Volume 74 - Issue 9

THE YALE HERALD volume xcii issue 3 september 24, 2023

yale's most daring publication since

1986!

volume xcii issue

9 ❧ november 12, 2023

@user285643 says u shld check out hannah szabó's piece on trans online spaces!!!! pg 14 @arthur says omg...judah millen and josh bolchover reviewed hamlet & got into beef with leo egger bcuz of it? pgs 2 & 12 @haroldluvr27 says visiting critic etai smotrich-barr roasts yale free press :oooo pg 3

The Yale Herald

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Dear angels that fly from Montgomery and posters of an old rodeo, This week, we thought about fish—living fish, the type you see in the ocean if you ever happen to go to the ocean. We thought about whether fish talk to each other, whether they tell each other stories, exchange gossip, tell lies, share jokes and news and reviews.

Our ichthyologist friends taught us that fish, like us, make sounds:

purrs and pops and clicks, as described by the people whose job it is to listen to fish. These sounds, we learned, are made from their swim bladders. The fish contract and relax their muscles, which then vibrate through their bladders to produce sound. Imagine purring from your bladder.

In this issue, we use our hands and our minds, but unfortunately not our bladders, to write words and stories. This week, we invite

you to be like Hamlet: read our words, words, words. Take an issue, do the crossword, read about the recent campus Hamlet production, take a copy back to your mom over Thanksgiving break.

Imagine we are fish talking to you through our bladders.

Most daringly, Rafi and Arthur

YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST

Gargoyle images throughout

by Fareed Salmon

YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST

THE MASTHEAD Editors-In-Chief Arthur Delot-Vilain/ Rafaela Kottou Managing Editors Madeleine Cepeda-Hanley/ Lydia Kaup/Hannah Szabó Creative Directors Sara Offer/Etai Smotrich-Barr/ Iris Tsouris Senior Writers Madelyn Dawson/ Nadira Novruzov/Jack Reed Columnists Joshua Bolchover/Irene Colombo/ Hardy Eville/Lyle Griggs/James Han/ Maude Lechner/Judah Millen/ Hailey O’Connor/Joanna Ruiz/ Lucy Santiago Design Alexa Druyanoff/Angela Huo/ Helen Huynh/ Grace Kim/Kris Qiu/ Claire SooHoo/Alina Susani/ Liza Tsidulko/ Vivian Wang/ Silvia Wang/Miya Zhao

Reviews Editors Theo Kubovy-Weiss/ Natalie Semmel/Elena Unger Reflections Editors Eva Kottou/Chloe Shiffman Culture Editors Emily Aikens/Isabella Panico/ Alex Sobrino Features Editors Connor Arakaki/ Madelyn Dawson/Jack Reed Opinion Editors Ariel Kirman/ Daviana Rodriguez Zamora Arts Editors Jess Liu/Eli Osei Voices Editors Cal Barton/Ana Padilla Castellanos Inserts Editors Jack Rodriquez-Vars Copy Editors Zoe Frost/Jisu Oh/Ece Serdaroglu/ Tessa Stewart/Alina Susani

Staff Writers Lillian Broeksmit/Kaylee Chen/ Elizabeth Chivers/Kate Choi/ Krishna Davis/Leo Egger/ Aidan Gannon/Oscar Heller/ Helen Huynh/Cameron Jones/ Anna Kaloustian/Megan Kernis/ Sophie Lamb/Hannah Nashed/ Jisu Oh/William Orr/Colin Quinn/ Will Sussbauer/AJ Tapia-Wylie/ Aidan Thomas/Amalia Tuchmann/ Ellen Windels/Ashley Wang/Avery Wayne/Elio Wentzel Web Editor Kris Qiu Business Abby Fossati/Evan-Carlo Fowler/ Avery Lenihan Calendar Jess Liu Photography Fareed Salmon This Week's Cover Iris Tsouris

November 12, 2023

IN THIS ISSUE: 2

REVIEWS

4

REFLECTIONS Your Dreams On Apple Juice

by William Orr Apple juice is my hallucinogen of choice.

Nailed Down

by Will Sussbauer Chewing, gnawing, biting.

FEATURES 14

Computer Crossdressing

by Hannah Szabó Charting the trans digital archive.

18

Through Hawaiian Eyes

by Joshua Ching A year in reflection with Professor Hi‘ilei Hobart.

Tony P: Consultant, Influencer, Cool Guy?

by Cameron Jones White button ups, salmon recipes, and vibrant masculinity.

8

STOP! NUT?

by Alina Susani Before my lips approach another’s.

Decomposition

by Sophie Lamb Picture this: an aspen tree turned gold by October.

13 Faux Pas

by Gavin Guerrette Rebel’s Valley—KEEP BACK—Steep Drop.

The Many Jews of Oppenheimer

by Natalie Semmel Judaism and Jewish American assimilation.

7

Harold Recommends

11

Ask Joehoru

by Joanna Ruiz

11

Cumsock

by Chesed Chap

12

Letter to the Editors

by Leo Egger

27

PUZZLE: Diamond in the Rough

by Jem Burch

28

Calendar

by Jess Liu

ARTS Questions on Blood

by Jisu Oh Catherine Opie’s photography constructs identity from setting.

