SEPTEMBER 2021

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Editorial Board 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 SAM SACKS, CC ’22, Director, The Blue Jay ANNIE POOLE, BC ’24, Layout Editor SYLVIE EPSTEIN, CC ’23, Senior Editor, Blue Notes BROOKE MCCORMICK, BC ’22, Senior Editor, Campus Characters NICOLE KOHUT, CC ’22, Senior Editor, Humor GRACE ADEE, CC ’22, Senior Editor, Features 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 CHLOE KOK, BC ’24 EMILY BACH, BC ’24 TARINI KRISHNA, BC ’23 MICHAEL COLTON, CC ’22 BECKY MILLER, BC ’24 CY GILMAN, CC ’22 WILLA NEUBAUER, BC ’22 CHLOË GOTTLIEB, CC ’22 VICTOR OMOJOLA, CC ’24 SADIA HAQUE, BC ’23 JAI QURESHI, CC ’23 ANNELIE HYATT, BC ’24 CLAIRE SCHWEITZER, CC ’24 JADEN JARMEL-SCHNEIDER, CC ’22 STYVALIZH URIBE, CC ’24 KELSEY KITZKE, BC ’23 JENNA YUAN, CC ’24 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

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

Vol. XXVII

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

Dominy Gallo The Blue and White Staff

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FROM THE STAFF Letter From the Editor Bwecommendations

Alexander Aibel

6

Dark Horses The grim story behind New York’s horse-drawn carriages.

Annelie Hyatt

7

Mystery Manor Untangling the fabled history of Schinasi Mansion.

Grace Adee

BLUE NOTES

8

Claire Shang

10

Ari King

15

CAMPUS CHARACTERS Sarah Kinsley FEATURE Across the Dianneverse Why were students blamed for the demise of a mayoral campaign?

MEASURE FOR MEASURE Moment AT TWO SWORDS' LENGTH

Hart Hallos & Cy Gilman

18

Do You Two Hate Each Other?

ESSAYS

Tarini Krishna 20

Sam Sacks, Nicole Kohut, 24 Maya Weed, Hailey Ryan, Sam Needleman, Chloë Gottlieb, & Lyla Trilling

Lyla Trilling

28

Michael Colton

34

Identifying “I” Club Zamana sparks a South Asian–American reckoning.

A Night to Remember Reflections on revelry.

THE CONVERSATION Melissa Clark HUMOR Dear Dante, Season 4 In which a newcomer to the city receives a warm welcome.

Cover by Kate Steiner // Centerfold by Maya Weed, Kate Steiner, Kat Chen, & Samia Menon theblueandwhite.org Instagram & Twitter: @theblueandwhitemag

No. III

Letter From the Editor

S

o, the time has come! “Wish you were here” has turned into “welcome back,” “miss you loads” to “see you later,” “slide to answer” to “meet me on steps,” “Join Zoom Class Session” to the creak of a Hamilton door. The campus our magazine has faithfully covered is at last, once more, a campus.

First-years dress in long-planned Pinterest outfits and old friends hug on the steps. Professors no longer peer from odd angles into misdirected Zoom cameras, and students must (alas!) don pants. We all get to hug again.

The end of the virtual campus means the end of the virtual magazine, and The Blue and White staff certainly look good in blue and white. We’re thrilled to present our first print issue since February 2020.

The transition back from the digital world has certainly brought its own obstacles: Loosening funds from the vice-like grip of a reeling post-Covid bureaucracy in time to deliver this issue proved, for example, quite the task. Word limits, which had receded only to the dreamlike memories of our beloved staffers, crashed down on first drafts like anvils. And I certainly didn’t know what “kerning” was—nor “reflow,” “drop cap,” or “glyph”—until the printers demanded a layout and Annie Poole delivered.

Our writers and illustrators offer you an energetic array of insights and explorations into the cobwebbed corners of our once-empty school. Alexander Aibel trails an unmoored horse (p. 6), and Annelie Hyatt investigates the legends and secrets of a rich man’s mansion (p. 7). Grace Adee profiles the sensational Sarah Kinsley, whom listeners from Lorem to DOPAMINE, Next Gen to free refills should know well (p. 8). Claire Shang, perspicacious as ever, reports on student involvement in progressive politics in the social media age (p. 10), and Tarini Krishna reflects on the apertures and advantages of

campus cultural organizations (p. 20). I also invite you to enjoy this issue’s duel between Hart Hallos and Cy Gilman, two newly minted swordsmen, over a certain twig-legged alumnus and his peach (p. 18).

If you’re feeling nostalgic for in-person nights gone by or excited for first flings to come, a coterie of Blue and White seniors have logged their fondest memories of campus weekends with elan (p. 24).

Dante will certainly have comforting words for you if the Big Apple has you feeling a little, well, small (p. 33). And if the dining hall your tour guide sold you on has proven, on first taste, less delicious than disgusting, enjoy a conversation with famed gourmand Melissa Clark, whose recipes Lyla Trilling tests (p. 28).

Loyal readers will note the absence of some beloved columns from our print issue, but never fear! We haven’t done away with old Verily or the shortcut.

You can find them, and more Features, Essays, Blue Notes, and Campus Characters—even a second Conversation—on our website, theblueandwhite. org. Glut yourself on our colorful and lengthy September release, of which this bound blue treat is only a taste.

We’ve awaited this reunion for seven cycles. Much has changed at The Blue and White since last we hit Low Steps for distribution, but we think the quarantine cut suits us well. It’s so nice to see you again.

Dominy Gallo Editor-in-Chief

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

Follow us on Instagram @theblueandwhitemag and Twitter @blueandwhitemag.

Contact us at bweditors@columbia.edu to submit a pitch, Measure for Measure, or Shortcut.

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THE BLUE AND WHITE

Bwecommendations, September 2021 Because nothing screams “back to school” like three separate Didion recs.

Dominy Gallo, Editor-in-Chief: Joan Didion, The Michael Colton, Staff Writer: Isaiah Rashad, The White Album. Guy Gallo, “Gifts from Nola.”

House Is Burning. F Boy Island (HBOmax).

Lyla Trilling, Managing Editor: Martin McDonagh, Cy Gilman, Staff Writer: Donnie Darko (Original The Pillowman. Claudia Weil, Girlfriends (1978).

Cut). Cécile McLorin Salvant, The Window.

Hailey Ryan, Publisher: Little Fires Everywhere Sadia Haque, Staff Writer: Halsey, If I Can’t Have (Hulu). Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Dorinda Essah Love, I Want Power. Shang Chi and the Legend of the and Portrait of Savannah Essah, located in the lobby Ten Rings (2021). of Milbank Hall.

Annelie Hyatt, Staff Writer: Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Samia Menon, Illustrations Editor: Sy Montgomery, Praise of Shadows.

The Soul of an Octopus. Peppermint tea.

Kelsey Kitzke, Staff Writer: Andreas Koefoed, The Sam Sacks, Director, The Blue Jay: Eric Kim on Lost Leonardo (2021). Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, NYTCooking. Bisa Butler’s portraits at the Art In- Woman, Other. stitute.

Chloe Kok, Staff Writer: Downton Abbey Season 1 Kat Chen, Co-Literary Editor: Blood Orange, Angel’s (Netflix).

Pulse. Satoshi Kon, Tokyo Godfathers (2003).

Tarini Krishna, Staff Writer: Joan Didion, PolitiDaniel Seizer, Assistant Pubcal Fictions. Susan Choi, lisher: Marion Cotillard’s Best Trust Exercise.

Actress acceptance speech at the Becky Miller, Staff Writ2008 Oscars. Tinashe, 333. er: In the Mood for Love Annie Poole, Layout Editor: Japa(2000). Fish Tank (2009). nese hair deodorant for a slickedWilla Neubauer, Staff back ponytail look. Joan Didion, Writer: “Leonard Cohen: “On Keeping a Notebook” and A Final Interview” with Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

David Remnick. Jim CarGrace Adee, Senior Editor: roll, The Basketball DiaMichelle Zauner, Crying in H ries.

Mart. Little Simz, Sometimes I Illustration by Lyla Trilling Victor Omojola, Staff Might Be Introvert.

Writer: Sólo Con Tu PareSylvie Epstein, Senior Editor: Lucy Dacus, “Yours ja (2006). Ousmane Sembéne, Camp de Thiaroye. and Mine.” The Wilds (Amazon Prime).

Jai Qureshi, Staff Writer: Louise Erdich, Love MediElizabeth Jackson, Senior Editor: Priya Krishna, cine.

Indian-ish (cookbook). Mohsin Hamid, Exit West.

Styvalizh Uribe, Staff Writer: Mitch Albom, The Brooke McCormick, Senior Editor: The Frick Madi- Magic Strings of Frankie Presto. son. Elderflower gin.

Madeleine Hermann, Staff Illustrator: The FratelSam Needleman, Senior Editor: Scholastique Mu- lis (specifically, “Starcrossed Losers” and “Chelsea kasonga, Our Lady of the Nile. Chris Marker, Sans Dagger”). Seeing The Lost Leonardo (2021) with staff Soleil. writer Kelsey Kitzke.

Sophie Poole, Senior Editor: Rickie Lee Jones’s dis- Vanessa Mendoza, Staff Illustrator: Trevor Noah, cography. Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation.

Born a Crime. Manifest (Netflix).

Eliza Rudalevige, Senior Editor: The last 100 pages Kate Steiner, Staff Illustrator: Paprika (2006). Bringof Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Ada Limón, “Late ing a sheet cake to a mosh pit.

Summer After a Panic Attack.”

Aeja Rosette, Staff Illustrator: Rewatching Mac MillClaire Shang, Senior Editor: Yōko Ogawa, Revenge. er’s Tiny Desk. Costco Kirkland brand pesto. Patsy Christian Lee Hutson, “There She Goes.”

Cline CDs on repeat.

Alexander Aibel, Staff Writer: Mike Nichols, The Rea Rustagi, Staff Illustrator: Terry Tempest WilBirdcage (1996). John Badham, Saturday Night Fever liams, When Women Were Birds. binki, MOTOR (1977).

FUNCTION. Emily Bach, Staff Writer: Baby’s breath flowers. Maya Weed, Staff Illustrator: Margaret Atwood, The Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River.

Blind Assassin. Sam Cooke, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

SEPTEMBER 2021

5

Dark Horses

this crusade. He claimed the horses were well-cared for, and that removing them would be erasing Manhattan’s history.

BY ALEXANDER AIBEL

I’m sorry, Mr. Neeson, I love your films. Taken? A modern classic. but what I saw were rotting walls, tiny stalls, and scared horses forced to parade through the country’s busiest city, instead of pastures to graze and clean air. I was horrified.

The grim story behind New York City’s horse-drawn carriages.

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or some (probably unpleasant) reason I can’t remember, I was in Times Square one day last spring. I was doing my best to dodge eager tourists on my way to the 42nd Street subway station—head down, earbuds in. Suddenly, something caught my attention: a beautiful horse galloping straight towards me, right down the middle of Seventh Avenue.

The horse looked neither happy, free, nor majestic.

