Issue 1 Spring 2023

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Vol. 69 NO. 1

OBERLIN’S ALTERNATIVE STUDENT NEWSPAPER EST. 1999 February 17, 2023

ISSUE 1 COVER ART Front Cover: Ever Hyman Back Cover: Ginger Kohn

Saffron Forsberg and Teagan Hughes Co-Editors-in-Chief

Raghav Raj Arts and Culture Editor

Julian Crosetto Layout Editor

Reggie Goudeau Features Editor

Isabel Hardwig Bad Habits Editor

Maia Hadler Art Director

Fionna Farrell Opinions Editor

Skye Jalal, Zach Terrillion, Ellen Efstathiou and Max Miller Staff Writers

Frances McDowell and Molly Chapin Production Assistants

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Utatibusdam, offic tem eum reiciatia velluptaqui tendam qui autatibus vo lupti rem resciis eum quae mossitium voluptur ab int, voluptatus as est invel endi ipsum erume nobitaepudit autas autatem volore sime inihiti un tiani hillitium quibusapit omnim rernat omnis acersped et vendae sent dolent es quid eum rest hilibus.

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The Rejection of African American Studies Marks a New Height for the Right’s Fearmongering Reggie Goudeau Features Editor As most of my frequent readers likely know by now, the College Board has recently revised its curriculum for AP African American Studies. This decision conveniently came a mere few weeks after Governor Ron DeSantis rejected a proposed AP African American Studies course in Florida high schools. During that incident, a January 12th letter to the College Board revealed a number of concerning comments from the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Articulation. The office claimed the course was “...inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value” according to DeSantis administration rejects proposed AP African American Studies class in Florida high schools

by Steve Contorno. A spokesman for DeSantis, Bryan Griffen, went on to tell CNN that the course prior to the revisions “...leaves large, ambiguous gaps that can be filled with additional ideological material, which we will not allow.”

This series of actions was not unprecedented and occurred due to a larger cultural war on the teaching of Black history and highlighting Black stories (namely from the U.S. Republican Party). In the months prior to this incident, many Republicans and right-wing news stations like Fox News have been demonizing what they call “Critical Race Theory” (CRT).

Critical Race Theory does not necessarily have a universal definition and is more of an overarching term than anything else. Still, for the sake of argument, I’ll use the following definition from the party credited for coin-

ing the term, according to the New York Times in “Critical Race Theory: A Brief History.” This individual is named Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a Black law professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Law and Columbia Law School. According to her statement in the aforementioned piece, Critical Race Theory “argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions” Furthermore, Crenshaw claims“...the theory says that racism is a systemic problem, not only a matter of individual bigotry.” Using this definition, it’s pretty easy to see the reason why many right-wingers and conservatives are feeling threatened by this term and its implications for their “land of the free.” These claims of racism being ingrained into society should not seem scary to anyone who has been subject to said discrimination, nor to allies of those people. The only party who has a reason to fear the average person learning of racism and discrimination’s casual integration into most of everyday life are those who use these methods for control.

This conclusion is in line with Crenshaw’s statement, “The rhetoric allows for racial equity laws, demands, and movements to be framed as aggression and discrimination against white people.” This is a tactic that occurred decades ago during the peak of the Civil Rights movement and then carried over into the protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Those in power, namely white and often wealthy people, always resort to this eventually when they feel their Illustration by Molly Chapin Production Assistant

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hold on existing power structures is loosening or threatened. After all, structures of white supremacy like the police allow them to criminalize Black and brown individuals while simultaneously having a natural defense for those criticizing repeated instances of police brutality. Many “radical” leftists and even the average Democrat often wonder how those like DeSantis or Donald Trump are able to maintain power without repercussions. After all, we all decided racism, indirect or direct, was bad years ago right? Well even if most of society does believe that (which I doubt more and more every year), those with the most influence do not share these sentiments, which is heavily indicated by many of these figures’ public statements, and private policy decisions.

Furthermore, most of DeSantis and Trump’s audience are extremely tuned into the admittedly limited scope of news media like One America News or Fox News. These stations are notorious for their fear-mongering and framing of threats to the status quo as an attack on these viewers’ livelihoods, beliefs, and rights to free speech. They frame protesters advocating for defunding the police as criminals and obstacles to a vague definition of “law and order.” Unfortunately, they’ve largely succeeded based on most cities’ police budgets only increasing even after the murders of even more Black people in recent years such as George Floyd and Tyre Nichols. Their campaigns succeeded so well that even moderates like President Joe Biden have pushed for nonviolence, understanding, and even larger funding for the police even in the wake of their repeated “mistakes.” This leaves me with little faith in the future of Africana Studies and all of its adjacent courses and curriculums. These platforms have largely succeeded by changing the definition of Critical Race Theory to mean anything that promotes the idea of inequality in America since that means America isn’t perfect. As flawed as this logic is, I fear this pattern from the news and Republicans of blatant misinformation will continue. Without action, it will eventually lead to more places giving in to the pressure of ignoring discrimination and its place in American history.

As dismal as it is, I’m not entirely sure if there’s a reliable method of combating this fearmongering from individual conservatives in power and the larger companies looking for more of their content. Despite DeSantis being one of the first Republicans to openly criticize their curriculum, the College Board changed their plans for this course across the nation in a matter of days following their comments. My beef with standardized testing aside, the College Board is a pretty widely accepted authority on matters of education throughout the country. If even they’re quick to fold after questionable criticism, what does that mean for the rest of America? How long is it before entire institutions like Oberlin begin bending to the will of the radical right? I know this may seem preposterous now, but how plausible did the denial of systemic racism by mainstream news, or even a section in AP African American Studies on “Black Conservatism” seem a mere five years ago? My point is, things change, and this place is rapidly changing for the worse if you’re anyone who’d benefit from more of the world acknowledging racism, or even the value of studying and appreciating Black people and history.

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The Fuzziness of Fizz: Is Oberlin’s Latest Pyramid Scheme Really Worth the Download?

Zach Terrillion Staff Writer An epidemic swept campus on the first day of the semester. It wasn’t COVID-19 or RSV, but rather donuts and posters. Almost overnight, a small slip was left outside nearly every dorm room on campus.

It advertised an elusive new app dubbed “Fizz.” It is an anonymous chat service billing itself as an alternative to other institutions such as YikYak. Major universities like Rice were already using it. It featured various Oberlin-specific memes. Making fun of Yeobie? Check. Men being roasted? Check. The final bit on the slip is a QR Code. They really wanted our download!

Fizz’s marketing plan did not end with the posters. Many may recall rows of students yielding rows of Dunkin’ Donuts outside dining halls. They were unavoidable. If you downloaded the app, they’d hand you a free pastry. It became a meme for about 12 hours. One friend posted on Discord a meme of Neo dodging bullets in “The Matrix,” except the bullets are “fizz people.” Many at Oberlin consider Fizz to be a pyramid scheme or bizarre social experiment.

I was skeptical of these conspiracies until the night of January 30th. I was walking by Barrows- the dorm which reveals all schemes. I witnessed a group of residents meeting with another person in an SUV. They were loading wagons filled with DOZENS of new donut boxes. There may be something afoot this spring semester. Perhaps this Fizz, this YikYak alternative, is a bizarre scheme.

Fizz is not necessarily a scheme or false document, but a growing service. It was founded in 2020 by two then-Stanford attendees: Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer. The two were members of their school’s COVID class, having their entire first-year experience uprooted for Zoom sessions. The duo devised Fizz in response to isolated students on campus, and to create a thriving campus community by way of the web.

To investigate Fizz, I downloaded the app, following the QR Code on the poster. It’s pretty different from YikYak and in some ways for the better. For one, there is more verification, making me register through my phone number and, most importantly, my school email. The only users on Fizz are certified Obies, envisioned by its creators as an “app by college students for college students.” This campus focus could actually work. YikYak often features activity from a mix of students and locals. This is usually fine, but the presence of non-Obie strangers and the app’s anonymity could lead to some sticky situations and dynamics.

The app’s student exclusivity allows more opportunities for community-building. I was fascinated by Fizz’s layout, as it felt much more like Reddit than YikYak. Both of the apps are hell sites, but at least Reddit allows room (to a degree) for genuine human communication and connection. Like Reddit, the

Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

new app has like and dislike ratios, dubbed “Fizzies.”

Make of this term what you will. You can include edited images on the app, adding extra tools you don’t get with the other guy. There are clubs advertised, polls to vote upon, and even mildly wholesome shoutouts. There is more than one type of post, which creates a space with legit energy. I didn’t feel quite the same pit of despair as when I log on YikYak. Fizz comes off as more welcoming. It lacks some of the typical harassment, existential dread, and incoherent bot-isms you get on the Y and Y. This is partially due to a legit moderation policy. Fizz’s founders claimed to hire about 15 moderators per school to supplement the usual AI content screening.

“They are not supposed to say who they are. Their job is to keep the app going,” according to an anonymous student who worked with Fizz that big marketing day. Harmful, toxic posts can supposedly be removed in minutes. Perhaps this policy is influencing the app’s more friendly tone. However, I will concede that the app, at Oberlin at least, is still in its early phases. Like most things, it could become worse the bigger it gets.

The app is growing nationally, partially thanks to mobilization from within schools like Oberlin. This semester, the thing that seems most afoot is one giant app-growing machine. Fizz is using its lofty funds from investors to recruit student ambassadors to promote the app across campus. In other words, they are the ones who hand out the donuts. At Oberlin, you could earn money for sharing a provided graphic to your Insta story on Jan 30th, as well as for distributing donuts and posters.

According to one such ambassador, their main mission was to get as many people onto Fizz as possible. This person personally learned about Fizz through an upperclassmen, someone known and trusted rather than a sketchy solicitor, and the upperclassmen learned about Fizz through mass advertising on sites like LinkedIn. The ambassadors received their posters and donuts through the PT, a member of Fizz who flew in with the goods. “They facilitated everything,” according to the student. They were instructed by this representative on their shifts and were put to work. At the end of the day, Fizz followed through on their promises of payment, delivered through Venmo. Little bundles from recruiting new ambassadors, putting up posters, donuts, hats, etc. “They kept their word. I was paid immediately.”

They also had plenty of donuts to eat after.

YikYak, as popular as it is, is not exactly liked.

More people seem to be checking the funniest posts recapped on Instagram than the thing itself. The rude/concerning commentary, the unkempt horniness, and the dead memes aren’t ideal. Still, the forums are often vital to catching the latest discourse on campus. I have been caught in a toxic web of deleting the app in my depression before re-downloading it to get all the hot takes after some major tea goes down.

