Post- 9/14/17

SEPT 14 – VOL 20 – ISSUE 1

In this issue...

Spain, Snakes, and Storms

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FEATURES

Editor’s Note

The Night Patrolman

3

Hurricane

4

5 LIFESTYLE Dark Violet

5

All Summer Day

5

7 ARTS & CULTURE Character Assasination

7

Back in the Saddle

7

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Older

8

Dear Readers, Welcome to a new semester and a new Post- !

It’s my first semester as Editor-in-Chief, and I’m delighted to welcome many new names to our staff and our readers to our first issue of the semester.

Much will stay the same: heartfelt Lifestyle articles, timely reviews of your favorite TV shows and odes to Rubik’s cubes. But much will change: features on Providence residents, arts pieces on bands touring Providence, and tips on how to best do groceries at the Ratty.

For me, the theme of this issue was the unexpected: learning about Harvey while on a flight to Houston, suddenly feeling at home halfway around the world, and not immediately loving Taylor Swift’s latest single. I hope you, too, discover something new in the next few pages. See you on the other side!

Best,

Saanya

editor - in - chief

Post- Board Editor-in-Chief Saanya Jain Managing Editor, Arts & Culture Joshua Lu

Managing Editor, Features Jennifer Osborne

Arts & Culture Editors Celina Sun Josh Wartel

Features Editors Anita Sheih Kathy Luo

Managing Editor, Lifestyle Annabelle Woodward

Copy Chief Alicia DeVos

Lifestyle Editors Amanda Ngo Marly Toledano Creative Director Grace Yoon Head Illustrator Doris Liu

Assistant Copy Editors Zander Kim Divya Santhanam Layout Chief Livia Mucciolo Layout Assistants Eojin Choi Julia Kim

Staff Writer Claire Kim-Narita Daniera Rivera Natalie Andrews Emma Lopez Alicia Mies Veronica Espaillat Sydney Lo Anna Harvey Anita Sheih Daniella Balarezo Eliza Cain Jack Brook Divya Santhanam Sonya Bui Catherine Turner

Cover Tim Ha Staff Illustrator Caroline Hu Erica Lewis Harim Choi Kira Widjaja Nayeon (Michelle) Woo

7 7 8

The Night Patrolman

Community Policing Informed by a Troubled Past

The boy waits for the screams to start. He borhood safe, to help people deal with difand his brothers go to sleep early, lying five ficult or harrowing circumstances in their in a bed, hoping to evade the sounds that lives—put into practice on a nightly basis. haunt their home and suffocate their ears.

For Gutierrez, these ideals are rooted proThe boy can never close his eyes. He lies foundly in the trauma of his own past. there listening, tense.

Gutierrez is a tall, half-Dominican The boy lives with his Dominican man, with a rough voice and a physique mother in the South Bronx, in a house that made him a star football player in where a block of welfare cheese and a the New York semi-pro leagues. The Eye carton of milk are the only fixtures in the of Ra, the Egyptian symbol of protection, refrigerator, and dinner most nights is is tattooed onto his spine. He knows how bread and pancake syrup. He walks to to look after himself: for eight years, he school kicking needles on the sidewalk worked as a correctional officer at a maxand comes home with bloody knuckles imum security prison. However, he has because if you aren’t Puerto Rican or black, a relentless conviction and energy for his you’re fighting everyday. new job; he loves taking “hot” calls.

The boy has a step-father named There is a constant tension underlying George, who wakes up smelling like the work of community policing: a runcheap rum and comes home at night with of-the-mill dispatch could turn deadly at the devil in his eye and anger in his fists, any moment and a seemingly difficult one slurring out the crooning melodies of Julio could be, and very often is, a non-issue. An Iglesias as he wraps towels around the officer like Gutierrez never knows what hands of the boy and his brothers. He forc- exactly he is going to find when he arrives es them to box each other until someone at a call. gets knocked out. If they don’t punch hard On a cold winter night in March, enough, he takes a metal coat hanger out Gutierrez receives a dispatch for a domesof the closet, twists it up, and beats them. tic abuse case in a downtown parking lot.

But George’s favorite target is Maria, Along with another officer, he arrives to the boy’s mother. It is her screams that handle the situation. keep the boy awake at night, so that at the A woman steps out of a silver Nissan, age of nine he already has dark bags under shaking her head back and forth, her hoop his eyes. He knows that he cannot fall earrings swinging. She seems annoyed, asleep, because he is his mother’s protector, her arms folded into her oversized sweater. her watcher, her guardian angel.

Cuts run up and down her throat.