26

VOICES

CULTURE Crabbing in the Quinnipiac

by Lyle Griggs On crab-catching, questionable footwear choices, and a muddy good time.

24

COVER STORY!

Judah Millen and Joshua Bolchover on Hamlet Etai Smotrich-Barr on the Yale Free Press

OPINION Resolved: Pittsburgh’s Debate Scene Sucks

by Oscar Heller Why are Pittsburgh’s high schools a policy debate dead zone?

9

INSERTS

IS IT EVEN GOOD? SEND PITCHES TO NATALIE.SEMMEL & ELENA.UNGER & THEO.KUBOVY-WEISS

REVIEWS

The Yale Herald

Judges 15:15 is a column by Joshua Bolchover and Judah Millen.

The name of the column refers to the Old Testament passage in which Samson slays a thousand philistines with the jaw of an ass. Make of that what you will.

2

To Watch or Not to Watch, That is Our Question Judah Millen, PC ’24 & Joshua Bolchover, SY ’25 Running from November 1-4 in the Crescent Underground Theater, this new production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet does not earn the moniker “new.” It is in most ways a traditional version of the play: the script is nearly unabridged, the costumes are vaguely period appropriate, and attempts at modernization are minimal.

When we thought about our approach to reviewing this play, we alighted upon two primary questions: Why Hamlet? and Which Hamlet? The answer to the first seems as though it may be answered by the unvarnished nature of the production and the fidelity to Shakespeare’s truly excellent work. It is a thrilling play that grips audiences across time and space.

As one audience member told us after the show, it was an “exceptionally enjoyable evening.” We have no quarrels with this notion and found the cast and crew’s fidelity to the original to be charming. However, with such a conventional and classical production of the work, the bar set for the actors becomes incredibly high: Hamlet has been staged countless times, often with great success.

Among the cast, two actors stood out for the quality and charisma of their performances. Hamlet (Phil Schneider, TC ’23.5) and Polonius (Leo Egger, TC ’23.5) proved themselves to be excellent thespians capable of professional quality work.

Answering our second question, Mr. Schneider emphasized Hamlet’s fury. Spittle tumbling out of his mouth while he held a dagger to the neck of his father’s murderer and mother’s new husband Claudius (Adrien Rolet, SM ’24), or veins in his neck bulging as he entreated

Ophelia (Victoria Pekel, BF ’25) to leave him and go to a nunnery, this Hamlet was angry at the world and at himself and at nothing. Mr. Schneider wrested much emotion from the role and his paroxysms of rage were as believable as they were fluent. The actor is clearly familiar with Shakespeare’s meter and almost every line he delivered was not only easily discernible but deeply pleasurable.

Mr. Egger’s interpretation of Polonius was the most impressive and innovative of the evening. At times his eyes vibrated with energy as he stood on stage wiping his brow with a large, white handkerchief and conniving with the King or attempting to understand the overtures of the young Prince.

His performance was so inspired and unique that we felt he injected new meaning into the role and dissolved effortlessly into the character. At times his lines directed towards the other characters were affected with such energy that they won bouts of uproarious laughter from the audience, a contrast to the ferocity of Hamlet’s acting that was welcome and sharpened the potency of each.

This is not to say that Hamlet and Polonius leave no room for other actors to shine. Ophelia excels particularly in her manic scenes after her father’s death. Her incoherent musings and panicky singing are laden with emotion, and prove that despite the strength of Hamlet and Polonius’s performances there is still room for others to excel. We are able to sympathize deeply with a character who loses her father, lover, and life.

Rather, the directionlessness of the rest of the cast leaves the play imbalanced. There are particular moments, which Shakespeare’s plays may be the most vulnerable to, when one notices that the actors are acting. Rather than the stormy shores of Denmark, one is transported uncomfortably back to the

Morse-Stiles Crescent Theatre.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern provided many such moments.

So too did Laertes. His reaction when he learns of Ophelia’s death is delivered with such emotional one-dimensionality that it almost seems humorous without intention. Often, lines are handled without delicacy as actors rush through Shakespearean brilliances as if they were shots of Dubra vodka rather than Macallan 25. One particularly irksome moment is the delivery of Rosencrantz’s rejoinder to Hamlet’s lament that Denmark feels like a prison. We are given little more than a second to ruminate on “why then your ambition makes it one; 'tis too narrow for your mind” (Act 2, Scene 2). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern rattle through their jibes at Hamlet, and their supposed light-heartedness is forced and over-rehearsed.

Besides Polonius’s energetic and humorous performance, the one successful innovation was the use of lighting. Different tones of white light, projected from above, coloured various scenes with distinct ambiences. Hamlet’s monologues and demonstration of his internal conflict was cast in a slightly cooler tone than scenes of domestic discourse, and a slightly warmer tone than his conversations with the ghost of his father, the dead King during which eerily white light bathed the stage and audience. This choice highlighted the distinction between the various character’s understanding of the depth of Hamlet’s disturbance. When he wrestles with the question of whether he ought avenge his father’s death, shown before a scene in which Claudius, Gertrude (Mia Rolland, SY ’24), and Polonius discuss the potential that his unusual behavior is engendered by love for Ophelia, the palpably different lighting of the scenes throws into relief the distinction between the internal and external. This update high-

REVIEWS

November 12, 2023

lighted one of the central brilliances of Shakespeare’s script, demonstrating the dramatically varying interpretations of madness.

