s division is accentuated sharply by its famous bridges, beautiful and absolute. $9.75 to cross. More to park. New York is a city completely interconnected with itself, like a blue whale, like any animal, blood pulsing from its cerebrum to its tail fin, from Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens to Long Island.
Downtown Providence is so close you don’t need a bus to get there, but the walk down is a lot more pleasant than the walk back up. I make the trek about three times a week, sometimes four. I like to think it’s making my hamstrings stronger.
Why do the Bay Area’s bridges strike me as so divisive? I’ve heard people claim it as an intentional set of choices designed to further
separate Marin County from the rest of its Bay Area counterparts—the idea being that, if public transportation across the Golden Gate were readily available, it might not be able to maintain its financially elite status. A snobbish (or, really, insidious) desire to put physical space between different clusters of tax brackets. And that, if you were one of Marin’s wealthier residents, you’d probably be able to afford a car , and the toll, anyways. San Francisco and all its museums and nightlife and famous landmarks at your fingertips, Marin’s striking mountains and beaches and forests kept to yourself. And as a resident, I can tell you, a drive 30 minutes north feels a lot closer than a 20- minute drive across a bridge.
At first, College Hill struck me in a similar way, a geographic differentiation from the rest of the city. Our bubble. And, perhaps shamefully, what a lovely bubble it was.
I didn’t just miss California over the summer—I missed Providence. I missed the couch
in my sorority’s lounge, where I always say I’m going to get work done, and instead waste hours talking with people who claim they’re working too. I missed running into friends at the Ratty, missed running into enemies at the Ratty, missed complaining about the food, which, in comparison to Haverford’s, is really not that bad. I missed being around so many people all the time. I am constantly bumping into community here. Here, connection comes with an ease that I haven’t found anywhere else.
I even missed the Thayer motorcyclists (though, now a few weeks into the semester, I can confidently say that feeling has worn off).
With all that lives within campus borders, why bother walking down the hill?
But the more you do it, the more you realize how little time climbing back up actually takes. You start to memorize the things you see on the trip back—that one cocktail bar you want to bring your friends to try, the wine and paint place, the view of the State House from the Amtrak station. You start to realize how close everything actually is. Providence is delightfully small.
RIPTA remains free for college students. But here, I mostly walk.
by Violet Chernoff
Illustrated by Christina xu
on public shaming the uses and abuses of cancel culture
In 2018, my mother was cancelled by a Twitter mob. “Katie Roiphe can suck my dick,” one user wrote. Others called her “human scum,” a “ghoul,” and a “harridan.” Enraged by the hypothetical contents of her not-yet-published Harper’s Magazine article, they preemptively took to their phones, brandishing metaphorical pitchforks at the mere speculation that she might name, and thereby endanger, the writer of the 2017 Shitty Media Men List. At 14, I saw the public shaming ritual—the bloodsport of cancel culture—through the eyes of the shamed. Nowadays, the phrase “cancel culture” prompts an automatic tune-out. But personally, I am less concerned with cancel culture as a phenomenon and more intrigued by the morality of public shaming. In aggregate, isn’t it an act of moral hypocrisy? To what extent is public shaming productive, and when does it become gratuitous?
Throughout history, communities have used public shaming to punish and theoretically deter moral offenders. Imperfect analogies to cancel culture abound, from the Salem witch trials to Mao Zedong’s China—all the way to McCarthyism. In the 17th century, public shaming took the form of stocks, pillories, and Hester Prynne’s symbolically degrading scarlet letter. In the 21st, it manifests as X retweets and Instagram graphics chronicling whoever’s perceived missteps. Whether termed bullying or accountability, whether government-sanctioned or not, the instinct to socially castigate is not new. But modern-day shaming is readily enabled by social media, where speed, ease, and anonymity breed a new form of recklessness. @RandomUser3478 can be as vitriolic as they desire.
Public shaming rituals often devolve into scapegoating. In the Book of Leviticus, there is a literal scapegoat—the sa’ir la’aza’zel ritually burdened with the community’s sins. The goat, a living repository for human depravity, is banished to the wilderness. Today, we have modern scapegoats, targeted in the recesses of X or the mutterings on college campuses, who bear the outsized weight of moral judgment. In our unceasing hysteria, we seem to have forgotten that the scapegoat, however obliquely, is merely a proxy for our deeper, more personal moral conflicts. Guilty or not, the targets of cancel culture are ascribed a shame that is not entirely theirs to shoulder. In turn, their exclusion and our proclivity for one-dimensional moral judgments expose the moral erosion of society writ large.
As part of its shaming, cancel culture
seeks to stigmatize moral transgressors—an ineffective practice that inflicts psychological harm. Stigmatization is defined as shaming where the wrongdoer is treated as an “outcast” or “bad person” beyond simply being held accountable. Herein lies the distinction between necessary and gratuitous shaming. On the one hand, it would be socially irresponsible not to shame harmful behaviors, not to uphold moral boundaries, or not to at least try to elicit remorse. On the other hand, shaming, especially when accompanied by stigmatization, is not a harmless approach.
Not only does shame-proneness (which, unlike guilt-proneness, is positively correlated with anger, hostility, and the propensity to blame external factors for one’s own misfortunes) lead to psychological symptoms like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, but, at its core, it is a non-adaptive emotion. Shame’s inherently ego-centric focus on the “bad self”—rather than the bad behavior—derails the empathic process, leaving individuals unable to direct their emotional and cognitive resources toward the harmed other.
While guilt prompts confessions, apologies, and redemptive efforts, shame leads to denial, hiding, and attempts to escape the situation that induced it. If the broader culture erases the nuance of your character, why wouldn’t you get angry, retreat inward, and externalize blame? When accountability crosses into performative punishment, it is no wonder that the shamed party clings to anger, resentment, and whatever cocktail of emotions arises from others going too far. As a collective, we should be cognizant of when we are punishing or shunning too harshly, as this overreach reflects our own morality, or lack thereof.
