The Strand | Volume 61, Issue 7

the

STRAND VICTORIA UNIVERSITY’S STUDENT NEWSPAPER VOLUME 61, ISSUE 7 | 15 JANUARY 2019

bridging the gap opinions | page 7 the inclusive future of skating features | page 8 editors’ picks: best of 2018 arts | page 11

02 NEWS

EDITOR | NICHOLAS FREER NEWS@THESTRAND.CA

Provincial Finance Minister condemns CPP and federal carbon tax

Changes which aid young adults and the environment decried by government NOAH KELLY EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

The Ontario Ministry of Finance started the year off swinging. On January 1, the Ford administration released a press briefing detailing its staunch opposition to changes to the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) and to the federal carbon tax plan, both of which took effect that day.

The two plans were made to address long-term concerns voiced by the federal government: saving for the retirement of Canada’s young people and climate change.

What is the CPP? The intention of updating the Canadian Pension Plan, it has been argued, is to benefit the current generation of students and young people. Through the current CPP, retirees receive 25 percent of their former income annually, up to a certain limit. In the new CPP, that number will jump to 33 percent. Though Canadians will begin payments towards this plan now, the percentage jump will not come into effect until

2065, when young people today will begin to reach retirement age.

CPP payments are split 50/50 between employer and employee. Currently, 4.95 percent of an employee’s paycheck goes towards the CPP with their employer matching that amount, totalling 9.9 percent. In the new plan, individual payments will incrementally increase until 2025 when they will cap off at 5.95 percent, totalling 10.9 percent.

This increase affects the self-employed more than others, as they pay both employer and employee payments.

What is the Canadian federal carbon tax?

The tax is meant to lower corporate and individual carbon consumption as a reaction to the reality of climate change. Provinces that have not enacted their own carbon tax, or whose carbon tax was found insufficient, will now have the federal tax applied. The tax is applied per tonne of fossil fuel emissions. Corporations are taxed based on their emissions in comparison

to the norms in their field, and consumers will pay 20 dollars per tonne (4.4 cents per litre of gasoline), rising to 50 dollars per tonne in 2020 (11 cents per litre).

Doug Ford’s administration scrapped the provincial Liberal government’s former cap-andtrade carbon tax, opting for a “Made in Ontario Environmental Plan… without the job-killing carbon tax,” as stated in the briefing, before the federal government’s assertion of the federal carbon tax.

In this briefing, the Ministry used adversarial rhetoric to make their stance clear against the newly implemented federal carbon tax and CPP. They cite the incoming laws as unaffordable to small businesses and families and a detriment to the overall well-being of the Canadian economy, rather than an investment in a more sustainable future for Canada’s young people. Both issues are currently split along party lines and will likely be major talking points in the upcoming federal election.

Ford education consultation concludes

But remains far from conclusive CHRISTOPHER LOOSE CONTRIBUTOR

On December 31, 2018, the Ford administration announced the conclusion of what the government has called the “largest public consultation on education in the province’s history.” This consultation, which began in late August of the same year, is part of Ford’s plan to fulfill his campaign promise to revoke the 2015 sexual education curriculum instated by the Liberals and to reinstate the 1998 version, which notably lacks any discussion of gender identity, consent, or sexting. Though the consultation originally pertained solely to the sexed curriculum, the project’s scope was expanded to encompass several aspects of education policy, including how best to deal with issues such as the province’s dropping EQAO test scores and cell phones in school.

This public consultation perpetuates what has been a hostile relationship between the Ford administration and Ontario’s teachers’ unions. In October, the provincial government introduced legislation which would impose a mandatory math test for new teachers. This was in an effort to address the failure of 49 percent of grade six students to meet the provincial standard in mathematical skills and comprehension. The test has been decried as “unwarranted and unnecessary” by Sam Hammond, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO). A representative from the

Ministry of Education has cited precedent of teacher testing in nations like Australia as proof of the legitimacy of the concept.

Critics of the mandatory test note that it fails to provide any support to current teachers wishing to improve their mathematical comprehension skills.

The subsidies put in place by the previous Liberal administration meant to ensure the accessibility of additional mathematics qualifications for elementary school teachers were terminated by the Ford administration prior to the introduction of the math test legislation.

Notably, the legislation, if passed, would also automatically and permanently revoke the teaching licence of any individual found guilty of sexual assault. This aspect of the legislation makes it difficult for teachers’ unions to oppose the bill, as it would place them in the compromising position of opposing what has generally been lauded as a progressive policy regarding sexual assault.

Prior to this dispute over mathematics, Ford threatened to crack down on teachers who followed some teachers’ unions’ recommendations to continue to use the 2015 sexual education curriculum, as opposed to the interim curriculum introduced by his government.

The interim curriculum includes substantial portions of the 1998 curriculum with the addition of a glossary that includes definitions of gender identity and consent. The announcement of ForTheParents.ca, the

online component of the consultation, coincided with Ford’s statement which advised parents taking issue with the material being taught to their children to contact the Ministry of Education directly. Ford’s promise that teachers would face consequences from the Ministry if they did not comply rattled union representatives, as this would supersede the teachers’ unions’ currently internal disciplinary protocols.

Results of the public consultation, obtained from ForTheParents.ca by request through the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA), indicate overwhelming support for continuation of the 2015 curriculum. According to the CBC, out of the near 1,600 submissions reviewed, two dozen are in support of the proposed 1998 curriculum. Ford has denounced these results, stating that “certain groups” flooded the site early on, and has since pledged to review the entirety of the 35,000 online submissions. This repudiation on Ford’s part has critics questioning both the efficiency and the function of the public consultation. If, as Ford suggests, the consultation was susceptible to manipulation, why did the government carry it out in the first place? More recently, the Ontario government’s proposed education policy has been taken to court by Sam Hammond and the ETFO, where they will argue that the scrapping of the sex-ed curriculum is unconstitutional and transgresses the Ontario Human Rights Code.

NEWS 03

@STRANDPAPER THE STRAND | 15 JANUARY 2019

Effective study habits for the new year MICHAEL MEJIA STAFF WRITER

As the winter semester starts in full swing, it’s time to explore the proven ways of effective studying. The following information provides four tactics to potentially improve study habits.

Make a schedule that can satisfy short-term goals Along with scheduling in lectures, labs, and tutorials, it is beneficial for you to schedule designated study periods into your weeks. Studies from Dr. John M. Grohol—an author and researcher of mental health— have shown that cramming is ineffective for retaining relevant material. Thus, have consistent study periods in your schedule for more exposure to course material. This will commit the information to long-term memory, which, according to Grohol, creates a more expedited retrieval process when recalling information. The key to successful studying is consistency, not frequency.

Having a schedule that you can stick to will improve your classroom performance.

Keep a healthy, active, and balanced lifestyle Maintaining a consistent healthy lifestyle in addition to juggling

academics, work, extra-curriculars, social life, and other commitments is a daunting task.

That being said, learning ways to balance all these aspects can have positive effects. Finding multiple outlets of interest to explore will help improve discipline and time management which will in turn improve academics.

According to an article from Harvard Medical School, exercising regularly releases vital hormones such as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine that coordinate to improve health, concentration, and attention.

Including regular exercise with healthy eating habits is most effective. Exercising can be as simple as going for a walk. There is no single right way to exercise; there are options for everyone.

In addition, a report from the journal of Science suggests maintaining consistent sleep patterns.

Sleep is crucial for committing learned material to memory. Allnighters are detrimental to this process.

Know what the expectations are for a class It is always a good idea to be aware of the expectations of a course. Before exam season, midterms, or tests, look through the syllabus and take note of major themes and ideas that might be prevalent in exams or assign-

What’s going on around campus this month?

ments. Taking note of the parameters of the course and the professor or TA’s expectations will reduce some of the traditional stresses associated with taking a class, as is highlighted through a research article published by the journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology.

The same article suggests that looking through an exam before working on it will reduce test anxiety and improve performance. The Old Exams Repository at UofT has a large collection of past exams for some courses. It is a useful tool that allows students to practice potential questions they might face.

Take breaks and reward yourself Finally, overworking yourself is a danger of student life. An article from the Elsevier Mental Health and Physical Activity journal suggests that taking breaks periodically and rewarding yourself can encourage an attitude shift which can improve overall productivity. Similarly, combining general exercise with breaks can have a heightened effect.

These tips are suggestions that can assist you in the winter semester. Hopefully, by trying them you’ll find a method that works for you and helps you succeed this year.

UofT Jazz at the Rex January 14, 6:30 pm to 8:10 pm The Rex Hotel, 194 Queen Street West This Monday, support fellow students and local musicians as they play at The Rex Hotel, a jazz and blues bar. Beginning at 6:30 pm with Meghan Gilhespy, one of the ensemble directors, the concert will go until 8:10 pm with various artists featured throughout the evening. The event is free, though tips are encouraged. Grab a drink and relax this Monday night with UofT jazz ensembles.

The Free Store January 15, 11 am to 3 pm HNES Building, Room 109 An effort to reduce landfill waste by giving away unused clothes and common household items, the Free Store is a recurring event every Tuesday.

The giveaway is limited to five items per person (and another if you follow them on Instagram—@ freestore_regenesis); bring your friends to the HNES Building this Tuesday and get yourselves something nice.

Frost Week: Donut Decorating Day January 15, 1 pm Bahen Centre for Information Technology, 40 St. George Street Donuts. Free donuts. What more is there to say?

Only a few things: the donuts provided by Gloryhole Donuts are part of the UTSU’s Think Pink #Bleed Blue campaign to raise awareness for the Canadian Cancer Society and their work against breast cancer. So, if you get a chance between classes or during lunch, visit their table in the Bahen Centre and frost a donut pink!