This cast and crew clearly has a love for the work and they largely manage to allow Shakespeare’s brilliance to shine through. We appreciated the clever use of lighting and the show-stopping performances of Hamlet and Polonius are a thing to behold: truly

anchoring and elevating the play.

Otherwise, the lack of modernization or ornamental coherence shines a bright light on the performance of the actors and in various instances, those not named Phil or Leo do not rise to the occasion.

We recommend this show for its entertainment and for the opportunity to see a few glimpses of true brilliance. If one will be rankled by any moments of awkward pentam-

eter or flat-footed delivery, however, perhaps stay away.

Verdict: 3/5. Length: 2 hours 45 minutes (10 minute interval after 1 hour 40 minutes). Theatre: Morse Stiles Crescent (304 York St, New Haven, CT 06511). Playing until: November 4th. Written By: William Shakespeare. Directed By: Sam Bezilla. ❧

Etai Smotrich-Barr, DC ’25, Herald staff

“Design is intelligence made visible.”

- Lou Danziger “The Yale Free Press is Bringing Courage Back to Campus,” proclaims the publication’s editor-in-chief in a letter introducing their October free speech edition. The once-moribund magazine is “ramping up” this year, trading in last year’s pseudonyms for (mostly) real names. But there is no Creative Director listed, nor any sort of designer. I don’t envy the anonymous soul responsible for designing the Free Press (for starters, they had to read the Free Press), but I would like to offer them some aesthetic pointers.

We will start on the outside.

This issue’s cover photo, printed at ~18 pixels per inch, depicts Phelps Hall at midday. The tower is just noticeably off-center, and the entire image is at a 5% rightward tilt.

The publication name is in a brush script; the edition theme is in a stencil font. The back cover image is a gray and white cat, twisting to avoid the hand attempting to pet it. (These are facts; the critique is implicit.)

Along the inner edge of the first page, a tall narrow box delineated

by not one, but three thick racing stripes contains the masthead and colophon. Text is centered and crammed to both sides of the box except when words are inexplicably left entirely alone on the line, making the reading experience almost poetic: “all correspondence. Not every / submission / may be printed.”

Turning to the articles, the Free Press has decided to both indent the beginning of each paragraph and leave a blank line at the end.

The result is that each paragraph stands isolated from the last. One can begin at any paragraph, and no visual (nor intellectual) cue guides the eye to the next. Pull quotes are placed directly after the body text they parrot, leading to such reading experiences as “I doubt this was spearheaded by Indigenous people. I doubt this was spearheaded by Indigenous people.”

And then there is the illustration. From the total misunderstanding of 3-dimensional space, I assume that it was courageously AI-generated. One such creation, facing an article titled “Thinkers of the World, Unite!” depicts a tiger staring into the camera, crouched on mangled hindquarters. Shapes that gesture toward birdliness fly above his head, and deep in the background, he is flanked by two onion-domed palaces. AI is a black box; we will never know what prompt generated this.

Other artwork includes historic political imagery, such as a suf-

fragist political cartoon from early 20th-century Britain. In one instance, a recreation of Paul Revere’s iconic Boston Massacre engraving is set alongside an article equivocating on the “alarming and incendiary,” but also “much-needed” crime fliers distributed by the Yale Police Benevolent Association at move-in this September.

And on one spread, the Free Press embraces text-as-image, filling blocks of unused space with the preamble to the Constitution and an unattributed Teddy Roosevelt quote beginning, “No man can be a good citizen who is not a good husband and a good father.” Each quotation is typeset differently and equally garishly.

If anyone would read another 700 words of critique, I might also get into: by-lines placed at both the start and end of the eic’s piece, inconsistency in drop caps, inconsistency in column width, abuse and inconsistency of small caps, misaligned text, Yale basketball, and a paragraph break inserted in the middle of a sentence.

Finally, since my name is on the masthead as a Creative Director of the Herald, I will hedge: no publication is perfect, certainly not on this campus. Those who wish to critique the design of the Herald are encouraged to email this writer directly. Particularly vitriolic letters may even be republished in these pages. Your speech is safe with us. ❧

OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD!

The Yale Free Press: A Midterm Critique

“I’ve quit having recreational sex.”

YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST

3

EXPERIMENTS AND PERSONAL ESSAYS OF ALL STRIPES SEND PITCHES TO CHLOE.SHIFFMAN & EVA.KOTTOU

REFLECTIONS

The Yale Herald

4

Your Dreams On Apple Juice William Orr, BF ’26

I

n The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley documents taking the psychedelic mescaline and describes the enlightenment gained from his experience. Ken Kesey and his gang of Merry Pranksters take lsd on a road trip through America in order to “expand their consciousness,” as documented in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric KoolAid Acid Test. Feeling a little stuck in my head, I decided to experience my own transcendental, mind-stretching visions during October break. My hallucinogen of choice? Apple juice.