Writing from the stacks of a Brown University library, where I am at risk of sounding preachy, I believe it is a matter of human decency to protect others from excessive shame and humiliation. In college, I am surrounded by sophisticated thinkers, in awe of my fellow students’ minds except when it comes to moralism. Perhaps my peers and I just draw the line differently, but when it comes to social punishment and redemption, it’s as if all complexity dissipates. Why, I wonder, is moral judgment the exception to our extensive training in intellectual rigor?
American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that stigmatizing behavior, or the impulse to stigmatize, is an aggressive response to infantile narcissism and shame rooted in
our own incompleteness. Less abstractly, when we feel insecure or shamed, we affirm our own normalcy by casting others as deviant. In this sense, the urge to shame others is a projection of our own unresolved psychologies—and should not be easily trusted.
As a case study in merciless public shaming, I interviewed former Congressman Anthony Weiner. The subject of three major sexting scandals, Weiner resigned from Congress, ran for mayor of New York City, returned to digital exhibitionism under the pseudonym “Carlos Danger,” got caught again, sexted a minor, accidentally included his young son in the background of a photo, and served 18 months in prison. Naturally, Weiner was publicly shamed, excoriated for his repeat offenses, and memed into infamy. And rightly so, to an extent.
This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, for absolute clarity and precision: In probing his case, I do not mean to minimize Weiner’s offenses or the magnitude of harm they caused. This is, solely and methodically, an intellectual inquiry into the question, “What comes after cancellation?”
Fourteen years after the first scandal, Weiner has grown used to talking about it. Before our conversation, I had thought, hoped even, that Weiner would be irritable and easily provoked. Perhaps we would commiserate over the profligacy of public shaming—he, an emblem of its ruin, I, a critic of its effects. Maybe he would yell at me when I asked about those headlines (“Weiner Roast,” “Erect Me Mr. Mayor,” “Too Hard to Stop!”), mimicking his outbursts toward strangers and newscasters in Weiner, the documentary.
What I got instead was a highly therapized, post-hoc version of someone who used to be more resentful and dispositionally cantankerous. “There’s this expression in twelve-step recovery,” he explains, giving me the vaguely apologetic look of someone about to regurgitate a therapeutic platitude. “It’s ‘what others think of me is none of my business.’ You take your own inventory, figure out your own actions, what amends are due, and then you basically say, ‘My side of the street is clean.’” Weiner is an enigma in that he recently ran for public office again. But his bid for New York City Council wasn’t some post-cancel-culture, Trump-era shift—it was just him. When he was first accused, Weiner lied repeatedly to his friends, family, campaign staff, and the general public. He throttled through nearly every dimension on the Compass of Shame Scale (COSS-4)—attack self, avoidance, attack other,
and withdrawal—except for the last. Since then, he has lost his job, his wife, and his privacy. He has served time, undergone intensive therapy treatments, and lived, highly supervised, in a halfway house.
Now, he has a sponsor for sex addiction and self-describes as someone who is “constantly touching wires” to see if he will feel something. It’s as if Weiner has been publicly shamed to the point of no return, numbed into a state of catatonic unfeelingness. “My situation is so sui generis,” he says almost proudly. Of course, his case sits at the extreme end of the spectrum, revealing tensions familiar to more run-of-themill campus cancel-culture debates but also pushing far beyond them.
Apropos of this piece and the moral decay of shamers, Weiner recounts, “When someone yells at me, and it’s always from across the street…When they’re talking to me, they’re not.” Rather than conversing with him, in goodwill or not, passersby chastise Weiner from afar. “If you’re yelling from over there, that means you’re performing your outrage,” he explains. “You’re performing for everyone else that you’re not a sex offender, or whatever it is.” Weiner’s anecdote, along with the almost sadistic creation of the Weiner documentary—a chronicle of scenes from his torpedoing marriage and gradual-but-thorough alienation of his supporters and staff—proves Nussbaum’s point about mankind’s need to other. Why else would we want to watch Weiner’s life fall apart in such excruciating detail?
Public shaming has a distinctly unflattering, voyeuristic component, one that
parades a false moralism and reflects poorly on shaming culture. It’s unethical—or, at least, morally ambiguous—to alienate others pointblank, but shamers justify doing so through moral disengagement. By downplaying the psychological pain and humanity of moral offenders, and thereby disengaging from them, participants in shaming culture distort reality to absolve their actions.
The very crux of moral disengagement is this false reality: a world where bad people feel pain differently or not at all, where there’s a oneto-one ratio of malfeasance and retribution—a world we have collectively inhabited and tried to prettify. Unfortunately, though, it’s not real. For those who resist this cultural charade and prioritize their own moral integrity (why tarnish it for the counterproductivity of public shaming?), a way forward exists.
With conscious effort, we can rework public shaming into a reintegrative process, mitigating its moral and psychological harm. In reintegrative frameworks, as opposed to stigmatizing ones, the wrongdoer is treated with respect and empathy. They are ascribed something closer to guilt, which attaches itself to an immoral act or behavior, rather than the self as a whole.
We can take inspiration from Japanese culture, where the evil part of the self— symbolized by mushi, meaning bug or worm— is excised through an act of remorse. We can allow for the possibility of nuance, of multidimensionality. We can end the absoluteness of cancellation, the fantasy of banishing someone entirely from society, and focus instead on their reassimilation. We can lower our metaphorical pitchforks, even for someone like Anthony Weiner.
Therapy, prison, social support networks, codes of conduct, and rehabilitation programs all exist, controversial as they may be, to safeguard moral standards. So why must we— the self-appointed guardians of morality, who seem to have complete faith in our own purity— step in beyond these systems? A messier, more complicated, more tolerant view of human nature and transgression would elevate our personal integrity and help make us a more moral society. What say you, Brown University?
on language & risks
how-was-your-summer-goooood-how-was-yours-so-goooodsaw-my-family-it-was-nice-
by Katya Michkovskaia
Illustrated by MINGLU DU
I rarely speak my native language at Brown. When I come back to my dorm and think in English—out of habit—I feel pathetic. It’s not because I don’t enjoy speaking it—it's this shift that reminds me of the performativity that underlies daily conversations. I sit on the floor and catch myself using generic filler phrases that are commonly used for comforting and supporting others. You’ve got this. You’re doing great.
