post- 12/06/19

In This Issue

post- farewells

POST- ITS 3

Nice to Meme You

ANNA HARVEY 2 ANNELIESE MAIR 4

A Decade Undone

Truthfully, Objectively KATE OK 5

Teens and Tens in the 10’s ROB CAPRON 5

postCover by Brenda Rodríguez

DEC 6

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VOL 24 —

ISSUE 12

FEATURE

Nice to Meme You

When Internet Language Is IRL

BY ANNA HARVEY ILLUSTRATED BY STEPHANIE WU

I

would not consider myself to be Extremely Online. I am Online enough to know that one should capitalize the phrase Extremely Online, as well as its milder correlative, Very Online.

I am Online enough to have installed time-limiting apps for Twitter and Instagram on both my phone and computer, but not so Online that I feel particularly comfortable regularly posting to either platform. I am Online enough in the sense that I have grown up in a culture where to be offline is, effectively, to not exist.

The beginnings of the internet date back to the early 1960s, when J.C.R. Licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist at M.I.T., proposed a plan for an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” The first prototype was built in 1969, and on October 29 of that year, the first “node-to-node” message was sent from one computer to another. From the early 1980s, scientists began to expand these nodes to create the network we understand today as the internet. This early internet reached its modern iteration in 1990 with the creation of the World Wide Web. No matter how bitter the vitriol spewed against it—especially over the past decade, with the rise of the smartphone (and

the alleged assault on English grammar that texting has waged) and, more recently, the exposure of politically motivated data-harvesting scandals—the internet was always going to be a place where people came to communicate. It was made by humans, for humans, and connected them with each other on a scale never before known.

I am not interested in discussing whether the internet is good or bad—for democracy, for language, for culture. It just is. I have never lived in a world without it, so I don’t know how to conceptualize an alternative.

I have grown up in a world whose linguistic register hews so closely to the lexicon of Online Discourse that what I think and say owes a debt to the internet.

As I’ve gotten older and spent more time online, I’ve started to notice the ways in which internet lingo has slipped into the spoken word. My friends and I will frequently say abbreviations out loud, peppering our speech with “lol,” “wtf,” and even “lmao” (pronounced la-mow). Conversations often begin with “You know that meme?” as we link something we viewed alone, on a screen, to an in-person interaction. Mild confusion

becomes Math Lady/Confused Lady. Stressful week?

This Is Fine. We assume a certain level of knowledge to make these references work, but no more than we would if we were quoting The Office or Parks and Rec (GIFS from both are, for the record, often used as reaction shots in comment sections). The level of pop culture background once gained by watching a hit TV show is now achieved by scrolling through Twitter.

But how important is it, really, that memes originate online, often pulled together from one person’s frenetic, goldfish-like thoughts, rather than from the careful honing of a writer’s room? Don’t they provoke the same effect? Some memes do, after all, come from TV shows, both scripted and reality. But I’d propose it’s the capacity for change that makes online humor different.

Within seconds, a post can be picked up, circulated, and shaped to fit the whims of anyone with a wifi connection.

In 2013, a William Carlos Williams poem was molded to address subjects as diverse as M&Ms, browser tabs, and think pieces, all while retaining its poetic structure.

In 2017, the same poem was rediscovered and adapted to the rhythm of “Mambo No. 5” and “Call Me Maybe” while somehow retaining its subject matter: The plums that were in the icebox, so sweet, and so cold. Somehow, people on the internet decided that modernist poetry was cool and ran with it. Something that may have been confined to obscurity was recirculated, altered for the digital age, and it made people laugh. I can’t say that I fully understand why some cultural tidbits become memes and others don’t, but the ones that do offer a form of collective communication, however ephemeral, that rivals only the written word.

University of Michigan linguist Anne Curzan calls language that originates online a form of “electronically mediated communication,” or EMC. EMC is informal, rife with abbreviations and variations in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling—the sentence “I’ll cc mary on that 2morrow” is an exaggerated example. Despite the yearly op-eds about the deplorable state of young people’s grammar, Curzan’s studies show that college students generally have a finely tuned instinct for when

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, As a senior, in my old age, let me tell you what I remember (about post-). I remember not knowing anyone in the room.

