Issuu

DOMINY GALLO, CC ’23, Editor-in-Chief LYLA TRILLING, CC ’22, Managing Editor HAILEY RYAN, BC ’22, Publisher SAMIA MENON, SEAS ’23, Illustrations Editor BENJAMINE MO, CC ’23, Literary Editor KAT CHEN, CC ’24, Assistant Literary Editor DANIEL SEIZER, CC ’22, Assistant Publisher ANNIE POOLE, BC ’24, Layout Editor CHASE CUTARELLI, CC ’23, Director, The Blue Jay ZOE METCALFE, CC ’22, Senior Editor, Blue Notes SYLVIE EPSTEIN, CC ’23, Senior Editor, Blue Notes BROOKE MCCORMICK, BC ’22, Senior Editor, Campus Characters NICOLE KOHUT, CC ’22, Senior Editor, Humor ELIZABETH JACKSON, CC ’22, Senior Editor, Features CLAIRE SHANG, CC ’24, Senior Editor, Features SAM NEEDLEMAN, CC ’22, Senior Editor, Essays SOPHIE POOLE, BC ’22, Senior Editor, Essays & Conversation ELIZA RUDALEVIGE, CC ’23, Senior Editor, Essays Staff Writers ALEXANDER AIBEL, CC ’23 EMILY BACH, BC ’24 ELYSA CASO-MCHUGH, BC ’23 MICHAEL COLTON, CC ’22 EDUARDO ESPINOSA, CC ’23 BILLIE FORESTER, CC ’22 GABRIEL GARON, CC ’21 CY GILMAN, CC ’22 CHLOË GOTTLIEB, CC ’22 SADIA HAQUE, BC ’23 ANNELIE HYATT, BC ’24

JADEN JARMEL-SCHNEIDER, CC ’22 KELSEY KITZKE, BC ’23 CHLOE KOK, BC ’24 TARINI KRISHNA, BC ’23 BECKY MILLER, BC ’24 WILLA NEUBAUER, BC ’22 VICTOR OMOJOLA, CC ’24 JAI QURESHI, CC ’23 CLAIRE SCHWEITZER, CC ’24 STYVALIZH URIBE, CC ’24 JENNA YUAN, CC ’24

SAMANTHA SACKS, CC ’22, Podcast Contributor Staff Illustrators LILLY CAO, CC ’22 HART HALLOS, CC ’23 VICTORIA FU, CC ’24 MADELEINE HERMANN, BC ’23 HAZEL LU, CC ’24

VANESSA MENDOZA, CC ’23 KATE STEINER, CC ’22 ROSALINE QI, CC ’22 AEJA ROSETTE, CC ’22 REA RUSTAGI, SEAS ’22 MAYA WEED, CC ’22

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Letter from the Editor “The body says what words cannot,” Martha Graham once told us, with her usual romantic edge. It’s been a long time since my bare feet touched a Marley floor, and even longer since they hit the stage, but even at the height of my dance career I rankled at the thought that there was anything at all words couldn’t say. Dancing, to me, was a rare indulgence in silence and an experiment with flesh. But, I thought, I probably could say whatever it was a Graham contraction was saying with words more easily—certainly less sweatily—with a pen and paper. Perhaps that’s why I’m here. After living as a disembodied head among the many other disembodied heads that make up The Blue and White these last six months I’ve spent as Editor-in-Chief—and after passing many focused hours considering what exactly their words can say—I’ve come to the conclusion that Martha Graham was right. The energy and emotion of this month’s issue are a testament to how desperate the members of our little magazine are to dance again. I don’t mean to imply that their words don’t say enough. Elizabeth Jackson has a great deal to say about Columbia’s new sustainability plan. Sam Needleman will tell you Michael Henry Adams had over six hours’ worth of things to say about “protecting, preserving and celebrating Harlem’s irreplaceable built heritage.” And Willa Neubauer’s subjects at Book Culture might have a thing or two to say in defense of what the books they sell have to say about, well, everything. But the pieces we’ve collected for you this month simmer with motion, bursting with excitement at the physical. They itch to explore the crevices and planes of the body and its place. Victor Omojola cracks the illusion of virtual height, and Elia Zhang laments a digital love. Tarini

Krishna marvels at the writing folded in the bathroom of Hungarian, and Becky Miller at the vibrant characters on Broadway. Sophie Poole yearns to claim the sanctity of the body on the streets, and Sylvie Epstein the space to move freely among friends. Even Verily Veritas wonders how better he can care for his environment, perhaps inspired by Elizabeth, while Chloë tests us on campus living and convention at Columbia. Lilly Cao sprawls our gorgeous city on the skirt of a dancer, and Maya Weed imagines our school in three ballets. Most of all, what we all could use after this year is a good chuckle, and our writers have delivered. Enjoy two heartfelt At Two Swords’ Lengths: Sam Needleman with Lyla Trilling, first-timer Daniel Seizer with departing senior Gabe Garon. Peruse a spoof conversation between Michael Colton and a CCE representative and an ever-insightful letter from Dante. I folded Chloë and Verily into my metaphor, but really, they’re there for the laughs. We all deserve a few. As you read this issue, savor the space we’ll share this coming fall. I write to you in a moment of tremendous excitement about what life in the hustle and bustle of campus has to offer once more. There’s little my words can say that my body could not, were I in the basement of St. Paul’s to thank this group for their collective commitment across thousands of miles to this publication, so I’ll say this: Death to the ban on hugs. Enjoy.

Dominy Gallo Editor-in-Chief

THE BLUE AND WHITE

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

Vol. XXVII

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

No. III

FROM THE STAFF 4 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dominy Gallo 6 BWECOMMENDATIONS The Blue and White Staff BLUE NOTES Victor Omojola Becky Miller

SIZE MATTERS Zoom friends discover if they measure up in person.

NOTES FROM THE FIRE ESCAPE Front row seats to a New York neighborhood’s quiet cabaret.

CAMPUS CHARACTERS 10 ADAM GLUSKER

Lyla Trilling

Daniel Seizer & Gabe Garon

AT TWO SWORDS' LENGTH 12 DOES THE GRIND EVER STOP?

Chloë Gottlieb

HUMOR 14 A PRACTICE EXAM GRE prep for the modern Columbia student, after Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice.

Dante

DEAR DANTE, SEASON 3 In which a picky eater is dished the dirt.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE 17 DIGITAL RELATIONS.

Elia Zhang Elizabeth Jackson Willa Neubauer Sophie Poole

Styvalizh Uribe

Emily Bach

Sam Needleman

Maya Weed

FEATURES & ESSAYS 18 A SAFER PLANET, PLANNED On Columbia’s new sustainability promises. 26

SEARCHING FOR NOTHING The joys of the Book Culture browse.

RESCUING JOUISSANCE A personal history of taking back the night.

OBEDIENCE: ACT I On “perfect passivity” and what it means to be Guai.

THE SHORTCUT 34 THE GARDEN OF EDE THE CONVERSATION 37 THE NOBLEST ARCHITECTURE Michael Henry Adams has spent his life preserving Harlem’s Black vitality. TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS 43 IN WHICH OUR HERO ATTEMPTS A ZEROWASTE LIFESTYLE

Cover by Lilly Cao // Postcard by Maya Weed theblueandwhite.org

Bwecommendations, June 2021

Because everyone needs summer reading—except us, because we are already doing it. Obviously.

Dominy Gallo, Editor-in-Chief: The Great (Hulu). Dinah Washington, “There Is No Greater Love - Live in Los Angeles, 1954.” Lyla Trilling, Managing Editor: Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine (1998). J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace. Hailey Ryan, Publisher: The Jersey Shore. Jersey Shore (Hulu). Samia Menon, Illustrations Editor: Kim’s Convenience (Netflix). Sitting under a kind-looking tree. Benjamine Mo, Literary Editor: Min Jin Lee, Pachinko. Matt Maltese, “Mystery.” Kat Chen, Assistant Literary Editor: Kim Petras, “I Don’t Want It At All.” Anything by Tomm Moore, I swear he’s the next Miyazaki. Sylvie Epstein, Senior Editor: The Met’s Alice Neel exhibit. Couples Therapy (Showtime). Elizabeth Jackson, Senior Editor: Bunheads (ABC Family). The Big Switch podcast. Nicole Kohut, Senior Editor: Xanax. Lactaid. Brooke McCormick, Senior Editor: Copenhagen, Denmark. Zoe Metcalfe, Senior Editor: Bo Burnham: Inside (Netflix). Smoking rosemary before adding it to a cocktail. Sam Needleman, Senior Editor: Jamaica Kincaid, “Putting Myself Together.” The early films of Willa Neubauer. Sophie Poole, Senior Editor: Hacks (HBO), Episode 8 (written by Pat Regan, my aspirational sister). Eliza Rudalevige, Senior Editor: TikTok accounts dedicated to mushroom foraging. Tankinis. Claire Shang, Senior Editor: Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen, “Like I Used To.” Jorts, in moderation. Daniel Seizer, Assistant Publisher: Kim Petras, “Malibu.” Survivor: Cagayan (CBS). Annie Poole, Layout Editor: Sitcom classic The Nanny combined with contemporary art (@thenannyart). Alexander Aibel, Staff Writer: Pi’erre Bourne, The Life of Pi’erre 5. One Piece Wano Kuni. Emily Bach, Staff Writer: Pablo Neruda, “United Fruit Co.” Anything by Yvonne Vera. Elysa Caso-McHugh, Staff Writer: Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Only

Illustration by Lyla Trilling 6

Yesterday (1991). Michael Colton, Staff Writer: Beach Fossils, Somersault. Best in Show (2000). Gabriel Garon, Staff Writer: Patti Harrison in general. Tuna tartare. Frolicking. Cy Gilman: Janet Malcolm, “Yuja Wang and the Art of Performance”. M*A*S*H (Hulu). Chloë Gottlieb, Staff Writer: Tomie DePaola, Strega Nona. Tweed. Sadia Haque, Staff Writer: Lucifer (Netflix). In the Heights (2021). Annelie Hyatt, Staff Writer: High Maintenance (HBO). Harold Pinter, “Ashes to Ashes.” Jaden Jarmel-Schneider, Staff Writer: Ljubljana this time of year. Chloe Kok, Staff Writer: Terra Mediterranean Vegetable Chips. Tarini Krishna, Staff Writer: Cy Twombly at the MoMA. Experimental wine (Ovid). Becky Miller, Staff Writer: Odetta, Odetta Sings Dylan. Megan Thee Stallion’s “Thot Shit” music video. Willa Neubauer, Staff Writer: “‘Oh my God, I’m in the mouth of a whale’: What it’s like being swallowed by a humpback.” Victor Omojola, Staff Writer: Invincible (Prime Video). Ziwe (Showtime). Jai Qureshi, Staff Writer: In Defense of Plants podcast. Overcoats, The Fight. Styvalizh Uribe, Staff Writer: Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown. Samantha Sacks, Podcast Contributor: Day X (the NYT podcast). Comedy Cellar standby line. Hart Hallos, Staff Writer: Standing outside the Capital One building that says “A Proud Welcome” in rainbow lights (across from Union Square Park). Madeleine Hermann, Staff Illustrator: Julie Mehretu at the Whitney. Jin Ramen. Vanessa Mendoza, Staff Illustrator: In the Heights (2021). Lorde. Kate Steiner, Staff Illustrator: Love, Death + Robots (Netflix). Cucumbers with tajin. Aeja Rosette, CC ’22: Buzzballz. Dolly Parton. @happyfishhead tattoos. Hating on LA. Rea Rustagi, Staff Illustrator: Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend. Earl Sweatshirt, “Riot!” The Goodreads app. Maya Weed, CC ’22: Pushing Daisies (HBO Max). Cracking the shells of freshly cooked crawfish.

THE BLUE AND WHITE

BLUE NOTES

Size Matters

Zoom friends discover if they measure up in person. BY VICTOR OMOJOLA

Jeannie Ren, CC ’24, is tall—5-foot-10, to be exact. For reference, that’s a whole six inches taller than the national average for women, if Medical News Today is to be believed. But aside from being statistically above average, Ren’s towering real-life stature struck me most because of its contrast with the rather diminutive one I had imagined attached to the upper torso, neck, and head I knew from Zoom. As soon as I saw her, I (perhaps rudely) relayed my surprise. This reaction to her physical presence, she informed me, is one she receives often. Ren is the muse of this piece. Our interaction sent me on an enlightening journey to discover how and why we make assumptions about people’s height in virtual spaces, and what this means as we re-enter the physical world. Without a doubt, racial and sexual factors are at play here. As Ren told me, “It’s extremely unusual for me to be, like, ten inches taller than the average Asian woman.” But I’ve come to learn that other considerations, such as how much one dominates conversations over Zoom, are also relevant. After all, despite my miscalculation, Ren’s stature well matched the intellectual height of her comments concerning Dante’s terza rima and Austen’s free indirect discourse. It’s quite fascinating that one can spend nearly eight months peering into someone’s physical room and hearing their metaphysical ruminations and still have no sense of their corporeal presence. After months of virtual Student Council meet-

JUNE 2021

ings together, Teji Vijaykumar, CC ’24, first met Kathan Reddy, CC ’24, in person this March. As Reddy walked out of his girlfriend’s bathroom, Vijaykumar “literally screamed out loud,” as Reddy phrased it—“a horrid, a terrified scream.” Her cries were more a result of Reddy’s unexpected appearance than a shock at his being 6-foot-3. Still, 5-foot1 Vijaykumar originally undershot Reddy’s height by a few inches, and Reddy had pegged Vijaykumar at a solid 5-foot-7. Like myself with Ren, they had both greatly misjudged each other’s altitudes. Last fall, Elaje Lopez, CC ’24, and Arjun Shreekumar, CC ’24, began to bond over their shared passion for The Great British Baking Show. I was curious to know if intimate video chat conversations concerning pastries and pies from across the pond formed a strong enough basis for correctly predicting each other’s physical sizes. Shreekumar did well to place Lopez at just one or two inches too tall (she’s really 5-foot-4), explaining that she “gives off taller-than-average vibes.” Lopez’s 6-foot-0 assessment of Shreekumar’s five feet and seven inches was a tad—shall we say—vertically optimistic. Up until fairly recently, my own height was a minor source of insecurity. I had spent just short of five years being just short of six feet, and the yearning for that additional inch of social currency was exhausting. Nonetheless, at my last physical in March, a nurse found me to be an even 6-foot-0 for the first time in my life. But I remained underwhelmed. I was still unvaccinated, attending classes remotely, and the sad reality was that there was no social arena for me to flex my newly reached pinnacle. As the above stories of height misjudgment show,

BLUE NOTES the virtual classroom diminishes whatever social advantage height might normally offer. A level playing field that nullifies one’s stature is one of the things Vijaykumar loves most about Zoom. “You have to sort of announce yourself before you talk,” she said. “Being a small person, in general, you usually don’t take up a lot of physical space and sometimes you might not end up taking a lot of space in the conversation.” Though he also emphasized the many downsides of the virtual meeting space, Reddy still echoed Vijaykumar’s comments, arguing that online, one is “physically equal to everyone on screen.”

