May 2022 Issue

Volume XXVIII, No. III

May 2022

THE BLUE AND WHITE The Undergraduate Magazine of Columbia University, est. 1890

Editorial Board CLAIRE SHANG, CC ’24, Editor-in-Chief SYLVIE EPSTEIN, CC ’23, Managing Editor KAT CHEN, CC ’24, Digital Editor TARINI KRISHNA, BC ’23, Publisher DANIEL SEIZER, CC ’22, Publisher HART HALLOS, CC ’23, Illustrations Editor MADELEINE HERMANN, BC ’23, Illustrations Editor ANNIE POOLE, BC ’24, Layout Editor BENJAMINE MO, CC ’23, Literary Editor ELIZA RUDALEVIGE, CC ’23, Literary Editor SAMANTHA SACKS, CC ’22, Podcast Director Senior Editors GRACE ADEE, CC ’22 SAM NEEDLEMAN, CC ’22 CY GILMAN, CC ’22 WILLA NEUBAUER, BC ’22 CHLOË GOTTLIEB, CC ’22 VICTOR OMOJOLA, CC ’24 ELIZABETH JACKSON, CC ’22 SOPHIE POOLE, BC ’22 NICOLE KOHUT, CC ’22 HAILEY RYAN, BC ’22 BROOKE MCCORMICK BC’22 LYLA TRILLING, CC ’22 DOMINY GALLO, CC ’23, Editor Emeritus Staff Staff Writers ALEXANDER AIBEL, CC ’23 MISKA LEWIS, BC ’24 COLE CAHILL, CC ’23 JUSTIN LIANG, GS ’24 ZIBIA CALDWELL, BC ’25 WILL LYMAN, CC ’23 IRIS CHEN, CC ’24 BECKY MILLER, BC ’24 MICHAEL COLTON, CC ’22 LEAH OVERSTREET, CC ’24 MARGARET CONNOR, BC ’23 ELLIDA PARKER, CC ’24 ANDREA CONTRERAS, CC ’24 ANNA PATCHEFSKY, CC ’25 CAT FLORES, BC ’25 MICHAELA SAWYER, CC ’25 SADIA HAQUE, BC ’23 DARIYA SUBKHANBERDINA, BC ’23 JADEN JARMEL-SCHNEIDER, CC ’22 MUNI SULEIMAN, CC ’24 ANOUK JOUFFRET, BC ’24 SONA WINK, BC ’25 KELSEY KITZKE, BC ’23 Staff Illustrators MACA HEPP, CC ’24 MAC JACKSON, CC ’24 HAZEL LU, CC ’24 VANESSA MENDOZA, CC ’23 SAMIA MENON, SEAS ’23 OONAGH MOCKLER, BC ’25 ROSALINE QI, CC ’22

AEJA ROSETTE, CC ’22 REA RUSTAGI, SEAS ’22 AMELIE SCHEIL, BC ’25 JACE STEINER, CC ’22 BETEL TADESSE, CC ’25 PHOEBE WAGONER, CC ’25 MAYA WEED, CC ’22 TAYLOR YINGSHI, CC ’25

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Vol. XXVIII

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

No. III

FROM THE STAFF Letter From the Editor Bwecommendations

Claire Shang The Blue and White Staff

4 5

Brooke McCormick

6

Sophie Poole

8

Cole Cahill

10

Sona Wick

15

Seniors of the B&W

20

Justin Liang

26

FEATURES The Business of Books Inside the book industry’s existential crisis over whose stories deserve to be told.

Jaden Jarmel-Schneider

30

Weed World Legal on paper, but not yet in practice.

Sam Needleman

34

THE CONVERSATION Ann Douglas On Beats, Bollinger, and burgers.

Gustie Owens

40

BLUE NOTES Creative Havens Into Columbia’s senior studios.

CAMPUS CHARACTERS Gustie Owens FEATURE Searching for the Activist Ivy Does Columbia’s political scene today live up to our reputation?

ESSAYS Butterfly Effect Control, chaos, and conversion in the Uris Pool.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go! B&W seniors pay tribute to their choice spots on campus.

THE CROSSWORD Epicenter

Cover by Aeja Rosette, Jace Steiner, and Maya Weed / Centerfold by Phoebe Wagoner

@theblueandwhitemag

theblueandwhite.org

@blueandwhitemag

Letter From the Editor I

t’s May. Just when everyone feels they’ve gotten in the swing of things, suddenly everything is over. People are scattering; maybe you’re reading this on your way home. Maybe you’re moving into an apartment of your own for the summer.

Maybe, like me, you have humanities professors who are generous with deadlines, so you have a few finals to go. Or you’re graduating, going into the world! Or, to get very specific, you’re one of the 19 graduating seniors of The Blue and White Magazine, in which case, stay for a minute—I owe you a thank you.

Writing and editing and illustrating is such a particular labor of love. It all just takes a lot of time—there’s no way around it. The upside is that this type of work is never done alone, and usually it doesn’t feel like work at all. Joining the magazine my first week of college, some of the first people I met at Columbia were staffers who are now seniors. I don’t think they could guess how significant those Monday nights on Zoom were for me. As they added up, I realized that this was why I had come to Columbia: people like this!

Smart and funny and articulate, quietly but brilliantly talented, who had decided to commit to this shared project. Every article materializing like a small but certain miracle.

All this said, you should know to expect some senior-themed content this issue. Our staffers write about what it means to find spaces of your own on campus—be it the senior studios that Brooke McCormick details (p. 6) or the places our B&W seniors have chosen as emblematic of part of their college experience (p. 20). We’re also proud to share some of our strongest reportage

of the semester with you. In these pages, thumb through features on weed legalization (p. 30), the political scene on campus (p. 10), the credentialization of the publishing industry (p. 26), and a musing on the Uris Pool as a strange sanctuary (p. 15). Online, you’ll find our writers considering antiracist books and the limits of reading, the resurgence in student climate activism, and the changing contours of Chelsea.

If you’re a member of this magazine’s audience, your readership is thank you enough for these seniors. But for me, I ought to spell things out.

Sam Needleman, none of us would be here without you. (I certainly wouldn’t.) And thank you, thank you to Aeja, Brooke, Chloë, Cy, Daniel, Elizabeth, Grace (though we’re lucky to have you for one more semester), Hailey, Jace, Jaden, Lyla, Maya, Michael, Nicole, Rea, Rosaline, Sam Sacks, Sophie, and Willa. You’ve made this magazine a truly special place to be, and we will miss you very much.

Claire Shang Editor-in-Chief

Read our full May issue and more online at theblueandwhite.org!

Follow us on Instagram @theblueandwhitemag and Twitter @blueandwhitemag.

Contact us at blueandwhitemag@gmail.com to submit a pitch, Measure for Measure, or Shortcut.

4

THE BLUE AND WHITE

Bwecommendations Fun flourishes in the spring.

Claire Shang, Editor in Chief: Gordon Matta-Clark, “Splitting.” Britney Spears, “Tom’s Diner” remix.

Sylvie Epstein, Managing Editor: Attending Surf, Turf, & Earth with Literary Editor Ben Mo. Billie Marten, “Liquid Love.”

Tarini Krishna, Publisher: Minx (HBO Max). Cucumber gimlet at Flowershop.

Daniel Seizer, Publisher: The game Assassin. Learning bridge via Youtube.

Madi Hermann, Illustrations Editor: Grimes, “California.” Sharing JJ’s “chicken” nuggets with Staff Writer Kelsey Kitzke.

Annie Poole, Layout Editor: Açaí bowls. Grown Ups (2010).

Eliza Rudalevige, Literary Editor: Xochitl Gonzalez, “Money Still Can’t Buy Cool.” My Stephen King Funko Pop. Grace Adee, Senior Editor: Super Paper Mario (2007).

Dominy Gallo, Senior Editor: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Love Letters. Britney Spears’ discography.

Cy Gilman, Senior Editor: Bill Buford, “Good Bread.”

The subway scene in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).

Chloë Gottlieb, Senior Editor: Chateau Diana, Duane Reade-label wine product. Being just a little late to a 10:10 (coffee in hand).

Nicole Kohut, Senior Editor: Don’t burn out in college because nobody cares.

Brooke McCormick, Senior Editor: Japanese Breakfast, Jubilee. Cardamom lemon jam ice cream at Morgenstern’s.

Sam Needleman, Senior Editor: Milano Market!!!!!

Washington Phillips.

Victor Omojola, Senior Editor: Melancholia (2011).

Morton Williams sushi.

Sophie Poole, Senior Editor: Metro Diner breakfast—two eggs sunny side up, sausage, whole grain toast, coffee with milk. Sheila Heti, “We Need the Eggs: On Annie Hall, Love, and Delusion.”

Hailey Ryan, Senior Editor: Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022). Starting a book club with your friends.

Michael Colton, Staff Writer: Steely Dan, Gaucho.

Knxwledge, 1988.

Margaret Connor, Staff Writer: Klaus Mann, Mephisto. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.

Andrea Contreras, Staff Writer: Jorge Ben Or, “Cinco Minutos (Five Minutes)”. Scathing vibe assessment

MAY 2022

of WSP crowd on sunny days.

Sadia Haque, Staff Writer: Business Proposal (Netflix). Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility.

Kelsey Kitzke, Staff Writer: Sheila Heti, Motherhood.

Bedouine, Bedouine. Cow (2022).

Miska Lewis, Staff Writer: Dijon, “Rodeo Clown.”

Pineapple fried rice. The greens in front of Earl.

Justin Liang, Staff Writer: Sally Wen Mao, Oculus.

Francis Poulenc, “Sonate pour clarinette et piano.”

Will Lyman, Staff Writer: Prince, Lovesexy. Drinking water in the sun. Saying “good vibes.”

Becky Miller, Staff Writer: Old Enough! (Netflix).

Grown Ups (2010).

Anna Patchefsky, Staff Writer: Slow Horses (Apple TV+).

Dariya Subkhanberdina, Staff Writer: Julie Otsuka.

Vendredi sur Mer, “La femme à la peau bleue.”

Muni Suleiman, Staff Writer: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars. Seasonally and celestially themed earrings.

Sona Wink, Staff Writer: Nathan Fielder, “Thin Watermelon.”

Oonagh Mockler, Staff Illustrator: Dario Marianelli & Jean-Yves Thibaudet, “Dawn.” Hot Chocolate, “You Sexy Thing.”

Jace Steiner, Staff Illustrator: Cherry blossoms, warm coffee, cool breeze. “Live Moon Jelly Cam - Monterey Bay Aquarium” (YouTube).

Betel Tadesse, Staff Illustrator: Sucker Punch (2011).

Antônio Carlos Jobim, “Waters of March.” Walks in Riverside.

Phoebe Wagoner, Staff Illustrator: Maya Weed, Staff Illustrator: The Kinks, “This Time Tomorrow.” T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn. Throwbacks.

After her online Conversation with Eliza Rudalevige, Professor Denise Cruz bwecommended …

Gina Apostol, Gun Dealers’ Daughter Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée View the rest online!

5

Creative Havens

Into Columbia’s senior studios.

BY BROOKE MCCORMICK

S

cattered throughout the Barnard and Columbia campuses are unexpected oases of creative expression. For some, these spaces are an artistic foil to Butler or Milstein. On the sun-drenched eighth floor of Barnard’s 600 dorm and throughout the maze-like Watson Hall, the seniors of the Visual Arts Department have an opportunity to create their senior thesis project in a studio of their own, shared with at most one other student. As the semester draws to a close, a portion of our classmates fastidiously print linocuts, sculpt experimental reliefs, and create vibrant oil paintings in between academic classes and second majors or minors.

The studios provided for the senior thesis process are a perk of a major that is sometimes overlooked. The thesis is, in essence, designed to help “develop an independent studio practice,” according to Emily Henretta, a thesis professor at Columbia. The project is the culmination of a major which differs slightly between schools: Barnard’s Visual Arts concentration skews toward conceptual and self-directed work, while Columbia’s program offers its students a more traditional studio curriculum. In contrast with an art school, the department leans toward the interdisciplinary-minded student; the young artists bring a broad academic background to their work.

For Barnard and Columbia Visual Arts seniors Delia Tager, Tiari Kuualoha Maile Faagata, and Lilly Cao, the studios have been a welcome retreat after three semesters online, when artmaking was confined to the trappings of childhood bedrooms or school-issued dorm room desks.

It was “liberating” to be granted such indepen-

6

dence after a year of painting with toxic oil paints in a dorm room, according to Cao. Their studio in Watson has eye-catching oil paintings hanging on most walls, as well as a satisfying, richly decorated inspiration board. They paint abstract human forms, embedded with particular cartographies speaking to bodily control and the domination of land through the medium of cartography. In this way, Cao has been able to connect her artistic practice to her scholarly interests in the History and Theory of Architecture, her other major. A soft blue air mattress also lies on one half of the room, a necessary piece of comfort within a demanding art schedule that, they tell me wryly, does not “subscribe to that myth of the genius artist, who, like, throw[s] paint on the canvas.” Instead, Cao’s method is “spiritual” and “rigorously planned”— she comes to her studio, puts her favorite music or audiobook on, and completes routine brushwork and tracing.

Delia Tager, who is working on a thesis that primarily honors a large, elegant tree branch she found after a storm in Morningside Heights, described the studios as a haven. She noted with certainty that the space allowed her to complete a project on a grand scale, one that’s a departure from more traditional mediums. The studio’s privacy offered her space to work peacefully on the project, without fear of her artistic process being disrupted, or her delicate materials being damaged. For Tager, the studios can be an energizing space, too, where students can leave their doors open to allow peers in adjacent rooms to drop by throughout the day.

It’s a breath of fresh air compared to campus—a “not very creatively fulfilling place,” in her words.

The opportunity to create art in a personal studio allows students to find energy in a personalized space. Tiari Kuualoha Maile Faagata, whose work engages in a range of media but explores overar-

THE BLUE AND WHITE

BLUE NOTES ching themes of Hawaiian identity, mythology, religion, and storytelling, usually listens to music freely as she works, and stores costumes from her dance group in the room. She even uses the space to practice dance routines for her multiple extracurricular performance groups.

As much as these private studios are a cherished part of the major, students are not relieved of the burden of paying for expensive materials. While they may receive the space to engage in their work, there is little other financial assistance provided by the department. If you’ve ever spent time in Janoff ’s or Blick, you’d know that art supplies are prohibitively expensive, especially oil paints and canvases. The $80 course fee for the bulk of Visu-

al Arts classes doesn’t even cover the charcoal you might need for a drawing class, or the special materials you’d need for one in printmaking.