Opening Reception: How to Breathe Forever January 16, 6 pm Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West (street level) Hosted by the Onsite Gallery and OCAD University, this new exhibition is free and runs from 6 pm to 9 pm. Curated by Lisa Deanne Smith, How to Breathe Forever “underlines the importance and interconnectedness of air, animals, coral, humans, insects, land, plants and water. The belief that everything in the universe has a place and deserves equal respect is the core of this exhibition.” Onsite is OCAD University’s professional gallery which seeks to promote experimental art, design, and new media.

MoveU Skate Series: Let it Go January 17, 7 pm Varsity Centre Arena, 299 Bloor Street In partnership with the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, as well as the UTSU and UTM’s Health and Wellness team, Hart House and ParticipACTION have teamed up to provide a free night of skating, hot chocolate, and crafts to all UofT students to promote the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. The event is open to anyone, but non-UofT students must pay a five-dollar admission fee. For those who do not own ice skates, there will be free skate rentals provided as supplies last. Get active this winter and enjoy a night of activity with friends.

ILLUSTRATION

| MIA CARNEVALE

Starry Night Coffee House January 18, 7 pm The Cat’s Eye Student Pub and Lounge, 150 Charles Street West Next Friday, the Arts and Science Students’ Union (ASSU) is hosting a coffee house with poetry readings, food, stand-up comedy, and more! Start off the new semester right by meeting friends and getting to know the undergraduate community. If you are a performer, a poet, or other kind of artist, sign up on the ASSU Facebook page by January 14.

If you’re attending, RSVP in the same place.

04 EDITORIAL

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF | AINSLEY DOELL AND SABRINA PAPAS EDITOR@THESTRAND.CA

To thine own self be true?

the

The value of your past selves

strand V O L U M E

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ILLUSTRATION

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

editor@thestrand.ca

|

MAIA GRECCO

AINSLEY DOELL SABRINA PAPAS

BUSINESS MANAGER

business@thestrand.ca

MISHAIL ADEEL

NEWS

news@thestrand.ca

NICHOLAS FREER

OPINIONS

opinions@thestrand.ca

GEORGIA LIN

FEATURES

features@thestrand.ca

REBECCA GAO

SCIENCE

science@thestrand.ca

TANUJ ASH KUMAR

ARTS AND CULTURE

artsandculture@thestrand.ca HARRISON WADE STRANDED

stranded@thestrand.ca

LEO MORGENSTERN

COPY EDITING

copy@thestrand.ca

TAMARA FROOMAN

DESIGN

design@thestrand.ca

JAY BAWAR

PHOTO

photo@thestrand.ca

HANA NIKCEVIC

ART

art@thestrand.ca

MIA CARNEVALE

WEB

web@thestrand.ca

ERIC MCGARRY

VIDEO

ANNIKA HOCIENIEC SONYA ROMA

video@thestrand.ca PODCAST

strandcast@thestrand.ca

SAMANTHA GRECO JASMINE NG

SOCIAL MEDIA

NATE CROCKER

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

MIRANDA CARROLL SANDY FORSYTH NOAH KELLY AMELIA MARTINEZ-WHITE ABBIE MOSER CONTRIBUTORS

EMMA KELLY, ARIN KLEIN, RACHEL LEGGETT, CHRISTOPHER LOOSE, MICHAEL MEJIA, WILFRED MOESCHTER, REHANA

MUSHTAQ, MAX NISBETH, EMMA PAIDRA COPY EDITORS ALYSSA DIBATTISTA, ARIN KLEIN DESIGN TEAM

JAY BAWAR, REBECCA GAO, SABRINA PAPAS ILLUSTRATIONS MIA CARNEVALE, KATIE DOYLE, MAIA GRECCO, SEAN KELLY,

TANUJ ASH KUMAR, YILIN ZHU PHOTOS

HANA NIKCEVIC, WARNER BROS. PICTURES COVER ILLUSTRATION SARAH FARQUHAR

The Strand has been the newspaper of record for Victoria University since 1953. It is published 12 times a year with a circulation of 1200 and is distributed in Victoria University buildings and across the University of Toronto’s St. George campus.

The Strand flagrantly enjoys its editorial autonomy and is committed to acting as an agent of constructive social change. As such, we will not publish material deemed to exhibit racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or other oppressive language.

The Strand is a proud member of the Canadian University Press (CUP).

Our offices are located at 150 Charles St. W., Toronto, ON, M5S 1K9. Please direct enquiries by email to editor@thestrand.ca. Submissions are welcome and may be edited for taste, brevity, and legality.

FOLLOW US @STRANDPAPER WWW.THESTRAND.CA

SABRINA PAPAS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

At the conclusion of Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998), Des McGrath (Chris Eigeman) vows to turn over a new leaf. His plan is to flee New York for Spain and avoid testifying in the tax fraud case against the owner of the disco club he co-managed, leaving it all behind. Turning to his friend, he considers the following: “Do you know that Shakespearean admonition 'To thine own self be true'? It's premised on the idea that 'thine own self ' is pretty good, being true to which is commendable. But what if 'thine own self ' is not so good?

What if it's pretty bad? Would it be better, in that case, not to be true to 'thine own self '? See? That's my situation.”

In his attempt to flee the country, Des recognizes that he is staying true to himself—he’s aware of his faults. Is there not still merit in that? “Thine own self ” does not need to be a model for perfect values and conduct in order for you to stay true to it. Can you not stay true to yourself in making poor decisions, as well as good decisions?

Hopefully we’re not all not running away from lawsuits, but there is a similar compulsion at the start of a new year to turn over a new leaf, or maybe several new leaves. We make resolutions and we hope for change.

These resolutions are representative of the positive improvements we hope to see in our lives. For many, the new year presents an opportunity to put our mistakes of the past year behind us and move on. But I want the faults of my past selves to stay with me. Remembering who I was helps me to understand who I am now.

Who can say what “thine own self ” truly is when it’s constantly evolving? And the only way I know how to grow is by learning from my past. I generally make the same resolution each year—to record and to remember my experiences through writing. For years, I kept consistent and detailed journals so that I could look back: on all the moments of comfort and hurt, to remember the words that were spoken, to recognize who I was, and how it felt to be that person. I haven’t been as disciplined with this as I used to be, but I still try to make note of certain moments and feelings.

In “On Keeping a Notebook” (1960), Joan Didion writes “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Would I be friends with my 17-year-old self? Definitely not. But she’s a part of me, and I’m still quite fond of her.

My past selves are like old friends. We’ve been through it all together. I don’t see them very often anymore, but when I do visit them through the words I wrote, they offer reassurance. There’s a certain kind of insight that can only be gained from the people I used to be. Looking towards a singular “thine own self ” right now, in this moment of your life, is not always going to give you a definitively correct answer. The people you once were, however, can sometimes help you out when you need them.

We’re inevitably going to make mistakes; not every decision will seem like the right one. Reflecting on the people we used to be is how we can grow and resolve to better ourselves. Forget about reinvention in 2019.

I encourage you to hold onto all of it, don’t leave anything behind. To thine own selves be true, whoever they may be.

OPINIONS 05

EDITOR | GEORGIA LIN OPINIONS@THESTRAND.CA

The plight of the bumblebee The dilemma of taking four courses for an overachiever GEORGIA LIN OPINIONS EDITOR

Taking anything less than a full, five-class course load was an anathema to me until a few weeks ago.

Whenever someone asked me whether I got rest over the holiday break, my answer was, “A little bit, but I mostly worked.” In this instance, “work” meant catching up on the dozens of readings I had neglected in first semester. A mix of high-stress commitments, work shifts, and mental health challenges caused a backup of theoretical texts on equity and diaspora—arguably the two topics I talk about the most—to gather in a shameful folder on my desktop. I’d taken five classes per term since I began university, and I briefly flirted with electing six courses last semester before realizing I was barely capable of making myself eat lunch every day, let alone committing to an intense academic workload.

I don’t pretend to glamorize being overloaded, nor do I enjoy being stressed. It is a behaviour that has been engrained in me since grade school, when my mother enrolled me in swimming lessons, choir, Chinese tutoring lessons, and after-school math help, so I had somewhere to be after school every day of the week. I was taught that being busy was positive—there was always anticipation for more.

My Flight of the Bumblebee (Rimsky-Korsakov)esque routine followed me into high school, whose culture of club competition was intensified by our

performing arts program. While singing in three mandatory choirs for my voice major, I was also applying to be a general member of any organization that piqued my interest with little regard for how much of myself I could afford to give up. I never considered the possibility of changing my overworked habits, because my family members encouraged me to devote myself to whatever I wished.

The peak of my overzealous antics arrived when I applied to a total of 16 post-secondary institutions, with my central reasoning being simply that I wanted to see if I could do it.

I needed to understand the distinction between challenge and stress. Thriving because I was being challenged to think in new ways is different from trying, and struggling, to keep my head above water the entirety of first year. I look back on poems I wrote in the deepest moments of my depression last year, and the lines of hopelessness are striking: the counsellor asks / “what’s stopping you from failing a class?” / i say / “because i cannot do that to myself.” / it wants to pacify me, contain me in a heatwave / until i suffocate from recluse / until i suffice with apathy / it is too hot to collapse on wrinkled sheets, so instead i fall inwards / fold my vessels into a bowline knot / until i can no longer taste sores / wrap self pity around my ankles / until i stay still.

These lines were not written by a self I am proud of, and I measure everything I do against the lows of the self who could not think further than the confines of a dark, joyless room. Even in the

moments that were manipulated by mental illness, I still forced myself to try to accomplish more.