I remember my heart rate quickening as I presented my suggestions to the other editors who certainly knew more than I did. I remember the rush of nerves and pride the first time I saw my name in print on a post- piece.

I remember the weekly Feature section editing meetings in the Blue Room or the Underground, wherever there were seats—wherever we could go to read together, debate syntax and structure, and draft effusive notes to our latest talented writers. I remember meeting with those writers in Starbucks or at The Herald office to serve as a sounding board for their budding ideas, helping flesh out promising outlines of piecesto-be.

I remember Spotify playlists, the Copy Couch, forgotten chargers and water bottles, heart-warming props, homemade baked goods, an unforgettable talent show, and the countless moments that have made me beyond thankful for this incredible community. I remember late-night coffee runs and conversations, impassioned debates about em dashes, and more than a couple laugh attacks that left me gasping for air.

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Many parts of post- take my breath away. Our staff ’s unwavering dedication, generosity, and talent across the board of writing, editing, designing, illustrating, and social media curation. Our readers’ continued support and feedback, both kind and critical—always welcome and much appreciated. The immense pleasure and honor it has been to serve as Editor-in-Chief this past year, seeing each part of this delicately balanced and carefully coordinated production come together to orchestrate a new issue every week; each built from emotion, artistry, research, passion, growth, and a little bit of chaotic good (or straight-up chaos, as in the case of our Spring Weekend issue, for which we worked until literal dawn).

Please enjoy this final issue of the decade, and of my tenure. I have not one ounce of doubt that EIC-to-be Amanda Ngo and the rest of the incoming team will lead our little publication to new heights. And I’m excited to enjoy the view.

For the last time, thank you, and happy reading!

Anita Sheih Editor-in-Chief

Things to Do Before the Decade Ends 1. Make that joke about not having 20/20 vision when someone asks where you see yourself in x years 2. See how much you can get for your iPod Nano on Craigslist 3. Yell “Billy Mays!!!!!!!!”

4. Date your papers “2019” 5. Switch from La Croix to Bubly 6. Wonder why the world didn’t end in 2012 7. Reminisce about Hannah Montana, The Suite Life, and the good ol’ days 8. Throw a massive New Year’s party to signal the return of The Roaring ’20s 9. Tell yourself you’ll (once again) get it together in January 10. Spend time with the people/things you love (including the final issue of post- this decade)

to use EMC and when not to. According to Curzan’s students, using EMC in inappropriate contexts— emails to professors, for example—is considered “very uncool.” Though the speech we use IRL (“in real life”) may not always align with EMC, some situations are similar enough for it to work. It doesn’t matter whether friends are communicating via text or at the kitchen table; the social and emotional registers of both types of interaction are casual enough to merit the same language. For those of us who have grown up enmeshed in the internet, our language, whether or not mediated by a computer screen, is often Very Online.

The language used on the internet, like any language, is prone to change. Take LOL, for example, which is more frequently written in lowercase and tacked on to the end of sentences. The earliest citation of “LOL” comes from a May 1989 post on the computer network FidoNet, though a man named Wayne Pearson claims to have invented it in the mid-80s on a Canadian bulletin board system (a precursor to the internet chatroom). LOL originally meant “laughing out loud,” though as even the most intermittent Tweeter could tell you, no one uses it that way anymore. According to a 2013 op-ed by John McWhorter, the LOLs dropped into online conversation aren’t meant to indicate humor anymore; they’re meant to “signal basic empathy between texters...easing tension and creating a sense of equality.” McWhorter offers LOL as a way of conveying nuance in a medium that lacks verbal inflection and body language. But what if we have both at our disposal, as we do in person, and we still say “LOL”? What does this say about the way communication has changed over the past decade? When did online language migrate beyond the written and into the verbal, and why?

I decided to ask Lucy Duda ’20, a longtime admin of the Brown Dank Stash of Memes for S/NC Teens Facebook page. She cited words like “yeet,” first adopted ironically before they “accidentally become a reflex,” as prime examples of the near-seamlessness with which internet diction infiltrates speech. “I think these things tend to come out more in speech when people are feeling nervous or awkward,” Duda said. “They provide a structured response in a widely shared vernacular and also allow us to deflect from the vulnerability of saying what specifically is on our mind.” We may be living in a new age of anxiety, but it becomes more manageable when we can trust that everyone else is in on the joke.