Despite these funding drawbacks, students generally relish the opportunity provided by the department to make art in a school with access to both a range of academic opportunities and a world-class art scene just a subway ride away. The studios are a special place for Columbia artists to, as Tager puts it, “work outside what I thought was possible.” Indeed, once you walk into one of these spaces, the scent of turpentine percolating in the air, students chatting or doing meditative work all around you, you’re hit with the sense of true creative freedom.

Illustration by Brooke McCormick

MAY 2022

7

CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS

Gustie Owens

BY SOPHIE POOLE

Illustration by Kat Chen

‘B

echdeltest’ is a word Gustie Owens, BC ’22, wants to use in a future crossword puzzle. (The Bechdel test evaluates sexism in media using three criteria. If a film, television series, or novel has (1) at least two named women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something besides a man, then it passes. If you are just now becoming aware of this test, you likely don’t attend Barnard College.

This is all to say that if you were to overhear my conversation with Gustie, we may or may not have gabbed about boys, momentarily flunking the Bechdel test and surely failing our Barnard forebears.

But after clearing the air—i.e., our shared interest in men who attended a certain all-boys school across the pond, the name of which is often a crossword answer—I can assure you we proceeded in typical feminist fashion.)

Gustie keeps an ever-expanding list in her Notes app entitled “Words I want to use in a crossword puzzle.” This is part of her work as an inaugural Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellow for The New York Times, which began in April. The fellowship provides mentorship for individuals from groups underrepresented in the puzzle-making world in the hopes of publishing “work that reflects a diverse range of cultural reference points, language usage and communities.” She came in hot with an idea for a themed puzzle: communist ballroom

8

dances. Made-up portmanteaus for this puzzle included ‘tanguevera,’ ‘polkarlmarx,’ ‘stalindyhop,’ and ‘foxtrotsky.’ Times Digital Puzzles Editor Sam Ezersky, her direct mentor, and the four other editors have since rejected this theme, but Gustie still likes the idea and I do, too.

At the end of the three-month unpaid fellowship, Gustie will submit a puzzle that may be published in the Times. She will also receive a free T-shirt.

This sounds fairly reasonable to me. But the announcement of this program inspired ire from geriatric subscribers. “When they announced [the fellowship] a bunch of people commented angrily, like, ‘What are they gonna do? Put the word ‘selfie’ in crosswords?’” Gustie told me. Unfortunately for the older cruciverbalists, ‘selfie’ is only the tip of the iceberg. Other items on Gustie’s word-wishlist, sure to challenge anyone over the age of 22: oomf, McLovin, bestie, onlyfans, bigpharma, Uggboots, redflag, darkweb, starchart, hotbox (es?) (ed?), and smize. Even I, admittedly, had to Google ‘oomf.’

Another term Gustie made up is ‘shenan,’ short for shenanigan. It is a word thrown around quite frequently at The Columbia Federalist’s general body meetings in Lerner 569. She leads the satirical newspaper alongside co-Feditor-in-Chief Nikhil Mehta, SEAS ’22. (This is not the first partnership between one of the three Mehta siblings and Gust-

THE BLUE AND WHITE

CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS ie, who all attended Horace Mann School before Columbia. Nikhil’s twin sister Radhika, or Rads, CC ’22, and Gustie were leads on the Butler Banner Project in their sophomore year.) After hearing shenan a few dozen times, I asked for a definition.

Gustie uses the word with such frequency that it has lost all meaning, she explains. A classic case of semantic satiation. Nevertheless, when pressed, she defines the term quite nicely: A shenan “can range from a slightly elevated ‘bit’ to a really elaborate event that is kind of absurd.” How to use it in a sentence, you ask? Say you’re at a Fed meeting and you’re pitching goofy ideas for a campus event.

Someone might say, “What if, as a shenan, we all just hang out?” It’s a catch-all term for any kind of hangout—be it spontaneous or studied.

But hanging out is easier said than done at Columbia. Gustie, a self-proclaimed lover of “organized fun,” believes that there are, quite simply, not enough places to hang out in these parts. So, instead of asking a couple friends to simply slurp down frozen margs on a Tuesday evening, she began to host weekly trivia nights—first on the roof of her apartment building, then at The Heights Bar & Grill. “I accidentally take things too seriously, very quickly,” she said, sipping her peppermint tea.

Gustie cannot help but scale up: Joking about hosting a casual trivia night at her apartment rapidly transformed into a weekly partnership with a local bar for Taco Tuesdays, when her close friends and distant acquaintances commune for a weekly trivia bowl. I gathered that the growth of her ‘shenans’ escapes even her, that their exponential expansion is unintentional but inevitable. With Nurasyl Shokeyev, CC ’22, she regularly organizes comedy shows featuring her funny friends. In February, I stood in a queue of students, which snaked from Riverside Drive to Broadway, all waiting to enjoy a couple hours of stand-up comedy from folding chairs underneath the Vampire Weekend chandelier.

As a first-year, I knew Gustie’s name before I knew Gustie. I knew her because she was seemingly attending every campus event promoted on Facebook. I consistently spotted her name on the ‘Going’ list for SNOCK, Postcrypt Art Gallery, and ColumbiaVotes events—perhaps because she is the only Gustie I know. Short for Augusta and inspired by her grandmother Goldie, though some call her Gus, Goost, or Guts. And yet it was more than her

MAY 2022

name. Gustie stood out for her quiet confidence in social and academic spaces, her genuinely funny online presence, and how she always seemed at home at Barnard and Columbia. In part, this ease was bestowed to her as a native Upper West Sider. Gustie grew up in the 80s between Riverside and Central Park—riding the 1, reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and then wandering through the Met, grocery shopping at Zabar’s, and living in rental apartments.

An urban studies major with a concentration in anthropology, her thesis work—a case study of the relationship between small landlords and tenants in New York during the pandemic and of recent laws like the Good Cause Eviction Bill—dedicates itself to the fraught relationship between New Yorkers and their living spaces. After graduation, she hopes to visit a friend who works at a refugee camp in Greece and travel to Mexico or Spain to brush up on her Spanish. But then she plans to return. Unlike most of us, she feels no urge to dash off to Williamsburg or the Lower East Side. Gustie’s not quite done with this neighborhood, and she probably never will be. It’s home. She just received her lease renewal this month for her Morningside Heights pied-à-terre. (Yes, she dejectedly sighs, like many other New Yorkers, her rent has significantly increased from last year’s pandemic rates.)

This October, Gustie began frequenting open studio hours at Mugi Pottery, on Amsterdam Avenue between 108th and 109th Street, a few times a week. She sent me photographs of a ceramic pitcher she made. It was her first attempt at silkscreen printing on clay, and she reproduced a 1952 Schlitz beer advertisement in which a husband comforts his teary, incompetent housewife with the words, “Don’t worry darling, you didn’t burn the beer.” I texted Gustie, “Freaking out about how incredible the pitcher is.” She responded, “LOL I fired it wrong so it can’t hold water.” Next text: “So I need to get fake flowers or smth.” She recalled a Mugi employee’s comment on her ceramic work: “You don’t let your skill level get in the way of your creativity,” they said. “Someone else in the studio was kind of shocked because to her that seemed so rude, but I literally loved that statement,” Gustie explained. She prides herself on not being a perfectionist. Sometimes Gustie will fill her pitcher with fake flowers instead of cold beer. That’s how it will be, and that is good.

9

F E AT U R E

Searching for the Activist Ivy

Does Columbia’s political scene today live up to our reputation?

BY COLE CAHILL

I

t’s a sunny afternoon on College Walk in 2003; the birds are chirping, Lerner Hall still has that new building smell, and the post-9/11 student body at Columbia has politics on the brain. Abram Handler, CC ’07, broke down a typical scene in a Spectator op-ed: Near the sundial is the Spartacus Youth Club, “a wacky clan of socialists who proudly assert to be the party of the Russian Revolution.” Members of the International Socialist Organization distribute pamphlets in Lerner. Lining the brick path of College Walk, protesters call for revolutionary Black liberation and “the defense of North Korea against the tyranny of the United States.”

This is certainly not a Columbia that I’ve ever seen. Compared to this depiction, today’s College Walk seems downright conservative. I keep my eyes peeled for campus uproar, protests, and direct actions, but with the major exception of the Student Workers of Columbia strike last fall, in-your-face political work is a rare sight at this University. Student groups promoting any political cause, let alone groups promoting the violent overthrow of the American state, are few and far between.

The deterioration of radical political activity here is indeed a relatively recent phenomenon. In the decades after the 1968 uprisings, Columbia sustained active chapters of radical student groups—organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, and Lucha, a radical Latinx student organization, all had active membership through the 2000s. The University’s radical reputation gained national traction, too: In 2006, after student protesters rushed the Roone Arledge Auditorium stage during a speech by the Minutemen, a vigilante border patrol group, Bill O’Reilly invited the president of Columbia College Republicans to debate the editor of this magazine on The O’Reilly Factor. O’Reilly called Columbia the “University of Havana North,” and the leading light of the "left-wing jihad.”

This characterization was generous, to say the least, but it aligned with a politically radical public identity for Columbia ubiquitous in the post-9/11 years. The “activist Ivy” image persists today in Co-

10

lumbia’s and Barnard’s branding—a student I spoke to recalled their tour guide telling them to expect a protest, a counter-protest, and a counter-counter-protest on any given afternoon—but the political climate on campus today is decidedly out of step with that claim. Perhaps more strikingly, the supposed Gen-Z vanguard leading the new era of radical leftwing politics is largely invisible. These are the students who were in high school for Trump’s election, who organized March for Our Lives walkouts; students whose earliest years of legal adulthood were marked by a global pandemic, a national uprising for Black liberation, and an attempted right-wing coup-d’etat of the federal government. December’s Harvard Youth Poll found 33% of Americans ages 18 to 29 considered themselves politically engaged, up from just 24% in 2009. Why, then, is College Walk so quiet? Is the politically engaged, radically bent version of Columbia dead in the water? Have Columbia’s radicals been absorbed by the institutions of neoliberalism? …

Left-leaning political organizations at Columbia fit into two broad genres, each characterized by their proximity to institutional politics. In one camp are direct action­­ –based organizations like Student Worker Solidarity and Housing Equity Project. While the days of radical flyering on Low Steps are largely behind us, these groups fill the void once dominated by the International Socialist Organization and Students for a Democratic Society. A flurry of direct action and mutual aid organizations, including Mobilized African Diaspora and Students Helping Students, surged in membership and support during the 2020 uprisings and the subsequent remote academic year, but are effectively dormant today.

In the other category are the longstanding groups which tend to work within established political structures and institutions: the Columbia University College Democrats, the Roosevelt Institute, and the Columbia Political Union. These groups intend to be big tents; Roosevelt and CPU both identify as “nonpartisan,” and CU Dems describes itself as “a

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E space for all people with left-leaning ideas.” It’s not impossible for talk of revolution or disavowals of the status quo to surface in these organizations, but they are each essentially committed to working with the powers that be.

There’s no official or unofficial census for campus club membership, but the most prominent explicitly political student organization at Columbia appears to be the Columbia University College Democrats.

CU Dems, as it is colloquially known, is not a radical organization. At their weekly general body meetings, 15 to 25 members meet in a cinderblock-clad room in Lerner Hall to watch a peer-led presentation on an issue of national political concern—taxes, student debt, interest groups, to name a few—before opening the floor to discussion. The conversations are relentlessly lively; hands shoot up after the conclusion of every comment, and the moderator often assigns a batting order of speakers once the discourse gets going.

“In good news, the IRS just got a 6% increase in funding in the Omnibus spending bill, so hopefully, gradually, we will be able to keep people more accountable,” the discussion leader declared at a meeting on taxes in late March. The floor opened into a series of takes about how the federal government can raise taxes on the wealthy—some suggested closing loopholes, others emphasized reforming and funding the IRS. Before long, the congressional elephant in the room materialized: The moderator mentioned that the Senate shot down a proposal for a billionaire tax, only applicable to the nation’s 700 wealthiest people, within a day of its introduction.

“Tax the Rich, as much as it’s a nice slogan, is probably not in the foreseeable future,” a member said.

Of course, any discussion predicated upon changing America through institutional levers in 2022 is bound to run into the problem of congressional gridlock. Even with Democrats gaining control of Congress and the presidency in 2020, the progressive agenda remains at a standstill—recall Kyrsten Sinema enthusiastically thumbing down a federal minimum wage increase and the hollowing out of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act last year.

After years of insistence for young people to vote, call their representatives, and march against gun violence, the unrelenting paralysis of Congress has, in part, led to the majority of young people to believe American democracy is failing. In this room,

MAY 2022

though, people remain committed to pursuing change through the levers of Congress. Members often reminisce about the New Deal and other periods when legislation managed to enact material changes; progress might be at a standstill now, but they believe that one day, with enough effort and strategy, governmental institutions can bring about the sweeping changes the nation needs.

Jacob Kimbarow, GS ’24, is in the room every week. An Air Force veteran, Kimbarow came to political engagement through leadership roles in barracks’ councils and booster clubs while in the service. He exudes a military-style cordiality, and it’s clear he has a few years on his peers in CU Dems.

But in many ways, he embodies the ethos of the 2022 college Democrat: He’s adamant about the pressing need for things like student debt forgiveness and universal healthcare, and he laments the out-of-touch Democratic Party establishment for standing in the way of real progress.

“The thing that I have hope for is not for my leaders now, it’s for the leaders that we’re going to have in 10 and 15 years,” he told me. I asked him whether the current state of affairs allows for that kind of time—the climate emergency is coming in a matter of years, not decades, after all.

“That’s the Catch-22 of it all,” he said. “I know when our generation, or our group, is in charge, things are gonna be different, but I don’t know if we can get there quickly enough.”

Kimbarow sees himself as part of a rising generation of reformers that will steer the nation in the right direction—once it gains control of the reins of power.

“If I’m having a conversation with Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, I have to act as if Nancy Pelosi’s having a conversation with the future Speaker of the House. I have to say that this party belongs to me, too. I don’t like the way that it’s going, I will be invested, and I’m going to annoy you. I’m gonna irritate you until I’m in charge,” he said.