A few years ago, while procrastinating on whatever schoolwork I had at the time, I did some research about lucid dreams and how to have one. Lucid dreams involve a dreamer aware that they are in a dream. With this cognizance, the dreamer can control what happens and can quite literally do whatever they dream. One of the techniques to achieve a lucid dream involved drinking apple juice right before bed—a random bit of knowledge that has stayed with me throughout all these years. A couple of weeks ago, I grabbed an early 5 p.m. dinner and decided to drink some apple juice with it instead of my usual orange guava passion fruit mocktail. That next morning, I woke up from a particularly intense dream but without any specific recollection of it. If apple juice at 5 p.m. could (allegedly) have that effect, imagine drinking it right before bed. My dream might inspire a surrealist masterpiece!

According to an article by Amerisleep, apple juice may produce more vivid dreams by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter ace-

tylcholine. Yet, the same article disputes the claim that apple juice can cause any lucid dreams (very on par with pre-existing doctoral bias against apples). Nonetheless, I decided to give it a try. On the first night, I drank a Christmas mug and a half of apple cider. Curling into bed, I hoped the scenes of senseless violence from my current read, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, wouldn’t seep into any of my dreams that night.

Graphic by Alina Susani

Results of Night 1: Disappointing.

Remembered only a terse text-off with a friend.

If I wanted to “sleep the sleep of apples” (in the words of Federico García Lorca’s “Gacela of the Dark Death”), I had to apple up. For the second night, in addition to drinking apple cider before bed, I ate some apple pie and listened to Fiona Apple.

Results of Night 2: Definitely vivid and very weird-slash-unsettling. These dreams would deserve their own piece to unpack. Still not lucid, though.

My sister, whose room sits next to mine, hates apples. Despite the fact that she was off at college, I

feared any anti-apple energy emanating from her room could be interfering with my experiment.

To combat this, I needed to fully harness the power of the apple.

Thus, the third and final night, I sprayed Glade apple cinnamon air freshener around my room and used Green Apple shampoo on my hair—in addition to repeating all the steps from the previous night.

To clinch it, I scattered Gala apples around my room like candles in a séance and put an apple under my pillow (while writing this piece I found a video recommending that technique, but it turned out to be an April Fools’ Joke). That night, with all the five senses covered, I went to sleep confident that I would finally have a lucid dream.

Results from Night 3: Pretty much nothing.

Before researching any pagan gods with affinities to apples, I questioned why the hell I was doing all of this. Sure, it was something silly to do during break, and it could be a way to control my dreams so I don’t have to experience nightmares like running from an intruder in my house and escaping by shrinking to the size of an ant in the laundry room. Also, I like apples. But what deeper issues was this lucid dream aspiration tied to? I already spend so much free time dreaming: creating fake scenarios in my head while listening to music and pacing around my room. As Fiona Apple said in her song “Sleep to Dream,” I had my “head in the clouds.” I needed to get my “feet on the ground” and reestablish my reality. Maybe, instead of dreaming about it, I could get what I want: not being “down bad” and nervous like 90% of the time, or perfectly crushing karaoke to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (though I don’t have any time or motivation to pursue singing lessons; I would need too many).

Or, at least, I could get another cup of apple juice. ❧

Will Sussbauer, JE ’27

A

fter seven years of eating minimal meat, my teeth and tongue have tasted more of my own skin than that of any animal.

The moment my mother ceased using her clippers to cut my nails, I began to gnaw at them. Chronic nail-biting has a name: onychophagia. Beginning at the loose edge, I pick and tear until I strike the tender skin just beneath. The folds of skin around the nail-sides come next. These are the most prone to bleeding, and often become inflamed; red with discomfort, I then pick at my cuticles, ripping imperfect skin from its roots and leaving only open wounds remaining. There’s a thin layer atop the base nail, too—this feels the best in the mouth, half the thickness of paper but less pliable. Each nail is swished with the tongue, a literal toothpick. I typically try to bite each nail into halves or quarters, for ease of swallowing; if they are too large, too thick, I can almost taste the jaggedness scraping against the side of my esophagus.

It used to be every time my teeth and skin collided, I recoiled. Not from a physical disgust—I knew it was bad, I knew it was unhealthy, I knew I needed to stop, and I could not. I was consumed by it, awash with both the practice and the guilt.

My onychophagia often seems to fall dormant once I cannot physically bite my nails any shorter, or once another obsession takes its sooth-giving place. Recently, the latter has occurred most frequently. I can slot these superseding forces, my phasic obsessions, into an endless mental Rolodex to be sifted through and added to

to varying poetic success. But those won’t do, will they? They all functioned as a veil of bilayered symbolism I may hide behind— just as that turn of phrase does as well. So, at the behest of my so-understanding editors, let me provide you earnestness, in plain English. I bite my nails as a means of coping with some compulsiveness I have always contained. I sorted my baseball cards before I thought of chewing off my nails; once I began to, the act of sorting occurred once every month, perhaps, then two, then never again.

