Post- 4/6/17

APRIL 4 – VOL 19 – ISSUE 20

In this issue...

Frisbee, Frizz, and Flings

Correction

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Sometimes, we make mistakes. Two weeks ago was one such occasion.

FEATURES To Throw a Frisbee

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Hair

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Daniel’s article will be reprinted with the correct byline in the issue after next. It can also be viewed on our website at post.browndailyherald.com.

Best,

5 LIFESTYLE

Monica editor in chief

Warm Skin

5

A Place on the Stage

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Intellectual Diversity at Brown

In our last issue, we accidentally misattributed Daniel Murage’s article “One Minute Early” to another author.

We deeply, deeply apologize to Daniel and to our readers for this error and will make every effort to ensure that errors like this do not happen again.

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7 ARTS & CULTURE Looking Back

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A Penguin at the End of

Post- Board Editor in Chief Monica Chin Managing Editor, Arts & Culture Joshua Lu

Managing Editor, Features Saanya Jain

Arts & Culture Editors Taylor Michael Josh Wartel

Features Editors Claribel Wu Kathy Luo

Managing Editor, Lifestyle Annabelle Woodward

Copy Chief Alicia DeVos

Lifestyle Editors Jennifer Osborne Celina Sun Creative Director Grace Yoon Art Director Katie Cafaro

Assistant Copy Editors Zander Kim Alexandra Walsh Layout Chief Livia Mucciolo Layout Assistants Yamini Mandava Elizabeth Toledano Cover Natasha Sharpe

the World

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Song to Song

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To Throw A Frisbee My freshman year, in an introductory art class, I became captivated by Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, which portrays four people—a couple, a solitary man, and a waiter—in a downtown diner at night. It is cold and dark outside, but the diner is warm and well-lit. The details are brilliant, meticulous, but what makes this painting unforgettable for me is the perspective. When you see the painting, you take on the perspective of an outsider, out in the cold, looking in at the warm diner. I always imagine this outsider to be forlorn and miserable, longing to be inside but not stepping in for some fearful reason.

Often, on cold February nights, when I am walking along the snow-encrusted streets of Providence, I imagine myself to be this outsider. When I walk down Waterman Street, I stop in front of Faunce House and squat to see Brown Taekwondo, dressed in their pristine white uniforms, standing in the center of their blue mats, throwing kicks and punches in the air. When I walk down Benefit Street, I stop in front of the Athenaeum and stand on tiptoe to see the neat rows of folding metal chairs, the red wine in plastic cups, and the salon speaker behind a podium. When I walk down South Main Street, I stop in front of the brick building with tall industrial chimneys and crane my neck to see RISD students working at their long steel benches. These scenes have nothing in common except this: They—the martial artists, the salon attendees, the artists— are inside; I am outside.

And I am tired of being outside.

At the start of my senior year, I decided to join Brown’s intramural Ultimate Frisbee team. I had signed up for the Frisbee mailing list my sophomore year and watched the emails pass back and forth like an observer at a tennis game. I would read them wistfully—there were countless parties and impromptu midnight games of Frisbee golf (frolf )—but I had never gone to a practice or a scrimmage.

This year will be different, I thought.

In September, when I got the email announcing the first day of the Frisbee Fall League, I marked the day on my calendar and, in preparation, lay out my athletic gear. When Thursday afternoon came around, I dashed from class in Wilson Hall to my room in Slater Hall, changed clothes, and set out for Pembroke Field.

It was a beautiful fall afternoon: The leaves were yellow and orange, the Providence sky purple and pink. The grass on Pembroke Field was long and green, and the golden cupola of the Nelson Fitness Center glowed in the distance.

I am going to miss this, I thought, suddenly nostalgic.

“Do you want to toss?” a short, lean boy with shoulder-length black hair asked me, breaking my reverie.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“I’m Rick, by the way,” he said, putting out his hand.

“Tushar,” I said, shaking his hand.

Rick moved to the end of the field

Brown Bucket List #3

to avoid the other throwers and signaled to me to throw. I placed my feet apart, moved my shoulder back, leaned forward in one single motion, and snapped my wrist right at the end, as a friend had taught me. The disc wobbled a little, but it then straightened out and went to Rick, who clapped it between the palms of his hand.

A respectable backhand, I thought.

Rick threw a forehand, which didn’t wobble at all, and I caught it by clapping my hands. We soon settled into a rhythm, throwing the disc back and forth. A breeze was blowing, and I felt good—the discomfort of feeling out of place was dissipating.

“All right guys, bring it in.”

I turned around and saw that the other guys had formed a circle in the middle of the field. I picked up the disc, and Rick and I headed to join the rest of the players.

In the center of the circle stood two boys. One had brown hair and a brown mustache and was wearing a purple, sleeveless Brownian Motion jersey with white shorts, while the other was clean-shaven and was wearing all-black: a pair of black shorts, a black T-shirt, and a black baseball cap.

“I’m Kenny,” said the boy in the purple jersey. “And this is Daddy D.” Daddy D—I liked the alliteration— raised his baseball cap in acknowledgement.

“And this is the year’s first Fall League,” Kenny said. The returners in the crowd cheered.