Currently, I am still enrolled in five classes. My mental health is on an uptick, but it continues to be a pendulum. I am involved in more activities and work than before, and my priorities are swirled in a perpetual jumble. But for the first time, I am weighing the benefits of taking it slightly easier and not forcing myself to give everything, because there are simply not enough pieces to go around. In my mind, taking four courses comes with many risks: financial loss for the full-time program fee, half a credit more to make up in order to graduate, the costs of summer school courses, seeing a blank spot on my timetable where my fifth class used to be, the disappointment in myself that I needed to let go of something in order to just barely manage relinquishing a valuable educational experience in a special topics class. When I hover over the “drop class” option on my ACORN account, my anxiety heightens, and I think about the criticism my mother would hurl at me for not being a consistent model student.

Yet I cannot help but imagine that if I do press “drop,” there will be a palpable sense of relief knowing that I have saved myself from regressing into a self that does not know when to stop. I hope I’ll be steady enough in myself, knowing what I can achieve and have already achieved, to follow through on a long-overdue promise to take care of myself and to start eating lunch again.

ILLUSTRATION

| KATIE DOYLE

06 OPINIONS

EDITOR | GEORGIA LIN OPINIONS@THESTRAND.CA

A culture of disconnect Navigating silences in the university classroom

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RACHEL LEGGETT ASSOCIATE OPINIONS EDITOR

Before I began university, a slew of school webpages and recruitment handbooks promised me exciting lectures. They were described as a place for discussion and debate among peers, where a meeting of minds would occur. I arrived at my first lecture, preparing myself for the intellectual supernova I was promised, and instead I got silence.

In my first few classes—after the frantic friendmaking days of Orientation—I had a few forced conversations with people I happened to sit beside.

But these never went much beyond basic introductions and the often-asked, “So, what program are you in?” As the weeks went on, even those conversations died down. Both lectures and tutorials began to feel like an endless ride on the TTC: each person remaining solitary and unwilling to acknowledge those around them.

In large lectures, this is understandable. That person you met awkwardly on the first day often disappears into a horde of other students never to be seen again, and that’s hardly because they’re avoiding you. It’s easy to stay anonymous in such an impersonal environment, but even in smaller lectures and tutorials I feel the same sense of isolation. In these small groups where there should be nowhere to hide, this problem often feels heightened. Without the excuse of a large lecture size, we

sit surrounded by faces we recognize, people with voices and opinions we are already familiar with, and still there is a silence no one seems willing to break. The ten minutes before my tutorials are often the most painful; we’re trapped by the discomfort of that silence but also don’t want to be the one who begins the conversation.

While there are times when I like the quiet and want to focus, in many of my classes, I often feel lonely. When I am in a lecture where I don’t recognize a friend, I feel lonely. When my professor says, “Turn to your classmates and discuss this problem,” and the person beside me stares stoically ahead, I feel lonely. It’s no secret that university can be a time of isolation for many students. After the forced comraderie of high school, an experience often shared with classmates you’ve grown up with, the new terrain of a university classroom can be challenging. Compared to high school classes, a university lecture is certainly more sequestered.

As I sit in my lectures, surrounded by a rainstorm of clicking keyboards, this isolation feels strange. The irony of it is that I am surrounded by other students, many of whom likely share this feeling of loneliness, yet we all continue to do nothing.

The people around me are sharing a common experience, but making the first move feels too difficult.

I am not an unsocial person, but in these rooms, I often don’t feel as though socialization is welcome.

Many people may come to university determined

| HANA NIKCEVIC

to focus only on their studies, but I think there are many like me who simply feel too awkward or too anxious to reach out.

Lectures and tutorials are not usually spaces of socialization, so approaching someone in these environments can be scary. I have rarely seen someone strike up a conversation with a classmate they didn’t already know, and as the semester goes on people seem less and less willing to meet their peers. After being handed connections in high school, it can feel alien to go out of your way to make friends in university. If you don’t make a conscious effort, it’s easy to go through your courses without meeting anyone. Most of the friends I’ve made in my time here have been through extracurricular activities or living in residence, not in academic spaces.

How can we develop a campus community if the main activity we share as students pushes us into isolation? Perhaps this issue is aggravated by how academically focused UofT students are, or how communicating in person is unfamiliar to a generation engrossed in technology. Regardless of these contributing factors, this culture of isolation in lectures ultimately will not change unless we carry ourselves differently. Rather than going through our lectures on friend-making airplane mode, I think many of us would be happier if we strove to look around and notice all the likeminded peers around us who await connection.

OPINIONS 07

@STRANDPAPER THE STRAND | 15 JANUARY 2019

New Year vs. new year The life and times of a new year’s resolution REHANA MUSHTAQ STAFF WRITER

When we think of the New Year, we often see a new dawn for transformation and fulfillment. We bombard ourselves with promises of hitting up the gym, managing money better, or perhaps even limiting our Netflix binging to an hour or two a day.

Depending on who you are, these promises may seem artificial. Why start in January? The distinction of starting something new on one day that you could have started the day before seems silly. We rarely discuss the historic and religious significance of a new year and the promises made annually that mark the change of a season. At the start of each year, ancient Babylonians made promises to their gods to pay their debts and return borrowed objects. Knights in medieval Europe would reaffirm their commitments through a “peacock vow” at the end of every Christmas season. No matter how futile these promises may seem, they are entrenched in human cultures and are unlikely to fade away anytime soon. As prominent as they are, New Year’s resolutions can lead to both benefits and mistakes.

The problem with making resolutions lies in

their unrealistic goals. What do we want? Perfection. In imagining a utopia, we reach too far away from ourselves instead of attempting to project the possible. We think of the end and not the means.

We idealize an infallible self without considering the time, energy, and effort involved in creating that self or achieving that resolution. We treat this “end” as a final point, after which we stop our pursuit. People forget that much of what they hope to change or take a chance on in the new year requires a constant, and perhaps lifelong, commitment. The result is ultimately disappointment.

Yet the boon of making resolutions is evident in its power to shape a rare period of positivity. By the end of the year, we are often weighed down by all that went wrong and all that was lost in the past year; even if it is only a symbolic refuge, the New Year is a period of renewal. In beginning something new that has come before, we are reminded of the renewing energy of life itself. We are struck by the thought, the feeling, that even though the past didn’t work out, we always have the opportunity to begin again. We long for an ending in order to enter something new. This renewal—a coming again of positive energy—gives us the strength we had

Bridging the gap What does it mean to feel a city?

EMMA PAIDRA STAFF WRITER

home noun 1. the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household This is the definition of “home” as given by the Oxford English Dictionary. However, after I returned home to Calgary, Alberta for the holidays, the true meaning of this word has become more obscured for me. On my first night back in Calgary, I was explaining to my mother that I had forgotten my toothpaste in Toronto, yet I told her that I had left it “at home.” A moment of stunned silence gathered between us followed by awkward laughter as we both realized what I had just said. Clearly, on some level, I considered my residence at UofT to be home, but then what did that make the house I had grown up in?

Can a person really have two homes?

Surely many students in residence, even if they are originally from Toronto, understand this sentiment of “home” as simultaneously being both UofT and their family household. Being back on campus has made the divide between the two homes even clearer for me. In Calgary, both my family and the friends who returned from other schools have no relation to the everyday elements of my Toronto life. Whether it be the annoyance of trying to safely cross Queen’s Park or the bizarre roaring box outside of the ROM that showcases its dinosaur exhibit, almost no one back home has any conception of what a regular day at UofT is like.

Simultaneously, few people at school fully grasp the concept of the Calgary Stampede or know what a Flames game at the Saddledome feels like.

So how can I begin to approach the chasm between who I am in my life at UofT and who I am in my hometown?

It’s a question whose enormity reaches beyond me, but I have figured out a couple of ways to handle its size. Firstly, what is most important is not having an absolute continuity between my Calgary and Toronto lives. The continuity that does matter is the ongoing presence of a sense of belonging to whichever home I find myself in. Between my two homes, one is not more real than the other. I belong in both of them, simply in different ways.

Secondly, it is about mindset, believing that anywhere can become a home if I have an attitude of open-mindedness and patience. Even though I have undergone changes and life experiences that those from my Calgary life will not be able to fully relate to, that is not what is most important. It would be unreasonable of me to expect my understandings of Calgary and Toronto to always flow together harmoniously. What does matter is continuously feeling that I have a place in both cities.

Not only is it possible to have two homes, but it can also be a good thing. I have learned to carry myself with confidence in order to cross the divide between my homes, and I hope the same is true for other UofT students. If the common denominator of care is present in both places I live, that is certainly more than enough to bridge the gap.

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HANA NIKCEVIC

previously felt was draining away.

In a way, we can make these changes at any point in our lives. But no matter the day or year, changes are marked by a significant realization or event that triggers our commitment to the effort. When we are immersed in the monotony of our daily lives, we neglect the introspection required to grow and change ourselves for the better. Instead, we section off specific days and celebrations to bring us moments of reflection, like birthdays. However, a new year commemorates something that is universally binding for those who follow the Gregorian calendar. Around the world, we wait for the clock to strike 12 in our time zone and for the New Year to begin. In that, it’s impossible not to think of where we belong and see ourselves in a way that is beyond the everyday.

New Year’s resolutions don’t always work out, but in making them we can project a confidence and enthusiasm about life that we often forgo in favour of old habits. Maybe a New Year is just a season to mark a new year, but culturally and historically this newness has been significant in leaving the past behind and moving on to something bigger and brighter.