Kimbarow’s approach does not represent every member of CU Dems; others have more tepid relationships to national Democrats and national politics in general, but still place their efforts in institutional approaches. Nikita Leus-Oliva, the president of CU Dems, a former organizer for the Biden 2020 campaign, and former intern for the DNC, doesn’t consider herself a capital-D Democrat these days.

“There are a lot of things that need to happen that

11

F E AT U R E

Illustration by Hart Hallos are destined to be blocked by the political system that we currently have, because it was meant to do that,” Leus-Oliva said. “And at the same time there has never been a time that we need these things more. I think it’s a matter of changing the system; it's hard to try to fix a system when you’re still in the system.”

Talking to Leus-Oliva, I can sense that she recognizes the difficulty of reconciling her clear-eyed awareness of the need for structural change with the futility of the federal government in practice.

It’s common for politically engaged young people to recognize the Sisyphean nature of electoral politics; their disillusionment with the system grows with each campaign and organizing endeavor, but they feel obliged to continue pushing through the available means. Leus-Oliva is steadfast in her will to push onward.

“I honestly think nothing short of revolution can bring a new system,” Leus-Oliva said. “So if we’re not organizing a revolution and we are still working within the system, we need those big sorts of changes.”

This attitude is shared by numerous members of CU Dems, who see engagement with “the system” as

12

complementing, not contradicting, their support for radical politics. They see many of the self-professed radicals as effectively inactive—talking a big game about the uselessness of political work without engaging in any real alternative. To Sarah DeSouza, the club’s president during the 2020–2021 school year, that phenomenon pervades white Columbia students who stake out radical political positions.

“These are not people who are reading the Black Panther Party’s texts,” DeSouza said.

“It just very much feels like talking points and no action. Even if you don’t want to be a part of CU Dems, there are tons of ways to be involved in New York City.”

Much like her presidential successor, these days DeSouza finds herself feeling distant from the Democratic Party, and the gulf between her belief in abolitionist politics and the party’s moderate platform has left her feeling further from traditional political engagement than at any point in her life. Nevertheless, she tempers her disillusionment with the belief that policy and legislation remain viable avenues for change—in fact, some of the few tactics on the table for college students. “With the resources that we have, that's kind of what we are allowed to do,” she

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E said.

The organization’s own means of putting beliefs into action are primarily their two annual excursions out of Morningside Heights: a campaign trip each November, in which members canvass for Democrats in contested elections, and a spring “lobby trip,” when they take a bus to Washington, D.C. to advocate for congressional bills.

The term “lobbying” is inextricable from its real-world reputation as a technically legal form of bribery. But rather than promising campaign donations, Dems members travel to Capitol Hill to earnestly attempt to persuade members of Congress—or, more often, their staffers—to support or co-sponsor legislation. This year, participants prepared talking points for legislation like the HALT Campus Sexual Violence Act of 2021, and a bill to federally replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. While at the Capitol, the students rarely waste their time with Republican representatives who categorically oppose anything within a 10-foot pole of the Democratic policy agenda. But as they lobby Democrats, the members confront the slim odds that their bills become law: Even if they manage to convince every elected Democrat, the Senate filibuster makes even the most minor legislation require Republican approval. Objectively, the odds of their lobbying impacting legislative outcomes are slim.

But Leus-Oliva thinks that’s okay. To her, the purpose of the lobby trip is to build community and educate members about legislative advocacy—moving the needle on legislation is an added bonus.

“Some bills, like Build Back Better, are never going to pass. It doesn’t matter who talks to who about it. It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to pass,” Leus-Oliva said. One group of students, she told me, still chose to lobby for Build Back Better.

Most of the club members, including Leus-Oliva, have no illusions about their influence over the Democrats’ agenda. “We are just a College Dems club, we’re not the Democratic Party. We’re not D Trip”—the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, that is—“we’re not any of these huge organizations. We’re not Joe Biden. We don’t need to put the pressure on ourselves to pass these bills,” she said.

“I think almost everyone that I spoke to after the trip said that they left the trip feeling like they have a real community and that the Dems community has

MAY 2022

been solidified—that to me is a better metric of success than what happens with the bill itself.”

Henry Magowan, CC ’22, a co-founder of the Gravel Institute, disagrees. Magowan has focused his energies squarely away from Columbia’s campus. As part of the team that ran Mike Gravel’s 2020 far-left presidential campaign, his political efforts garnered national attention during the primaries. He and his collaborators, Henry Williams, CC ’23, and David Oks, transitioned the campaign into the Gravel Institute, which focuses on producing left-wing political educational videos, last year.

To Magowan, the CU Dems lobby trip serves to legitimize a broken political system without materially influencing legislative outcomes. He sees Democratic officials as fundamentally unresponsive to the demands of student political organizations.

“This is just how the DNC operates. They tell you that they're listening and that they care about the young Democrats of America, but they basically fool you with taking the meetings in the first place,” he said.

The lobby trip, in his view, isn’t merely ineffective—it reinforces a counterproductive and inherently regressive approach to student political action.

“I struggle to provide you examples of the insider track being successful,” he said. “And once you get your foot into the Democratic Party and its entire apparatus, it is so easy to slowly see yourself pulled to the center, pulled to the right. That’s just how these things work.”

Lula O’Donnell, BC ’22, a member of Student Worker Solidarity, expressed a similar view. “There’s a constant pull of liberalism defanging radical movements. As a student organization, I definitely think that we have so much work to do locally,” they said.

“There is so much power to be built right here that I don’t really feel a need to go to Washington, because all of the power we need to make these grand changes we already have.”

This semester, O’Donnell helped lead the revival of Student Worker Solidarity, a group originally coalesced in 2012 to organize undergraduate student solidarity with labor unions at and around Columbia. The group fell inactive during remote learning and remained defunct during the graduate workers’ strike last semester. The widespread support for the strike motivated O’Donnell to help reestablish a space to organize campus unions and leftist projects, including efforts in the greater community. Recently,

13

F E AT U R E SWS is working to connect Columbia students with the organization United Front Against Displacement to help oppose the privatization of the Harlem River Houses and other New York City Housing Authority complexes.

The fledgling group’s meetings are small, with about a dozen loyal members descending into a Pupin classroom each Monday night. But SWS is not alone in looking to channel more direct forms of political action outside of Columbia’s gates. Housing Equity Project combines outreach to homeless residents of Morningside Heights with advocacy for housing justice in Upper Manhattan, with particular emphasis on mitigating the gentrifying impacts of Columbia’s expansion into Harlem. Rebounding after a pandemic hiatus, the organization counts around 40 active members across its outreach, shelter staffing, and advocacy initiatives.

When Sam Howe, CC ’24, transferred to Columbia from Amherst, he expected the “activist Ivy” reputation to hold water. After seeking involvement in a general leftist political group—he emailed the YDSA chapter but heard back over a month after the fact—he found the student group working on political and community-based work that most compelled him was HEP. “I think I knew that no matter what I’m coming to a rich institution that has a vested interest in keeping its student body alienated in some sense from the community around it and from serving that community. So I had no aspiration that I was coming to a school full of people who had the energy and time and motivation to constantly work and be activists,” Howe said. “But I was also disappointed to some extent to find how many people, at least who seemed to me, had little to no interest and did not do much reflecting in terms of their position in terms of the community.”

It’s meaningful that Howe found that HEP was the home of the political work he had in mind when he arrived at Columbia—it indicates a larger trend of leftist campus politics focusing more on systems around the University rather than working to change elements of the literal undergraduate experience.

Among students active in groups like HEP and SWS, there exists a sense that the best use of their political energies is supporting the people and communities grappling with the harms of Columbia’s institutional policies, whether that means rallying students to support a picket line for higher wages

14

or organizing against the University’s role in pricing out Harlem residents. For better or for worse, the political culture of protesting campus speakers has fallen out of favor, and large-scale movements against campus sexual violence have faded out of the limelight—Take Back the Night, which was for decades one of the largest protest events at Columbia, was not even held this year. Today, the attention of Columbia’s leftist set is increasingly turned toward the material consequences of the university they attend.

It’s hard to know whether that shift places the era of communist flyering and internal protesting behind us—after all, the YDSA tuition strike garnered thousands of signatures demanding improved undergraduate learning conditions during the 2020–21 school year—but the classic objects of progressive campus politics are decisively not drawing widespread participation. DeSouza recalled a day this semester when anti-abortion protestors demonstrated on Barnard’s campus without drawing largescale opposition. To her, that lack of urgency signals a complacency toward forces of oppression among Columbia and Barnard students.

“I have not seen any articles about that protest.

I’ve not seen any talks about that protest. The fact that it was happening outside of our front gates—it’s a typical example of [how] we are complacent in our own oppression,” DeSouza said. …

The two-year anniversary of the national uprising for Black lives, with its widespread radical demands for the abolition of police forces and reimagining public safety, is approaching. The memory of that summer, when the racist violence baked into our institutions demanded uninterrupted attention, had not dissipated when Columbia’s physical community reconvened last fall. As the academic year comes to a close, the momentum of that summer and the urgency to demand a new system hasn’t produced a new 1968. But as established organizations interrogate their approaches and newer groups set out to organize the student body, perhaps this is a moment of transition for political work at Columbia.

“People here are really smart, but I think people also need to be provided with more political education that is actually geared toward action,” O’Donnell said. “We need to collectively figure out how to not let homework get in the way of meaningful political change.”

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY

Butterfly Effect

Control, chaos, and conversion in the Uris Pool.

BY SONA WICK

M

y first experience in the Uris Pool was one of abject humiliation. It was November 2021, and I had never put on a swim cap before. It’s no intuitive task. With the added pressure of the chuckling grad students not-so-subtly watching me, it took about 10 minutes to accomplish the measly result: ears out, accompanied by a few exhausted strands of hair. Smeagol-like, I waddled out of the locker room.

In the water, I realized that, while able to swim, I knew little of “strokes.” Freestyle: exhausting. Backstroke: disorienting. Butterfly: not even close. I settled on an extremely slow breaststroke, keeping my head above the water. Despite feeling ridiculous, I swam about once a week for much of the fall. I never stayed for longer than 15 minutes, and most of that time was spent catching my breath. I viewed the Uris Pool with detached (likely defensive) iro-

ny: a strange hovel where I went to exhaust and embarrass myself. It merited little serious thought.

A day after moving in for the spring semester, a mirror fell on my head. Two hours later, I fainted (likely because of the mirror), leaving me with double head trauma. Every concussion is different— some combination of visual, auditory, or vestibular effects—and mine happened to unravel the link between my eyes and brain. Any visual stimulation, including looking at a screen, reading, or peering out too bright a window, would send me into hourlong bouts of nausea and headaches.

For the first two weeks, I lived in constant terror that my brain would never be the same; most days it felt like a mush sloshing between my ears. I felt fragile. I became incredibly superstitious, obsessed with cracking the sequence of seemingly arbitrary events that led to the fateful one—perhaps if I had

Illustration by Taylor Yingshi

MAY 2022

15

E S S AY properly recycled that takeout container, the cosmic overlords wouldn’t have tipped over the mirror. I struggled to understand how events I had no control over could uproot my life so quickly. How do I rely on a sense of stability? How do I stave off chaos? Is the world governed by raw entropy, a cavernous maw of randomness set out to slowly devour us? I saw a comrade in Murphy, his namesake law my new credo.

I returned to school slowly, painstakingly, over the month of March. When my brain finally felt solid enough, I became more motivated to exercise than I’d ever been before. I was aware of the complex behind it: Losing control over my body made controlling it feel especially gratifying. My new routine involved one to two hours at Dodge every night, half that time spent in the Uris Pool.

After a while, my disjointed breaststroke of yore evolved into something comfortable. I started to swim in uninterrupted intervals so long that time melted away. I felt like an Alka-Seltzer tablet dropped into water, dissolved and purposeful. In the pool, the concussion and its associated anxieties melted away. I was in control of my body, mind, and environment. What was formerly a mundane pool became a sacred space, a shrine to order’s triumph over chaos.

I started to wonder what was behind the mystical experience I had had, whether there was something uniquely meditative about the Uris Pool. Was I alone in finding it a special place, or did it affect other users similarly? …

Its formal name is the Percy Uris Natatorium.

Aside from some light cosmetic changes, it has stayed the same since 1974. On a given day, the pool is occupied by a wide array of characters, all of varying degrees of talent: The varsity swim team meets as early as 6:30 a.m. onto 9, and sometimes in the afternoon; the Beginner Swim PE class (mandatory for those who fail the swim test) meets sharply at 9 a.m.; recreational swim is afternoons and nights; club teams take over past 9:30 p.m. and practice late into the night.

Recreational swimming is open to anybody with a Dodge Fitness Center membership. Lucy Arico-Muendel, BC ’23, lifeguards at the pool three times a week. She enjoys the crowd’s unpredictable composition, which consists of undergrad and graduate students, professors, and the oldest man

16

you’ve ever seen. The pool fosters a fusion of socialization and athleticism, and a heartening cultural synchronism between faculty and student life.

Then, of course, there are the seniors taking their swim tests. They’re easy to spot: often giggling and in gaggles, anxious to complete Columbia’s most infamous exam. Those who fail must take Beginner Swim with James Bolster, head coach of the men’s swimming and diving team. Bolster spends his days toggling between Olympic-level athletes and students that failed to swim three continuous laps—a combination I found incredibly charming.

Bolster’s pedagogy seems just as much mental as it is physical, focused on building his students’ confidence as much as their swimming ability. “They start, they’re petrified, they don’t even want to get in the water. By the end of class, they’re completely comfortable and they really feel like, ‘Wow, I got a skill.’ It’s wonderful for their self-confidence, and it’s really a class that I enjoy teaching.”

Lifeguards monitor these classes as well, watching students improve over the course of a semester.

“I’ve seen a few swimmers from the classes come back during rec swim,” says Arico-Muendel. “This one guy even went above and beyond and learned butterfly, even though that’s not necessary.” …

These stories I found heartwarming, but I needed to dive deeper: What about the pool felt so profound to me?

Most people I spoke to noted the location of the natatorium, buried four floors into the already subterranean Dodge gym. “I don’t want to be four levels underground,” says Arico-Muendel. “It’s a little miserable … if we drilled into any one of the walls, what would we encounter? The subway?”