And then I wonder why I don’t feel any better.
English has a delightful flow. Its transitions are seamless and smooth—it envelops you like fog in the mountains; when I speak, I envision a river of milk and honey that lulls and carries me far away. But the milk is murky. You can get away with just using a sequence of socially-beloved phrases, stretching out in a meaningless chain, one after another. When I use them, it’s as if I have given up my sense of autonomy and engineered my communication to be traditional, tried and tested rather than tailored to this particular situation. The range of situations where expressions sparkle with feigned joy (wow!! no way OMG!! that’s amazing!!!!!!!!!) could include either a wedding or a well-seasoned salad, a decision to S/NC a class, or… actually, to not S/NC it as well. Russian snaps me back into reality. So do Spanish, French, and Portuguese. In those languages, there is no secure scenario to follow. Speaking Russian is riskier than sticking to the dialogue templates in English, but much more raw and rewarding. When I hang out with my Russian-speaking friends on campus, I feel exposed, as if the eggshell that I’ve been carefully hiding behind this whole time is cracking and falling down. Here I am in front of them—naked, raw, unrefined.
Neuroscientifically, it's less taxing to describe emotionally charged experiences in a foreign language. Deep autobiographical memories and experiences are rooted in your native language. To talk about them in a foreign language, we don’t just rely on emotional processing, but on many other cognitive functions, which dampen the emotional reaction. That’s why I can convince myself in
English that everything is phenomenal and that ‘you’ve got it, girl,’ but when I stare at myself in the mirror and manually switch my thoughts to Russian, the same words affect me much more strongly.
Paradoxically, speaking your native language to yourself and a foreign one to others lead to almost the same degree of embarrassment. When I speak Russian to myself, I can’t hide behind a barricade of fake consolations and luscious compliments. It’s a language in which my бабушка makes brutally honest comments about my housekeeping skills, in which my папа corrects my posture, and my мама psychoanalyzes my romantic interests. It’s also the language that Dovlatov spoke and never sugarcoated. There is no place for hypocrisy in Russian, or The Native Language in general. That’s where vulnerability comes from—facing the “quivering creature” you are when no one is there to smile, nod, and bounce back with a comfortable anecdote.
As for the embarrassment when speaking a foreign language, we all know how it feels to be paralyzed when the all-mighty native speaker looks you up and down as you try to mumble, “I’d love to visit Brazil.” The part that hurts the most is how reassuring and excited they seem when they tell you, ‘You speak so well!’, which only further confirms how awkward you sound. It feels like the extent of your nonbelonging is so huge that it relieves them—you’ll never be at their level, so why not grant you a condescending remark? This embarrassment you feel is also a kind of rebellion—confronting your own pride and arrogance in even daring to speak their tongue.
Are you ready to sacrifice your confidence to melt into a new version of yourself? How far will you go, knowing that, for a long time, this version will be a reductionist shadow of your personality? How hard will you push yourself to reinvent the way you think about grammar, intonation, and pacing? How much will you change, stepping so far away from yourself, and which aspects will remain untouched by the transformation?
You know what the worst aspect of the
language barrier was when I moved to the US? Humor. Sarcasm used to be my main means of communication, and I was effortless with my jokes in Russian. I was absolutely paralyzed when my toolbox of shared cultural code, experiences, and wordplay disappeared. That first week at Brown, when not only the characters and objects around me were new, but even my own words felt alien, extraneous, and clumsy, was a distressing yet adventurous linguistic expedition. I made many new friends, and one of them was the English language. It never replaced Russian, but it offered me its own treats, like slang, puns, and proverbs. I didn’t betray myself by switching to a different mode of communication; I architected a symbiotic system where every new language benefited and enriched my identity. But honestly, language in its essence is pure embarrassment. Any of your ideas, when they lose their spiritual and intangible nature, become flawed and then easily critiqued. And to be eloquent enough in at least one language takes dedication and tedious revision. Maybe that’s why people tend to slip back into familiar conversation templates. There is no need to make any risky decisions on how to describe your summer or make a person feel better.
In order to succeed in a language, be it foreign or native, it’s crucial to know why you speak. Is it to maintain a socially acceptable distance, to keep others away from your true persona, masking it with empty epithets or soulless interjections—or do you actually want to foster a connection and put yourself at the risk of being judged for what you believe?
I invite you to break free of the automatic mode of perception and start thinking, start speaking, for yourself. Maybe that coat is not AWESOME—maybe it’s the fabric, or the pockets, or the silhouette that you’d rather point out. Or maybe you don’t even like it that much. Critical thinking is not just a tool for the classroom, but also a way to challenge yourself and break the vicious cycle of conformism and performativity.
We have control over the word choices we make. Don’t hide behind them; use language to be seen, and you will soon feel addicted to expressing what’s on your mind, and not the one of the collective consciousness. Take risks, stay sexy.
After yet another late arrival, I wrote this in my notebook:
I never quite stride with the length, speed, and ease I hope for when I’m in a rush. Hurrying means swinging my legs like they’re a pair of logs. In rebuke, sweat collects above my upper lip, in my armpits, on the soles of my feet. My calves whine against the effort: You’re too apathetic to push me like this, out of the blue!
There’s no time to listen to them, of course. Only time enough to swerve and sidestep the pedestrians congesting my walking route. Everyone’s so aloof! Is no one but me due somewhere—nearly overdue? Does anyone have anything to do but clog my shortcuts and muffle my footsteps with their headphones and chatter?