Speaking in memes is itself a slightly absurd act. But its absurdity finds an equal sparring partner in the daily news cycle. If asked how I feel about it all, I can reference the things that keep me up at night: climate disaster, the housing crisis, antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Or, to express how overwhelmed I feel, I can reference Kim Kardashian Laying in Bed. Which would you prefer?

If kids these days are using internet language IRL, the boundary between being on and offline feels like an artificial one. In fact, it seems like we’ve been edging in this direction for the past decade. About five billion people worldwide own mobile devices, and about half of these are smartphones, with adults 18-34 leading the way in smartphone use across the globe. If online is always in your pocket, are you then Always Online?

Real Life, an online magazine about “living with technology,” with the emphasis “more on living,” poses one answer. In the introduction to its January 2018 issue, “Extremely Online,” the editors write, “What if instead of an escape from being ‘in real life,’ we think of

the internet as a genre or style?” At the risk of sounding like the heretical English concentrator I am, I think the internet is literary. It is a constantly evolving book of life, where events are created, erased, and memorialized at lightning speed—it is a record and an art form and also a place and a medium in which to work out what it means to be a person right here and right now. According to Real Life, “‘Online’ can be seen as structuring an entire a [sic] way of being in the world,” and “‘online’ can be thought of as a way of doing things, not the place they are done.” To be online is “to speak in memes, to see in photos, to intuit the metrics and know what counts.” In other words, it “might be understood as an openness to being continually humbled and troubled by the ever shifting [sic] contexts of conversations.” To be online is to be attuned to the breakneck pace of modern life and to be trying to keep up. To be online is to recall Distracted Boyfriend when making decisions, to reminisce over Nyan Cat, or to use “retweet” as a verbal affirmation.

TL;DR (“too long; didn’t read”): In this culture we’re all Pretty Online, clicking and scrolling, chatting and laughing, and being messy, fallible, silly, and human.

post- farewells going but not gone

BY POST- ITS SYDNEY LO, JULIAN TOWERS, AND AMANDA NGO ILLUSTRATED BY NAYA LEE CHANG

Sydney post- was a late night that just got later. I began writing for it my first year at Brown, finishing articles the day they were due. I sat in my dorm room, alone, at 8:00 p.m., working through rambling Narrative pieces about baristas and oil painting. While I am not all that proud of those early pieces, they led me to a Feature section editing position two years later.

I had a decent idea of what editing entailed when I began: weekly content development, grammar checks, and close reads of articles. While all of these

responsibilities have certainly been a part of my postexperience, there were also the coffee-fueled Feature meetings on Monday mornings, during which we caught up on weekend adventures while perusing the piece of the week. There were the Thursday production nights, with free pizza, snacks, and exposure to new and exciting writers. There was friendship. There was being a part of something, of a family of creative, dynamic editors with inimitable tastes in music. When I finished my edits on those Thursday nights, around 9:30 p.m., I often didn’t want to leave.

So, eventually, I didn’t. I took on a managing editor position for the Feature section. I got to lead the Monday morning Feature meetings. Production nights went as late as 1:30 a.m. for me, spent poring over drafts and waiting for the printer at The Brown Daily Herald offices to work. And though I’ve never loved staying up so late, my work allowed me to grow even closer to the post- team. So much so that I can barely imagine what next semester will be like without it. But I know I will always have a part of post-, and it will always have a part of me.

Julian post- is the only venue on this planet that has never rescinded my aux privileges. That’s remarkable. After an adolescence spent inflicting my Spotify selects on parents, high school friends, and boarding school van drivers, lifetime bans are what I’ve come to expect; yet, somehow, each Thursday night during production, my colleagues will actually ask me to play my music!

Given that my self-esteem is almost entirely tied up in how others react to my preference for 1970s German funk-rock and modern-day Detroit scam rap, I cannot overstate what this validation means to me.

I like to think that this attitude—everyone’s embrace of the intimate—carries over into the work that our editorial class has done; under the kind, curatorial eyes of Celina and Sydney, the Narrative and Feature sections have been bastions for the kind of personal writing that few campus newspapers have ever cradled.