Instead, it looked frightened and confused. It had lost its carriage, in which I imagined bewildered sightseers or a flustered young couple in love, and now it wandered the streets aimlessly, unmoored. Had this horse come all the way to Times Square from the park? How did a horse even get loose, let alone make it this far on its own? And where did it, in fact, belong?

I set out to answer these questions as my alter ego, “Aibel the Stable Inquirer.” I even pitched a cheery Blue Note to document my quest. Pen (well, Voice Memos app) in hand, I took to the streets in search of truth. What I found was a gloomy reality.

I began my mission at the Clinton Park Stables. I ventured to 52nd and Eleventh Avenue to see this mysterious abode and meet the riders and caretakers of New York’s fabled urban ponies. But everyone I asked to interview immediately turned me away. The conditions in the stalls were dishearteningly ugly—what was this equine hellhole? I returned to my computer to find out more.

Years ago, Mayor de Blasio attempted to ban horses from Manhattan, but actor and (evidently) part-time animal activist Liam Neeson vehemently opposed

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I went to Christina Graham, BC ’23, a regular of Kensington Stables, located in Brooklyn, to see if my suspicions could be confirmed. Graham spent her childhood riding and working with horses in Brooklyn and said that Kensington runs the only stables in the city where one can leisurely ride horses. Though she loved her time at the stables, she wilted at the dismal conditions many of the horses face.

Graham agrees that the city’s horses are exploited and should not be made to work as tour guides. “Horses are not supposed to be carrying the weight that they do,” she said. “The way you’re supposed to take care of horses—you take them out for exercise, then you let them out to graze, or put them in their stall, where they have water and food at all times … they need constant fuel and energy.” In the New York City tourism business, attention and resources like this are nowhere to be found; not for humans either, I might add. Even Kensington Stables has very small stalls packed right next to one another, and sicknesses like ringworm spread easily.

Today, horses remain in the city as a way of preserving “history” and “culture,” and as an attraction for wide-eyed visitors. Might I suggest tophats or chamber pots, to evoke a similar historical charm? Cholera, perhaps? Those overworked and mistreated horses are as anachronistic in this city as the medieval conditions we keep them in. And as for New York’s culture: People-watch on the 1 train til the end of the line, and I guarantee that’s all you need.

THE BLUE AND WHITE

BLUE NOTES

Mystery Manor

Untangling the fabled history of Schinasi Mansion.

BY ANNELIE HYATT

D

espite its position amid many palatial buildings, the Schinasi Mansion, located at Riverside Drive and 107th Street, remains incomparably ornate and ostentatious. A mere half-mile from Columbia’s campus, it’s often encountered by students as they meander downtown, spurring idle questions and speculations about its origins. Rumors of abandoned speakeasies and underground drug-dealing have circulated for years, but few have taken the time to mount an active investigation.

Unfortunately, many of these more salacious tales yield little accurate information. But it’s easy to see how the stories snowballed from kernels of truth: For instance, a since-sealed underground tunnel does indeed run from the mansion’s basement to the Hudson River. Historians speculate it was either used to smuggle controlled substances such as tobacco, alcohol, and hashish, or as a secret passageway for Morris Schinasi’s many mistresses. Also shrouded in mystery is the relationship between Mr. Schinasi and the mansion’s architect, William Tuthill, a man remembered for designing Carnegie Hall, founding the Architectural League of New York, and, in Columbia circles, lecturing at the University on architectural history and acoustics. Schinasi refused to compensate Tuthill for the mansion for undisclosed reasons, which may or may not have prompted Tuthill’s decision to sue Schinasi for nearly $6,000.

Schinasi Mansion is the only free-standing mansion in Manhattan, built at a time when many thought that the city’s richest would tire of the Upper East Side and relocate to mansions along the Hudson River. While this migration didn’t ultimately occur, these speculations left behind mansions like Schinasi’s—strange, isolated remnants of a bygone era.

The Schinasi Mansion was constructed in the French Renaissance style, boasting twelve bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and five kitchens across its three stories.

According to Lily Koppel of the Times, the white marble building includes an “Egyptian marble hall inlaid with Turkish glass,” as well as a Louis XVI drawing room. Finery from Europe to the Middle East bedecks the residence, as a testament to its various cul-

SEPTEMBER 2021

tural origins. Pineapples embedded throughout the mansion’s halls provide another decorative feature— the fruits traditionally symbolize hospitality in the United States, because they were once so difficult to procure.

The building was erected for Morris Schinasi, an Ottoman immigrant who came to America with virtually nothing but a cigarette rolling machine. He founded the cigarette factory Schinasi Brothers with his brother, Solomon, after coming to New York. The two soon amassed a fortune selling ready-made cigarettes made with imported Turkish tobacco, rather than the conventional American varieties grown in Virginia. He commissioned the mansion in 1903 and resided there with his wife and three daughters until he died in 1928. The mansion was then sold to Rosa Gunter Semple to be used as the Semple School for Girls, a finishing school for young women that also functioned as a private secondary school.

Until recently, the Schinasi Mansion has been solely owned by either the University or its faculty. Columbia bought the mansion as part of a larger land purchase in 1960, turning it into a daycare center referred to as the “Children’s Mansion.” Later, from 1970-71, it housed a Columbia and Barnard residential program called the “Experimental College,” an immensely intriguing notion whose details were, unfortunately, never documented. It then changed hands again, in 1979, to its penultimate owner, Columbia Law School professor Hans Smit. The mansion was renovated for twenty years, and it was used for Columbia Law School gatherings during that time, but never lived in.

The mansion is currently owned by Goldman Sachs representative Mark Schwartz, who purchased it for $13.5 million in 2013. This was a dramatic decrease from Smit’s initial selling price of $30 million, supposedly because its substantial renovations still fell short of what luxury buyers expected for that price Despite the many questions that still exist about the Schinasi Mansion, it is clear that, like many architectural landmarks of the Upper West Side, its history is intertwined with Columbia’s. Impenetrable, misunderstood, and often omitted from the narrative of Columbia’s relations with the surrounding neighborhood, it demonstrates that the University shapes and has been shaped by the most arbitrary and unexpected places. Shells that reach us through the years, shaped by changing tides, but never spilling their secrets.

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CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS

Sarah Kinsley

BY GRACE ADEE

L

ast February, rising indie pop star and producer Sarah Kinsley, CC ’22, sampled her childhood bedroom. In a playful retort to everyone who’s ever told her that “women don’t produce music,” Kinsley captured all sorts of everyday sounds–tapping tables, slamming doors, clinking glasses. With some luminous vocals recorded at home and a bit of technical magic, these disparate noises coalesced into the soaring melody of “Over + Under,” a track on Kinsley’s sophomore EP, “The King,” released this past June.

If this video sounds familiar to you, you’re likely among the 4.5 million people who viewed it on Kinsley’s popular TikTok account this year; the platform played a critical role in catapulting her into the public eye over the past few months. Kinsley stumbled into this online fame, and the pressure to capitalize on it overwhelms her at times. “Keeping up this momentum is like fighting this beast, the ‘algorithm’ that no one understands but that can literally change your life entirely,” she said.

While some might become obsessed with chasing the white whale of internet stardom, Kinsley doesn’t seem too interested in reverse engineering a hit. Her creative process isn’t formulaic—she speaks reverently of discovering auspicious phrases in her journals or snippets of sound in her dreams, and the bursts of creative energy that can grow these seeds into songs.

Kinsley started producing her own music in 2019. The year before, she worked with Grammynominated artist Luc Bradford—also known as ford.—on an electronic lo-fi song called “Craving.” Though it was a rewarding experience overall, Kinsley noticed that when reviewers mentioned her vocals, it was only to describe how their “airiness and beauty” contributed to Bradford’s vision as a producer. It was a real-life example of a phenomenon Kinsley discusses often in classes for her Columbia Music major: the female voice as “the vessel for this male creation,” now and throughout history. This experience made her curious

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about how producing might allow her to assert more creative control over her music. “The producer builds this landscape, builds the canvas,” Kinsley realized. “How can I understand these elements, too? Like, how can I build my own world according to my own rules?”

When writing about Kinsley’s musical world, critics love to cite her many years of classical training. “It does have more of an effect than calloused fingers,” Kinsley acknowledged. But while this theoretical knowledge informs her approach to composition, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. “I feel like all people have a canon of things that they worship,” she said.

Kinsley’s personal canon reflects her eclectic taste, spanning Fleetwood Mac, J. S. Bach, Arlo Parks, One Direction, and the Cocteau Twins. Her first live concert was with an ABBA impersonation band in Singapore. She can still vividly recall the excitement as she and her younger brother stood up on the theater’s velvet seats, straining to glimpse the musicians.

Once an ABBA fan, always an ABBA fan, we agreed. “Sundays are for ABBA,” she laughed.

Riffs and melodies and lyrical themes emerge, transformed, as her own distinct and fully-realized musical landscape in “The King.” Last year, Kinsley made a list of all the things she wanted to do before she turned 20: dance around her neighborhood in the rain, pull an all-nighter in her childhood bedroom, write a letter to herself at 21. “Then the last thing on the list was, like, write the song of all songs. The song that’s a tribute to you—this very potent and felt homage to being young and also getting old and feeling nostalgic for things that we just can’t really have back,” she said. The resulting song became the EP’s titular track, though the rest of the project also springs from that initial eruption of nostalgia.

Kinsley related the EP’s narrative arc thoughtfully and without pretension. She imagined it as an hourglass, she said, moving from the external world to her inner life and back again.

“Karma,” the opening track, explores how intuition can challenge superstition when it comes to love; she considers it the most outwardfacing, concerned more with relationships to

THE BLUE AND WHITE

CAMPUS CHAR ACTERS others than to the self. In contrast, “I’m Not A Mountain,” the center track, is the EP’s bleeding heart—“the most honest I’ve ever been in music,” Kinsley called it. The album culminates in the triumph of “The King,” which represents “who I wanted to become,” she said.

“The King” is the purest expression of Kinsley at this particular moment. Even in interviews, she’s meticulous and candid in her emotional expression, unsatisfied with any approximation of truth. I told Kinsley I was tempted to call this EP a coming-of-age story, which amused her.

Of course, I didn’t mean to file her under “Teen Angst” among the John Green novels. Rather, in these songs, Kinsley is spellbound by the constant tug-of-war between past and future.

Kinsley’s practice wasn’t always so introspective: Describing “The Fall,” her 2020 EP, she said, “A lot of the songs for that EP were about other people, and they were all sort of dedicated to my growth Illustration by Maya Weed

because of them. This time around, it was like I was really coming into my body and growing out of things I had worn out of, and being free.”

There was another major change for Kinsley this time around: She now works with a UK-based management company called Everybody’s Music, and her songs are licensed through their distributor AWAL—an acronym for “Artists Without A Label.” This indie group allows her to maintain artistic autonomy while easing the logistical pains of releasing music. “They have so much experience with it that it was just such a breeze,” Kinsley said. A bit of residual exasperation crept into Kinsley’s voice as she recalled what it was like to publicize “The Fall” on her own. Unsure of how to get her music out there, she did what many emerging artists do—paid for services that would get her music into the hands of music bloggers and playlist curators who might give it a listen. She found it more frustrating than fruitful. “I just thought it was ridiculous to have to submit in order to get people to even listen to music,” she said. Rejection comes with the territory: When she heard back from bloggers at all, it was often in the realm of “Thanks, but this isn’t really my taste.”