08 FEATURES

ILLUSTRATION

EDITOR | REBECCA GAO FEATURES@THESTRAND.CA

| SEAN KELLY

THE INCLUSIVE FUTURE OF S K A T I N G TORONTO'S ODDITY COLLECTIVE AND OTHER YOUNG SKATERS ARE A FORCE FOR POSITIVE CHANGE IN THE SPORT

EMMA KELLY CONTRIBUTOR

When I first met Kira Tejada on a dreary, spitball-coloured afternoon in early November, they immediately clocked the Unity sticker plastered on the deck of my board. It came as no surprise to me that Tejada was a fan of the Oakland-based queer skate collective founded by artist and skater Jeffery Cheung in 2016. Tejada and one of their roommates, Zainab Imam, founded the collective Oddity in Toronto last year with a similar objective to Cheung’s: to create a safe and welcoming space where the city’s “hidden queer skater population” (as Tejada puts it) could meet up and skate together, support and encourage one another. The Facebook page for one of Oddity’s summer events stresses that homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and racism will not be tolerated, and that informal instruction will be provided for beginners. I learned that Tejada, Imam, and their third roommate, Oddity member Chuck Hopper, typically drag a rickety cage cart of skateboards to every meet-up—the steep cost of a board is often one of the most prohibitive aspects of skating—and start off each session with a land acknowledgement. As people of colour, Tejada and Imam also find it imperative that some meet-ups be exclusively for Black and Indigenous people of colour. Imam, who has training as a social worker, helps facilitate a circle discussion at the end of each event. She says this intervention is crucial because “in the West, we often forget how the mind and body connection is so integral to us as human beings… I find that [skating] helps me nourish and become in tune with that connection that then fuels me as a creative,

political being that white supremacy and its systematic oppressions often aim to erase and diminish in Black and Indigenous people as well as other people of colour.”

I am a fervent admirer of Tejada, Imam, Hopper, and their work with Oddity. Although I am probably the worst skater alive—and that’s saying a lot because there’s no shortage of Instagram-famous skateboarding dogs—I have always been a fan of the sport. While I was getting coffee with Hopper, they said that skating was another avenue of their art practice (Hopper also performs spoken word around Toronto under the name Soft Honey and runs the thrift brand Casually Clothed). Tejada, who is currently an apprentice at Ink & Water Tattoo, echoed that skating gave them the feeling of being “free in their own world,” like there were no rules and that they finally had the liberty to play around and be silly. This is one of my favourite qualities of skating: it has never been about perfection. No matter how good you get, you are inevitably going to mess up a trick and fall flat on your face. You are probably going to do that a lot. But the more you fall, the more you learn how to fall and how to bounce back. It is this process of redoing and persevering, this process of learning, that is the fun part. And when you finally land that trick, everything feels perfect.

Oddity is important because of the vacuum it was created in. Many people, including me, associate skateboarding with figures in media like Steve-O from Jackass, Tony Hawk, Bart Simpson, and, most recently, Jonah Hill and his movie Mid90s. There seems to be a near-universal assumption that it is a mode of expression only available for straight white men from the suburbs.

We inherently link the qualities necessary for skating— innovation, tactical thinking, physical strength, and dexterity—with this kind of person due to the Western patriarchal ideology that structures our society. I am anxious even talking about skating, much less actually skating, in public since I worry I will not be taken seriously because of my gender and femme-presentation. I sometimes feel as though a skater who lacks machoism has no right to be skating at all.

Tejada, who has been skating since they were nine years old, described to me the similar discomfort they often experienced in skateparks and shops. The majority of skaters in these environments usually appear to be white, cisgender, heterosexual, and male. Tejada maintains that their initial reaction to meeting skaters of this ilk was the same that they have had with every person they see holding a board: “Oh my god, this person skates! I want to be their friend!” Their attempts were often rebuffed or ignored outright. Cheung told i-D Magazine, “It’s funny that skateboarding—which is something that stemmed from going against the mainstream—can also be so much a part of that same heteronormative culture.”

Despite the emergence of a skate mentality in the late 1970s that was based on the enduring ideals of defiance against authority and conformity, creativity, and a simultaneous sense of individualism and community, propagated mostly by ex-surfers like the Z-Boys in Southern California, skateboarding can often seem like a daunting niche to break into for queer people, femmepresenting people, and people of colour.

Some of the most revered pioneers of the sport, like the late Jay Adams (one of the aforementioned Z-Boys),

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@STRANDPAPER THE STRAND | 15 JANUARY 2019

have also helped foster its homophobic undercurrent. In 1982, Adams assaulted Daniel Bradbury and his partner and left Bradbury for dead. Adams told Juice Magazine, “We went to a place called the Okiedogs and two homosexual guys walked by and I started a fight. That’s just how every fuckin’ night was for me back then.” Adams only served six months in jail for Bradbury’s death.

He was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2012 and posthumously honoured at the TransWorld SKATEboarding Awards in 2015.

Adams’ case is an extreme one. However, in conversation with The New York Times, Victor Valdez, who rides for Unity, says, “Growing up, I skated with your typical skate crew—dudes’ dudes,” and he regularly heard homophobic slurs in the scene. In that same piece, Cher Straub, a 25-year-old transgender woman who also rides for Unity, says she skated alone after she became more open about her gender identity, despite her long career in the sport. “I lost all my friends,” Straub says. “I didn’t skate for 10 years. I just quit—I didn’t own a skateboard, I didn’t look at skateboarding magazines. I hated it.”

Furthermore, when Brian Anderson—who has won Thrasher’s Skater of the Year award and ridden for Toy Machine, Girl, Anti Hero, Independent, Nike SB, and Spitfire—came out as gay in September 2016, he told Rolling Stone that it was something he had known about himself since a young age was “really scared” to reveal as an adult because he thought it would have a negative effect on his career.

For women, skating presents another set of unique challenges. In a 2015 interview with Broadly, Lacey Baker, one of the best female street and technical skaters of all time, spoke on the discrimination that female skaters face in the male-dominated industry. Having been the recipient of the 2017 Super Crown Women’s World Championship and the Berrics’ “Populist” award, Baker pointed out that women in these competitions often win less than half of what the first place prize is for men.

She said, “The skate industry is a bunch of dudes mak-

book The Answer is Never, which chronicles the history of skateboarding, Jocko Weyland writes, “Skating was [always] multicultural… there were always a lot of nonwhites involved in skating, which I liked about it.”

However, Ray Barbee, an African American pro skater, told Huffington Post that lack of access, mainly due to economic inequality, has kept skating mostly racially homogenous, with people of colour still in the minority. “You think [about] the ’70s and the park era, and there’s definitely people of color that were skating in the parks,” Barbee said. “But again because the tone was set early on for the practitioners that got into skateboarding from surfing it became predominantly a white thing—that’s just the reality of it.” White people had more access to skating equipment and resources than people of colour. “Now to skate a half-pipe you got to know the dude that owns the ramp. To have [access] to a half-pipe your parents most likely had to have bought their home, have enough property to house a ramp and be able to pay for a ramp.”

As skating moved away from the suburbs and into the cities in the 1990s, the scene became more diverse by demographic default. It embraced new terrain and participants, who went on to represent skating at the professional level and start new companies.

When Chocolate Skateboards was founded in 1994, it was hailed by many as a “multicultural team.” Though it wasn’t the first team of multiracial skaters, it did anticipate the subsequent change in racial demographics brought on by the popularity of street skating.

Nonetheless, there still exist areas of under-representation in the sport. Dustin Henry is a pro skater from Calgary who is Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in on his father’s side. He said he does not “look” Indigenous, so it was an aspect of his identity he downplayed for many years.

“Being Indigenous has been something I’ve hidden for most of my life growing up because I used to be afraid of what people would think. I thought they would judge me in a negative way, so since I didn’t look it I never mentioned it.”

legedly erupted after Jessee called Ned “Peanut” Brown, an African American skater, the N-word at a skate contest in 1986. Jessee told the OC Weekly in 2006 that Brown confronted him for talking to Brown’s girlfriend.

“I actually talked shit to him, on the top of the ramp.

And the next thing I know, I’m on the bottom of the ramp. He socked me in the mouth.”

Jessee has sported swastikas and white power stickers on his helmet at least since the late 1980s. The swastika has also appeared on a hand-stitched jacket Jessee donated to the Skateboard Museum, in his now-defunct clothing line Jason Jessee Apparel, and in his artwork.

When asked about his use of swastikas by VICE last May, Jessee replied, “In my past, I used hateful symbols, speech and culture to get a reaction out of people [...]

The hateful symbols I have used in the past do not represent who I am and what I believe in. I do not support white supremacy or white power that may be affiliated to any type of club or association that supports those views. I have no plans to ever use any of that negative symbolism again. Period.”

Nonetheless, Jessee sported white supremacist insignia in his 2007 documentary Pray for Me and has continued a relationship with alleged neo-Nazi band The Highway Murderers. Recently, he has been sponsored by or collaborated with (in addition to Brixton and Santa Cruz) OJ Wheels, Independent, Grant’s Pomade, Madson Sunglasses, Stance Socks, and Converse. He is featured on the May 2018 cover of Thrasher magazine, and in April his first major video role in a decade came in Converse’s Purple. Converse and Santa Cruz both dropped Jessee after facing criticism. However, the fact that his racist leanings have been widely known and documented for more than 30 years suggests that these companies were more concerned with saving face than promoting an earnest dialogue.

My intention is not to hold up skateboarding as an object of either contempt or reverence. I do not think that the sport is inherently a tool for social justice or bigotry. Rather, it is, at its best, a beautiful project that

Skating is for everyone, yet the nature of the patriarchal society we live in has convinced many that it is not ing decisions and judgements. If I don’t have long hair, wear tight pants and a push up bra then they decide I look too much like a boy… It’s about how I look. It’s about how we all look. It’s catering to all these dudes in the skate industry.”