I feel that through my conversations, two critical pieces of information were revealed. The first is that people are really bad at guessing height over the internet. The other is that the virtual meeting space has helped to expose the physical world’s many shortcomings (no pun intended) when it comes to creating an environment in which everyone feels comfortable being a part of the conversation. It may be a tall order (pun intended), but as we leave the keyboard for the chalkboard, it will be in everyone's interest for us to render size irrelevant.

I asked everyone I spoke with if the idea of acquaintances being unimpressed with their height in a first in-person meeting results in any anxiety. Lopez said that she had not given it much thought and that she is more concerned about her own reaction to other people’s heights. “Out of nervousness or awkwardness, I would probably say something like, ‘Whoa, you’re short,’ and then immediately regret it.” When I made this same inquiry to Ren, she quipped that she’s “grown into it.”

Front row seats to a New York neighborhood’s quiet cabaret.

Notes From the Fire Escape BY BECKY MILLER

t 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in late April, I leaned against my metal fire escape, hoping to see something interesting unfold below me on Amsterdam Avenue. Maybe it was because I had just watched West Side Story, but I was aching for some action. Ideally, I would, from my perch, witness a pirouetting street gang or a knife fight, or spot a soda-stacking ex-delinquent whose gaze I could hold long and tenderly. I made myself some microwave popcorn and settled in, ready for New York City to explode before my eyes. I first noticed a kid steal his mom’s phone out of her hand and run up and down the block with it. He was like Chris Rock’s excitable, foamsword-wielding son in What to Expect When You’re Expecting, clumsily sprinting around with so much ebullience that people began to stare. He grinned and his mom laughed as he waved his prize like a pirate with newly-found treasure. Then, quickly remembering how to be charming, he caught up with his mom and held her hand.

Antsy, I started counting things, searching for excitement or weirdness in the quantity of stuff on the street. There were seven overflowing trash bags on the corner. Nine parked bikes on the block, more zooming by in the bike lane. One person biked past standing up and I felt a thrill of vicarious excitement. I understand biking standing up to be a near-religious experience, up there with parting the Red Sea Illustration by Rea Rustagi and smoking a drunk cigarette.

THE BLUE AND WHITE

BLUE NOTES I saw three bare, hairy chests in one minute. Immediately after, a man in a yarmulke pushed a double stroller with only one child in it, which reminded me of Hemingway’s famous six-word short story—“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”— but more Jewish. I sighed with relief when I noticed challah sitting in the other stroller seat. The restaurant below me only had two outdoor dining bubbles, an undeniably sad number of outdoor dining bubbles to have. An elderly couple stood up and left one of them. The woman had a watch that looked like one my mom had—black leather band, thin, rectangular face. Maybe that’s just what most watches look like. She walked a healthy two steps ahead of her man and he followed like a puppy. They eventually moved next to each other and crossed the street. I soon lost them. The sight of this sweet couple quelled whatever expectation of drama and commotion I had been holding on to. The streets were not in a frenzy; it was a Tuesday afternoon. I was reminded of Paul Raci’s speech in Sound of Metal where he tells Riz Ahmed’s character, the newly-deaf Rueben, to look for and cherish life’s “moments of stillness,” and Rueben’s contentment when he finally listens. It was right then that I squashed my shpilkes, chilled out, and enjoyed. On the roof of a building a block up on the other side of the street, in between two graffiti-covered

chimneys, a woman gave a man a haircut. Her scissors were cutting his blond locks alarmingly short in the front—I prayed that he had meant to ask for bangs. I fantasized that when she finished, he would look in the mirror, hate her work, and blame her for ruining his life. She would respond coolly, like the barber in Fleabag: “If you want to change your life, change your life. It’s not going to happen up here.” Down the block, a girl, probably eight or nine, pushed kids half her age on the swings. She switched back and forth between two swings, trying to strike each with equal force at even intervals. She gently helped the younger kids out of their swings when it was time and they ran away to hang from the monkey bars. With her job finally finished, the older girl plopped down on the biggest swing, kicked off, and let herself go. I remembered last fall, when the tree across the street had been aggressively yellow, and then, a couple of months later, when I couldn’t stand the sight of its naked skeleton. Somehow, it was budding green, now. Flower petals floated past me like confetti, carried uptown by the wind. One block up, across the street, an old man sat cross-legged at a table outside of the pizza shop. I couldn’t make out his face, but he had been sitting out there, facing the street, this whole time. His head tilted up as he soaked in the new sun and reveled in the quiet.

Illustration by Samia Menon

JUNE 2021

CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS

Adam Glusker BY LYLA TRILLING

n high school, Adam Glusker, CC ’21, was not cast in RENT his senior year. This is significant because, in my mind, Glusker was the lead in every play our showbiz-infested Santa Monica private school produced. On a warm Los Angeles afternoon, over a fermented grain bowl and some sparkling limeade, Glusker corrected my fabricated memories—he never sang “La Vie Bohème” in our black box theater, and he certainly never danced among a group of Angeleno teenagers pretending to have AIDS. In fact, Glusker never got leading roles at all—he was always beat out by a kid with famous parents or a kid who was “skinny and blonde.” Perhaps I was confusing Glusker acting in RENT for Glusker blasting Paula Abdul’s “Cold Hearted Snake” during lunch and dedicating it to our high school’s theater director. Either way, he put on a good show. This RENT Mandela effect undoubtedly stems from the fact that as a human being, Glusker radiates main character energy. At 6-foot-5, with bleached hair and a unique talent for vocal projection, Glusker takes up space. “Imposing” is how he describes himself. Despite our shared high school and college experiences, our friendship is fairly recent—I can distinctly remember a time where Glusker and I ignored each other in the salad line at Milano’s. But I’ve always been particularly impressed by Glusker. In high school, he directed and produced an ambitious staging of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, he dominated the stage in The Crucible (—“Did you play a judge?” — “No. The judge.”), and he’s gotten almost every internship I’ve ever wanted (HBO, A24, and Anonymous Content, to name a few). He assured me, however, that he’s had a relatively normal upbringing compared to his industrybred Los Angeles peers: “My parents don’t work in showbiz—I guess you could say that my story is a ‘from rags to indie television’ situation.” Glusker is a recognizable campus figure—aside from his towering physical presence, he’s both a Blue and White-published writer and a former cast member of V125, Columbia’s last in-person Varsity Show. This fact still surprises me—as

someone who describes Columbia’s culture as “testicles, vomit, and Virginia Woolf, to use three words,” Glusker does not seem the type to celebrate said culture in a musical-comedy setting. “The thing about me being an actor,” Glusker told me, “is that, like, fundamentally, acting is a mental illness.” Needless to say, V125 is merely a shadow in Glusker’s theatrical past—he has no intention of becoming an actor. Despite his aversion to the craft, acting and theater have undoubtedly played a major role in Glusker’s life. “A big part of my personality in high school was that I was like, ‘I hate this town’—‘this town’ being Los Angeles, California—‘I’m going to the big city!’ My high school bedroom was literally decked out in the New York City skyline—I had the fucking Top of the Rock view on my wall.” But then, Glusker went to one of those “The city is your textbook!” high school semester programs where instead of living in the Big Apple, Glusker was plopped into the middle off Dobbs Ferry. Maybe Los Angeles wasn’t so bad after all. “Sure,” Glusker told me, “When I was a freshman at Columbia my bio did read ‘LA/NY’ on Instagram … But, I guess, the sort of struggle of my life has been whether I am Beverly Hills or I am New York.” Glusker is, of course, referring to Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise. He likes the “Aaron Sorkin speed” of New York’s dialogue, but the drama of Beverly Hills, to Glusker, is unmatched. Glusker is utterly obsessed with “The Real Housewives,” a fact that became apparent in his playwriting thesis, R.I.P. Andy Cohen, which I had the pleasure of watching (and then reading, and then re-reading) in April. R.I.P Andy Cohen, which Glusker described as a “play/cry for help,” uses the real-life story of Glusker and his ex-best friend, whose character is aptly titled “[redacted],” betraying each other “in the spirit of being wholly iconic.” As my roommate and I sat on our couch, watching his virtual performance, it felt as though we were intruding on something deeply personal. There was something perverse about listening to actual podcast recordings and reading real, emotionally vulnerable text messages between Glusker and [redacted]

THE BLUE AND WHITE

CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS while the boisterous banter of Beverly Hills’ finest housewives hummed along in the background. Originally, Glusker wanted to create from memory what he remembered about his relationship with [redacted], but it didn’t feel real enough. “That felt bad,” he told me. “I was like, ‘Wow, I don’t really remember this,’ which was sort of like lying and fabricating conversations, which I guess is what auto-fiction writers do all the time—I just felt weird.” So Glusker stuck to the facts: “I knew that I had these audio recordings and I had that text message and those were real. So I started with those. And then, from there, I sort of made a play.” His “sort of” play was exceptional, shocking, and grotesque all at once, and it deservedly received the Robert W. Goldsby Award and the Dasha Epstein Amsterdam Award in Playwriting.

I asked Glusker if he wanted to be a playwright, and, to my surprise, he shook his head no. He graduated in April and is starting work at the Creative Artists Agency (“CAA—ever heard of it?”) for the theater department in August. “What then?” I asked him, mockingly. “You want to be a development executive?” Glusker shot me a guilty look—I nailed it. “No! You are selling out!” I yelped. But he isn’t, not really. Glusker would never compromise his integrity or authenticity—everything he does is exactly what he wants to do. He makes one dream of working in corporate Hollywood. But I have my suspicions. In my mind, I know he’ll be a famous playwright. Just like I know, without a doubt, that Adam Glusker played Mark Cohen in our high school’s 2017 production of RENT.

Illustration by Lyla Trilling

JUNE 2021

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H

Does the Grind Ever Stop? Affirmative.

BY DANIEL SEIZER

he grind stops. It screeches to a halt.

Well, to be more specific, my grind stops. My grind screeches to a halt. While I’ve always been known to give up on any sort of professional commitment or academic goal, Zoom school has presented a few more ways in which the grind must clock out. For one, I almost always have a Bravo show (most recently, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills) streaming on split screen because, let’s face it, the “Zoom Class Sessions” tab on CourseWorks doesn’t have the same auto-start trailer algorithm that Netflix has, and my monkey brain knows which is more appealing. Thus, my grind stops for at least one hour each day so I don’t fall behind on Survivor. Then, there are the four hours each week I have to catch up on The Bachelorette. I know you may be thinking, “Isn’t The Bachelorette a two-hour show?” And while you would be correct, you would also have failed to remember that everyone needs at least two hours post-show to discuss which contestants are there for the right reasons. Oh, and then there’s the TikTok of it all. My screen time tells me that my daily average time on TikTok is one hour and 25 minutes. This, of course, isn’t counting all the TikToks I watch on my friends’ phones—but we don’t have to worry about that now. My grind also stops for good, mental health (ish) reasons, too—like naps! Is eight hours of sleep really enough? No. Never. And it’s not like I get eight hours anyway. (Most nights recently, I have fallen asleep with phone in hand, TikTok on, and woken up with fright a couple of hours later). So it’s not like I’m staying up late to continue grinding. To cope with my lack of sleep, I used to drink (read: completely and utterly depend upon) coffee. I used to be able to drink two or three cups of black coffee a day. Over winter break, I went cold turkey on the magic beans. Now, whenever I try to drink coffee, I

can’t even have half a cup without developing three different types of facial tics. So my grind stops yet again. Well, my grind slows. Everything is slower without coffee. My grind stops for basically any offer that sounds more appealing. When I have a choice between studying for an Organic Chemistry midterm and watching a movie, the movie always wins. Hell, when I have a choice between studying for an Organic Chemistry midterm or cleaning the stove, even the stove will win. In all honesty, I’ve come to dislike the grind. And who among us hasn’t felt this way? If you say you haven’t, you’re a stupid idiot liarface! A mere four years ago, I could spend more than 12 hours at school every day. I had class starting at 7:12 a.m. Now, I’m lucky if I make it through one Zoom lecture at two times speed. Even though I lived near Columbia last semester, I went to Butler a grand total of once. Now that you know I don’t care for the grind one bit, let me be blunt: The grind stops with me. My children, should I sire any (adopt any?), shall not grind. This I swear to you. It’s not that grinding is bad. It isn’t, I assure you! But the idea that the grind never stops is one that I simply cannot abide. So I will probably allow my children a couple of hours of grind time per week. Maybe half as much time as their allotted screen time, because I’m not trying to be unreasonable.

Negative. BY GABE GARON

n short: No, it never does.

Allow me to elaborate. When I was young, my

THE BLUE AND WHITE

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H mother and I vacationed in Italy. While meandering through an open-air market in a small Tuscan town, we got lost and wandered down a dark, dusty alley. Sometime between entering the alley and emerging from its shadows, I bumped into an elderly woman. She was old and wizened, with fingernails like talons peeking out from the ancient shawl she’d wrapped around herself. She locked her piercing blue eyes on mine and muttered a curse in Italian before hissing at me and hobbling away. Suddenly, I felt a wind pass through me, causing my juvenile bladder to release and my heart to skip a beat. When my mother noticed that I’d pissed myself and admonished me, I tried to explain to her that I’d been cursed by an evil witch in the alley, but she didn’t believe me. She brushed me off and told me not to judge old ladies—“They’re very nice and a wonderful source of wisdom,” she informed me. “Plus, one day, your tits will be that saggy too, so you should count your blessings.” And we went on our way. But something inside me had changed. I didn’t quite understand what this change was, at first. I felt drawn to certain things: the viola, convention centers, multi-level marketing schemes. In lieu of playdates, I would ask my mom to take me to Macy’s so I could wander up and down the aisles admiring the sport jackets and business casual attire. When we walked back to the car, I would linger in front of the JoS. A. Bank and gaze longingly at the Talbots. When the NASDAQ was down, I was down. When it was up? Oh, boy, was I up. While the other children dreamt of sugar plums and Barney and “playing outside” and diapers and whatever else, I fantasized about Bill Gates and Cheryl Sandberg. The long conversations we might have!” In middle school, my obsessions expanded and grew. I became a virtuoso violist and pianist, I made about $15,000 in the stock market thanks to a few key investments, and I was reading at an

JUNE 2021

11th-grade level. I was on the top of my game. I befriended Dan Bilzerian, I gave DJ Khaled the seed money to record his first single, and I went to Nutrilite conventions on the weekends. By high school, I was serving as the finance manager to the CFO of a company that provided companies with CFOs. I started to develop all sorts of medical problems—my eyes faded to a pale blue from constant exposure to my laptop and the screen in my Tesla XS. My hands became blistered from typing and accepting LinkedIn connection requests. My spine twisted under the weight of my enormous pecs. My hair turned gray and my fried nervous system, shorted out on Redbull and espresso, left me with constant chills, the only solution to which was an old shawl I found in the attic. One night, on my way out of my double-sized walk-in closet (complete with its own guest room, bathroom, and kitchenette), I glanced in the mirror and gasped. I had become that old, wizened woman that had cursed me in that Italian alley. The realization struck me to the ground, and, once again, I soiled myself in fear and awe. I passed out. When I finally came to, one thought rang through my head: Luce a gas. Capo ragazza. Mantieni il cancello. It was the Italian witch’s hex. I knew, somewhere deep inside me, that I had to place it upon someone else’s head in order to free myself from the Sisyphean grind to which I’d dedicated my life. That night, I snuck out of my mansion in the Hollywood Hills and headed to Abbot Kinney in search of prey. Eventually, I found a victim–a blonde girl in line for Salt and Straw, clutching an iPhone XR covered in Parade stickers. I hobbled over to her and whispered my curse: Luce a gas. Capo ragazza. Mantieni il cancello. “Oh my god, you weirdo. Was that Italian? Did you just say ‘Gaslight, Girlboss, Gatekeep’? This is why I don’t come anywhere near fucking Venice Beach anymore.”