I carried a lot of guilt about this compulsion, though—I was told it was disgusting, and unhealthy, and unappealing, all of which I now realize are entirely true. But the guilt has since dissipated after perhaps a decade of looming over me, for I have accepted nailbiting as a necessity. Somehow, by whatever amalgamation of genetics and experiences, nature and nurture, my brain has wired itself to obsess.

I cannot help it—I do not think I would like to, either. This essay was written in a state of phasic obsession, and I am proud of it. But I need some way to transition out of it. When my writerly or readerly or organizational brain is not fanatical, something must be.

Thus, my nail-biting is the adaptive constant, a structure to the overwhelm, because it has to be.

Isn’t that nice? A hopeful ending.

My self-destructive habit of germs and blood reseen as an inevitable, a stalwart against entropy. I cannot stop myself from gnawing at nails or ideas until they bleed, and in this absolution there is comfort.

Oh, how I love the rustle of those cards. ❧

OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD

Nailed Down

perhaps every week, or month, or day, depending. To write this sentence, I ticked through the index: the tens of thousands of baseball cards I reorganized every weekend; the pack of gum I chew in an afternoon; the hours and hours I spent on a wood-block sorting game until I sorted wood squares in my sleep.

Oh, the rustle of those cards.

There’s a shiver—perhaps it’s just the wind, or a slight anemia due to the blood dripping out from my finger.

It’s dripping not from a bit nail, though, but a paper cut. Many of these cards—particularly those of authors, of Poe and Didion and Stoppard and Hayes and—have been mangled over the years.

Some are fraying, from decades of use; others are torn from being too-often flipped-through; the ink is smudged on many, perhaps from rewrites. Over many cards I have reprinted my own writing, for that too is consuming. During any given project, my eyes become myopic; I begin to shape my life, make decisions in accordance with my written arguments. Every experience becomes thus a hangnail, torn off and observed for research as implications ooze. This gnawing and observation fills the same role as the onychophagia; once, amidst the most extended of these monomanias, I think I even clipped my nails. But once the current obsession wanes, all its cards stacked neatly in the index, I know I could fall back upon my nails to consume me for a moment, until the next author or project may take its place once more. They form the structure of the Rolodex, really, what holds it all together.

This habit of mine, this nailbiting, underlies all else, and will remain regardless.

In previous drafts of this piece, I continued with the indexing metaphor. Trees and wind and catastrophe and Atlas were all evoked too,

“You merely adopted the woke left. I was born in it, raised in it.”

REFLECTIONS

November 12, 2023

5

REFLECTIONS

The Yale Herald

Tony P: Consultant, Influencer, Cool Guy? Cameron Jones, BF ’26

T

“Gay best friend always has a chance.”

OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD!

6

he first time I saw him, he was walking toward me. He stared at the camera. A wide smile was plastered to his face. The caption above his head told me this was his “Tuesday Fit as a 24 Year Old Consultant in DC.” The fit in question— jeans, a blue button up, and a charcoal blazer—was further described as an “Earthy Business Casual.” The combination was apparently a perfect example of “sleek professionalism” and “comfortable.” He finished the fit check by crossing and recrossing his arms dramatically (his “signature arm roll”).

Needless to say, after my first exposure to @_tonypindc (real name: Anthony Polcari), I needed more. As I swiped along, each of his posts revealed itself to be a window into a psychological horror beyond belief. I soon learned that Tony P’s apartment was entirely unadorned except for one colorful abstract print above his couch and a vinyl copy of Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits hanging just a little too high up on the wall.

In one “Week in the Life” video, he called his headphones an “essential” for his walk to work, but what was he listening to? “Sweet Caroline” and “Cracklin’ Rosie” ad infinitum? His weeks were almost too predictable: he worked, went to a corporate event or a ballgame, cooked a new salmon or chicken recipe, watched TV, and put on fits that most would consider drab office attire. His life appeared to be a purgatorial cycle of boredom and isolation, barely masked by that classic Tony P smile.

I became obsessed. He was the only lifestyle influencer I followed, yet his lifestyle was neither desir-

able nor particularly interesting. I reasoned that my obsession came from him being a kind of digital sideshow. @_tonypindc appeared to provide insight into a life so warped by corporate culture and digital content production that originality and authenticity no longer had a place. I looked forward to each post for what it might reveal about this grim figure.

But, having followed him for a few weeks now, my attitude’s flipped. In no way do I envy his lifestyle, but I certainly envy his attitude. I’ve gone from feeling a vague disgust towards what I thought was his disingenuous enthusiasm, to feeling admiration towards what I see now as sincere excitement. I’d like to believe that he really is this stoked about plain white button ups and salmon recipes. I’d like to believe that he is content with the same 12 Neil Diamond songs on shuffle. Tony P’s

most revealing videos are those where he discusses his personal ideology of “vibrant masculinity.”

Vibrant masculinity embraces the word “and.” Men can be traditionally masculine and still express emotions, participate in typically masculine activities (for Tony P, football and golf) and still wear colorful clothing while doing so.

I’d like to believe that Tony P can live a life many would call mundane and still express joy for everything in it.