For my part, I received the Arts & Culture

“He kind of looks like my pet cockroach back home… It’s endearing.”

“My accent? Oh, I’m not from London. But I’m British by invasion!”

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NARRATIVE section in 2018 with a mission to shun topicality, forego criticism, and instead encourage students to tell their life stories through their relationship to artists and their work. At the end of the day, I’m grateful to my writers above all. When it came time to pitch each week, they accepted my bizarre mission with force and ferocity; I have no doubt these talented folks probably would have written really great reviews, had I not refused to publish them.

Ten years from now, if I’m still working with people who wholeheartedly embrace the weirdness coming out of my speakers, then I’ll have postmagazine to thank for plugging me.

Amanda Summer after my senior year of high school: It’s a sweltering night, and I am making no attempt to sleep.

My phone dings. Morning Mail. I am an eager prefrosh, excited to be looped into University goings-on even before I step foot on campus. Some publication called post- is looking for editors, copy editors, and staff writers. Gee—they must really need a copy editor if they don’t know to capitalize the title of their own publication. *** Winter during my junior year of college: I am cozy on the Copy Couch, named as such for no reason other than my insistence on occupying it every prod night. Music is playing, snacks are haphazardly shared over the table, old issues of post- lay around the room. Someone asks me whether a person stands “in line” or “on line.” With an executive decision to instate the former as an official entry in our style guide, I invalidate this linguistic oddity of New Yorkers. Argument ensues, and everyone is shouting or laughing, or both.

It’s been an absolute pleasure to be post-’s copy chief. Contention over commas and em dashes aside, I’ve grown to love post- and the family that we’ve formed around this incredible publication. I’ve grown to love the intimacy with which our writers approach each article, the vibrancy that emanates from our illustrators’ works, our dedication every Thursday as we work—through drooping eyelids and against assignment deadlines—late into the night to get the next issue out.

But this is not a farewell. I’m excited to try and fill the shoes of our graduating staff next semester, even if that means I have to leave the comfort of the Copy Couch for a ripped leather chair at the head of the table. Thank you all for everything you’ve done for this magazine.

Until next semester, post-.

A Decade Undone Naming Now, Knowing Later

BY ANNELIESE MAIR ILLUSTRATED BY JOANNE HAN

I am to start with a Statement on the 2010s—a whole decade coming to a close!—the years of X, Y, and Z, the shifts from A to Q, the return to B, the emerging popularity of E, the obvious appeal of G and H in these times of X, Y, Z, A to Q, B and E, which are all reflective of the times of W, and are all the same thing, if we really think about it.

Or we can narrow the scope to my experience of the 2010s. Still, the thought of reflecting on an entire decade is overwhelming. Especially the thought of putting a piece into the world that suggests I have any real knowledge or authority to pick out of the pile and describe (even with the caveat of it all being from my limited point of view) what has happened at the intersection of the decade’s history and my little life.

No matter how “personal” my thoughts on the 2010s may be, I’ve still experienced them in contexts of communal, national, and international events to varying degrees. And between the personal and the (inter)national, there stands the responsibility of choice: As soon as I select any one event, I endow it with importance. I could privilege high school graduation, the 2017 Women’s March in New York, my first time voting in a presidential election, entering Brown as a frosh with near-certainty that my admission was a mistake, and so much more than can be neatly packaged into a list.

This is an area of thought heavily explored by theorists (usually in terms that fly above my head): how language itself selects and views an object, a person, or a place, and how readers locate and connect bits of text to create meaning. As soon as a subject is present in the text, readers assign it significance: Actors and objects become variables in an unfolding narrative, taking action, undergoing change, even if only to establish a sense of place or reality. And with the presence of anything in a text, there looms the shadow of absence: a powerful tool when used purposefully and responsibly but a potentially and historically harmful one, an inevitable element of any piece of writing whose length fails to reach infinity.

So I’m sitting here a bit dumbstruck. It feels like anything I choose pulls itself out of my personal sphere and into shared experiences of time—“shared” not nearly the same as “equivalent.” Moreover, in selecting

events, trends, returns, injustices, emergences, and all else that occurs in the span of 10 years, I have to map out time! How the hell do I do that?