Her comment evokes either claustrophobia or perhaps some sort of reverence: Trudging down all those stairs feels like a pilgrimage to the core of the earth. The pool becomes a sort of cavernous, echoing pond. Stalactite cones protrude from the wet floor while stalagmite flags hang from the ceiling. I thought this, at least, until Coach Bolster burst my bubble. “It does seem like it is four flights underground, but in actuality when you are down on the pool deck you are on street level.”

Deep (or perhaps not so deep) below the earth, Newton’s fourth law reveals itself: No one looks hot in a swim cap and goggles. It is truly incredible that the most collectively naked spot on campus hap-

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY pens to be by far the least sexy. However unappealing as it may sound, I’ve found that looking like a prenatal alien around my peers is oddly liberating.

It changes the social pretext. Bald, vision-impaired, and suspended in fluid, we return to an embryonic state—the pool a communal womb on whose walls we kick and spin. In utero, we cast our focus inward. “It’s an activity that promotes this introspection,” says Coach Bolster. “The opportunity to sort of immerse yourself and get away from the rat race.”

In my conversations, I found that many people experienced the timeless effect of swimming that so moved me. Coach Bolster seemed to share my reverence for the water: “It’s an incredible form of meditation … You hear the rhythms of your own body, you have this sense of freedom to do whatever you want. You're in charge of everything.” I was surprised by how closely his description recalled my own experience of swimming as a means of control.

While Arico-Muendel doesn’t often swim in the pool, she told me she experiences a similar meditativeness from the stand. “When I’m watching I have to put my phone down and stare straight ahead …

I let my mind wander. With the lap swimmers, it’s almost relaxing to watch them do the same thing over and over again. I know it’s relaxing for them, so I’m sort of experiencing that secondhand.” …

A week ago I was swimming a slow backstroke, jellyfish-like, and contemplating this very article.

The blue and white tile like … the flag of Denmark? like Chani’s eyes? Enwrapped in meditation, I lost my grip on spacetime and bumped headfirst into the wall. I felt shocked and betrayed by the Percy Uris Natatorium: After all my dedication, this is how you reward me?

I remembered something Coach Bolster told me about his experiences freewater swimming.

“There’s this wonderful sense of freedom, freedom of expression. It’s you and nature, and to a certain extent, you’re controlling nature.”

Up until that moment, I agreed with him. I felt that, through extreme bodily discipline, I could somehow warp the world around me to my will.

While swimming, I felt impenetrable. Yet as my head smarted through my swim cap—a much more benign version of the pain I had endured months ago—I realized that disorder is unavoidable and

MAY 2022

that sense of control is illusory. We all age. We all suffer damages.

I sought to understand what made the pool special, but I came to recognize its universality: a microcosm of the human propensity for imposing arbitrary structure to preempt the chaos we most fear. We place lanes for people to swim in, station lifeguards to watch over us. We perform our daily regimens with machine-like repetition. The pool is a tamed reproduction of oceans, lakes, and rivers, those bodies which fall under the unpredictable domain of mother nature. The water is so chlorinated that, according to Arico-Muendel, “Covid can’t survive a foot above the pool.”

But as hard as we try, water simply cannot be forced into our prescriptions of order. Randomness increases as atoms are given more freedom to roam around. Liquids are governed by more chaos than solids are, but less so than gasses; in that sense, their fluidity provides a sort of entropic middle for humans to explore. Above ground, we are crushed by the weight of gravity, academic expectations, and bookbags. In the water, we experience the foreign freedom of the liquid state. We may attempt to mitigate the pool’s water with buoys, safety precautions, and goggles, but we can never truly control it. Water is consistent in its entropy, just as chaos is reliable in its pervasiveness.

In Paradise Lost, chaos is an enemy of creation; yet hasn’t Darwinism shown that the two are one and the same? The world is indeed governed by raw entropy, but that entropy is creative just as much as it is destructive. The invisible hand that tipped over the mirror also, perhaps, placed me in a class with a future close friend. There’s no use fearing chaos; in many cases, it deserves our welcome.

Once more, I looked around the Percy Uris Natatorium: two students moseying by on flotation pads, talking about their day; an undergrad thrashing past an old man; a woman treading water in perfect equilibrium. An ecosystem of its own, a primordial soup of human limbs, naked, in slow-motion.

Staring chaos in the face, we can either cower in fear or continue living. When students of Beginner Swim stand at the pool’s edge gripped with fear, Coach Bolster’s job is to talk them in. “The water will support you if you let it,” he told me. “Important that you respect it, but not that you fear it so that you’re afraid to jump in.”

17

18

THE BLUE AND WHITE

MAY 2022

19

E S S AY

Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

The class of 2022 is the only grade that experienced a full pre-pandemic year on campus. As they prepare to leave, our B&W seniors pay tribute to their choice spots on campus.

The Van Amringe Quadrangle Lodged between Hartley and Wallach.

H

ere at Columbia—the greatest university in the greatest city in the greatest world in the greatest galaxy—we don’t waste time with silly titles or epithets. Always on New York time, we talk quick; with no syllables to waste, our school has a great penchant for portmanteaus. If I heard someone say “Northwest Corner Building,” I would have to assume they referred to some mythical establishment, certainly located in NYU territory.

Instead, we do NoCo. We do ButCaf. We do HamDel, LitHum, FroSci—even UWriting is shortened by four iambs. Nearly everything here has a catchy name. Emphasis on nearly.

It wasn’t until my senior year that I learned even my secret, hidden, indie, favorite spot on campus had a title. The Van Amringe Quadrangle sits between Hartley and Wallach, a sweet rotunda which, according to our school website, “is best used for barbecue or tabling events.” Don’t let the admin fool you—this spot is Cool, capital C. Freshman year, relegated to a life off the grid in a Hartley single, I noticed every manic pixie dream girl and their respective Cocteau Twin­–boyfriends stood around the Van Amringe Quadrangle smoking cigarettes, laughing at the loser simpleton Nietzsche. Lonely and isolated, I took the suave insouciance of my fellow Hartley hostages to be a badge of pride. Not all hope was lost: I, too, could evade the sickly and socially inept stereotype of a Hartley resident. Hope resided in that quad, and she resides there still. Check it out one day; I promise you no one has heard of it before, mostly because the Van Amringe Quadrangle is a super long and super stupid name.

—Chloë Gottlieb The Northwest Corner Conference Room(s) A (conference) room with a view. ampus was porous in the spring of 2021. As we were forbidden from entering the living quarters of others, my “roommates” were those

C 20

with whom I snuck into abandoned lab spaces and claimed squatters’ rights over empty classrooms.

We learned which doors were kept ajar, which could be coaxed open with a tap of an ID, which would submit to a jerk of the arm.

Before we knew that the door between Pupin 11 and NoCo 7 was “yankable,” we needed the elevator. As it rested on ground level, we’d pray for a stranger on a restricted-access upper floor to unwittingly summon us up. With such tricks now sealed off, my only access to the conference room at the top of NoCo is through fragmented memory—details stitched together into a tattered quilt of recollection. There are, for instance, actually two conference rooms, but I remember only a single corner framed by two walls of floor-to-ceiling windows that thrusted the entirety of Manhattan upon anyone who entered. I cannot now produce a mental picture of the view, which stared down at the roofs of every other building on campus, but I can still hear the muted gasps that emerged from the lungs of those staring at it for the first time.

I remember that in April, I camped out in the room for one of two consecutive nights I spent awake finishing a term paper—though I cannot remember which of the two it was. I don’t remember when at night my friends came, bringing Sweetgreen and welcome distraction, but I do remember that I saw the sunset and the sunrise alone. I don’t remember what shade of purple set itself atop the dimming horizon, or exactly what it felt like when the first ripple of light crept over northern Queens.

But I remember that I was listening to Mort Garson at the beginning of the night, and Ambrose Akinmusire at the end. I remember that at 7:30 I took a last sip of the skyline and left for Hungarian in search of caffeine. I don’t remember if I ever went back.

—Cy Gilman Strokos A contemporary eatery with perspective.

M

y biggest regret from my time at Columbia is something I did too late. What can you,

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY dear reader, do earlier than I to avoid this feeling of remorse, you ask? Go to Strokos sooner than your second semester here. Actually, go on move-in day.

Take your family and show them the beauty of Columbia.

To me, Strokos is a mythical place. To others, it is a Greek deli on the corner of 114th and Amsterdam. While it is technically outside of the gates, I consider it part of my campus. In fact, it is the center of my campus, if you measure these things in terms of frequency of visits. Conservatively, I go to Strokos four times a week. I approach the counter and I order my classic: a bacon, egg, and hashbrown on an everything bagel, no cheese, please.

The cost of any item at Strokos varies by the day, and that’s just the way it is. As frustrating as that may be, you won’t remember it when your teeth sink into the best bagel north of Absolute. There’s a reason their tagline, proudly displayed on each of their shirts, reads “A Contemporary Eatery with Perspective.” So go to Strokos, and stop eating at prehistoric cafes with simple-minded outlooks.

There will always be haters. To preempt them, I say this: Strokos is better than HamDel. If you disagree, fuck you. HamDel will make you cry, Strokos will give you a feeling of ecstasy like nothing you’ve ever felt before. HamDel is disgusting, Strokos is ethereal. HamDel is chaos, Strokos is grace.

—Daniel Seizer Joe’s and the Journalism School Between fact-finding and home.

T

here is absolutely no good reason why the coffee shop attached to Pulitzer must be called Joe Coffee and not, simply, Joe’s. I have added the possessive ever since my first day of classes, when I was sitting in the journalism school lounge reading for Romanticism and a barista wandered in, offering free cold brew. I had not ever enjoyed coffee prior to that fateful day, but took a bottle for appearance’s sake. Unaware of my toddler-like tolerance for caffeine at that time, I finished the entire bottle and promptly struggled not to fall down the stairs as I walked to my seminar.

For reasons I can’t explain, I made the journalism school a home freshman year. The one-room, one-table library is slightly pathetic, the lounge has comfortable couches but little convenient table space, and the lighting is quite consistently bad.

Nonetheless, Joe’s and the J-school were a bustling

MAY 2022

somewhere for a freshman unsure she wanted to be anywhere at Columbia at all. It helped that there’s a line in The Newsroom alluding to a “hot-shot EP out of Columbia J-school.” (Wanting to be an Aaron Sorkin character is a significant part of my personality.)

My presence in Joe’s soon became a joke among my friends. In Joe’s I’ve marched through paper after paper, read book after book, and struggled through avalanches of equations. I got coffee there nearly every Monday and Wednesday morning before Andy and I strode to Gulati’s Principles. I interviewed the fiery-haired rockstar that would play a lead in the only play I’ve ever written. I’ve doubled over with sobs, overcome by the sly demons of my future-faced imaginings. I’ve nursed a fleeting, obligatory crush on an anonymous barista; he wore beanies and baggy pants and seemed to care about my days. I’ve half-yelled with laughter as Sophia and I people-watched and tried valiantly to get work done. They used to have doughnuts.

I bought one each for three of my friends on my first Valentine’s Day here. They don’t have them anymore.

Joe’s is not romantic. It has none of the secluded, literary charm of Hungarian or Max Caffe. It is stark and gray and no-nonsense. The brightest thing against its slate backdrop are the people and the mixed-up chatter of their mixed-up lives, brought together for a moment in the space between fact-finding and home.

—Elizabeth Jackson The Lerner Game Room A work-free zone.

I

spent most of my first year of college trying to find someplace to sit. If Columbia students have taken one thing from New York City, it’s an enthusiastic embrace of squatters’ rights: If I see an EcoReps water bottle and a Marx-Engels Reader on a ramp table, I know it’s safe to assume that my Ferris biscuit and I are not welcome.

This is the only way I can think to explain the stunning amount of time that I’ve spent in the Lerner Game Room—in the child-size chair between the air hockey and foosball tables, naturally.

When you enter the Lerner Game Room, a sign by the door announces that this is a place for play—“a work-free zone!” I interpreted this rule loosely. By this, I mean that, once situated at my

21

Illustration by Brooke McCormick

E S S AY

perch, I did my homework playfully. By that, I mean that when those rare brave souls actually began a game of air hockey, I quashed my knee-jerk reaction: Hmm … the clang of those pucks sure does make my ears ring. Who was I to put a damper on their institutionally sanctioned fun?

Perhaps this haunt would never have become a habit had my best friend Elizabeth not also recognized its unexpected charms—its vibrant atmosphere, its ample seating, its multiple outlets. We could sit there for hours, talking over the murmur of a Family Feud marathon. It turned out to be one of those friendships where it didn’t matter where we decided to go.

The other day, I returned to our space of choice for the first time since the pandemic. I immediately texted Elizabeth to declare that I had entered a work-free zone. I didn’t have to say more: “grace

22

grace grace. did you go to the lerner game room without me?”

It wasn’t the same, I told her. It’s hard to play foosball alone.

—Grace Adee Milbank A decidedly good building.

L

ast year, somewhere on 108th, from the confines of my light-deprived fifth-floor walk up, my roommates and I sipped espresso, chatting about what we missed about campus and hated about our apartment. As we caffeinated, we rebuilt a year lost, mapping memories to corners and corridors. Time after time, I found myself returning to Milbank.

“A good building should feel alive,” I told my roommates, between sips of Café Bustelo. “A good

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY building should have cracks and character, bricks and books, and ideally a stained-glass window.”

This year, I find myself returning to Milbank, a decidedly good building. Each morning, I mold my Doc Martens into the marbled stairs, hollowed by the kitten heels and Mary Janes of Barnard students past. Sunsoaked in the corner of the classroom, I daydream to the clangor of church bells and coos of the pigeons, gazing through the dusty windows that frame Riverside like a postcard. I may even stick my hand out the window, tracing my nails across the mossed and scalloped edges of Spanish tile, wrapping my fingers around the curled stems of ivy vines. If I’m running late, I run a minute later to pause and admire the Kehinde Wiley portraits, even if just for a moment. Some rush by, studying for years without a trip to the rooftop greenhouse or a moment on the benches under the trees. But I prefer to pass the time on windowsills and benches, remembering that I am alive and in a decidedly good building.

—Hailey Ryan The Hartley Rec Room (HRR).

T

he day I discovered the Hartley Rec Room was the day my life at Columbia really began. Some people might tell you that Amsterdam Bridge, or Low Rotunda, or maybe even the Van Amringe Quadrangle are the gems of this campus, but these people are ignorant. These are people so taken by the veneer of campus beauty that they overlook the true nucleus of Columbia life. With two pingpong and two pool—billiards—tables, Hartley Rec Room (HRR) is simplicity, it is convenience, it is coziness, it is joy, it is youth, it is fun.