HUMOR

A Practice Exam

GRE prep for the modern Columbia student, after Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice. BY CHLOË GOTTLIEB Reading comprehension: Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main conclusion of President Bollinger’s latest email? A. The $11-billion endowment, unfortunately, cannot be spent on any persons employed by the University, unless their name rhymes with Bee Lollinger. B. An apology for hiding the Lenape commemoration plaque behind three untrimmed bushes, and a confirmation that its location will not be changed. C. President Bollinger will begin signing off his correspondences with an NFT paw print stamp of the Obamas’ now deceased dog, Bo, above his cognomen, “PrezBo.” D. None of the above, his email was written entirely by predictive text and is utterly incoherent. Select the most correct explanation for why you did the majority of your group project. A. Everyone else will mess it up. And besides, the scales of Lady Justice are often evened out by a team partner review form. B. Your attachment style is anxious-avoidant. C. Your class partner is newly single, and not responding. He’s probably with that blonde girl, who always made you doubt. She’s so much older than you—she’s everything you’re insecure about. D. You might climb to great heights, but baby, you’ll climb ’em alone. Someone invites you to a Q House party the same night as a RatRock concert. Which of the following is an appropriate response? A. Pregame at RatRock and leave after making some unprotected eye contact with a tinyhat-skate-life boy. B. Unironically do a TikTok dance at Q House and be asked to leave. C. Throw on something “camp” and flip a coin to decide where you’re headed. D. Stop having gay friends. Who would be most successful in a hand-tohand combat fight against Interim Provost Ira Katznelson? A. Joon Baek, former CCSC President. B. Blue-haired girl in a History seminar.

C. @gab_nyc. D. Ten-foot-tall Allen Ginsburg. Which one of the following uses flawed reasoning? A. Prioritizing CC readings. B. Consenting to eat dinner at John Jay. C. Waiting for the elevator in Hamilton. D. All of the above. Select the sequence which most accurately portrays the PoliSci/Econ-major-to-McKinsey pipeline: 1. Stan Scorsese. 2. Thrive off of external validation. 3. Actively harbor a dislike for your peers who receive financial aid. 4. Forgive your father for voting for Trump since he only did it for the economy, after all, and politics aren’t everything. 5. Try coke in the Mel’s bathroom. A. 3-1-5-4-2 B. 5-2-1-3-4 C. 4-1-3-2-5 D. 2-1-3-4-5 Deantini is a: A. Libra. B. Sagittarius. C. Cryptid. D. Low-calorie alcoholic beverage popular among UWS SoulCycle instructors. Which of the following markers of the American millennial zeitgeist is most prevalent on campus? A. Hogwarts House pride. B. Skinny jeans. C. Dunder Mifflin merchandise. D. That sorority sister who has two queer acquaintances and therefore feels entitled to complain about there being “no straight guys at this school.” Which of the following famous phrases, attributed to a Columbia alum, best reflects the student experience? A. “I don't know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference.” (Jack Kerouac) B. “When I was in ‘Jarhead,’ I felt really good about my body, really confident.” (Jake Gyllenhaal)

THE BLUE AND WHITE

HUMOR C. “Stiiiiiiinky!” (Alexander Hamilton) D. “There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all.” (Lou Gehrig) The atmosphere in the Lerner Covid-19 testing station is: A. One of guttural shame. B. Down if you are. C. Humid. D. Haunted by the Ghost of Assemblies Past. You’re canceled for tweeting which of the following? A. “drinking boba is a female trait.” B. “Vax Fax: the Covid-19 vaccine causes night blindness.” C. “mmmm P-bobo’s boot tastes so good” D. “Blair clearly had a dominant & controlling nature typically associated w Type A ppl, so some say she has OCD & we know for a fact she struggled w bulimia (S1E9), which is obvi tied to her strong self-criticism and unhealthy relationship w power (hello, minions), but— #THREAD 4/17” Complete the sentence: In this house, we believe in _____ superiority. A. Butler. B. Milstein C. Sitting on the lawns, squinting at a PDF on your laptop. D. None of the above. You actually don’t dream of labor at all. Mark the answer that puts the sentences in the best possible order to form a coherent text. 1. Grief is like a cavity, you think. You don’t want to run your tongue over the rot or missing tooth, for fear of its loss being confirmed. You think people are better defined by their shadow, negative space. 2. People only have so many heartbeats. You shouldn’t use them all up, it’s why you don’t drink coffee. 3. You remember the haikus she used to text you, sometimes in the contour of a hip or a hand. Words reaching out, palm open. 4. Your roommate goes swimming with their shirt on. You think of David Foster Wallace comparing an orgasm to a birthday to jumping off a diving board. As a kid, you thought words were heavy, and using them required a weight minimum, like on a rollercoaster. 5. You think of burning a copy of Infinite Jest. A. 2-1-4-3-5 B. 1-2-3-4-5 C. 5-3-2-1-4 D. 5-5-5-5-5 Undergraduate students who cross the grad-strike

JUNE 2021

picket line can most accurately be compared to which of the following? A. Lucille Bluth asking, “How much could a banana cost? Ten dollars?” B. Grimes. C. Any of the men from Frasier. D. Any of the girls from Girls. Which one of the following “squads” strikes fear in all who see them to this very day? A. Timothée Chalamet Redbubble laptop sticker enthusiasts. B. The line of Barnard students waiting to be signed in to E.C. C. The gods among mortals who remember to carry cash for Absolute Bagels. D. The ghoulish shadow people you’ve spotted in the underground tunnels. Huh, when you look closer it’s as if they’ve evaporated into thin air. Weird. What do you mean, the tunnels have been closed for eighty years? The Manhattan Project? Okay, yeah, right. Whatever you say, buddy. E. That one group of friends who met during NSOP and never branched out again. F. The Venn diagram of people who chose French to complete the foreign language requirement and people who trip up the stairs in Ferris (which is a circle). Solve the following FroSci question, redacted from a 2016 exam. The best evidence that the so-called “3K radiation” is truly the radiation from the primeval fireball that attended the birth of the universe is: A. The enormous amount of non-binary vibes in the radiation. B. The fact that it refuses to admit exactly how old it is. C. Its isotropic distribution (i.e., the fact that it is not slim thick). D. Still debated to this day. For all we know, it’s actually 5G radiation. Select the answer that best completes the following sentence, borrowed from a Literature Humanities midterm. Jephthah and Agamemnon are associated because both of them: E. Murdered their daughters in an angry rage. F. Banished their daughters for throwing out decades-old Bed Bath and Beyond coupons. G. Microdosed with their daughters during the full moon in Sagittarius. H. Had their daughters put to death to avoid an awkward inheritance conversation. An answer key can be found on the following page, but need not be examined if your parental contribution exceeds $83,339 (in which case, an automatic pass will be applied).

HUMOR

Dear Dante, Season 3 In which a picky eater is dished the dirt. Dear Dante,

los than he does, in order to balance things out.

My roommates and I share groceries and, for the most part, it really works. Sometimes, though, one of my roommates buys too many portobello mushrooms. Like. Way too many for anyone to want. I’d like to keep our living situation friendly, but I just cannot keep up. What should I do? —CC ’23 Dear PORTOBELLO HATER, The only way to make a shared grocery arrangement truly fair would be for all of your roommates to eat every meal and snack in equal quantities, at the same time of day, in front of each other—like you’re on Sesame Street or in the Manson Family or something. By not doing exactly that, you’re inviting yourself to lose out at least a little bit on this whole arrangement; by being a childishly picky eater (portobello hater), you’re practically guaranteeing it. What I’m saying is, you pretty much did it to yourself, and it’s going to be on you to dig your own way out of this ditch. But worry not—the solution is simple enough for even the least mature among us (i.e., you) to understand. First, you’ve got to understand that your present conception of “way too many portobellos for anyone to want” is falser than you ever could’ve imagined. And second, to address the issue of finances, you should attempt to match his demand for portobellos. It’s simple economics. If your roommate is taking up an outsized portion of the grocery budget with his (totally normal) food preferences, you should be eating as many—nay, more portobel-

What I recommend is a steady diet of five to eight baby ’bellos—that’s just a nickname, they should be fully grown portobello caps—per day, doubling that quantity on the weekends. It sounds extreme, but it’s an essential step if you want to have the upper hand when negotiating the ’bello budget in the future. Of course, by then, it’ll be too late, you’ll love the portobellos. But that’s alright because, again, your roommate is not the odd one here—you are, for failing to see portobellos for the earthly gift that they are, and for even slightly resisting the idea of including them in every meal, especially breakfast. So pull up a plate, grow the hell up, and help yourself to about 40 portobello mushrooms each week, unless you want to continue to bleed needless money on groceries. The good news is, they’re healthier than Illustration by Aeja Rosette meat, as long as you don’t mind the taste of dirt. Now that you’ve deconstructed your formerly critical notions of mushroom fandom, you’ve got no excuse to let a meal pass without chowing down on at least a good few sauteed porty b’s. I said five to eight per day above, but the more I think about it, if you’re really trying to get even with your roommate—which is messed up of you, by the way—you should shoot for double digits. Sounds daunting now, I know, but it really is the only way to make sure your whole grocery-sharing arrangement is fair for everyone. A conversation would do the trick for some people, but I can tell, based on your pacifist approach to grocery shopping, that that isn’t exactly your forte. Best of luck, and happy eating, Dante

THE BLUE AND WHITE

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Digital relations.

BY ELIA ZHANG

Intimacy is not love. We were pushed together By this trumpeting tide of thought. The two of us shared a symptom But not together, in the sense that we reside at the same place. It was waving, waving With a triumphant loudness coated under a silence Condensed, distilled The heterotopia in which I sat beside you Liking that version of me, not knowing if I had projected that fondness To the other side.

So indignant about human rights abuses, so knowledgeable About the systematic oppressions whose mechanisms you’d elaborate; A fervent faith in justice, an icy indifference To the living people that you touch and see. I was lonely and I needed a direction to cling on In a city so various, so new, yet so cold, and a year so absurd. I could feel you everywhere, and every time In my chest a whimper of pain. I didn’t even realize it until Long after I had parted from there.

How foolish it would be to believe That it was through this tide and this tide only That we could step into unprecedence and My light was reflected in you and you saw mine. dance around this so-called modernity. A light that made us believe the taste of an apple Now my phone is broken and I can find nothing to be less important about you; Than the naming of a tree. The history of us finally destroyed Our eyes were blinded when we dragged our feet By the modernity that we once cursed. into the lecture hall, How swift, how speedy one can change— Under that light all small talk seemed A fainting node amidst a web of dots utterly unbearable. Forever stretching, enlarging; a margin You were not a physical entity, but a unknown, a reality passionate speaker Incomprehensible. Argumentative enough They say that the order of our world is made To drag our conversations along. by words Maybe something true would come ahead of the And so were you, my friend. next round And isn’t foolishness the answer Maybe something to cling on, a thought that lays To every single question of us? still and sound. Shanghai, a memory filled By the presence of you. A talker without a body, only words Spreading everywhere around The dark tunnel under the subway, the shining street of phoenix trees, My desk that was covered By the works of authors you criticized. I could almost see you beside every cup of my morning coffee

JUNE 2021

Illustration by Vanessa Mendoza

F E AT U R E S

A Safer Planet, Planned On Columbia’s new sustainability promises. BY ELIZABETH JACKSON

very year, the climate asks us what it will take for us to get serious about protecting the Earth. Every year, a longer California fire season, more devastating Florida hurricanes, a more stifling heat wave (somewhere, everywhere). Every year, I wonder if I’ve seen the last cool October, the last month of inbetween days separating throat-closing heat from parka-wearing wind. “It’s been this warm in March before, right?” I ask my enduringly patient father; as though to say, “I know the climate is changing but please, please, not so fast.” After years of climate protests, negotiations, and both grassroots and high-profile organizing, we’ve thankfully seen bolder government commitments to reduce emissions over the past year. However, these commitments must be made even more ambitious if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and, maybe even more importantly, governments and private entities alike must be more explicit about the concrete mechanisms they will implement to achieve their goals. Columbia University has increased its emphasis on climate action since the beginning of last year, announcing its intent to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The University also announced the formation of the Climate School and its direct divestment from fossil fuels. These important actions and commitments have been met by similar questions about whether and how the University’s heightened commitment to sustainability would be reflected in its own operations. This past Earth Day, Columbia offered an answer to these questions by unveiling its latest sustainability plan. Dubbed “Plan 2030,” this collection of initiatives follows up on the University’s inaugural 2017-2020 plan as part of its commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The net-zero commitment covers all emissions defined as greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol, one of the earliest global agreements to limit GHG emissions. The University also breaks down its emissions into three categories: Scope 1

emissions are GHG emissions directly produced by Columbia sources, like campus fleet vehicles or boilers in its buildings; Scope 2 emissions are “indirect emissions from the consumption of purchased electricity, steam, heating, and cooling”; and Scope 3 emissions are all other indirect emissions, like faculty travel and investments. Plan 2030 sets interim targets for emissions reduction, expressed as percentages of 2019 emissions: 15% reduction by 2025, 42% by 2030, and 63% by 2035. Such targets are essential on the road to net zero, to avoid procrastination on important emissions reduction measures. Columbia reports its emissions through The Climate Registry, a non-profit organization that provides tools, including reporting mechanisms, to help organizations transparently reduce their emissions. Assistant Vice President in the Office of Environmental Stewardship Jessica Prata explained that OES collects and compiles data annually on all of Columbia’s emissions sources (including electricity usage and commuter emissions) into a Greenhouse Gas Inventory. From there, Columbia calculates its emissions based on widely used standards publicized by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and submits its data and calculations to TCR, which requires the University to hire a third-party verifier for the data. Columbia has engaged in this process since 2017. As Sustainable Development Professor Jason Smerdon discussed, in addition to independent verification, this transparency is “the best way for anything like this to have true accountability and oversight.” Energy Campus energy consumption is responsible for 99% of total Scope 1 and 2 emissions, making this area absolutely crucial to achieving Columbia’s net-zero goal. The best method to reduce emissions associated with energy consumption is obvious: consume less energy. Columbia plans to decrease consumption by implementing greater efficiency measures, including updated efficiency standards for new buildings and building retrofits, “fuel-related improvements in effi-