“For first-timers, this is how Fall League works,” Kenny said. “We start off with a warm-up lap or two, then we do stretches. After the stretches, we break into teams and do drills. Then the teams scrimmage.”

“Any questions?” Daddy D asked, taking off his baseball cap.

“No, father,” one of the guys in the circle said, and there was laughter.

“All right, let’s go then,” Daddy D said, putting on his baseball cap.

After the warm-up lap and stretches, I hobbled—the groin stretches had taken their toll—over to the assigned corner with the rest of my team. The drills went fine. My forehand was wobbly, but my backhand was good enough.

Physically, though, I was beat: My shirt was drenched with sweat, my mouth was parched, and I kept taking off my glasses to wipe away the droplets of perspiration falling from my hair.

After the drills, we switched to the scrimmages, which was a relief. I stood on the side, waiting for my turn, sitting out most games.

“Tushar, you’re up,” Kenny said. He was the team captain and had gone around the circle repeating our names until he remembered them.

I ran onto the field and stood with the other six members of our team.

“We’re doing man-to-man marking,” Rick said. “Look across the field, and the guy directly opposite you is your man.”

I looked across and saw Daddy D. Oh fuck, I thought.

Our team suffered an ignominious defeat (7-2), and I screwed up often.

Daddy D was too fast for me, as I had feared. When his team was on the offense,

he would feign in one direction, and then room, and saw Daddy D standing in turn and dash to the center of the field, the center of the room. while I followed hopelessly behind.

“Hey guys,” he said, and several “Who is marking him? Who is people shouted back greetings. “I just marking him?” Rick would shout. wanted to acknowledge that this a After the game, Rick pulled me very bro-ey atmosphere and that we aside and pointed to the field, “Look at are cognizant of that. But there’s no all those guys. They’re giving it everypressure to drink, and we are doing our thing, running as fast as they can. You best to make the program a welcome can do it too.” space for everyone.”

I hated to tell him that I had been My fears temporarily allayed, I sat running at my full speed—that this was back down on the couch. full-tilt ahead. I sat out for most of the reKenny and Daddy D explained maining games—out of sheer exhaustion how Frisbee initiation worked: The more than shame at my incompetence. first-timers would come up, one-byAfter that first Fall League practice, one, to the speaker’s chair—a chair in I went to a few more practices, but the front of the room—and share an sporadically. Papers and midterms kept embarassing story. Afterwards, they me busy, and most days I didn’t have would drink from a Frisbee filled to the the energy (or the heart) to tramp over brim with beer (or punch). Once the to Pembroke Field. first-timers had gone, returners could

By November—midterm season—I volunteer to share their stories. had almost forgotten about Frisbee, when For the next few hours, I was the invite to the Frisbee initiation arrived. regaled by one outlandish story after The house was indistinguishable another. There were raunchy camp stofrom the rest of the houses on the street. ries, scatological stories, police-evasion The blue paint was chipping in places, stories, and even a story involving an and the house number—metal digits inflatable chair. As the evening neared stuck on the door—had a digit missing, to an end, the beer towers had multiits faint glue-outline still visible. There plied—six instead of the initial two— were three empty glass bottles lined on and grown in height: Everyone was in the porch, like sentries on duty, and a benign and muddled state. thickets of bushes grew outside.

“All right,” Daddy D said, standing I hesitated for a moment. This up, “It’s time to wrap up. Have anyone seemed too ordinary. Maybe I had of the first-timers not gone yet?” gotten the address wrong. Just then I The room was silent. I was hoping heard a rustling sound from above. A no one had noticed that I hadn’t told a moment later, a yellow rivulet arced story when someone grabbed my arm from the balcony to the bushes. with a vice-like grasp.

I moved back as a pungent odor It was Rick. wafted from the bushes.

“You haven’t gone yet,” he said.

The door to the house swung open, Cornered, I muttered, “I guess I could go.” and Kenny stepped out.

No one heard me so Rick acted as “Hey, do you mind,” he shouted, looking an amplifier. Holding up my arm like a up at the balcony, “This house is a home.” referee declaring the winner of a boxThere was a moment of silence and ing match, Rick said, “He said he’ll go.” then the sound of a zipper.

A path cleared for me from the “Sorry,” the disembodied voice from couch to the speaker’s chair. I walked the balcony said. “The line to the bathup to the chair, draped my jacket room was really long.” around it, and sat down. A sea of Definitely the right house, I drunk, strange faces stared back at thought, and followed Kenny inside me. My palms were clammy, and I was and up the stairs. tapping my foot. There was a buzz goInside, there were three sagging ing around the room, and I waited for couches with holes in the seat cushthings to quieten down. ions, the yellow stuffing visible. String I told the story about the time lights ran along the length of the room. my roommate Cormac had, uninvited, The window latches were broken, and serenaded me and my date. (You can the windows were propped open by find this story in the Post- archives mini-towers of empty Bud Light beer online.) It went down well—though to cans. The room was stuffy and hot: be honest, the audience was so drunk Almost all of the men’s Frisbee team— that they would have applauded even a nearly 40 people—was present, sitting “Hansel and Gretel” retelling. on the couches or on the floor. There As I knelt and drank from the Friswas shouting and confusion as beer bee filled with beer, they chanted my cans were thrown around the room. name—“Tushar, Tushar, Tushar”—and I made my way across the room, step- even though the beer tasted foul and ping over the people sitting on the floor, the edge of the Frisbee was chipped, for and sat down on a couch near the window. those few moments I felt perfectly safe My escape hatch, I thought, peerand happy—like I had finally found ing out of the window. somewhere I belonged.

