Post- 10/26/17

OCT 26 – VOL 20 – ISSUE 7

In this issue...

Fish, Furniture, and Freeways

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Editor’s Note

FEATURES Filling the Void

Dear Readers,

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– Jennifer Osborne

Rhode Ghosts

Is there a day less scary than Halloween? Forget about the ghosts, ghouls, and vampires; this is the only night we let children wander the neighborhood and collect candy from strangers. No, the real horrors are saved for the rest of the year: the rainy Wednesdays, the December darkness at

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– Chen Ye

noon, the Fourth of July fireworks that terrorize every dog on the block.

What scares us is always elsewhere: escaping description, erasing boundaries, exceeding our imaginations. “I have seen the dark universe...yawning, without knowledge, or lustre, or name,” writes the great chronicler of American horror fiction, H. P. Lovecraft.

5 LIFESTYLE Boiled Fish

So open the pages to articles about Rhode Island’s forgotten highways, John Green’s latest novel, and PVDonuts. Read a word, then a sentence, then a paragraph, all caught up in the same eternal wish, language’s

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– Pia Mileaf-Patel

Tidying Up

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singular scream: Don’t let this story end. Not yet. Not now.

Have a witchy week,

Josh

section editor

– Karya Sezener

7 ARTS & CULTURE It Goes On and On and On 7 – Ameer Malik

Family Matters

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This Time in Ages Past...

Hot Post- Time Machine “How did the Backstreet Boys manage to to look so sexy in absurd 1990s fashion?”

— Chantal Marauta, The Cheerleader Effect 10.27.2016 “I have come back from the afterlife to tell you all about the seductive powers of my neighbors’ trash cans.”

— Lauren Sukin, Seven: A Short Story 10.22.2015

– James Feinberg

Post- Staff Editor-in-Chief Saanya Jain

Creative Director Grace Yoon

Features Managing Editor Jennifer Osborne

Head of Media Claribel Wu

Lifestyle Managing Editor Annabelle Woodward

Features Editors Anita Sheih Kathy Luo

Arts & Culture Managing Editor Joshua Lu Head Illustrator Doris Liou Copy Chief Alicia DeVos Layout Chief Livia Mucciolo

Lifestyle Editors Amanda Ngo Marly Toledano Divya Santhanam Arts & Culture Editors Celina Sun Josh Wartel Copy Editor Zander Kim

Layout Assistants Eojin Choi Julia Kim Gabriela Gil

Natalie Andrews Sonya Bui Sydney Lo Veronica Espaillat

Media Assistant Samantha Haigood

Staff Illustrators Caroline Hu Erica Lewis Harim Choi Kira Widjaja Nayeon (Michelle) Woo

Staff Writers Andrew Liu Anna Harvey Catherine Turner Chantal Marauta Chen Ye Claire Kim-Narita Daniella Balarezo Daniera Rivera Eliza Cain Emma Lopez Jack Brook Karya Sezener

Cover Illustrator Doris Liou

Filling the Void An Interview with PVDonuts

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ori Kettelle does not know why donuts are round, but that hasn’t stopped her from building Providence’s very own donut empire. In the sanctum that produces College Hill’s most popular weekend indulgence, she tells the PVDonuts story, one of a rise to greatness as impressive as those on the yeasted rounds in her display case.

“My husband and I, whenever we would travel, would try and find the best donut shop. I don’t know why, I don’t know how it started, but that’s what we would do.

And then coming back to Providence…We have such a big food scene here, and missing a specialty donut shop, we figured, let’s try it out…I know we have a bunch of donut shops now, but the only thing we had here [then] was a Dunkin’ Donuts.”

For a year, the idea stayed put in Kettelle’s home kitchen. “I would make six donuts at a time, and [my husband] would bring them to a gym, bring them to friends, and they would kind of give me feedback.”

Eventually, these taste testers began placing orders, and the donuts crept onto the public stage via Instagram. Kettelle then quit her job at another local bakery, and she and her husband poured their savings into a wholesale operation on the corner of Hope and Maine.

Kettelle described this moment as the real turning point. “The day you quit your job, you have to make it work at that point…

The plan was to do wholesale for six months or a year, but it went super fast; we couldn’t keep up.” While Kettelle didn’t yet have a storefront, her donuts made it into local coffee shops. The reception was stunning. “The first weekend, we had probably 10 dozen donuts on order for the entire weekend, and then the next Saturday we had 22 dozen for [just that day].” After that first weekend, they knew they had to look for a path other than wholesale.

From the wholesale operation at Hope and Maine, Kettelle and her husband moved to share retail space at Sin, a local bakery near the Harborside Campus of Johnson & Wales University. Even after enforcing a four donut limit per customer, they consistently sold out only two hours after opening, making the need for their own store even more apparent. After two months of searching, they found a location on the corner of Ives and Wickenden, and that was the beginning of PVDonuts as we know it.