Another professional female skater, Marisa Dal Santo, talked to Platform about her experience with attending all-female competitions: “The guys’ contests go on for 3 days while the girls’ contests go on for 20 minutes.

There’s usually 10 people at the most in the crowd… For those same reasons they’re also kind of lame and embarrassing, [because] it shows how low girls are viewed in skateboarding.”

Furthermore, in a 2002 interview with Thrasher, Alexis Sablone, another female pro skater, said, “I think girls should just skate in regular contests. I don’t think girls should have to have their own category—they should just be in a skateboard contest. Girls just skate with guys, it’s all the same.”

Within male-oriented skate circles, notions of skating “like a girl” demonstrates how women who skate are placed on the lowest rung in the hierarchy. Women’s involvement in the subculture is largely viewed as a performative intervention; they are separated from the centre normative as “girl skateboarders” and are often paid less and treated with less respect than their male counterparts. Their appearances are played up for their marketability reinforced by the hetero-masculine interests at stake in the commercial world of skating. No one takes them seriously.

How race figures into skateboarding is a much more nebulous issue than other forms of identity politics. It has never been a whites-only sport. Mexican American Tony Alva and Asian Americans Peggy Oki and Shogo Kubo were some of skating’s earliest mega-stars who helped distinguish it from its surfing roots. In his

In an interview with Quartersnacks last October, he elaborated: “I feel like I didn’t have many [Indigenous people] inspiring me when I was growing up… I’d go to a skate park and all the natives you would see were drunk.”

Henry said there is only one other Indigenous person he skates with—his brother Tristan Henry—and only one Indigenous person he could recall making an impact on Canadian skating: Joe Buffalo, a Cree skater who has been semi-retired since 2007. Now that he is older, Henry says, “I’m ashamed of the way I used to think because now I realize how special [my identity] is… So I’m trying to reconnect with my culture and heritage because it is who I am and I am not hiding it anymore.” By being more open about his background, he hopes to make an impact for other Indigenous people in skating. He has noticed that, among skaters, “people have become more interested in my culture.”

Skating is getting more diverse as it ages, but the issue remains: iconic figures still get a free pass to use their platform to spread hate.

Celebrated as a legend within the community, Jason Jessee initially rose to fame in Santa Cruz in the 1980s.

He garnered sponsorships with Santa Cruz Skateboards and Speed Wheels due to his powerful vert style and outrageous personality. In 2012, TransWorld named him 24th on its 30 Most Influential Skaters of All Time list, calling him “simply one of the baddest individuals ever to ride a skateboard.”

However, it is widely known that Jessee is someone who consistently uses racial and homophobic epithets, as evidenced in his interviews in many skateboarding publications. He is also a fan of the swastika and other white power imagery, often employing these symbols in his artwork and clothing.

Racial bias was also the reason behind a fight that al-

people at all intersections of identities can find joy in.

Skating is for everyone, yet the nature of the patriarchal society we live in has convinced many that it is not. We exist in a world that tells us that freedom of expression can only be bestowed upon straight, white men. In the hands of anyone else, it is supposedly too dangerous. Tejada told me that they could surmise the goal of Oddity with one phrase: “radical accessibility.”

But what does that mean? First and foremost, we must be willing to listen to marginalized voices that we are most likely to exclude, so that we can understand their needs and how those needs are and aren’t being met. We must compassionately hold space for these voices, even when it means grappling with difficult emotions and truths. And, lastly, we must recognize the aspects of our practices and culture that act as barriers or drive people away, and then we must proactively dismantle what is not serving us. It will involve building relationships and re-evaluating priorities. It will require thinking of marginalized people not just as metrics, but as people we are curious about and excited to work with.

Skating is often marketed as apolitical and detached from social issues. This simply isn’t the case. Skating, like everything else, is a product of our dominant culture. Skating has never been about perfection, but together we can work towards a more inclusive future for the sport.

Imam told me that Oddity has been a “dream come true” for her as “a space with such a variety of lived experience, wisdom, and knowledge in it.” She added, “In actuality, it’s more than just a space to come longboard or skate, it’s a space where we talk, laugh, share our stories, our struggles, where we are heard, and actually seen. [Oddity] is filled with so much love, energy, and excitement all the time… There is a huge need and want for it.”

10 SCIENCE

EDITOR | TANUJ ASH KUMAR SCIENCE@THESTRAND.CA

2018 in review: four fun and fundamental stories ILLUSTRATION

TANUJ ASH KUMAR SCIENCE EDITOR

| TANUJ ASH KUMAR

Each year, the world of science continues to march onward, making massive strides and small steps alike. With the many scientific fields that exist, it can be incredibly difficult to identify which stories are most important in a roundup of scientific content in a year. Because of this, some stories can be buried altogether. So to start off a fresh new year, here are four breakthroughs in science and mathematics that may not have been given the front page, but that are incredibly important nonetheless.

1. Redefining the kilogram Unless you hail from south of the border, you probably see the fundamental unit of mass all over the place: the kilogram. But have you ever wondered where exactly the kilogram’s definition of mass comes from? How do we know that the mass that “1 kg” represents actually means something, and isn’t just arbitrary? Well, up until this year, it was an arbitrary definition. Since 1889, the notion of a kilogram wasn’t defined by some kind of fancy physics concept, but instead by a hunk of platinum-iridium alloy in France that set the standard reference point for what “1 kg” was. This year, joining the sweeping range of changes involving the redefinitions of measurements in terms of core physics properties, the kilogram was officially standardized to be defined in terms of the Planck constant, a fundamental constant of quantum mechanics.

2. AI still isn’t as smart as us These days, we hear a lot of buzz around the futuristic (or, in some cases, infamously cyberpunk) technologies that developments in AI are bringing us, from self-driving vehicles to accurate prediction systems.

If you’re more directly connected to the computer science world, the buzz around these technologies more specifically narrows down to “deep learning,” a kind of renaissance in machine learning and statistical learning that uses “deep neural networks” to do everything from learning classifications to generating art and music, all through the use of complicated multiparameter functions chained together.

One central bedrock of deep learning work is object detection: a trained network being able to learn the objects in an image or space and then recognize them correctly in new images or different spaces. For the past decade, work with complicated deep network architectures has brought object detection to nearly perfect accuracy—that is, until this year. A simple set of experiments found that while these networks were getting incredi-

bly good at detecting the same objects in increasingly altered scenarios, they failed in different contexts. Dubbed the “elephant in the room,” it takes the simple, intuitive idea that a network that can easily detect everything in your living room will immediately get confused and fail in accurate detection when superimposing images of elephants in the room, even though we could still recognize the objects in our rooms no matter what unexpected animal found itself at home there.

There’s still quite a long way to go for our computers to catch up with our complex analytical capability.

3. The hidden ninth planet (no, not Pluto) Sorry, Pluto! We mean an actual planet—a fairly massive one, at that, one lying at the edge of our solar system that astronomers have been finding increasing evidence for. The notion of a fairly large planet lying beyond the orbit of Pluto but within the confines of our local space of the galaxy is something of a common fictional trope, but the discovery of such a planet would shake our cultural conceptions far more than Pluto’s de-listing did. So far, the evidence of such

a planet has rested upon the increasingly erratic and irregular orbits of various small rocky and icy bodies lying in the far reaches of the solar system, but it wasn’t until this year that astronomers detected what may be a dwarf planet with an orbit so elliptical that it points strongly to the presence of this planet somewhere at the edges. If not, solving the particular mystery of why these orbits are so strange would add another bright step to our understanding of a constantly chaotic universe.

4. String theory isn’t compatible with our universe, or vice versa A deep and controversial conjecture put out by one of the world’s leading string theorists has left the theoretical physics community in argumentative flutters (that is, the physicists who believe string theory is our current best hope of a general unified theory).

The gist of the conjecture states that universes that are logically consistent with themselves (that is, their laws of physics are a consistent set of laws, and are not self-contradictory) have a particular set of properties as estimated by string theory of which, the main one involves the density of en-

ergy in the emptiness of space (“dark energy”) decreasing more quickly than a particular rate as the universe expands. The problem is that our universe is doing the opposite, which is a contradiction to the conjecture, despite the fact that it currently holds true for all experimentally modeled simple universes under string theory. The reasonable implication here is that perhaps the conjecture is too simple and needs to be more complex to deal with a complex existing universe, and this is a conception that reaches the philosophically heated physics arguments regarding the pursuit of “simplistic beauty” leading one astray from a potentially complicated and messy truth. But this is allegedly a fundamental conjecture, and so either path on the road seems to hold harrowing conclusions: either, our theoretical conception of the cosmos has something fundamentally missing because we are still just barely beginning to understand it and we might need to radically alter our entire picture of how the universe works; or, something is wrong with our universe itself. (Though it is most likely the former, this issue may split the string theory community.)

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@STRANDPAPER THE STRAND | 15 JANUARY 2019

The Strand's Best of 2018

Our editors' top pop culture picks SABRINA PAPAS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Best album of the year?

Love Yourself: Tear by BTS

Best movie of the year?

Person to Person Person to Person presents the narratives of multiple New Yorkers over the course of one day, but director Dustin Guy Defa is less interested in telling resolute stories and more interested in his characters. What matters here are the people—vibrant in their quiet lives.

While this K-pop group has successfully explored darker themes in albums such as the brooding Dark & Wild and seductive Wings, Love Yourself: Tear focuses on the self and the path of the individual, rather than depending on the allure or hurt of the significant other. Following the end of a relationship,Tear asks why the bond broke and considers how, possibly, love did not exist in it at all, because of the absence of self-love. Tear proves, through its R&B base and mix of genres, that one should never hide one’s passions, fear, and doubts in a relationship, and that wearing a mask for someone else only causes more isolation, instability, and damage.