When I say to people nowadays, I’m off to play pingpong, they look puzzled. “Where?” they ask. To that, I say, “If you haven’t broken cue in the Hartley Rec Room, what have you been doing?” Hartley Rec Room is post-Macro-midterm solace, it’s a racket sport cardio workout, it’s friendship and it’s heartbreak. There are people out there who think of pingpong as a “mini version of tennis” or “not a real racket sport,” but these people haven’t experienced the HRR endorphin rush. When I’m smashing a looper or feigning a flick shot, I think back to racket sport legend Billie Jean King’s inspiring advice that “champions keep playing until they get

MAY 2022

it right,” and I think, No, pingpong is a champion’s sport. Pingpong isn’t “mini tennis”; tennis is mega pingpong. And if that isn’t a metaphor for something, I don’t know what is.

—Jaden Jarmel-Schneider The Minor Latham Playhouse Have you seen Mike or Greg?

I

f my ghost haunted the halls of this campus (and perhaps it already does), the apparition of a curly-haired girl wearing rubber boots would weave through the wings of the Minor Latham Playhouse. Ghost tours of the future would list sightings of this phantom—pushing a set of double doors open with her feet while balancing two armchairs on her shoulders, running up the basement stairs in search of a key ring, echoing, “Have you seen Mike or Greg?” as reported by witnesses, or trying on an assortment of earth-toned vests and pastel pants. She would sit in the darkened dressing rooms when in need of a breath, a rest. Her knees would be dusty from rummaging through the rabbit warrens of Milbank Hall, hauling furniture and hand props. Turn any corner and there she may be, drilling stubborn screws, swagging crimson curtains, casting shadow birds on the wall, or running lines in haste.

The story they would tell, these ghost tour guides of the future, is of a girl who staked her claim straight out of the gate. Eighteen and eager, she wore pigtail braids and gingham, danced as a troll and traipsed as an orangutan. At 19, she mopped watermelon guts and chocolate blood from the floor. At 20, she sat on the corner of the stage, joining an impromptu chorus of “Mr. Blue Sky” in a play that proved spookily portentous of the quarantine to come, and cinematized a disco in Cork. At 21, she greeted fellow ghosts in empty red seats. At 22, the stage was hers to share once more; she crossed the Mediterranean Sea, grew from lad to lady, sprung from an Elizabethan age to modern ecstasies, “about to understand …”

Every night the ghosts gather around the lone lamp center stage. Mine, I suspect, will join the ensemble of that prestigious crew. Theaters are spaces built for ghosts, for surplus stories, and so a part of me will always linger in the MLP. —Maya Weed

23

E S S AY The Writing Center Its warmth comes from its people.

T

he Writing Center is the only place on this campus that I would not watch burn. In fact, if the Writing Center was (god forbid) burning down, I would run inside and burn with it.

I, like many anxious first-year students, stumbled upon the Writing Center out of fear—specifically, fear that I wasn’t as intelligent as my peers, a status confirmed or denied by the grade I would receive on my first LitHum essay. My analysis of oak trees in the Iliad earned me a 78%. But I continued to visit religiously—not least because I believe my session with Elizabeth transformed a D paper into a C+ paper. Rather, my visits were spurred by something other than letter grades: It was warm.

Not literally—as we all know, Columbia’s electricity is crap. Its warmth comes from its people.

If you skip up the steps to Philosophy and make a sharp right turn upon entering, you’ll find yourself at the wooden doors of 310. You’ll be greeted by John—not verbally, only through subtle eye contact—who sits snugly at a corner desk, broadcasting heavy metal hits on days electrocuted with rays of sunshine and smooth jazz on those overcast by gray skies. Jason will probably arch his eyebrows above his desktop, shifting his gaze from the master scheduler—or the pixelated image of a plump dorayaki that consumes his screen—to check in on you. His soft gaze, combined with Kip’s contagious laughter, tells you it’s okay to tip-toe further in.

So you take a seat at the communal table, snag a fun-sized Snickers bar, and maybe flip through a few old New Yorkers before your session. You listen to the consultations happening around you: “Let’s imagine that you’re putting these writers in conversation with one another”; “I hear you saying this … does that align with the intentions of your project?” among many absurd phrases that make writing sound like building a personalized amusement park. Then, when you’re scanning the walls, pausing on the miscellaneous party bags that have been cast as room decor, you’ll realize what you don’t hear: “right,” “wrong,” “good,” and “bad.”

When it comes time for your session, you think you know what to expect: warmth. But warmth arrives in varying degrees. Bridget will ask you about your life’s story. Helen will make a day-by-day plan with you. Ellie will make you laugh. I will offer you

24

tea. So even if you look outside to find the fiercest storm brewing, you know you’re warm.

—Nicole Kohut The Kent Tables Have a surprisingly good cry.

T

his city, with its practically infinite experiential offerings, crucially lacks one thing: places where you can be both alone and outdoors.

Throughout these four years, I’ve lost count of how many moments necessitated such an environment—times when I needed to be in the open air but loathed the possibility of entanglement in a dreaded stop-and-chat. It often feels like Columbia’s campus is too small to even walk from Lerner to Pulitzer without brushing shoulders or making eye contact with someone you recognize.

The closest to this ideal of solitude I’ve found on campus is the row of tables across the entrance to Kent. If you time it right, you can avoid the mass exodus of students to/from East Campus during the passing periods between classes. If you really time it right, you can find the perfect vantage point to see lower campus baked in the orange glow of the late afternoon sun. Read a book. Write in your journal. Have a surprisingly good cry. Enjoy the sublimity of the moment.

—Rea Rustagi Fayerweather The product of class struggle.

I

n college I learned that the disciplines were invented here. They probably shouldn’t have been, but they were, so we might as well have fun being inside of them. Lucky for us that they each have a building—we can really kick around.

So I kicked a little, and in college I learned that Avery is a hearth, a mound, a roof, and walls. The point of the sixth floor of Philosophy is to dramatize, dramatize, dramatize, and the point of the seventh is to develop an analytic of power. Casa Hispánica is the origin of modernity, no matter what Maison Française tries to tell you. Schermerhorn’s highest calling is to give deep, ecstatic pleasure— Dodge’s, too. Both are miracles of consciousness, which is sometimes individual and other times collective.

I am quite confident that Fayerweather is the

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY product of class struggle. Inside, my freshman year, a professor wowed me. Her speech patterns made me think of a jellyfish pumping itself up from the depths of the cartoon sea: out, in, out, in, out, in.

Now, I secretly give people the jellyfish test. It’s not standardized, and it’s very difficult to grade. People who pass it are worth keeping around. I think I’ll continue to give it for a while longer, after college.

—Sam Needleman Straus Park Looking toward home.

I

arrived in Morningside as a sophomore, just a semester before Covid began. Living in an apartment on 110th, I knew little about the dorms and quads and buildings of Columbia and Barnard. I navigated to appointments and new classes with a campus map on Google Images, zooming in on bold blue names. In the afternoons, I walked home from class by St. John’s on Amsterdam, passing the community garden on 111th Street, and along Broadway, the Duane Reade, the shoe repair shop, the flower shop. I had no ties to either campus, and little connection to its students. I felt, rather, a warmth for the neighborhood, which I still knew only for its pedestrians, dogs, buildings, and surrounding sidewalks.

Before its closing in the spring of 2020, I would amble towards Xi’an Famous Foods on 101st Street, taking my plastic container of noodles up to the park between Broadway and West End on 106th to sit by the statue of Ida Straus. She and her husband, Isidor, died on the deck of the Titanic, folded in each others’ arms. Before their deaths, the couple had bought a house on 105th and Broadway, right where the avenue bends uptown. Now, the water pours from beneath Ida’s bronze dress as she leans on one arm and looks toward her would-be home.

In the days of Xi’an Famous Foods, a man with a bag of Wonder Bread often came to perch beside her and throw crumbs—sometimes whole slices— to the birds.

The week before I left New York that spring, a man visited Ida to plant tulips in the shape of a heart. I came to the park with a sandwich from the deli and a book I was reading for class. It wasn’t the last, or even tenth to last, time I would head to the park for a meal. But that day, despite lingering homesickness, I was the happiest I had been

MAY 2022

since before high school. The man with the Wonder Bread scattered his crumbs with a vengeance as I gathered my things and made my way back uptown. Ida watched me when I left, the tulips beneath her still unopened in their little ring.

—Willa Neubauer Reunion Courtyard A gray space.

R

eunion Courtyard is the name of the plaza located between the Vagelos Alumnae Center and Barnard Hall. The courtyard used to have a bench overlooking Claremont Avenue where I sat my freshman year, when I lived nearby, in Brooks.

Sometimes, I would kneel on the bench, rest my hands on the parapet, lean forward, and look as far left as possible. The wind, rushing in from the Hudson, would cool my cheeks. Then I would swing my head north, toward my future sophomore dorm and Riverside Church. A classmate I met my first semester told me Bob Dylan met his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, the one clutching his arm on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” there.

When I began to write this, I realized I didn’t know the plaza’s official name. The official map on Barnard’s website leaves a gray space between the Alumnae Center and Barnard Hall, as if nothing is there. The other day, I took some time between classes to visit the courtyard. To my surprise, a white tent occupied the space. The bench was no longer. Instead, a small sign hanging from the rafters welcomed me to the Barnard Center for Toddler Research. I padded onto the blue rubber gym flooring, presumably installed for the children’s safety, and continued my search for a name. In the six-inch space between the tent and Barnard Hall, I found a plaque affixed to the building’s 104-yearold façade. To read it, I had to take a photograph, so I hoisted myself over a concrete block, which functioned as a weight for the tent, and stuck my arm out for the best angle. The inscription read: “In grateful recognition of the many ways alumnae giving strengthens the College and advances Barnard’s mission, this plaza was dedicated in 1993 and named Reunion Courtyard.” In the gray space that is Reunion Courtyard, I was at once 22, 18, an alumna, a toddler.

—Sophie Poole

25

F E AT U R E S

The Business of Books

Inside the book industry’s existential crisis over whose stories deserve to be told.

BY JUSTIN LIANG

S

haye Areheart, Director of the Columbia Publishing Course and veteran editor in the book business, has worked with the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, George Plimpton, Ray Bradbury, Martin Amis, Christopher Isherwood, and Sir Edmund Hillary. In her hour-long conversation with The Blue & White, she recounted episodes from her three-decade career which included picking up Forrest Gump from a then relatively unknown author. The last major title she discovered before quitting to head up the Columbia Publishing Course was Gone Girl. No one is more convinced of the value of physical books in a digital world than Shaye Areheart.

Walking around Morningside Heights, it is difficult to conceptualize books as an endangered species. After all, they can be found not only lining the rafters of a building right in the middle of campus, but also in the hands of students bent over their Homer and Marx, Austen and Woolf.

Yet, to the chagrin of the Arehearts of this world, college campuses seem increasingly like zoos with books as their pandas: an endangered species more and more difficult to locate in the wild.

In 1950, Manhattan had 386 booksellers. Now it is down to less than 80. Downtown, the legendary Strand Books, having only recently averted its own closure, was once part of an ecosystem comprising over 50 used and antique booksellers on the stretch of Fourth Avenue between Union Square and Astor Place. Even Amazon, the contemporary retail behemoth, had to admit defeat when it recently announced the closure of its brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Still, there are signs that the tides are turning.

Book sales rose measurably for the first time in decades during the pandemic’s first year, prompted perhaps by boredom and a desire for escape from the apocalyptic tidings borne online. Even non-readers may be unknowingly consuming literature by proxy: 70% of the world’s top 20 grossing films are based on books, with television adaptations not far behind. As a result, successful shows, such as Bridgerton and The Queen’s Gam-

26

bit, have pushed their fans to pick up the books that inspired them in the first place. For all its faded luster, literature retains a privileged position as gatekeeper in the value chain of culture. …

For all her experience as a linchpin of the literary world, Areheart occupies a surprisingly modest office in a corner of Columbia Journalism School, which is better known for hosting the Pulitzer Prize than for housing the Columbia Publishing Course. Still, the influence of the latter looms large in the book business.

Its alumni include the CEO of Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher, alongside executives and senior editors across a range of other national imprints and magazines. Columbia’s course, which offers a six-week certificate program every summer in New York, is the oldest such program in the country. Celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, it is widely considered a top feeder into the publishing industry.

Despite the cultural influence of the book business, it is a small and narrow world. After decades of industry consolidation, power is now concentrated in just five large publishing behemoths headquartered in Manhattan, which collectively represent over three quarters of the total market. Many of these “Big Five” are themselves part of larger media empires like News Corp. Last year, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit to successfully block the proposed merger between Penguin

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S Random House and Simon & Schuster, arguing that excessive concentration would lead to lower advances to authors, as well as higher costs and less variety for readers. That same year, the Big Five were also hit with a class action lawsuit that alleged collusion to fix prices.

The past two years have seen the publishing industry at a crossroads: Even as book sales rose during the pandemic, the Big Five were facing renewed skepticism of their extraordinary power as the gatekeepers of the nation’s culture. These two trends collided with a third. As the nation convulsed under the shattering impact of a pandemic, it was also confronting anew the systemic problem of structural racism, which returned

Illustration by Vanessa Mendoza to the spotlight following the murder of George Floyd.

The results of a 2019 American publishing industry survey showed that 76% of respondents identified as white, and 74% as cis women. Among editors whose job it is to acquire new books, the percentage of white-identifying respondents in-

MAY 2022

creased to 85%. Analysis by the New York Times, meanwhile, showed that 89% of books published by the Big Five in 2018 were by white-identifying authors. These numbers are vastly at odds with the demographic composition of the United States.

Of course, the demographics of book readers tend to skew whiter, wealthier and more educated. A 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 25% and 38% of Black and Hispanic respondents did not pick up a book in the past twelve months, compared to 20% of white respondents. But this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy: If fewer books are published that speak to minority audiences, then these audiences are less likely to buy books in the first place.

At Columbia, the longstanding debate over the Core Curriculum’s privileging of “dead white men” obscures the fact that contemporary literature is plagued by similar inequities. In some ways, the tide is actually going in the wrong direction: 2021 saw conservative attempts to ban books—typically those representing Black and LGBTQ perspectives—surge to their highest level in two decades in the United States.