As he waits for George, he whispers “I scratch myself in the shower,” she his prayers: Our Father, Who art in Heavsays when they question her, miming the en...deliver us from evil. Please, I don’t motions with her hand swiping sideways. want him here no more, don’t let my moth- “I have eczema.” Her boyfriend, a large er get hit no more…until the front door man with a skullcap and ponytail, sits creaks open and he knows that George mutely in the shotgun seat smoking a has come home. cigarette.

When the sounds of crashing plates A male friend comes over and tells the and Maria’s screams become unbearofficers that nothing happened, but Gutiable, the boy slips out of bed and climbs errez runs the boyfriend’s name through through the first floor fire escape window. their computer system and learn that the He jumps ten feet onto the cool pavement girlfriend has a permanent restraining below, running barefoot in his underwear order against him. They remove the man for two blocks to the emergency fire alarm. from the car and clasp the handcuffs on.

He runs in all weather, through thunder“You fucking serious,” the friend cries storms and snow, never even feels the cold out, shaking his head. The boyfriend on his feet or the rain on his face because remains silent as he is placed in the back he is so terrified of what is happening back seat of Gutierrez’s car. home. He becomes his mother’s legs, his “You just signed my death warrant,” only thought to pull the alarm lever and she whispers, nearly hysterical. then race back, listening as the screechOn the way to the station, the boying sirens fill the Bronx night and force friend calmly asks about the restraining George to leave the apartment before order. She was supposed to have cleared the police and fire trucks arrive. The boy it with the Attorney General’s office a becomes obsessed with the superhero-like couple months ago, he says. Why is it still power of the police, the only people that showing up? can make George stop, if for an evening.

The request probably got stuck in the The nightly trip down the fire escape system, Gutierrez says. If you guys want to becomes a ritual. be together, you should take care of that, The instinct to protect and the obseshe advises. sion with stopping violence never leaves The boyfriend shakes his head. He the boy. Today, Jimmy Gutierrez carries will spend the night in jail and then be sent the memories of his childhood with him to the ACI, awaiting the pending charges; as he works the mid-shift night patrol in he’ll likely spend six months in jail.

South Providence. He’s still considered a After Gutierrez drops the man off rookie but works District Two and Three, at the station, he sighs. The woman had two of the neighborhoods highest in crime. never removed the restraining order, he In a post-Ferguson world where the had checked multiple times. Besides, these word “police” has become synonymous requests never get stuck in the system — in the media with racism, brutality, and they are updated instantly. structural oppression, the job of a com“She’s scared of him,” he says, in the munity police officer has become tougher privacy of the cruiser. “Back there, that than ever. For officers like Gutierrez, who was a show. She was protecting herself. insist that they operate differently from The boyfriend knew what happened. But the prejudiced cops and institutions in the he didn’t need to make up some defense. news, community policing represents a set He let her do that.” of ideals—an obligation to keep a neighThe front dashboard of the car, he

adds, had been covered in drops of blood— the boyfriend’s phone was soaked in it.

The woman had been wiping it off her neck and face when Gutierrez told her to step out of the car.

“I try to really give 100 percent with those domestic calls,” Gutierrez says. “Because they are likely dealing with a lot of distress. So if I can make a difference and make them feel safe—even for one night— that will probably mean the world to them, because it did to me when I was younger.”

An officer must have an intimate relationship with his or her beat, the urban area in which they regularly patrol. They must know every side street a suspect might turn onto, every shop owner, homeless person, and prostitute, all the people who through the interconnection of their lives form the lifeblood of the community.

“The community should embrace and show the gratitude and love for the police,” Gutierrez says. “But at the same time, vice versa: police officers should have the same compassion and love, and show this through the caring nature of their policing.

It’s vital and critical for community to know that its police officers are there for them.”

He believes firmly in the importance of being proactive. He’ll sidle his car up to transvestite prostitutes walking down Cranston Street, asking about their day and reminding them, gently, to keep moving; he calls out greetings to the old men standing on corners holding paper bags of liquor, and smiles at the store managers, almost all of whom shake their heads when Gutierrez tries to pay for his food. He takes reports on break-ins and suicide attempts, complaints of loud music and of disorderly neighbors, calls about children left alone and fights in parks and firecrackers in the street.

The entrance to District Two, where Gutierrez primarily works, is sandwiched between two streets — Broad Street and Elmwood Avenue— that diverge from the gothic Grace Church Cemetery. The blocks are lined with the grungy facade of mom and pop businesses that represent a microcosm of the neighborhood demographics: neon and painted signs illuminate places like Joselito’s Barbershop, Trinity United Methodist Church (the largest Liberian church in Rhode Island), Mi Sueño restaurant (doubling on weekends as a disco club), and the Cranston Street Market (“We accept food stamps”).