Ironically, many of those same publications have since added “The King” to their featured playlists. British pop culture magazine NME called her a “shit-hot artist” in their profile back in May. She now has fans who comb through her discography, eager to learn the genesis of songs she hasn’t thought about in years. But even though she seems to have cracked that elusive “algorithm,” she’s not leaving Columbia’s music scene in the dust just yet—she’s over the moon about the Postscrypt show she’s booked in September (“I got the 9:30 slot—I can’t wait!”). Kinsley’s a romantic, a sucker for the way you can hear the music “rippling through the stairs of the chapel” when Postscrypt’s line goes out the door.

Her nostalgia is contagious. For that moment, she transported us to that dusky St. Paul’s stairwell—somewhere between this September and all the ones before it.

SEPTEMBER 2021

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F E AT U R E S

Across the Dianneverse

Students carried a mayoral campaign on their backs. Why were they blamed for its demise?

BY CLAIRE SHANG In June, as New York City voters plodded through the morass of a dozen Democratic candidates ahead of the mayoral primary, any diligent citizen who visited Dianne Morales’s website was greeted, emphatically and urgently, as a “fellow loving disruptor!” Like many in the field, Morales emphasized her commitment to breaking from the past—a pose that, given Bill de Blasio’s extraordinary unpopularity, would have been silly for any candidate not to strike. Each built their own brand of aversion to the status quo; Morales’s rested on a three-pillar platform of “dignity,” “care,” and “solidarity,” the center of which was a plan called “Dignity Now,” which promised, in her first 100 days, a citywide rent moratorium and free tuition for CUNY students. The most headline-worthy promise was her proposal to slash the NYPD’s operating budget in half, a $3 billion commitment that no other candidate dared to match.

Morales ran as much on her own identity as on progressive initiatives, vying to become the first woman and first Afro-Latina mayor. She was raised in Bed-Stuy public housing, and her campaign was the first to designate a section of its field outreach exclusively to NYCHA residents. A firstgeneration college student and product of New York public schools, she pointed to her professional success leading a handful of national nonprofits as proof of her sheer force of will.

The primary drew weeks, not months, away, and the left had yet to consolidate under one candidate.

With endorsements from linchpins like the Working Families Party and the Sunrise Movement, Morales seemed increasingly likely to emerge as the top progressive, despite—or perhaps thanks to—her lack of political experience.

By May, she had received three million dollars in city matching funds, and had, at that point, the second-most donors in the race and the lowest average donation. She’d doubled her name recogni-

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tion among voters since March and squarely dominated the under-24 vote. “Some polls were putting us at the same place as Maya Wiley,” said ex-staffer Lia Franklin, a sophomore at Wesleyan University.

“We were doing the best we’d ever done.”

But within the last week of May, Morales’s ascendant candidacy became one of “the biggest jokes in city politics history,” said University of Connecticut junior Alice Volfson.

First, her campaign manager and senior adviser resigned, citing her inaction over accusations of staffer sexual harassment. Further allegations of racial discrimination, lack of pay, and an enduringly toxic work environment culminated in an internal vote for a union, Morales’s firing of four union leaders, and what amounted to a work strike for the majority of her staff, who subsequently lost access to campaign email and the office. On June 9, three days before early voting, Morales formally fired 45 workers, a third of whom were collegeaged.

As Morales lost control over her campaign, pundits and writers dangled her candidacy as an example of the failures of identity politics, or “leftist” lingo, or “unionization militancy.” The one throughline was a constant emphasis on her young campaign staff. In “The NYC Mayor’s Race Is a Warning for Progressives” from June’s Atlantic, Hunter Walker warned that “young progressives are unwilling to make the sort of labor commitments necessary to actually elect a progressive.” A post-election autopsy in The Nation classified the conflict over unionization as a mutual destruction, “a progressive campaign eating itself alive, with its staffers and candidate publicly turning on each other.”

Attributing equal culpability to employee and employer, the article also slipped into scapegoating “the organizing and activist culture of the young staffers” which “conflicted with the professional world of a campaign.”

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S

In this rendering, Morales’s young staffers were irresponsible, incapable, and irreverent. They were the ones to blame for their boss’s fall, and even greater, for “undermin[ing] the overall interests of the working class,” as one Jacobin article put it.

Implicit in this coverage, infantilizing though it may be, is a recognition of how influential young people have become in politics—and how difficult it’s been to accurately describe their presence.

When young ex-staffers rejected this narrative, they affirmed the very professionalism they purportedly lacked. “You shouldn’t have to reside in a toxic work environment. And also, it’s not like we weren’t working,” said Franklin. “People were working their asses off every day.”

Having taken the spring semester off from college, Franklin began volunteering for Morales in January and was hired in April as part of the campaign’s expansion from eight to 50 staffers in two weeks.

As with all staffers, her contractual “labor commitment” was 40 hours a week. Most worked well over 50—even up to 95, a college student who averaged 70 hours a week told me—and were granted no days off.

Aside from certain aberrations—like how Morales, unlike Adams, Garcia, Wiley, Donovan, and McGuire, did not offer staffers health benefits—none of this was entirely unusual for political work. And that was the issue.

“We were being told this is the norm, this is what you’re going to get in politics,” said Volfson. Even after her three years of campaign work, only the Morales experience made it click that “just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s right.” ··· In late April, NY1 declared that “through TikTok, memes, and custom sneakers, Dianne Morales may be the youth candidate.” All the young staffers I spoke to did indeed discover Morales through social media, but they cited her policies—especially her commitment to defund the police and her background in education—as the reason for her enshrinement as the “youth candidate.” “We’re not just there for TikTok, we’re not just there for memes, we’re not there for some diversity quota,

SEPTEMBER 2021

and we’re also not there for youth outreach,” Volfson said.

Last fall, Massachusetts senator Ed Markey’s unexpected victory over Joe Kennedy was attributed largely to “an army of 16-year-olds” who spearheaded digital organizing on a scope so broad they appropriately dubbed themselves the “Markeyverse.” Markey himself specifically credited the Markeyverse for his win.

These new strategies challenged public perception of youth involvement in politics as “superficial,” said Josephine O’Brien, CC ’26. O’Brien was one of over 200 unpaid fellows who worked on Markey’s campaign last summer. Because traditional door-knocking was not an option in the pandemic, these young organizers created sprawling social media networks and proved the efficacy of relational organizing, which calls upon individual staffers to organize their immediate communities, nudging friends, relatives, and peers to become involved.

This spring’s “Dianneverse” was fashioned after Markey’s, said Owen Potter, who worked for seven months of his pre-Oberlin gap year as a volunteer, then as a staffer. He first created a Twitter account for the teen-run organizing group Youth For Dianne and began posting memes in the spirit of “just messing around.” Soon, other volunteer-run Twitter accounts emerged, each with a customized profile picture set against the campaign color scheme and hundreds of followers: bagels4dianne, cats4dianne, subways4dianne. They interacted constantly with each other.

In May, Debi Saha, a sophomore at Rice, left her internship with mayoral candidate Scott Stringer, who was accused of sexual assault, and began volunteering for Morales. The Dianneverse’s “good vibes” pulled her in—Saha called the strategy “brilliant” for making interacting with politics abnormally fun. When she reached an organizing milestone, the Dianneverse constituent accounts would tweet “like, ‘we love you,’ or something like that. It was just really affirming and funny.”

While young people had exceptional decisionmaking power on both the Markey and Morales

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F E AT U R E S

Illustration by Hart Hallos campaigns, in Morales’s universe, “the youth were allowed to do stuff ’cause there was really nobody else,” said Potter. Over 90% of the campaign’s volunteer base, estimated Volfson, was under the age of 20. For these volunteers especially, the campaign’s horizontal organizational structure, which created ample space for both independence and confusion, made it “very easy, I think, for people to feel like the whole campaign is kind of on them,” added Potter.

When the campaign was able to expand in April, it hired young people who had been working for months as volunteers. Franklin remembered a “blurred line” between the two capacities: “When you’re a volunteer, it’s one thing—you’re not getting paid, you’re not under contract, you’re doing what you can do. But when you do have a job, your employer has to pay you and give you a day off.”

This apparently simple distinction was complicated by the fact that, post-hiring, young staffers’ duties often didn’t change substantially. “At times

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it kind of felt like I was doing the same thing, just getting paid for it,” said Potter.

In the Atlantic article, an anonymous Democratic political operative said, “It seems like many of these kids would be shocked and upset at just normal boring office jobs and the expectations there. And campaigns are so much harder than that.” The commentator was right to distinguish “normal boring office jobs” and campaigns: The mundane “expectations” of the former were never established for Morales’s staff. “We never had a code of conduct, we never had a workplace set of norms, we didn’t have sexual harassment training.

That is not hard to ask for,” said Franklin.

The existence of the Dianneverse—to push the metaphor to its limits—displayed an understanding that campaign work norms, relegated to another universe altogether, could not reasonably be acceptable in this world. The volunteer effort to create meaningful support for staffers in the cam-

THE BLUE AND WHITE

F E AT U R E S paign work environment filled a vacuum of defined structure or due process. It was an optimistic rewriting of political norms, a hope that, by leaning into the insularity of political work, it would be possible to perform it on one’s own terms. ··· Organizing, Volfson said, is “intoxicating, almost like an addiction.” It’s both “so fun” and “so fast-paced”—a description that, delivered in one breath, implied the two were inextricable.

Volfson first experienced the reward of overinvestment while working for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in Iowa. “You see change happening so tangibly that it’s like, you want more,” she recalled. “You want more yeses, you want more people to talk to you about policy, you want to go to another fundraiser, you want to see your fundraising numbers go up.” At the onset of the race, Morales felt to her like New York City’s own Sanders.

O’Brien described the visible return of work campaigns offer, which tends to attract “perfectionist types or overachieving types” who might otherwise find themselves in equally intense, data-driven jobs. Unlike those careers, though, the intensity of campaign work comes with “built-in community.”

Political work, she summarized, is “this very, very important thing that I care a lot about, and I have a lot of control over even tiny little bits of it”— unique because both the work and the devotion to it are inherently rewarding.

But especially because campaigns have a set end date, campaign work also comes to be defined by what inevitably follows it: “It’s just non-stop. And when it’s done, everything’s paused, you’re just kind of empty,” said Volfson. The intensity of this work is such that it can only be described by referencing what occurs in its absence: burnout. This identification, which every interviewee reached for, encompassed work-induced exhaustion but also betrayal, confusion, jadedness, even guilt.