I don’t want to spiral into those never-ending, brain-numbing questions of what time truly is or means—I usually shut myself down when my thoughts start trotting along that trail, afraid I’ll find myself up against the edge of confusion and despair. Instead, I find the challenge of mapping out time a fascinating one: It’s a question of how we mark locations along the paths of our lives, how we establish and refer to those reference points.

After graduating high school, I started one of those sentence-a-day journals with the hope of recording as much of my College Experience as I could (with the least effort possible). I found myself up against a challenge of choice: What about my day mattered enough to record?

Even more importantly, it seemed, what would I want to remember in the future?

The latter question dominated early entries: My first weeks at school were a routine of meeting new people, shopping exciting classes, and going to social events. I’m not going to be terrified, lonely, and doubtful later on, I’d think. So I won’t want to remember that.

Around a month into college, I looked back on the earlier sentences and realized that, though they weren’t untrue, they were BS. My mental map of my recent history didn’t align with the breadcrumbs I’d laid out in writing; there was a discrepancy between what had literally happened and what felt true to me.

I was desperately searching for, and thus trying to create, turning points of my immediate past: accompanying new friends to the pumpkin patch for hayrides and hot cider, meeting someone at Unit Wars, staying out late and going to Jo’s for the first time.

But the truly significant moments of that time only emerged later: meeting my new doctor in Providence; my roommate and I discovering uncanny similarities between our lives; typing “Brown” into the “Company” section for my contact on someone’s phone, assuming I wouldn’t keep in touch with the person who would eventually become one of my best friends and senioryear housemate.

In order for me to remember, or keep track of, this time in my life—and thus be able to develop relationships, to reflect on myself and to grow—I gravitate towards these points that anchor the befores and afters of my narrative. The points themselves shift with time; my memory values different moments, or varying elements of the same moments, as I proceed through college and my 20s. I think there is some element of choice as to what events matter most to me, or what has provoked the most change—but this choice is limited to the extent that I can direct my own mind and thoughts. It’s a collaboration, sometimes a contention, between self and brain: Together, my brain and my self are learning to condition, decondition, and develop me, drawing a linear timeline into the present, dotting it with knots of memory.

Because people kind of have to. Our histories fall into narratives because, as historian Hayden White says, narratives are the only forms of writing—of stories—that we recognize. Maybe a linear organization is the easiest to put together and follow; even in cases of purposeful ambiguity, as my writing professor would urge me, it may be necessary to “signpost” the text to give the reader a sense of solid ground. So when we select events, we don’t just assign them importance: We set them up as static, untouchable moments as well as points of turning and returning in our mental timeframes.

As for the decade, I find myself afraid to say anything at all. I think that any reflection upon this time will inevitably unfold as a stubbornly linear narrative, defining itself through the recognition and repetition of salient events. Of course I have thoughts, fears, and even

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ARTS & CULTURE hopes for the present based on the past 10 years. But I’m wary of making choices of importance and of absence.

I’m insecure about defining turning points relative to time, about pinning these moments down in such close proximity to now. And I’m aware of the desire to mark some events over others in an attempt to address, or even to please, onlookers in the future.

I’ll let myself be by leaning into patience, setting myself in the humbling contexts of the vast, shifting landscapes of my community and world, and engaging in some healthy procrastination; I’ll let meaning emerge with me.

Teens and Tens in the 10’s

The Decade’s Most Important Films (To Me)

BY ROB CAPRON ILLUSTRATED BY CECILIA CAO

As we approach the end of 2019, major publications—readying their year-end arts & culture retrospectives as per usual—are charged with an additional, even more brazen task: determining the highlights of the 2010s at large. How could we ever transition into 2020 without definitive, “official” recognition of the decade’s best and worst content? Yet if these lists fail for me as a method of remembering our collective past, it’s because the people who curate them have the audacity to contradict my personal rankings. Jerks.

Joking aside, I know these lists are essentially harmless: fumbling attempts to canonize what’s most important from ten years of cultural detritus. However, they rarely will take me on a tour of collective history, instead recalling my personal memory. That, to me, is the key component these “best-of” lists tend to neglect: There are personal reasons why we remember certain works of art, why we might cherish something regardless of its quality or content. Allow me to provide some examples from the deep recesses of my own teenage cinephilia that will hopefully inspire your own think pieces. And if a particularly egregious choice lands me on your kill list, remember: I’m not saying these are the best films—just the ones that spoke the most to me.