Although the shootings and stabbings are certainly the most sensational calls for Gutierrez, a larger part of his job is simply talking with people and listening to their

stories. Communication, he says, is the most important tool for an officer.

One night, dispatch assigns him to a “Person Annoyed” call, which came with the request for a Spanish-speaking officer.

Although latinos make up nearly 28 percent of the Providence population, as of last year there were only 50 hispanic officers in the Providence Police Department out of 407. As a result, Gutierrez is often called to translate for his colleagues.

An annoyed person can hardly seem worthy of a 911 dispatch, but Gutierrez says these can sometimes be the most important calls — they can help diffuse a situation before it becomes more drastic.

The man, a young Nicaraguan immigrant in a baseball cap, meets Gutierrez’s cruiser on the street. Wary of a set-up, Gutierrez pats the man down and parks.

The man begins speaking rapidly in Spanish, telling Gutierrez about how the mother of his child is refusing to let him see his daughter. While he attempts to offer advice, after thirty minutes all Gutierrez can do is suggest that the man consult with a lawyer about the custody process.

“He just needed someone to vent to,” Gutierrez says afterwards. “He wanted me to give him a better response I think, but you have to go to Family Court for that.”

In many ways, being a cop is a lot like being a counselor or a social worker.

Gutierrez often deals with people like the Nicaraguan man, who, struggling to navigate the legal system, expect the police to be able to solve their problems.

Yet Gutierrez frequently encounters the opposite problem — one of distrust, the fundamental divide between the intentions of the police force and the community it interacts with.

“I tell my own kids when I see the cops: ‘Look, these are the good guys, making us safe, there’s no reason to be scared!’”

But for South Providence residents — a majority minority neighborhood — there appears fair reason to be hesitant about interacting with the police: African Americans, for instance, are arrested here at a disproportionately higher rate than whites, even more so than in Ferguson.

For better or worse, gone is the super-hero image of the cops that Gutierrez grew up with.

Part Two coming next week...

Jack Brook

staff writer

Cindy Shin

illustr ator

Hurricane

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

I

find out about Hurricane Harvey in the middle of a non-stop flight to Houston, too focused on finding coffee before takeoff to check The Atlantic Daily at the airport.

Reading about the worst hurricane to hit the United States in 12 years didn’t have immediate impact—from above, everything is soft, tea-logged Biscoffs and cotton tufts of clouds, no sign of rain.

My sister and I came to visit my dad, and all he could talk about on the drive to his house is the storm.

I learn that Henry the accountant has lived here for 30 years and isn’t worried, and neither is the pilot next door, that we have batteries and movies queued on the DVR. I’m urged to check his weather app, which lets you scroll through the next 24 hours and track the storm’s trajectory. Houston is lit up in red, but the implications of this are scoffed at.

We pull into the garage at his house in Kingwood, a northern suburb of the city, and find my stepmother fretting as her three-year-old daughter fills cup after cup with water for a tea party with her younger sister—the grocery stores ran out of water yesterday. She wanted to make meatballs for dinner, but the organic ground beef was sold out too.

My dad starts railing about “these people,” who cleaned the store out of water and batteries and bread.

He’s willing to bet they’re the same ones who bought every last model of the generator he was eyeing, to keep their fridges cool. To outsmart them, we’ll go to the store early the next morning after breakfast at Cracker Barrel.

My mother is Chinese and taught us to be frugal. When we first moved to the states and shopped, the sight of Americans pushing carts overflowing with packaged foods would compel her to lecture us about that time she cleaned out my paternal grandmother’s fridge, finding bread and cheese flowering with mold, a spice that had expired in 1983. My father has inherited these habits—whenever a trip to the grocery store is announced, we clean out the fridge, mentally noting that there are already cartons of eggs and gallons of milk, a fruit drawer jammed with bananas and strawberries and mangoes. The list of things they are almost out of or actually need take up two lines on my notes app.

Regardless, we are going to the store, because we will not be outsmarted by “these people” and be the ones to go without.

When I wake up, the rain is coming down with force, but we strap in the babies and set off for a breakfast at Cracker Barrel anyway.

The windshield wipers can hardly clear the rain fast enough to reveal the road ahead, but the waves of water churned up by our wheels can be seen from the side windows. I have a feeling that is not quite fear, but an apprehension that something will happen soon, a sick anticipation. A car drives by in the next lane, drenching the right side of the car, water whooshing over the roof and trickling down the left. We swerve a little, but it’s unclear if the wheels or my stepmother’s shaking hands caused it. She seems suddenly aware that we are risking our lives for blueberry pancakes.