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S ciency” like more effective insulation for steam pipes, and “electricity-related improvements in efficiency,” like replacing existing light fixtures with LED bulbs. Through “strategic electrification,” Columbia will transition its fossil fuel-based systems, like heating, to clean energy-powered electric systems. Currently, centralized fossil fuel-based heating and cooling plants serve the 65 buildings on the Morningside campus; these buildings account for approximately 60% of Columbia’s Morningside+ Scope 1 emissions. Columbia is set to undertake a Central Plant Electrification study that will run until May 2022, which will investigate methods for electrification and energy conservation. Columbia will also need to pursue efforts to electrify its other direct sources of emissions, like natural gas stovetops in some dormitories. As the electrification strategy develops, the specifics of these initiatives will hopefully become more clear. With Columbia’s new electrification efforts, increased demand for electricity is inevitable, and to comply with the plan, electricity must derive from a zero-emission source. Since 2018, Columbia has claimed to achieve 100% renewable electricity across its campuses, through a combination of purchased hydropower from the New York Power Authority, commissioned solar power from two solar farms serving Lamont’s local grid, and purchased National Renewable Energy Credits. Because the electrical grid interconnects many different sources of power, it is often impossible to determine the exact source of the electrons a consumer receives: As a market mechanism, RECs allow Columbia to purchase power from renewable energy generators even if that power is not physically delivered to Columbia. (A single REC represents 1MWh of renewable electricity.) The University has purchased RECs from two wind farms in central Oklahoma to compensate for the power that it purchases from the mixed-source, partially fossil-based New York grid. In the coming years, Columbia seeks to move away from purchasing RECs from far-flung generators and turn, instead, to supporting local renewable energy sources as they develop. Professor Michael Gerrard, a member of the Senior Sustainability Advisory Committee and the plan’s Renewable Electricity Working Group, emphasized the importance of considering the ultimate impact

JUNE 2021

of a purchase on the renewable energy industry. Specifically, he mentioned determining “whether the purchase is helping to finance the construction of new capacity or is just providing additional money for an existing facility” in considering a shift to local clean power from RECs generated further away. “If you’re buying a renewable energy credit from an existing wind farm in Oklahoma,” he told me, “you’re benefiting the profitability of the wind company, but you’re not leading to a net increase in renewable energy. So in order to advance the cause of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we need to contribute to the construction of new … renewable energy capacity.” He added that the construction of new generation capacity “might be facilitated or accelerated by a Columbia purchase.” The University is also evaluating the potential to install on-site renewable energy generation, like rooftop solar panels, to fulfill some of its energy demand—but Gerrard clarified that “there’s very limited capacity” for this kind of generation on Columbia’s campuses, given the need for abundant land or large, flat roofs. New York City’s 2019 Local Law 97 will provide a substantive enforcement mechanism for Columbia’s clean energy transition. The law “sets increasingly stringent limits on carbon emissions per square foot in 2024 and 2030” for buildings exceeding 25,000 square feet in size, and includes a maximum penalty of $268 multiplied by the amount (in metric tons) by which a building exceeds its emissions limit. Gerrard mentioned that many Columbia buildings are subject to Local Law 97, so Columbia and other large property owners are heavily incentivized to finance greater renewable energy development to ensure a sufficient clean energy supply—especially given the steep penalties for missing 2030 targets. Notably, Local Law 97 is structured to encourage the sourcing of renewable energy “generated in NYC or directly sinking into the NYC grid” to comply with obligations. General year-by-year recommendations and important transition considerations have been laid out by the Renewable Electricity Working Group. Immediate next steps include quantifying an estimate of Columbia’s clean energy needs in the coming years, building in energy efficiency reductions and elec-

F E AT U R E S trification increases, and investigating existing and potential alternatives to the National RECs that Columbia currently uses to compensate for its purchase of mixed-source New York City power. Sustainable Transportation Columbia will also attempt to cut emissions in the transportation realm. This includes emissions from all University vehicles, the transport of freight to and from Columbia, and the work-related travel of Columbia affiliates.

for some means of negative emissions, like planting trees or conserving natural resources, to absorb or compensate for continued emissions. International offset projects, in particular, are also notoriously difficult to verify in terms of continued legitimacy (e.g., whether the trees I am paying to conserve actually remain protected from logging) and additionality (e.g., whether those trees were in any danger of log-

Illustration by Vanessa Mendoza

Plan 2030 sets the goal of reducing emissions from on-campus vehicle fleets to zero by 2037 by requiring replacement of retired department vehicles with either hybrid or electric models between now and 2027, and with exclusively electric models between 2027 and 2037. These new vehicles will also contribute to the University’s increased electricity demand, further underscoring the importance of the clean energy transition. The University will encourage lower-carbon methods of commuting through telecommuting and carpooling, installing more EV charging infrastructure, and working with the city and state to improve pedestrian and cyclist conditions. There is as yet a notable absence of detail in the plan regarding how the University will incentivize greater adoption of remote work once public health restrictions have been lifted. Similarly, for business travel, Columbia’s current plan focuses on expanding digital alternatives. When inperson gatherings are essential, the University will also more actively communicate lower-carbon travel options for getting there. However, whether employees adopt these travel methods largely depends on individual choices, which are difficult to account for and regulate. Long-haul transport is also one of the more challenging areas to decarbonize globally. With this apparently in mind, the plan states Columbia’s intent to “offset emissions from University sponsored business travel” if such emissions cannot be mitigated. Offsets are a contentious solution, given that they do not usually represent absolute emissions reduction. Rather, offset projects generally involve paying

ging in the first place). Given these issues, Gerrard expressed his “hope that offsets will be a last resort.” Though Plan 2030 leaves open the possibility of using both local and global offsets to contribute to interim targeted emissions reductions, Columbia states that it will not use offsets to meet its 2050 net-

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S zero targets. Smerdon also mentioned an awareness among University affiliates that “some offsets are better than others,” specifically referencing Columbia’s commitment to only purchasing offsets that “voluntarily submit to third-party verification.” The plan also states the University’s intent to prioritize local offset projects to provide local “co-benefits to Columbia’s immediate surroundings and commu-

ity groups to reduce water consumption in residence halls, encouraging students and faculty to “use the campus as a living lab to drive water reduction solutions,” and integrating “water reduction goals” into campus decisions regarding product purchasing and structural design and maintenance. Mechanisms for achieving these goals, as well as greater detail about the goals themselves, are currently absent from the plan and will ideally be fleshed out as the University moves forward with implementation. Somewhat surprisingly, the Columbia Water Center was not involved in the development of the Sustainability Plan. In fact, when we spoke, Professor Upmanu Lall, director of the Water Center, was not aware of any prospect of involvement as the University enacts the plan. However, Prata, of the Office of Environmental Stewardship, later called the Water Center an “important partner moving forward,” indicating a potential disconnect between departments that will hopefully be resolved in the coming months. Columbia’s ability to decide on the sources of its water is limited by the legal requirement that it obtain water from the city, so, as Lall explained, the best opportunities for greater sustainable water use lie in stormwater and wastewater initiatives. More sustainable water use may also result in energy benefits to the University.

nity” and be more easily verifiable. Water The Water Conservation and Capture section of Plan 2030 is sparser, and mostly presents the University’s broader goals, like working with campus sustainabil-

JUNE 2021

Specifically referencing the Manhattanville campus, Lall mentioned that “any wastewater that is generated has to be pumped up to the treatment plant on 143rd Street to be treated and then discharged. So that requires quite a bit of energy.” He also explained that because the Manhattanville campus is a “new build,” “the amount of wastewater being generated on that plot of land today is substantially lower than what’s going to be generated once that campus is operational,” which prompts the question of whether the additional volume of untreated water, especially during extreme weather events, may strain the existing capacity of the 143rd Street treatment plant. Though presumably, analysis has been done to ensure that the facility is sufficiently equipped, if Columbia were to develop on-site systems for capturing, treating, and reusing stormwater and wastewater, the University could mitigate some of its energy consumption while avoiding overloading the

F E AT U R E S off-site treatment facility. Lall also said that New York City is “very interested in subsidizing wastewater treatment developments,” and referenced eight buildings that treat their own wastewater and generate net revenue for doing so. While Lall has presented ideas for on-site treatment to the University, there had not been any follow-up to those proposals as of our conversation. Student Engagement and Communication Undergraduate and graduate students, often among the most vocal sustainability advocates at Columbia, were represented on nearly every working group involved in creating the latest sustainability plan. Moving forward, students have key roles to play in changing campus culture to align with the University’s sustainability ambitions. For these students, Columbia’s campus is a “living lab,” as the plan calls it—a place to develop innovative and practical mechanisms for achieving greater sustainability. The Campus Culture Student Group associated with the plan focused on improving sustainability literacy on campus, beginning with constructing a definition of sustainability that would resonate with all students, regardless of their backgrounds or focus areas. Group member Isabelle Seckler, CC ’23, explained that a key potential opportunity for disseminating sustainability information involves integrating that information into “pre-existing modes of training” mandated for students, like NSOP presentations and semesterly modules for club executive boards. Seckler has many ideas for increasing sustainable consciousness at Columbia—including a scripted series of short videos centering sustainability in a campus and neighborhood context. Additionally, she mentioned the utility of a virtual, appbased Toolkit, which would allow students to track Columbia’s progress against its own sustainability metrics. The Toolkit would also encourage students to transform online activity like watching informational videos into tangible advocacy by connecting them with sustainability initiatives on campus. Smerdon underscored communicating sustainability efforts as a main area of improvement for the University, in addition to accelerating their implementation. Somewhat similar to Seckler’s Toolkit

idea, Smerdon mentioned scannable signs around campus, which would provide students with immediate information concerning efforts like energy efficiency and landscaping practices. Smerdon and Seckler both mentioned options for student engagement in Columbia’s existing sustainability structure, both through student groups and through designated University fora: The Earth Institute regularly hosts Climate Cafés, and working groups like the Campus Culture Student Group encourage student participation. Smerdon also discussed the importance of students as activists, saying that their crucial role is “to continually remind us to reach for the stars, set aspirational targets, be our moral conscience, and really encourage … the University community to not become complacent.” He also emphasized the importance of remembering, in the face of broadly understandable depression about the climate crisis, “that we have agency,” citing the Sunrise Movement as an example of a student organization that has successfully escalated the conversation around climate efforts. Materials Management, Design, and Circularity In Plan 2030, Columbia promises to align with New York City’s goal of sending zero waste to landfill by 2030. To divert waste from landfills, Columbia will expand its organics collection and assemble a committee of industry experts to set standards for waste reduction. Columbia will also foreground its zero waste goals at large University events, which will raise the profile of the initiative. When considering the validity of zero waste claims, we must be sure to investigate the accounting mechanisms that back them up. Specifically, Professor Athanasios Bourtsalas, lecturer in Energy and Materials, underscored a common confusion around collection and diversion rates. He explained that a city or institution may claim to have achieved 100% recycling, for example, but this percentage generally refers to the waste collected, rather than the waste that actually gets recycled, due to inefficiencies in the recycling process. When pursuing the goal of landfilling zero waste, Columbia must be sure to track its waste beyond collection, which it could do through direct contracts with an organization like the Sims recycling facility and, potentially, a waste-to-energy

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S plant (for processing any smaller fraction of waste that cannot be recycled or composted), rather than contracts that only involve the New York City Department of Sanitation or private haulers. Regarding organics and recycling, one forthcoming Columbia initiative is a pilot waste collection program for many Columbia-owned apartment buildings. Under the program, the DSNY and Columbia will distribute separate bags to the apartment buildings that are participating in the program—one each for organics, recyclables (single-stream), and non-recyclables/compostables. The program allots a particular number of each type of bag, measured by volume, to each building. Bourtsalas, leader of the program, highlighted a common problem with organics collection for practical applications like the manufacture of fertilizer: Organics are often at risk of contamination from metal, glass, and plastic. Contamination of recyclables by non-recyclables or organics may similarly impede their processing. The Columbia-DSNY program seeks to combat contamination through regular inspections of organic waste by building superintendents and program leaders. Bags of recyclables may also be inspected. If inspected bags are found to be contaminated, fines can be assessed on a per-building basis. If a building exceeds its allotment of bags for non-recyclables and requests more, the building will be charged a fee, thus encouraging residents to make greater use of organics/recyclables bags. Bourtsalas explained that similar programs in Milan and Korea led to a 20-60% increase in separated organics collection from food waste over five to six years. Columbia also seeks to ensure that its retail tenants align with its sustainability efforts. Smerdon, a member of the Retail Tenant Alignment Committee, mentioned that a strategy for ensuring retail tenant participation is incorporating sustainability expectations into the contracts that tenants sign with Columbia. The Materials Management section of Plan 2030 specifically references a requirement that tenants adhere to “University waste-hauling practices” and to reporting requirements based on Universitydefined sustainability metrics.

JUNE 2021

As it stands, Plan 2030 primarily emphasizes waste diversion at the end of a product’s life. This stage, however, is only one part of the broader ideal of the circular economy, which also incorporates actions like repair, reuse, and sustainable product sourcing. In discussing Barnard’s independent sustainability efforts, Professor Sandra Goldmark, Director of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action, highlighted Barnard’s emphasis on a holistic view of waste. “I don’t think we should only be thinking about waste at the end of the pipeline,” she said. “I think we need to think about waste right from the beginning: what we buy, and where we get it from, and how much we buy used, et cetera.” Through its Circular Campus initiative, Barnard emphasizes internal reuse (i.e., exchanging and repurposing goods within the campus). To this end, it recently launched a partnership with the platform Rheaply, which allows Barnard affiliates to advertise and exchange unwanted “materials and supplies.” Prata mentioned Columbia’s willingness to collaborate with Barnard on circular economy and reuse initiatives moving forward, leaving the door open to a possible partnership between the two administrations in this and other sustainability areas. Putting It in Perspective As with all sustainability commitments and planned initiatives, we must ask ourselves whether Plan 2030 reflects the urgency and scope of the crisis at hand. The sustainability experts I spoke with were generally impressed by the ambition and comprehensiveness of Plan 2030. They saw it largely as a positive extension of Columbia’s earlier sustainability efforts. However, Smerdon commented that organizations like Columbia should always be striving to do more and on a faster timeline. He offered a sobering and important reminder about how we should view even generally positive sustainability efforts. “One thing that I hope about these kinds of measures is that they don’t breed complacency within the community,” he said. In his view, everyone at the University should see Plan 2030 as a set of “important first steps” and a strong example of “working in the right direction. But if you’re not running around like your hair’s on fire over this issue, you’re not doing enough.”