With Fizz, however, we may no longer need to depend on YikYak and its limited moderation. From my exact 32 minutes of experience with the new app, it shows potential. Each person on the app is verified and ready to engage in some legit discourse in a safer setting that feels more like social media, even if it remains faceless. The circumstances of its growth

on campus are sketchy. When asked whether they believe Fizz is a pyramid scheme, the ambassador said, “I see how it can seem suspicious. Our promotion was one day only and then we were gone.” However, they personally didn’t get this impression. The PT had apparently been a college student who promoted Fizz on their campus. They dropped out of school after being hired by Fizz to promote their software across the country, including here in Ohio. There are human faces behind these operations, as insane as they sound.

Fizz, in all its fuzziness, may fulfill the promises of its many, many, many ads. It may be a scheme, but it could also be a scheme for the greater good. Compared to YikYak, “Fizz seems a bit more calmer than that. There’s more Oberlin jokes and Oberlin content.

I can relate more to that stuff.”

If you hate living in Ohio, maybe you should think about why Skye Jalal Staff Writer

At Oberlin, you soon become familiar with a certain chorus of lamentations about life in Ohio. The lead sopranos, I’ve found, are natives of a certain unnamed northern city off the Hudson River, and their cries cover many topics: the winter, the cornfields, the drabness of the suburbs, and so-forth. Listening to them, it’s almost hard to believe that Oberlin is not some large, private-funded prison, but instead somewhere we all elected to attend, and many of our families pay large sums of money to send us to.

In a way, I do sympathize with the struggle. If I came to rural Ohio expecting it to resemble lower Manhattan, I would also probably be pretty disappointed upon arrival. Still, the narrative is tired and I think both the city evangelists and my own eardrums could benefit from some new talking points.

It is a strange relationship, the one between the Oberlin student and the land around us. I felt the strangeness a few weeks ago while shivering in a wedding dress in a small church parking lot near I-71. I was working on a photo project with a friend and we had been driving around all day to different churches in Lorain to take photos. I was cold and uncomfortable, feeling like a trespasser in several ways.

Most acutely, I was aware of my friend and I’s brownness, alone in a space we didn’t belong to, and the bright-veneer whiteness of the dress on my body, making me stand out

from the landscape and blend in with the church. It made me nervous. At one point, I pulled a steel pipe from the back of my truck, gesturing to it as my weapon of choice if any white hoods were to come running. It was a joke, but it also wasn’t. We had seen the flags and billboards from the highway while driving over. I had read the news.

Aside from that, I felt like a trespasser in another sense. Scared as I was to be a Black person, I noticed a certain power that I carried as an Oberlin student. Not that I believe in the right of white people to any of this land, and much less so the right of the church, yet I still wondered if it was an entitlement that made me feel so free to use someone else’s sacred space as the backdrop of a photograph. There I was, nervous to sign longer than a 3 month lease on a storage unit in this state, but feeling apt to tell its stories.

I ended up not printing that roll of film. The photos were dark and a little out of focus, but more so, I knew I hadn’t thought about my relationship with the landscape around me deeply enough.

A description of a world-map on the walls of a 1920s British classroom reads, “The world map was red for Empire and dull brown for the rest, with Australia and Canada vastly exaggerated in size by Mercator’s projection. The Green which Meridian placed London at the center of the world.” Unfortunately, many Oberlin students have formed a Illustation by Molly Chapin Production Assistant

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Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

similar mental map of the world as the imperial British empire - centering what they know in bright red, and everything else that is more rural, more conservative, and quite frankly, poorer, forming a dull brown expanse around it.

There are criticisms to be had about Oberlin’s location in terms of accessibility, however much of the “I hate Ohio” narrative is just a thinly veiled classism. At times, even I am surprised by how readily a blatant hatred of poor people will be admitted on this campus. “Love the Marxist theory, hate the proletariat,” it seems to be. Or perhaps its “Hate the proletariat, love their Carrhartts”.

The town of Oberlin has a poverty rate that is almost double the national average. About 1 in 4. I really do

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wonder if people know this or care as they complain about the cornfields, the strip-malls, the trailer parks, the visual blandness, the poor transit system, the lack of things to do, and whatever else that is on the agenda.

What they are referring to is evidence of economic despair. Oberlin students complain about Ohio as if the communities around us elected to have their cultural centers bulldozed

by Dollar Generals. The uncomfortable truth is that the major difference between where many of us came from and Ohio, isn’t a matter of city versus rural, or red versus blue, but a glaring wealth disparity.

It’s a wealth disparity that we are greatly padded from experiencing fully, with regular shopping shuttles and musicians bussed in on the

weekly from all over the country.

But for some this still isn’t enough.

The extreme disgust with having to live like much of America does, the disgust with proximity to the “wrong kind” of poverty- is an ailment that can only be cured with flights home and semesters abroad to European countries.

Oberlin complaints about the standard of living here are markedly blind to the fact that other people are experiencing these issues with much greater force.

If not blind to the issues of class, the blanket statements of Ohio disdain carry a heavier weight- a belief that Oberlin students deserve better than the people around us. Aware of the class dynamic, the Ohio-hate then stems from a belief that Oberlin students are uniquely special and undeserving to live in this landscape, entitled to a transit system and bustling nightlife, in a way that the people around us aren’t.

This is why I wouldn’t say that I sympathize with the “Support Gibsons” signs that you’ll see staked around greater Oberlin, but I do recognize how there is a certain depth behind them. I understand how if you lived in a community where the greatest economic power was constantly bulldozing over residents, laying off workers, and busting unions, and then its students pranced around as if they are supreme human beingshow anything taking down Oberlin would be a cause to celebrate.

I say this, because many Oberlin students will justify their unsavory attitudes towards the people around us, with the perceived ideological differences between the college and community. However, this first rejects the porousness between the two communities, and the reality of how Oberlin-esque privilege contributes to the conditions in which ideological extremism is able to breed. Secondly, it rejects the fact that Ohio is not a monolith- it is the land of abolitionists, those who ran away to them.

This “Trump Country” is indigenous land.

My mom grew up on the Georgia coast, so I spend many of my summers driving from Atlanta down to Tybee Island to be with my family.

The whole island is only three miles long. When work is a mile away and family is even closer, life forms this wonderful orbit around the home.

People have the time to labor on their homes and their families, in a way there isn’t the time for in the city.

You have the time to pop back home halfway through the workday to water

the plants and check if the sourdough is rising.

It’s something you can’t really understand from afar. It’s something you can’t fully appreciate unless you’ve spent almost 20 summers with your aunt, watching her leave for work in the morning, coming back midday to make you a salad for lunch, and then arrivingat the end of the day with zucchinis from her dads garden to make dinner with the tomatoes from her own, everyday.

A couple weeks ago in Atlanta, I was in a conversation about Georgia beaches, and was surprised to hear the Tybee ocean described as “shit brown.” After looking back at photos, I have to admit, the water does look a little khaki colored. But it was something I had never thought about before.

Me and the person who then went on further to call Tybee a “white trash Seaside”, were both talking about the same three-mile stretch of island. Our difference in perception lied in that we had different metrics for measuring it. In all my summers spent on the island, I had never thought about the clearness of the water. It had never mattered to me.

Compare this to the last time I went to New York, when I spent my time wondering only why parking cost more than my phone bill, and where all the trees ran away to.

Different people can experience the same landscape in different ways.

Perhaps the perceived lacking of Ohio, isn’t an inherent lacking of the landscape, but a gap in one’s understanding of it.

Last semester, my friends and I went to a “Root Beers and Yesteryears’’ event at the Oberlin Heritage Center. We were younger than the median age there, by probably about 40 years. On the side porch of the OHC building, there was a man playing a phonograph recording of Thomas Edison’s speech following the end of WW1. Dressed in 1930’s period wear, the man spoke to us from the porch in an assumed transAtlantic accent about the history of the RCA dog for almost half an hour, and it was delightful.

There is something special about living here;about the quiet, the grass, and the midnight stumbles down Union street. It isn’t home, and it probably isn’t where I’ll want to be forever, but it is something different.

Perhaps there are other things to be learned from this land. Maybe there are things to be loved and cherished, and possibly somewhere down the line, things that will be missed.

I Won the AVI Valentine’s Day Dinner I am the luckiest person alive. I know. You don’t have to tell me.

Max Miller Staff Writer

Stevie Valentines Day Dinner Photo by Ma x Miller

When I saw the Instagram post about a raffle to win a ticket to an AVI Valentine’s dinner, I entered with a sort of morbid, masochistic curiosity. What romance could AVI possibly offer? The dinner was scheduled to coincide with my long-distance girlfriend Daisha’s first time visiting Oberlin. What better way of welcoming her to our glorious town than to bring her on a nice date night to a dining hall?

So, I entered the raffle, and, with some obscure stroke of luck, I was tagged in AVI’s Instagram story as one of fifteen winners a few days later. It was a dream come true, so much so that I messaged AVI, “This is the best day of my

life,” to which they responded with a Google form where I was instructed to choose which entree I fancied.

On Friday night, February 10, Daisha and I walked into Stevie unsure of how the night would go. I halfway expected fluorescent lighting, circular tables, and plastic weighted centerpieces with tin foil hearts, accompanied by the usual Stevie food.

What I did not expect was an entire section of the dining hall to be roped off in an attempt to create an environment for raffle-winners. We walked into the section, greeted by three attendees in fancy dress. They directed us to our assigned table in an adapted conference room, passing by various duos, some clearly couples, others friends. Blackout shades blocked the area so that attendees could forget that they were in Stevie.

The elaborate table sets were beautiful and clearly displayed with care, complete with small tea candles, a circular vase containing a bouquet of flowers, and red napkins folded in the shape of roses. Large windows framed the clouds perfectly as nighttime transformed the skies from auburn to deep blue. Soft jazz played from a speaker next to an appetizer-clad table in the front of the room. It felt a little like that one Phineas and Ferb episode where they build a cruise ship and dress Buford like Baby Cupid, suspending him from the ceiling in an attempt to create a romantic environment for Baljeet and his date. (Worth mentioning that the rope breaks and Buford falls on the table, smushing the meal carefully prepared by Ferb. Apologies to those that did not get this reference.)

The dinner started out with two appetizers: a Curry Chicken Satay Skewer with Yogurt Sauce and a Beet Poke Bowl, which was the true showstopper. It had a little spice to it, and according to Daisha, “the red shit on top is so good.” The only demerit of the dish was that the beets proved to be relatively hard to handle, resulting in my staining the white tablecloth not once but twice. A nice little strawberry salad was also provided, which was very cute!