“We need more diversity in the industry,” Areheart concedes. Columbia Publishing Course utilizes its location in New York to bring in a range of current industry practitioners, and she highlighted efforts to include guest lecturers and panelists from a variety of backgrounds. However, she confesses that more needs to be done to increase diversity in the student body. In part, this stems from the dearth of minority applicants: “We’re trying to do more outreach.”

Part of the problem is pay. Just a few years back, salaries for entry-level positions at the Big Five started at around $35,000, well below what was cited as necessary for survival in New York, one of the world’s most expensive cities. Starting salaries at smaller and independent publishing houses were even lower.

The result, as an opinion piece in Publishers Weekly remarked, is that the only students who could afford to get their foot in the door were those from wealthier backgrounds without student loan debt, whose families could supplement their incomes in the early years of their careers.

The Columbia Publishing Course gives students a very high likelihood of stepping straight into paid roles, circumventing the unpaid internships

27

F E AT U R E S that are often a rite of passage for new entrants.

But with tuition, room, and board totaling over $9,000 for a six-week program, the price of admission is steep.

There are signs that the industry is becoming more inclusive and accessible. Last year, several of the big publishers and independent presses announced pay hikes to between $40,000 and $45,000. However, the draw of the publishing industry is only so much related to the monetary component. “It’s not going to be the same as going to work for an investment bank,” Areheart admits.

But her students “don’t want to work for an investment bank … they want to work with creative people and ideas.”

Sabrina Castillo, a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course, started working full time at Random House earlier this year. She cohabits with her partner—who earns a higher wage than her— in Chicago, citing the pandemic with allowing her to work remotely to offset the industry’s extreme concentration in a city as expensive as New York.

Castillo remarked that growing up in an immigrant household, not many members of her Latinx community were readers. Being a writer or an editor was outside the realm of imagination; her family and friends were always more focused on jobs that offered “financial security” for their immigrant parents. It was only after becoming an English major in college that she began to meet more like-minded peers. Castillo’s experience may help explain the dearth of minority applicants that Areheart referenced: There is simply not enough awareness.

Kitanna Hiromasa, another graduate of the program and now a publicity assistant at Riverhead Books, credits her family for inspiring her to pursue publishing. She recalled a second cousin who had worked as a literary agent, and her grandfather who had published a number of books. As a person of color, she recognizes that her family is more the exception than the norm.

Because publishing is not necessarily a high-profile field, it relies more often on people who are already in the know to replenish its ranks.

Indeed, one more barrier to inclusion is the culture of the publishing industry, which remains centered around personal connections. “There’s a great deal to be said for networking,” according to Areheart. Some of this is intrinsic to the book

28

business: Editors, agents, and writers must have a certain chemistry and build relationships over years to understand each other’s literary preferences and personalities. Areheart’s own break came just as she was graduating college when one of her professors, a nationally recognized poet, surprised her with a job offer to be his personal assistant.

Columbia Publishing Course can sometimes sound like a finishing school for the book business. According to Hiromasa, resumes and cover letters are worked over meticulously, while workshops simulate the experience of acquiring, pitching, contracting, and marketing new titles.

But it can also be thought of as a bootcamp for networking: “You send thank-you notes to every single person that comes through to give a talk and it gets so much easier as you go on.” She also mentions the value of having Areheart as a mentor and ally, given she “holds such power in the publishing world.”

Siena Brown is a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course who now works at W.W. Norton & Company. As a publishing professional who is half-Black and half-white, she is hopeful that she can become a role model for other women of color in what remains a culturally influential industry. “I want to give back to the community,” Brown says. “That’s part of the reason I want to be in this industry … but there are times when I am the only woman of color in a room … and that can be disheartening.” The fact that cis women comprise three quarters of the workforce only makes it more notable that white men continue to predominate in the upper echelons of management, where salaries and bonuses run in the six figures. The CEOs for four of the Big Five publishers in the United States are white and male.

Riley Hubby, an alumnus of the Columbia Publishing Course who now works in sales at Penguin Young Readers and is nonbinary and transgender, cites children’s publishing as an area especially in need of diversity. “This is where children see themselves in media for the first time.

We’re very concerned with making sure that every child gets that experience.” Hubby continued, explaining that more diversity can help to “bring perspectives that cis straight colleagues might not be able to, not because of anything they’re doing wrong, but just because they have a different life

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S experience.”

Brian Smith, who is a Black alumnus of the course, now works at Columbia University Press, where he is a member of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. Smith echoes the idea that diversity in publishing cannot be limited to just content alone. He mentioned instances when a Black author felt misunderstood by the way a white copyeditor approached their work. On the other hand, he cautions against a siloed “separate but equal” scheme where authors and editors are obliged to share the same background: There is still value in the cross-pollination of ideas and perspectives. Rather, the mere presence of different voices in a publishing team can help diversify the overall environment in which books are acquired, edited, and put out into the world.

One aspect of the acquisition process that has been particularly contentious of late is the compensation gap for non-white writers. “We talked a lot in the Columbia Publishing Course about authors of color getting paid less,” said Hiromasa.

In particular, the year 2020 saw Black writers start the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe to underscore the discrepancy in their advances compared to their white counterparts. The writer Chip Creek, who is a white man, tweeted that “#PublishingPaidMe an $800k advance for my debut, which changed my life. I’m still in shock about it. But I’m more shocked to see the numbers from writers of color like the extraordinary Jesmyn Ward.” Ward, the first female fiction writer to ever win two National Book Awards, tweeted that “my agent and I fought and fought before we wrestled our way to” a mere $100k advance. The lack of diversity in publishing is not merely a cultural problem of authors of color being misunderstood. It is an economic issue, too, of their being literally undervalued.

The various obstacles to greater accessibility and inclusion in the book business, from the financial to the cultural and relational, make it imperative that publishing houses be more intentional about diversity. Providing more competitive salaries to level the playing field is only the first step. Hubby noted that publishers responded to a summer of activism in 2020 by renewing their commitments to diversifying new hires. Brown has even observed an increasing trend of publishing houses specifying that certain positions are open for all, but that people of color are especial-

MAY 2022

ly encouraged to apply. While not a silver bullet in itself, this can be one more step on the way to bringing historically underrepresented communities into the fold.

No change is overnight, and the longevity of careers in the book business means that the upper echelons in particular will take time to diversify.

“People love publishing. People who are editors, they want to stay there forever,” Brown observed.

Today’s senior editors began their careers at a time when publishing was much less welcoming to women and people of color. “Seeing that very white, that very male hierarchy … can I even make my way up the ladder?” Brown said. “That’s what’s stopping people from applying.” It can be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: A lack of diversity in leadership positions can dissuade people of color from entering the industry in the first place; but without more diverse entrants, those leadership structures will never change.

Nonprofits like We Need Diverse Books are hoping to turn the tide, offering programs such as internship grants to financially support marginalized students looking to work in publishing. However, as Hubby observed, it is not only a matter of bringing more diversity into the door: Retention is equally important. A program called Rise Up, for instance, targets mid-career publishing professionals, helping prevent burnout and building a support network for editors of color who might otherwise feel alone in their respective journeys. The Columbia Publishing Course, too, could potentially benefit from more targeted outreach, support, and financial aid programs.

Ultimately, there is only so much the book business itself can do to combat structural racism.

Fundamental inequalities in household income and educational attainment weigh on the purchasing power of minority readers and this cannot be solved by books alone. Yet the publishing industry, which remains a gatekeeper of the multitudinous stories that populate our shelves and our screens, remains a powerful influence in our culture. And if, as Joan Didion suggested, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” then the stories we collectively choose to tell are determinative of who lives and thrives. Perhaps more diversity in the book business will prompt non-readers to turn a new page, convincing a new generation to appreciate books as much as Areheart does.

29

F E AT U R E S

Weed World

Legal on paper, but not yet in practice.

BY JADEN JARMEL-SCHNEIDER

T

he weed truck has arrived in Morningside Heights. Sometimes it’s on 116th, but mostly it lingers on the corner of 109th. Flanked by Covid testing vans, this one has green Goosebumps-style lettering and advertises solutions of a different type: CBD and THC marijuana products, just about one year legal in New York. A middle-aged man in dark monochrome athleisure stands outside the truck, beckoning at passersby. Through the glass of the concession window, a cadre of younger men engages in the kind of effortless hang you might expect at a smoke sesh. I never get the impression that they are high—no smoky haze, no smell, no red eyes— but I can’t help but wonder if they have been planted there to give off precisely that impression. Buy our pot; then you can be chill, just like us.

Several times now, I’ve seen the athleisurely man in friendly dialogue with older residents of the neighborhood. Their genial tones belie the tension between them as the older, mostly white, neighbors launch questions about legality and permits. What is it our neighbors are afraid of? Perhaps the truck represents the encroachment of a youthful drug on their Manhattan enclave. Perhaps they continue to, as America has, feel a racialized unease around weed. Perhaps the truck, in its unabashed existence, flaunts the degeneracy of marijuana, the image of a criminal drug in a white neighborhood.

In March 2021, New York became the 19th state to fully legalize weed when it passed the Marijuana Regulation & Taxation Act. The law authorizes marijuana possession, processing, and distribution with multi-tiered regulation and licensing programming, and the corresponding shift in enforcement was swift. According to the NYPD’s public data, when comparing the three months leading up to legalization and the three months following, there was a 95% decrease in the number of marijuana-related arrests.

Nearly a year later, on Jan. 5, 2022, after his swear-in as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, Alvin Bragg sent a memo to his new staff. It was a fresh start for an office that has historically been tough on low-level marijuana offenses. He

30

wrote about growing up in Harlem in the 1980s with loved ones in jail and shootings in front of his home. He wrote about justice and fairness, harm and safety. After outlining his prosecutorial philosophy, he introduced a series of Day One initiatives.

Under “Policy & Procedures,” Bragg declared that “the Office will not prosecute … Marijuana misdemeanors.”

Even with marijuana legalized, a cultural discrepancy remains. Weed is all the rage—studies back it up (13,000 since the beginning of last year, Google estimates) and economists have favorably analyzed its tax revenue benefits. In the past decade, marijuana has been touted as the cure for everything from Multiple Sclerosis to public debt.

Even celebrities have decided that publicizing their smoking habits would be good optics. In a famous 92nd Street Y interview with Andy Cohen, Martha Stewart told the crowd matter-of-factly, “Of course I know how to roll a joint.” Jane Fonda, who became a CBD brand ambassador last year, cited marijuana as her go-to pain med. But as marijuana continues to go mainstream, the undercurrent of a century-long campaign to smear its name leaves weed in a confused cultural space.

On the surface, legalizing weed ushered the drug into cultural normality. A carousel of pro-legalization narratives emerged: Everyone smokes, anyways; the state could be pulling in billions on weed sales currently siphoned by the black market; it’s not that unhealthy, it’s not even addictive. But focusing on legalization’s promises elides what being weed-friendly actually looks like on the ground.

This is an aesthetic question, a question of what happens when the hidden becomes visible: Food trucks dispensing hashish to college students on a busy corner of Broadway while the NYPD continued to arrest people for possession and criminal sale in the year after legalization, 82% of whom were Black or Hispanic. ··· Close to campus is a small smoke shop, adorned from floor to ceiling with every piece of weed paraphernalia in the books: Lauryn Hill grinders,

THE BLUE AND WHITE

Illustration by Maya Weed

MAY 2022

31

F E AT U R E S imitation Murano glass animal pipes, RAW Supernatural 12-inch rolling papers. When I entered— strictly for an interview—the owner showed enthusiasm at first, but forbade me to record our conversation. He took me to the corner where he kept his two display cases of pre-rolled joints. He told me about his father, who opened the store, and his brother, who mans the counter at night.

But when I began to question him lightly on weed legalization, licensing, and policing, his demeanor turned. “I thought you’d be asking about other stuff,” he said abruptly. “Let’s end it here.” I left the store confused. Weed is legal now, right?

There is no doubt that in the American symbolic order, legalization and cultural branding are distinct but often run in parallel. When alcohol was banned in 1920, legislators and anti-alcohol activists alike cited “health concerns” as their primary justification for temperance. In reality, there was no research to suggest that alcohol was a particularly dangerous substance, or that criminalizing it would bring about more overall health. It didn’t matter—prohibition was never about health or safety; it was about the puritan conservatism and anti-immigrant sentiment these illusory precepts could conceal. Prohibition didn’t achieve its stated goal (alcohol continued to circulate at an almost pre-legal frequency). Its success was the marketing of alcohol: attaching a cultural value to the act of drinking, making it illegal, criminal, degenerate.

The culture of substance restriction is a distinctly American phenomenon, and the story of the cultural branding of weed follows similarly. When weed first became popular in the early 1900s, it was associated with racist Great Depression-era ire toward the Mexican immigrants who introduced it to American culture. As it percolated through American life, this anger was sublimated into a narrative about the hysteria-inducing effects of marijuana, the so-called “marijuana menace”—a racialized term used widely to associate marijuana with Blackness and mania—and the mythical Mexican “locoweed.” As is often the case, the law swiftly succeeded cultural anger. By 1931, over half of the states had outlawed marijuana. Since then, it has consistently shapeshifted within the American consciousness: the subject of Nixon’s unscientific drug scheduling, the degeneracy of the 1980s hippie transplant in California, the criminality of communities that served time and time again as

32

targets of various misguided and disingenuous drug wars.

A year ago, drug deals took place in alleyways; now, interested buyers peruse shelves of hybrid, fruity pre-rolls at the window of a dispensary on Columbus. What can we make of this confusion, of this discrepancy between legality on paper and legality in practice? Some cultural force is attempting to free marijuana from the image of the washed-up dropout, from fear of crime and disgust at alternativeness. Yet heavy cultural baggage continues to weigh on the drug. Of the Columbia students I interviewed, each wanted to remain anonymous.

One told me that she knows weed is technically legal, but she thinks it will take years for it to feel legal—that is, to consume without shame.

In the past decade, certain demographics have been able to adapt weed into their identity without shame—think weed coming to be associated with spiritual elevation and white hipness. At some point, perhaps when the wealthy and powerful decided they no longer wanted to buy from the guy on the corner, or when the state grew desperate enough to cash in on the drug trade, the alliance of individual and state produced a new narrative to corporatize cannabis. Joe Rogan viewers watched Elon Musk smoke a joint before explaining his project to merge AI with the human brain. Smokers can use their phones to customize their weed vape settings if they buy devices from Pax, a company now valued at $1.7 billion. We are witnesses to the era of the tech bro in his company tent at Burning Man, inhaling New Age shamanism. This is the narrative of weed as technology and innovation, pushed by America’s most cherished religion: science.