2010: The Social Network I’d never been on social media. It didn’t matter. At 11 years old, I was distinctly aware that David Fincher’s The Social Network was a fantastic movie. What made it good? Perhaps it was Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant, rapidfire dialogue, or Jesse Eisenberg’s effectively neurotic delivery of really big words that went (and still) go over my head. Perhaps it was the film’s crushing loss to The King’s Speech for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and the series of battles I waged with my history-obsessed father over which movie was better.

And since a 12-year-old couldn’t quite comprehend the merits of shot composition then (and a 49-year-old Dad in 2010 barely understood Facebook in the first place), it goes without saying that I lost every time. Ah well. He got his history movie. I got film history—and my first sense of what masterful directors like Fincher were capable of.

2011: Midnight in Paris What can I say? I’ve been addled by melancholic pangs of nostalgia since before my teenage years. I also spent two woefully short days in Paris a few months prior to watching this in theaters, so to say I came in with a little bias would be an understatement. But even if my knowledge of the region was limited to the Eiffel Tower, cool catacombs, and the weird, horrendoustasting “grape juice” that Dad let me try, the movie made me feel tangible longing for a place I could never

be a part of. And the score! The score! Trumpets are the best, man.

2012: The Avengers Do I even need to talk about this one? Words fail.

You have to understand—back then, these superheroes appearing together as a unit in a film that wasn’t their own solo title was revolutionary. If you can recall the famous 360-degree shot around the team in the film’s final battle—and in today’s oversaturated superherodriven society with Disney operating as feudal lord, you probably aren’t allowed to forget it—please add this mental image of me watching it: a chubby 13-yearold, scarfing down popcorn, smiling ear-to-ear. These movies might not quite be cinema, but they’re certainly movie magic.

2013: The Green Inferno Don’t watch this movie. Please. I snuck in and shouldn’t have. It’s a cannibal horror film. It’s just gross.

Skip, skip, skip. I wouldn’t, however, tell you to skip the experience of sneaking into an R-rated film with your friends (might be a little late if you haven’t already had the chance, alas); I’ll never forget the horrified gasps and giggles as bodies exploded, faced decapitation, or worse; and our nervous assurances to one another afterwards that it was “fun, right?” Our collective horror when we remember the experience makes the whole ordeal worth it. If theaters ever do go, I’ll miss the sojourns they allow into random cinematic territory.

2014: Whiplash As an aspiring screenwriter, one of my long-term goals is to utilize music in new and exciting ways. That goal wholly comes from this film. There’s plenty of room to debate the movie’s message and morality (no spoilers here—that ruins the “fun”), but all I will say is this: The last 12 minutes engaged me like nothing I’d ever seen. A perfect union of sound and image, and the creation of raw energy. The sense of being alive.

2015: Spectre This one was my first real cinematic disappointment.

I even liked 2008’s Quantum of Solace (and James Bond fans loathe that one). After the brilliance of 2012’s Skyfall, I expected another masterpiece, another extension of Bond lore that wasn’t a rehash—and got an overambitious, tonally confused mess. Here’s to the next one. It had one unintentional side effect, though— it made me begin to wonder if somehow, someway, I could do better.

2016: La La Land Moonlight is a better film. That is clear. But I said it myself: I’m a nostalgia boy. And despite the silly spectacle of Ryan Gosling saving jazz, the movie couldn’t help but win over this viewer—an angsty former child star questioning his place in showbiz. And that ending. Sigh. This movie’s been charged with being a tad sentimental, its nostalgia the primary fuel for its emotional verve. I may even agree with that reading upon a rewatch. Which is why I never will rewatch it.

Some experiences should be left untouched.

2017: The Florida Project This one’s tough, because for me it totally hinges on what I believe is an utterly ingenious ending. Just watch it. And think of this—I’ve never seen a movie make a more effective point about both the beauty and frailty of dreams in so short a time frame. If La La Land shows the beauty and tragedy of our dreams, this film captures the poignant, brutal truth that they cannot always come true, and maybe never had a chance to in the first place.

2018: Eighth Grade Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse was my favorite.