I lifted my pen and nearly smiled. Even as I griped, I had to admit: There’s something irresistible about tussling with time.
I When I was seven and my sister Abi was ten, we were late to a karate tournament. We wanted to win trophies. Meanwhile, Los Angeles traffic, the things that weren’t in my mother’s purse but needed to be, and the clock’s proclivity for forward movement came together in perfect harmony. My father stepped on the gas and my mother hissed, “Oh Daniel, Daniel…”
In the back of the car, Abi and I fixed our focus on executing Carmographs, our very own highly scientific graphical system for transcribing everything there was to know about a car ride. We each dangled our pens over a page. The only forces allowed to move the pen were the car’s acceleration and judders. My Carmograph spiderwebbed across the paper; I also stole a glance at Abi’s, whose lines were
notes on time
may
it always be fast and slow
by NINA LIDAR
Illustrated by Julie sok
more congested.
“Fuck!” (on the rare occasions my father said the F-word, it burst out like a gunshot); sirens caterwauled; our backs thumped against the seats that had scooted forward to meet us.
A big vested torso blacked out the window. The policeman’s knuckle came forward and rapped on the glass. My father inhaled and exhaled and pressed the window button.
Apparently we were going 90. I imagined the cop’s voice coming out of a robot. “That’s 25 miles above the speed limit, you know. Very dangerous. There’s some paperwork you have to do now. It’ll take a few minutes.”
I tapped my mother on the shoulder and whispered (because I still knew how to be polite, of course), “Look at my Carmograph.” I passed it up to her. Abi said, “Wait, look at mine,” and placed hers right on top of mine. I would have said something, but I remembered the policeman was standing there and knew my father’s voice wasn’t usually so deep and gravelly, so I kept my mouth shut.
My mother’s head wasn’t angled at the paper.
“Did you look at my Carmograph?” I whispered.
Abi said, “No, look at mine first.”
My mother twisted back to face us. She raised her eyebrows, nodded, and smiled. Blah, blah, blah, my dad and the policeman were saying things to each other that sounded like nothing. What’s a registration? I’d always wanted to open the glove compartment, but whoever made cars didn’t put glove compartments in the backseat for kids. I would have filled mine with Harry Potter books and Oreos. My mom reached in and excavated
a booklet from beneath a hundred napkins, then handed it to my dad, who handed it to the policeman. What were they even talking about anymore? Adults only ever seemed to have fun when they were talking to kids.
A kiai is the yell you do in karate to emphasize an important strike. I had just recently decided to transition mine from a “Hai!” to a “Tsah!” and it was even more momentous than when I decided to begin writing my lowercase As with the extra curl on top. I’d still catch myself writing the old A sometimes. I’d have to erase it and write it again, the new way. When I wrote “Carmograph” on the top of the page, and in pen, no less, I did the As the new, right way, first try. Now I was about to debut my new “Tsah!” at the tournament, if we ever made it.
What were we doing getting pulled over? I might not even have time to practice before we got there, before I had to do my kata for the judges.
“Abi, listen to my kiai.”
“No—”
“TSAAAAAAAH!” It came out with even more force than my dad’s F-word. The way I screeched, I felt like an eagle. Or maybe a crane, the best of the five karate spirit animals.
My mom almost had her chance to get mad, but she only got as far as an electric-shock jump in her seat and an “Oh my God, Nina!” But I was right about kids being the only way to make adults have fun. Or at least to stop being so not fun.
Outside my dad’s window, the torso sank and a head took its place. I thought he might be mad, but the policeman had on a little smile. He stuck his head halfway inside.
“That was quite a yell, miss.”
“Thank you. It was my kiai. For karate.”
Abi sat up as straight as a ruler, the way she always did when it was time to look mature. She said, “We’re both orange belts. We’re on our way to a tournament.”
“We’re gonna do Kata One, and then we’re gonna spar. I hope we don’t miss the katas, but we’re late. I like katas better than sparring. My sensei said he bets I could win a trophy.”
Abi said, “We’ve been practicing every day.”
The policeman said, “Wouldn’t want to face you two girls in a fight.” And then he said that it was our dad’s lucky day, and normally he’d give him a ticket, but we should go win some trophies instead.
My dad sang “We Are the Champions” for the rest of the drive. We got to the tournament right on time. I won fourth place for my Kata One, which wasn’t as high as third, second, or first, but it was high enough that I still got a trophy. Abi won second in her division, and I was hardly even jealous, because I got a trophy all the same, and I watched her kata and it was really good.
Also, after the policeman left us alone, my dad waited until he couldn’t see the police car anymore, and then he stepped on the gas until we were going 90 again. My mom still said,
A minute earlier, her arms were stretched wide around bags of groceries and her bulging stomach. She had no shot of seeing the ground. Stepping from the car onto the curb, the most she could do was hope that her waddle would deliver her to the thin lane of shoveled pavement, but a shock of frigid wetness seized her toes instead. Such was her fate, though she permitted herself a string of conciliatory expletives: her feet plowed two new troughs through the snow. Up the stairs she went, down plunked the bags, and back out she went for the second load.
I shot into the world in the form of a lesson: Life doesn’t wait for your permission to launch its cannonballs right at you.
My mom’s Motorola cellphone jingled. She shuffled her second load of grocery bags into a precarious single-armed embrace, shimmied her cellphone from her pocket, was about to flip it open, then heard a faint whoosh where the snow sucked it into a wet abyss.
Out flew a new string of expletives and down went a new set of parallel, if slightly more haphazard, troughs in the snow. Down went the bags in the foyer, outspread their contents on the floor, around pivoted my panting, cursing mother, and back outside she hobbled to crane her neck over her humongous belly in vain
little arms and said, HUZZAH! I AM COMING!
I punched through the amniotic sac with a fist destined for the orange-belt seven-andeight-year-old-division fourth-place kata trophy.