She talks about turning back, but my dad agrees with enough all rights and if you wants to make his disagreement clear, so we continue. I have always marveled at how Texans will drive from their houses to a restaurant five minutes away and move their cars when going between strip malls with adjacent parking lots.

Today, however, that is not enough— we park right against the wall of the Cracker Barrel, where there is no marked spot at all. We eat our staggeringly large breakfasts, heavy with grease and syrup, alongside just one other table of customers.

My stepmother takes her daughters home after breakfast, worrying more about the roads getting sealed off than the possibility of having only canned tuna over rice for dinner three days from now. There aren’t many people at the store. We buy another carton of milk, just-in-case bananas, more dairy and fruit and meat. My dad throws in a cooler—we

have one, but it won’t hold everything in the fridge. At checkout, the cashier tells us to be safe; it seems likely that he, at least, wonders what we’re doing.

We take the back roads on higher ground home, but the water still makes its presence known in shoulder-height waves outside the window. Dread and misgiving linger even after we arrive safely and start to rearrange the fridge to fit the groceries in. Our preparations did not happen in vain, as the power goes out soon after, and we remove meat from the freezer to line the coolers, pack them with the new and old eggs, the butter and cream and milk until they are full. Two coolers were not enough. My dad’s cavalier attitude is wilting faster than the newly-purchased arugula, left behind in the defunct fridge. We’ll have to eat the fruit like crazy, he says. We can have steak and salmon for dinner. The small injustices pile up—the Nespresso machine will not work without power, and the Starbucks drive-through was closed this morning, so my dad doesn’t even have his quad grande latte macchiato to fall back on. There is no wifi, and the LTE flickers. My dad can’t track the storm on his app, so he looks out the window at the pool, at the water running over the sides into the garage and down the driveway. He says even Henry must be worried now—the pilot too, now that his TV’s off.

The power comes back before we start cooking, but the memory of not having it means we make both the steak and the salmon anyway.

We only check the news after we eat, and it is then that we see videos of the flooding downtown, the rescue operations. Friends who knew where I was had left messages asking if we were doing all right.

For four hours, we had known

4

less about what was happening 20 miles away than those back in Boston. I am not an eyewitness to Hurricane Harvey, because I did not leave the house while it was happening, except to buy food we did not need in a neighborhood that was not devastated. I can only tell you what I told those friends, about the useless coffee maker and how almost-scary it was to go to the grocery store. I did it to stress how comparatively safe I was, but also, to my shame, to show that we had been through something.

The power goes out twice more in two days, for half an hour each time. My dad goes for a drive around the neighborhood and tells us the house on the golf course they had considered buying is completely waterlogged, but it turns out Chrissy, the neighbor with the pilot husband, had had power all along. How that could be escapes my dad—there must be a better power company he should be with.

The grocery store parking lot is under a foot of water, but only a foot.

We should go there as early as possible because the shelves of the fridge are getting a bit bare.

My stepmother objects—her friend Chrissy has come over, the kids are playing, we have food for lunch, the kids need their naps. “I don’t think there’s going to be lines,” she scoffs.

“People are freaking out,” Chrissy offers, with her years of Texan experience.

“I wouldn’t be surprised by anything these people do,” my dad warns.

“These people,” of course, are

Jennifer Osborne managing editor

Katie McLoughlin illustr ator

5

Dark Violet

Sweetening Memories

“hey, we’re living in a fucking incubator,” i say, deliriously battered by the summer haze; “but what does it matter?”

really. no one cares. whatever is done is done. we are easily forgiven blissfully hidden in our brash recklessness and idealistic trust in the wrong people.

picture us: top-floor apartment curtains closed shut tricking ourselves we have made the weather our subordinate. we master manipulators twist and turn our glasses of artificial wildberries fermented then imported,

we cling onto the prettier pieces of our past sweetening memories and thinning them out through polaroid frames that are to be hung on the walls of our dorm rooms.

Sonya Bui

contributing writer

our tongues

Vincent Chen

an acquired taste of summer,

illustr ator

our stories since the dead don’t speak. so then who cares (or remembers?) if my grandpa was actually a dick because my mother still recalls him fondly. i figured it’s easier to confess in past tense or when your blood is tainted; then there would be no difference between a revelation about having once fucked a much older redhead then suffering from ptsd or that about telling your mother you wish you hadn’t been born oblivious of her threatened miscarriage.

All Summer in a Day Madrid wakes slowly on Sunday.

I walk through the winding alleys near plaza mayor, smiling politely as I pass elderly couples exiting churches and groups of friends returning home from Saturday-night adventures. The midday sun throws us all into shadows of the old, marigold-colored buildings. I drag a finger along their warm walls and move intuitively through the city.