Entrees further proved that this was not a typical Stevie dinner. We were served a “Dual Plate of Beef Filet with Lavender Demi, Butter Poached Garlic Shrimp, Seared Yukon Potatoes, and Sauteed Lemon Broccoli.” The filet was wonderful and the shrimp was exquisite. As a rookie food reviewer, I was unsure what to write about either, so my notes contained little bits of inforContinued on Page 8 7

mation such as, “genuinely shocked,” “yum,” and, “mouthfeel?” The broccoli was beautifully cooked and perfectly flavored, a stark contrast to the usual steamed Stevie variety. The potatoes were kinda whatever, but I am not picky. I wrote, “they taste like potatoes.” The entree was served with an edible flower, of which Daisha wrote, “the more you chew, the more intense the feeling of Nickelodeon slime infiltrating your entire mouth becomes.”

We appreciated the gesture, regardless of taste.

The event was well-produced but a bit bizarre; the absurdity of having a nice candlelit dinner in Stevenson Hall was not lost on me. And yet, the atmosphere, though manufactured, felt strangely romantic. It is possible I am simply a sucker for candles, jazz, and Martinelli’s. But, the Stevie staff achieved the feat of creating a comfortable, soothing level of ambience that was complemented by an air of conversation that surrounded the room. Something about it felt strangely serene, almost contemplative.

Ultimately, the food didn’t really matter. Neither did the pristine tablecloth or the rose-shaped napkins. Really, what mattered was the individualized intimacy each duo had been lucky enough to find themselves existing within.

There is nothing like sitting across from someone you love, whether platonically or romantically, with jazz playing, illuminated only by candlelight. Sometimes, you stumble into a cozy pocket, whether due to curiosity or sheer stupidity. Enjoy it.

Femme ’n isms: Exhibits Are Fluid Zach Terrillion Staff Writer One of the artworks presented in “Femme n’ isms, Part I: Bodies Are Fluid,” the first in a series of exhibitions planned by the Allen Memorial Art Museum, is a work by Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim. It is a screen-print depicting the mythological cyclops, Polyphemus. This androgynous depiction of the creature is accompanied by a quote from Oppenheim, who claimed that art reflects “the entire human being, which is both male and female.”

Her art offers a direct challenge to the gender binary: how can art, in its subjectivity, deconstruct the roles of gender, particularly among femmes?

This is the primary goal of the Allen Art Museum’s new installation, which takes up ¾ of the upstairs Ripin Gallery. This exhibit explores feminist art from the perspective of intersectionality, observing liminal identities based on non-whiteness, non-cisgenderism, and non-heteronormativity. The title “Femme n’ isms” implies traditional feminine pre-

sentation, but also something more. A celebration of women but “also femmes and the feminine.”

Contemporary art curator Sam Adams, student assistant Fudi Fickenscher, and multiple community advisors served as the main organizers. The community advising present ties this exhibition closely to shared authority; people in and outside of the curation world created it.

If I could use a word to describe the works on display, it would be “shedding.” Shedding all barriers around, whether for womanhood or modern art itself. For the first piece you encounter in the exhibit, you see pretty literal “shedding.” An animated video installation by Korean artist Heesoo Kwon depicts women in a bathhouse leaving behind their human skins to become gigantic snake people.

In removing these skins, they remove the gendered labels and roles that hold them back. It is uncanny, frankly terrifying, but ultimately profound as hell. It sets the tone for the whole

exhibit.

The objects in the Ripin invites visitors to shed their skins like the women in Kwon’s digital bathhouse, queering and abstracting their identities to create “-isms.” A watercolor piece by second-wave feminist painter Hannah Wilke claims to be a selfportrait. Still, its abstract, almost labial presentation makes an “-ism” of the human form itself.

The exhibit also creates “-isms” of art, playing with our definitions of it. I was particularly fascinated by a scattered series of polaroids depicting various Black American women in ordinary situations.

They are feminine forms for sure, smiling in teeny sepia-toned corners and ruminating on secluded black and white beaches.

They have lives that aren’t too extraordinary, which makes them more so.

These women’s marginalized identities are allowed a space to be authentic, creating an unconventional archive. In viewing them, the visitor “sheds” their vision of art being

auteur-driven. It can just be simple bits of humanity for us to appreciate.

The exhibit organizes itself by broad themes rather than by chronology or artist. We start with “body parts and impossible wholes.” These explore the human form, separating and mixing it with concepts like labor, patriarchy, and psychology. A highlight here is multiple pieces by contemporary artist Kiki Smith, who often uses unconventional material to deconstruct images of the female form. See, for example, a woman’s pregnant belly made out of plaster titled “Shield.”

The following section covers themes of the divine. Feminine forms interact with icons of religion and mythology.

It’s here we see the Polyphemus silkscreen by Oppenheim. A piece by Betye Saar, noted for her depictions of Black Womanhood, shows two breasts and other human features arising from an ocean framed in a rainbow. It channels “mysterious

Photos by Zach Terrillion

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transforming gifts by which dreams, memory, and experience become art.”

It is another example of this exhibit embracing ambiguity, in this case, within dreams.

You also find the subjects of pop culture and aging. There are various works of pop art playing with how the media depicts female forms. It tinkers with iconography, though not quite the same type as “the divine.”

For aging, the final piece of the whole exhibit is surprisingly simple. It is a pair of photographs showing off the abstract works of before. Titled “Three Sisters,” the first image depicts three Chinese women in their youth, while the second portrays two survivors in their old age. It introduces mortality to feminine expression.

Overall, this exhibit adheres well to its goals. It is quite possibly the queerest exhibit I’ve ever encountered. It’s the first time I’ve stepped into an art museum and found my inner gender crisis projected onto

canvas. It plays with feminine forms ranging from kitschy monuments by Andy Warhol to liberatory work for marginalized groups. They say art is subjective, and this exhibit expounds on how art’s fluidity can help illustrate gender’s fluidity, abstracting itself to “-isms” as it picks itself apart.

Illustration by Niovi Rahme Contributor

Got a Light?

An Inside Look at Pearl Tolliver-Shaw’s Wondrous Lighter Collection Max Miller Staff Writer

Pearl Tolliver-Shaw’s lighter collection Photo by Max Miller

“Got a light?” It’s a sentence frequently uttered on this campus, no matter the time, location, or weather. If you haven’t been asked it, you’ve at least heard it being asked, casually at times and desperately at others; I imagine some readers have been that desperate asker in a time of need. It is possible that you have asked Pearl Tolliver-Shaw to help light your cigarette. If so, you have been lucky enough to borrow one of her many elaborate lighters, even if only for a fleeting moment.

Pearl first agreed to give me a sneak peek into her lighter collection around October with the condition that she first bring back some of her favorite lighters from her home in Brooklyn, New York. After four-ish months, we finally met up to discuss her famed collection.

Last Tuesday, Pearl led me into her room in Keep excitedly, moving a drying paintby-numbers off of a chair so that I could sit comfortably. The walls were artfully decorated with an Aubrey Plaza baseball card, a maroon Oberlin College Lanes t-shirt, and a poster advertising the aptly-named Pearl Lager Beer, among other funky little knick knacks Pearl seemed to have garnered in one place or another.

She began gathering lighters from various locations in her room, seemingly procuring them from thin air. Once she had exhausted hiding places, Pearl began lovingly placing them on her gray shag rug, telling me about the history of her collection. She told me that

she, “had more at home but had to force myself to only bring one bag of them.”

When asked about her ideal lighter, Pearl said, “I really want one that’s a joint holder with either Aubrey Plaza’s face on it or Megan Fox’s face on it. I would actually love a lighter that has a case that has Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body on it. That would be pretty sick.”

She said her love for lighters partially stemmed from the “journey of a lighter.”

Pearl said, “Muscle memory: you put a lighter in your pocket. And then, next thing you know, it ends up in someone else’s pocket and then someone else’s pocket. You never know where it’s been.” Pearl told me, “I want this collection to be at my funeral.”

Though it may seem odd to place a mundane, disposal object on this emotional level, it is clear that Pearl’s lighters are almost inherently emotional. Each piece of her collection takes strength from the context around it, whether it’s the people Pearl is with, the place that the lighter was acquired, or the memories that have been made with the object. Each lighter is inseparable from its emotional content; every piece captures moments in time.

Pearl viewed her lighters fondly while answering questions, showing each treasure equal attention. She became visibly disturbed when I asked her to pick her top five lighters to form her personal lighter all-star team.

After some deliberation, here’s what Pearl decided on:

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Love’s Lighter “One thing about me is I love Love’s. Love’s is a gas station and an awesome place. My sister, when she went on her road trip, became obsessed with Love’s. She and her friend would stop at every one. She got the logo tattooed on her leg and sent a picture of the tattoo to the manager of Love’s. They sent her a ton of free merchandise, including lighters and a JBL speaker that says Love’s on it. So that’s from that. But I also just love Love’s.”

Miss Marlboro “This one actually doesn’t work. But it’s pretty amazing and it comes with a case, which I’m a big fan of. It’s beautiful. Feel how heavy it is. I love its little case. I got it for my birthday. I’m not sure how it works. I tried to put fluid in the bottom. Didn’t work.”

J & M 4eva “This is my sister in a bikini on a lighter. She got these for her girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. This obviously has to make the all-star. It feels like I’m carrying my sister around in my pocket.

It would be insulting to not have that in the allstar.”

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Las Vegas “I like this one because it lights differently than others. It has a really nice texture. It’s just fun.

This was also a gift. My sister got it in Las Vegas.

I haven’t been to Las Vegas, unfortunately. It’s on my list though. Isn’t it on everyone’s? This one is just really chic, you know?”

Whiskey South Carolina “These are kind of annoying because they’re not actually the best lighters. But it’s not always about the ability. I feel like I have to put this in there because it’s just awesome. This one’s from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It’s about three and a half years old. This one is definitely from a souvenir shop.”

Glass Onion: Better Than You Think, Actually Ellen Efstathiou Staff Writer

Off the bat, I love murder mysteries. Everything from Poirot to Clue to The Hardy Boys is delightful to me, so when I saw Knives Out for the first time, I was enthralled. (I mean, I probably would have liked it even if it wasn’t very good, but luckily it was amazing.) This also meant that when I heard that there was going to be another movie about Benoit Blanc I couldn’t wait for it to come out.

Of course, I was also a bit worried when I heard there was going to be a sequel. For the most part, sequels that weren’t planned for from the start aren’t very good. By all accounts, Knives Out was supposed to be the only story involving this particular detective. However, Glass Onion has proved that sometimes, these unplanned sequels can be really good.

The general consensus that people seem to have about Glass Onion is that, while it’s good, it’s not as good as its predecessor Knives Out. Here’s why I think that is. When Knives Out came out, no one knew that it was going to be good. It was a murder mystery, a genre that hadn’t been used very much in recent memory, and it was an original story. So, it was a pleasant surprise when it turned out to be great.

I think that Glass Onion hasn’t been as widely liked by people because it didn’t have the shock factor of being good. Everyone went into watching the movie knowing that it was at least going to be good even if it wasn’t as good as Knives Out. So when it was good, but not better than Knives Out, people felt let down.