This one was more important. You may be beginning to notice a trend in my selections—themes of nostalgia, childhood, dreams. Unsurprising, given my biggest role from my child-star days. Would it be weird if I said this movie felt like an authentic, digital-childhood version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid? Would Greg Heffley even keep a diary in today’s world—or, like Eighth Grade’s protagonist, start a vlog? The longing, the hope, the anticipation of the future—all here, captured wonderfully. Got high hopes for you as a director, Bo Burnham.

2019: TBD What? I haven’t seen Parasite yet.

Truthfully, Objectively

Top 10 Albums of the 2010s

BY KATE OK ILLUSTRATED BY OLIVIA LUNGER

2010: Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest Listening to this album in early high school, I imagined that I would one day walk down a collegiate sidewalk listening to “Memory Boy.” Or listen to “Revival” while perusing my wardrobe for low-rise jeans that are two inches (not one) below my bellybutton, or while attempting to cook a frittata and achieving more of a confusing stir-fry. Indeed, I do these things now. Deerhunter’s 2010 release is just sonically joyful, and this album makes me want to believe in doing things (or having done things) in an idyllic manner, as “halcyon” suggests.

HIGHLIGHT: “Revival” 2011: Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring for My Halo Vile’s album is almost hyper-normal—the work of a music fan more than a musician, which is why I am drawn to it. A little R.E.M.-y with its depressive pop sensibility on “Jesus Fever,” a little Dylan-y with its Shakespearean vocal twists on “Puppet To The Man,” and all-around tale-teller Lou Reed-y, this album is derivative in the most genuine way. The album’s sincerity in stylistic imitation is endearing. Consider that Vile released it to mark his departure from the (soon-to-be-Grammywinning) band he played guitar for, The War On Drugs, and we find yet another layer of humility in the work.

HIGHLIGHT: “Jesus Fever” december 6 , 2019 5

ARTS&CULTURE 2012: Jonny Greenwood - The Master This is the second soundtrack Radiohead bassist Jonny Greenwood composed for director Paul Thomas Anderson—one that is as cinematic as Anderson’s epic film. He captures a sense of pre-war America in sprawling orchestral arrangements, while also portraying the disturbing, post-war atmosphere in sparse tracks like “Able-Bodied Seaman.” One of the reasons why The Master is among my favorite films is that it distorts an Austenian sort of restraint and puts it forward with a haunting, masculine stillness, presenting its narrative as close-to-natural as much as it is unnatural. In my opinion, Greenwood perfectly encapsulates the film’s contradictory analogues of emotional chaos and stillness.

HIGHLIGHT: “Get Thee Behind Me Satan feat.

Ella Fitzgerald” 2013: Kanye - Yeezus Here, we have Kanye West when he began to be very “New Kanye”—Yeezus amalgamates over-the-top ego and character with a jarring shift to electro and noisy pitches. With collaborators like Arca, Hudson Mohawke, and Daft Punk, Kanye departs, warps, drills, and digitizes hip hop in an unprecedented manner for the producer-rapper. The album is messy and minimal; it captures conflict in its egotistical sonic highs and chaotic conceits.

HIGHLIGHT: “I Am a God” 2014: Amen Dunes - Love Damon McMahon, under project name Amen Dunes, whines a lot on this album, but these whines soar in a Tim Buckleyan manner—folk at its most elemental.

The album resembles a collection of childhood tunes in its repetition, but it has an overwhelming sense of expansion and climax with its meditative chord progressions in songs like “White Child” and “Lonely Richard.” Love feels devotional, as the title may suggest.

Though McMahon doesn’t make the object of devotion exactly clear, it’s that ambiguous gospel of experience that makes this album stand out.

HIGHLIGHT: “Lonely Richard” 2015: Travis Scott - Rodeo Rodeo was Travis Scott’s debut studio album— establishing the dark, hedonistic production that Scott is now heralded for. Though he relies on standard hip hop braggadocio and decadent narratives of the Hollywood Hills, on tracks like “90210” and “Nightcrawler,” Scott shows what trap is capable of: an almost tangible, hyper-synthetic architecture of sound. Scott’s curation of over-the-top autotune, bizarre feature selection, and plasticky production formulate the audible translation of his fame and success.