While Kettelle shies from calling PVDonuts a mom-and-pop shop, the workplace camaraderie and accessible food that the label implies live on in her store. All 17 employees, from diverse backgrounds that range from vegan baking to plated desserts, pitch in to brainstorm the monthly menus.

Describing the crew, Kettelle said, “We have a really big background when it comes to flavor profiles, so it’s really fun when we all get together and just kind of spitball ideas…

If we come up with a mock menu, we’ll show the girls up front and ask them, ‘Hey, tell us what you think.’” The store has no investors, meaning constant communication with the front staff about sales and customer prefer-

ences is the only influence on the menu.

The food at PVDonuts is conscientious.

The store uses the word “gourmet” not to describe food in a trendy niche, but rather something well-prepared that is just good.

Everything they sell, from glaze to brioche, is made in-house daily. The display case features not only Instagrammable flavors like the PSL or Nitro Vanilla Latte, designed to cater to the millennial, but also honey crullers for the older crowd and chocolate sprinkle for kids.

Despite the prices, these donuts really are universal. Kettelle said, “At first I thought it would be more millennials and that age group, but we get such an array—we get families, we get people from the nursing home across the street who just buy like a single donut and read a newspaper, we get, on the weekends, just a crapton of college kids.”

The store also supports the development of other local businesses by giving them the opportunity to test their products.

“We wish we had [had] a mock day of what it would be like in retail…I think [it] is really, really important…to provide that for others starting out,” Kettelle said. Their most recent popup allowed the owner of The Burgundian to prototype the dense, pearl-sugar packed liege wafels heretofore restricted to Brussels or New York City. While The Burgundian had done some pop-ups and wholesale before their debut at PVDonuts, the owner told Kettelle that the experience was eye-opening, improving his concept and motivating him toward the goal of opening his own shop.

PVDonuts’ community projects aren’t restricted to building the Providence food scene. Once a month, 20 percent of sales (and sometimes a special promotional donut) is directed towards a charity organization, from Planned Parenthood to hurricane disaster funds. “We also think it’s really important to be part of the community and help where it needs to be helped,” Kettelle said.

Despite all of her achievements, Kettelle insisted her success is the product of having the right concept at the right time.

“It was an idea, you know, I didn’t think this would happen…We just saw that there was a void back three years ago.” When PVDonuts opened, they were the only specialty store around, the only place with inventive, inhouse flavors instead of the mass-produced classics. “At the end of the day, Dunkin’ Donuts can only do so much,” Kettelle said.

As far as I can tell, however, the characteristics of a specialty store do not explain PVDonut’s success. In-house flavors are ordinarily a novelty buy; a dessert shop that runs on local ingredients and does good in the community is still an occasional indulgence. The cupcake or cronut, even back when they were all the rage, never classified as a breakfast ritual. PVDonuts has regulars, that much is clear from the line of people snaking outside the door at 8:30 a.m. on a Wednesday. But if the specialty donut status is not what keeps these customers coming back again and again, what is? What is the

real void in Providence? *** I had never heard of Kellogg’s before coming to Brown and learning to eat breakfast and snacks a la America. Coming from China and Singapore, where rice porridge and pickles or kaya jam on toast is the breakfast baseline, Pop-Tarts were a revelation, crispy pastry edges and oozy sugary filling the perfect accompaniment to a cup of coffee. The creamy, doughy masterpiece that is a bagel with cream cheese followed, before being supplanted by the Uncrustable. I learned to dunk Oreos in milk, ate Nutterbutters by the sleeve, sampled every type of generic candy bar in a Halloween pack. My friends couldn’t understand why I viewed these things as treasures. Pop-Tarts in the morning made them feel gross, Uncrustables were only nutritionally acceptable after a 30-hour stint in the Rock. I was spared this disillusion only because I came to these foods late, experiencing them for the first time with the same taste buds I possess now.

The hard truth is the Oreos you nibble on now will never be the same as the ones you inhaled at your fifth-grade birthday party. We are born with super-sensitive taste and a propensity to seek sweetness, an evolutionary mechanism designed to help kids seek high-energy foods for survival. As we age, our sensitivity to sweetness dies off, replaced with a new appreciation for the salty and bitter. We overcome our aversion to the unknown, trying new cuisines and adding spice to our foods; we begin internalizing the difference between the natural sweetness of a banana and sucralose, start reading nutrition labels. The net result is sweet foods are less intensely pleasurable, an Oreo becoming a poor alternative for cookies studded with dark chocolate chips and sea salt.