Another thing that I think affects Glass Onion is that Benoit Blanc is now the main character. While this is more in line with how murder mysteries are usually told, it is a difference from the first movie.

While Helen does take over as the main character in the last half of the movie, for the most part we are trying to figure out the mystery along with Blanc. And a character that is an outsider to this situation trying to figure out the mystery is not as compelling as someone who has actual stakes in the plot. Blanc has no emotions tied to the mystery being solved. This is why the climax focuses on Helen getting revenge, and Blanc is nowhere to be seen.

I think people are criticizing Glass

Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

Onion for the reasons that they praised Knives Out. A lot of reviews of Knives Out point out that it doesn’t follow a typical structure of a murder mystery. We find out who did it and how five minutes into the movie via flashback. It later turns out that what we thought happened wasn’t actually what happened, but for the majority of the movie we think we know what’s going on. Glass Onion does the same thing, although we don’t find out the twist until much later in the movie.

In fact, I think that Glass Onion follows the structure of a typical murder mystery better than Knives

Out did. There is a setup of all of the motivations that each character could possibly have, there’s a murder, clues are gathered, and finally there is the reveal. The only difference is that the clues are gathered during the flashback instead of in the present day.

Something I appreciate about Knives Out and Glass Onion is the way that memory is played with. A lot of times in murder mysteries, something is shown exactly how it is, and it’s up to the audience to notice possible background details. However, Rian Johnson’s movies will show shots in the way that the characters remember them. Examples include whether Miles hands Duke his glass

in Glass Onion, or Harlan’s voice overlapping when Marta is trying to remember when to turn in Knives Out. It really shows how inconsistent memory can be and adds some realism to the story.

I think that if Glass Onion had come out before Knives Out, it would have had the same cultural impact.

The writing is still great, the cast is still great, the twist is still great, the social commentary is still great. I think that it is only the fact that Glass Onion is a sequel that people are not praising it as much. So you can see clearly — like a glass onion! — that Glass Onion is good.

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In Pursuit of Grace: An Interview With Mavi Raghav Raj Arts & Culture Editor

Mavi chooses his words carefully.

The Charlotte-based rapper — and Bachelors of Science candidate at Howard University — is only 23, but he speaks with a piercing clarity beyond his years, at once laconic and ruthlessly incisive. He’s already been established as a generational voice in the hip-hop underground, having collaborated with the likes of Earl Sweatshirt, Pink Siifu, and The Alchemist; he’s an omnivorous talent who’s as comfortable over the fractured loops of contemporaries like MIKE and Navy Blue as he is with lush, densely ornate instrumentation.

Currently, Mavi’s on tour behind his 2022 album Laughing So Hard It Hurts, one of the year’s best, a kaleidoscopic, vibrant record that’s unflinchingly honest and undeniably beautiful, even in its rawest moments. As a bookend to the first leg of that tour, Mavi arrived at Oberlin on Friday, February 5 for a show with Boston rapper Diz, bringing his sunny warmth to the ‘Sco’s stage on an otherwise cold night, wearing a smile as bright as the “Mayor” chain around his neck. Before the show, I sat down with Mavi to discuss the album, being on the road, the literature that inspires him, and more.

personal requirements going in. The bigness and the vastness is because I hadn’t released anything for like three years. The personalness is because that’s ultimately all I could lean on in terms of what was gonna make it hold weight in the mind of the listener. Those were really my main goals: making it expansive in terms of it touching a lot of different sounds, to where the live performance has a lot of different dimensions, but then having it centered around what’s personal to me. Because at the end of the day, people will attach themselves to truth and meaning. We’re all very overstimulated nowadays, and it’s like a marketplace that’s too fast for any of our attention spans. So y’all just need some meaning, and some truth, y’know?

It covers a lot of ground, but one of the main themes I noticed on the album is the way you’re examining your masculinity. Back in 2020, you were set to release a sophomore album titled Shango, which you ended up shelving. How has that understanding of your masculinity evolved in those two years between that and this album, and how have you processed that?

I thought I was going to be a dad last year. That was a moment of extreme vulnerability and prostration toward the progression of my life story. I had to sacrifice myself to the journey, because things slipped out of my control. And to re-define myself as a man within that ceding of control has meant that I value my own flexibility and resilience, my ability to corral the wild animal forces in my life.

I wrote Shango in the weeks after they killed George Floyd. And I was living in Washington, D.C. I was going out there protesting, all skimasked up and shit, and it really felt like America was gonna be over. I bought a gun for the first time. It was just a very aggressive album, out of fear, and I was centering my masculinity in the part of myself that could kill something. This album is more of me centering my masculinity in the part of myself that can protect something.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To start, you’re on your first headlining tour. What has that experience been like?

Really fun. It’s required a lot out of me as a leader, because I have to drive the whole thing. It’s all me, you know? I had to pay closer attention to my body, so I’ve started running, exercising a lot more and shit. It’s not my first time on tour, but it’s my first time on my tour, so the relationships I’ve built have been a little more tight knit with each city. And I’m able to see the city in more detail, so it’s been really good. It’s been everything I could ask for and more.

You’re touring behind Laughing So Hard It Hurts, which feels like a really significant record for you. What led you towards something so big in scope yet deeply personal?

Those are the two good words to describe it. Those were kinda my

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Mavi at the Sco Photo by Raghav Raj

I feel like that process requires

Mavi at the Sco Photo by Raghav Raj

is about the flows, you know what I’m saying? So there’s times and songs on this album where, basically, it’s just about that.

Another thing: two of my favorite rappers are Future and Young Thug.

There’s this one thing that Future always says when they ask him about his flow. He was in an interview about his new album, and he said that “you know, it’s about the vibe, it’s about the moment.” And that really used to just sound like a vague, airhead rapper kinda answer to me, but then I realized that the thing that makes me go back to a Future song might be a half-second, the way he said like two words. For someone to really extract and distill and concentrate those moments across an album is what attaches our memory to the beauty of that album. And I wanted to give the listeners as many of those kinds of moments as possible, with what I can control through my voice.

I think that sort of presence plays a big part in what makes the album so interesting, but there’s also a lot of depth in your lyricism. The album begins with the song “High John,” and as a whole is based on High John the Conqueror and that story.

Folk hero man. Slavery freedom man. Strong laughter man. His laughter guides the slaves to freedom.

a lot of sensitivity and internalizing within yourself, which is something I hear a lot of throughout the album. One of my favorite songs is “Chinese Finger Trap,” which is this devastating, brutal, really sad song about tragedy and loss.

That’s the best one! *laughs* How has your music served as a way for you to work out that grief and that loss that’s so prevalent throughout the song and the album at large?

That’s all I got. I come from a household where frank and vulnerable conversation isn’t necessarily how we run stuff. There’s like a spirit of embarrassment around saying something positive about your next family member, or saying something that makes you appear soft or affected. To be able to speak directly to my feelings is one of the main “author’s purpose” reasons why I do

this, or why I would need to do this even if no part of my life — in terms of how I procure funds or how my lifestyle is — demanded that I do it. I would need to do this because it’s just my upbringing, because of how few outlets otherwise I have to say these kinds of things.

A big part of it is not just what you’re saying, but how you’re delivering it. Another favorite of mine on the album is “Opportunity Kids,” which has this really dope beat that you’re just going back and forth over with this incredible flow. How did you approach this album from a recording standpoint, as a rapper and a performer?

Two things. First, there’s this thing in music — I used to play instruments and shit — and it’s called a rhythm étude, which is a study, like a half song or proto-song. A rhythm étude

In another interview, you mentioned reading Zora Neale Hurston’s retelling of that folktale.

What is the role that literature, and specifically Black literature, has played in your writing process?

I need like four or five new books to start a new album. I saw this on Twitter the other night, someone said that writing without reading is like working out without eating. I’ve been talking to all the homies, like “tell me what I need to read.” The homies, especially the homies that are a little more critical of me, know what I need to read. They know I don’t understand what they understand. Reading is like loading up my gun, you know?

You gotta do it.

Do you have any reading recommendations?

Big one! I got a book on me now, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain. There’s this bookstore where I’m home, called Archive, and they basically sell old magazines, Ebony, Jet, stuff like that. I recommend that everybody collect, and especially

collect things from the time before manufacturing changed, before media changed, and hold onto that stuff.

Curate your own collection of physical artifacts and memory bank stuff.

Just having containers of memory, because as kids who were raised on the Internet, it’s important for us to renew the value of physical media.

Where are you at when it comes to physical books over eBooks?

For me, eBooks are hard to focus on, because there’s nothing stopping me from pausing the book and just scrolling through Twitter or playing Retro Bowl.

I love Retro Bowl, that’s such a good game. We need more side-scrolling arcade games.

Who’s your team?

Carolina Panthers, man. I’m on season 22. My team is OP. I play it just to play it at this point, like I’m not gonna lose, ever. Sometimes I just leave my organization every once in a while and go rebuild another team.

This might be a rivalry thing, but I went to the Falcons for a year, won them a Super Bowl, and went back to the Cincinnati Bengals.

Man fuck the Atlanta Falcons! *laughs* But back to the eBooks: the imaginative fuel, the magic stuff of our imagination that we have designated for our phone, is more readily and instantly rewarded by stuff other than reading. You can be anybody on the internet, and I don’t just mean you can post and pretend to be anybody.

You can get on TikTok and literally get in someone else’s shoes, into their life, for a day. That’s why you read a book, but a book doesn’t have flashing colors and your favorite song in the background. It’s a high ask, discipline wise, to have this part of your brain work on this, but it’s really rewarding.

In a way, that stuff about the instant reward and discipline makes me think of one of the hardest hitting lines on the entire album: “finally sober, and it’s just another layer of lonely.”

I’ve seen you post a lot about your sobriety on Twitter — what sort of change in perspective has that given you?

People are so fucking annoying. *laughs* And that’s not me being petulant either, it’s just like I had a mechanical Continued on Page 17 13

block on annoyance that is no longer there, so my patience is true patience.

I don’t just get to be Shaggy anymore.

But grace is always rewarded. Nothing good comes easy, so to continue the pursuit of grace is the goal.

I don’t know, people be telling me all types of stuff about how “ever since you sober you this,” or “ever since you sober you that,” but I don’t really like hearing that shit. Because, okay, let’s say that you have crippling Generalized Anxiety Disorder after a traumatic experience, and you take such-and-such amount of anti-anxiety medication. And by some stroke of god, you don’t have your medicine, and someone’s like “wow, you seem so alert today!” That’s brutal. I wasn’t taking that stuff for fun, and I didn’t stop taking it to be more consumable for people.