There still are people (including my friends) that accuse Tony P of faking it. Maybe he’s in it for the clout, or just laying the groundwork for a congressional run. But, if @_tonypindc is just a facade, I have yet to find any cracks. Tony P has remained authentic to his perhaps unauthentic self, even under pressure. When I saw that my beloved Tony P had posted a video featuring Senator Mark Warner, I was worried. Would he suddenly start being serious and politician-like? Would he discuss pressing issues and make himself appear like a true confidant to a very important man? No. He was just the Tony P we Tony fanatics know and love. At the outset of the video, he does a little dance.

Then, he brings Senator Warner to his level by demonstrating to him the classic Tony P arm roll. Wearing a bright yellow tie and an even brighter smile, Tony completes a perfect arm roll while Senator Warner looks on in wonder. Looking at neither Senator Warner nor the camera, it’s clear that Tony knows he’s awesome, with or without an audience. We’re just lucky we get to watch. ❧

REFLECTIONS

November 12, 2023

STOP! NUT? Alina Susani, ES ’26, Herald staff

A

n unavoidable part of growing into a teenager is the dreaded Talk. The Talk where you sit and squirm in front of your parents while they attempt to educate you on safe sex in the most awkward way possible. My Talk, however, included an additional element.

As my mother sat with me on my bed and told me to never let anyone cross the sexual boundaries I chose to hold, she also told me that I must implement another layer between me and my person of interest: I must ask, before kissing someone, whether they had eaten anything containing my various allergens in the past few hours.

Now consent may be sexy, sure, but does that apply to interrogating the other person on everything they have consumed since they last brushed their teeth?

This brings me to my revolutionary STOP! NUT? concept.

Conceived by my high school best friend after I told her about my mom’s idea and my concern about how I would possibly ask the essential question, she suggested I just blurt out “STOP! NUT?” immediately before my lips approach another’s. Not that that makes the situation any less awkward, mind you, but I appreciated the sentiment. Call me crazy, but that’s not quite the first impression I want to make. Luckily, I have yet to use this method in real life. Perhaps this is partially because, for some reason, a not-insignificant number of the people I’ve kissed (and an even larger number of crushes) have also been allergic to nuts.

Whoever said opposites attract was clearly wrong.

My odd ability to attract other

allergy kids and my lack of kissing-induced trips to the ER don’t mean I haven’t had close calls.

While I haven’t quite put the STOP! NUT? into action (sorry mom), I have paused mid-makeout, remembered they had mentioned how their roommate got these delicious new snacks with some nut filling, and, in a panic, asked, “Wait, you didn’t have any of those, did you?”

You may be thinking, “That’s ridiculous, there’s no way you could get an allergic reaction by kissing someone.” But, I assure you, as if the general embarrassment of having allergies isn’t enough, this is yet another disadvantage of being an allergy kid. While I don’t have the personal experience to prove it (so far), my fellow allergic friends can affirm that one can, in fact, have a reaction from kissing.

One such friend, who is allergic to avocados, among other things (who the hell is allergic to bananas?), kissed his girlfriend, who had eaten an avocado shortly before, and his mouth immediately began to itch. Miserable? For sure. But there’s a sort of intimacy in it. Ever since then, she never forgets to brush her teeth as soon as she eats something he can’t. When they go out to eat, she’ll avoid his allergens like they’re her own. I think there’s something romantic about changing the way you live to accommodate the person you love.

There is also an intimacy in the way someone checks the ingredient list before I ask, and in the way their mom already knows what I can’t eat when I visit, and in the way they warn me that something in the menu has pistachios, and in the way they alter their grandmother’s recipe so I can try her cake. When the person I had that close call with, in response to my alarmed question, rolled his eyes and said, “Of course not,” my relief was palpable and my heart was touched. So, as I tolerate the

endless jabs of “having allergies is so embarrassing” and “people with allergies shouldn’t exist” (trust me: I, too, believe we should have been eradicated by natural selection long ago), I wait for the person who will no longer eat Reese’s Puffs even if it’s their favorite cereal, for the person that I won’t have to worry about STOP! NUT?ing, for the person who will drive me to Yale Health when the dining hall fails to correctly label the food. ❧

HAROLD RECOMMENDS 1. Cumming first: winners wait for no one.

2. Deleting Snapchat: middle school streaks were meant to die.

3. Morning coffee at Gather

in East Rock: pay your price all month long.

4. Running a half marathon: easier than a full one.

5. Sneezing during sex: shockingly erotic.

6. Sidewalk chalk: release your inner child.

7. Breathing fire: one step closer to dragon-mode.

8. Heckling: some of these per-

formance groups kinda suck.

9. Eating chalk: it’s like tums but less medicinal.

10. Shutting the fuck up: you need to chill.

7

FINGER ON THE PULSE. SEND PITCHES TO EMILY.AIKENS & ALEX.SOBRINO & ISABELLA.PANICO

CULTURE

The Yale Herald

“I don’t care about boobs, I’m on Goodreads.”

OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD!