However, taste is as much a product of memory as a physical reaction—despite the calories and our new, complex tastes, we continue to reach for that Oreo, craving the childlike rapture of eating it. We hope to find escapism and instead get disappointment, the sour aftertaste of what we now know is high fructose corn syrup reminding us of just how far away naptime and recess are.

“There is only so much Dunkin’ Donuts can do,” Kettelle said. She’s right—not about the limitations of what can be achieved in an 89-cent donut in terms of flavor inventiveness or nutrition, but about it not being enough. We are not chasing the donuts of yesteryear, but rather the memory of splitting a glazed old-fashioned with dad after school—we want the same euphoria, but it takes different flavors to hit that now.

PVDonuts gets it. The brioche base for all their yeast donuts is saltier, butterier, and less sweet than the traditional, and thus more adult. Paired with a nostalgic topping, it may just be enough to spark that childhood memory in many. This was the case with the Dunkaroo donut, unveiled as part of PVDonuts’ ’90s menu last March.

Dunkaroos were the Froot Loops of the ’90s, packages of snack-size cookies and icing for dipping devoured by millions of schoolchildren before they were discontin-

ued in the United States in 2012 (serious fans can still get their fix across the border in Canada). On the surface, the Dunkaroo donut seems simple—a brioche donut, covered in a sprinkle-laden vanilla glaze reminiscent of the frosting, dusted with graham cracker crumbs. For customers born in the golden age of Dunkaroos, it was Kryptonite.

Kettelle laughed, “I feel like every time you throw in something like childhood, people freak out...We now bring back the Dunkaroo once a week, because people would email me just being like, ‘Bring back the Dunkaroo!’” I could visualize the customers in Thursday’s line, standing in the cold, waiting to replace the worries and strain of adult life with the nostalgia of preschool snack time.

Standing in line for my own donut after the interview, I was at a loss. I wanted that same experience, but I didn’t grow up with most of the toppings on offer. The one familiar item was cookie butter. Here, it is the most millennial spread imaginable; in Singapore, it is called speculoos and ubiquitous.

The cookie butter donut, like the Dunkaroo, looked unassuming. However, it tasted like the buttery, solidly adult luxuriance that comes from dipping croissants into milky coffee, suffused with the sweet warmth of gingerbread. No bittersweet reminder here that speculoos is too sweet now to eat straight out of the jar—this donut was a hit of nostalgia, bringing a sense of home comforts and burst of childlike positivity.

Instead of worrying about the lecture on dot products I was missing for an interview, I remembered the Biscoffs I’ve eaten on every plane trip to the United States since I was 10, bouncing out of my seat with excitement to be on vacation. I got the simple happiness of spreading cookie crumbs onto bread at breakfasts long before Nutella came around.

It’s a feeling worth sharing. I could see myself joining the line some Wednesday morning with my Pop-Tart-wary, Uncrustable-skeptical friends, just to watch their eyes light up as they rediscover childhood favorites through toaster pastry crumb and peanut butter creme patissiere. For those without an association to any of these foods, don’t worry—the cookie butter donut, like so many others, is part of a monthly menu of ever-changing, inventive flavors. Eventually, your Dunkaroo will come.

This is the void, and PVDonuts fills it.

Jennifer Osborne managing editor

Michelle Woo

staff illustr ator

Rhode Ghosts

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Stories about Highways Past, or Ones That Never Were

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ook around our part of New England, and you’ll see artifacts of the past scattered throughout the landscape. Some are quite distinctive, such as the old railroad bridge on the Seekonk River, or the Superman Building in downtown Providence. Some are memorialized, like the route of British retreat from Concord during the Revolutionary War. But peer a bit closer, and you’ll notice the numerous other structures, pathways, and patterns that have lingered—not explicitly cherished, preserved, or acknowledged, but a subtle part of everyday life regardless.

Such is the case with Rhode Island’s abandoned highway projects.

The closest stub is just down the street from Brown—go east on Angell Street to the waterfront, and you’ll find yourself on the Henderson Bridge, a massive six-lane highway bridge that rockets across the water into East Providence. Suddenly finding yourself on an expressway is odd enough, but in East Providence, the mystery deepens: A large “ALL TRAFFIC” sign ushers vehicles onto an off-ramp less than a mile after the expressway begins. Where the main highway should continue, a strip of gravel lies dormant, passing underneath the overpass of the intersecting street. Squirrels dash by, rather than cars, headed toward the narrow strip of trees that have grown to bracket the gravel path. Follow them, and you can trace the expressway’s intended route to US-44, a surface road, on the border with Massachusetts.

“In Rhode Island, similar project are underway to undo sins of freeways past.”