MIRANDA CARROLL EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Best movie of the year?

Eighth Grade Eighth Grade captures both the contemporary ethos of young teenagers and the universal struggle of growing up. This movie is honest, awkward, and real.

Most of all, it shows what it’s like to be young and on the internet, young and self-conscious, as well as young and trying to figure yourself out.

TAMARA FROOMAN SENIOR COPY EDITOR Best album of the year?

Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe Every. God. Damn. Track. on this album iS AN ABSOLUTE BANGER and qualified for song of the summer!!!

The production level of this masterpiece was UNBELIEVABLE!!!! Truly! Top! Notch!

ERIC MCGARRY WEB EDITOR Best movie of the year?

Sorry to Bother You ILLUSTRATIONS

| YILIN ZHU

Best TV show of the year?

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Amy Sherman-Palladino’s writing has reached a peak with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. If you’re not convinced, the incredible production and costume design is enough of a reason to watch.

A super amazing and funny take on a strange, modern world. It takes on issues of race and economic inequality while simultaneously giving an amazing story, with the craziest twist ever.

HARRISON WADE ARTS AND CULTURE EDITOR

MIA CARNEVALE ILLUSTRATION EDITOR Best movie of the year?

Incredibles 2 After 14 years, Pixar was able to bring back a memorable childhood film while maintaining the same reliability and allure of The Incredibles by merely telling the next chapter of the story. Incredibles 2 captures the subtlety of family dynamics by turning the tables and exploring the twisted side of justice in society.

Released on my birthday, this album was a great gift; Reyez’s voice is beautiful and her tunes are catchy but authentic. Being Human In Public is a powerful and emotional album on which Reyez sings about her experience as a Latina musician and with sexual harassment in the music industry.

NOAH KELLY EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Best movie of the year?

Burning This is the movie I’ve been thinking about the most, still lost in its mystery and stuck, sliding over its surface, trying to find a way in. It is ostensibly a love triangle between two reunited classmates and an enigmatic, playful man named Ben. Steven Yeun plays the latter role with such charm and control his seductive appeal becomes distressing. Really, all of Burning plays between this seduction and agitation.

Director Lee Chang-dong has built a thriller out of cold, crisp images and a subtly unnerving score from Mowg. More frightening than what we see is what we don’t: the potential for violence is already determined by the way class and sex define how we live, dream, and play.

Best album of the year?

Being Human In Public by Jessie Reyez

Best TV show of the year?

BoJack Horseman BoJack Horseman comes back with another season of dark humour that will have you falling to the floor with laughter, then lying there, staring up at the ceiling, questioning if there is such a thing as a good and moral life.

Best album of the year?

Veteran by JPEGMAFIA Best TV show of the year?

BoJack Horseman In its fifth season, BoJack tackles not only the #MeToo movement and the issues that plague it’s fictional version of Hollywood, Hollywoo, but also the show’s own legacy and the effects it has had on its viewers. BoJack Horseman never loses its comedic or introspective lens, and it’s still the best show on television.

Best album of the year?

ONEPOINTFIVE by Aminé Aminé’s second album kills it in every aspect. With awesome bangers, ridiculous beats, and lyrics that pull it together, he just knows what he’s doing.

JPEGMAFIA’s jagged industrial production and eclectic collage of samples layered with the sonic explosion of his vocals make this album a mind-rocking, head-banging 19 tracks. An added bonus: the album features song titles like “I Cannot F**king Wait Til Morrissey Dies.”

ARIN KLEIN COPY EDITOR Best movie of the year?

Hearts Beat Loud Queer WOC love story portrayed by queer WOC; amazing soundtrack and score; Ron Swanson as a nice dad, singing an acoustic ballad. What more could you ask for?

12 ARTS AND CULTURE

EDITOR | HARRISON WADE ARTSANDCULTURE@THESTRAND.CA

Music for the end of the world

How The 1975 and Julia Holter unsettle the sights and sounds of the present NATE CROCKER SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER

I am watching Season 15, Episode 13 of Keeping Up with the Kardashians—the one where Khloe gives birth. Khloe lies on the birthing bed, surrounded by no fewer than six cameras. Each camera will share this moment with a wide audience of strangers like me. She screams. Kris grins. I stare. I whisper to myself, “This is the end of the world.” Yes, this is some next-level Kristevian abjection: True (Khloe’s daughter) is not only ceasing to be part of her mother, and so becoming her own person, but she is also becoming an object of the public, an object divided millions of times over through phones and televisions. She is not only in that hospital room, cradled by her grinning grandmother, but also on my phone, on my Apple TV, in my mom’s People magazine. Khloe is in “full beat,” she looks fabulous, she is ready for these cameras, for my consumption of her delivery. I find myself deeply moved by this woman I have never met but have come to care for. How? Through my TV screen I feel connected not only to Khloe and True, but also to everyone else watching this scene of double abjection.

Why? I close my eyes and hear her scream. I whisper to my compatriots through the screen: “Alright, we have come here together, to what has to be the end of the world.”

I am struck. I must write about this. How? What will I say? This is the end of the world!

The episode ends and my screen says: “‘thank u, next’ video beginning in 5, 4, 3…”

“Oh, wow, I love that video…” With an apathetic shrug I think: “I’ll write about the end of the world later.”

Apocalypse anxiety is as old as the Book of Daniel, but with recent revelations such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report and the rising popularity of governments that could not care less about the air we breathe, end-of-the-world narratives feel particularly relevant. Two of my favourite albums of 2018 deal explicitly with this anxiety. The 1975’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships and Julia Holter’s Aviary engage with the end

of the world as something we are quickly approaching (if we haven’t reached it already). But as I continue to listen into 2019, I find myself asking: What does the end of the world sound like? Why do both albums incorporate older musical landscapes to frame today’s uncertainty? And why does the end of the world have to sound at all?

Both Holter and The 1975 have been outspoken about their intentions to depict a post-Trump world on their most recent projects. In response to the 2016 American election, Holter found herself asking how love and empathy shape and are shaped by a populist political shift. As she relayed to Rolling Stone’s Sasha Geffen, “It’s not just Donald Trump. We have autocratic leaders all over the world now who are challenging human rights. It’s not necessarily that that’s new, but it’s happening in a new way.” Holter wanted to explore alternative methods of communication through sound in response to these new challenges to human rights. Enter Aviary, a 90-minute record that borrows as much from Arthur Russell’s 1980s experimental disco as it does from Hildegard von Bingen’s 12th-century plainchant. On Aviary, Holter quotes Dante’s Inferno (“I Shall Love 2”), sings about ancient Greek femininity in a mesostic poem of Anne Carson’s name and the title of her Sappho translation (“I Would Rather See”), and includes a nearly eight-minute atonal barrage of bagpipes (“Everyday Is an Emergency”). To say the least, this album is all over the place. And it is through this allusive and sonic crucible that Holter seems to “hold the mirror up to nature” (to throw another allusion up in the proverbial air). That is, to respond to a world on the brink, where reality stars give birth and become president as much on our phones as in reality, and Holter mimics this pandemonium.

The 1975’s approach to this threshold of collapse hardly differs. In the album’s centrepiece, “Love It If We Made It,” (voted Pitchfork’s Best Song of 2018), Matty Healy mournfully flits from observing a Mediterranean “beach of drowning three-year-old” refugee children to eulogizing Lil Peep to quoting Trump (“I moved on her like a bitch!” / “Thank you Kanye, very cool”). The effect of this panorama is like a Twitter feed put to pop music, haunted by

the hopeful, but ultimately cynical, refrain of “I’d love it if we made it.” The album’s joyride does not end with this song. Before A Brief Inquiry’s conclusion, the band grants its listener a tender jazz track (“Mine”) and a man/computer love story narrated by Siri (“The Man Who Married A Robot/Love Theme”). The album is bookended by two songs about negotiating suicidal impulses in the digital age (“Give Yourself a Try” and “Always Wanna Die Sometimes”). Similarly to Holter, The 1975 answer a world that feels like “the most” by mirroring its maximalism.

One of the most striking elements about these albums that confront the chaos of 2018 is their shared reliance on the past. Holter spoke to Pitchfork about how she drew inspiration from Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory, a canonical text in both medieval studies and memory theory. And even without Carruthers’ intellectual influence, medievalism pervades Aviary: take for instance the allusion to Dante in “I Shall Love 2,” or the opening bars of “I Shall Love 1” that sound like a Plantagenet procession. A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships similarly frames its exploration of 2018 through the past, albeit a different part of history from Holter’s medievalism: ’80s and ’90s pop-rock nostalgia. The band has always acknowledged its reliance on retro musical landscapes. In 2013, Healy told NPR that he sources inspiration from John Hughes’ filmography. These movies, Healy said, “discuss everything that I discuss: love, fear, sex and a longing for something beyond.” The fantasy of our parents’ teenage angst is everywhere in A Brief Inquiry, from the Joy Division guitar riff that opens “Give Yourself a Try” to the Oasis-influenced “Always Wanna Die Sometimes.” According to these albums, part of depicting today’s threat of the “end” involves confronting the past.

So why are these artists so insistent on framing today’s world with yesterday’s sounds? And why does a world on the brink have to sound like anything at all? The carefully titled “Everyday Is an Emergency” from Aviary suggests that chaos must be musicalized (atonally so) because it is on the verge of being normalized. The title of this eightminute cacophony of bagpipes implies that the “everyday” (not “every day”) is the real emergency. Few things feel more everyday than my social media scroll, but that space is precisely where I confront what feels most like “the end.”