For Volfson, whose Twitter bio reads “burntout staffer with too many books,” Monday staff meetings at 11 a.m. coincided with class. A full-

SEPTEMBER 2021

time student and staffer, work-school balance— let alone work-life balance, she clarified with a chuckle—was infeasible. These two spheres were instead intense in their simultaneity: “I would set up the staff meeting on my phone and I would set up my class on my computer,” she said, “and both of them would just play.”

When neighborhood organizer Wena Teng, CC ’25, reflected on unionization, the memory was inseparable from her last days as a high school senior. During the grueling eight-hour meeting in which staffers presented their case for and voted on unionization, in her pocket her phone was signed into Google Meets for class. Most of the Queens field team, said Teng, were full-time college students.

Relational and digital organizing, said O’Brien, made work harder, as it became easier for everything to become work. “When I look back on texts from August of 2020, it’s literally all me asking my friends, ‘Can you come to a phone bank?’” With friends, she found herself implementing voter persuasion strategies and “thinking of how I can take advantage of this time that I’m spending outside of work to benefit my work.”

When Volfson left work, she re-entered the Dianneverse from home. And then, after hours of tweeting and posting and replying and DM-banking from her bed, “the first thing I would do when I [woke] up is check Twitter. Did Dianne post?”

Work was as unspoken as it was ubiquitous— “politics doesn’t recognize overtime,” said Volfson.

As Anne Helen Petersen argues in “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation,” viewed over seven million times since 2019, “the thing about American labor, after all, is that we’re trained to erase it.”

Petersen writes of the pitfalls of the “return on work” that draws young people to politics. For her, burnout also comes about from “the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be ‘worth it’—worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization—isn’t.” Her example refers to student debt, which, like campaign work, is

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F E AT U R E S undertaken in the name of unlocking a better future—a future believed in so fervently it becomes part of one’s present identity.

Potter, one of Morales’s first hires, had trouble articulating his emotional response to the dissolution of the campaign. Eventually, his response echoed Petersen’s description: It was, he said, “definitely hard to put five, six months of your life into something, and it’s like, oh well, this wasn’t really worth it.” After his firing, he tried to enjoy summer by acting on his need to “get away” from the Dianneverse and reenter the world.

The purpose of identifying burnout is not to introduce a dead-end, although it sometimes feels like a foregone conclusion, an emotional and physical state nearly mythical in its magnitude. Understanding political work through understanding burnout can help us see that the latter has specific origins: the relentless normalization of demanding working conditions for first-time workers or volunteers.

“We had 13-year-olds on the campaign who were working the same number of hours, sometimes even more hours than I was, and definitely did not know that what they were doing was unhealthy,” said Volfson. Another factor, said Saha, is the lack of political opportunities for young people outside of campaign work. “They just thought that this is what work-life is like,” added Volfson. ··· One of Morales’s first responses to the demand for unionization was—after skipping a Monday staff meeting that she had promised would include “anti-bias training,” said Volfson—to send a Slack message encouraging staffers to “take time for self care.” Petersen writes that self-care is a “common prescription” when one willfully misunderstands that burnout is the diagnosis at hand: “It’s an $11-billion industry whose end goal … is to provide further means of self-optimization. … Selfcare isn’t a solution; it’s exhausting.”

Volfson scoffed as we discussed the Slack message; the absurdity of Morales’s hasty effort to superimpose corporate solutions, a vestige of her years as a nonprofit CEO and wholly inappropriate here, was self-evident. “I was already planning on tak-

14

ing that day off, regardless of whether she gave us the permission to,” she said. Though this victory was hardly as concrete or revelatory as a campaign win, young people still emerged in June with a nascent understanding of the control they could wield over their own work.

Burnout, suggests Petersen, requires “paradigmshifting change. Which helps explain why so many millennials increasingly identify with democratic socialism and are embracing unions: We are beginning to understand what ails us, and it’s not something an oxygen facial or a treadmill desk can fix.”

In this case, though, it was easy to reduce the union to a matter of language, and many did. It was never certified by an external body, unlike that of comptroller-elect Brad Lander. This is not to say they didn’t try: Staffers had approached the Campaign Workers Guild in March but “because hiring practices were taking so long in the campaign,” they were told that recognition would not be possible, said Volfson. And in the second push for unionization, they based their demands on the successful Lander agreement—“literally verbatim went through it, edited it a tiny bit, and then those were our asking points,” said Franklin—but still faced backlash for “wildly aberrant” requests.

Regardless, the union came to represent what a campaign workplace should be; ex-staffer Twitter bios that read “forever Mayorales Union” indicate that it remains so. In the weeks after unionization, as workers remained unsure of their employment status, the union was a “point of support,” said Franklin. Most tangibly, it raised ten thousand dollars, distributed as mutual aid to ex-staffers, in a single week in June.

Reflecting on her six months in the Dianneverse at the end of our conversation, Franklin sounded truly burned out: resigned, guilty, and, most of all, lost in a sea of countless other staffers. Still, like many fellow workers on the Morales campaign, her original, urgent faith had sustained her for months. “I guess I didn’t really want to look further [at her flaws], so that’s kind of my own fault, but I think it was true in a lot of people,” she said.

“You wanted someone to believe in.”

THE BLUE AND WHITE

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Moment

BY ARI KING Your Siamese twin, nine minutes dead Is slunked to the side of the hospital bed.

What do you think now? What enters your head?

Do you sit there and wonder, was it something I said?

Or do you feel it now lifting, now turning its head Now straining to deliver something well-hid Something to tell its old hip-tied friend.

The words fell like the sleeptalk of a kid.

You have to perform the operation.

Illustration by Lyla Trilling

SEPTEMBER 2021

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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H

Do You Two Hate Each Other?

Affirmative

BY HART HALLOS

G

od, it seems like yesterday, doesn’t it? But it was years ago—my sense of time is probably distorted because I have a lot of trauma and a suuuper fucked up relationship with my family (ugh).

I can almost picture where we were: my friend’s Rural Farmers Are Poor and That’s Really Funny To Me party. Omggg put that steam right back in your ears, you sillies; we were all fully vaccinated and wearing masks, and also it was before Covid.

Some twunk in Margiela overalls was pouring shots of Peach Schnapps for the classic drinking game Count to Two, and someone really witty said they hoped this bottle was distilled using the peach Timothée Chalamet fucked in Call Me By Your Name (2017). Needless to say, it crushed. And just as everyone finished screaming, laughing, AND crying, I prepared to follow it up with WatchMojo’s #1 fun party fact: that T Challey had chlamydia … or was it syphilis? At the very least HPV ...

Then, out of nowhere, some plaid-clad pipsqueak pipes up and steals my fact. I honestly don’t remember that much of it, just that it all happened in slow motion—soft blond hair bouncing as he enunciated the “y” in genital herpes, mouths agape at the news, someone literally about to cum. A sex-positive discussion on the villification of STDs ensued, and I was sickened by every minute of it.

Like, hello? Were you even in our quadrilateralshaped group of six before that? Because I didn’t hear you speak up, stupid. Maybe you thought I was weighed down by these two extremely ironic hay bales, but I assure you I still had plenty of room to carry that conversation. On. My. Back. Okurrr!

I wish I came up with something that good on the spot. I guess that’s why they say foreskin is 20/20.

But I don’t even think about it that much—definitely not when I’m jerking off! I can’t believe you would even ask me that omg that is so violating!!! I only jerk off to FamilyDick™ (#ad).

So yeah, you could say I hate Cy Gilman. Because the thing is … he kept spilling Timmles’ gonorrhea-

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ridden beans. At my friend’s If You’re From The South How Are You Cool open bar? My (toxic) ex’s Do Homes In Rural States Have Real Floors soirée? My other ex’s toxic ex-friend’s If You’re From Kentucky Is This Your First Pair of Shoes social? All the same: killer joke from some underappreciated genius about Teedles Cheedles breedin’ the ol’ peach, followed by huge laughs and a few seconds where I think “Hey, I just might get my epic party line in.'' But every time, Cy Gilman busts on in, practically red in the face and with ice-hard nipples to tell us about TimTam Chaddles’ ambiguous phallic pustules. Not okurr!

It didn’t even matter if people knew that Ladybird supporting actor and international heartthrob Timothée Chalamet had Hep B- and spread it around NYU (like I said before, that’s actually pretty cool and you’re being super judgmental rn).

What mattered is that I should be the one to tell them! Not Cy! Not Cy with his freshly ’roided, Jeff D.(I.L.F.) Bezos muscles; not Cy with his Limited Easter Edition Tonka Dump Truck of an ass; not Cy with his occasional mild-to-severe pain when peeing! Ugh I haaate Cy so much I want to hate him so hard!!! Also my friend told me Cy reads Columbia undergraduate magazines, so take from that what you will (Horse. Hung.)

Ok sorry I had to go clean up a glass of water that I spilled. But it should be extremely obvious at this point that I hate Cy Gilman—hate him so much that if I saw him at another party, I might even slap him in the face! Yeah, I said it—freedom of speech!!!! He cost me so much by stealing my really cool fact thast one time I barely even remember; like, imagine the scores of people who would have gone away loudly saying “Woah, that guy Hart was fun, toned, and witty—we should invite him to our next wine, cheese, and cocktail party ASAP.” And if there’s anything you’ve learned from reading this, it’s that I would be great at a wine, cheese, and cocktail party. Please invite me! I’ve never even tasted alcohol before!!!!

Signed, Twink looking for love and horse tranquilizer

THE BLUE AND WHITE

Illustratio

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H

Negative

BY CY GILMAN

H

ate? HATE? Hate doesn’t begin to describe the veritable constellations of sentiments racking my soul—doesn’t even begin to delve into the chaotic system of emotional negotiations and intimate hostilities that go on between two people. It’s fucking complicated, man.

When you notice that the ripples in the frosting of your birthday cake look like the sand dunes on Arrakis (see the way they undulate: straight up, then thrust down and forwards) and you begin to weep, is that hate? Or when you see some Victorian orphan in Washington Square Park, cross-legged and smoking a blunt, and you start hyperventilating—could that possibly be a copy of Howard Zinn in his hand?—is this hate? God damn it, sometimes I think I’m morbidly haptodysphoriac and sometimes the feeling of rubbing my face through a bowl of just-over-ripe peaches is nothing short of hapto-Armie-Hammer-fucking-euphoria: This is many things, but it is not hate!

I see things sometimes.

On the 1 train, going from 116th to West 14th, I look out the window and see, clear as day, the Beautiful on by Hart Hallos Boy himself. He stares directly at me through the pair of sooty windows passing in the night, gazing straight into the depths of my being with the kind of smirk that freezes one’s veins. And then a drop of blood drips like a tear down his cheek, and the left side of his face begins to shrivel up, and those grinning teeth turn the color of Moutarde de Dijon (I know these aren’t real Chlamydia symptoms, but my subconscious has an active imagination) and then he mouths across the gap, You made me do it, and then pulls a bunny mask over his face and then I realize Wait shit that last bit’s Jake Gyllenhall and the vision promptly disappears.