This half-alive highway is an artifact of Providence’s participation in the freeway-building craze of the mid-1900s. By the end of World War II, many of the United States’s city centers were dilapidated—a result of the Great Depression and subsequent redirection of industry toward the war effort. A host of factors, including white flight and legislation encouraging sprawl, emptied the middle class out of downtown areas, exacerbating the decline. While cities desired urban renewal of these areas, the idea of “downtown” had changed from a mixed-use place to live, work, and play, to a spot exclusively devoted to work and leisure. Such a shift toward suburban life strained transit infrastructures, since they were designed for movement within a city, rather than to and from it. The highway, whisking commuters past congested surface roads, was seen as the future.

With federal funding from the

Eisenhower Interstate System, Rhode Island’s Department of Public Works designed a network of expressways that would crisscross the state, including the Henderson Expressway. The proposed highway would have cut through the heart of Fox Point, splitting off from I-195 before snaking north along the shoreline and crossing the river via Henderson Bridge. The bridge was completed in 1969, before construction of the freeway. By then, however, the negative impacts of running highways straight through cities were being felt across the nation, as neighborhoods boxed in by viaducts and overpasses withered. The Henderson Expressway project stalled and was eventually canceled as support waned, leaving only an oddly-built bridge in its wake.

Other parts of Providence weren’t as lucky. Construction of the US-6 and RI-10 expressways west of Federal Hill acted as a noose around Olneyville Square, the multicultural nexus in South Providence then known as the city’s “Second Downtown.” Traffic only worsened after these expressways were constructed, and a 1964 study found that a third of stores and companies in the area went out of business between 1954 and 1959. Visit Olneyville today, and the scars of the 6-10 connector project are still visible—traffic clogs the streets because of a missing ramp from RI-10 to US-6, and the landscape’s empty lots pose a striking departure from the bustling commercial activity of Federal Hill and downtown, only a couple of blocks away. The negative impacts of the freeways in Olneyville caused Rhode Island to truncate or cancel projects

in Newport, Johnston, and Kingstown as well, scattering ghostly interchanges and expressways throughout the state.

These spectres don’t have to be permanent, however. Drivers from Providence to Boston might note the odd 270-degree pivot that I-95 makes in Canton, Massachusetts, to join MA-128. This strange alignment is a remnant of the 1948 plan for the Southwest Expressway, a monstrous eight-lane highway that would have plowed through Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Jamaica Plain into downtown Boston. But already reeling from housing demolition, business closures, and blight from just-finished freeways such as I-93 and the Mass Turnpike, residents revolted. Ordering a moratorium on freeway-building inside Boston, Massachusetts, Governor Francis Sargent initiated the 1972 Boston Transportation Planning Review (BTPR), a landmark reconsideration of Massachusetts’s transit planning and freeway systems. This review resulted in deprioritization of new freeway projects, and a renewed emphasis on mass transit, including commuter rail and subways, to serve the growing city’s needs. Once again, Boston was home to a revolution—this time, of urban planning—and the BTPR served as the template for major re-evaluations of transit planning in almost every other major American city. For the first time, local community input, as well as environmental concerns, factored prominently into planning, and federal aid began to fund mass transit projects as well as highways. On the Southwest Corridor, important rail links for Amtrak’s long-distance

routes and MBTA’s Orange Line and commuter rail were constructed, alongside bike paths, community gardens, and parks. The green spaces that were built instead of the freeway unified the neighborhood, instead of fragmenting it, and are still in heavy use today.

In Rhode Island, similar projects are underway to undo sins of freeways past. Today, sports fields, parks, and a bike path lie where the Henderson Expressway would have sat. Nearby projects to relocate I-195, reconnect India Point Park, and build a pedestrian bridge across the Seekonk finished a couple years ago. Approaches to the Pell Bridge in Newport are being rebuilt, transforming a space-wasting and business-draining freeway stub into a surface roundabout integrated with Newport’s street grid.

But perhaps most importantly, the highways in Olneyville are being rebuilt. While they won’t totally disappear, they are being reengineered with the lessons of the past 50 years in mind. New bike paths and pedestrian walkways will improve access, and the highways will be slimmed, beginning to reconnect Olneyville with surrounding communities.

Soon, one more ghost will be banished to memory and photographs, and hopefully in its place, a neighborhood will regrow.

Chen Ye

staff writer

Caroline Hu

staff illustr ator

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Boiled Fish

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An Investigation of Tradition

fish boil is a styrofoam plate and plastic spork affair. The local travel site Doorcounty.com’s dining section calls it a “must-see culinary event” and directs visitors to nine places to see, eat, and experience a fish boil. “What began as an economical way to feed large, hungry hoards of lumberjacks and fishermen has become an integral part of the Door County experience.”