IV
In the minutes before my first date with my now-boyfriend, I couldn’t get my heart to slow its pumping. It kept on as though, if it pumped fast enough, it would beat a new tempo straight into the clock’s cogs. The seconds would have no choice but to tick by faster. And then I’d get to the good part already—I’d get to the date.
Now, when I’m with him, my heart slows. It tries to tug the clock in the other direction. It wants the seconds to stretch out and relax. “Bum…bum…bum…bum…” Time doesn’t need to keep moving, does it? Why would it when we could stay right here?
V
The sun rises to the middle of the sky on a Tuesday and catches my shadow slipping around the side of the house.
People lean back against their headrests because they don’t need to watch the road when no one’s car is moving anyway.
Runners pick a faster song: encouragement
things left unsaid
class, gender, and the relationships of normal people
by Madison Diaz Illustrated by jay moon
This summer, I reread Sally Rooney’s sophomore novel, Normal People, for the first time in four years. The first time I read it, I finished it in one sitting and fell in love, but didn’t completely understand why. Was I supposed to love the main characters? Hate them? Root for them? I reread the novel with these questions in mind, hoping to answer them this time around. Four years later, I finally understand why I found the novel so compelling: it’s real. A story about two Irish teenagers whose lives intertwine across the span of four years, Normal People is, at its core, about the effects of class, wealth, and gender on romantic relationships. However, before telling people about my love for the novel, I often preface with, “I know it’s not for everyone, but,” hoping to gauge whether or not a fellow reader will understand my interpretation. In the era of BookTok and social media literary discourse, many on the internet have painted Normal People as a novel about a toxic relationship, riddled with miscommunication between two main characters who seem frustratingly unable to speak.
Normal People is set in Ireland from 2011 to 2015. Marianne and Connell attend the
same high school but live in entirely different circles: Marianne comes from familial wealth and notoriously has no friends at school, while Connell is well-liked by everyone and comes from no wealth at all. When Connell’s mother becomes a cleaner for Marianne’s family, the two form a unique, secret bond that follows them to university. They experience many ups and downs, often characterized by their lack of communication and misinterpretations of each other’s feelings.
Upon rereading the novel, I have begun to resent the internet for its tendency to mischaracterize the story. When you search Normal People on TikTok, countless videos appear: fan edits of the Hulu adaptation, reviews both good and bad, analyses, rants. The novel garners reactions on both sides: some readers love it, while others express a strong disdain for it. Many have called it boring, stating that “nothing happens,” while some hate the main characters and their relationship journey. One of the largest criticisms from readers is the lack of quotation marks around dialogue. “The first time I tried to read Normal People, the lack of quotation marks made me quit,” one TikTok commenter writes. While difficult to get used to, the novel’s lack of quotation marks is an intentional stylistic choice by Rooney. Without quotation marks, the lines between what the characters are saying and what they are thinking are blurred, reflecting the constant miscommunications between them. This creates an immersive reading experience—our confusion about where thoughts end and dialogue begins mirrors the confusion that the main characters feel when communicating with each other. During Marianne and Connell’s interactions, lots of things are left unsaid. It is these complications that ultimately drive the story and make it worth reading—unconventional punctuation and all. Prior to reading the novel, I had already seen these various debates surrounding its merits online, and anticipated a “will-they-won’tthey” romance. On Goodreads, reviewers often categorize it under the “Romance” genre. However, I feel that this label greatly oversimplifies what the novel is truly about. Reviewers who deem it nothing more than a romance often fail to examine the nuances of Rooney’s intended message. While the plot is centered on a romantic relationship, Rooney uses that relationship to make statements about class and gender. The conflicts within Marianne and Connell’s relationship often stem from their failure to communicate and be honest with each other. Fundamentally, these conflicts are rooted in their wealth disparity and patriarchal values. While in college, they break up because Connell, unable to find subsidized housing, must move back home to work. Marianne, meanwhile, lives in an apartment inherited from her parents. Connell finds it too difficult to ask, even though he knows Marianne would say yes, thinking “It just felt too much like asking her for money.” Connell’s financial background, paired with the pressure to be “masculine” in traditional Irish society, affects his view on asking Marianne for help. It’s not a question of whether they love each other enough to be together, but rather their fundamental differences that create a large discrepancy in their communication styles.
At the root of these conflicts are the things they aren’t saying. “They never talked, for example, about the fact that her mother paid his mother money to scrub their floors and hang their laundry, or about the fact that this money circulated indirectly to Connell, who spent it, as often as
not, on Marianne,” Rooney writes. Connell’s masculinity is something that he grapples with throughout the novel. Around Marianne and her wealthy inner circle, he feels insecure about being perceived as helpless, since patriarchal societies often paint men as the “breadwinners.” Marianne is equally impacted by the stereotypes of their society. Throughout the novel, her trauma leads her to seek validation from men. While travelling in Europe, Connell notices deer on the road that freeze in the headlights of cars rather than saving themselves, and compares this behavior to Marianne’s. When learning about Marianne’s abusive relationships, Connell fantasizes about harming the men who have harmed her and is “unable to reconcile himself to the idea of losing his hold over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use.” Because Connell feels so emasculated in the financial and social aspects of their relationship, he takes on the role of her “protector,” allowing him to regain his sense of masculinity. Although Connell feels empowered by this role, he’s also made uncomfortable by Marianne’s willingness and desire to be dominated, leading to conflict within their romantic relationship. He can’t understand why she would submit herself to mistreatment, while Marianne can’t understand why he won’t treat her like everyone else does. The frustration that many readers feel surrounding Marianne and Connell’s lack of communication is understandable, making the depiction of their relationship all the more realistic. Rooney paints a picture of a transactional relationship. Connell’s proximity to Marianne and her wealth benefits him: He finds several opportunities for jobs and scholarships simply by being in her circle. “Rich people look out for each other, and being Marianne’s best friend and suspected sexual partner has elevated Connell to the status of rich-adjacent: someone for whom surprise birthday parties are thrown and cushy jobs are procured out of nowhere,” Rooney writes. In turn, Marianne receives love and attention from Connell that she lacks from other people in
her life. Although they both benefit from this exchange in many ways, they never discuss it, out of fear that the other will not understand due to their fundamental differences in class, gender, and life experiences. It’s extremely realistic in the sense that these are topics that normal people find difficult to talk about. Whether it’s regarding money or status or background, it’s easy to let difference become grounds for miscommunication.