I was unaccustomed to all the noise and exuberance, and was feeling Tushar Bhargava nervous and out of place. I had stuck s taff writer my head out of the window—under the Jenice Kim pretense of getting fresh air—and was illus tr ator gauging the drop to the ground, when the room fell silent.

I pulled my head back into the

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Hair Navigating Hair as

an Indian-Canadian Woman I am seven years old, sitting in the car next to one of my family friends. The light from the street lamps occasionally flits into the dark car, illuminating parts of our skin.

“Look at my arms,” she tells me. Through the dimmed glow of fluorescent yellow light, I catch a glimpse of her tanned arms. I look at her, puzzled.

“There’s so much hair on them,” she whispers, her voice cloaked in shame.

I have hair on my hands too.

Dark and wispy, I can see them on my arms, like thin grass from seedlings in the spring.

“I have them too,” I tell her.

“How come the white girls in our class don’t? Why is it just us?” she wonders, her pupils widening in the dark.

I hastily change the subject, afraid and unsure of the answer to her question. But through the years, I have carried this memory with me. I remember it every time I go in for a waxing appointment and my legs are looked at with disgust.

I remember it when a friend points at the small hairs that sprout on my upper lip.

“Smooth and clean,” my aesthetician exclaims as she painfully rips off sections of my hair. I grit my teeth, cognizant that my outfit the next day depends on my hairless legs. After each appointment, the aesthetician looks at me with a proud smile, as if my body has been transformed with each wax. As I walk out of the salon, I feel oddly empty, pruned to a sanitized perfection. And every two weeks, my body fights back, wildly sprouting dark hairs at an even more rapid rate, refusing to be tamed. The battle continues.

I am not alone in these trials. A poll conducted by Jezebel reports that women spend over 1,728 hours in a lifetime waxing or shaving.

The economic cost of hair removal is even more surprising. The Atlantic reports that the average woman who shaves spends more than $10,000 on hair removal over the course of her lifetime, while a woman who waxes will spend more than double this amount. Given the exorbitant amounts of time and money we spend on bodily hair removal, it is interesting to note that shaving and waxing provide no biological benefits. In fact, Nature Magazine reports that bodily hair follicles are crucial to providing a productive ecosystem for the hu-

man microbiome. In other words, our body hair is beneficial for our health. Why, then, do we spend so much of our time and energy on hair removal? To better understand how hair removal has been inculcated in modern culture, we must turn to the historical forces which have led to current day practices.

In the early 18th century, European settlers chastised the hairless skin of indigenous peoples. They found hairlessness to be a strange phenomenon of the indigenous community. Hair removal was, in fact, considered a violent and brutish practice by European settlers.

It was only when Darwin published Descent of Men that social conceptions surrounding body hair were transformed. According to evolutionary theory, men were deemed to be hairier, while women were characterized as less hairy, smoother, and more feminine. An 1893 study proclaimed that insane women had thicker and more copious amounts of hair than sane women.

According to 18th-century scientist Havelock Ellis, women who were hairy were considered more likely to be criminals and display strong characteristics of animal vigor.

It is evident, then, that hair became a medium of social control.

American women in the 1900s aspired to have smooth, clean, hair-free skin. Body hair became

a distinction of class, with middle-class women employing hair removal techniques to distinguish themselves from lower-class and immigrant women who couldn’t afford to do so. This was further exploited by corporations in the 1900s, when Gillette launched an aggressive marketing campaign focused on helping women achieve beautiful, smooth underarms. This sentiment was carried throughout pop culture, with magazines lauding the clean, smooth, attractive woman. Ads with the captions “Unloved” attempted to characterize hairy women as lonely. As new hair removal techniques emerged over the course of the 19th century, the practice of shaming hairy women and adulating women with smooth bodies continued. And so, hair has become a powerful product of racial, political, and corporate forces, ultimately changing the way women perceive themselves.

As a woman of South Asian origin, shaving and waxing is a necessary means to exist within the fabric of society the Western world has imposed. While my long eyelashes and dark, defining eyebrows are celebrated, my legs and arms are scorned in their natural state. And yet, I have my moments of rebellion in the dark winter months, when I stop battling my body and let nature take its course.

It is during these cold and silent months that I become accustomed to seeing the way my hair curls on my body, dark and liberated, loud and defiant.

I sit with my nine-year-old cousin in a movie theatre, when she turns to me and asks why she has hair on her upper lip.

“Everyone makes fun of me for having a moustache,” she says, earnestly looking up at me. In her eyes, I see my bewildered seven-year old self, hastily pushing down my long sleeves to cover the hair which grow on my skin. I look into her wide, doe-like eyes and uncover my sleeve to reveal my own unshaven arm hair. “It’s natural,” I tell her.

Whether we women choose to shave, or not to shave, is a highly personal choice. And yet, it is my hope that through small acts of resistance—encouraging young women to be proud of who they are, acknowledging that beauty itself is a fluid construct—we can create a more accepting, inclusive, and free society.