Every hour or so, I open Twitter: Trump is threatening to close the entire southern border; the death toll of the tsunami in Indonesia has risen to 426; Khloe posted a picture of True wearing a white hat. The first two tweets elicit a sigh—they are “the end”—but the third tweet is the only link I click to get the full story. This is Holter’s “emergency.”

I believe it is my apathy, my normalization of catastrophe, that Holter and The 1975 want to shake their listeners out of. And perhaps one method of doing so is to infuse old sounds into 2018’s musical landscape. Their albums’ sonic allusions might not be intentionally soothing or nostalgic, but they illuminate the present through a Brechtian destabilization of it. They are not the Drake, Ed Sheeran, or Taylor Swift records (no shade to any of these artists) that could not sound more like 2018 if they tried; Aviary and A Brief Inquiry immerse the past into the present perhaps to elucidate and destabilize the normalization of the end of the world. The end of the world, that is, might have to sound like the past to draw attention to itself. By interlacing the sound of 2018 with the past’s uncanniness, these records perhaps intend to shake their listener into a finer awareness of the present’s chaos.

Cool. So now what? I close my laptop, leave Starbucks, and head home to watch another episode of Keeping Up. Now that I have been sonically shaken out of my stupor and I see it’s the end of the world, maybe I’ll buy a metal straw on my way home so I don’t have to keep using plastic ones. Thanks, Julia Holter and Matty Healy. However regrettable my apathetic conclusion, I believe these albums are aware of its likeliness. Maybe it is enough to know it is the end of the world: I saw it (Khloe and True), I heard it (Aviary and A Brief Inquiry); now “thank u, next.” Yes, I’d “love it if we made it,” but perhaps that is as far as it goes— a hopeful, but finally despondent, chorus to sound us out.

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@STRANDPAPER THE STRAND | 15 JANUARY 2019

Review: Aquaman

Experiments in time in an inspired superhero spectacle PHOTO

HARRISON WADE ARTS AND CULTURE EDITOR

I’m worried when we might go next. Arthur Curry, also known as Aquaman, is wrestling his half-brother Orm above a pit of underwater lava for the crown of Atlantis. A colosseum full of Atlanteans rings with cheers. The screen flashes orange and blue as the camera spins around the men, showing the lava and ocean in turn and dressing the image in swathes of colour. Sure, there are stakes: if Orm wins, he will become Ocean Master and attack the surface. Another impending superhero disaster. But Arthur has only been in Atlantis for a few minutes and the movie has barely started. More importantly, I have only been in Atlantis for a few minutes, and already I’m wonderfully lost in its sights and sounds and in the long, digital shots that Aquaman uses to welcome me to this city and to this fight. I couldn’t care less about what’s happening in the story; I’m having too much fun.

This early fight is representative of Aquaman as a whole, as an increasingly rare kind of blockbuster film unafraid to be creative in its world-building and form. Here, an octopus plays the drums and jellyfish act as spotlights, revealing towering statues surrounding the colosseum and dressed in seaweed. At other times, Willem Dafoe rides a hammerhead shark; Dolph Lundgren leads an army on seahorses. There’s a laser war between crab-people and great white sharks. There’s even a glimpse of steampunk mechas.

These icons make up the movie’s endearing excess— excess that informs each performer’s commitment to their

part, including Patrick Wilson’s delightful, villainous exaggerations as Orm. More interesting, to me, than the icons themselves is how Aquaman presents them. The fight with Orm is shot in long, digitally-enhanced takes, letting the camera rush after each impact and bend around each movement until the shot breaks. This direction makes the combat in Aquaman not only legible but tangible; the camera moves with the same fluidity as water. When the fight is cut short, Mera and Arthur escape Atlantis—one of the few character-motivated transitions in a movie more interested in exploring the dynamics of its fantasy spaces than wasting time explaining how we get there.

I’m worried about when we might go next, because in Aquaman, each space contains multiple times. When each shot is so digitally obscene, so full of computer-generated imagery, it might leap forward or backward in time at any moment. In the movie’s opening sequence, Thomas Curry, a lighthouse keeper, finds Queen Atlanna unconscious, washed up on the shore. Once he helps her to heal and she explains how she’s escaped Atlantis, their love spans years.

It, too, plays out in long, single takes, laying time across the space of the lighthouse. Later, when Mera and Arthur dive into the ocean to go to Atlantis, time turns backward.

As the camera dives with them and passes from air to water, they change into a younger Arthur and his mentor, Nuidis Vulko, who teaches him how to use his powers.

An endless number of times fit into one space. Memory always returns, always informs the present. In Aquaman, places have memories, too.

The spatialization of time makes perfect sense in a film about a fallen city, with scattered peoples and his-

| COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES

tories. If when drives the ideas behind Aquaman, where drives the plot. Arthur travels the globe to find a mythic trident; Orm visits each surviving community of Atlantis to convince them to join his cause. Long takes bring the past into the present, and the movie is structured around visiting and spatially exploring those pasts. Digital effects turn back aging as Kidman, Dafoe, and Morrison are de-wrinkled and pulled out of time by a combination of makeup and CGI. This reverse-aging suits a movie whose conflicts revolve around family: early in the movie, Arthur ruptures the Kane pirate family, edging David to become Black Manta; Atlantean law forces Orm to fight Arthur for the title of Ocean Master. Only the characters that age, that span past and present—namely Kidman and Morrison—carry the emotional core of the movie. Their love story frames the narrative and offers an alternative to an unproductive violence.

Aquaman understands that action is only another facet of melodrama, two sides of the same coin. Digital effects might be most apparently tactile in moments of spectacle, but the same techniques are used for romance. I am just as awestruck by the energy of the fight, atop Sicilian rooftops, between Arthur and Black Manta as I am by the following scene, where Mera and Arthur’s ship drifts towards an endless horizon line. At the bow of the boat, in an orange and blue sunset, Mera plays the recorder as Arthur wakes with seaweed bandaging his wounds. Action, then serenity. Two ways to feel. In this melodramatic excess is a potential use of digital effects and production: to stretch the limits of time and space in new forms of fantasy.

Broadway's reawakening

Listening to theatre as a form of magic GEORGIA LIN OPINIONS EDITOR

Despite Broadway’s moniker as the Great White Way, productions are making tangible strides to showcase diverse stories that meld tradition and innovation. May 2019 be the year you over-invest in musicals and understand the weaving of lives when harmonies align, and may it be the year that the spectacle of the Tony Awards comes to represent all swaths of identities.

“It’s All Happening” from Bring It On: The Musical “They Live In You” - Samuel E. Wright & The Lion King

Ensemble from The Lion King “Let It Sing” - Joshua Henry / Violet “I Still Believe” - Claire Moore & Lea Salonga from Miss Saigon “The Money” - Lin-Manuel Miranda from 21 Chump Street: The Musical – EP “Right This Way” - Bandstand “Omar Sharif” - Katrina Lenk from The Band’s Visit “What About Love” - Cynthia Erivo & Jennifer Hudson from The Color Purple “A House Is Not a Home” - Kristin Chenoweth from Promises, Promises

“First Burn” - Arianna Afsar, Julia Harriman, Lexi Lawson, Rachelle Ann Go, & Shoba Narayan Hamilton's Hamildrops “In My House” - Grace McLean, Phillipa Soo, & Brittain Ashford from Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 “One Second and a Million Miles” - Steven Pasquale & Kelli O’Hara from The Bridges of Madison County “Blackout” from In the Heights “Pretty Funny” - Lindsay Mendez from Dogfight “One Last Time (44 Remix)” - Christopher Jackson, Barack Obama, & Bebe Winans from Hamilton's Hamildrops

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EDITOR | LEO MORGENSTERN STRANDED@THESTRAND.CA

I tried to explain what “snow” was to Margaret Atwood and then briefly asked her about The Handmaid’s Tale LEO MORGENSTERN STRANDED EDITOR

Leo: Hi Margaret, thank you so much for meeting with me for this interview.

Margaret: No problem, I had nothing else to do today.

Did you have any trouble finding The Strand’s office?

What is that?

Sure. Can we talk about The Handmaid’s Tale now?

Haha oh Margaret you are so funny! I love that classic Margaret Atwood wit.

No. I want to talk about “snow.”

Thank you. But what is this “snow” you speak of?

It’s the white stuff that falls from the sky in the winter.

Okay fine.

What do people do with snow?

Sometimes they make snow men or snow angels.

Is it dangerous?

Do snow men become snow angels when they die?

No.

No.

Is it alive?

In my novel they will.

I cried “BE GONE WHITE SUBSTANCE” but it would not be gone.

No.

Okay.

Where was it coming from?

Hmmm. Perhaps I will write a novel about “snow.” Tell me more!

I’m going to go write my novel now. Goodbye.

Yes, I had a little bit of trouble on the drive over here because this white stuff kept falling on my car.

Oh dear!

The sky! Falling from the sky and onto my car!

Ha ha ha, it almost sounds like you’re describing snow.

Umm, snow is cold.

Like the hearts of men!

Thanks for coming in today Margaret.

You’re welcome.

Realistic new years resolutions MAX NISBETH ASSOCIATE STRANDED EDITOR

We can sit around grasping our iPhone running bands, Martha Stewart cookbooks, and ECOMAN study subscriptions, all while huddling by a digital fire of our own self-delusion reading The Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants, but eventually we’ll all be burned by the reality that these pants indeed do not fit. The reality that it takes a little more than sisterly love and the Spice Girls reunion to hold your cold, miserable January together. So without further adieu here are the New Year’s Resolutions you should have made because there weren’t enough lists like this already on your Facebook newsfeed.