F E AT U R E S

Searching for Nothing The joys of the Book Culture browse. BY WILLA NEUBAUER

lthea Lamel is an Upper West Side native and the manager of Book Culture on Broadway, two blocks north of the store’s 112th Street location. Aside from Columbia’s bookstore, Book Culture’s independent holdouts remain the last bookstores in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood that was once brimming with them. When I met Lamel in late May, she was sitting behind a desk lined with pocket-sized easy reads, the paperback equivalents of clickbait. Beside her, an elderly woman with a beret sifted through sci-fi, and a man with a Columbia University face mask pulled a book from a section titled “Staff Picks.”

Illustration by Aeja Rosette

Lamel is aware that Book Culture’s readership is diverse, and that store demand changes as its customers do. “When we first reopened last June, everyone was only buying books about pandemics, from nonfiction to classics to contemporary dystopian books, and books about race and racism in America,” Lamel said. Now, interest has shifted. “I do think this year it has been hard to focus on a book, so we’ve been selling a lot of books to customers who just want some-

thing light and riveting that they can escape into.” Lamel understands the collective exhaustion that weighs classrooms and workplaces down these days, even as the virtual era draws to an end. In a year with fewer vacations, beach reads have certainly infiltrated tables, bookshelves, and the hands of subway riders desperate for escape. Stephanie Meyer’s Midnight Sun was the fourth best-selling book of 2020, next to Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens’s clichéd mystery set in a North Carolina swamp town. The stuff of late-aughts middle-schooler fantasy, Midnight Sun is a retelling of the Twilight saga from the eyes of vampire Edward Cullen, now represented by an especially pale, magnificently groomed Robert Pattinson. Lamel has her own picks on the beach-read front. “If there’s one book I’ve recommended to almost anyone I’ve spoken to this year, it’s the book Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakoupolos,” she said. “I read it last summer when I was stuck in the city and it was a good placeholder for a vacation, as the book really transports you to Athens in the summer. It’s also a book about reflecting, both forward and back, which I think we’ve all done a lot of this year.” In the early weeks of spring, Book Culture employees wheeled a cart of children’s books, books on sale, and soon-to-be-out-of-print paperbacks onto the sidewalk of 112th Street. Some copies are used, others are new and less attractive—a large paperback on American insects, a book on Soviet cityscapes, and a study of Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe’s collaborations titled Guise and Dolls. Distinct from Columbia’s bookstore on 114th Street, owned by bookseller giant Barnes & Noble, Book Culture’s identity lies in an eclectic assortment of bestsellers and smaller, independent press releases. Located in a space formerly occupied by Labyrinth Books, and before that by an extension of the 112th Street USPS, the store’s character seems to spill from its enclave beside the post office and onto the surrounding sidewalk.

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S Customer interest in the store’s wide offerings has sustained Book Culture through many hardships, including the pandemic, since its 2007 opening (a recent date for a neighborhood staple). Feuds, mostly over finances and labor, between Book Culture owner Chris Doeblin, his employees, and the co-owner of the recently closed Book Culture on Columbus, Rick MacArthur, have destabilized the store’s reputation. After five of his workers voted to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union in 2014, Doeblin retaliated by firing the employees, later rehiring them only after significant community backlash and a day-long worker strike. Financial strain has also presented difficulties for the independently-owned chain—$140,000 behind on rent, Book Culture on Columbus closed in 2020, to the dismay of its Upper West Side loyalists. In the store’s final month of business, dozens of sticky notes appeared plastered on the windows overlooking Columbus Avenue, scrawled with messages such as, “Independent bookstores are the lifeblood of our community!” and, “Support real people owning real stores!” With two remaining Manhattan locations situated on 112th and 114th Streets, just blocks from Columbia and Barnard, Book Culture remains an integral part of university life and local culture. As I meandered by the carts of books on 112th Street in late May, a young boy crouched in his rainboots before a stack of cardboard children’s titles, while his mother flipped through a copy of Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart. I thought about the adoring tone of each sticky note at the Columbus location and considered our shared desperation—a craving especially poignant during the pandemic—for some version of literary escape. The child who knelt at his mother’s feet picked up a copy of Goodnight Moon, surely attracted by its distinct blue and green cover. I was reminded of the unpretentious nature of any good bookstore, which simultaneously offers a space for readers of children’s classics and writers of dissertations. Lamal recognizes that Book Culture’s appeal also stretches beyond its title selections. “We were so excited to welcome our customers back throughout this past year,” she said, “and for many people we were the first business they entered as they shifted out of lockdown. We were glad to be able to provide that for the community.” Pierre Rodgers, CC ’22, may well have been one of the individuals spotted by Lamel after

JUNE 2021

his return to campus in September of 2020. Rodgers escapes to the store when he feels overwhelmed by schoolwork or the city. He appreciates its quiet, unassuming atmosphere. “My favorite part about going there is the way that you really feel separated from the chaos of school and the city and the subway, and can take a moment to just browse, maybe read a page or two, and just relax,” Rodgers told me. Anna Connell, CC ’22, shares Rodgers’s eagerness to browse the store in her free time. She frequents the 112th Street location, scouring the aisles for birthday presents or light reads, sometimes only to flip through new releases and find sentences that interest or excite her. “I love going into a bookstore and reading the first two pages of a few books; I feel like just by reading two pages, I can get a snippet of what that writer kind of has in mind,” Connell said. Book Culture provides her with a place to buy school-books, but also to wander, and, in her words, grow: “It’s a really comforting place—you can always go there and feel at home, but also feel like there’s growth for you, feel like there’s some discovery left to be had.” While Amazon offers limitless titles, some more obscure than those at a small book store, the shelves of Book Culture retain a certain allure. I consider Connell’s and Rogers’s browsing experiences, and the influx of customers Lamel witnessed buying fiction this past winter and spring. The vastness of the internet surely intimidates—with too many titles, uncurated and interspersed with advertisements, we yearn for something intimate, and something nostalgic, perhaps. Book Culture is both. Before meeting Lamel, I headed to its 112th Street location, searching for nothing. A selection of poetry, new titles facing outward, greeted me on the ground level, beside a heap of pastel tote bags. Upstairs, I picked an early 25th birthday present for my brother, a Portuguese cookbook on sale, and flipped through a copy of Joan Didion’s White Album, which I’d started but lacked the endurance to finish. It wasn't till I made my way to the register that I caught a glimpse of Meyer’s Midnight Sun flashing gothic letters amongst a pile of new releases. I hurriedly added the book to my pile, searching the cashier’s eyes for any shadow of judgement. As she rang up the book, she paused, admiring its oversaturated cover. “This one is unbeatable,” she said, smiling. “Just you wait.”

E S S AY S

Rescuing Jouissance A personal history of taking back the night. BY SOPHIE POOLE CW: mention of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment.

y mother recently sent me a newspaper clipping from March 20, 1990. She was featured in The Daily Trojan for her work as an undergraduate with the newly-founded Women’s Issues Advocacy office at the University of Southern California. She stumbled across an announcement for the office’s establishment, and found herself, as if struck by a spell, walking into the Student Union building and asking for a job. The office was cramped, with one Macintosh computer, so she sat wherever there was room—often a small settee in the corner. She organized CARE (Creating Attitudes for a Rape-Free Environment) Week, and the daily paper covered the first event: At a table set up on Truesdale Parkway, USC’s College Walk, my mother and other students encouraged their peers to sign anti-rape pledges. The image alongside the article pictures my mom (referred to as “Sheri Davis of CARE”) as she “explains the anti-rape pledge to Risa Field, a junior majoring in broadcast journalism.” She wore her hair differently then—longer, with blunt bangs. The quality I recognize most is her posture. She leans across a table, holding the pledge out to Risa. Her outstretched hands reveal her characteristic sensitivity. The shot is overexposed, but there is something about her figure that glows with newfound purpose. A social worker now, my mother often works with women and adolescent girls; to complete her Masters in Social Work, she wrote her thesis on domestic violence in the Jewish community. In this photo, I imagine she arrived at an understanding: She could do something for those who felt scared, or hurt, or abused, or angry, or exploited. Along with her work with the Women’s Issues Advocacy office, my mother led the Women’s Assembly and organized Take Back the Night on USC’s campus, an annual event protesting violence against women. TBTN was born in the 70s and quickly became emblematic of second-wave feminism. The event was a mainstay on college campuses by the 80s and 90s: In April 1988, over 350 Barnard and Colum-

bia students organized and attended the school’s first TBTN. A photograph on the official website shows a swell of students cascading onto Broadway, headed toward sites where “men prevent us [women] from walking alone.” On 114th Street, with its string of fraternity brownstones, Carman Hall, and Riverside Park, choruses of “Women unite; take back the night” and “We’re gonna beat, beat back those sexist attacks” punched the air. One participant wielded a sign with the message, “Even in the stacks we’re not safe.” In the following year, and on the opposite coast, a young Sheri stood in a crowd circling the Tommy Trojan statue. She also chanted: “Claim our bodies, claim our right, take a stand, take back the night!” Once galvanizing to college students in 1988 and 1989, these feminist rhymes seem hollow today, as if a throng of protesters were screaming into a cavernous space. Echoes begetting echoes. Elegies of upskirting, mattress-carrying, Lyft drivers masturbating behind the wheel, apartment stalkers, Sarah Everard, “fifth female victim reports random attack at NYC subway station.” Violence continues, undoubtedly, despite TBTN protests, self-defense classes in Central Park, hot-pink pepper sprays dangling from keychains, Denim Days, and safety jewelry cuffed to our wrists. Lounging at a rustic eatery, former Bachelorette Becca Kufrin posted a picture to advertise Flare, a company specializing in bracelets “that could save your life.” The bracelets, which received a special mention for Time’s “Best Inventions of 2020” award, can mimic emergency phone calls, text friends for help, blast the wearer’s GPS location, and (optionally, the website insists) dial 911. In the ad, Kufrin nestles her chin into her palm to show off the bracelet on her slim wrist. Beneath the photograph, in which she wears a ruffled, blush-colored top and matching makeup, her caption reads: “Raise your hand if you’ve ever had to come up with an exit strategy with your bestie before a first date in case it goes horribly wrong or you start to feel like maaayybbbee your date is a potential serial killer. We’ve ALL done it.” The elongated “maybe,”

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY S surely intended for a cutesy—even softening—effect, reads like a sinister proposition. Instead of striking a relatable tone, the emphatic capitalization of “all” is foreboding, as if to say, “If not already, then soon!” Kufrin wears her $130 Flare bracelet everywhere, she assures her followers, even on walks with her corgi.

its official email address, but checks the accounts inconsistently. She is in the process of combining TBTN with another student group—one committed to restorative justice, like No Red Tape CU—hoping to “try and fold in some of our events into the work they’re already doing.”

Somewhere beneath this dystopian sheen of safety jewelry and coiffed influencers, however, is a kernel of truth: Despite movements shattering silence, the violence continues. Are we screaming too loudly? Are we screaming at all? Are we saying the wrong words to the right people? Or the right words to the wrong people? Are we screaming in the wrong direction? In the wrong cave? In the wrong orbit? ··· I first met Maya Campbell, BC ’22, at a Barnard sendoff event in Seattle for incoming first-years. Maya had traveled by car from Eugene, Oregon. It was a still, hot day. My mother drove us to the luncheon. Sitting in the passenger seat, I turned around to see Mount Rainier as we drove across I-90. At the venue, we drank tea, nibbled on lemon loaf, and spoke to elderly Barnard alumni about their memories. I wore a dress and, when I noticed the other students’ more casual ensembles, fretted over the choice. Maya and I chatted briefly, just long enough to learn we would be taking the same section of First-Year Writing in the fall. When I spoke with her recently, I was reminded of this time before university, before New York, before the knowledge of my own vulnerability.

Before Maya and I set foot on the Barnard quad, the University’s TBTN was in the process of redefining itself, reckoning with the tradition they maintained. The event became completely gender-neutral starting in 2012. To distance themselves from NYPD supervision, the 2017 march was canceled; from then on, the event was solely an on-campus rally and Speak Out. In the last two years of the event, attendance dwindled. In 2018, around 50 students attended; by the last TBTN the following year (and Maya’s first), “about 20 students” trekked through the rain to Low. The organizers were primarily seniors, and Maya was the only first-year—evidence that incoming students were no longer flocking to the organization.

Maya grew up in Eugene, home of the University of Oregon, and she attended her first TBTN event at fourteen. Arriving at college, she sought out Barnard and Columbia’s chapter and quickly joined its ranks. Now, as she concludes her junior year, the community has dissipated. She laughed when I explained my happiness at finding her name linked to an old TBTN Facebook event—my previous attempts to reach the club via Facebook Messenger and email had been unsuccessful. Maya is an administrator on the Illustration by Kate Steiner group’s Facebook and has access to

JUNE 2021

While the overarching structure of TBTN has been abandoned, Maya believes the Speak Out (the portion of the evening when participants share their stories of sexual violence with the group) “is fundamental to Barnard and Columbia eventually having some sort of system of restorative justice practices on campus.” A now-inactive Instagram account started last July, @cusurvivors, borrowed the Speak Out model, with a few key differences. While the Speak Out was conducted in person, the Instagram collective maintained the anonymity of survivors and their stories.