But mostly, me and sober Mavi have been getting along great. There are often many times where being sober feels better than being high, and being able to live for those moments has been really rewarding. My body for sure works better. I used to smoke an amount of weed that was inappropriate for anyone. All my friends still smoke weed, and ever since I stopped I realized that I’d smoke way more weed than any of them. That was crazy, because I thought we were all smoking weed together! *laughs* You also talk a lot about sobriety on “Last Laugh,” which is maybe my favorite song of yours, point blank. It’s this really great bookend, and I remember tearing up when I first listened to it. What were you thinking of as you tried to sum up this big, meaningful album? What was that like?

It was scary. Every album I try to have a progress report, something like “Previously on Mavi…” just as a way to gather where I’m at. The two verses of that song started as separate songs, but most of my shit starts all piecemeal. That vocal at the end of the song is my girlfriend, and she wrote a poem to our baby. I was like yeah, this needs to be the last thing on the album. What I like is that if you listen to the album on a loop, the last thing you hear is literally the most devastating thing on the album, and then the first song is “High John.” Laughing so hard, it hurts. It hurts, but then you’re laughing so hard.

Is Anyone Saving Cinema?

Ben Burton Contributor

Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

I love a trailer. Getting to the theater early to watch new releases is like being gently held. It is to be seen and recognized for what you are watching and shown a curated set of what’s to come. The last time I was in a theater, I saw trailers for Ant Man (gross), back to back old-people-go-wild comedies (80 for Brady & Book Club: The Next Chapter), and Cocaine Bear. This kind of discordance of theme, genre, and tone comes when these trailer curators have no idea who a movie is for.

What came next on that screen was Damien Chazelle’s Babylon which, as the trailers suggest, has no ideal audience in mind.

Babylon is a loveless love letter, a mean-spirited amalgamation of well-trodden Hollywood tales. Chazelle revels in 20s excess and ahistoricisms, but it’s still too neat and nice to embrace Kenneth Anger’s wildness. Chazelle references a film constantly throughout the 188 minute runtime and decides to end the film with a glorified fan cam of that film’s best moments, like a magician revealing his cards. So it’s not for the film nerds, it’s not for any Pitt or Robbie fans (who serviceably play their character-less parts), and it’s not really satisfying for anyone who loves the 20s, old films, or really just movies in general. Babylon designed its advertising on social media platforms, pushing its star power, its sex, and its excess to engage the youth in the excitement of film with the implication that it would be in the theater.

When I saw it, the theater was basically empty - a few old couples, a few lone stragglers, and my enraged family. If any young faces saw Brad Pitt in a toupé staggering to algorithmic big band jazz and thought they just had to pay $15 to see it big and loud, they certainly didn’t show up. Deadline reported that Babylon had to make $250 million to break even. It made $3.6 million on its opening day. Babylon agonizes over its own demise, desperate about saving cinema and loving cinema and going to the cinema while creating something that actually only cares about its own demented, indulgent vision. Babylon wants to save cinema, but it only seems to give audiences another reason not to go.

The state of cinema, specifically that of the American awards gauntlet, has been subject of particular criticism this season for similar issues. Runtimes are long, subjects are dreary, and art seems inscribed with a classist capital A. What, you don’t like White Noise’s arch dialogue and disjointed structure? You just don’t get it. All Quiet on the Western Front just has to be that long — after all there were so many trenches. I’d make jokes about Bardo too, but I’ve yet to meet anyone else who could be convinced to finish or tolerate it. Truly, this has been a year of the

arcane and intricate auteurist cash giant, the Big Experiment, the ambitious well-financed genre switch. The problem with these behemoths is their self-conscious spectacle, their masking of shoddy and overfunded work with a criticism of the mainstream.

Chazelle may argue that we need these films, his film (god forbid), because they are trying to save cinema.

Saving cinema has been on the agenda for a while, and for good reason. AMC is threatening priced seating, ticket prices are rising, and theatrical windows are tightening. In the finite ways Babylon works, it does because it’s in a theater. And yet, this is also the year of Avatar: The Way of Water. Here is a film that seems to follow the format of what was previously criticized: an over 3 hour, oddly paced, indulgent piece that tacks on to its purpose “saving cinema“. But The Way of Water made over 2 billion dollars. Avatar is the highest-grossing film of all time, and its sequel is the 4th. Did Avatar 2 save cinema? What about Top Gun Maverick last summer, which made 1.5 billion? Did that save cinema?

On one hand, we can see this success and conclude that cinema never needed to be “saved“. Alternatively, we can realize that the rhetoric of saving is both blunt and nonspecific. It may be better to say that the flailing theater chains are happy to fill their seats for the new Avatar as much as the new Ant Man, the new Baumbach, or the new Cronenberg. Cinema is saved by Avatar and Top Gun in as much as they show the medium is alive, selling, entrancing, and experimenting, but they also reveal the limiting tastes of an audience only willing to fill seats for the next sequel, serialized installment, or nostalgic flourish. These films are expensive, and the pressure of their success and commerciality means that for whatever aspects of the form are subverted or played with, it must always be in the name of commercial success.

The failed, bloated, auteurist nightmares from the year reveal that crafting an indulgent love letter to the changing of a medium and to alternative film styles and worlds will not inherently “save”. The repeated discourse of their failings negates their own paranoia that the end is near. Film is still a culturally relevant force. The Oscars may not be, Damien Chazelle may not be, but “film” is.

So how to really “save“ cinema? Does anyone know? It seems those least interested in self-conscious preoccupation with the question on screen are most successful at answering. Against the grain of these behemoth auteur films, there has been a softer trend. There has been a bevy of projects, not all necessarily box office or critically recognized hits, which highlight a world of experiment, film adoration, and protectionism, but alongside emotional delicacy. Aftersun deploys a child actor and Paul Mescal in a hangout movie with more emotional resonance and film reverence than in The Way of Water’s pinkie toe. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On transforms from a twee A24 Youtube joke into something surprisingly engaging, frank, and real. Pinnochio — the Del Toro film — uses a bizarre twist on a classic narrative to question how we tell stories about ourselves, and what makes a good man. Love or hate Everything Everywhere All at Once, but its success derives from its incredible earnestness.

Chazelle begins Babylon with an elephant pooping on a group of men trying to push it up a hill for an executive’s party. It’s as if to say, “this is the movies,” or rather, what goes into creating them. To him, film is composed of shit and tears and horror and sexual deviancy and evil and the beauty is what emerges from the concoction. But there is another way. There is love.

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Returning to White Noise Saffron Forsberg Editor in Chief The Grape published its first article on Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, tastefully titled “BREAKING NEWS!!!!!!!!” by former editor-in-chief Priya Banerjee (OC ‘22), on July 16th, 2021.

It’s a sweet article to read now: one promising the milling about of “super beefy king of the screen” Adam Driver, the appearance of celebrity trailers, and the excitement of background extras who are also friends and peers. The short article is goofily historic, in retrospect, when recalling that summer, and especially now that Baumbach’s White Noise (2022) sits streamable on Netflix. It was widely released on New Year’s Eve. And though, in the film, Oberlin itself comes in and out of focus, the film acts as a strange snapshot of that Unprecedented Summer Semester.

But perhaps I’m biased in my sappiness. I am a member of a dying breed, after all; I was here that fateful summer ‘21 semester (sorry, “trimester”) Baumbach came to town, to our own College-on-the-Hill. And, like most people who were here, I feel a wave of vague nausea when recalling the sweaty, ravenous delirium that was our summer trimester. I suppose, to some, it was “Obie summer camp”...but I don’t think I ever felt that way. I remember, as the trimester drew to a close, sobering up, crying it out, and returning to my hometown to devour Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, as though its postmodern prose could provide any needed clarity. I, predictably, loved the classic novel, and understood why it had presented itself to Oberlin that summer, however incompatible its content was with the manic perfection of the big-budget Netflix production it promised. Because hey, the summer ‘21

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Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

trimester was utterly surreal, so maybe it was the perfect environment for an Airborne Toxic Event.

This is to say that my first watch-through of White Noise was one of shrieking and pointing. I never claimed to be above that; I didn’t grow up anywhere cute or interesting enough to warrant large cameras, boom-mics, Greta Gerwigs, or Adam Drivers, and it was almost unsettling to see the little Ohio town that, by now, I know like the back of my hand, in fuzzy faux-80s fluorescence. Beside me, on New Years, in our humble Texas living room, my mother surely marveled at the fact that she had raised a kid who had gone on to fondle a number of extras in a Baumbach film. Is this not the American Dream? To raise a child in an unfilmable place who is able to trot off to a filmable place to bump shoulders with filmable people? How wonderfully

distracting! I needed to watch it again.

So, a month later, after all my initial amusement, I returned to White Noise to (attempt to) watch it as someone who hadn’t so thoroughly mythologized its production. I tried to wrap my head around the momentous, Spielbergian production, the soaring Danny Elfman soundtrack, the constant StrangerThings-ian nods to every 80s blockbuster ever made, all while Driver and Gerwig and Cheadle clamored to retain Don DeLillo’s stilted and larger-than-life dialogue with all the religiosity of Shakespearian players. The film contains so many moving parts that it’s hard to locate where one is even supposed to lay one’s eyes from shot to shot.

Of course, the novel is somewhat this way. There’s a reason it’s been called “unfilmable” and “unadaptable”, as though filmmakers shouldn’t dare even lock eyes with its content. 1985’s White Noise is cluttered and postmodern, addressing the garish veneer of the ‘80s American wasteland, the clinical insularity of academia, and the inescapability of one’s mortality, all through the eyes of a professor (Driver), his troubled wife (Gerwig), and their blended family. It is, at times, purposefully oblique. Which presents the question: how charitable should we, as an audience, be about films deemed “unadaptable”?

Should we extend generosity to Baumbach for simply trying? For introducing a classic novel to a new generation of viewers (and readers) to whom it may now be especially relevant? Is Noah Baumbach brave for even attempting to translate DeLillo into something enjoyable to mainstream audiences, to those who have never read the novel and likely never will? Can such a film stand alone? And, perhaps an even tougher question: can it stand alongside its paperback counterpart?

It’s hard to say. The novel is dense, circuitous, and at times difficult to digest…but it also isn’t a big-budget Netflix enterprise. Postmodern novels do not promise what widely-released movies promise, and they do not attempt to win over every reader (or, rather viewer…consumer) who encounters them.

They don’t necessarily entertain, and thus don’t often present themselves as two-and-a-half-hour odes to candy-colored Gen-X nostalgia. And, because of this, White Noise (2022) feels like Baumbach-gone-Disney, Baumbach-goneDuffer-Brothers, and, unfortunately, makes DeLillo’s masterwork feel a bit that way, too. In all its bemusement at death-proof American capitalism, the film is eerily commercial.

DeLillo’s Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies, becomes a bewildered TV Dad under Driver’s care. Something about DeLillo’s Babette has been smoothed over and tamped down, as well. Is it just because, while watching the film, I have to pretend I’m not looking at Frances Ha in a vivacious wig?