Over the past month I’ve learned the nuances of my new monotony: the tangled streets, cheap breakfast spots, good grocery stores, where

Leaving Loneliness Behind in Madrid

to buy a fan. Tomorrow, I will take the Circular 2 bus line to my internship at a non-profit, take the 1 Metro line to the gym after work, and walk down Calle de Segovia to return home, like every weekday.

Perhaps I’ll grab dinner with my roommates in La Latina or meet up with a friend at the Royal Palace. For now though, I step slowly, reveling in in an unrealized and unplanned afternoon.

Not yet wanting to return to my un-air-conditioned apartment, and without enough energy to trek

to el parque del Retiro, I veer to the right of my normal path and wander through el parque de Atenas. It is comfortingly still and somewhat quiet. Expanses of trimmed grass and emerald shrubs have parted for pebbled paths where couples walk their dogs. Adults smoke beneath the scattered trees while their young children race to the playground at the far end of the park.

In the opposite corner, a bar fills with cheery music, employees unloading boxes of alcohol in preparation for the evening.

I unpack my lunch on some uninhabited ground and sit beside it. The grease from the bocadillo de calamares has bled through the wax paper wrappings. I take a photo of the golden-toned sandwich for my parents. “The best in Madrid,” a Tripadvisor comment had claimed.

I bite into the bread and deep-fried squid. Two euros well spent.

Once I finish the sandwich and a rainbow-hued pastry from Madrid’s Pride Week festivities, I relax and watch emerald monk parakeets fight for crumbs. I am alone. I won-

6 der if my roommates a few blocks away have noticed my absence.

However, despite being in a foreign country, despite every relationship in my life abroad being a new one, my aloneness is not haunted by loneliness.

I expected loneliness—braced myself for the ache in my chest that plagued me during my first weeks at Brown. According to Huffington Post article “Lost in Translation: Loneliness Abroad” by Isabella Basco, loneliness is “the common dark side” of studying and interning abroad. Why? Factors like culture shock, a new environment, and major lifestyle changes-- all formidable causes for the feeling-are not only unavoidable but also fundamental to the living abroad experience.

Over the days leading to my departure, I perused countless online diaries where college students described their consuming loneliness and desperately clung to any half-handed advice they gave. A GoAbroad blogger told nervous travelers to rest and allow for space. Someone else suggested keeping busy so as not to dwell.

“Start practicing Mindfulness Meditation,” a Study Abroad Portal blog post claimed.

Still, I am weeks into the program and feel a startling lack of loneliness. Instead, I am secure, calm, and confident in my relationships and myself. Moreover, I realize just how lonely I had been

during my recently finished school year.

Although I made many friends throughout my first year at Brown, I often felt distanced from them, as if I were an extraneous attachment to their social circles. Everyone always seemed to be more connected to others than they were to me.

Indeed there was a startling lack of intimacy in all my friendships, never sharing problems, secrets, or our real emotions. I knew it took time to access that intimacy, but I was not willing or able to give that time. If I did not see you going about my normal classes and daily schedule, I simply did not see you.

I spent my free time sitting alone outside lecture halls or working through homework by myself in my room. At the time I did not mind. I enjoyed the peace and freedom of not having to work around others’ schedules. But I hadn’t gotten over my loneliness, I’d adjusted to it.

Panic and the sense that I had no one near to turn to had become a daily part of my life. I kept to myself because I didn’t want anyone to know I was lonely. I studied because I feared that I would have no support if I failed and that no one would care. Although toward the end of the school year I grew closer with some and was partially unburdened from the weight of loneliness, I still dread returning to that lifestyle in the fall.

I am not alone in this. A national survey of Canadian univer-

sity students found 66 percent of them reported feeling very lonely. A 2016 U.S. study saw 60.6 percent of students in American universities expressing loneliness as well. It’s not just being at university, though.

A 2014 AXA PPP healthcare poll determined that 18-24 year olds are “four times as likely to feel lonely ‘most of the time’ as those aged over 70.”

These statistics sit within me like an unanswered question. A million miles away from my normal life and friends, and I have somehow managed to escape loneliness—if only temporarily. Perhaps it is the lack of constant work encouraging solitude, or the varied opportunities to socialize and have fun, or the Madrid lifestyle.

Perhaps it simply took a clean slate and new adventure for me to pay attention to my connections with others. I wonder if that attention-my newfound sociability-- will survive the fall semester.

I pick up my belongings. Green Whatsapp notifications fill my phone’s screen. One of my roommates wants to order in for dinner.

I reply and begin walking home.