E S S AY S As the group remains inactive, the need for the tradition wanes. It is no longer a thing of the present or even a performance of the past, but a bona fide relic. Anne Valk, a professor of History at CUNY’s Graduate Center, in her essay “Remembering Together: Take Back the Night and the Public Memory of Feminism,” notes the centrality of memory in TBTN. Current posters, for example, still include imagery used in the first TBTN events: women dancing, crescent moons, raised fists or hands, and the color purple. Barnard and Columbia’s TBTN logo is a sketch of two hands holding candles, bending toward each other, melding into one flame. Valk illuminates the problematic function of memory in the tradition and criticizes TBTN for its selective amnesia. By conveniently forgetting critiques of the movement, such as playing into “racist stereotyping by law enforcement” and carceral feminism, TBTN curates an amended history. History is even integral to the name, which “suggest[s] an unnamed era when women could safely walk the streets after dark.” TBTN at once foresaw a safer future and recalled a fantasied past—an unsustainable dialogue. As TBTN persisted, it thrived on the passing down of tradition, often from women to girls within families. This image is appealing: mothers and daughters, old and young, holding hands to forge an intergenerational link in the effort to stop violence against women. Motherdaughter storytelling, though not intrinsically a problem, indicates the role of memory and nostalgia, both personal and public, in TBTN. Through its interest in preserving the past, TBTN became a symbol of second-wave feminism and its centering of whiteness, trans-exclusionary practices, and carceral response methods characteristic of that era. Barnard and Columbia organizers attempted to adapt the model, but TBTN’s origins rendered it obsolete. ··· Safe Walks NYC was established after a string of violent attacks targeting women at the Morgan Avenue L train station in January. Anyone can request an escort to or from a subway station or bus stop, and a volunteer from the community will arrive. This is one example of community-led safety initiatives as an alternative to police departments. It requires planning ahead, asking for help, placing trust in a person you may not know. Moreover, it creates a system for communal care, challenging the need for a police presence that, for many, instills fear instead of assurance

and perpetuates the violence it claims to prevent. When the Violence Against Women Act passed in 1994, it focused on bolstering police responsiveness to instances of gender-based violence; the Act was conjoined with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. As abolitionist, journalist, and author Vikki Law writes in “Where abolition meets action: women organizing against gender violence” in the Contemporary Justice Review, VAWA’s focus in police force ultimately places women “who are politically, economically, or socially marginalized … at further risk of both interpersonal and state violence as well as of arrest, incarceration, and for immigrant women, deportation.” To provide an avenue for help outside of carceral responses, organizations like Sista II Sista, a collective of women of color in Brooklyn, and Safe Walks NYC have emerged in their stead. In the 70s, alongside the first whispers of taking back the night and the expanding awareness of violence against women, self-defense programs cropped up, like Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts in New York City and Feminists in Self-Defense Training in Olympia, Washington. While at USC, my mother remembers organizing a self-defense class on the job at the Women’s Issues Advocacy office. “They talked about not being afraid to use your voice to, you know, be loud, to call attention to yourself,” she recalled, when I asked her about it. “A lot of people who prey on women, mostly men—they assume that you’re going to go along with them and be scared and not do something that’s going to call attention to yourself because that's how women are socialized: to be nice to people.” My mother smiled sadly. “I think you and I both, we’re nice. We don’t want to cause a fuss.” After I learned about the attacks at the Morgan Avenue station, I recalled the first time I feared for myself, the first time I felt unsafe and alone, was also in a subway. It was two summers ago, and I was sitting on a Manhattan-bound C train. From Nostrand Avenue to 14th Street, a man slowly trailed me across the subway car. He stood over my bowed head, his knuckles hanging close to my shoulder. When the doors slid open, he followed me. I galloped away from him, stretching my legs three stairs at a time, grabbing onto the handrail to propel myself. I looked over my shoulder to find him on the platform, his pursuing eyes caught between the slats in the staircase. Even

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY S after I lost sight of him, I ran for blocks. This image imprinted itself in my memory: His face flattened and split into tiny segments. I did not “cause a fuss,” I did not scream, I did not ask for help. Instead, I made myself an island, small and remote, glancing back through the slats of a staircase as I fled. I first read Hélene Cixous’s 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” in an English class, and I immediately shared the PDF with my mom, my grandmother, and my sister. “Must read,” I texted. The essay proposes a feminine way of writing, overflowing with jouissance—pleasure, love, otherworldliness; to write ourselves, to write our body, and, therefore, to lay claim to a whole and embodied self. Her final sentence rings in my ears, like my own chant: “In one another, we

will never be lacking.” While rehearsing for the Thesis Festival this spring, I walked home every night with my three castmates. Our characters lived a century before us in a Catholic reformatory on the Lower East Side, where the play allowed their unhinged creativity and violent fantasies to unfold. Outside of their dormitory, they endured sexual abuse from their priest. When we finished rehearsal, we waited for each other to take off our skirts, collect our scripts, and return stray papers, overcoats, and plastic oranges to the prop cart. Like pallbearers in a funeral procession, we would roll the cart down the hall to the storage closet. Then we would set off into the night, forgetting our characters, walking down Broadway together.

Obedience: Act I

On “perfect passivity” and what it means to be Guai. BY STYVALIZH URIBE

n the middle of an hour-long seminar last semester, my phone started buzzing and wouldn’t stop. When I finally retrieved it, the screen displayed call after missed call from my mom. She had sent me a video of a man beating an elderly Asian man to death on the A train. Passengers did nothing but avert their gazes. From 2,000 miles away in our California home, she urged me not to go outside. Staying in was the only way to make sure I was safe, she told me. I had to be a 乖孩子 (guai hai zi), or an “obedient child,” for her. I couldn’t bring myself to continue watching as the man, with an uncanny resemblance to my own deceased grandpa, was slowly beaten to death on the screen in my hand. I turned my Zoom camera off and replied—hands shaking, vision blurred—“Okay.” ... 乖 (guai) has developed into its current form out of a collision between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, and the East and the West. The word, often used to praise children, denotes obedience, docility, and conformity to accepted norms of behavior. An essay by race scholars Do-

JUNE 2021

lores de Manuel and Davis Racio suggests that, as Asian American children grow up, they negotiate a “triple bind”: they are “pressured to remain faithful to ancestral heritage, while at the same time admonished to assimilate and become fully American, but ultimately [find] that because of their Asian genes, many Americans will never give them full acceptance.” I know from my own experience that parents often strategically deploy 乖 in processes of their children’s “becoming” Chinese American. How is this distinctly Chinese cultural logic adapted for an American social context? In answering this question, I found myself reflecting on my own upbringing, and how being 乖 relates to a particular Asian American trope. ... I stared out onto third-graders playing in the parking lot of my American school as their parents trailed behind them. I felt my mom tug at my hand and tighten her grasp. We had just moved from Taiwan, and both of us made sure to keep our distance from the many white families in our neighborhood. In Chinese, she said to me, “Look at them—running around and not

E S S AY S caring about the cars. Imagine if a stranger came along and stole them from their parents. Could you even imagine how devastated Mommy would be? Promise me that you’ll never be like them, that you’ll always be a 乖孩子.” The conversation ended with a pinkie swear in an American parking lot. ··· The “Asian” in “Asian American” is notoriously amorphous: It is constituted and made meaningful by the encounters between different strands of inherited values, each unique to specific cultural identities too often blanketed under the continental gesture of “Asian.” In accordance with the inherited notion of 乖, I grew to epitomize a cultural ideal. The rigor of my high school schedule—AP courses and college-level math—became the defining feature of my life. When school ended, I practiced Rachmaninoff ’s “Prelude in g minor no. 5” and Liszt’s “Un Sospiro,” accomplishments my mother could brag about. Even seemingly meaningless activities, she held up as expectations towards excellence—like aimless laps in the pool, swimming from wall to wall. Rigorous swimming practice, like working hard at school and mastering an instrument, was something I could control. But no matter how hard I trained, I couldn’t control the effects of being the only Chinese person in a white crowd. I had been taught to be careful, but I wasn’t the only one: In that exposed and chlorinated atmosphere, I could tell my white peers had learned to be just as tentative and distant around me. ··· I wanted to skip swim practice and spend more time with my friends from Chinese school, even if only a few more hours, while we waited for our parents to pick us up. So I lied to my mom. I said that I had too much leftover homework to finish to go to practice, and that I had planned to study with my friends. When she discovered my transgression a few days later by talking to one of the teachers, I felt her chilling glare shoot all the way down my spine. My mother drove me to the police station and told me, as I quivered in the passenger seat, that she wanted to disown me. I was a liar, and therefore couldn’t possibly be the daughter she raised; I was no longer her 乖孩子. ··· 乖 has become a normalized part of my life and those of other Chinese Americans who strive to be well-behaved, obedient, deferential. The etymology

of 乖, however, reveals a paradox. The character can also be used to denote “perversion, deviation and transgression.” In our recent conversation, University of Illinois linguist YiHan Zhou shared his fascination with the “anto-antonymic” properties of 乖. He explained that the word’s semantic contortions through time have been so drastic and varied that its current meaning completely opposes the original. What was once “deviate” became “cunning”, then “smart”, then finally “obedient,” 乖’s closest modern translation in English. Repetition over generations has altered and enhanced the public's understanding of 乖’s meaning. Various guai teachings permeate Asian social norms, each iteration imperceptibly changing to approach an ideal of “perfect” and passive behavior within children. And it’s not just children adults demand obedience of. Green bags of coconut-flavored Kuai Kuai (乖乖) snacks are commonly placed on devices in research institute labs, taped to hospital respirators, and placed on printers and near computers, to ensure that these machines never break down. These snacks are said to possess some “magical power” that “bewitches wayward tech—whether disobedient desktop computers, intractable servers or ill-mannered ATMs,” according to a Taipei Times interviewee. Immersed in this environment awash with 乖 imagery, Chinese American children passively, and dare I say mechanically, continue to accept 乖 as a desirable, even magical, characteristic. Children are conditioned to perform merely the Generic Asian, reduced to automated behaviors that foster machine-like levels of obedience and animosity toward the wayward. But at its heart, 乖 is situated within the family. In listening to my mother’s words and promising that I would always be her 乖孩子, I began to personify 乖 without fully understanding what it meant. Over time, 乖 came to signify a web of inherited expectations that I had internalized over the course of my upbringing: that I would conform to a specific social hierarchy, or, in Zhou’s words, “play a

THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY S role without causing fuss.” Yahui Anita Huang, a scholar of Chinese linguistics in Columbia’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, researches commonly-invoked phrases—like 面子 (mien zi), or “reputation,” and 臉 (lian), or “face”—and their role in negotiating autonomy and filial responsibility. When I spoke with her, she quoted Lu Xun, a famous figure in Chinese literature: “面子是中國人的金錢光臨,” or, in English, “Our reputation [as Chinese people] is worth more than gold.” 乖 (guai) extends from this belief. To be 乖 is to embark on a continual project of preemptively saving face, to preserve one’s culturally invaluable reputation. Chinese

Illustration by Hazel Lu

daughters, sons, and students learn to “add more 乖 to [our] portfolios,” as Huang said. Zhou’s and Huang’s warnings, though they address distinctly Chinese behavioral practices, reminded me of the American model minority standard. Similarly pervasive, both anticipate and project obedience and self-restraint onto Asian people. Further, the standard of 乖, according to Zhou, has always been established by those higher up in the social hierarchy—typically parents and teachers. The white

JUNE 2021

majority in America sets up the “ideal” expectation, and I am forced to play my role without fuss or complaint, as I have been taught. This performance of “guai” behavior problematizes our roles as Americans, as we remain mechanical pawns in a much larger social game. As a parenting style, Huang summarized 乖 in terms eerily similar to the model minority stereotype; in this framework, she said, adults choose to “emphasize and value obedience over independence, compliance over innovation.” This comes at the cost of exploration and self-expression: In both 乖 teaching and the model minority paradigm, “creativity is not really addressed.” Asian American culture has not been handed down, unchanged, from parent to child; with each generation, practices are partly inherited, partly modified, and partly invented anew. Speaking to these researchers helped me remember that we young people are one such link in this chain, connecting the past with our future. 乖 is both a set of aspirations to conform to Asian social obligations and familial expectations and a desirable adaptation in order for Asian Americans to effectively compete in mainstream society. Even as 乖 traditionally demands conformity to certain behavioral standards, its ambivalence opens up the possibility of negotiating these boundaries. With a formal, “original” character that denotes perversion and revolt, the disjunction of the “乖” allows behaviors that reinforce and behaviors that challenge prevailing social expectations to co-conspire. Interpreted this way, 乖 can infringe on the model minority discourse. For Asian Americans, eliminating these stereotypes promises long-awaited validation and belonging. It offers a glimpse of a different kind of being in American life, one that acknowledges race but abandons the confines of American expectations on Asian personalities— one in which we are seen neither as a threat nor nothing more than a 乖孩子. ··· The drive back home from the police station was silent. It isn’t easy to reconcile a seemingly predetermined identity. In that drive home, I decided that I was okay with losing the status of my mother’s 乖孩子. Perhaps now, I could be more than just a 乖孩子. Perhaps I already was.

T H E S H O RT C U T

The Garden of Ede BY EMILY BACH

rimstone’s Anthropology museum was once the best of its kind. In 2017, Future Society named it a “a shining example of the power of human interface,” the magazine’s highest praise for a museum of its limited capacity. In a town of around 13,000 residents, the museum was the only tourist attraction for miles. Still, it rarely got attention beyond the county. Following the review, tourists from across the country flocked to the town, eager to witness what they assumed to be the exhibit of the century. Chunks of dark wood dressed the walls, carefully whittled to form face-like structures. They hung unpainted and unfinished, a product of thinly veiled budgeting issues. Deer-hair eyebrows were the only interruption to the woodwork. Meant to illuminate the sculptures’ eyes, they kept the attention of onlookers, but contributed little else. Ede, the collection’s lead sculptor, knew early on that the sculptures’ eyes would be the downfall of the project. Everything else could be formulized. Cheekbones chiseled into subtle parabolas. Lips carved into a diamond, refined into curves. Eyes were the only things missing from his equation for humanity. About a month into carving, he began to look past this flaw, a trait that was uncommon in his work. Ede had been awarded the title of lead sculptor for his precision. A master craftsman, his work hung in museums from New York to Paris. But by 42, he’d grown tired of the perfectionism attached to the art world. He told himself that the faces weren’t intended to be flawless, just something for the living to mourn the dead. When the exhibit debuted, he didn’t even notice the eyes. Face after face draped the walls, carefully spaced no more and no less than 13 inches apart. There were 587 of them, the precise number of residents that the town had lost in the previous ten years. Accompanying each of them was a plaque containing only the artist’s name. Ede’s appeared 71 times. Even though he’d finished his work on the collection, Ede visited the museum often. Locals afforded

the project compliments like parents reminiscing as they flipped through their high school yearbooks. They spoke about drunken memories and awkwardly charming grocery store encounters over humble smiles. Their laughs were the living reward for Ede’s labor. By the time the project was open to the public, Future Society’s review came as no surprise to Ede. Quickly, tourists reserved their reactions, waiting anxiously for faces that critics commended for their relatability. When they finally entered, most found a few to focus on. Some spoke about their family, others loved ones, others people they barely knew. The namelessness of the project made it that way—that anyone could find anyone in any one if they looked hard enough. Ede grew to stay away from the museum after the review came out. He’d go once a week, typically on Thursdays, to remind him of the craft that he had since abandoned. Occasionally, he encountered a stray tourist family, but, for the most part, Thursdays were reserved for the locals. He’d watch mothers live the five stages of grief in seconds, anger flashing through vibrant eyes, arguably too alive. At times he questioned whether the project reopened wounds or healed them. Scanning the faces, he’d forgotten which ones he’d created and to whom they belonged. He remembered only one, shortly named Kian. It stood in the fourth room, the one visited by the fewest, on the south wall’s third row. Ede had captured the curvatures of his forehead perfectly, weaving the lines of his skin into the lines of the wood with more precision than the others. There was nothing technically special about Kian, he was just the first, the last to lose his humanity. On his weekly trips, Ede would visit Kian last, staring at him longest. He did it out of respect. His wall rarely interested viewers, and Kian, in particular, seemed more dead than alive to most. Ede didn’t understand what made some of the sculptures stand out against the others. Perhaps people just couldn’t see themselves in him, he thought. In some ways, he blamed

THE BLUE AND WHITE

T H E S H O RT C U T himself for his second death. He was, after all, the one that was supposed to keep him alive. Ede’s weekly visits grew into a pattern over the following months, and as the hype from the review died down, he came to know the other regulars intimately. One lost her brother to lung cancer; another lost his son to a fire in their home. They carried tear-stained notes, like visitors at a graveyard, clearly created by hands that didn’t understand the weight of what they had lost. Ede understood the notes, but not their grief. Another couple visited the museum regularly, but they were more interested in each other than the sculptures. The only other regular was the security guard, whose post became progressively less exciting as the months after the review dragged on. Where he used to be on high alert, he now sat on a quaint metal stool in the fourth room, keeping Kian company and stalking his ex-wife on Facebook.

mal intent. Ede watched her out of curiosity. It’d been weeks since he’d seen a newcomer, and their process fascinated him. They afforded each sculpture an extra glance of recognition, like an offering to the lost. The returners didn’t even look at the other faces anymore: They were only concerned with the one they recognized. He appreciated the people who gave each one a moment, even if it disappointed them. When she entered the fourth room, the security guard flattened his uniform and met her eyes for a moment. Nobody had truly been there for days, so he didn’t have much of a reason to be on high alert. Ede trailed behind her, far enough that she wouldn’t notice him, but close enough that he could judge her reactions. Which ones impressed her, confused her, struck her? He wanted to experience the sculptures with her.