Like every god, science is most powerful for its symbolism. It signifies American achievement: the meritocracy of discovery, the rational power of our exceptionalism. It comes as no surprise that even the Prohibitionists excepted medicinal whiskey. A select few physicians obtained licenses to prescribe and distribute whiskey, so long as they had made a diagnosis first. It is equally unsurprising that the first steps in weed legalization came in 1996, when California passed a law legalizing marijuana when used for medicinal purposes. A medical stamp of approval made these substances acceptable to the American public.

Today, weed is everywhere festooned with the

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S aesthetic trappings of rationality. Exact percentages of THC on weed labels produce the effect of scientific precision. Leafly, the weed review, education, and news site with 100 million annual visitors, meticulously describes the particulars of every high with nigh-academic detail. The cultural value of science confers the safety of state-sponsored institutional support, of empirical studies and data. It is a brilliant marketing ploy, one that undoubtedly cost millions upon millions of dollars of lobbying and marketing pitches, of consumer surveys and focus groups. It is a cultural narrative that is palatable to a significant swath of Americans, to the aging moms and dads whose kids fled the suburbs to join the urban counterculture, the Reaganite religious conservatives, the middle-aged retirees, the young technocrats.

Weed has always been marketed intentionally, but its increasing—and now legal—ubiquity paired with a century of shaming produced a cultural discrepancy requiring reconciliation. Even with legalization, it remains marked by criminality, degeneracy, blackness. The shift to market weed as scientific represents an effort to remove weed’s residual shame so that it may flourish in the cultural and economic mainstream.

This marketing shift ignores the other side of this reality. The reality is that, for the past century, the criminalization of weed has led to the formation of an entire economy—one that, even before legalization, contributed billions of dollars to the actual gross domestic product, and which entire communities and marketplaces are reliant upon. What does this economy do now? The unspoken reality of legalization is that it creates a cost of entry that is entirely unfeasible for non-corporate entities: the money for lawyers to acquire dispensary permits, the high taxes. One study found that this cost was so insurmountable that even after two years of legalization in California, illegal weed dealers still outnumbered legal ones three to one.

In an indelibly American way, we forced the development of below-ground economies through the criminalization of a practice we dogmatically cast outside the realm of social acceptability. Forbes estimates that even in 2020, almost 75% of the weed market existed underground. Yet when the desires of the wealthy lead us to bring that economy out of the dark and into refurbished food trucks on the streets of the Upper West Side, there is no means

MAY 2022

of recourse for those underground economies. The city government’s answer so far has been to reserve 100 of the first dispensary retail licenses to New Yorkers with marijuana-related convictions. On the surface, the city’s plan is a nod to the racial injustice of the historical policing of marijuana misdemeanors. But this decision, which overlooks the projections that legalization will not come close to eliminating the weed black market, can’t be considered much more than optic strategy.

The cultural appetite of America’s elite is myopic—it takes no issue brushing aside the thousands of people still imprisoned for marijuana offenses in favor of a progressive, hip outlook on drugs, the mobilization of a convenient aesthetic. And it does not bat an eye at the fact that the industry now making them billions continues to incarcerate people of color at alarming rates, that the very people who voted as pro-drug war conservatives now—with the realization that marketing weed as lucrative and scientific, even healthy, can line their pockets—are the ones championing decriminalization. It is an obscene cultural U-turn, one that without a more concerted focus on the existing underground economy threatens to rupture entire communities so tech-bros can light up on podcasts and cut ribbons at bell-ringing ceremonies, so they may smoke weed without shame.

One has to wonder what the future holds. Might we see a kind of nostalgia that the centennial of alcohol prohibition has occasioned, of nights out in pseudo-speakeasies? Does the future hold destigmatization as it did for alcohol, or has the image of weed been irreversibly tainted? Might it allow for the mass release of prisoners who committed acts from which the state now profits? These are questions emblematic of the tensions between prohibition and normalization, between hiding and publicizing, questions that will remain open until American culture decides how it wants to treat marijuana.

The weed truck is still trying to find its footing in the neighborhood. Every couple of days, it is parked in a new place—catty-cornered to its first perch, or sometimes a few spaces up the block.

When another car claims its spot, the truck has to double park for the day. It’s out in the open, but not quite a dispensary. It’s visible but transient, hesitant or perhaps unable to establish itself as a permanent fixture.

33

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N

Ann Douglas

On Beats, Bollinger, and burgers.

BY SAM NEEDLEMAN

T

he door to apartment 122A was propped open, as it often is, with a very large book, and the posters affixed to it looked eager to tear through their Scotch tape. “Organizers Needed! Fight For Lasting Change!” read the flier for the Eastern Service Workers Association, of Trenton, New Jersey.

“ADVOCATE for low-income families to prevent utility shutoffs and reverse government policies that enrich utility companies while promoting use of fossil fuels.” Above it was a slightly larger poster for a film noir festival in San Francisco, featuring a buxom woman experiencing some kind of ecstasy in a closet full of film reels. Marx and movies: What more could you need?

Inside, something was slightly off: The afternoon light filtered in, a rarity in an apartment whose owner normally hosts her students at night. But Ann Douglas, the Parr Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature, proceeded as usual. She apologized for the piles of newspapers in the foyer, offered fresh-squeezed Westside fruit juice, sat across from me at her dining room table, and started talking. Her home is less a salon than a lair; there are no walls in sight, just rows of books and VHS tapes. Douglas has lived there since the fall of Saigon, when she absconded from her post as the first woman tenured in Princeton’s English Department and took a job at Columbia. Since then, she has written two major books, The Feminization of American Culture and Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, and made two decades of progress on a third, Noir Nation.

During last year’s heady Summer A session, I took Douglas’ Film Noir class, six weeks of threehour lectures that knocked my socks off. I followed up with her famous Beat Generation course. Her classes feel delightfully aughts-ish, as if Ezra Koenig would have cut them. Though she retired 10 years ago, Douglas still teaches with gusto and passion, two qualities that set her apart from the feudal lord– like academics of her generation. She doesn’t just grade undergraduates’ papers; she pores over them like an ancient rabbi scrutinizing the Torah. Never have I heard someone more frequently called “the

34

real deal.” By this her students mean that Douglas is herself a Beat, or maybe a wise shopkeeper who would point you in the right direction if you were a Hitchcock protagonist—someone, in either case, worth hanging around and listening to.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. ··· The Blue and White: I think of you as a scholar of the night.

AD: Couldn’t have said it better.

B&W: Are you nocturnal?

AD: Oh, yes! I mean, I never really discovered it, because for the first 30 years of my teaching career, I didn’t have that much control over my hours. So I got up. But as I got older and could choose more, more and more, it became clear. I really do believe that the night is a very creative time. I’ve often thought that one of the reasons I’ve always been so fascinated with Russian history, culture, literature, art in general ... If any country could be said to have invented night, it would be Russia. As Solzhenitsyn once said, “The Arctic is our ocean, not the Pacific.” It’s the size of it. But of course they, like Scandinavia, have some of the shortest days of the year. When I think of, say, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, the lower depths … night is a great subject in Russian literature. It’s always bothersome because Hitler was so big on the north. Are we talking Nordic? I don’t think so. I think it’s just where you grew up. Are you a night person?

B&W: Very much so. I sort of discovered that in high school, that I do my best work after 11 p.m. or so.

AD: The same with me.

B&W: And it’s nice here because you can go take a walk at 2 a.m., and all is well. So what about death?

Death also figures largely in the subjects that you study.

AD: That has a lot to do with all the early deaths in my family—both my grandparents and father died by the time I was 11. I just turned 80 two weeks ago.

I realized that 80’s the first birthday, a decade birthday, that I’ve ever had where you don’t think, And I wonder what I’ll be doing when I turn 90! Your future

THE BLUE AND WHITE

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N has become speculative. I always know I could have a stroke tonight. I could be dead. And so it sounds a little strange, but these last 10 years have been really the happiest of my life. Because, as Dean Moriarty says, I’ve decided to leave absolutely everything out of my hands. Of course that means that you’re all the more active about doing the things you can do. I’m looking here [points to a large crate] because that is my third book. That is the manuscript.

B&W: Oh, this is the noir book?

AD: Right here, right here. I’ve been working on it for 20 years. It’s called Noir Nation. I really do see noir as the cultural form that depicts the birth of modernism and what it became. Of course I have less energy now than I did 20 years ago. It doesn’t feel that way, but of course I know it’s true. And I do feel it when I look back and think, God, and yet you were writing that book and teaching four courses! That’s inconceivable today. When I retired from the full monty … various friends like Joyce Johnson said, “Well now, don’t teach and just work on the book.” But I didn’t want to stop teaching right away.

Teaching is primary for me. I believe in it. The tragedy of our lives ... is that we don’t know enough, or we don’t know what we need to know when we need to know it. Tony Bennett, you know, not a favorite with me, though I think he’s very pleasant. He was in a documentary about the British blues singer Amy Winehouse, whom I love, just love—and could never understand where she came from. I mean, how did this girl in this middle-class Jewish family ... and there she was singing! He said, “You know, she had it. She was one of the greats. We’re talking Ella and Billie.” He said, “I’ve found that life teaches you how to live it, if you can just live long enough.” She couldn’t live long enough to maybe get a handle on some of her problems. I’ve lived long enough. Life has taught me how to live it. Teaching was what I did through everything that ever happened in my life. It’s my safety, but it’s also my inspiration.

I’m close to a single-cell animal. My own feeling, dealing with so many, many students over the years, is that if someone has a really strong interest center—doesn’t have to be their only interest center, but something that compels them, that they need to stay in touch with—their life can fall to ruins, and they may well come out OK. It’s not their upbringing, it’s not how smart they are. Is there something or several things that they really care about?

B&W: Tell me about your early years near Tupper

MAY 2022

Lake, a small town in the Adirondacks.

AD: You crossed over the railroad tracks in Tupper Lake, and the other side was Faust, New York, some of it very impoverished. We weren’t one of the impoverished ones. Unfortunately, about 30 years ago, because the town was dwindling so fast, they abolished Faust, and it just became part of Tupper Lake. Really my home was Faust, New York, and I’ve always loved that for obvious reasons. That was a completely different world. It was a world where many of the working-class men—and it was largely a working-class community—worked in the lumber industry. My mother was quite scornful because they’d be away lumbering and then they’d come back having been paid and they would drink and drink and drink, and actually sometimes lie on the street.

My father died. He got leukemia—a kind that they still have no remedy for today. One week we were celebrating his 37th birthday, and the next week he was dead. We had absolutely no preparation. My mother had just lost her father and her husband. There were three little children. My mother very quickly remarried to an extremely wealthy guy whose father was an immigrant from Scotland and had founded the Diamond Match Company. My stepfather would take us whenever we traveled to supermarkets so he could survey the world of his products. Unfortunately, like my mother’s mother, he was an alcoholic. We kids didn’t know, but we knew he smelled funny, and that unpleasant things happened when he was on a drinking spell of several days.

Suddenly we went from being kind of middle-class with hopes, to being upper-class with a private plane, a chauffeur, all kinds of servants. It was just daunting, and my mother became someone else. My father wanted a wife who always did things with the family. What he wanted was someone who’d be in a gorgeous house dress by 5 when the chauffeur brought him back from his Park Avenue offices. And they would have drinks together, and no children were allowed. So it was suddenly this different regime in which the idea of the family had disappeared.

Now, shall I tell you about my Jewish affiliation?

B&W: Please do. We were going to get there anyway.

AD: I was going to a public school. I had a friend whose name was Lois Rosenberg, but it wasn’t Lois who was the object of my heart’s affection—it was her mother. And this was a place, their home! They had prints of art pictures. There was classical music.

35

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N It was just this completely different world. Because I spent so much time there, my parents—who were good people, I promise—decided that this really wasn’t good that I was so closely involved with this Jewish family. They spoke to the Rosenbergs, and the Rosenbergs, not wanting to make trouble, I’m sure—I will never know what they thought—they agreed that we would be separated. I was 7, and when my mother told me about this one day after school, I of course got violently upset. I went running the five blocks or three blocks or whatever it was to the Rosenbergs. I think it was very classy—she could have said, “Your parents are pretty unfortunate, and I’m sorry you had to find out about this so soon.” She didn’t do that. She said, “We all discussed it, and this is what your parents think is best.” I think she loved me enough not to want to set me against my parents forever. She said she’d always love me, and she gave me a little pin. It’s the only piece of jewelry I’ve kept my whole life. It’s very small, with a pearl and a little sapphire in the middle of it. From that time forth, I knew that these were the people. It wasn’t some belief that Jews were superior people. I just knew that what they did was what I wanted to do.

B&W: The developments of your political consciousness and your cultural consciousness were very linked.

AD: They were linked. Although the culture always had its own life. I early discovered I wasn’t that happy at home, and I was really very unhappy once my mother had remarried. I became an accomplished shoplifter. That was just my way of getting back. But most of all, I just read and read and read.

I started out with my grandmother's books. Gradually, by, say, 13, I was reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—I’m sure not understanding very much— and absolutely Richard Wright. I fell in love with the novel. I fell in love with poetry. To this day, when things get really bad, I have places that I go—Gerard Manley Hopkins, King Lear, again and again, Macbeth. The stuff that for me is even deeper than politics, which is the sufferings and joys and experiences that you have as an emotional person trying to find a vocation and people you can talk to at every point in your life. I do feel so lucky in that I knew pretty early that I wanted to do exactly what I’m doing. To learn is to live, to live is to learn—that’s kind of the syllogism that has meant the most to me.

My first week at Harvard as a freshman, you were required then to take a reading and comprehension

36

test. I finished well before anyone else. And when I handed it in, he said, “Too hard?” I said, “I hope not,” thinking, God, did I not turn over the page? I had placed number one. My first husband was always trying to learn to read faster, and even trying to observe what I did. He went to Evelyn Wood, I think, and it really didn’t help him that much. You’re wired that way or you’re not; I don’t think it even means you’re unusually smart. When I was in my 30s and I published my first book, I had an affair, the only one I’ve ever had, with a person not totally dissimilar to my stepfather, a Wall Street tycoon, a young tycoon who had started a new firm that was going gangbusters. He clearly had millions by that time. He just couldn’t understand why someone would need to read as much as I did. We lasted a little less than a year.