Also according to the website, “It’s a way visitors can pay homage to local tradition while filling their bellies with fresh, local fare.” Growing up, my nuclear family’s word of choice for stomach was always tummy. When in Wisconsin, where my dad grew up, belly sounds right.

In Fish Creek, right in the heart of Door County, Wisconsin, Pelletier’s Restaurant begins the fish boil every evening at 5 p.m. Families fill the tables out on the back deck. Kids jockey to sit as close to the rope as possible.

Behind the rope is the cauldron.

Pelletier’s Restaurant’s website is freckled with photos of white Wisconsin folks. My Wisconsin folks are just partially white: We visibly differ from the rest of the fish boil guests in our gaggle of Indian (both with subcontinental roots and Native American ones) and black members, from babies to toddlers to octogenarians. The fish boil has Scandinavian roots, after all. In one photo, they are stacked in a 21-person human pyramid. A tall, but approachable man in a blue T-shirt and faded work jeans tends to a massive fire in several action shots. With buzzed blonde hair, he quickly walks away from the

column of flame. In another, he leans back frozen, about to douse the fire with a bucket of chilled water. Here he hoists filets of fresh, local fish into the bucket of boiling water.

This is owner and boil master Matthew Peterson. Around five thirty, Peterson begins to pace around the cauldron, making sure the temperature is all right, the kids are out of the splash zone, the fish is ready to go, people are paying attention. A fish boil is dinner and a show. And arguably, the show is the important half. He holds a hand over the steam to feel its warmth. He looks over his shoulder at a cauldron-sized vat of cool, descaled fish, skin still on and bones still in. The vat is metal and has holes so the boiling water can seep in and do its magic. Another vat has potatoes and onions.

The deal: $17 per person with two six-ounce pieces of boiled fish, boiled potatoes, cole slaw, unlimited non-alcoholic drinks, and a slice of cherry pie.

Other restaurants in the area include Al Johnson’s Swedish restaurant, where goats roam the grass-blanketed roof and waiters dress in traditional garb, artisanal creameries with, of course, very high quality cheese. Then, there is Culver’s frozen custard and fast food, home of the butter burger. There’s a popular wood fired pizza place, and a large diner-like spot called Julie’s. The descriptors “rustic” and “American” come to mind when I think of eating in Door County. A lot of places are inside an inn, or a lodge, with a big fireplace and dark beers on tap.

At the fish boil, the real magic is when the boilmaster—for that is what he is called—drops the potatoes into the water. It’s time for the “boilover.” In a split-second spectacle, men yell concise directions to each other, step nimbly out of the way in clunky workboots, children lean forward in their seats, mouths purse to say “ooooh.” Fleshy fish goes in and the water spills out the top of the cauldron: “Boilover!” the men shout.

It sizzles the wood fire below and a column of flames and smoke erupts straight into the air, a sooty, nuclear cloud. The boilmaster jumps back, the ooooh’s escape children’s mouths, a few grandparents gasp.

“You go to the fish boil to come together over Wisconsin and celebrate Fish Creek tradition.”

Afterward, we all partake. On a plate, the fish boil is less than exciting. A beige plastic dish divided into three sections by the dish itself, high school cafeteria-style, boasts a hearty scoop of creamy coleslaw, two boiled potatoes with red skin and one boiled onion, or for kids, there are formerly frozen crinkle cut French fries. Where the dividers of the three sections meet, a thin lemon wedge balances on its rind. The biggest section has the fish. It’s presented

in whole slices of body, both sides covered in skin that fades from dark silver to silvery white and can only be fairly described as slick. The inside of the fish is pinky white. As it sits there in its shallow pool of oily water, chopped into two six-ounce chunks with bones exposed at the wrong angles, it is one of the few times I consider fish a meat.

Dessert is cherry pie. Tart cherries are super Wisconsin, super local.

The farmer’s market has an array of cherry products like tart cherry juice, cherry pickles, ten types of cherry jam and preserves, cherried baked goods, dried cherry bath salts, cherry scented potpourri. You can go tart cherry picking. Chopped cherry salsa is fantastic. Door County loves its farmer’s market, for a good reason.

Strolling through the market with a cold cherry juice is fantastic—a pan-seasonal family activity.

Ultimately, you don’t go to the fish boil for unique flavors. For that, there’s fish curry from the Indian takeout spot in the same neighborhood. Or a frosty root beer from the drive-in burger joint. Door County knows good food, but it also appreciates tradition, and for that, I appreciate Door County. One Yelp reviewer angrily urges visitors to save their money and spare themselves from “bland and bony” small pieces of fish. Matt P. doesn’t get it. You go to the fish boil to come together over Wisconsin and celebrate Fish Creek tradition. A community can bond over a meal, even if the dish is not quite your taste.