On a Thursday four months after the review and six She scanned the north months after the opening, a wall first, clearly searchbrown-haired woman cauing for a single face, before Illustration by Maya Weed tiously entered the museum. moving to the east one. She carried herself like she was lost, but held onto Once she reached the second row, her shoulders colenough familiarity to avoid looking like a tourist. lapsed and eyes pressed shut. “No. Please, God. No,” she cried, with wandering and wrinkled hands reach“I’m sorry, I was wondering if you could help me with ing to a short, angular face in the middle of the wall. something,” she whispered quietly, avoiding eye con- Her index finger shook as she braved her eyes open. tact with the couple draped all over each other. They glared at her crassly, annoyed by her intrusion. She “Ma’am, please don’t touch the artwork,” the security didn’t notice, though. Her eyes didn’t leave the walls. guard said, unimpressed. Ede watched coldly as the woman inched away from the sculpture, desperate to “You’re just gonna have to find ’em yourself, they don’t trace the lines of that which she had lost in the dark have names here,” the man replied shortly. Without wood. She stared into its eyes, searching for some sign thinking, he returned to his partner, slurring through of life or forgiveness. But as Ede anticipated months a series of lovey phrases he’d discovered on Google ago, they gave her nothing. This sculpture wasn’t his, moments before. so at least it wasn’t his fault, he thought. The woman moved on quickly, this time sensing she wasn’t welcome around them. Instead, she traipsed through the rooms, scanning each wall with abnor-

JUNE 2021

“I never should’ve left,” she continued. Her voice wove around the words to avoid the consonants that were too difficult to pronounce, too unfinished to be spo-

T H E S H O RT C U T ken into existence. “I should’ve stayed, I should’ve fought.” This time, tears hid in the wrinkles of her face. “God, you’re so grown up, how’d you get so grown up?” she said in a cadence between laughing and weeping. “I’m so sorry, Kian,” she finished, before returning to watch the sculpture silently.

While Ede stood before the east wall, the woman’s eyes traced the south wall’s first and second row, leaving nothing to be remembered. She paused momentarily at the third one, an almost invisible quiver escaping her lips as she stared at Kian’s face. In no more than a second, she moved on almost hauntingly to finish the row. Turning to leave, she paused shortly and stared instead into Ede’s eyes.

Ede glanced at the face on the south wall, at Kian, then back at the sculpture sharing the woman’s gaze. Something about the foreignness of its face cut deeper than her loss, a fact that was reaffirmed each time she’d hold her eyes shut for seconds at a time, attempting to create an image of Kian in the structure of a stranger.

“I hope you find peace,” she said. For no more than a moment, Ede and the woman’s eyes connected before both returned to the wood. In a flash, he saw it—the grief of losing something that almost but never was. It was real but not alive, raw but not recognized. He nodded in her direction, and she left. Ede moved to stand before Kian’s face.

She remained shaking as she traced invisible lines in the air, imagining the creases in his nose and the softness of his eyebrow hairs. She moved slowly, with intention. Ede watched silently in the other corner of the room, both amazed and appalled by the pain that congregated in her fingertips.

He stayed longer that day, questioning if Kian was watching from afar, more heartbroken or healed. He wondered the same for the woman. The security guard studied Kian with him, somehow aware of the event that occurred before them. They grieved his loss together, or, at least, Ede wanted to believe they did.

Perhaps she’d realize the sculpture wasn’t Kian, Ede hoped. But he knew she wouldn’t as he watched the sculpture grow into her image of Kian, her jaw relaxing as she found a temporary but new sense of comfort in her ability to remember him. He took a step closer, planning to tell her the truth. Misunderstanding, she stepped to the side. “Sorry to block your view,” she said, before ducking her face to wipe tears from her face. Ede didn’t say anything in return, but when she looked back at him again, he understood that it was his responsibility not to. Kian was already lost. The character of his memory was no longer Ede’s to determine. Attempting to make her exit, the woman glanced over each sculpture, clearly hoping to leave without disturbing her onlookers. Ede took the woman’s place in front of the sculpture that she had deemed her own something: a son, brother, friend. Maybe a lover. Like an engineer, he held a mental blueprint of Kian’s face to the sculpture, noting its similarities. Structurally, the jaw and face structure were vastly different. The nose was lopsided to the right, cheekbones plumper than Kian’s. The only similarity they shared were their almond eye shapes.

That afternoon, Ede returned to the whittling room for the first time in months. Spiderwebs overwhelmed his metal tools and grief crowded a pile of abandoned wood. The table was rearranged by other sculptors, but his energy sunk deep into the floorboards, impossible to move. He stared at the blocks for a moment, wondering how many memories were destroyed by the pitfalls of his craft. Taking a seat on his creaky metal stool, he began to carve. Sculptures for the lost, he remembered. Sculptures for the lost. He’d long forgotten the equations he swore by months ago. This time he crafted only from what he felt, disregarding the shape of parabolas and power of exponents. He drew the lines in his forehead, the ones only he could notice and only he could recreate. He wanted to deface the wall. Today, Ede’s face is the only one in the museum to be accompanied by a blank plaque. The sculptures were to remain nameless, and his was no exception. When polished, his plaque’s reflection is one of many places where museum visitors can see themselves, but the only place they find their own eyes.

THE BLUE AND WHITE

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

The Noblest Architecture

Michael Henry Adams has spent his life preserving Harlem’s Black vitality. BY SAM NEEDLEMAN

ichael Henry Adams has lived since 2006— or maybe 2007; he can’t quite remember— on 129th Street and Convent Avenue. Before that, he lived on 138th and Amsterdam, in the apartment with the most sunlight he’s ever had. Before that, 122nd and Lenox. Before that, 122nd again, just west of Marcus Garvey Park. Before that, Hamilton Place. Before that, the Village— Hudson Street. Before that, 120th, and before that, 138th and Amsterdam again. Before that, Hamilton Terrace. Before that, a sublet on 147th and Broadway. Before that, 147th and Convent. Before that, the 37th floor of 500 Park Avenue, where he worked as the live-in cook for Larry and Klara Silverstein. Before that, “Queens—one of those first places you come to in Queens.” Before that, Riverside—wait, no. Before Queens was Fordham Road and Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, in the living room of an apartment owned by an estranged member of the Afghan royal family. Before that, 158th and Riverside, in the dining room of a subscriber to a gay men’s roommate service. Before that, a bedroom of another subscriber to a gay men’s roommate service on St. Nicholas near 145th. Before that, Hamilton Terrace again, with a friend named Kevin, in a very historic house. Most of the buildings Adams has lived in are about twice as old as he is now. For a city that likes to thrust itself into the center of world history, that’s a low multiplier; if he had left Ohio for a historic quarter of Paris or Aleppo or Calcutta, the number might be higher. Still, he has found a life’s meaning in reminding his neighbors about the very interesting piles of bricks and stones that people on this island have tended to make, and about the very interesting ways that they have tended to live in them. This is especially true of Black people in Harlem, who made, in Adams’s words, the “most dynamic contribution to world culture” in American history with music

JUNE 2021

that they composed and performed inside those piles. He insists that bricks and stones are worth keeping around not just because they make great houses and schools and churches and stores, but also because they enable people to make beautiful things, and are themselves quite beautiful to look at. Singularly so: New York City has no real aesthetic parallel in space or time. Certainly Harlem doesn’t. Nothing close. Adams’s devotion to Harlem is not inborn, but it’s just as resolute as you might think. He formed it by himself on the long journey to Manhattan from the middle of the country in the middle of the last century—Akron in 1956, where he learned to love buildings. His father was a high school teacher, a university professor, and an athletic coach, and his mother was a nurse; his four sisters were all younger. After he was rejected by colleges in Boston—the grand houses of the Back Bay tempted him—he stayed in the old Rubber Capital of the World for a decade of undergrad. He moved here in the summer of 1985, and two years later he enrolled in the Master’s in Historic Preservation program at Columbia. He didn’t graduate, largely because he struggled to find a thesis advisor with his interests and passions; only through a process of elimination did he land with the famed architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright. She found his academic writing too florid, “like Henry James.” Then he tried to make a living saving buildings, which proved difficult, as it usually does. But it was especially difficult for Adams, a gay Black man up against a white establishment intent on writing their white architectural histories to buttress their white ideologies. Over the decades, Adams has worked as a curator’s assistant, a sales clerk, a “cook slash houseman,” a waiter at Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too, and the Community Cultural Associate for State

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N Senator Bill Perkins. But he’s best known as a historian and an activist. His publications include Harlem, Lost and Found and Style and Grace: African Americans at Home; gorgeous copies of both are available to pore over in Avery. He is now searching for a publisher for Homo Harlem, a book about queer life uptown in the twentieth century, and for his memoir, tentatively titled Mud Huts. His message and mission are crystal clear in the name of one of the many preservationist organizations he’s founded: Save Harlem Now.

can vendors on 125th Street that sell these socks for little girls for a dollar apiece. At Marshall's, and—what is that place? There’s some place that’s underground that’s another outlet store. And then occasionally, if you get tricked by seeing something at Brooks Brothers that’s on sale, I might go there. I got these shoes online. I once recklessly bought a hat from Brooks Brothers, but then I found out by getting a Brooks Brothers charge card, I could get this tremendous discount. So I did. But unfortunately, I’m very careless with my clothes and things.

I met Adams twice at the peak of early June’s heat wave, when Harlem’s streets were even quieter than their weekend morning norm. By noon, chic crowds started filling the outdoor sections of the restaurants he led me to for eggs benedict and coffee and bellinis. Adams is the sprawling neighborhood’s designated dandy; both days I spent with him, he donned a straw boater and a post-Memorial Day blazer. “We haven’t seen you in over 400 days!” the owner of the second restaurant declared as he set us at a prime table in the shade. Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum and maybe New York’s most celebrated curator, walked by with her husband and said, “Hi, Michael!” Adams nodded, then paused for a minute before launching back into his story.

B&W: Really? Have you always been that way?

After hours of talking, I finally told Adams I had to go. “But we haven’t seen any buildings yet!” he cried, as if the autobiographical monologues on history, politics, and culture he’d just spent a weekend delivering were meant as an appetizer. I reminded him that he had been extremely late both days and, on the second, steered me away from the buildings and toward brunch just after we’d finally linked. We laughed. I assured him we’d meet again; hopefully, his buildings aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. ··· The Blue and White: Where do you shop? Michael Henry Adams: For my socks, from Afri-

MHA: I have been. I think it must have been a reaction against my father. He was very meticulous and had things that he’d had from the beginning of his college days at the end of his life. I used to wear them, and I think I ruined those, too. When I was a kid, I would watch movies like Gone with the Wind or A Band of Angels or Saratoga Trunk, and I’d find myself identifying with the white people. Why did I do that? I guess because I wanted to be an heir, to be a part of the beauty, of the beautiful way of life, the clothes and the buildings. B&W: And you had no examples of that aesthetic in Black life? MHA: Well, I did to a certain degree. But I realized that the font of all that beauty and grace was devolved from the white society. Eventually, I came to see that whether it was Williamsburg or Oak Alley or some other grand plantation house, because of these places being linked to slavery, that I have some sort of responsibility to abjure them. So I transferred my affections, then, to English country houses. Ultimately, I came to realize that William Beckford was the richest man in England because of the West Indian sugar trade. I came to recognize a more profound truth: There is no beauty or attainment of any kind anywhere in the world, no mosque or temple or cathedral, that’s not rooted in misery and suffering and hell some kind of way, and that the Soviets have got it right—that you can’t destroy Czarist palaces because they, like plantation

THE BLUE AND WHITE

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N houses, represent the blood, sweat, and tears of so many and therefore are transmuted into the cultural patrimony of us all. B&W: Why should buildings be preserved? MHA: Because they are a tangible embodiment of what we as a society say we value, what matters. If one is in agreement with the proposition that Black lives matter, then it needs to be underscored by conceding that Black landmarks matter as much as white landmarks. If you have a situation where 80 percent of Greenwich Village is protected by landmarking, and only less than 10 percent of Manhattan above 110th Street is protected by landmarking, well then something clearly is wrong. B&W: Is Harlem the most historically significant neighborhood in Manhattan? MHA: Certainly for Black people. But, you know, New York is a place of momentous importance not just to Black people. Everything from the fashion industry to the movies to literature are all expressed by the architectural legacy of New York. But certainly, wherever you go in the world, Harlem is a place of international significance that’s immediately recognized. B&W: Have you found that there’s a disjuncture between that significance and the way that people who live here treat it, especially people who are intent to preserve certain parts of the city and not others? MHA: In New York, ambivalence for preservation is a given. But is New York unique? No. Wherever you go, be it Venice or Newport or New York, there are a certain number of people who are perfectly sanguine about the idea of killing the goose that lays the golden egg. If you concede that one of the things that is foremost in making this place viable and profitable is tourism, all these places are all too happy to bring in cruise ships and to build waterfront hotels that block the waterfront, and build more and more luxury condos, which are unsustainable in terms of the environment and unsustainable in terms of preserving an authentic atmosphere that people will want to experience. And so at some point, which