When Baumbach and Gerwig work together, a certain way of delivering lines emerges, even absent of the mumblecore spirit. It’s much of the director’s charm. But isn’t the essence of mumblecore (conceptually and aesthetically) its distance from the loud and mainstream? Baumbach’s style is strange and stilted when accompanied by a hearty Netflix budget, and like many such multi-million-dollar adaptations, White Noise comes across as though a team of executives assembled an equation for a Great Movie only for that equation to feel all too present in the final cut.

In the end, it’s easy to declare that Baumbach’s White Noise tried too hard.

What else was it supposed to do? Adapting DeLillo requires effort, and the effort Baumbach put into his rendition of the novel is apparent. Indeed, it’s hard to parse exactly where the film went wrong. One could argue the budget too big, the aesthetics too jaunty and plastic – but is that not the aesthetic the novel presents? Like other 80s-era consumerist commentaries – a great example being David Byrne’s decadently campy True Stories (1986) – White Noise goes all in on the Reagan-era fluorescence. But, for some reason, it falls flat here. Perhaps I must assert what I hoped wasn’t true: White Noise should stay on the page. But thanks for stopping by, Mr. Baumbach.

Superimposing the Human Voice (Or, Why ChatGPT Isn’t a Better Writer than You) Fionna Farrell Opinions Editor It’s common fact, among writers, that writers are the saving grace of humanity. How heavily it weighs on us, the burden of making people want to keep living in 2023. While churning out the old ‘stone last semester, not once did I think about being Lena Dunham (for Girls is a well-written show) or about being on Seth Myers (for he is far too goodnatured to even be real). I thought about the children. I thought about the friendless.

I thought about people in house fires and people who had been left on read. I am here to be miserable, but to make others less so, Seth.

(That may or may not be a line from my capstone.)

It is clear that ChatGPT was invented to rob me of this unstinting duty. What can be said of my capital-p Purpose when the bot attends to not only matters of the mind, but also those of the modern heartless heart?

My friend, who is going to Iceland, could ask it how long it would take to walk across the island. Or for a list of the best restaurants in Reykjavik, or perhaps the name and home address of the doctor who delivered Bjork.

Meanwhile, my, uh, other friend could ask the bot why she is no longer capable of looking anyone in the eye anymore, or why true

evil lurks in the hearts of—-well, nevermind. I digress.

Don’t get me wrong. To a certain extent, that might be well and good, that we now have an incorporeal counselor who (unless we are Joaquin Phoenix in the Spike Jonze film Her) will not leave us when we start to love it. After all, the amount of us who can’t afford therapy is surely commensurate with the amount of us who lost all our friends during the pandemic. There’s no denying, either, that sometimes the cold weight of reason, the callous yet emotionally vulnerable INTP-droid of the internet, is the best advice-giver out there.

They may lack certain things called “nuance” or “empathy,” but many humans lack those things, too. What’s “dangerous” about Chat GPT isn’t necessarily its inherent bent towards the objective. It’s where we get to the subjective area of human experience—which all creative endeavors are supposed to represent—where things get murkier.

Like that one overzealous, morally ambiguous intro-level professor we’ve all had, the old Generative Transformer is a polymath of all voice and language. It can rev up the sweet nothings as well as the more common nothings, the nothings that hurt. It can write

anything like anyone. Chat conjures up a violent brunch time incident in the style of Franz Kafka. Chat has Chaucer become preoccupied with Harry Styles’ contribution to fashion.

Chat has Joan Didion pretend she feels real human emotions. Here is an excerpt from Hemingway-Chat’s long-lost work, Swifter than Death, where protag attempts to acquire Taylor Swift tickets in the wave of nuclear apocalypse: The world was in chaos. The streets were filled with the sounds of explosions and screams. The air was thick with smoke and the scent of death. But I was determined to get Taylor Swift tickets, even in the face of a nuclear apocalypse. I stumbled through the rubble, dodging falling debris, searching for a ticket vendor. My heart was pounding, and my hands were shaking, but I refused to give up. I had to see her perform, to feel the power of her music, to find a moment of hope in this dark and desperate world. Finally, I spotted a small booth, and I sprinted towards it, dodging burning cars and fallen buildings. I pushed my way to the front and shouted my request. The ticket seller looked at me with a mix of confusion and horror, but I didn’t care.

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Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

I have never been a Swiftie and those train chemicals haven’t yet reached my frontal lobe, but this piece failed to move me. It’s nothing against Hemingway; The Sun Also Rises did stir a wide set of emotions in yours truly, mostly because I felt bad for poor, dickless Jake. No, this piece is rather lacking a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that made old Ernest so…err…literary? Revisittable? Riper than a summertime peach for zoomer cancellation?

Perhaps that thing is casual misogyny. Or perhaps it is a penis-lacking protagonist, or maybe the daunting sense of spiritual emaciation looming over every character because of the big war going on.

The Missing Thing very well could be one of those things, but it also may be something more…ineffable. A humanity to the language.

A voice unafraid to say, yes, this process of creation was like bloodletting, no different than a trip to the Mercy ER. This masterwork was written in demented ten-minute spurts between chronic periods of crying and masturbation. This took every part of me, and parts outside too. The result is something I want to give to others (because obviously, my writing would make a great gift). This is for my brother. Or my dog. Or my friend.

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But I’d never give anything to anyone I’d attempted on a first try. My third-favorite writer and second favorite George, George Saunders, says that “what writers really do when they write” is…learn how to be human. (Oh my god, no, he didn’t actually say it like that, could you imagine? No wonder everybody hates us.)

What you write is not going to be perfect the first time. In fact, like when (some of) you lost your virginity, it will probably be pretty terrible and animalistic first time, the floundering dredge of hyperbole and cringe-angst, of lazy epithets and lazier platitudes about love (after all, the only reason you’re writing is because Tinder Adonis #3 ghosted you after the second date). No, the first draft, if it’s worth something, will probably make you regret you were even born. For reasons other than that you came out wanting to be a writer. For being an average one.

The human voice, though, isn’t something that’s found in the utter shit-pile that is the first draft. Like our loyal GPT, it is more than something that can be automated through simple syntactic strategies and perfected if we could only “tap in” to the secret code, live the worst human experience imaginable. Despite how I may sound, the point of writing might not be to make everything about yourself (I

know, I know), but to learn how to communicate. Because we don’t, in fact, already know.

It takes time. A lot of time—far more than the three seconds it took Chat to indulge your horribly perverted prompt.

Saunders uses the sample sentence, “Bob was an asshole.” You can change that sentence to, “Bob snapped impatiently at the barista.”

And then, “Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife”... “who passed at Christmas.” We understand more about Bob now with every unraveling of a new, different, and more human sentence. He is no longer simply a caricature. He is no longer just you and your self-referential mess. Caricatures are what the first-draft writers and what Chat GPT are pretty good for.

A sterile and hollowed-out shell of what one might be meaning to say, when they haven’t learned what they really want to. Those original thoughts are usually the least empathetic ones. It’s stupid to think that “great writers” touch us with only one reach. That hand is always shaking, and the grip only grows closer, more confident after multiple tries, an infinite sum of fistfulls of air. But, in the end, you learn to understand more. You learn to forgive more.

“In Case I Go Missing” Binders: When Gender Violence Got Commodified Catherine Gilligan Contributor CW: discussion of gender based violence and sexual assault

A little over a month ago, a woman went viral on TikTok, and subsequently Twitter, for filming a video in which she showed off her “In Case I Go Missing” binder. Among many other things, the binder contained the contact information for several of her friends and exes, a sample of her own handwriting, personal medical records, fingerprint samples, and a lock of her own hair, presumably to be used for forensic analysis or DNA testing. The video has garnered 1.7 million likes since it was released. In the comments, other women chastise her for not taking the lock of hair from the root of her scalp (supposedly in order to get a more accurate sample) and for not including her dental records in the folder.

Meanwhile, other viewers naturally had a field day mocking this woman’s particular brand of entirely deluded, true crime-induced hysteria. What many didn’t realize, however, was that the video came not from a personal account, but rather a page for a brand called “Savor”. The company has about 200k followers on TikTok and primarily sells organizational receptacles for everything from wired headphones to passports (who says capitalism doesn’t breed innovation?). Generally, the account averages about 10k views per video, but their “In Case I Go Missing” binder video racked up about 11 million in just six weeks.

Of course, Savor is far from the only company that sells inane products intended to “keep women safe”. While it’s tempting to deride the woman in the video, or Savor itself, the truth is that there is a multimillion-dollar industry predicated on women’s fear of gender-based violence; think Hello Kitty switchblades, sparkly pink rape whistles, lipstick tasers, “lady’s” handguns. This fear doesn’t only lend itself to the popularity of bedazzled weapons—it permeates into every aspect of many women’s lives. Recently, a British supermarket company caught flack for releasing an advertisement for a dress with the tagline “For walks in the park, or strolls after dark”, to which many Twitter users chose to “clap back” at with quote tweets like “HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA THEY THINK WE STROLL IN THE DARK HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA”. There’s an entire genre of content on social media dedicated to “spotting signs” that you’re being targeted by sex traffickers, be it zip ties on your tires or white markings on your tail lights. And of course, there’s the pervasive media obsession with missing (white) women; Natalee Holloway, Lauren Spierer, Maura Murray, Gabby Petito. All of these disappearances and others like them have inspired True-Crime podcasts, Lifetime movies, Netflix limited series— genres that are popular almost exclusively with women.

The bottom line is, one can accrue immense financial and social capital by commodifying women’s fear of violence. This is not to say that this fear is necessarily irrational. While the racial and socioeconomic implications that underlay these anxieties can’t be minimized (what types of neighborhoods are middle-class white women afraid to walk through at night? What kinds of men do middle-class white women fear being victimized by?), the reality is that women of all backgrounds are at a higher risk of experiencing sexual violence than men. While accurate statistics on sexual assault are difficult to procure for a number of reasons, according to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National

Network), the largest anti-sexual Molly Chapin Layout Assistant assault nonprofit organization in the US, about 1 in 6 American women have been the victim of an attempted or completed rape (compared to about 1 in 33 American men). These numbers are even higher for women who are marginalized in some other way; Indigenous women, Black women, transgender women, incarcerated women, women with intellectual disabilities, sex workers. It’s a fear that’s instilled in us from the first time our mom shows us how to hold our keys between our fingers or the first time a girl at a party asks us to watch her drink while she goes to the bathroom. It’s a fear that is reinforced constantly

by TV and TikTok and Twitter. And it’s a fear that comes from a very real place- even if it’s also a fear so detached from the reality of whom the primary perpetrators of sexual violence actually are.