HIGHLIGHT: “90210 feat. Kacy Hill” 2016: Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool Yes, 2016 is the year that Beyoncé’s Lemonade was released, and I don’t have an exact explanation as to

why I favor Radiohead’s release. But I can guess that Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool remains my favorite because of how divisive the album is. None of the songs on the album are specifically meme-able or tweet-able— they are all too atmospheric and ambient and dodgy in genre. But A Moon Shaped Pool’s amalgamation of genre and shape is what attracts me to it. From the quick prog-ness of “Burn The Witch” to the ambient, spacey “Glass Eyes,” Radiohead brings forth a patient sort of artfulness.

HIGHLIGHT: “True Love Waits” 2017: LCD Soundsystem - American Dream I have a shirt that proclaims “LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, BACK FROM THE DEAD.” And this sort of mantra is what fascinates me about their comeback fourth studio album. Following 2010’s This is Happening, LCD Soundsystem had announced that they were officially disbanding—complete with the whole farewell tour shebang—only to reunite five years later and release a number-one-charting album.

But with American Dream, bandleader James Murphy perfectly captures a musical sort of renaissance, of “coming back from the dead,” of nostalgic cult and obsession. Murphy understood the combination of anxiety and cynicism that fans had about the new album, and he managed to combat it. It’s not exactly disingenuous, either—it doesn’t seem like Murphy booby-trapped music geeks and nerds to feed into a cultural trap. Instead, he allows them a glimpse of cultural interiority.

HIGHLIGHT: “American Dream”

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Anita Sheih FEATURE Managing Editor Sydney Lo

“But like in a terrible Tim Burton movie, aggressive anti-social behavior turned out to be a hidden pathway to making friends.”

- Julian Towers, “why all lists are garbage” 12.6.18

Staff Writer Anna Harvey

“I miss the insignificant significance given to harvests and end-of-the-year celebrations, the comfort of days void of the sense of something to be done.”

- Sydney Lo, “pumpkin spice & other existential autumnal comforts” 12.6.17

6 post–

Section Editors Sara Shapiro Erin Walden

NARRATIVE Managing Editor Celina Sun Section Editors Liza Edwards-Levin Michelle Liu Jasmine Ngai

2018: Bob Dylan - More Blood, More Tracks The 14th volume of Bob Dylan’s archival “bootleg” series, More Blood, More Tracks comes in two versions: a one-disc collection with 11 tracks, and a six-disc collection with 87 tracks. This compilation of previously unreleased recordings is from sessions for the original 1975 album Blood on the Tracks. With alternate takes of familiar classics like “Tangled Up in Blue,” Dylan’s new installment in his bootleg series gives me a glimpse into his private life, which isn’t necessarily comprised of private details. More Blood, More Tracks is eye-opening; the album’s obsessive repetitiveness makes Dylan even more visible as a person and less of a perfect mythic figure. I couldn’t imagine Mick Jagger being friends with Dylan until hearing their take of “Meet Me in the Morning” and listening to them argue about who plays slide guitar.

HIGHLIGHT: “Tangled Up in Blue (Take 3, Remake 3)” 2019: Wilco - Ode to Joy Tweedy’s 2019 release marks Wilco’s return to whispery, subtle charm. After the lukewarm albums Schmilco and Star Wars, Ode to Joy feels like a revelation—but it doesn’t exactly sound like one. In this album, I feel as though Wilco is doing what Wilco does best, which is crafting a gangly collection of beautiful melodies. Wilco returns to their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot comfort zone of introspective indie rock, but they find a way to keep their sound spiritually rich with loose touches of emotional weight.

HIGHLIGHT: “White Wooden Cross”

Staff Writers Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Danielle Emerson Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Grace Park ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Julian Towers Section Editors Nicole Fegan Griffin Plaag Staff Writers Rob Capron David Kleinman

LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Kahini Mehta

SOCIAL MEDIA Head Editor Camila Pavon

Section Editor Caitlin McCartney

Editor Paola Solano

Staff Writers Eashan Das Lauren Toneatto

HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Rémy Poisson

COPY Copy Chief Amanda Ngo

LAYOUT Co-Chiefs Amy Choi Nina Yuchi

Copy Editors Maddy McGrath Jennifer Osborne Mohima Sattar

Designers Joanne Han Steve Ju Iris Xie

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