Divya Santhanam staff writer

Doris Liou

illustr ator

5

Warm Skin

A Summer Fling that gets Better after Goodbye

She shuts the screen door with its peeling paint, and a smile breaks out on her face. An evening wellspent, and the best is yet to come.

Sex is good, and his skin is warm.

He offers to walk her home, as he does every night, but she declines, as she does every night. Sex is good, and his skin is warm, but she likes to end her nights alone. This gives her the necessary 10 minutes to remind herself that a breezy July night filled with stars that she doesn’t know the names of is more than enough to satiate her.

Her mother has always told her that the nicer the boy the warmer his body temperature will be. This summer boy is proof that mom was right. He is so nice. But nice only gets you so far. That may sound mean, but it’s honest. She wasn’t honest with him then, so she should be now. He laughs at her jokes in all the wrong places and apologizes when he shouldn’t. He doesn’t see their disconnect. Part of her knows that the deeper she gets, the more wrong she is doing.

He thinks she likes his jokes, which only proves that he doesn’t know her laugh. He thinks that they have an understanding, but their conversations run in circles, beginning and ending with wispy nothings.

It gives her a certain sense of power, to know that he thinks he has her, to know that he thinks she is consumed by him, when really she is consumed by sweat and warm skin and walks home that filling her lungs with romantic notions of summer and love.

What they have is not love. What they have is not even love adjacent.

What they have is convenience that quickly becomes routine, but she refuses to give up those walks

home. All day she is surrounded by people—happy, cheerful, silly, buzzing people—high on spending their days outdoors, and she loves it. She feels energized and alive too. But this is new for her; she normally is the kind of girl who gets overwhelmed, who often needs quiet moments to herself, to be in her own head, to daydream. She reaches the halfway point of the summer and realizes she has been in the moment every moment she has had. So she stops letting him walk her home.

But she still doesn’t return to her daydreams. Instead, she floats home on the leaves that tickle her toes in their Birkenstocks, on the night sounds that don’t quite scare her, on her ability to be detached.

She didn’t know she could be like this. She doesn’t think it means she is cold-hearted or mean-spirited.

His understanding of their situation certainly gives him what he wants, aligned with his own notions of what romantic summers should be like. She began in June with these same notions, with hopes of a grand summer love. What she gets is sex and warm skin, which truly isn’t half bad. In fact, it’s kind of good. You can say she was heartless, thoughtless, that she was cruel, that she drew it out for too long and snatched up someone else too quickly. But she didn’t daydream once that summer; she felt strong and in control. She felt like herself, day after day after day. Her moments alone on nighttime walks home confirmed this, that she felt totally satisfied all the time. Not because of sex with him, not even because of his warm, warm skin, but because of her days of friendship and laughter and her ability to

A Place on the Stage Endless reflective windows meld into crumbling brick walls, colored tarps cover construction sites, and LED advertisements illuminate a frigid night. The expanse of Manhattan unfurls its skyscraper-clad curtains and opens into my reality.

I am swept into the giddy tourism, the excitement of a first visit. My expectations swell as names I’ve only seen on my Hamilton Pandora Station light up 45th and 46th streets.

I am about to see my first Broadway show.

With Google Maps pulled up on my phone, I walk with my mother, who lived in the city decades ago. We wind through the wide sidewalks and numbered streets.

She tells me how Broadway used to look before the city sculpted it into an ideal of lights, restaurants, and shops. “You never wanted to just walk around,” she explains, scan-

touch every single star when no one was looking. She could do everything she wanted.

He didn’t see this girl, or if he did, he didn’t understand her. To him, she was the kind of intimacy he had never had for more than one night, but he had picked the wrong girl to extend that magic we can all feel in one moment. She gave herself to someone who didn’t see her sense of humor or her life or her love of book dedications, but she’s alll right with that; she didn’t really want him to. He gave her walks

home, moments where she could be alone, unafraid, and feel free and strong and happy that she was who she was—that she was radiating all those Romantic notions of summer all on her own, placing the stars in the sky.

Charlotte Blumenthal staff writer

Soco Fernandez Garcia

illustr ator

The Thrill of a First Visit

ning the road ahead. She has pulled her purse to her chest instinctually and shivers in the cold. I mention to her learning about that in one of my classes. We check the address of the theater again.

It is odd to face a city that has lived in your head all your life, to fit the fragmented portrayals into a physical position relative to others, and then yourself, within this map. My mother’s life as a nanny on the Upper East Side, the shimmering Times Square and Broadway Theaters, the glamour of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, and countless other token components of the city. I watch them connect through streets and subway stops in front of me, excessively close together and surprisingly far apart.

A flashing screen illuminates a woman in white twirling around the stage. “Natasha, Pierre, and the

Great Comet of 1812,” the bold script below her reads. We arrive at our theater, printed tickets warped from the rain. The cold follows us as we are directed through the theater.

The hallways bend around the orchestra, stage, and mezzanine, lit by small artificial lamps. A staff member hands us the yellow Playbills and shows us to our seats. We sit on winding banquettes directly on the stage, with open spaces woven between us for actors to move through.