Do note: This is not a pathetic fawning celebrity

SEPTEMBER 2021

obsession; I am not some twitchy loser drooling over a wall of paparazzi printouts. I’ve reached nothing short of my goddamn telltale-heart moment . I’d had my 15 minutes of fame, been touched by God—I had been given the keys, delicately wrapped and tied up with lace, to a very small, precious room—and not only did I trash the place but I chucked its contents into the street. I turned a jewelry box into an arms cache and opened the floodgates, knowing full well what carnage would follow.

Reader, I marred him. I gave Timothée Chalamet Chlamydia trachomatis. I loved him and I fucked him and I made him ill and I left him—now Challie Mae is spreading the chlam while I’m spilling the tea—each of us going from party to party, him downtown, me up, each of our names on more pairs of party-going lips than mono. I’ve Dorian Gray-ed it so that I’m stocking up on social clout by rolling him in the dirt for something I did—and now the goss about Tim Tam and his Vegemite has taken on a life of its own, and with each re-telling, the particulars get as fuzzy as the surface of a certain lascivious stone fruit. Party animals have begun to mix up Challey’s Clam with Crabs or the Clap—such terminological sloppiness being the hallmark, I immediately assumed, of truly tragic virginal naïveté.

Yet even those who should really know better are twiddling with the details: My doctor the other day tried to convince me that I was, in fact, afflicted not with chlamydia but with a case of the pox. “No,” I tried to explain to him, “You’re getting your STDs mixed up like the rest of them. Mr. Chalamet has chlamydia, not syphilis.” But he wouldn’t listen.

Deluded sexual fantasies brought on by neurosyphilitic dementia. Yeah, right.

And so my doctor’s incompetence means that the only bearers of my inconvenient truth are myself, my conscience, and the one and only Timon of Manhattan himself. And as I linger for hours in tiny Italian towns on Google Street-View, bathed in sweat during the wee hours of the night, I cannot but desperately hope—nay, I know it to be true, for God is always forgiving—that he does not hate me the way I so undoubtedly deserve. And as for me: How can I hate someone who I have so badly wronged? How can I hate someone whose bones are the skeleton in my closet?

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E S S AY S

Identifying “I”

Club Zamana sparks a South Asian–American reckoning.

BY TARINI KRISHNA

I

love the month of November. The trees bloom golden and maroon. The air nips but doesn’t bite. There’s a sense of renewal when Diwali— the festival of lights, of the triumph of good over evil and knowledge over ignorance—lands. I had never celebrated the holiday with anyone outside of my family, but many of my friends from my first semester of college were planning to attend the Diwali celebration held in Ferris by the Hindu Students Association. In preparation, I had kept my lehenga in my dorm room wardrobe, tightly wrapped in plastic.

The week of the Diwali celebration, I overheard two students behind me in Ferris talking.

“Are you going to be going to that Diwali party that’s being thrown this weekend?”

ty’s South Asian affinity organization. I couldn’t have predicted at that moment that two months later, I would become a part of Club Zamana, run for secretary, then slowly back away from it once again.

At that time, though, the thought of running across the 116th Street crosswalk while holding up the skirt of my lehenga, chunni billowing out behind me, nauseated me. In fact, I specifically decided not to interview for Club Zamana because I didn’t have an answer to their rumored question, “What does being South Asian mean to you?” All I had was a Jhumpa Lahiri Namesake style answer: Woe is me, I grew up in a predominantly white town. But I began to wonder, do other people think I’m that type of Indian?

I knew I would have said the same thing if my friend group in those early months of college had been predominantly white. My cultural heritage would have been celebrated solely within the confines of my family, and I wouldn’t have been able to share it as easily with my college friends. I grew up in a small town in Protestant New England where Asian-American stereotypes were used either to exceptionalize or to alienate. So I had spent most of my high school experience rebelling against stereotypes— pursuing STEM or working to please my parents—in order to blend in with my peers.

In Cathy Park Hong’s essay “United,” she writes that Asian-Americans take up apologetic space.

Asian-Americans, specifically South Asians, have a noticeable presence in American universities.

Yet I personally found it difficult to gaze admiringly at the South Asian cultural organizations on Columbia’s campus. I had been told that these clubs were incestuous and one-dimensional, filled with Indian-Americans who had a claim on the second-generation immigrant narrative: Their parents immigrated to the United States for their children to have a better life and more opportunity, and so they had to deliver on the American dream. I couldn’t relate to that either; my parents lived in the U.S. for almost two decades before I was born.

After hearing that student dismiss the Diwali celebration, I suddenly felt self-conscious. Was I becoming that type of Indian-American? I knew I wasn’t the type of brown kid to hang out only with other brown kids—I wasn’t raised in an environment where that was possible. But my friend group was, unintentionally, predominantly Asian-American, and some of my friends were even part of Club Zamana, Columbia Universi-

Hong also develops the concept of the self-hating Asian—asking oneself in a room full of Asians, “Who let in all the Asians?” For a while during my first semester of college, I wondered if I was a self-hating Indian-American. My perception of these South Asian clubs lined up with Hong’s description: as I saw it, there were enough of us to span multiple groups, so we were taking up space. Hong writes that “racial self-hatred is see-

“Oh, God no. I’m not that type of Indian.”

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THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY S ing yourself the way whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.” As a result, “Instead of solidarity … the boundaries of yourself are no longer distinct but congealed into a horde.” I worried that I would lose my carefully cultivated individuality if I were to join an organization like Club Zamana. ··· Over winter break, I rehashed the semester with my friends from high school. I told them stories about my involvement in Columbia’s mock trial team. They were meant to elicit laughs and smiles but my friends, many of whom were also on their college mock trial teams, reacted in the opposite way: That’s horrible. Toxic. Do you guys even have fun as a team?”

I spent almost eight hours a week and every other weekend in November at tournaments, staring in disinterest as the clock ticked away. I didn’t trust the people on the team, who thrived in the adrenaline-heavy, competitive culture of “Columbia’s most winning team,” as it likes to call itself. But I also came to see the activity itself as a lesson in the “art of whitening oneself,” as former mock trialer Abby Cao, CC ’23, described it to me, in order to perform for old white judges. I quit the team the day before spring semester classes started.

Soon after, Club Zamana released applications for operating committee members (OCMs). As a first-year at Barnard, it was only natural that I felt lost. Mock trial had failed its purpose as a club: to be a community to take part in, to make campus feel less daunting. I longed to be part of something that I would be excited to attend meetings for, as my friends on Club Zamana were. They talked about upperclassmen in the South Asian community who helped guide them. They had club bondings and inside jokes, and they walked each other home at night.

When I walked into my interview, I finally knew how I was going to answer that “What does being South Asian mean to you?” question that had been haunting me since first semester. I talked about the accepting and familial environment a South Asian community can create. It’s not cool to outright reject your culture in Club Zamana

SEPTEMBER 2021

to assimilate into white America. You can ask someone where the best place is to get your eyebrows threaded and receive an answer, instead of hearing a white woman bragging about how they don’t need to worry about that. You can mention specific aspects of your childhood, like summer trips to India or certain foods, and people will immediately understand and add on.

That same evening, I received an acceptance email, along with instructions to choreograph a thirty-second dance for the first meeting. Shortly after introductions, the co-presidents asked the new OCMs to perform their dances. All the new OCMs, except for myself, stood up together and did the TikTok renegade dance. It dawned on me that the dance was a prank. I then sheepishly stood up to perform my amateur Bollywood dance to the song “Bole Chudiyan.” Once the music started playing and I started dancing, I realized that I was at ease. My dance ended in applause and soon became a running joke, but I wasn’t mocked as the weird girl or the gullible new member. I was now one of them. I was accepted.

Despite differences in personality, background, and interest among its members, there is a level of unconditional acceptance within the club. People wanted to learn about me as a person, which is how I found myself at a James Bond–themed club bonding event discussing my passion for local politics with the two presidents. Campus immediately felt smaller. I’d bump into other members walking from Kent to Butler, or buying Girl Scout cookies outside the main gates, and they’d always stop and ask how I was doing. During the early stages of the pandemic, the club held regular Zoom calls. Upperclassmen were committed to uplifting underclassmen. “I would literally ask anyone [for help] and if anyone asked me, I would be more than happy to help them with anything” said Fatima Khan, BC ’22, former vice president for Barnard and now senior adviser.

Before joining, I hadn’t considered how diverse the organization truly is. Khan also commented on the geographic and economic diversity of members within Club Zamana, with international students from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka; students from ethnically diverse areas

21

E S S AY S of the U.S., such as the Bay Area and New Jersey; and people from predominantly white areas, like her home of New Hampshire. Club Zamana was not the stereotypical, one-dimensional club I thought it was. ··· As I settled into the club and found safety in thiscommunity, though, I saw that it still had its own flaws to grapple with. Club Zamana’s exclusivity has ignited a lot of anger for individuals who were interviewed but not accepted. It stirs up questions that do deserve answers—answers not many of us would like to hear. Why do you need to interview to be part of a cultural club? How do you prove your identity? What are the criteria for acceptance?

Hiba Ismail, CC ’21, joined Club Zamana in her first year. She described her interview as less than stellar, but she had been introduced to the club by a lifelong friend sitting on the board. “She’s going to be able to vouch for me in a way that no one else in the room can, in a way that honestly extends beyond the interview process,” Ismail said.

“I definitely think that she had a strong role to play. And I’m not denying that.” Although I was not interviewed by any of my friends who were in the club, I am sure that my familiarity with some

of the members may have helped me during my interview.

As Club Zamana’s secretary during the 2020-2021 school year, I had a vote on who would become our next generation. I pushed more for interviewees who discussed their lack of a cultural community growing up because I personally identified with that background. We debated whether students who spoke about being part of a South Asian association in high school needed Club Zamana to find community in college, as if we could determine that.

The process is undeniably subjective. The board wants to accept as many new members as possible. Paradoxically, to foster a tight-knit community as promised, the club is bound to exclude many.

When we spoke, Khan suggested creating a general body of people who can attend meetings and participate in the club without being on the board. More outreach could also bring more people into the fold. But club president Rahil Bhatia, GS ’23, pointed out that an open environment can disrupt the administrative work that needs to happen at these meetings. Club Zamana meetings are more bureaucratic than social. An hour

Illustration by Samia Menon

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THE BLUE AND WHITE

E S S AY S or more is spent covering details on upcoming events, hashing out the logistics, and assigning people tasks. Bhatia suggested taking a poll of people who have interviewed with the club and those in the community to gauge who would like to contribute to meetings.

Another potential focus for the upcoming year is Club Zamana’s political responsibility. Members have decided that they are no longer satisfied with the general perception that the organization is a social club, and are taking action on internal and external complaints that as an affinity organization, it does not take enough initiative on social and political issues.

During the wave of Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, members of Club Zamana organized a virtual discussion about anti-Blackness in the South Asian community and police reform that was attended by over sixty people. The club has also hosted a discussion on combating Hindutva, the Hindu nationalist ideology underlying Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party, that undermines India’s secular values.