Pia Mileaf-Patel staff writer

Linda Liu

illustr ator

Tidying Up

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6

Furnishing Mental Rooms

hat do you do when you wake up every morning?

Hastily run to class?

Check Instagram? I usually lament the fact that that my 9 a.m. starts in three minutes. Other answers are possible. A noteworthy answer is, look at a list of things you are grateful for.

One Saturday morning, I had the pleasure of going to a workshop by Robert Weiner ’16 on reflections to deepen meditation practice and daily living. One of the exercises we did entailed making a list of all things we were grateful for and then reading the piece of paper every morning.

The task sounds simple enough, but truthfully searching within to find the blessings of your life is actually quite a challenging endeavor. What makes it difficult is the scarce amount of time we usually feel comfortable allocating to introspective discoveries.

So much of learning in the traditional school environment is external. It involves the consumption of knowledge and the diligent effort to make sure what is consumed is retained. Introspection, however, involves discovery.

Discovery is not consumption; it is innovative, creative, and vulnerable.

There’s a very genuine human fear regarding being truly honest with ourselves and delving deep into the spheres of our consciousness. Luckily, an ancient practice has been developed to assuage this fear and encourage self-reflection: meditation.

The meditation scene at Brown is profoundly convenient. Simultaneously true to the traditions of the practice and relevant to the everyday life of a student, meditation “sits” are about opening our doors of perception to a deeper way of experiencing

the world. A large part of college education is about gaining completely new information. If we think about the act of information acquisition like arranging furniture to decorate a room, we would not neglect thinking about the room holistically, nor would we neglect cleaning it and purifying it when necessary. Weiner said, “We often hear our peers saying things like, ‘I spent this many hours in the Rock, studying for this lesson.’

But we never hear someone saying, ‘I spent this many hours today studying my mental patterns.’” Meditation allows us to do this: to look straight in the eyes of what we are experiencing, question our own habitual thinking patterns, and possibly transcend our own limited experience.

As the leading and only student-run meditation group on campus, the Brown Meditation Community is made up of a vibrant, diverse group of people who want to purify their mental rooms. “Most of what we do is hosting meditation sessions Tuesdays through Saturdays between 4 and 5 p.m. at Manning Chapel,” said meditation leader Cooper Schwartz. “We meditate for 20 minutes and have a short break to do walking meditation or just stretch. We then do another 15–20 minute sit and chat for a little while.

Sundays between 4:45 and 6 p.m. we have a community building workshop in Winnick Chapel with the specific intention of being mindful and purposeful in the way we interact with each other. On Monday nights from 7:30 to 9 we have a 30-minute meditation session and then tea.”

Another opportunity to engage with both meditation sessions and bring your own tea is the contempla-

tive studies initiative developed by Professor Harold D. Roth. A lot of the courses in contemplative studies have required meditation labs.

In these labs, particular techniques and philosophies that are studied in class are put into practice to deepen students’ understanding of the mate-

one’s crowded room of thoughts in tidal waves. It is challenging to learn how to live day in and day out under those waves and still have space to perform the daily burdens and responsibilities of everyday life.

Expressing his idea that meditation practice is about striving to find the

“If we think about the act of information acquisition like arranging furniture to decorate a room, we would neglect thinking about the room holistically, nor would we neglect cleaning it and purifying it when necessary.” rial. First-year student Lauren Yang said about her experience: “I attend medlabs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9 a.m. Sometimes, I become really focused and feel the harmony of body and mind and the sphere of experience that the practice brings to me. Some of my favorite practices are noting practice, stopdrop-and-return technique, and Taoism practice. As for the stopping technique, when I notice a thought has entered my mind, I tell myself to drop it and return to my practice.

I also use this technique while I am concentrating on doing my readings outside of meditation. After my medlabs, I am usually very concentrated in my following CS17 and art history classes, and I feel centered for the rest of my day.”

The most curious thing about meditation is that it is a practice that is not limited by the time that one puts into it. It’s almost as if it transcends that input time and impacts

balance in all of our waking moments, ancient Taoist thinker Lao Tzu said, “It is easy enough to stand still; the difficulty is in walking without touching the ground.” Such clarity and peace of mind is profoundly useful in a college setting cluttered with deadlines and chaos. If we keep the goal of furnishing and purifying our mental rooms in mind, perhaps the next time we wake up and race to class, we will be able to arrive without touching the ground.

Karya Sezener staff writer

Seo Jung Shin illustr ator

7

It Goes On and On and On

I

admire the diverse works of John Green. I enjoy the insightful and humorous video blogs he makes on his Vlogbrothers YouTube channel, which he runs with his brother, Hank. I also like the fun and educational Crash Course videos Green collaborates on.