Sydney Lo

staff writer

Kelly Lee

illustr ator

7

Character Assasination

When “Look What You Made Me Do” dropped, I became convinced that there’s a distinct part of Taylor Swift that enjoys trolling her fans. For the third time in a row, she’s dropped a lead single that’s weird and obnoxious and annoying but also undeniably catchy, and half of me absolutely hates it, and the other half of me wants to leave it on repeat for hours. The song was immediately polarizing, which is hardly rare for a Taylor Swift lead single, but for the first time it wasn’t so much the song that people took notice of as the narratives surrounding the song.

As a song, “Look What You Made Me Do” masks vindictive rage under a cool veneer, and it primarily operates as a diss track that’s directed towards both everyone

Back in the Saddle At the end of the third season of BoJack Horseman, the titular anthropomorphic horse/washed-up TV star seems at the end of his rope. Having indirectly caused the overdose of his former co-star, destroyed his relationship with his only loyal friend, and bottomed out on the artificial bravado that sustained him through a short-lived career renewal, we last see BoJack gazing at a herd of wild horses running through the desert, eyes empty of hope. He can, it seems, go no lower.

Of course, in this most nihilistic of animated sitcoms, this seemed to be true at every new low the unique and brilliantly constructed character has achieved over the course of the show. Will BoJack, voiced by Will Arnett, see the error of his ways after seducing his lifelong friend’s teenage daughter, who has come to see him as a father? Perhaps after sabotaging the burgeoning career of his co-dependent roommate, Todd (Aaron Paul)?

Or after trying to kiss his biographer, Diane (Alison Brie), at exactly the wrong time? How many Hollywood (or, in the parlance of this dizzyingly complex alternate universe, Hollywoo) projects, friendships, and relationships can he possibly jettison, before the show veers into overkill? Is there a limit?

Apparently, yes. As unlikely as it may appear, the show’s writers, led by the hugely ambitious show-runner and creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, appear to be building their woebegone horse a bridle path to redemption.

The awkward entry into the newly dropped season four—BoJack doesn’t appear in the premiere, and only returns to the fold in the second episode, which constitutes nearly a year of his life—is a relatively easy restart for the viewer who has been absent from Holly-

Snakes, Narratives, and Taylor Swift

and nobody, a vague “fuck you” to the media, the haters, and/or all of the people she’s been in conflict with. And make no mistake, Taylor Swift has entered a sizable number of celebrity feuds over the past years, most of which are irrelevant and exaggerated tabloid bullshit.

But one feud cut deeper than the rest: her feud with Kanye West, whom she publicly attacked onstage at the Grammy Awards in 2016 after supposedly taking offense to one of his song lyrics that implied he was responsible for her fame. Taylor, as Taylor would, framed her jab as distinctly feminist, saying to “all the young women out there” that they should not allow any man to take credit for their success.

Then a phone recording between her

and Kanye leaked, a recording where it was revealed that he had not only told her about the lyrical content, but that she even approved of it. Taylor immediately went on the defensive and penned an Instagram post decrying Kanye for referring to her as “that bitch” in the song—a slur that’s absent from the leaked recording—all the while taking care not to mention her now-debunked grievance about how he had taken credit for her success. She ended her message with a strange statement: “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009,” excusing herself from a narrative that she had just finished rewriting. The event was dubbed Snakegate, and after a few furtive days and dozens of headlines on gossip sites, the zeitgeist went on to a different topic and all parties went silent.

What makes “Look What You Made Me Do” such a questionable comeback is Taylor’s portrayal of this accusation on the same level as the baseless fluff that’s hounded her for years. “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off” worked as direct responses to unjust criticism. In those songs Taylor genuinely felt like a victim; why exactly should anyone care about who she’s dating? But the Kanye thing felt more serious because it exposed Taylor as someone who was willing to lie and mire the reputation of someone with whom she claimed to be friends. The video’s snake imagery, the ending that directly references

the “bitch” slur, and a slew of other possible references you can probably read on Buzzfeed make it hard to argue that her intention wasn’t at least partly to strike back in a feud that she had previously decided to leave behind.

I want to go to the parallel universe where Taylor Swift’s grand comeback was notable not for its petty, vindictive nature, but for her acknowledgement of her past faults.

Wouldn’t that make for an exciting, buzzworthy comeback? A great introduction to a new album cycle from one of the biggest pop stars in the world?

But Taylor decided not to go down that route, perhaps for personal reasons, perhaps because she knew it wouldn’t have been nearly as dramatic and exciting. Instead, she has decided to embrace the role of the bitch, and she has not only dived back into the narrative but completely redirected its course. Taylor is anything if not business savvy, and there’s no doubt in my mind that her creative choices this era will bring her success and sales. But as someone who’s been a fan of her since 2007, I’m finding it increasingly challenging to root for her.