8

Crabbing in the Quinnipiac Lyle Griggs, BR ’25

A

t the counter in Dee’s Bait and Tackle in Fair Haven, the nexus of know-how for New Haven County fishermen, Peter DeGregorio and I got to talking about crabbing. Dee’s advertises live bait (shiners, eels, bunker, night-crawlers) and fishing equipment, but advice is its most sought-after product. DeGregorio is as gruff and curmudgeonly as his average customer, but his eyes lit up a bit when I told him that I was new to saltwater. He held up a growing line of fishermen to answer my questions and rattle off his favorite local spots. When I asked how to find Atlantic blue crabs, which I’d seen on ice in the fish market down the street, he told me to try the mud bank behind the Target off I-91. New Haven County’s most productive bits of water don’t usually look like something out of Field and Stream.

With two hours to kill the next day, I set out for North Haven armed with an eight-foot net and a vague notion of what crabbing might look like. The spot turned out to be a muddy, plastic-littered bank along the Quinnipiac River.

There was nobody else around, but well-worn trails and monofilament-festooned trees along the bank told me that the dreary scene deterred neither fish nor fisherman. I scrambled down to the bank and, despite the favorable low tide, quickly found myself stuck up nearly to my knees in slick estuarine mud.

Despite my ruined shoes and general clumsiness, I had surprisingly little trouble finding crabs.

Almost every bit of underwater shelter (downed trees, stacked

rocks, shopping carts) harbored a few. Netting them proved more difficult than expected, though, and it took me several ungraceful attempts to snag my first. My first major problem involved separating crab and net: blue crabs are loath to let go of things. The first crab eventually relinquished the net, clamping firmly on to my left thumb instead. I responded by shouting in agony and flinging the surprisingly strong creature back into the Quinnipiac.

Crab #2 gave up more easily, and I eventually got the hang of it. My second major problem involved my poor equipment. Lacking a bucket, I had brought two flimsy trash bags with me for crab storage purposes. Unfortunately, crabs #3 and #4 proved skilled at poking holes in stretchy plastic, and my bags were soon thoroughly perforated. Still, I emerged from the river with nine decent-sized crabs in tow. Mud-covered but triumphant, I sped back

to New Haven feeling only slightly guilty about the crab water sloshing around in the backseat of my sister’s recently-detailed car.

As strange as boiling creatures alive can make a person feel, my housemates and I prepared the crabs nearly without incident (one crab nearly exploded in the microwave, but the rest were handled more expertly). Despite the circumstances of its extraction, the large soft shell crab that I ate arguably tasted better than anything I’ve had in a restaurant. My housemates reviewed the hard shells less glowingly, but at least nobody dropped dead.

On my next trip to Dee’s, Peter informed me that there is no limit on crabs in the state of Connecticut.

You can just take them! For free! As many as you want! Anyway, anyone willing to contribute to the cost of a good pair of galoshes and a better net is invited to my backyard crab boil sometime before the season ends on November 30th. ❧

November 12, 2023

VOICES

Decomposition I don’t quite know what to call this time in my life It’s fall. I knit a sweater. I keep a bag of apples from a sunny day next to my bed, and they wake me up like an August sunrise, hard and sweet. I write everywhere I go—I bite my nails and pull strange winding threads through the pages of my notebook. The trees outside my window have recently lost their godhood—they are mortal beings now, turned orange and gold in their old age, wrinkles lining their faces, smiling in the pale afternoon. I think about home a little less. I feel like I think about nothing at all.

My parents’ lives have moved on, my friends have different friends in different places. (Q: What makes a stranger? A: My mom remade my bed with different sheets.) I am softening. It is fall and I soften, I let things enter and grow from me. The gentle 4:00 p.m. glow of my dorm settles under my skin, alongside the outline of the Rockies from my childhood window and the smell of my mother’s hair. I drink tea at night. I eat figs. I wear rings and silver hoops, go for runs late at night, I let myself slip into the thing I never was.

But I keep returning to the Aspen in my memory Picture this: an Aspen tree turned gold by October.

Aspens don’t often grow from seed—they grow from each other’s roots, a vast network of tangled births and deaths, scaling the hillside as a single breathing organism. She is a product of her history, of her ancestors’ majesty. Yet, as she grows, she grows apart from all the trees before her: the random scattering of DNA and light and water raise her twisted and bent, her branches drawn to the west, trunk turned east. She is still bound by her roots to the memory of her past. But she is making something new from it.

In the spring of a new year, she blossoms into a pale, green thing; in the summer, she expands. In the fall, as the soil turns hard and the air cold, as her leaves shed her bare, she is made human in loss. It’s October and I know my childhood is beginning to shed from me. It’s October and I am gold with mourning.

- Sophie Lamb JE ’27, Herald staff

Graphic by Alina Susani

9

CULTURE

The Yale Herald

The Many Jews of Oppenheimer Natalie Semmel, DC ’25, Herald staff

“This guy looks like someone who would be seduced by fascism.”

OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD

10

M

onths after its release, I am unapologetically writing a piece about Oppenheimer. To put it simply, I adore this film. It is an amazing and exhilarating experience that is, above all, thoughtful.