And I admire the novels of his that I’ve read, partly because Green imbues his young characters with respect and dignity. Unlike certain adults I’ve come across who dismiss the experiences of young people as the side effects of growing pains, Green never talks down to his characters, never belittles them because they’re young. Instead, he conveys their capacity for deep thinking, their concern for profound matters, and their numerous struggles—with intimacy and vulnerability, purpose and meaning, loss and grief—as those that many people, regardless of age or background, share.

I’m also thankful for Green’s courage in sharing vulnerable details about his personal life; he’s discussed, among other matters, his experiences with OCD in various speeches, videos, podcast episodes, and interviews. I’ve written about my OCD before, but what I haven’t mentioned is that I try to find examples of older people who have OCD or other mental health conditions, whose successes help me get

In Praise of John Green’s New Novel Turtles All the Way Down

through my lowest moments. On my worst days, I despair about my future, questioning how I’ll make it through life when I’m overwhelmed by my compulsions. I wonder: How can I ever be physically intimate with a romantic partner if I have an intense and irrational fear of germs, one that compels me to wash my hands for way too long?

How can I ever hold a job if it’s hard

ing and spending time with friends while dealing with her condition, which often causes her pain both psychologically and physically. The book, however, manages to be beautiful and hopeful because it unflinchingly grapples with the hard truths of living with a mental health condition, and of living in general, without falling into despair.

Green’s depiction of Aza’s psychological

“On my worst days, I despair about my future, questioning how I’ll make it through life when I’m overwhelmed by my compulsions.” for me to focus because of my anxiety?

In these moments, I think about how older people who have similar conditions manage to live decent lives, and I tell myself that if they can do it, then maybe I can, too. John Green has been one such role model for me, thanks to his bravery and openness.

In Green’s latest novel, Turtles All the Way Down, he tells the story of Aza Holmes, a high school student who struggles with OCD, which, in her experience, often centers on anxiety over contamination and bodily illness. Aza tries to manage her daily life of study-

turmoil gives us readers a sense of what she goes through but also reminds us, through Aza’s thoughtful and reflective narration, that language is inadequate in conveying the full extent of pain and that we can only ever fully understand our own consciousness, never someone else’s. I’ve enjoyed the lively and sharp voices of Green’s previous narrator protagonists, but here, Aza’s voice during moments of intense anxiety breaks into several internal voices that swirl in a frightening, chaotic cacophony. Yet, in Aza’s other moments, when she’s happy or sad, experiencing something new,

or thinking about someone significant from her past, she speaks with beauty.

There are similes and metaphors in this book that moved me, that made me mutter, “Wow,” under my breath as I read.

The book also allows readers to meet complex and layered supporting characters, who show us how, in some ways, aspects of Aza’s crises echo the dilemmas of others. For example, Aza often wonders who she is and where her identity is located: How can she be her thoughts if she can’t control what she thinks? How can she be her body when she shares it with millions of microorganisms? In a different but somewhat parallel way, another character, a wealthy young man named Davis, questions his own identity during his talks with Aza and in his blog entries: Do people relate to him only because of his riches? Is who he is dependent on his wealth? Would he be a different person if he were born into a different socioeconomic class?

In Turtles, Green uses a wide scope to encompass the breadth of life, in all of its ugliness and beauty. He shows us how Davis, Aza’s best friend Daisy, and Aza’s mom try to navigate the difficulties of their lives as Aza navigates her own. Through these introspective characters, Green’s novel looks at life’s messiness and ambivalent complexities. He doesn’t sugarcoat the truth to make it easier, but he also doesn’t exaggerate the truth to make it harder, either. Green’s book reminds us that we are alone in some ways and connected in other ways, that life involves suffering and happiness, that things get better and things get worse and so on. The trend of life is an oscillating line, not a fixed slope that curves up or down.

The novel starts off like it could be a mystery. A billionaire from Aza’s town disappears to escape arrest, and there’s a large monetary reward for information about his whereabouts. Aza and Daisy attempt to solve this mystery.

But as the novel unravels, it becomes a character study of Aza, and it’s a rich one at that. Green develops a main character who feels real and carries a powerful story about mental health.

Mental health is something that we need to talk about more in our society, and novels like Turtles encourage us to begin these important conversations.

I love this book. I love it more than I thought I would, for the simple fact that it became, for me, the best novel

by Green that I’ve read. I needed to read this story about a young person afflicted by OCD who strives to live a decent life. I hope this book finds a wide readership and resonates with many people.

Ameer Malik staff writer

Kira Widjaja

staff illustr ator

Family Matters

N

oah Baumbach’s latest, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), which dropped October 13th on Netflix, will certainly stand the test of time as the only film by a major American director to feature an Academy Award-winning actor (in this case, Dustin Hoffman) watching the 2014 Cameron Diaz/Jason Segel vehicle Sex Tape. Whether it is otherwise notable seems an open question.