JUNE 2021

these people generally feel will be sometime after their demise, people will stop coming here. But the short-term gain is just too irresistible. B&W: Do you ever think about what your life would have been like if you hadn't come here? MHA: Well, you know, there are still libraries. So I would have found a way. And I might have even been happier, in terms of the greater physical comfort I might have been able to have living in Akron or Cleveland, and I certainly hope I would have become even better known as a big fish from a smaller pond. But on the other hand, with every passing year, I realize that it would have been impossible. I mean, the last time I was home, I was down on the campus of the University of Akron, where I was an undergraduate. There was a young white man walking down a street—there was hardly anyone on the street, on the sidewalk—he was walking down the street and he had a big rifle in his hands. And that’s legal in Akron. Why? Why? My whole preservation evolution came about because as a kid, one of the things we would do when I was a child is my father would take us out for a ride. We’d just go driving around the different neighborhoods and just look! As a young kid, I would see neighborhoods I thought were beautiful and that had wonderful old houses, and then I would notice that some wonderful 19thcentury house was being torn down and being told that it was going to become a parking lot or a supermarket. There was this one house that was not so far from our house which sat on a hill and had big columns. And I remember when it was on the front page of the paper that it was being demolished. I could read. And I remember it said it had pink marble columns, and I knew what marble was because my great-grandmother had these tables in her living room that had vein marble tiles. So the whole notion of pink marble just seemed so exotic and incredible. And it was being demolished! I remember talking to my father about it, and this kind of thing continued getting worse and worse. When I was near the end of my college career— which took an enormous amount of time, like 10

THE BLUE AND WHITE

Illustration by Samia Menon

years or something—there was a house that had been built by this man who was the grandson of the founder of Akron. His house had become the United Fund, and because I had been the president of Red Cross Youth and we had done a letter folding thing there one time, I knew this house, and I knew it was largely intact. Even though the exterior was covered in aluminum siding and the front porch had been taken off, the interiors were all intact, wonderful. So the United Way decided they were going to tear down this building. I couldn’t believe it. And the city had this armory building that was built just prior to the First World War, and they were going to tear that down. And they did—they tore them both down. So that prompted me to write this guest editorial to the Akron paper. At the end, I invited people to join together and start a group that would be concerned with Akron’s preservation, called Progress Through Preservation. It got started, and I quickly learned the pain of how you can start something, but because people are almost always going to be inclined to be more conservative and unconfrontational than I am, they would try to push you aside so they can create a more decorous group, which, from their perspective, will be more effective because it won’t be beating up on people all the time. So I got swept aside. B&W: What was New York like when you came here? MHA: It’s very funny, you know. I’d seen an article in the National Geographic about Harlem that included a photograph of Mrs. Hoyt and her entertaining guests at dinner in her house on Hamilton Terrace with a maid—that’s the woman who had Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum, the first job I had. Then, there was also an article that came out in Ebony magazine called “Where the Black Middle Class Lives,” and it showed people on Hamilton Terrace. Ironically, the first place that I lived in New York was then Hamilton Terrace, and the shock for me was that both articles seemed to suggest that some neo-Harlem Renaissance was in effect. So I was rather surprised when I got here and I went to places like Strivers’ Row and realized that some of the houses there were still rooming houses. Harlem seemed to me by no means some place on the upswing. In fact, my very first visit to Harlem was an accident. I had come here in whatever year it was that the song “I’m Coming Out” was brand new, and I was going to go to church at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. And instead of getting off at 125th Street on the local train, I got off on the next stop, which put me on this street, behind the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. What’s very funny is that many of the apartments and the buildings here were vacant, and in preparation for a visit from Richard Nixon, who was coming here to campaign for Black votes … they didn’t want him to see Harlem as too run down, so they put these decals on the windows of vacant apartments that showed Venetian

JUNE 2021

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N blinds or curtains or sometimes a flowerpot with a geranium, or sometimes a cat, even, so that if you were riding by the motorcade, you might think, Ah! What a cheery place. A true Potemkin village. So when I got off the train, I was looking around and I saw these buildings with ... all sorts of architectural embellishment, and I thought, Oh, this is neat. They told me Harlem was a slum. At that point, still, I had this blind spot. It seemed inconceivable that one could have noble architecture in a slum, and I continued to have this until I noticed those decals, and all of a sudden the sight of the decals on that Sunday morning gave me the idea that this was indeed a kind of menacing place that I should make a hasty retreat from. So I did, and went to St. John the Divine. B&W: “White Harlem.” Is that a phrase you use to refer to pre-1920s Harlem, and is it a phrase you use to refer to present-day Harlem as well? MHA: [Laughter] Well, I hope not. We are going to see! This is the year when the census data comes out. I suspect that Harlem is still over 50% Black. What people don’t appreciate is there’s been a tremendous amount of white disappointment vis-à-vis Harlem. People will buy an apartment or rent an apartment or buy a house, and their eager real estate brokers will say to them, “Oh! The noise, the trash, isn’t that terrible. But don’t worry, this block already has five white homeowners, and soon the Blacks will be gone.” And they’re not—or not sufficiently. So they sell up and move on. And then there are others, like, say, Don Lemon and his boyfriend, who simply think, Well, this was fun, this was off-beat, but we can do better. And they’re gone. Marcia Gay Harden: Poof! Gone. B&W: When you go to Columbia, there is a kind of existential—maybe not guilt, maybe guilt— but, at the very least, concern that the institution you’re paying for a degree is destroying, at least in part, this neighborhood. MHA: They’re definitely a part of it. And there are white people perfectly happy to help them in the name of supposedly helping Harlem.

When I first came here … I was protesting against the demolition of the Audubon Ballroom and Theatre to build Columbia’s biotechnological research lab. That was … where Malcolm X was killed. One would not do that in terms of the Ford’s Theatre or the Dallas Book Depository or the Lorraine Motel, as a fitting monument to Lincoln or Kennedy or King. Today … there could be no more startling indictment than to see that this all could have been saved, that even now there are parking lots and undistinguished buildings where [Columbia’s lab] might have been more reasonably built. When you have the place where Malcolm X was killed and you just let it go for a parking lot, that is a pretty lame situation. Look at someone like A’Lelia Bundles, Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter. She’s on the Columbia board. Columbia tells her, “Oh, there’s not going to be any displacement in terms of our expansion.” Well, that’s a joke. She can try to tell herself that all she wants to, but it’s not true, it’s not so. But she doesn’t want to believe it is, for good reason. I mean, she’d have to question her whole involvement with it. And she will say, “Oh, well, you know, thanks to my presence, I’ve managed to get an A’Lelia Bundles scholarship that helps people.” How many Black people will be able to take advantage of that? I don’t know. But is the tradeoff worth it? I don’t know that, either. Was the exchange of Seneca Village worth Central Park, that all New Yorkers have benefitted from? Doubling my despair that people are so exercised about Seneca Village—which, like it or not, it’s gone, it’s gone forever, there’s nothing you can do to bring it back—is the fact that whether you’re talking about Tremé or Washington, D.C., or parts of Philadelphia or Harlem, all these places are Seneca Village. All of these places were richer by far, culturally and economically, than Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And although it is a bloodless evisceration, it is just as thorough and long-lasting as what happened at Greenwood, and happening in the same way, with the participation of government making it easy for people to rape and pillage and steal what had been prosperous, eminent Black communities. So where is that outrage? That’s the outrage that I have.

THE BLUE AND WHITE

TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS

In Which Our Hero Attempts a Zero-Waste Lifestyle

BY MAYA WEED

erily Veritas had always run a tight ship.

It was a trait he had inherited from his father, Vergil Verily Veritas IV. Protective of the fleeting minutes of youth, he had taught young Verily the virtues of rigorous routines. As numerous late-night journal entries on customized packs of ivory-toned, looseleaf parchment paper indicate, both the form and the content of Verily’s inner monologues rivaled the pampered efficiency of cut-throat investment banker Patrick Bateman. Today, however, Verily would insist that his similarities with Bateman ceased at their penchant for precision. To prove so, he would point to the modest lifestyle he had recently adopted, which contrasted starkly with the character’s rabid, late-80s materialism. “I say, what do your chums think of you when they see this flotsam?” V.V.V. IV had inquired on a stuffy summer afternoon last week. (He was uptown for … Verily did not know what.) He pointed to the mini waste bins at the foot of the bed, overflowing with Synergy Kombucha bottle carcasses that, Verily remembered with shame, had taken just three days to accumulate. “Ch—chums?” “Chums! Am I correct that the lot of them are constipated environmentalists? I thought your generation bonded over your inevitable climate refugeeism. What do they have to say about you, then, about all this … waste?” His eyebrow cocked on that final word. Waste … Verily reflected on his indulgent tendencies in that moment, tendencies that often got him into trouble with his “chums.” And now, with his father. The clutter of his living quarters began to clutter his otherwise empty brain. He plunged into fits of melancholy, pondering the harm that his minuscule

JUNE 2021

life had caused in the cosmic opera of the planet. The following nights, whenever Verily turned off his antique lamps, his towers of personal possessions mutated into shadowy, grotesque goblins in every corner of his dorm room. But Verily was no David Bowie. He was not powerful enough to tame this goblin horde fit to fill at least three blue bins. They haunted his dreams, joined by the jeering chorus of single-use items in his waste buckets (such as his daily disposable monocle wipes and mini-tubes of artisanal shaving cream imported from Milan). Verily recoiled in disgust at all this stuff. Not only did his amassing of trash and trinkets serve as evidence of his unsustainable consumerism, but, more importantly, it disrupted the feng shui of his treasured Hartley single. He decided it was time to, once again, ramp up the rigor of his routine. A chronic sufferer of compulsive article reading, Verily spent the next thirteen hours of a beautiful summer’s day poring over countless online blogs that outlined the best practices to live a life of zero waste. Quickly, he realized that to pare down his output, he needed to first embark on a purchasing spree. “Want to Reduce Your Waste to Zero? Well, it won’t happen overnight,” one title read. “Do you know who my father is?” Verily scoffed. “Watch me.” He stood in front of his warped mirror, feet planted like Wonder Woman: “For the good of Earth.” He patted himself on the back. Verily grasped his leather satchel and faced the world he wished to save. The smoldering heat of the New York City streets

TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS only fueled the fire of his mission. Exhaust fumes, tumbleweeds of plastic bags, and styrofoam cups danced around his thoughts like cartoonish, ghostly specters. He turned to his list to sharpen his focus. Items included but were not limited to: 1.

A Hiking Backpack

Verily would donate his current backpack to the University’s pantry. He selected a hiking bag for its ability to hold any number of reusable tupperware containers—to store waste that may require unique disposal methods only available at specified locations. This way, if he ordered a meal while out on the town, he could utilize his own serving supplies and transport leftovers while still leaving enough room for his tender and swollen self-worth. 2.

Mason jars

Verily had a Pinterest account (as we all do). He was aware of the fashionably rustic social points he could score with the deployment of mason jars. He always balked at going full hipster, if he could use the term unironically outside of the millennial population—but he desired a scruffiness to his edges that, to his chagrin, did not compliment his bone structure.

“Why thank you, my chum,” he would humbly nod. If only, Verily dreamed. 3.

Vermicomposting

This item truly led Verily into unfamiliar territory. Determined, he ventured downtown to the Lower East Side Ecology Center to acquire packs of red wiggler worms destined to decompose his detritus. He considered how he should address these worms. They would be living and dining with him, after all. Verily prided himself on his social etiquette. He knew he could not possibly christen every wriggler, but as he visited Hungarian on his journey back to campus, jar at the ready, a working list of names whirred in his mind. His new backpack carried the rest of his eco-conscious collection. Lawrence Holloway, Theodore K. Wickham, Mitchem Pilsner Jr., Vlad the Rad, Chad, Conrad Galahad— Verily felt a tap on his shoulder through his Brooks Brothers polo. Is it happening?? Is now my moment to shine? He held his breath in anticipation of praise. Of kudos. Carefully readjusting the angle of his body

Verily nevertheless tingled while picturing this potential version of himself: Verily the Illustration by Vanessa Mendoza Crunchy, the kids would say. He imagined ordering an iced matcha latté under the warm lighting of Butler’s Blue Java Café, offering up his mason jar and handmade grass straw to the barista as peers gazed in awe at his earthy aura. They would then tap his shoulder and remark something akin to “Kudos to you, my friend.”

THE BLUE AND WHITE

TOLD BETWEEN PUFFS so as not to shove any queuers with his backpack, he locked eyes with the tapper. “Ah.” Laude Lacuna. Verily’s freshman roommate. “Dear Verily,” Laude smirked. Verily felt a chilled draft wisp through the air whenever he conversed with Laude, even on a balmy day in June. He grew to suspect, unkind as it may be, that Laude’s soul was lacking—as in, he lacked one. He was a bit of a shapeshifter, see. The two had gotten along in their roommate honeymoon era, but Verily soon felt as though Laude fed on his very lifeblood for survival. Along with his wardrobe, Laude’s vocal cadence and choice of conversational diction cloned Verily’s carefully cultivated persona (a family effort not so easily eclipsed). It frankly freaked him out beyond measure. Ever since, Laude had periodically selected new subjects of social imitation. Who was the real Laude Lacuna? Verily wondered if anyone would ever know. This month, he appeared to be Joseph Greenwell. Channeling the bow-tied Vice President for Student Affairs, Laude eyed Verily’s hiking gear. “Looking to stay connected to nature while in Morningside Heights? Well, at 4:30 on Tuesday there will be an informational Zoom panel on—” “No, no, in fact, I—” “Reach out if you have any questions! Another event …” Laude’s eyes pierced straight through him as he droned on in email jargon. Verily began to better understand Patrick Bateman. He questioned the choices that brought him to this juncture, his aspiration to live a life of zero waste. He was showing promise. If only he could gather his wits alongside his new gizmos and follow through. Alas, here he was, wasting time waiting for coffee with Laude Lacuna— Wait.

JUNE 2021

I’m wasting time, Verily realized. The most precious commodity of all! If this was the life he was to choose, he would have to fully submerge himself in the mire. He suddenly felt every tick of the second hand tock in his heirloom watch. How many lives could have been saved from climate crises in the minutes he stood in line with Laude, or in the hours he had spent deliberating over the healthiest-looking worm bag in the Lower East Side Ecology Center? My God. It was then that Verily vowed: No more squandered seconds. No more transcendental meditation Tuesdays or Faulkner recitation Fridays. No more filet mignon Mondays. No more. “My apologies, but there’s no time to waste!” Verily triumphed aloud. He suddenly broke out of the queue and trotted away, leaving Laude preaching to a column of air. If Verily could’ve swung his satchel around his backpack and clicked his heels together like a Newsie, he would’ve, for never before did he feel so ready to carpe the diem. Inspired nonetheless, he started to run (yes, run) along Amsterdam all the way back to Hartley, only stopping to snatch scraps of litter in his path. Speed-cleaning demon, that’s what I am, Verily mused. I am the Crunchy Climate Cleaner, and I will earn the kudos of every soon-to-be-chum of mine on campus, you bet your bottom dollar, father— Back in his room, as carefully as he could at warpspeed, Verily unloaded his backpack and began setting up the vermicomposting station. He broke the seal on the worm container like he was performing a cesarean section and delivered the wrigglers into their new world. “Greetings, fellow crusaders,” Verily welcomed them. He allowed his heart rate to slow ever so slightly. “Let’s get crunchin’.”

f 45

Postcard by Aeja Rosette

THE BLUE AND WHITE

JUNE 2021