I ruffle the shiny paper of the program, and I am again confounded by the sudden normalcy of holding a Broadway theater program in my hands, of reading a program on a Broadway stage. My mother and I scan the pages, follow the dense cast descriptions and audience notes. I imagine the hundreds of hours of work it must have taken to bring the performance to this night. How are we to be a part of this?

The stage is made to resemble a Russian opera house, with scattered tables and fake paintings hanging from the crimson walls.

Brilliantly delicate chandeliers hang above, illuminating gold accents in their refractions. Everything is meticulously crafted, drifting between the realism of the Russian setting and a romantic backdrop for the characters. Beside me a stranger taps me on the shoulder. “Do all Broadway performances look like this?”

“They built the whole thing for the musical,” I respond, recalling the research I did for the show weeks earlier. Still, a single production hardly seems to justify the suspended areas of the stage and complex seating arrangements. The stranger nods, gaze frozen in awe. I imagine I look the same.

Before the lights dim and the first haunting note is played,

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before actors erupt onto the stage in perfect coordination, I am holding my mother’s hand and looking at pictures we’d taken earlier that day. She smiles tiredly, and I grin back at her. We are here, in New York City, where she used to live and where I’ve never been. We are embedded in this landscape. I close my eyes and feel my small, small place on the stage.

Sydney Lo

staff writer

Clarisse Angkassa illustr ator

Intellectual Diversity at Brown There were two of them, standing in front of the soda dispenser in the Ratty, bodies tense and movements agitated.

“You can’t say that.”

I saw her hands clenching and unclenching by her waist, face scrunched up in frustration. “I know you disagree, but I’m just saying that— ” “You’re wrong.”

“Just let me explain, Nina— ” “You know what, I don’t have to listen to this shit.”

“Nina!”

Watching this conversation escalate, I was amazed at how unwilling each was to consider the other’s perspective. It’s incidents like these, common at Brown, that demonstrate an issue with the way that we define diversity on this campus. I know that diversity may seem to be a word that has been exploited to exhaustion, become so common that it’s nearly synonymous with the inane, but that does nothing to undermine its importance.

In my eyes, diversity on a university campus should be first and foremost defined as intellectual diversity.

I would define intellectual diversity as the collective diversity of thought, opinion, and perspective, which are primarily fed and sustained by individual diversity of culture and identity.

It often seems as though the definition of a university’s diversity has become conflated with the simplifying categorization of its individuals: statistics generated based on characteristics of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or academic focus.

At times it feels as though the reason that those differences are so precious in constructing the community has been forgotten.

Each of our perspectives is shaped through our unique experiences and

Colette Bertschy

staff writer

Anonymous illustr ator

culture: our expectations, norms, history, beliefs, dress codes, political affiliations, and identities—all are culturally dependent.

The reason that it is so important to compose a university body of individuals who embody these differences is that they create the varying perspectives that feed and sustain discourse.

Discussion confronts people with opinions that differ from their own, which puts preconceived assumptions under examination. Individuals step beyond their comfort zones, fostering debate that ultimately leads to the progress that is so unique to a university setting.

We all have different reasons for coming to Brown, but a common thread among students and faculty, regardless of their particular fields, is the search for some form of knowledge and intellectual growth. How can we grow without the intellectual diversity of our community creating a platform for discussion and debate? Without exposure to new ideas, concepts, and ways of thinking? What would push us to define our ideas, find creative solutions, and piece together new concepts if there was no one to challenge us to do so?

As a community, we thrive because of our differences. Yet, particularly since the most recent election, there is one difference that we are beginning to exclude: Views or opinions that have been deemed “conservative” on issues that have become politicized by the bipolar partisan nature of our governmental system are beginning to get shut out.

The issue is that the more topics become politicized, the less is left to discuss without honest debate being replaced by partisan diatribe. Today, even scientific fact has become a partisan issue: hence the legion of climate deniers and luke warmers that persist in the United States despite the overwhelming data gathered each year pointing toward our changing atmospheric composition.

In an article titled “Intellectual

In Defense of Discourse Diversity,” published by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2005, author Stanley Fish suggested that “the line between the political and the academic is at times difficult to discern—political issues are legitimately the subject of academic analysis; the trick is to keep analysis from sliding into advocacy.”

It is hard to dissect an issue like climate change, abortion, immigration, or religion without blurring the lines between academics and advocacy. But there is a line, difficult though it may be to respect: Once you cross it, you hear the other side but are no longer listening.

Politics is woven around most areas of our lives, and at the moment, we do not have a very politically diverse campus. It is less a question of how many members of our community identify as conservative than it is a matter of how few people are willing to voice opinions that have been “claimed” by the conservative party.

I have found it increasingly difficult to have an honest discussion with people on campus on what are deemed “sensitive” issues, since it has reached the point where even friends will hesitate before sharing a controversial opinion. And it’s not even that we have become expected to disagree with whatever opinion is being propagated by the conservative party—as my friend put it quite candidly one evening, “If you don’t subscribe to a particular brand of liberalism, you’re shut out from most of the social circles.”

Brown University: a community where increasingly homogenized political-intellectual notions are becoming normalized throughout the student body. Whether or not you agree with those norms is irrelevant—this trend could be seen as a recipe for intellectual stagnation.