Stalin—he’s here somewhere [searches for picture of Stalin]. When he was training as a revolutionary … his underlings … would say, “What should we do now, as we’re kind of waiting for the revolution?” He said, “Read. Just read.” That’s why I feel a certain affinity.

B&W: What were the other profound aesthetic experiences of your adolescence?

AD: Movies. Growing up in Faust, until I was 7, we didn’t have a movie theater. We didn’t get a television until we went back to being near my father’s father in New Brunswick. And of course I was thrilled, and they had four o’clock Westerns on every day, so Westerns were my first great passion. But the wonderful thing about Highland Park and Bronxville ... is that there was a movie theater just about a block away. I saw Disney cartoons, which I liked a lot. I loved Wizard of Oz. When we moved to New Jersey to be with my stepfather, control was much less good over us because my mother really had this separate life with her husband. So my next-door neighbor and I, starting near about 11 or 12 … we would go to movies and even sit through them twice. The biggest experience was Elvis Presley and Love Me Tender. Later, I broke his records in some symbolic ritual because I got very interested in playing the piano—classical music became my passion. So music was always there. I loved R&B, I loved rock and roll, I loved the great jazz singers. I just early found out that human expression is the greatest gift humans ever gave to each other—not the power to articulate, but really to explore emotions that couldn’t be ... expressed in words.

THE BLUE AND WHITE

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N

MAY 2022

things, her tests are as high as they can be, and yet she was just thrown out of school six months ago.

What are we going to do with her? I heard first from Middlebury. They did not accept me because of the disciplinary problem. And then I heard from Vassar, telling me that they would take me, no fellowship, which I really wanted because I hated living on my stepfather’s money. I thought, Wow, I’m cooked.

Amazingly, I got into Harvard. Just before I was going to graduate, I was then seriously involved with a wonderful guy, a senior whom I would marry a year later and still love to this day, though we weren’t meant to be married. (I’m really not meant to be married, period, I’ve concluded.) His family was very close friends with someone in the Harvard administration. They’d just gone through their admits and returns, and my boyfriend said, “I bet it’s not often that you get someone like Ann Douglas who just is a shoo-in.” He said, “Oh, oh no, not at all. We take one gamble every year—someone whom we know it’s just as likely she will fuck up as that she’ll succeed.

And that’s the only reason she got in here.”

B&W: In Terrible Honesty, you argue that the theory of historical causality, most

Illustration by Jace Steiner

In Boston—that was more movie theaters than I’d ever had available, and people who were interested in movies as I was. We didn’t even know movies was an art; we just knew that we were passionate about them. And then you had Fellini, and you had Godard, and you had Truffaut. And you were beginning to discover the Russians—good God, Eisenstein, look what he did! And then when I moved to New York, at the end of ’74, rerun theaters were everywhere. Luckily I’d gone to school at Harvard, which had the Brattle Theater. It was the start of rerun art houses, and every night at midnight, Casablanca.

But that is where I saw double features of Bette Davis. That was where, you know, I heard names like Billy Wilder and William Wyler. Once I was in college, I was kind of home free. No one had control over my time or destination anymore. However, they later spent a whole year playing that horrible Julie Andrews … with all the little German orphans coming up over the hill.

B&W: The Sound of Music. I also hate that movie.

Why were you expelled from Milton Academy? And then how did you end up at Harvard?

AD: This was the late ’50s. You’re in the girls’ school. The boys’ school is across the street. You may not ever trespass on the grounds of the boys’ school.

So I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke. I was a virgin. I mean, it was none of the things that one might hope. What I had done was do things like meet my boyfriend in the cemetery, where we read Wordsworth together, not even kissing. We were poetry lovers. And going to the chapel on the boys’ side of the street and ringing the bell. And then I would recite Nietzsche: “Oh sky, though pure and deep, though abyss of light. Gazing at thee I quiver with godlike desires.” From Thus Spake Zarathustra. So I’d been on final probation for about half my time by the end of my junior year. The head mistress, Miss Johnson, decided to really crack down on any meetings in the cemetery. And of course I thought ...

Well, that’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.

And within a few days, we were reading poetry at 6:30 a.m. It was late springtime, and who was there but the birdwatching club from the girls’ school, and they reported me to the principal, and that was it.

So I presented at least a problem by the time I applied for college.

She’s gotten straight A’s in a range of

37

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N notably the Marxist tradition, is common sense. But you also argue that it doesn’t explain everything. You write, “I only wish to acknowledge that such theory stops short of full explanation, that the road ends before we do, that we make our way nonetheless, traveling through the dark by some other form of knowledge.” What is that other form of knowledge?

AD: Marx was wrong that a worker's revolution was going to be coming along. I think the traditional separation that has been made is that Marx as a predictor is one thing; Marx as an analyst of capitalism is still unsurpassed. When John S. Mill had a complete nervous breakdown ... someone told him to read Wordsworth because he would find ... a culture of the feelings. I’d already had a lot of losses in childhood that many people don’t have. And I’ve always been amazed at what was getting me through. That isn’t a situation where I open Marx. That is a situation where I open maybe even the Old Testament and a psalm, where I open Keats, usually one of the Romantics.

I’ll never forget being a freshman at Harvard.

And I was taking a course with ... Michael Walzer.

I’ve met a lot of brilliant people, and he was, in many ways, my most important teacher at Harvard. Back then I hadn’t realized how unusual it was to be able to read Marx. What really impressed me was that we all had to go see him ... he said, “Well, now let me tell you a little about you.” He said, “You live with a lot of money.” Of course it wasn’t my family. But that is, from 8 on, that’s how I’d grown up. He could tell me all the class markings of my life. And I thought, This is an even more powerful tool of analysis than I understood. He would be quite close to, say, what Barbara Fields is today. He was a practicing socialist and Marxist, as well as a brilliant theorist. One time I was home on vacation, and we’d been reading all this Marx. I said, “Mother, I just love Marx.” And my mother said, “Well, Ann, it’s important to me, too, that you get good grades.” It just could not enter her mind that I meant Marx.

B&W: I want to get the story straight on the Žižekian symbol that you once told me about in your apartment, which might be the photo of Stalin.

I think you also mentioned that you have a cross.

AD: I was always drawn to religious or quasi-religious Christian art. So visionary company has always had a lot of meaning to me, but it doesn’t really have to do with a belief system. I respect the teachings of a number of people. Jesus would certainly be

38

one of them. I love Paul and the epistles. They are people who have an acute development of some kind of wisdom of the kind of thing that Marx isn’t going to get you through.

B&W: Your Beats class often feels in a great way like it’s a cultural history class.

AD: I was introduced to the study of literature in a serious way by people who saw it as part of history.

And I’ve never been able to see it in any other way, even though its uses aren’t determined by its historical context. In other words, I can take John Donne, let’s say, for my personal needs or ... to teach him, but that wouldn’t have anything to do with what I believed. I believe in poetry. The courses I designed myself were always a mix of history and culture. That was my training, but it suited me; if I’d been trained in theory, I suspect I would’ve broken away. ’Cause I wanna know why. You’ve gotta go to history for the why.

I really don’t read novels very much anymore. I read history. I have been pursuing the Second World War for about 25 years. It’s an inexhaustible subject.

I read a lot of biography as well. I don’t believe you can sever the person from the text.

B&W: So many of us in my generation are still in thrall to a very silly logic of college admissions that was forced down our throats. But is there something that distinguishes a Columbia student?

AD: Oh, yes. I really think so. And it really started when I tried to figure out how it could be that the students at Columbia were brighter in 1975 than the ones that I had at Princeton. I think I’m right: Parents who were willing to let their children go to New York to be at a top school … were parents who understood … that danger and education were not antithetical. That meant those parents had raised these kids. If Boston’s raising you, watch out, because you may end up a smaller person than you started.

There are very good things in New Haven, but no, New Haven isn’t raising you. Even if what you do is sit in the library all the time and study, New York’s still getting to you. Students are finding out that the world is enormously varied. They’re finding out that it’s enormously unfair. And that’s why I really do believe Columbia students are brighter. New York is your foster mother. As my friend Irving Howe said to me, “If you think New York can solve all your problems, you are very badly mistaken. If you think New York won’t help more of your problems than any other place in the world, you’re also sadly mis-

THE BLUE AND WHITE

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N taken.”

When we were talking about whether or not we could ever have a Beat movement again, the flowering of all these wonderful arts in the post-war decade ... I watch my students and I think, Yeah, we could. Is this the great renaissance of the ’50s? I don’t think it can be. You’ve gotta have lots of very lowrent housing. I always have a certain feeling of guilt.

I had an offer at one point from City [College], at a time when there was more of a surge of idealism.

It’s more important for me now to focus on all the rewards of teaching people as gifted ... as the people whom I encounter here. I see these students and I listen to them and read their papers and I take a lot of time and care with them, and I always have. The students make me feel that there will be a future. Obviously, I don’t have one. Maybe I’ll have a few more good years—that would be great.

B&W: The other day, an Italian tourist stopped me on Low Steps and said, “Is this a private school or a public school?” I found myself saying, “It’s private, but it should be public.”

AD: I think our faculty is better than our administrations deserve. I disapprove of the whole star system in which— B&W: The whole what system?

AD: Star system, in that to woo a certain professor whom you really want, you will knock down, put three apartments together, and you will pay them forever, and they will teach one course every three years. I just think we have to stick to the fact that we are a service profession. We are not entrepreneurs.

Our function is to keep on learning and to teach appropriately what we know. I have fought the administration on many, many different issues my entire career. We always have bad presidents and we have them for a long time.

B&W: Bollinger just announced his retirement— AD: What?

B&W: Bollinger just announced his retirement.

AD: Oh, good! Well, he’s already been here too long.

B&W: What have you found so objectionable about him?

AD: It all started when he came in, that’s why I remember. The graduate students, like these strikes that took place in the last year, they were striking to get better conditions, better wages— B&W: And you always stood in solidarity with them.

MAY 2022

AD: Yes, yes. That spring, I had been there with an ethnic studies protest that involved hunger-striking undergraduates. And then there were meetings with the labor union that the graduate students wanted to join. Whoever was president was leaving, and Bollinger was coming in. You just do have to remember that the best preparation for being an administrator at Columbia, particularly in housing, is, say, if you’ve been absolutely in the thick of boss-labor relations in Chicago 70 years ago. It’s tough. There are people who know where the bodies are buried.

Real estate is really what it’s about.

We presented this case and explained why we thought a union would be a good idea. We had a shortlist of three, four people that he might talk to from either position. Of course, what we knew was that the people who wanted the union were much more passionate than the people who didn’t want it. Anyway, I didn’t know this, but Eric [Foner] told me he never called anybody. He impounded the votes, as the trustees wanted. We never found out how that election went. So that started it off. It was all very well that he’d fought the famous admissions case in Michigan, and clearly had been on the right side then, but I never hoped for anything again from him. It just seemed amazing to me that he wouldn’t even want to talk to the students and would clearly take the trustees’ guidance.

B&W: And he basically has been a real estate developer ever since.

AD: Yeah, I think so. I'm sure he would start telling us all the contributions he’s made to education.

The Lenfest Center, for someone who likes movies, it’s great. But I remember that corner. It had a diner, it had the McDonald’s, and it was a working-class, mainly people-of-color neighborhood. Those things are very hard to forgive, because you’re tearing at communities of people who worked out—I’m sure very unsatisfactory in many respects—but ways of living. When you went in, you always had to be prepared to wait. You put your order in and then you'd wait.

B&W: Do you still frequent McDonald’s?

AD: No, because that was my nearest one. And there was one also on Amsterdam or Columbus that a friend and I used to go to. I actually love the burgers.

B&W: So where do you get your fix now? Shake Shack?

AD: Yes. Absolutely.

39

EPICENTER

BY GUSTIE OWENS ACROSS 1. Body of water, in Italy 5. Triangular sails 9. Cabaret director Bob 14. Recently retired name of a NYTimes section 15. Baseball brothers 16. Crop pest 17. Watch or clock 19. Bush’s 2004 opponent 20. Plant that can be poisonous 21. Wine prefix 22. Central: Prefix 25. TV episode where things can go awry 29. Site of Bridgegate inn 2013 31. Troubling sign of things to come 32. Chinese martial arts 33. 90 degrees from vert.

34. Not discouraged by rain, snow, heat nor gloom of night 35. Covid-19 hotspots, or a clue for 17-, 25-, 51- and 59-across 39. Utah city 42. Disease research org.

43. Japanese car 47. “Naked” rodent 49. “Oui monsieur” across the border 51. Sign of fright or cold 53. Yiddish cries of dismay 54. Bezos’ newspaper 55. Prepare for body building content 57. Thin Russian pancakes 59. Side dish cooked in a seasoned broth 63. Olympics symbol 64. Annoys 65. Supreme Court count, for now 66. Inner turmoil, common in teens 67. Actors in a play 68. Catches rays

DOWN 1. Place to park 2. Software intermediary 3. Garnet or ruby 4. Keats poems 5. Thor actress Alexander 6. Words in many wills 7. Italian lawn bowling 8. Take to court 9. Underage drinker’s license 10. Like code anyone can use 11. Magical hallucinogenic, in slang 12. Madam’s counterpart 13. Dreyer’s partner in ice cream 18. Come to the curb 21. Dizzying posters 22. Texter’s initials alongside a reaction pic 23. Letters of credit?

24. PhDs and MDs 26. Dark black or brown 27. Airport schedule abbr.

28. USN rank 30. “ I’ll Be There For You”

on Friends, e.g.

33. Goofy chuckle 36. Inappropriate 37. Big name in credit cards and NYC bikes 38. Relax 39. “ No way!”

40. One of Pooh's pals 41. Hasty wedding option 44. Game with Skip and Reverse cards 45. Mr. G Biv? 46. Horace’s “__ Poetica” 48. Stand firm 49. Seasonings 50. Best at the skatepark 52. Schitt’s Creek mother 56. Backpack or jean jacket decor 57. Source of support 58. Memorial designer Maya __ 59. Documentarian (and brother of Ken) 60. Kill Bill actress Lucy 61. Raggedy doll 62. Moroccan city