Joshua Lu

managing editor

Kay Liang

illustr ator

Watching the Fourth Season of Bojack Horseman woo a while. But that doesn’t mean it’ll seem entirely familiar. In the first six episodes, some of the show’s characteristic heavy themes—especially, early on, the death of family members—are treated with totally uncharacteristic callousness. The show’s mix of rapid-fire, 30 Rock-style humor and the emotional resonance of Golden Age drama is beginning to wear thin. Inevitably, this blend confuses the question of where the audience’s loyalties should lie—ought we to cheer BoJack on his baby steps toward mental health or laugh at him for trying?

The jokes are superb, and the voice acting—the best on television bar none—is even better. Aaron Paul, especially, is, an absolute joy as Todd—his versatility and timing should long ago have landed him a post-Breaking Bad role less misbegotten than the one he plays in Hulu’s The Path. He, among others, benefits from the hit-or-miss but probably wise choice to start the season off with episodes dedicated to singular characters rather than the ensemble as a whole. His installment is called “Hooray! Todd Episode!” I second that.

As a sitcom, BoJack continues to outpace nearly all its competition. But this season, more than its predecessors, feels episodic— disjointed; some of its arcs go unfulfilled or disappear until needed. Plot points, increasingly, are recurring gags only used to maximize their effect. Too much of this season feels like an ensemble of those Very Special Episodes from nineties sitcoms that Waksberg has made his life’s work to ridicule—“Todd Learns About Sexual Labels,” maybe, or “Diane Gets a Gun.” We don’t get the kind of spectacular twist that concluded last season

(it involved an underwater city and a few tons of pasta, and has to be seen to be believed).

Instead, the thesis of the season—that family depression resounds over generations—is reiterated in different permutations as the season winds to a close. It’s true, and devastating, and presented in as eloquent and effective a package as could be imagined for a cartoon about a horse. But the meat of BoJack’s issues is largely ignored, especially given that the most egregious errors of the season aren’t even his.

Much like the end of previous seasons, as this fourth installment winds to a close, we’re left wondering: What now? The difference now is that an answer to that question seems ever less likely to be in the offing.

The show’s concept episodes get pride of place. The eleventh episode, “Time’s Arrow,” on BoJack’s mother’s dementia, is nowhere near as revolutionary as it’s hyped up to be, but the sixth episode, “Stupid Piece of Shit,” astounds—a simple, uncomplicated, heartbreaking elucidation of BoJack’s depression that wounds as often as it amuses. It should be experienced spoiler-free, and as part of a binge; that’s always been the right way to watch the show, letting the innumerable quips wash over you and the enormity of the characters’ complexities overwhelm you. And in the context of its longer history, the fourth season of BoJack still does that. But the structural genius of the show was once that, when binged, the descending arrow of BoJack’s life could be clearly delineated episode to episode. If he was going down, he was taking you down with him. But disappointingly, now that BoJack’s long-lost daughter (Aparna Nancherla) has begun to nudge him towards righteousness, his recovery or rupture is no longer a continu-

ous curve. The depths of his depression seem to surface as the writers feel is necessary for their granular-level setups and for no other reason. The long-term plan is hard to see.

BoJack has never not been worth watching. And your desperation to see what will next wreck the emotional lives of its characters—an edge-of-your-seat desire usually reserved for action-heavy potboilers—is unlikely to be affected by a slight decline in quality. But the audience for the show, conditioned to recognize the gorgeous intricacy of its construction, deserves consistency, even if BoJack isn’t ever likely to find it in his own life.

James Feinberg staff wrtier

Clarissa Liu illustr ator

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Older

T

he kids are not all right, can’t you see? Posters are everywhere in the town, so many, that the latest pleas for information cover up the faces that have vanished only a few months ago. There are whispers abound that Derry, Maine, has been cursed by God or by some ancient, supernatural force stretching all the way back to when Derry’s founding fur traders disappeared without a trace. Whatever it is, everyone is afraid. Curfew is at seven. Even in the summer, when kids should be having fun, houses go prematurely dark, or worse, they never even bother to light up.

From the very first scene of It, the latest adaptation of the eponymous Stephen King novel, we’re aware of what, or rather who, is terrorizing the children of Derry. With the streets flooded by a thunderstorm, sevenyear-old Georgie loses his toy boat down a drain, where it falls into the waiting hands of Pennywise, a clown who offers the boat (and a balloon) back to the kid if only he will step a little closer, reach a few feet farther.