We cannot allow nuance to be forgotten or inhibit its development by restricting our discussions to only what we want to hear. And it is not enough to hear ideas we disagree with—we

actually need to be willing to listen and engage in conversation.

“Nina! Nina just hear me out— ” “I don’t want to.”

Not everyone who voted for Trump is racist, misogynistic, or bigoted— those labels are becoming an excuse, a cheap shot to discredit their opinions and opinions propagated by the conservative party. Opinions we don’t want to listen to.

Worse, though, is the ease with which those words are now tossed toward anyone who voted for our president, regardless of their actual reasons for supporting him. And we fear those labels, despise them, do our best to avoid them: We would sacrifice sharing our perspectives just to avoid being branded by them.

The consequence? Reducing the collective intellectual diversity of our campus body, fostering intellectual stagnation by limiting discourse and debate due to the overly partisan politicization of opinions to conform to majority trends.

Intentionally or not, we have begun to limit free speech on our campus.

7

Looking Back

Letter from New York: Sunday in the Park with George and The Price

Seeing Sunday in the Park with George is at this point in history is less a theatergoing experience than an act of worship. If the well-to-do Broadway set or bourgeois theater maniacs, immortalized in another Stephen Sondheim piece, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” had their own version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Sunday would probably be it. In other words, the thrill of getting to see the Georges Seurat fantasia in person puts people either of a certain age or certain mold in such a transported state that it’s practically irrelevant who stars in or who directed any particular production. Give us those gorgeous melodic experiments and flawless lyrics (by the aforementioned Sondheim) and tightly plotted, experimental book (by James Lapine), this time at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway through April 23rd, and you’ll get no complaints from us.

That’s why it’s especially thrilling that this revival, the show’s third iteration on Broadway, is practically perfect in every way. Sarna Lapine, the librettist’s daughter, has staged a minimalist version of this emotionally massive musical that, thanks to smart design elements, never feels small. The sets, appropriately, are composed entirely of variants of color and light, designed by Tal Yarden and Ken Billington. The ensemble cast is ridiculously talented – Tony nominee Brooks Ashmanskas and Tony winner Ruthie Ann Miles grace the production in shockingly small roles, proving even Broadway stars go gaga for George.

But of course, no production of this show, fundamentally, works without its two tentpole stars, and, thank God, Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford are inhumanly

good in the roles originated by Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. Gyllenhaal, miraculously, is just as good a singer as he is an actor. He is, in many ways, a second coming of Patinkin – so bursting with manic energy and talent, that, when finally given room to go nuts in the number “The Day Off,” he threatens to tear the theater apart.

Given Patinkin’s iconic status, the similarities in their performances are sometimes a weakness for Gyllenhaal, but the force of the latter’s charisma soon overwhelms any flaws.

His personality is so fiery you can sense the degree to which he’s almost encumbered by anyone else onstage – perfect for his dual roles as artists no one understands. Ashford’s magnificent stage presence, given her stellar work in Kinky Boots and You Can’t Take it With You, should come as no surprise. She is better on all counts – singing, bravado, absentminded sexuality – than Peters ever was.

The dramatic brilliance of Sunday -- and this becomes clearer with this revival than it ever was before – is that its style, exactly as Seurat’s was, is pointillist. Lapine’s disparate and seemingly unrelated dramatic installments and Sondheim’s jumpy, wild, thrilling music combine to tell a seemingly conventional story of artists coming to terms with their tradition and their humanity (or lack thereof). It’s only when you step back that the colors wash together and the perfection of the piece is revealed. So perhaps it’s fitting that, with a distance of three decades between Sunday’s original production and now, the show’s vitality should be clearer than ever. *** While Sunday’s reduced set design from its original 1985 production serves to empha-

A Penguin at the End of the World Club Penguin shut down on March 30th at the stroke of midnight PST. It was the end of an online game that, through its decade-long existence, was a defining part of growing up for generations of kids. Its death was a symbolic one as well, yet another reminder of the ephemerality of our childhood experiences. But we largely ignored these musings and instead made some memes about the website, most notably the ones involving how easy it is to get banned for saying naughty words.

As a game, Club Penguin was an anomaly. There wasn’t a whole lot to do, really—you could play minigames to get coins for clothing (if you bought membership). But the main draw of Club Penguin was the ability to interact with others, even if you could only do so with their cheesy preset messages. It wasn’t a game designed for prolonged playing sessions, but rather one you were intended to continuously revisit over a long period of time for brief spurts. With time came new content; for instance, a new edition of their newspaper was released every week, and a new pin (a wearable collectible) was occasionally hidden somewhere in the world for you to find.

There were always fresh sitewide events to participate in, where you could often score free clothing and furniture.

Other childhood RPGs in this early era of the commercialized internet were similarly designed. Neopets was filled with fun, quick events that could only be done once

a day, and new material was continuously being created every week. There were more overt barriers preventing kids from playing for long periods of time—for example, games could only be played three times before Neopoints (their currency) were no longer awarded—but the main roadblock was the simple lack of activities after a certain point. You were forced to wait until the next day, when everything would be unlocked for you to continue your progress.