But as an organization dominated by IndianAmerican Hindus, those who do not share that identity can feel unsure about speaking up about more controversial issues. Ismail, who identifies as a Pakistani-American Muslim, explained that certain political topics can be difficult to broach when the majority may not have the same perspective: “I think, in a sense, it’s also brought about a chilling effect,” she said. Myesha Choudhury, BC ’23, who identifies as a Bengali-American Muslim, echoed these sentiments. As Club Zamana’s former political chair, she found that the social issues the club prioritized focused on India or the Indian-American experience, and she wishes they could address issues affecting South Asians at large, such as the persecution of Muslims in India under the BJP. “Zamana does tend to shy away from overly political issues in fear that it will have repercussions in the turnout for social events,” said Choudhury.

Bhatia hopes to change that culture and “raise a community where people feel comfortable to come to me with ideas … [and] issues that they

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care about and feel need to be talked about.” The South Asian umbrella is rife with divisions based on religion, wealth, and colorism, along with the variable experiences of the diaspora. As a cultural affinity organization, Club Zamana can continue to work towards opening a dialogue along these fault lines.

As for the dreaded question, “What does being South Asian mean to you?”: The board may subject it to some revision this year, so it’s not as easily interpreted as asking interviewees to prove their South Asianness. Bhatia does not like the question, and he suggests that it could be rephrased to ask the interviewee what it means to be part of the South Asian community. If I could answer that question today, I would say that it means safety, both in individual identity and in a sense of belonging in a community.

Still, I decided to leave the club at the end of this year because I wasn’t sure I was entirely dedicated to it anymore. Many people will join Club Zamana and stay for all four years, though sometimes they only stay for a year or two. But the organization welcomes its former members back to every event. I know I’ll always be a part of the community because I understand, through my time with the club, that South Asians can take up space unapologetically.

In Sanjena Sathian’s novel Gold Diggers, a question is asked at the Miss Teen India pageant: “What does it mean to be both Indian and American?”

If I wasn’t involved with Club Zamana, I wouldn’t be able to answer that question for myself. But now, I know that I don’t have to choose between displaying my South Asian and American identities. They’re intertwined. I was so worried that my ethnicity would overshadow my personhood that I didn’t understand that that type of South Asian is a character, born from the imagination of those who are many generations past the secondgeneration immigrant. It’s a character built from the stereotypes imposed on South Asian Americans. I had never defined myself based on those stereotypes and in that quest for individuality, I learned that finding a cultural community does not negate my cultivated personhood. Rather, it can provide a space to further flourish.

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E S S AY S

A Night To Remember

Despite an 18-month hiatus, B&W seniors prepare for fall by reliving nights of revelry, cheap wine, and longform improv.

Yes, and …

Despite the fact that I, unlike most, have ballet class on Fridays, the Columbia school week ends on Thursday evening. This, of course, means that Wednesday is Thursday and Tuesday is Wednesday and Monday is Tuesday—or rather, all weekends begin on Thursdays. With the trace of CC class (cinnamon gum and Descartes) lingering on my breath, I joined the masses pouring out of Hamilton at six, on a shockingly dark, bitingly cold, and exceedingly typical October eve. My cluster of friends blocked the wooden doors. People’s puffers swished past us, pushing toward John Jay for Beyond Brats and grain bowls. My roommate and I remembered the leftover Mama’s Too in our Carlton Arms mini-fridge. Was it worth going back to 109th to get it? Absolutely, it was.

Once we arrived, we shrugged off our backpacks, shed our winter coats, and devoured the cold gorgonzola pear slices resting on greased-through paper plates.

By 8, we’d made it to Lerner to watch Third Wheel.

The improv shows are a who’s who of Columbia: NSOP friends, real friends, the redhead from Stranger Things. Most of the crowd was standing, but we had arrived early enough to secure seats.

The soon-to-be-Twitter-famous-senior-in-thegroup asked the crowd for “any noun that’s NOT a food.” My offering of SHOFAR was drowned out by someone else’s KIBBLE. The KIBBLE-themed set commenced. I still picture myself as a part of the troupe.

We found ourselves on 114th at the Potluck brownstone for a Caroline Sky SNOCK concert around 10. In the basement entryway, there sat two big plastic plates of catered food, presumably snagged from a table on the Lerner ramps. One overflowed with lukewarm deli meat, the other with brownie bites and cheese cubes. I held court over the vegetarian plate, which quickly grew

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crowded with revelers shooed downstairs by the hosts, fearful of noise complaints. The cute guy from my CC class sauntered toward the buffet.

We talked about today’s Descartes reading as I nervously noshed on cheese and brownies. From across the room, I heard the MC announce my friend on keyboard. I made a joke in our professor’s authoritative British baritone before wriggling my way to the front of the crowd.

—Sam Sacks, Podcast Director

Mission: Impossible Despite my eyes (paralyzed with fear) and my jaw (dropped to the tile floor), Patrick recited his testimony without pause: “This is excessive. Nobody needs THIS many soap dishes. Like, the fuck?”

As my horrified expression showed, this simply wasn’t the time for a Sus-Dev revelation. Nonetheless, I couldn’t blame Patrick for berating the shower supplies—I had, after all, just shoved him, Sam, and Dylan into a musty Carman bathroom.

Why would I knowingly put my newfound—and, at the time, only—friends in a position to become riddled with the plague, you ask? At that moment, I thought I was protecting them from something much worse: an RA. That night, we had shed our dorm-party virginity.

As John Jay 11 residents, we had a lot of expectations for Carman, but our night out only verified two: the toxic black mold that festers on floors two through six and and the terrifying RAs who stalk the halls, ready to bust your balls at any given moment. When I heard a thunderous knock on the suite door, followed by hushed predictions of an RA en route, my soul left my body as I switched into stealth mode. I navigated a crowd of unjustifiably petrified first-years, located the bathroom despite never having been in the suite before, and

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E S S AY S closed the door behind my floormates before any randos could rush in.

Can you imagine executing the perfect plan, under pressure, and then having your friend scream bloody murder about soap dishes? But, as Sam would soon remind me, Patrick wasn’t wrong about the soap dishes. Dylan, who had been filming the entire conversation, chuckled in agreement. The moment replaced my fear-struck face with a smile and, soon after, an uncontrollable laugh. Maybe I had overreacted, or maybe I was being hit with the side effects of actually coming to appreciate my John Jay single, but my quasiconscious, spy-like instinct knew these friendships would be lifelong. And that was more important than the RA tyrant who, by the way, was just a first-year begging to be let in.

—Nicole Kohut, Senior Editor

Mountain Trolls, Autumn Strolls, Growing Old Despite the fact that this chilled October night was the dead center of my first semester of college and the dead end of my first college theatre production, it was also my 19th birthday.

The evening had many phases: first, a pre-show meal of stellar green curry at Thai Market; then, a descent into Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a world of green strobe lights and caramel-scented smoke machines; and finally, a cast party with multiple sub-phases spanning different residence halls.

Fall crept forward, swaddling New York in warm colors and cool breezes. That night, the wind twisted through Broadway’s cross streets, carrying the smells of waste and halal spices, sounds galore. I left the troll-infested mountains of the Minor Latham Playhouse to enter a fairy-lit double in Owl House, modestly sipping concoctions of “Peer” (pear) cocktails. We twirled and chatted. Later, the task became balancing plastic cups of prosecco and playing Psych in a Sulz Tower lounge, overlooking the Hudson River with the peppered lights of New Jersey outshining the night sky. Pssh—imagery, tingles.

When the clock struck midnight on October 21,

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2018, I was smiling with people I could not have met at any other time or place. I was doing what I love. I was growing older and glowing, ever so subtly and just beneath my skin, with glee. And birthday snickerdoodles were in my future. It was a moment worth savoring. I had been a part of something—my first thing in New York, in college, away from home—that had now come to completion, just as I was to commence another year of life.

If only for a fleeting moment many moons ago, my feet felt grounded on Columbia’s granite and brick, in lockstep with new and friendly faces.

Numerous mystical and memorable nights fill the space between then and now (even through “the Great Between,” as Ibsen may have called 2020), and here’s to hoping even more will dapple the year to come.

—Maya Weed, Staff Illustrator

Hot, A Splash of Milk, One Splenda Despite the cold, we always managed to find warmth. It was one of those frigid New York City nights broken up only by trips to Westside Market and sprints across the Quad. We found warmth under the twinkle lights on College Walk or under the covers in a Sulz double, squeezing one too many hallmates onto a twin extra-long bed. But that night we craved a different kind of warmth— the fever dream of spontaneity that always gives rise to adventure. We longed for a heat that could only be found off a downtown stop on the 1 train.

We rode down to 34th Street, the normally glaring Penn Station lights perfectly blurred by sips of International’s cheapest bottle: Barefoot’s $8 pinot grigio. There are only two acceptable reasons to go to Midtown, and since we weren’t catching a train to New Jersey, we were on our way to KTown.

On Korea Way, also known as West 32nd Street, we were greeted by an orchestra of karaoke bars, flickering neon signs, and tofu houses. We stopped at the first street cart we could find, pressed up against the sizzling trays of food as passersby—barhoppers, bouncers, and busboys—rushed to their destinations. We waited

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E S S AY S for our order, wondering aloud what the streets looked like from within a halal cart. What did the friendly man at the corner of 116th and Broadway see when he handed me my morning coffee—hot, a splash of milk, one Splenda? From the karaoke bar above us, we heard a heartwarming rendition of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” bellowed by drunken teenagers. We couldn’t help but sing along, glowing like the street lights dangling over us.

Eventually, we found our way back to the 1, to the twinkle lights on College Walk, and to our twin extra-long beds in the Quad. We were already dreaming about ordering our morning coffee from the cart—hot, a splash of milk, one Splenda.

—Hailey Ryan, Publisher

Time Runs On Despite having only just met her, I had the confidence to cut her name and our Friday evening in two, given that we’d become fast friends over JJ’s curly fries after a million people said we’d get along, so Ariana was now Ari, and we vowed to meet again in her room at 10, because I had to stop by a party at my senior friend’s on 112th, so I ambled out to windy Amsterdam, where I linked with a friend who shared the same senior friend as me, and we conferred and determined that given all the seniors our senior friend knew, she probably had plenty of alcohol on hand, so we brought havarti and mangos from Westside and plopped ourselves on a couch in the corner of our senior friend’s plush apartment until her senior friends—St. A’s-adjacent, Comp Lit, Newports— talked to us, which only lasted until everyone stopped talking because a senior friend fainted, though not from substances, we were told, as we made our way out the door, where I was greeted with the rude truth of International’s early closure and forced to schlep to Liquors and back for a bottle of red, which got Ari and me drunk enough to talk about our exes and our crushes and our classes and our grandpas, until her friend knocked and plopped down, criss-cross-apple-sauce, and asked for a glass of wine, saying absolutely nothing about himself and leaving it up to me to learn, somewhere down the line, that he was the most talented painter in ’21, bar none—that a portrait

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by him meant everything to anyone—and instead letting Ari show us her posters, including the least derivative Warhol in all of dorm history and a funky map of Seattle, a gift from her high school boyfriend, with whom I’d one day eat arepas in the East Village over winter break, and guiding us eventually to the only EC party where we knew everyone, which made dancing and gabbing quite effortless until I craved my typically early, unannounced, and solo party departure, leaving myself room to breathe in the placid Kent-Philosophy plaza, a reprieve that fortified me well enough to swim against the Beta-bound tide on 114th, toward Ruggles, where my friend, who had been an integral part of the EC party where we knew everyone, was waiting, as he was practically every night that semester, with weed and vitamin gummies and a vat of Mountain Valley, which we devoured in rounds until I opted to drift toward McBain, where I swore the only other person up was my friend who tended to have bad dates, and after asking her to recount that evening’s, I lurched into my bowling-alley room and annotated a little Machiavelli and told myself it wasn’t worth it to wake until the Absolute line died down the next afternoon.