Near its beginning, the film has a kind of ground-level charm particular to Baumbach’s style. Losing oneself in his oeuvre is easy since much of his later work especially is cheerfully interchangeable. His editor, Jennifer Lame, who’s done his four latest films, has a deft touch and a sense of humor. His imagistic landscapes of New York (and for him it’s nearly always New York) are rendered with an agreeably salt-of-the-earth honesty about location; in Meyerowitz, it’s refreshing to note that a scene set at the Museum of Modern Art is actually

At the Movies: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) filmed there. Baumbach, too, is primarily an imitative filmmaker, and this film, like a good deal of his work, borrows liberally from Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, and Alexander Payne, in equal measure. But the pleasures of his films fade on reflection. The ruminative writer/director has made seven narrative features since the turn of the century, only one (2005’s The Squid and the Whale) truly great, and much like another of his recent projects, While We’re Young (2015), Meyerowitz’s remarkably strong start is eventually undercut by emotional blatancy and a fundamental lack of empathy for its characters.

If Baumbach has a true strength, it is for directing actors, and his great—and in some ways audacious—triumph with Meyerowitz is allowing his bold-face stars to relax into the archetypal spaces where they’re strongest. Hoffman, as Harold, the patriarch of the titular family, spends much of the film locked into a rapid-fire murmur that can’t help but be compared

“Baumbach’s characters are never easy to like, and he has a knack for casting the kind of actors ... who flout the audiences affections with the disgust of a foodie turning his nose up at a hot dog.” to his turn in Rain Man, twenty-nine years ago. Watching the film, you feel yourself as ready as his brood to snap and exhort him to shut up already, which is exactly what Baumbach wants—Meyerowitz is about the kind of brutally unfair hierarchies that emerge in a fractured family (the aforementioned Wes Anderson covered much of the same ground in 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, a film with a much more morbid ending than this one that still manages to be infinitely more pleasant). For Harold, that means favoring his youngest, Matt (Ben Stiller), over his misbegotten oldest, Danny (Adam Sandler), and the all-but-ignored middle child, Jean (Elizabeth Marvel).

Stiller, used to drifting through Baumbach’s New York stories as a listing sadsack, here plays the West Coast hotshot; it seems an unwritten rule that he must always play one or the other. Marvel, like her character, fades into the background, and her foremost moments on screen correspond with Baumbach’s worst writing—a pity.

Sandler’s work on the film has been much-discussed, but in truth, there’s nothing new in The Meyerowitz Stories but the gentle reminder that he is a great dramatic actor who’s never gotten the roles he deserves, which, after PunchDrunk Love (2002) and Funny People (2009), should be a well-known fact.

Baumbach lets Sandler, too, stay in his comfort zone—as in those two films, Sandler plays the sweet schmuck with occasionally-flaring anger issues. The first third of Meyerowitz is so strong, so lived-in, so authentic, because it allows Sandler to be its focus; then, perhaps

fearing his star might accidentally pull a Jack and Jill, Baumbach retreats from him and jumps from thread to thread.

Thus the Salinger-adjacent title.

What follows is a retreat of a different kind. Baumbach’s characters are never easy to like, and he has a knack for casting the kind of actors (Jesse Eisenberg, Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig) who flout the audience’s affections with the disgust of a foodie turning his nose up at a hot dog. The Meyerowitz clan is not as unsympathetic as Eisenberg’s character in Squid and the Whale, or Stiller’s in Greenberg (2010), but the film holds the audience at a purposeful distance that soon begins to feel more frustrating than artful. Another singularity: Baumbach is certainly the only director in the world who can make Emma Thompson, as Harold’s wife, an unlikeable bore.

The ending, worst of all, is pat and largely easy, offering bromides about not becoming one’s parents straight out of the self-help section. Baumbach is not a great filmmaker, or a great writer, but he is a good one, and, clearly, one trusted by some of our greatest working actors. Danny says of Harold in the film, “Maybe I need to believe my dad was a genius because I don’t want his life to be worthless.” Baumbach has so much going for him it’s hard not to need to believe he can do better.

James Feinberg staff writer

Jess Fleming illustr ator

Some Spooky Tunes for a Spooky Night...

Scariest Songs 1 “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” 2 “Can’t Be Tamed” 3 Anything sung by Scary Spice 4 “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” 5 “Monster Mash” 6 You singing in the shower 7 Alicia DeVos singing in the shower 8 “Boyfriend” (the Bieber one) 9 “I’m Yours” 10 The Scooby Doo Theme Song

8

“What the fuck is a rhombus?”

“Cila the d ntro is t evil.” he pl ant

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