I understand readers’ frustration with Marianne and Connell’s relationship, truly. At the end of the day, who wants to root for characters that can’t seem to just speak to each other? Reading the novel, I wanted to yell through the pages, put the characters in a room, and force them to say what’s on their minds. But in a way, I think that this frustration is what makes Rooney’s writing so good. Marianne and Connell feel real—you understand them, you root for them, you hate them, you love them, and you do it over and over. And isn’t
that what great literature is supposed to do: make you feel? Sally Rooney’s writing takes on a very specific style: character-driven, structurally unique, almost matter-of-fact. She writes with no intention of embellishing or being dramatic, but rather creates characters that endure reflective internal journeys. The trajectory of Marianne and Connell’s relationship is succinctly laid out by the first line of the novel: “Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell.” This simple line explains the dynamic between the characters, which remains constant throughout the novel. Marianne is willing to be “used” in order to be loved, making herself available to Connell. Connell sees Marianne as a stable pillar in his life and knows that she will always be there. This is emphasized by the last line of the novel, spoken by Marianne: “You should go. I’ll always be here. You should know that.” Rooney writes not for a dramatic plot but rather to explore human relationships and the class dynamics that impact them. Normal People isn’t a romance, or an example to live by; it’s a harrowing and realistic depiction of a complicated relationship plagued by unspoken questions.
below the surface
on pool parties, teen movies, and the age of gracelessness
by Sara Harley
Illustrated by Corrina Zhang
My childhood in California can be memorialized as a hodgepodge of rainbow pool towels, water guns, cherry popsicles, plastic cups, and sticky fingers: a pandemonium of juvenile chaos that could only be found at a pool party. Speakers blasted my dad’s encyclopedic playlist while I splashed my sister and immediately regretted it. The lazy summer sun almost forgot to set while we sat on the patio waiting for pizza delivery, wrapped in ponchos and towels like little Russian babushki.
A few weeks ago, I was reminiscing about The Edge of Seventeen, my favorite movie I watched in high school. The film’s deadpan humor and raw writing capture the abrasive and oftentimes painfully awkward essence of what it means to “come of age.” Towards the middle, the protagonist Nadine phones a boy: “Hey, do you have a swimming pool? Can I come swim in it?” It dawned on me that all of the best (i.e. my favorite) coming-of-age films seem to have a commonality: pool parties.
I grew up during the golden age of the “Disney Channel Original Movie”: sparkly and deliciously corny mostly-musicals where nothing bad happened and Kevin Chamberlin almost always made a guest appearance. The plot is the same every time: The protagonist lives in a world where
feminism, and the abolition of gender roles—all under the guise of a silly campy beach musical,” according to a review by Freddie Hill.
Watching Disney Channel movies, I couldn’t wait to start high school. In retrospect, despite their entertainment value, I think they gave me unrealistic expectations for what being a teenager was going to be like. The actors were far too old, the characters never experienced any true hardship, and the plots were idealistic and based on extraordinary circumstances. I went to an all-girls school, so the closest I came to football players becoming theatre stars was me playing a fish in our fall musical, The Little Mermaid.
As I grew older, I continued to search for movies I could identify with. I found most movies that tried to portray adolescence felt like speculative fiction. It was obvious the writers hadn’t been teens for years; the jargon was outdated and references to popular culture were cliché. Pool parties have become an analogy for the teenage experience: strange and turbulent places in which nobody knows how to act their age, everyone realizes they’re wearing far young audience, managing “to explore themes of environmentalism, anti-capitalism, feminism, and the abolition of gender roles—all
they don’t feel they entirely fit in, then they discover they have a special talent or skill, and use it to overcome some sort of obstacle. The climax is usually a grand celebration of their individuality, of breaking free from the status quo. Despite their formulaic storylines, Disney Channel movies from this time radiated an aura of youthful harmony and joy that got me every time. I planned my weekends around High School Musical and Camp Rock movie marathons.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I was nine, all I truly wanted was to be an extra in Teen Beach Movie. A meta retelling of the musical West Side Story, bikers and surfers band together to bring protagonists Mack and Brady home after a massive wave plunges them into the movie set of “Wet Side Story.” As if it were yesterday, I remember rewinding the dance break in “Cruisin’ for A Bruisin’" on my portable DVD player to learn how to dance like Ross Lynch. I was unsuccessful. The ocean—a pool of sorts— serves as the story’s catalyst, representing a place of possibility and imagination, where reality can be turned on its head. The film is surprisingly thoughtful for one targeted at a young audience, managing “to explore themes of environmentalism, anti-capitalism,
under the guise of a silly campy beach musical,” according to a review by Freddie Hill.
Watching Disney Channel movies, I couldn’t wait to start high school. In retrospect, despite their entertainment value, I think they gave me unrealistic expectations for what being a teenager was going to be like. The actors were far too old, the characters never experienced any true hardship, and the plots were idealistic and based on extraordinary circumstances. I went to an all-girls school, so the closest I came to football players becoming theatre stars was me playing a fish in our fall musical, The Little Mermaid.
As I grew older, I continued to search for movies I could identify with. I found most movies that tried to portray adolescence felt like speculative fiction. It was obvious the writers hadn’t been teens for years; the jargon was outdated and references to popular culture were cliché. Pool parties have become an analogy for the teenage experience: strange and turbulent places in which nobody knows how to act their age, everyone realizes they’re wearing far fewer clothes than usual, and it becomes socially acceptable to belly flop.