—Sam Needleman, Senior Editor

The Midnight Train Despite our best efforts to fight against time, the hands of my watch inched toward 10 p.m., which meant we had about seven minutes to get the drunkest we’d ever been in our lives. Dressed like Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, we were ready to ride the relentless mechanical bull we call the MTA. The Subway Party was beginning at any minute.

This was my first, and, thanks to Covid, only Subway Party, held in April of my freshman year. Hundreds of students flooded the 116th stop, high

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E S S AY S on adrenaline and ketamine, set on riding to Rockaway and skinny dipping. I pitied those hoping for an easy commute home from work. Drunk bodies blockaded every 1-train entrance on our entire line. I couldn’t move, we were packed so densely. I was preoccupied thinking about the subway cars, and how I’d never know if I’d ridden the exact same one before. I thought about how there are currently 6,418 MTA subway cars on the roster. If I left my wallet on the train, it would surely be gone forever, lost to the sea of metal crates ebbing and flowing like waves, sweeping an electric ocean of passengers across town. I thought about how, years from now, all of Manhattan will be submerged in salt water, and how we already know exactly what that will look like because the city throws its retired subway cars into the ocean for safe-keeping. Although eerie, it’s reassuring that, deep in the Atlantic Ocean, the cars are preserved: a museum of the Big Apple reserved for subaquatic tourists.

Subway Party gave us a kaleidoscopic supercut of our time at Columbia. In one car, the cool seniors who led our river rafting expedition through the Delaware Water Gap swayed back and forth. In another, friends from orientation sang ABBA songs in perfect harmony. The next car over, a neighbor from home’s baby cousin, all grown up,

and all the friends we might make in semesters to come. The people in the final car held hands and sat on laps and passed around bottles of Svedka.

Unlike Sylvia Plath’s Esther, who can only reach for one fig from the fig tree, I collected many that night, plucking and tasting sweet moments from Columbia’s long-reaching branches.

In no time at all, give or take two hours, we arrived at a Jewish pizzeria deep in Brooklyn and ate greasy cheese and kosher pepperoni. We then went home and tucked ourselves into our beds.

We woke up and ate bagels at John Jay or egg scrambles at Ferris or breakfast sandwiches at JJ’s.

We talked about last night or the essay due the next day or which library best chased away the Sunday scaries. The nights, and even the mornings after, blur together. All I really remember is laughing. Everything else is a smear of red and blue carried in memory, to the hum and perennial sway of charging subways on their tracks, moving somewhere just beneath our feet.

—Chloë Gottlieb, Staff Writer

Survivor and Chocolate Almonds I watched Survivor in bed and ate chocolate-covered almonds.

—Lyla Trilling, Managing Editor

Illustration by Lilly Cao

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

Melissa Clark We always have to eat.

BY LYLA TRILLING

A

piece of toasted bread, a slab of butter, a plump orange tomato, and a few delicate fillets of anchovy—this is the “snack” Melissa Clark prepared for the video crew shooting her kitchen for the New York Times YouTube channel. As the crew moans in delight, Clark shrugs: “My hubby makes good bread!”

Anything resembling shakshuka? Count me in.

Made this in my cast iron skillet while my friend forced me to listen to a true crime podcast about a murder at Lululemon. Bloody leggings and garam masala are a beautiful combination.

To the layperson, a snack does not exceed the culinary level of a pretzel, or, if you’re lucky, a gummy fruit shaped like a cartoon character. But Clark chooses to live an elevated life—never doing what is expected, always challenging the taste buds to a richer, fuller experience. Mayonnaise in chocolate cake? A wonderful moistening agent. Green peas in guacamole? Undeniably locks in the color, regardless of how you may feel about the taste.

A shockingly easy and delicious dish. Made this on the floor of my living room while watching Survivor: Cagayan (double burners are very portable). Added a bouillon cube and some carrots. I even pickled my own goddamn onions.

As a third generation Brooklynite and a student of iconic female food writers like Betty Fussell, Clark’s upbringing was ripe with culinary experiences—her father’s walnut cookies, bagels and cream cheese on Sunday mornings. It is no surprise, then, that Clark refuses to take sole ownership of her recipes: “It’s just how I cook,” she told me. “They are everyone’s recipes.” Her unique culinary sensibility would be impossible without the people and places that informed it.

I reached out to Clark regarding a serious crisis in my apartment—a 10-month gas shutdown, an unusable oven, and a stovetop devoid of practicality.

A masterful food writer and recipe developer with 45 cookbooks in her back pocket would surely have an answer. Help me, I practically begged via polite, if fangirly email. And help me she most certainly did. What follows is a food log of Melissa Clark–approved recipes that can be made with nothing but a toaster oven and double burner.

Day 1: Spiced Eggplant and Tomatoes with Runny Eggs.

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Day 2: Vegetarian Skillet Chili

Day 3: Skillet Chicken and Farro with Caramelized Leeks What a beauty she was—fresh, herby, and umami all at once. You really get two dishes from this recipe: a flavorful, browned chicken and a warm, farro-leek stew perfect for a cloudy day. Packed this up and brought it to my babysitting job; enjoyed it while watching The Princess Diaries.

Day 4: Adobo-rubbed Veal with Sage I literally made veal in a toaster oven. This is the phrase I repeated to myself many times after the deed was done. I cannot believe how incredible it tasted—fatty, juicy, tender, sweet, spicy—the toaster oven might be the best method for the job (sorry, sous vide!) I got this recipe from an article that Clark published in 2005 about cooking in toasters (the baked peach and zucchini feta salad are also winners). As a result, the veal was infused with an undeniable Y2K vibe—making me more and more nostalgic for Dick Cheney with each bite.

When my week of cooking was done, I sat down with Clark to chat about the food-writing boom, fried twinkies, and her love of the culinary arts.

The meeting was cut short by an olive oil chal-

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N lah that desperately needed her attention. It was Rosh Hashanah, after all.

The Blue and White: From your English track at Barnard, and then your MFA at Columbia, how did you go from literature into cooking? How did that transformation occur?

Melissa Clark: I always say that food was my lens—it was just the way I saw the world. I love the way that you can understand culture through food. I think that, luckily, it’s become more of a thing. When I was interested in food writing back when I was at Barnard and Columbia, there was a fringe element to it. Now it's very mainstream. It spoke to me because of my childhood—food was always how I sorted out the world. Looking back through history and literature, to me, was also a way to connect the dots. Human beings are constantly evolving, but we always have to eat. Eating is a glue. It’s the glue of civilization, and no matter where you are, there’s something about eating that binds you to other people.

B&W: Something I like about your recipes is that, in your written instructions, you allow for a lot of intuitive cooking, like a “pinch” of this and something “to taste.” How important do you think customization is? How important is it to be able to intuit what you’re doing rather than follow the recipe exactly?

MC: It’s essential. It’s what makes cooking into an art, into a creative process, and I think that people are afraid to do that. I know there is comfort in a recipe, but there’s no possible way for you and I to follow the same recipe and make the dish come out tasting the same. I really feel like if I can get people to be more comfortable in that driver’s seat—taking control, doing it the way they want it, tasting this and adding that—that’s my goal. I really try to encourage that in the way that I write recipes. You have to do it your own way because you’re feeding yourself. I’m not going to taste it!

I don’t care! Do it your own way! With my recipes, I will always say it’s a guide. It’s just a way to give you ideas to make something delicious for dinner.

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B&W: I read about the guacamole-green-peagate that you were tangentially involved in. What’s your stance on guacamole with green peas?

MC: I mean, do what you want. It’s your guacamole. I thought it was a brilliant idea—it locks the color in! Look, I truly believe that food has a cultural importance—you don’t want to offend anybody. But I actually don’t believe that putting peas in guacamole is offensive, depending on how it’s done. Right now, there’s a lot of discussion about what it means when you adapt another culture’s recipe into your culture, and I think these are important discussions to have. I also think it’s important to be able to put peas in guacamole. I think what’s important is to acknowledge the greater tradition, and if you are a big chef like Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who did the recipe, I think it’s your responsibility to make sure the original doesn’t get obscured by your adaptation. Now, with guacamole, that’s not going to happen because, at this point, guacamole goes across many cultures. If you’re going to publish a recipe from a different culture, it’s your responsibility to learn about the original and put that out there, as well. Before recently, nobody paid attention to cultural appropriation of food. It’s an important thing to discuss.

B&W: Getting back to your own culture, I want to know more about cooking in New York as a kid. What are some recipes that your parents taught you that you still use today, or some of your childhood favorites that continue to inspire you today?

MC: My dad’s walnut cookies. Simple little Viennese walnut crescents. My mom’s lemon bars, which she got straight out of the Charlie Brown Cookbook. I think they were called “Lucy's Lemon Squares.” Matzo Brei was a big one. And bagels and lox. On Sundays, we’d go and get bagels and lox for brunch, and those flavors really speak to me, and they will continue to speak to me. You know, it’s funny, because when you grow up and you get married and have a kid, you create a new culture within your household—bagels and lox is just not my current family’s thing. It’s my old family’s thing, and that makes me a little sad.

B&W: Have you developed any new family tradi-

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Illustration by Lyla Trilling

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N tions? Any new family staples?

MC: We have the things that my family loves, like my daughter loves this crumby pasta that I make.

It’s like this garlicky bread crumb pasta. You take day-old bread, you make it into crumbs, you toast it with olive oil and garlic, sometimes you can put in red chili flakes, anchovies, or parmesan and then you make these delicious, crispy crumbs.

It’s just crispy, savory bread crumbs, and you just put them on your pasta. It’s really simple. You can add a little bit of butter or olive oil or pasta water. And both my husband and my daughter love chili, which, frankly, I could take or leave, if you’d like to know.

B&W: Really? I feel like your skillet chili recipe is like the recipe. This is very shocking news to me and I think the whole world as well.

MC: What, that I'm “meh” on chili? It’s fine. It’s just—talking about the recipes that speak to you, chili speaks to my husband and daughter. They feel about bagels and lox the way I feel about chili. You negotiate with your family and you create your new traditions, you know? I mean, we all love waffles. We’re all big popcorn people. We make delicious popcorn.

B&W: Tell me about the popcorn.

MC: Tons of nutritional yeast, seaweed flakes— and just so much butter, like an obscene amount of butter and salt. It’s just great.