In reality, most women who are victims of sexual assault know their rapists well. Offenders are rarely strangers trailing a little too closely behind us as we walk home from work, nor men ogling our tits on the bus, but instead boyfriends, husbands, brothers, fathers. Not only do about 90% of women assaulted on college campuses know their assailant, about 50% are on a date with them when they are assaulted.

Instances of marital rape occur in roughly 14% of all heterosexual marriages. In about half of all instances of child sexual abuse, the perpetrator is a male relative.

In my mind, it’s no wonder why the pervasive narrative concerning “female safety” is that the outside world is inherently dangerous for women. A contributing factor is undoubtedly how easy it is for “feminist” social media influencers and predatory brands to capitalize on, but I think there’s something much larger at play. Perhaps the real reason why we hide behind our bejeweled pepper spray canisters and why we don’t wear ponytails in public anymore and why we might even be compelled to put a plaster mold of our teeth in an “In Case I Go Missing” binder is this–it is far more painful to know that what you are coming home to is more dangerous than any Uber ride, crowded bar, or late night walk ever could be.

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No one signed up for my model train ExCo so now I build a model train set on my own for two hours a week Flip Ptarmigan Model Train Enthusiast It was a glorious idea: a collaborative model train set built over the course of one semester, with each of the participants earning legitimate college credit for their role in its construction. Each week, we would investigate, design, and build a different element of the model train set: the train, the tracks, the flora and fauna, the buildings, the inhabitants. Each participant would make imaginative and substantive contributions, all led by me, a wizened—and yet still dauntless—model train enthusiast. We would emerge on the other side of the semester with a miniature lush wonderland—a playground any motorized train would be lucky to have.

Things have not gone exactly to plan. I watched my course’s Google Form application like a hawk all throughout Add-Drop, and yet not a single application graced my screen.

The average ExCo instructor—the easily cowed, the timid, the weakwilled—would have called it there. Maybe reality television can wait, they might have said. Maybe fiber arts, or the circus, or contact improvisation can wait. Model trains wait for no man. They will grind your bones to powder under their tiny battery-powered wheels.

So I pressed on. Every week, for two hours, I go to King 101 and continue building a model train set. I’ve laid the tracks, molded the landscape by hand, hot-glued artificial vegetation with care. But I’ve noticed some deviations from my original plan; deviations that have occurred by my hand, and yet without my knowledge or consent.

The lush wonderland I envisioned has become a barren wasteland, dotted only by the occasional desert shrubbery. The businesses along the tracks are shuttered, their awnings tattered and their facades faded. The inhabitants, each of them isolated from the others by a vast swath of desert and ruin, lay prone under the unrelenting sun—the fluorescent lights of the King Building—in a cradle of hot glue.

They say that nothing can last forever. But as long as I keep diligently replacing its batteries, my model train will run indefinitely. Far longer, I’ve learned, than any optimism, joy, or companionship I could hope to experience. I’ve run out of love to give her, and her me. Yet I remain.

Just keep chugging. Just keep chugging. Just keep chugging.

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Illustration by Molly Chapin Production Assistant

I am the last man on earth who does not know what podcasts are Captain Ruffles Contributor

Illustration by Ophelia Jackson Contributor

I feel like I’m not an interesting person.

Actually, I think I’m okay. It just seems like everyone knows so much more than I do lately.

Did I miss something?

The interesting thing is that no one’s personalities have dramatically changed. They all just constantly now have fun stories and facts to share. Tim knows a lot about revolutionary history in Latin America (he’s a chemistry major), Hazel explained to everyone the science of dreaming and where lactose intolerance comes from (they’re a Conn student), and even Flip’s mom suddenly has a lot of funny jokes to share (she’s Flip’s mom).

I just feel like it’s too hard to impress my friends these days. I don’t have anything interesting to say. I’m just a politics major. I don’t have time to develop a personality.

Even my roommate’s drifting away. She’s been on calls for a long time. Doesn’t say

much. Just listens to these two people talking for about an hour and six minutes every day.

Not exactly, but that’s the average by my estimate. She doesn’t talk to me much anymore.

Sometimes she goes to class still listening to them. They seem really funny and smart. They know so much about music history. Maybe that’s why our friendship is dissolving. I can’t be interesting for an hour and six minutes straight. I’m a politics major.

I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this.

The most plausible theory I’ve been able to come up with is that since the pandemic started, a series of little voices have been inside my friends’ (and Flip’s mom’s) phones and computers, feeding all of them special information to gaslight me into insecurity and imposter syndrome.

I will get to the bottom of this. Even if it kills me.

The Manifesto of a ‘Sco DJ Who Has Never Had an Attendant Finn Sipes Contributor

Illustration by Niovi Rahme Contributor

Dear Oberlin Student Body– What else do I need to do to make the Sco more tempting on a Wednesday night? Hm? I have tried making posters.

I have tried making Instagram graphics. I have tried doing my own chalkboard art, which I hear you make fun of in that stupid fucking hallway that carries sound way too well. “Oh look at this shit, that guy can’t do bubble letters, these letters are so uneven and stupid and there’s not even a drawing,” hey FUCK YOU. The ‘Sco workers didn’t want to help me again because they knew no one would show up.

What do I need to do?

Listen, I know it’s the middle of the school week. I get it, you’re tired and have a lot of work and live with the worst time management this world has ever seen even though you’re only taking four classes with

no extracurriculars. It’s hard. You probably just want to stay in your dorms with your friends hanging out or doing work or getting rest or getting high, right?

Bullshit.

EVERY NIGHT, Wilder is PACKED TO THE BRIM with you ASSHOLES. You don’t care about staying in the dorm–hell you don’t even want rest. You guys would rather wait an hour and a half outside of the Rat to eat some oversauced undercooked cauliflower during fourth meal than come listen to music and get a drink for even 10 minutes. You must enjoy sitting around outside Decafé and getting yelled at by the workers for coming in while they are at capacity since you refuse to even turn 180 degrees and walk through the doors to my splitchers. You are right outside the goddamn door. Just come in!

Please! There’re pool tables, there’s

lights, there’s foosball! You can even just come in to tell me how shitty my music taste is if you want, I don’t mind! I’ll give you stuff to throw at my booth that I will clean up later!

Maybe it’s me. Is it just that you guys hate me? It’s okay if that’s the case, I get it, small school, lots of people to decidedly hate for no reason. Is this all just a ploy to personally make my life worse?

So, as I write this, face up with my back on this dusty-ass floor, sober, questioning if I even like this music anymore, I beg you, don’t just stick your head in to see if anything fun is going on in here. Just like, come in. Please. Just walk on in.

Anyways, I’ll be back next Wednesday with some Crunckore, and following that week (for all you 80’s and 90’s lovers) you can tune in for some Grebo! Desperately hope to see you there.

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The illusion of choice in conversation Ellen Efstathiou Staff Writer Imagine that you are on campus for winter term. For some of you, this might be easier to picture than for others. But I don’t know you personally, I don’t know your life.

So, you are on campus for winter term. Now, we are going to add something to this daydream. You are having a conversation with somebody. This isn’t somebody you know well. Maybe they are an acquaintance, maybe you’ve just struck up a conversation while in line at Stevie because someone decided that having only one dining hall open for dinner during winter term was a good idea. I digress.

The point is, you are having a conversation.

What do you talk about?

You may think that you can talk about anything. You may think that the world is your oyster in this conversation. You may think you have a choice. You are wrong.

The only place that this conversation can land is the question, “What are you doing for winter term?”

There is nothing else to talk about at this point in time. Nothing else of note is happening right now.

You could answer this question with a lie, I suppose, if you really want to. But why would you? It’s not like anyone would be able to tell the difference between a lie and the truth.

You will answer their question.

“I’m writing a research paper.”

“I’m learning a language.”

“I’m building a killer robot.”

“I’m involved with a play.”

“I’m practicing living in a mountain cave.”

“I’m knitting scarves.”

They will respond.

“Oh, cool.”

You will have nothing else to talk about.

There is only one thing you can think of to say.

“What about you?”

They will respond. Perhaps their answer will be similar to yours. Maybe you will ask each other some more questions about what you are each doing. Maybe you will even understand each other.

Perhaps you are a better conversationalist than I am. Maybe this question about winter term projects will lead to more things that you can talk about. Again, I do not know you.

But here is what you must know.

Talking about winter term is inevitable. This is the illusion of choice in conversation. But you already knew that. You’ve participated in these conversations yourself.

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Illustration by Ophelia Jackson Contributor

The first 3 lines of New Yorker humor articles that I can’t access the rest of Captain Ruffles Contributor Common Anatomies of Disappointing Men by Sam Corbin and Mads Horwath

Why I Have Decided To Give Up Kidnapping by Nathaniel Stein

Unlucky in love? Don’t despair. Here’s an illustrated taxonomy of deeply disappointing men to help you identify some anatomies common to a few subspecies of Homo sapiens, so that you can spot the signs that someone is about to waste your time before it actually happens.

After thirty-four years, I have decided to give up kidnapping. To anyone who knows me, and my unerring devotion to kidnapping, this news will surely come as a shock. True, kidnapping is not what it used to be.

I Am Swimming And It Hurts Me by David Hertz New Year’s Resolutions are hard. I meant to start swimming on January 1st. Check the date of this article.

Winter-Outfit Word Problems by Anjali Chandrashekar Mel had ten lip balms among five coat pockets. How many does she have now?

My Cat Studies English by Katherine Long The cats keep their milk and the owls are learning Hebrew. Are the ducks calling me? Is my Duolingo working correctly?

Fictional Novel Or Real Woman’s Diary?

How To Tell What You’re Reading by Monica Heisey

A Guide to Grieving the Loss of Your Catalytic Converter Skye Jalal Staff Writer

Illustration by Molly Chapin Production Assistant

It’s a common dilemma: you’ve brought home a book and are about to dive in, when you notice a woman’s name on the cover.

Rats! you think.

The Secret to Wealth Is Giving Up Pointless Expenses (And Other Lessons From My Twenty-Eight-Dollar Book) by Chandler Dean and Sarah Gruen More Americans than ever are struggling to make ends meet. Is this because wages have remained stagnant while expenses creep up?

Could it be that healthcare costs more, while insurance covers less?

1. When you go to start your car, you will quickly notice something wrong. It will sound like there is a bear fight inside of your engine, or perhaps like the entire vehicle is on the brink of explosion. On the phone with your Dad, he will encourage you to start the engine again so that he can hear it. Against all of the senses that six million years of evolution bred you to have, you will do it, and after this and a peek under the car, you will find yourself a confirmed catalytic converter theft victim.

2. Read up. You don’t understand this yet, but you’re going to want to know a lot about catalytic converters. After the theft, you will go to your friends for support, but instead find yourself Oberlin’s new resident catalytic converter expert- explaining what they are to almost everyone you talk to about it. Get ready to answer questions that will make you wonder if some people you know have ever seen a car.