Stand-up comedian Bo Burham’s directorial debut Eighth Grade is the most authentic and vulnerable portrayal of modern teenage awkwardness in cinema. Ironically, it’s also rated R. During her last week of eighth grade, the protagonist Kayla navigates what it means to be dubbed the “most quiet” student in her class. Portrayed by Elsie Fisher, who was only 14 during filming, Kayla navigates crushes, acne, selfimage, and social media in a world that desires to accelerate adolescence. She has her own YouTube channel, where she posts advice about how to stop caring what others think, be yourself, and find confidence. But, at their core, the videos Kayla posts are failed attempts at trying to convince herself she doesn’t care what others think, when in reality, she struggles with intense selfconsciousness and social anxiety.
Perhaps the most famous of the bunch, the pool party in Eighth Grade is gut-wrenching. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s worth watching the short scene as a study of how the camera can be used to evoke tone. It begins with an agonizingly long, drawn-out tracking shot of Kayla walking onto the patio in a neon green one-piece. Her shoulders are hunched and drawn forward. In the background, an orchestral piece with trumpets builds louder and faster, as if Hans Zimmer were marionetting the scene. These elements point towards an uneasiness in the narrative. Kayla sees a group of her male classmates shooting water guns, spitting water, and eating snacks, while her female classmates try to tan and attract attention.
The drawn-out awkwardness is finally broken when Kayla submerges underwater. The music stops and the pace slows. She leans against the edge and wraps her arms around herself. The pool is a medium of freedom, a force that both cleanses and reveals. The image Kayla manufactures through her YouTube channel dissolves, revealing her susceptibility to insecurity beneath.
If Eighth Grade epitomizes what it’s like to be a middle schooler, then Booksmart is the perfect transition to epitomizing high school. The story follows Molly and Amy, two high-achieving high school seniors who want to experience what it’s like to be a “normal teenager” the night before graduation. When they finally find a party to attend, the story seems complete—cue pool party.
In contrast to Eighth Grade, the pool scene
in Booksmart takes place at night during a house party. Amy is invited to go swimming with a girl she likes. The color of the water is noticeably darker, representing a place of intrigue and opportunity, as opposed to escape. Instead of one long tracking shot, there are many nimble camera breaks that quicken the tempo of the scene, eliciting a certain sense of danger and urgency. While Kayla dreads the pool party in Eighth Grade, Booksmart’s director Olivia Wilde says that Amy’s maturity allows her to “to take a leap, literally, into the pool. She’s going to shed her skin and fly.” The song “Slip Away” by Perfume Genius creates an unexpected emotional undercurrent in the scene. Just as Amy jumps into the pool, the synth and bass crescendo like a beating heart. The second verse goes: “Don't look back, I want to break free / If you'll never see 'em coming / You'll never have to hide / Take my hand, take my everything / If we only got a moment / Give it to me now.” Enveloped by water, both figuratively and literally, Amy is exposed as her most unguarded self. Exhaling a visceral breath of teenage liberation, the water sets her free. Will Ferrell, an executive producer on the film, reacted to an early cut of it, saying, “That’s one of the most beautiful scenes I’ve ever seen.”
To me, swimming pools take anyone— characters in film and in real life—and reduce them to their most ordinary, natural identities. Untethered from both space and time, these scenes raise existential questions about the very nature of our existence: Who are we? How do we interact with the world? In what ways do we try to hide ourselves? Put another way, pool scenes in teenage movies expose characters’ thoughts and insecurities.
As universal childhood experiences, pool parties evoke memories of supreme moments of liberation, anxiety, joy, and introspection. I think my nostalgia for artificial bodies of water as a cornerstone of childhood, though, is in large part due to the movies I watched. As I grow older, I continue to notice how my life has been shaped and, to a certain extent, preserved by the media I consume. In these places that preserve authenticity, perhaps it's just better to swim below the surface.
shades of today
a moodboard of fall
by liv moon
Illustration by Orla maxwell @eight_of_ponds
Fall enters Providence with a quiet gravity. The city’s color palette shifts as the trees along Benefit Street turn. While the foliage may be beautiful, these warm colors are the manifestation of a fleeting moment. As chlorophyll drains from each leaf, other pigments—anthocyanins and carotenoids— creep up to the surface. Reds, oranges, golds, and greens litter the sidewalks in slow motion. There’s something deeply familiar about this process, not only because it happens every year, but because it feels like a reflection of the seasonal fluctuations we experience ourselves.
The breeze sharpens. The days shorten. People stop lingering, and life begins to pick up ever so slightly, tilting towards some sort of inevitability. You can feel it in the air—not just the change in temperature but the shift in atmosphere—as a tired stillness settles across campus, like a collective breath no one realizes they are holding. The only audible rhythm is the echo of coughing, accidentally forming a chorus in the background.
Intentionally or not, students begin to mirror the changing leaves. The yellow-orange of Emergen-C packets, the muddied browns of over-steeped tea gone cold, the dull pinks of tired eyes against the green tinge on the face of that one kid who doesn’t “feel too good,” these aren’t just curated fall hues—in actuality, these shades of today are the byproduct of barely holding it together.
Rest becomes negotiable. Eating well becomes an aspiration. Health becomes performative because there’s no built-in pause between all the things you’re still expected to produce: papers, projects, ideas, answers.
At this point in the semester, students talk less about “staying healthy” and more about “not getting sick.” The goal isn’t to thrive, but to endure, to scrape together enough of yourself to
get through the next thing: critiques, midterms, final proposals, the group project that got lost in the back of your mind until someone finally emailed. The next task on your to-do list becomes patching things together and carrying on because everyone else seems to be doing the same.
On campus, where expectations are constant and the pace rarely slows, this seasonal shift follows a schedule of its own. Your body starts asking questions your Google Calendar can’t answer. Most students won’t admit it outright, but the truth is clear in the half-smiles you’ll see across campus: many are running on empty. Their once creative minds are fogged by dehydration, and their concentration is slipping alongside their motivation.