B&W: Okay, so, you were in college and then you went to grad school. I feel like there’s no clear trajectory for food writers. Could you walk me through what happened after you graduated?

How did you progress to where you are today?

MC: I did an MFA in nonfiction writing at Columbia, which was great. Food writing wasn't a thing. Now, I’ll go back to Columbia sometimes and teach a food writing class—we didn’t have that when I was there. When I was interested in writing about food in the MFA program, people kept asking me if I was going to be a critic because that was the only kind of food writing people imagined. They didn’t consider cookbooks to

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be writing, and there was no narrative food writing—it wasn’t a thing outside of criticism. I graduated from the MFA program in ’94. It was the beginning of the Internet! All of a sudden, there were blogs and there was a public space where I could write about food and get paid for it. So, I was really lucky, I was at the cusp of this new thing. These websites would pay me to write 900 words on pumpkin pie, and I’d write a full story, and it was great. At the same time, though, I was just out of grad school, I was living in New York, which, as you know, is no joke. So I was also waitressing, I was coat checking. I was writing these stories for these websites that are all defunct now.

And I was also writing for Time Out New York.

I would write some restaurant round-ups, sometimes I’d write trend stories, which are probably my least favorite thing to do.

B&W: Do you remember any of the trend stories that you wrote?

MC: Oh god, yeah. Believe it or not, Fort Greene was an up-and-coming neighborhood back in the ’90s, so I wrote about restaurants in Fort Greene, like, “Hey, this is a new up-and-coming neighborhood with a food scene!” I have one early story I wrote for the New York Times in 1999 about how chefs were using tapioca—not tapioca pudding, but just tapioca pearls—to create new dishes. And that was one of the first trend stories I wrote for the Times.

B&W: Nuts.

MC: Nuts. Different time! You know, I always say, you can’t go back and do the thing I did. Young food writers ask: How did you get to do what you do? And my path isn’t there anymore. Nobody is paying you a dollar a word to write a 900-word story on pumpkin pie for the Internet. I truly believe you need to learn how to cook and how to write. And I tell people to take cooking classes and writing classes, work in a restaurant, and just really learn both sides of the craft.

B&W: So how did you get to the New York Times?

MC: I was really just in the right place at the right time. My really good friend knew this guy, who

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N knew this woman, who knew this guy at the New York Times, and she started working as his assistant. And then she went to India for three weeks, and while she was gone, I took over her job. Completely random. It turns out that this man, his name was Rick Flaste, was the person at New York Times who created the Dining In, Dining Out section. He called me a few years later and said, “Hey, do you want to do this itty-bitty little thing called The Food Chain? It’s a food Q&A.” Back in the day, if you wanted to know how to do something, you couldn’t just look it up online. Like, what’s the best way to beat egg whites? Or why don’t egg whites always inflate?

Back then, people would write physical letters and mail them to the New York Times building.

And I would answer these letters. Nuts, but it was great, it was totally great. That was my first job for the Times.

your favorite restaurants in New York City?

MC: Oh god, so many and they change a lot. My world got really small during the pandemic, I think all of ours did, so all of a sudden, it’s anything I can walk to. Some of my go-tos right now: I live in Prospect Heights, I’ve been in love with the cooking at LaLou, which is a little wine bar restaurant, it’s fabulous; Sofreh, which is Persian and around my corner, is fantastic. I mean, gosh, so many places. A few takeout places where I get wonderful things to cook with: Brooklyn Larder, R&D on Vanderbilt, Olmsted, Maison Yaki—all of these things are within a ten-minute walk from my house. Alta Calidad is another favorite one. The chef there is really, really interesting.

He’s Indian, he’s cooking Mexican food, and it’s just fabulous. That’s the neighborhood round-up for you. Bien Cuit for their bread and pastries is great.

B&W: You’ve written 40 cookbooks, is that correct?

B&W: You’ve written a crazy amount of cookbooks, you have so many recipes in your arsenal—what are you most proud of in your career?

MC: Give or take. Forty-five, maybe?

B&W: That is so insane to me. I’m wondering, with that many cookbooks, how are you still finding inspiration? How are you still coming up with new recipes? I feel like you’d tap out at 30, but here you are.

MC: A lot of them I was coauthoring, and that’s a whole other discipline. I didn’t have to come up with the recipes or the content, I just had to shape it. But even so, I’ve done two instant pot books: I have this new toy that I get to play with, and it’s a whole new thing and there’s a learning curve, and then you master it and create new recipes. Then, I did a book for kids called Kid in the Kitchen. And again, it’s a whole new way to think about cooking. Many of the books I’ve written are a narrow slice of cooking. It’s like you are taking a new route somewhere and there’s all these new things to see, new things to play with, and to think about. It’s limitless, really. I can’t imagine ever not having something to write about. There’s always a new way to think about food.

B&W: For the readership, because I’m sure everyone is very curious, could you name some of

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MC: There was the pea guacamole controversy.

That was definitely fun because I got Obama to tweet at me. He puts garlic in his guacamole, and I totally disagree with that.

B&W: I disagree with that as well.

MC: I broke the deep-fried Twinkie story. Have you ever been to a state fair where you’ve had a deep-fried Twinkie on a stick?

B&W: Never, because I’m from Los Angeles, and we don’t deep fry things because we suck. But anyway, back to the Twinkies.

MC: So, deep-fried Twinkies are now one of those things you can get at every state fair. I wrote a story about it. I found this guy deep frying a Twinkie. He was probably the first person to ever deep fry a Twinkie and put it on a restaurant menu. And so I wrote about him and then it got huge and deep- fried Twinkies took off.

So that was fun—I changed this guy’s life forever. He was a Scottish guy who came to New York, opened a chip shop, and, apparently, when you are cooking at the fish station at a fish and

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N chips restaurant, and you’ve had a few beers at the end of your shift, anything you have around goes into the fryer. So, he’s coming out of work and he goes to the bodega down the street and what does he find? Twinkies! And he throws it in the fryer.

B&W: That actually sounds incredible.

MC: I wrote a profile that I’m really proud of, of Betty Fussell, who is one of my mentors.

B&W: Is she the mayonnaise cake woman?

MC: Exactly. I’m proud of that piece because I feel like it really captures her. I’m interested in food writing for women. Everybody wants to be a food writer now, but to be taken seriously as a food writer a generation ago, if you were a woman, was really hard. It was a whole other landscape. I’m very interested in telling these stories of women who are really the pioneers of the field, and Betty Fussell certainly was one of them. I’m about to write another profile of a woman in London, named Claudia Rodin. She wrote the Book of Jewish Food. These are things that I’m proud of and continuing to work on.

B&W: I’ve seen your New York Times kitchen tour. You have an immaculate kitchen that is immaculately organized. I’m wondering, with the amount of stuff that you have—the amount of gadgets, the amount of spices—what is your goto, desert island cooking tool?

MC: Of course, I need my knife and my cutting board. You just need your knife and your cutting board, although I suppose if you’re on a desert island, you can use your knife to cut yourself a new cutting board. And my microplane. I love my microplane. I need my microplane.

B&W: Oh, yes. I had a feeling you were going to say that. These days, I think that a lot of people think of Allison Roman as the anchovies girl— she’s the one who’s always trying to incorporate anchovies into her recipes. But the truth is that you are the original anchovies girl.

B&W: Are there other foods like anchovies that you think are underappreciated and deserve their moment in the spotlight?

MC: I mean, organ meats I wish people would eat more. This weekend, I made beef kidney, and it was so delicious. Gosh, that’s a real outlier, though. I shouldn’t be telling people to eat more organ meats, that’s just weird. Horseradish. It’s just a simple little thing you can get at any store.

We don’t use it enough as a condiment, on sandwiches, and in dressings. Using Asian fish sauce as an umami booster should become more mainstream again. If you’re a committed cook, chances are you either have some or you know where to get it. It adds so much flavor—just throw it in any kind of marinade that you’re doing, in salad dressing. I love it with eggplant. Also, butter. Use more butter. People don't cook with enough butter. When you butter your bread, just go for it.

Keep your butter at room temperature, it’s very important. Italian chilis—I think Asia is the focus of our chili paste craze right now, but Italy has some amazing and really interesting chili paste with different flavor profiles, including one that actually has fish in it. It is amazing. If you find a dish is missing something, add that in. It will likely be what you need.

B&W: Now, potentially my most important question that I’m going to ask you: Tonight is Rosh Hashanah.What are you making?

MC: I make olive oil challah that I love. And it’s from my friend Robin Aaronson, who also went to Barnard. It's her mom's recipe that I've adapted. I was considering doing a chicken soup, but it’s too nice out for that, so I’ll probably do a simple chicken dish. I have a sweet and tangy chicken on the New York Times that I love, so I might do a simplified version of that. I’ll probably make some kind of roasted potato with that, of course, we will have a big green salad, probably green beans, and honey cake. I haven’t done any of this and it’s already noon.

B&W: Luckily, that is the final question. We have concluded. You can go make your challah.

MC: That is true.

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HUMOR

Dear Dante, Season 4

In which a newcomer to the city receives a warm welcome.

Dear Dante, I’m an incoming freshman from a small midwestern town, and I’m so excited to move to NYC! But should I be? I’m getting worried about coming to such a big city with so many new people. I consider myself an extrovert, but I still feel like I’m gonna be overwhelmed by Manhattan and its scene—do you think I am?

Please let me know/reassure me.

City of Ember clearly missed a few lessons. Because if you’d ever read anything authentic about the island of Manhattan, this would all be old news to you. Since it’s clearly not, your best bet might be to try living someplace with a bit less bite. Maybe swim across the river and “make the most” of Hoboken. It’s a nice town, and I’m sure the Cake Boss family would be happy to have you.

Consider yourself reassured.

Best of luck, Dante

Yours, CC ’25 Dear BUMPKIN, There’s a phrase that comes to mind whenever I hear a story like yours. It goes: New York doesn’t want you. It sounds harsh, and it is harsh, but the number one rule of living in this city is to shut up and take it. Showing up with expectations for anything but a terrible time is, to put it plainly, laughably stupid.

P.S. And just a tip. You’re clearly a curious and foolish kid. But Buddy (the reigning Cake Boss) gets angry when asked questions. So I’d drop the whole Katie Couric routine unless you want a frozen brick of fondant to the face.

The city takes, it does not give, and the second rule of living in it is that you shouldn’t want to be here. Excitement is tacky, and optimism is a pre-Y2K thing.

Being an “extrovert” (which is repulsive, by the way) won’t do you any good if everyone in the club views you as a kid on take-your-child-to-work-day, just there to see real leather for the first time in your life. Keep blabbering about meeting people, visiting the Statue of Liberty, and enjoying yourself, and people will avoid you like they avoid the water-bottle guy’s bulge (which is to say, by a thirty-foot radius). So leave your Nebraska-goggles at the door—or just don’t come at all.

Whatever barley-wrapped textbooks they had you using back home in the

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Illustration by Aeja Rosette

THE BLUE AND WHITE

THE POSTCARD

Postcard by Aeja Rosette + Michael Colton

SEPTEMBER 2021

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The Crossword