3. Go to campus safety and fill out some paperwork. Sit in the office and ponder the motives that caused someone to stare out at a parking lot full of unlocked luxury vehicles to steal from and target the car whose back-window was secured with electrical tape. Some sort of reverse Robin Hood situation? You won’t know.

4. Be sure to forget to take the two neon yellow “STUDENT DRIVER PLEASE BE PATIENT” reflective magnets off the back of your truck, so that when the campus safety officer drives you over to the lot, you can make sure they’re in every photo for the police report.

Illustration by Molly Chapin Production Assistant

5. Drive with Campus Safety to the police station, and fill out–guess what?--more paperwork.

You will be led into a small gray room, and you will wonder who else has sat in this seat before in the past. Did Lena Dunham sit here once after the theft of her catalytic converter?

Perhaps there was once the girlfriend of some Northern Ohio drug lord, sitting right here as she apprehensively turned him in, in exchange for her own freedom.

6. But no, it is just you. Trying to figure out how to fill the rest of the victim statement page after you’ve already written, “I looked under the car and it was gone.”

7. In the days that follow, sometimes you will pause and think to yourself, “Someone cut a fucking hole in my car.” Other times you will feel like you found a connection to something.

8. Reddit forums and random conversation will show you an entire network of converter victims just like you- people you didn’t know existed before you became one of them. Something that was once an abstract story on the news, you will now know most acutely.

9. They say grief is the great unifying force.

Divorce and death do break us, but also stitch our pieces closer to each other. You will find this with the loss of your catalytic converter.

10. It will be painful- the theft and the paperwork and the calls to insurance. But you will understand something that you didn’t before. Something about that pain will feel satisfying, like pressing your thumb into a bruise. It will feel like growing up.

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INTERVIEW WITH THE GUY WHO INVENTED THE PHRASE “SOUPED UP” Isabel Hardwig Bad Habits Editor We at Bad Habits are constantly looking to bring new stories and perspectives to the people of Oberlin College. Recently, I managed to sit down with the guy who invented the phrase “souped up,” (henceforth referred to as “Souped Up Daniel,” or SUD). This is his story.

IH: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. It’s been a huge year for the phrase “souped up,” and I know you must be bombarded with press requests. Would you mind telling me a little about your climb to fame?

SUD: God, yeah, from here it really seems like “souped up” has been around forever. And people think it must have been an immediate smash hit, but there were a couple dark years in there where I thought it would never make it. In the late 80s, it feels like I dropped it into every conversation. And people didn’t like that, because they could tell how hungry I was, how much I wanted it. I think that sheen of desperation to the phrase “souped up” has never really faded away, but now it’s wrapped back around to being sort of charming.

IH: Wow. Do you have any idea when that shift came about?

SUD: Well, for a while I wasn’t really sure what “souped up” was going to be. I knew it had the potential to be something really, really good, but I was a mess in those early years. I used “souped up” for anything, as a noun, verb, whatever. I would tell my wife, “I’ve got to go soup up,” and then I would just stand outside, not really sure what to do. It’s painful to remember that now. It was a different time.

SUD: Man, it’s so hard to say. It’s already exceeded my wildest dreams.

I guess I would say that I hope “souped up” becomes a beacon to hope for people who don’t really have a lot that’s souped-up in life. There’s kind of a DIY attitude to souping up that I think is something we can all share. You know what I’m saying?

IH: I do. Christ, I really do. And I know we’re looking to the future now, and the future is so bright, but if I could ask one more question about the history . . .

SUD: Go ahead.

IH: If you could meet that kid now–that down-on-his-luck kid who wasn’t sure “souped up” was ever going to work out, who was just chasing the high of using it even once–what would you say to him?

SUD: I would say . . . I would tell him that he should hold onto it as long as possible, to keep trying new things and improving on his old work. To soup up “souped up,” you know? Because people need him. So many people he hasn’t even met yet, who don’t know he exists right now, they need him to keep doing what he’s doing. Sometimes . . . sometimes I miss that part of my life, back when I was just blindly stumbling around, trying to grab the reins of something so much bigger than myself. But then I hear the phrase “souped up” coming from a friend, or a neighbor, or a news anchor, and I know that I’m in the right place. I’m exactly where I need to be.

IH: Thank you so much. It’s been so special to meet you. I hope you know that you’re touching lives everywhere you go.

IH: What changed?

SUD: Yeah. I know.

SUD: I remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting in a Cracker Barrel parking lot, and I was so close to giving up. I just wanted the whole thing to be over. And then this guy comes over, and he saw my custom SUPDUP license plate, right? And he’s like, “what does that mean? Does it mean the car’s really good?” And it was like a fucking bolt of lightning. I could see the whole thing so clearly. And I turned to him, and I said, “Yes. It means the car’s really good.” The whole rest of the day, I felt like I was floating. I knew then that it was going somewhere. That I had the chance to make a difference.

IH: I know there’s been a lot of infighting in the “souped up” community lately, particularly regarding the kind of soup that is being souped up with, and indeed whether the souping-up soup matters at all. Would you like to weigh in on that discussion?

SUD: I mean, I can’t say much. At some point, “souped up” just took on a life of its own, and it didn’t need anything from me anymore. I just think that people in the online forums are really disengaged with split pea as, like, a concept. I don’t know. If more people really thought about split pea, it’s like, who knows what they’d find?

IH: Thank you, that’s very insightful. Do you want to talk a little about where you hope “souped up” will go from here?

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Illustration by Maia Hadler Art Director

Which of my favorite Decafe foods are you?

Where do you live? a. Traditional housing b. A co-op c. Language housing d. Off campus What’s your major? a. Something STEM-y b. Something Social Science-y c. Something Humanity-y d. Something Instrument-y What is the meaning of life? a. 42 b. To do stuff c. The joy is in figuring it out, dude. We are but specks floating around trying to be happy. d. To win What is your favorite of my favorite words? a. Pantuflas b. Blob c. Definitely d. Mustachioed Do you think I should get my ears pierced? a. Yes b. No

Ellen Efstathiou Staff Writer

c. Maybe d. What?

What should I do for Valentine’s Day this year? a. Ruin other people’s dates b. Ask someone out c. Cry d. Lecture everyone on the origin of Valentine’s Day after doing bare minimum research Where are your favorite bathrooms? a. Wilder b. Mudd c. Peters d. Nowhere because people keep pissing on the seats and not cleaning up after themselves even though they are adults in college, oh my god some of you need to learn some manners How do you feel about participation grades in classes? a. I am great at talking b. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh c. Ahhhhhhh d. They are a necessary evil

Answers: If you chose mostly A you are…

Ruffles chips! The love of my life. I didn’t know about them until last year, and now I am obsessed. They’re cheesy, and crispy, and bumpy, and they make me happy. Truly the best invention in the history of mankind.

If you chose mostly B you are…

The Tuscan Chicken Ciabatta Sandwich! I am so sad when this disappears from Decafe. It’s a sandwich, a truly classic food. And the ingredients make it so I can tell my parents that I have technically eaten a vegetable. I will get this sandwich at every opportunity.

If you chose mostly C you are…

Double Chocolate Chip Cookies! So much chocolate. So much sweetness. Wrapped in plastic individually. My sweet tooth longs for these cookies. This has been my ode to Double Chocolate Chip Cookies, as seen on my Creative Writing Major application.

If you chose mostly D you are…

The Raspberry flavor of Pure Leaf! Raspberry is the best flavor, do not argue with me. This supposedly has caffeine, so I can pretend that it wakes me up. It is wet, and yet my mouth still feels dry after drinking it.

Which Oberlin library are you, and what does it say about your love life?

Describe your ideal first date: a. A walk in the arb, possibly stargazing b. Afternoon coffee at Slow Train c. A concert at the Sco d. Attending the annual Walleye Festival of Port Clinton, Ohio Which of my current favorite songs is really speaking to you right now? (i’m sorry if none speak to you but it is my quiz so please just choose nicely.) a. Gentle Hour - Yo La Tengo b. Good Will Hunting - Black Country New Road c. No More Virgos - CMAT d. Borders - M.I.A. What is your favorite planet? a. Earth b. Jupiter c. Venus d. Pluto Where would you live under the sea? a. In a colorful coral reef b. Inside of a sea anemone c. Camouflaged under the sand d. In the dining room of a wrecked ship Which animal would you share your home under the sea with? a. Sea cucumber b. Sting ray c. Dolphin d. Anglerfish

How would you get rid of the animal you were sharing your undersea home with if you found out it had betrayed you? a. Poison b. Bury it deep in the sand c. Lock it out of your shared home and let nature run its course d. Read aloud a list of things you hate about it until it disintegrates into sea foam How would you cope with the guilt of murdering your undersea best friend? a. Wander the ocean silently and aimlessly for the rest of your life b. Think about something else c. Try to find another, more loyal version of it d. Dress up a shell to look like your deceased friend and talk to it as if it was alive

Maya Denkmire Contributor

Answers: Mostly A’s: Art Library Just like the art library, your love life is a cozily-furnished place to be. I would not be surprised if you have a long term partner or at least a close friend to whom you are unnaturally devoted. You and your beloved are likely the type to lie intertwined in a variety of locations (for example: velvety green couch, strangely loud beanbag, between moving bookshelves) and make those around you flinch (either with discomfort or jealousy) at your open display of intimacy.

Mostly B’s: Mudd I’m gonna be honest, things are looking a little bleak for you. Amidst the interconnected and infinitely complex web of hookups, breakups, and whatnots that sprawls across Oberlin’s campus, you have lost track of what you are looking for (much like one loses track of their favorite study spot in the winding and identical bookshelves of Mudd.) Perhaps you were initially craving someone who finds joy in the simple things, like watching active construction sites, or an intellectual who can teach you the Dewey Decimal system, but whatever it was, you have long since forgotten. My advice? Retrace your steps. Maybe there’s a reason you can’t get that special someone out of your mind.

Mostly C’s: Science Library I’m just going to come right out and say it. This library is best after dark. The contrast between the dark outside and the warm yellow glow of the lamps inside gives the science library a cozy feeling reminiscent of snow days of yore. I’m guessing you have spent a lot of time in various dorm rooms staring out dark windows, if you know what I mean. I’m glad you are having your fun, but remember that the ceiling-high windows in the Sci Li give excellent light during the day. Maybe you should try sticking around till the morning once in a while.

Mostly D’s: Oberlin Public Library All around the city of Oberlin is hidden a series of Scrabble tiles in increasingly obscure locations. Once you have found and collected each and every tile, a spirit will appear to you in the form of a three-legged dog and whisper to you a riddle whose answer holds the key to rearranging the letters into a cohesive order. The message spelled out by the letters will reveal to you the current location of your true love. Go, quickly, and find them. Time is running out.

Illustration by Niovi Rahme Contributor

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