Neopets was in the news these past few years for being purchased by Jumpstart, a company which proceeded to neglect the website. New glitches continuously cropped up, and beloved features were inexplicably removed. Then, on the day of a facility move, the notoriously restrictive chat filter was accidentally loosened, and months of pentup frustration towards the Jumpstart team was suddenly unleashed in an explosion of shitposting. The ingame forum was soon filled with thread titles like “fu cking sjws again,” “hell is empty,” and “i cant believe i cant fu cking cuss on neopets.” New Neopets were bequeathed names like “dickdestroyer” and “WaffleSlut.” The festivities died soon enough and bans were handed out, but coupled with news that much of the original staff for Neopets had recently been laid off by Jumpstart, the episode rang like a final knell for those who grew up playing the game.

These examples are just two of many.

Runescape underwent a massive overhaul some years back to the point of unrecogniz-

size a new directorial approach, some design elements are more utilitarian than others.

Terry Kinney’s revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price, at Broadway’s American Airlines Theatre through May 14th is set in an attic with the top of a staircase conveniently located downstage left, the better to conduce staging and, perhaps more relevantly, entrance applause. Over the course of the show’s twoand-a-half-hour running time, Mark Ruffalo, Jessica Hecht, Danny DeVito, and Tony Shahloub come tromping up the staircase, and it pays to show off the merchandise.

The Price is an inordinately depressing, violently funny play dealing, unusually for midcentury drama, with the human side of capital, rather than the capitalistic side of humanity. Ruffalo’s Victor Franz, a cop near retirement, spends much of the second act with seven hundred dollars wadded tightly in his fist. All that green is courtesy of DeVito’s Gregory Solomon, a furniture dealer looking to buy what amounts to the entire estate of Victor’s deceased father for a measly twelve hundred bucks. Most of Shahloub’s Walter Franz’s time on stage is spent arguing with Victor, his younger brother, about how much cash their dad actually had on hand when he passed over, sixteen years before. In short, The Price has its mind on its money and its money on its mind, which doesn’t make it any easier to forget how much you paid for your ticket.

The writing, naturally, is lyrical and magnificent, and the acting is near-uniformly great. Hecht, the weakest element of last season’s Fiddler revival, pulls the same trick here – she’s eternally and needlessly running back and forth across the stage despite the threeinch heels with which she’s saddled – and

Ruffalo plays Victor as such a mouth-breathing sad-sack that he lets Shahloub and DeVito (the latter making his Broadway debut at 72) run away with the show a bit(Actually the breakout star is Derek McLane’s gorgeous set, which looks like a Cornell box crossed with a Hopper painting). But who’s complaining?

This is a show about pride and money, and nothing hits that combo right on the nose like star casting on Broadway, a practice in which both proliferate. It doesn’t really matter if the production is great (which, incidentally, it is); you know that standing ovation is coming at the end anyway. As Miller once wrote elsewhere, “Attention must be paid.” Check and double check.

James Feinberg staff writer

Soco Fernandez Garcia illustr ator

The Deaths of our Childhood Games ability, as did Maplestory. Toontown Online was also shut down by Disney in 2013. The games that used to populate the Disney and Nickelodeon websites are gone—does anyone remember that Lilo and Stitch one where you had to stack sandwich ingredients?

One reason is the sheer increase in competition these days; mobile apps are portable, addictive games for little kids, and YouTube has many content creators that directly target children. Games like Minecraft and Roblox, where the users themselves can create different game types, offer nearly limitless entertainment. The business models of old, where content was unlocked through waiting and returning every day, are no longer effective in an age where so much possible entertainment is readily available. Rather symbolically, Club Penguin’s death gave way to Disney’s new mobile-only penguin-themed game, Club Penguin Island. Featuring disturbingly high-resolution penguins and promises of “non-stop action!”, it was a blatant bid by Disney to transfer the charms of Club Penguin to a more profitable medium.

Of course, our penchant for nostalgia doesn’t give a shit about business models.

Despite the obvious flaws, we still mourned the deaths of our childhood games; we still have emotional ties to these games even if we haven’t touched them in years. Many people, including myself, remade a new account and waddled around in the days leading up to its deletion. There were fun

events to celebrate the end, and the Club Penguin staff even added the ability to tip the iceberg, which had been an urban legend of sorts since the birth of the game.

Flipping it over would reveal a dancefloor and a plaque that read as follows: “Together, we can build an island, create a community, change the world... and even tip an iceberg.

Waddle on.”

Club Penguin, like many of these old childhood games, never felt like traditional games, really. They operated as communities and worlds, where the objective is never to defeat a final boss or get every achievement. The only goal was to explore, make friends, talk to people from all over the world. Waddle on—it’s a simple phrase, but a fitting one.

Joshua Lu

managing editor

Michelle Ng

illustr ator

Song to Song The characters of Terrence Malick’s new film, Song to Song, could be weightless.

In one scene, Faye (Rooney Mara) and BV (Ryan Gosling) float in zero gravity while flying on Cook’s (Michael Fassebender) private plane. These people dance and sing, live on the top floors of skyscrapers, and watch the sun set in the Texas desert.

They’ve left their broken families and boring suburbs to chase a different kind of life.