In the midst of sickness, the semester keeps spinning and deadlines won’t bend, but still, you show up the next morning half-awake, puffyeyed and all. You share ginger chews with your friend. Your roommate texts you a soup recipe over Instagram. You send your lecture notes to the classmate who needed the extra hour and a half of shut-eye. Someone leaves a cough drop on your desk, a gesture of solidarity. Fall is beautiful, but it asks for a lot. It pushes you to choose between rest and rigor, to turn in a project that is done “just enough,” not because you don’t care, but because your body is calling the shots.
There’s a reason leaves fall: a tree knows to conserve its energy and will let go of what is inessential so that it can survive the changing weather. What may look like decay is actually
strategy, adaptation. Rest is a medium of some sort, and although immunity may not end up on your resume, it is shaping the quality of work you produce in the long run.
A strange clarity emerges during these months. Unlike the brightness and inspiration that fuels the beginning of a semester, this new understanding is of limits and priorities, of practical advice: which professors are lenient with extensions, if tomorrow’s meeting is mandatory, where to find the best bowl of noodles on Thayer. Maybe this looks like disengagement, or perhaps it's a form of survival.
Students start to recognize when it's time to scale it back, when to ask for help. They begin to acknowledge small moments of peace, such as a shared laugh in the studio, a text from a friend checking in, a short walk between study sessions that helps them feel more awake. Experiences like these are reminders that wellness is not a solitary goal. Rather, it is woven through the fabric of daily life.
We underestimate how much of a resource
our immunity is. Perhaps most of us don’t even notice when it’s hard at work. There’s a misconception that immunity works like a switch: You’re either healthy or you’re not. In truth, immunity is a layered process that rarely feels complete but is always in motion. Your immune system is like any other system, after all. It requires maintenance, occasional experimentation. Blind faith, maybe. Most of all, it requires time, which no one seems to have enough of lately. But you do what you can: sleeping in when you can, choosing water over a third coffee, getting your vitamin C in as many days of the week as you remember to. It’s
hard to say if it's working, but you keep doing it anyway.
The reality of fall is not the candlelit fairytale sold by Trader Joe’s alongside their Fall Fantasy Pumpkins. It’s messier and livedin. Damp, and a tad achey. But above all, it’s shared. Everyone is a little bit sick, a little bit
tired, a little bit behind. In the honest struggle of student life in flux, there is community, which may not be a cure but is a kind of resilience. This is how we care for each other in fall: indirectly, without ceremony.
POS T-P OURRI BEFORE YOU
GO
anatomy of a college student's bag
the collegium discipulo sacco dorsali specimen and its functions
by April Wang | Illustrated by April Wang
1. Laptop: The lifeblood of a college student, plastered with stickers and maybe a little chipped from being dropped that one time. In the immortal words of Rosa Diaz, if anything happened to it, you would “kill everyone in this room and then [your]self.”
2. Pencil case: 10 percent pens and pencils. 90 percent random implements that you will never use—but what if you need them someday? Then you’ll be glad to have a mini stapler, hole puncher, and convertible scissors.
3. Headphones: For warding off awkward conversations.
4. Notebooks: Makes you feel less like a screenager—until you realize that taking physical notes is really tedious and slow. So you migrate to your computer or iPad. The barely used notebooks are still there just so your backpack isn’t depressingly empty.
5. Phone: The quintessential tool for procrastination. Say, have you done today’s Wordle yet?
6. Laptop charger: The one day you forget it is the one day that you’ll desperately need it.
7. Water bottle: Keeping you healthy by keeping you hydrated, and also adding 10 pounds to your already strained back. On second thought, maybe just get a coffee.
8. ID: Attracted to the bottom of your bag like a moth to a flame. Don’t worry, you definitely didn’t accidentally leave it behind on a chair somewhere. Totally. It’s not in your hand, though. Or your pocket. You should check to make sure it’s actually in your bag. Just in case.
9. Jacket/hoodie: Takes up an unreasonable amount of space. You will look like you’re carrying a pillow if you shove it into your bag.
10. Random trinkets:
a. A wrinkled syllabus that has been compacted into a paper lump after you put it in your backpack and forgot about it.
b. A snack for the starvation block you’ve accidentally built into your schedule.
c. A keychain or pins—either some overpriced blind box figurine or niche fandom reference that will make for a great conversation piece if anyone notices.
this is the pits
post- mini crossword
Lily Coffman
Across Down
1. Jobs for a detective
6. Pitted martini garnish
7. Small candy bars or crosswords
8. Pitted summer fruit
9. Tizzy
1. Makes free, as a meal
2. Not of this world
3. Biblical mount
4. Kick out
5. Chill vibe hang
Thank you for reading
“It was only my mother who could communicate with me during those first two muted years… We improvised with signals—the rubbing of the chest, the patting of the head—our homemade vernacular. Sometimes, I still feel like she is the only person who understands me.”
— Ellyse Givens, “loveaches”
“Perhaps it is that intimacy flourishes in the gentlest of spaces, in the most ordinary of moments, when a single heartbeat can expand and deepen, as if to extend a hand and ask to dance.”
— Sarah Kim, “nothing much is happening” 10.5.23
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Emilie Guan
FEATURE
Managing Editor
Elaina Bayard
Section Editors
Anika Kotapally
Chloe Costa Baker
ARTS & CULTURE Managing
Section
Section Editors
LIFESTYLE
Section Editors Hallel Abrams Gerber Nahye Lee
POST-POURRI
Section
COPY CHIEF
Jessica Lee
Copy Editors
Indigo Mudbhary
Lindsey Nguyen
Rebecca Sanchez
Tatiana von Bothmer
LAYOUT CHIEF
Amber Zhao
Layout Designers
Emma Scneider
Emma Vachal
James Farrington
Tiffany Tsan
SOCIAL MEDIA
Rebecca Sanchez
Yana Giannoutsos
Yeonjai Song