REALsolutions: (I realize this is terrible) The Michael Stop Studying My resolution is to study more for the first couple weeks, discover a new show, give up on said show, spend a week watching YouTube and browsing Net-

flix in hopes of finding literally any piece of entertainment to prevent me from enacting any conceivable responsibility I have, most likely get caught in a rabbit hole of Vine compilations with some variation of the title: “The Vines that kept me from setting fire to all my belongings, shaving my head, and volunteering to be the first human on Mars,” then re-watching The Office.

I’m Beyoncé Always This year I will spend more money on travelling, shopping, and drinking than any year before but will bury it with the guilt-laden phrase of “I deserve this. I need to treat myself ” even though all I will complete this year is a front-to-back viewing of The Office…twice.

Every white guy you know I will somehow listen to more podcasts, recommend more obscure TV shows, and brag to you about my Nintendo Switch.

Blake Shelton’s my dad I will pick up an instrument I used to play once, put it down, and then wait another five years before my dad guilts me into trying it again.

Got Lululemon for Christmas I will enter Hart House, be confused as to what to do, use the treadmill or bike, leave, and never go back.

Tide Pods I will memes.

Reality At one point in the New Year during the period in which I should be working the most, I will be lying on my bed with my laptop open to the Netflix homepage; holding a melting, half-eaten tub of ice cream and a stolen spoon from Burwash; scrolling through Instagram and involuntarily saying “I’m so tired.”

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@STRANDPAPER THE STRAND | 15 JANUARY 2019

2018 in memoriam Remembering what Stranded has lost in the past year LEO MORGENSTERN STRANDED EDITOR

Note: I’ve only been the Stranded editor since September, so this article only covers September to December. If you died in between January and August 2018, I apologize.

Note: Please listen to “You Raise Me Up” by Josh Groban while you read this article.

Becky Gu, ?-2018 Most well known for her famous article “It’s COCKtober you sluts,” Becky Gu has not been heard from since October 2018. She is presumed dead. In lieu of flowers, Becky’s family requests that you please send her message on to the 12 spookiest sluts you know.

The Boundary Sadly, without copies of The Strand to hide their “newspaper” in, The Boundary went out of business shortly after they destroyed The Strand. Shame.

Dr. Friedrich and Dr. Hanz Dr. Friedrich and Dr. Hanz were world-famous doctors of ASMR, best known for their famous routine “Robbing a Store That Only Sells Jello.” They were also renowned for their charity work providing free ASMR training for orphans in developing nations. Both of them died this October in a terrible pickle-swallowing accident.

Ainsley and Sabrina’s friendship The Strand Editors-in-Chief, Ainsley and Sabrina, used to be best friends.

They did activities together, such as go to the movies. They even shared socks.

But now they hate each other and call each other mean names and spit at each other during meetings. It’s very unpleasant.

The Strand itself The Strand was totally owned by The Boundary this past November (pictured below).

The diss was so vicious that The Strand was totally destroyed and everyone just died.

Areas of the GTA rated according to my experience playing competitive girls’ hockey in those areas from ages 10 to 16 ARIN KLEIN NHL HOPEFUL (AFTER ALL THESE YEARS)

I’m from Ottawa (Go Ice Go!), but from ages 10 to 16 I travelled to the GTA fairly often for hockey tournaments. You can learn a lot about a city, township, or neighbourhood based on the local Atom, Peewee, or Bantam girls’ hockey team, so here are a few of my thoughts on areas of the GTA. Stoney Creek (the Stoney Creek Sabres) Their players were very rough and mean. As a sportsmanlike player, I was mad: 0/5 Oakville (the Oakville Hornets) My dad says their team was good, and he drove me to all the GTA tournaments, so I believe him: 1.5/5 Whitby (the Whitby Wolves) Nice alliteration. We beat them at Provincials, so I guess it must be a cool place: 3/5

Etobicoke (the Etobicoke Dolphins) I first learned the name Etobicoke from hockey and I thought it was a fun name: 4/5 Leaside (the Leaside Wildcats) Worst place ever. Their team was really good and I hated it: -100/5 Scarborough (the Scarborough Sharks) They had pretty jerseys: 3/5 Markham/Stouffville (the MarkhamStouffville Stars) Can’t remember any details but I get a bad feeling when I hear this name: 1/5 Durham West (the Durham West Lightning) We won a tournament hosted here and I got a trophy with a cool blue lightning bolt on it: 5/5 Not technically in the GTA but: Sudbury (the Sudbury Lady Wolves) Wtf is the name “Lady Wolves”??: ?/5

ILLUSTRATION

| MIA CARNEVALE

16 STRANDED

@STRANDPAPER THE STRAND | 15 JANUARY 2019

These crazy things happened in 2018???

Check out this recap of 2018 and reminisce on another year of mediocrity. the rescue mission. But it’s okay, because in the end, we learned that you can easily get Musk to tweet you within the half-hour if you insult him openly, which is the same thing as fame nowadays.

JASMINE NG PODCAST EDITOR

JANUARY: Tide Pods! Wow, what a throwback. Can you believe these Gen Z kids with their crazy fads and bottomless desire for the taste of death?

FEBRUARY: Black Panther came out in theatres. This movie was not simply a cultural but also a medical breakthrough, as Michael B. Jordan single-handedly cured several people of sexual repression by 1) dressing like a film student once and 2) having a shirtless scene.

MARCH: Mark Zuckerberg was questioned about Facebook’s role in election meddling. Sobering stuff. That’s why we made memes about him being a lizard man!

Conscienceless corporations, who? Coping mechanisms, what? I don’t know them.

APRIL: Beyoncé headlined Coachella—the first black woman to do so! This event was momentous, and every aspect of the performance was brilliantly choreographed. So glad that all the limp-cornrowed, feather-headdressed, bindi wearers were able to witness this show for 399 USD while the rest of us watched online, stuffing our faces with day-old mac and cheese!

MAY: Yanny versus Laurel! What a marvelous reiteration of The Dress phenomenon! Ha-ha, wasn’t it so funny how we “ended” friendships over this misinterpretation? Wow, I wish I could feel something. Anything!!!

JUNE: Big Dick Energy. Nothing else happened this month.

JULY: A Thai boys’ soccer team was trapped in a cave, and Elon Musk (better known as Elongated Muskrat) threw public tantrums about being excluded from

AUGUST: Honestly, I don’t remember what happened in August, but I did some Googling and apparently, a pigeon fought a boa constrictor in the middle of a street in London (Find the link to this video on thestrand.ca).

SEPTEMBER: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, accusing then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

There was nothing funny about this event and I have to lie down now, because I’m enraged again.

OCTOBER: Weed became legal in Canada! Now I can’t make jokes about bonding with the neighbourhood weed man, but it’s painfully obvious they weren’t good jokes in the first place. This change was probably for the best.

NOVEMBER: Ariana Grande released “thank u, next,” and we all collectively sighed in sympathy and relief. The world needs more bops that are about maturely acknowledging the past while also subtly mocking past partners, but then again being grateful.

It’s a balance.

DECEMBER: Wedding time for Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra, as well as Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth! But even with love and four-carat diamonds in the air, how could we forget Nick and Miley’s romance when they were 13?

Remember when 16-year-old Miley said: “Maybe I’ll end up marrying Nick Jonas!”? This December, we celebrated the marriages of four hot celebrities, but we really ruminated on the sweetness of tweenage romance and the depth of our own emptiness.

2019 year in review

Can you believe these crazy things happened in 2019??

WILFRED MOESCHTER STAFF WRITER

2019 was a great year, but 365 days is a lot of days to remember! That’s why I’m here to summarize the most shocking moments that this 2019th year of our Lord had to offer. Feliz Navidad and here’s to 2020!

January 17: UofT reveals its NEW new smoking policy UofT started 2019 off right by publishing its new official smoking policy, which stated that all individuals on campus must smoke at all times or they’d get arrested. Caffiends’ famous one-dollar cigarettes quickly become the hottest-selling item on campus.

February 24: Leo Morgenstern hosts the Oscars and then is killed After Kevin Hart turned down the Oscars like The Strand keeps turning down my pitch for a ten-article exposé on the grain industry, the folks at the Oscars had no choice but to come to the UofT community to find a host. Stranded editor Leo Morgenstern got the job and his routine was so bad that The Strand Editors-in-Chief killed him. That’s show business, baby! Jimmy Kimmel took over as Stranded editor in Leo’s absence.

March 20: Jayde Jones takes President Robins’ job 2019 was the Year of Student Politics after VUSAC President Jayde Jones declared that if she was re-elected for a second term, she would invoke the never-before-used “Ol’

Switcheroo Clause,” which would switch her job with President Robins’. This resulted in an 11,124 percent voter turnout on Election Day, after everyone in Canada participated. Condoms and dental dams will now be handed out at President’s Tea. July 6: The Great Fire of 2019 In what was surely the third worst event of 2019, UofT went up in flames. You may be asking how an entire campus spread out across Toronto (and Mississauga) burned down.

After his newspaper empire was reduced to ash, The Varsity Editor-in-Chief Jack O’ Denton took control of The Strand and declared martial law, completely wiping the remains of The Mike out of existence.

October 21: The Cashman becomes Canada’s Prime Minister Nobody expected Russell “The Cashman” Oliver to run in the 2019 federal election, but his success was inevitable: none of the other candidates could advertise like he can.

With a net worth of 560 million dollars, he is the richest Prime Minister to date—and the most handsome.

December 31: New Year’s Eve happens Last week, the Earth experienced New Year’s Eve, before becoming 2020 years old. Happy Birthday! As a birthday present to the planet, the people of Earth generously decided to stop global warming for the day.