As Faye tells us in a voice-over, “I wanted to escape every tie and every hold, to go up higher.” Faye looks up to the sky often and watches the birds. Malick’s characters want to fly, but of course, they can’t.

Song to Song is an acquired taste; like most of Malick’s recent films, including Tree of Life (2011) and Knights of Cup (2016), it’s been met with lukewarm reviews. The plot is a sparse love triangle between Faye, BV (what kind of name is that?), and Cook set amid the music scene of Austin. Other women hang on the margins of the film, on-again off-again girlfriends of either Cook or BV. They are a waitress (Natalie Portman), a singer (Lykke Li) and a mystery (Cate Blanchett).

Patti Smith and Iggy Pop show up playing themselves. All of these people are more like sketches than three-dimensional characters. If they have depth (or weight, per se), it’s because Mara, Gosling, Fassbender, Portman, and others, have been in so many superb movies over the last few years that we already know their faces, their mannerisms, their voices like old friends. By letting these stars play fictional versions of themselves, Malick frees us to see everything else in the story: the rest of the world.

Indeed, in Song to Song, Malick aims to create less of a traditional narrative than a filmic experience. You won’t always be able to figure out what characters are

The Bold Visions of Terrence Malick talking about. For people that live and breathe music, Faye, BV and Cook don’t seem to know or talk much about their work. Instead, they speak in broad themes (“You get used to drifting, wandering, they say follow the light” or “It would be awful to have these good times, but not love itself”). Whether you think these musings are privileged daydreams or earnest philosophical inquiries says a lot about whether Song to Song will thrill or irritate you.

Visually, Song to Song is almost always beautiful. Malick calls on the talents of the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, winner of three consecutive Academy Awards for Gravity (2013), Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015). Scenes are fragmented, most shots lasting for only a few seconds. The camera rushes and retreats towards actors; a butterfly in the background may be just as important as the characters fighting in the foreground. Overlapping sounds will drown outspoken words, indie songs will fade into classical scores. This strategy of fragmentation means the film feels more like flipping through Snapchat than watching a traditional Hollywood blockbuster. Although the point-of-view shifts from Faye to BV to Cook and back again, the film’s formal style combines to create a collective memory. Blissful moments of romance and pleasure are gone in an instant, but not forgotten. “I wish it could last forever,” Faye says at one point.

The kind of love that Song to Song believes in is a love without bounds. It’s at once both exclusionary and inclusive.

When Faye and BV are in love, they can go anywhere, do anything, and find happiness. They’re like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Cook, meanwhile, sees his life of wealth and material satisfaction (he lives in a remarkably metaphorical

glass house) as empty next to the love of his friends. “They have a beauty that makes me look ugly,” Cook says. It’s a revealing statement because the entire cast is so beautiful that we wonder what kind of ugliness is possible from them. In Malick’s vision, however, beauty is synonymous with truth, ugliness with lies. The film’s romanticism lies in the possibility that Faye and BV will the find the beauty within each other, a transcendent truth.

The film’s sublimity shouldn’t overshadow how sensual Song to Song remains. “What part of me do you want?” asks the waitress (Portman) in bed with Cook. This is a film that wants every part of the body. Mara is put on particular display: Her nails and hair change colors, and Gosling often kisses her feet, strokes her cheeks, marks her chest with an X in marker. There are only a few sex scenes, yet entire stretches of the film are defined by intimacy, of characters getting close enough to whisper, to touch. Malick’s camera settles on men with strange tattoos as Faye reads a few lines from William Blake’s poem “The Divine Image”: “Pity a human face and love, the human form divine…

Then every man, of every clime, that prays in his distress, prays to the human form divine.”

Malick has always been making religious movies; his 1978 film, Days of Heaven, ends in swarm of locusts. Tree of Life was an even more explicit portrait of mid-century American Christianity (Think of Jessica Chastain’s famous voiceover: “The nuns taught us there are two ways of life: the way of Nature and the way of Grace”). But in Song to Song most of the religious and philosophical musing is kept to a minimum. If we associate contemporary religion with restrictions, with sin and punishment, then this film seems

firmly secular. And if the film seems to lack strong ethics and moral values, it’s because they must come from within characters, who struggle to articulate any right way of living. “I told myself any experience is better than no experience,” Faye remarks.

What’s left is an open city for the viewer to explore; freedom becomes not just something for the characters to explore but a burden placed upon the viewer.

We are left to make sense of Song to Song much like the English explorers in The New World (a Malick film from 2005): Our maps won’t tell us where we are going.

I’m somehow left with the lasting image of Faye and BV racing through the stoplights of downtown Austin in a convertible. The wind rushes around them. Gosling has one eye on the road so he doesn’t crash and another on his love. This is a radical way of living, an impossible balance. A moment that lasts a minute but wishes it could be forever.

Josh Wartel

sec tion editor

Josh Allen

illustr ator

Spring Allergies 1 Roots ‘n Shoots 2 Tour groups in front of the Ratty 3 Stale memes 4 Senior Week packages 5 Soft boys 6 Very extroverted people 7 Toe socks 8 Reslife emails 9 Couples on the Main Green 10 Finals

at h w .” w o an n k g e t ’ v n be o d l s to l i t “I smean it “First of all, I am not trash I got a 3 .

1 on my ACTs.”

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