And so Georgie becomes the first victim of the demonic clown, but surely not his last.

Pennywise, we learn, reappears in Derry once a generation (every 27 years to be exact), a mystery not so much to be solved as endured.

Hopefully, one kid suggests, we’ll be one of the lucky ones. Grow up, leave Derry and do our best to forget all about the other children who just floated away.

Except what kind of Hollywood movie would that be? None of the young teens who anchor It, whether it be Georgie’s stuttering brother Bill, horny and lewd Richie, the uptight Eddie, or the shy, kind, new kid on the block Ben, are allowed to forget Pennywise. They must band together and search abandoned library archives, wells, sewers, and haunted houses to rescue Derry from the demonic clown.

Do the kids succeed? The trick of It, and the entire genre of teen horror movies, is to make this question impossible to answer and mostly incidental to the pleasures and fears of the film. Pennywise, we come to understand, is only the beginning of the evil in Derry. Our band of adolescent heroes are also being hunted by knife-wielding Henry and his sadistic gang of slightly older teens.

All of the adults seem lost and angry. At best, they stare at the endless loop of sitcoms on TV and make their children take useless pills.

At worst, they sexually abuse or rape them.

“None of this makes any sense,” one of the kids realizes. “It’s like a bad dream.”

But what to do, children, when you wake up? It is full of jump-scares, spooky sound effects, and blood but is utterly afraid to critique anything beyond the evil clowns.

The film’s engagement with race is a disaster, an example of liberal “political correctness” gone embarrassingly wrong. The film’s lone black boy, Mike, only joins the other boys mid-way through and spends most of his screen time clarifying that he is an “outsider” (he’s homeschooled, while everyone else goes to the public high school) and running for his life from Henry, a character coded as so overthe-top evilly racist, that he hardly needs to tell Mike to “stay the fuck out of my town.”

Any hopes of seeing the nuances of racial difference, violence, and oppression are crushed by the standard Hollywood ethics of confronting evil: Put aside your differences (Mike’s blackness, Bill’s stutter, Ben’s weight problem, etc.) and unite for the good of the team. This moral is an obviously transparent method of hiding the deeper evils of society— it’s the same sort of rhetoric that was trotted out immediately by the racist Republican Party last month to distance themselves from the KKK march in Charlottesville.

It’s blind spot toward race manifests

The Terrors of It

itself in a deeper structural and aesthetic failure as well. Following so many horror movies, It relies on the dichotomy between the light and darkness to condition the spectator on what is known (and thus logical and human) and unknown (the irreducible irrationalism of being “afraid of the dark”). To not be able to see that this binary between natural or artificial light and darkness, or night and day, is intimately connected to embodied whiteness and blackness is to recommit the same sins that the adults make toward Pennywise: blindness and ignorance.

Just as It has a single black character, it also has a single girl: Beverly. Following the pattern of concealing difference, the first meeting between the neighborhood boys and Beverly is staged at the local pharmacy, where she hides a box of tampons behind her back.

Later, she’ll cut her hair short, but not too short. Beverly is watched with a mix of awe and terror throughout the film: She haunts the boys in the day the same way Pennywise haunts their nights. Leered on by our heroic boys, hit on by an old man, and labeled a slut by the other girls in school, Beverly emerges the true survivor of this story. Too bad she’s reduced to another fantasy: that of a Sleeping Beauty. Managing to be simultaneously virginal (“I’ve only kissed one boy,” she says. “I never believed the rumors,” Bill tells her) and violated by her father, Beverly is saved from Pennywise in a climactic set-piece ripped from the fairy tales that decades ago were passe.

After the kiss awakens her from a tentative, eternal sleep, Beverly delivers the boys the bad news: She is moving away to Portland. As she talks, the sun is setting on another day, Pennywise is safely back in the ground, and another year of school beckons.

But if you listen at all to the end of the movie, you can still hear the sound of the kids who

will never grew up, forgotten and trapped forever. Oh, children, 27 years from 1989 is 2016, a nightmare of a year. I guess It’s never really over.

Josh Wartel

sec tion editor

Kay Liang

illustr ator

Conversation Starters to Freak Out First Years 1 “Do you have a summer internship yet?”

2 “Classes here are so easy.”

3 “I always have fun.”

4 “RISD classes are super easy to get into.”

5 “I’ve been in the VISA lottery seven times. Maybe next year.”

6 “It stopped snowing in June last year.”

7 “Everyone I know is BEST friends with their roommate.”

8 “The Ratty has the BEST food on campus.”

9 “You’re going to that party this weekend, right?”

10 “So what percentile was your SAT score? Oh, mine was 105.”

8

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