Of course, maybe that should be the bare minimum for a film spanning more than three hours. Still, in my multiple viewings of the film, Oppenheimer far surpassed whatever this baseline might be.

The film is a thriller, a noir, a piece of historical fiction, and a biopic. It allows one to view Oppenheimer and the events of his life through an eerie and psychologically troubling lens.

Through all of these genres, Oppenheimer grounds itself in different versions of American Jewishness. In the film, as in real life, Oppenheimer clashes with Lewis Strauss, one of the original members of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 and eventual chair of that same organization. In Strauss and Oppenheimer’s first encounter, Albert Einstein, another Jew, makes an appearance. Before this, however, Strauss remarks to Oppenheimer that he’s the president of Temple Emanu-El in New York. Located on the Upper East Side, Temple Emanu-El is the first Reform congregation in New York City and has long existed as a base for the movement. Strauss, who calls himself a “self-made” man, clearly sees his leadership role at Temple Emanu-El as an indicator of status. He has made his way up to the top of a significant Jewish institution. He flexes this symbol to Oppenheimer but receives only a nod.

Does Oppenheimer even know

what this means? In the film, he never suggests any kind of propensity for his religion. Earlier in the film (and earlier in the timeline of this non-chronological story), Oppenheimer meets Isidor Rabi, a physicist who in the film goes by ‘Izzy’. During this portion of the film, the two are young men traveling to Zurich. Oppenheimer has just delivered a lecture in Dutch, having learned the language in six weeks. Izzy calls him a “schvitzer”—in Yiddish, a show off. Oppenheimer is confused, and Rabi remarks, “Dutch in six weeks but you never learned Yiddish?” In real life, Rabi emigrated from what is now Poland to the United States.

His family, like so many others, spoke Yiddish at home. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer was a second generation American Jew who was raised by wealthy parents on the Upper West Side. Is it his wealth that disconnects him from the Yiddish language? The location of his childhood? A generational gap?

Oppenheimer’s detachment from the Yiddish language is not the only element that sets him apart from Izzy. During this part of the film, which is set in the late 1920s, Oppenheimer has just completed studies at Göttingen in Germany, and he meets Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg would later go on to head the Nazi project to build an atomic bomb, the role that Oppenheimer takes on in America. Within this context, Rabi mentions his fear and anxiety about traveling through Germany. “Ever get the feeling our kind isn’t entirely welcome here?” Izzy asks Oppenheimer. “Physicists?”

Oppenheimer responds. “Funny,” Izzy says. This might be a mistake on Oppenheimer’s part, a joke, or perhaps a subtle reference by the film to the antisemitic labeling of Einstein’s work as “the Jewish science.”

Although Oppenheimer has seemingly no interest or investment in his own religion, he cares about religion to some extent. He named the first test of the atomic bomb “trinity,” in what can only be seen as at least partially a reference to the most famous trinity, the Holy Trinity. Meanwhile, the film’s most memorable line, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” is a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu text.

Thus the film establishes four types of American Jewish caricatures: first, the recent immigrants and refugees, seen through Einstein. Second, the earnest, first-generation Jews, who perhaps do not consistently practice religion, but feel a cultural connection, as seen through Izzy. Thirdly, the Strauss type, who is able to—in a very American way—transform Judaism from a religion to an institution, wherein what is ultimately a form of community service can become a form of gaining power.

And finally, Oppenheimer himself is a particular kind of Jewish intellectual, one who has an interest in religion, but doesn’t seem to understand his friend’s fear when traveling through what is about to become Nazi Germany.

Past the world inside of the film, the film’s cast undoubtedly brings these characters alive. Although, on both of my viewings of the film, audience members laughed when Tom Conti’s Albert Einstein was first shown, not a single performance in the film disappoints.

There is an ongoing conversation about non-Jews playing Jews in films; a conversation that I feel particularly invested in. As an

November 12, 2023

What’s the best Jimmy Butler Last Week, Fucked Q:hairstyle?

Around and Got a A: I really liked when he had locs.

It was a subtle troll.

Triple-Double

Joanna Ruiz, JE ’25

Q: Why are the Miami Heat so good?

A: They have really awesome fans

(me). I like to believe I telepath-

I've been watching a lot of basket- ically communicate with them ball lately. And people who follow my Instagram seem to notice.

Probably because I post about it.

But I also do other things. But basketball is probably the most important thing I do. That and this column. Okay keep reading.

Q: How do you feel about the new

Minecraft updates to the mines?

A: It’s pretty good. I just get really overwhelmed by how big they are.

And how many new ores there are.

Like what do I use copper for? And why is there so much of it? God. I’m just a girl…

Q: How much is 9 + 10?

A: Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh Q: What were you like in high school?

A: Really awesome and funny.

Very ambitious. Had shorter hair.

Was in marching band. But in a really cool way. I was also a girl who would eat hot cheetos in the back of the class at 7:30 a.m. Subversive.

through the TV. Butterfly effect, y’know. I’m yelling at them in my mind and that energy travels to them. So then they play really good because they feel me sending them bad vibes and they don’t want to make me upset. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m also a really big Miami Heat hater. They’re really sorry and only play good when they feel like it. Like how do you almost lose to the detroit pistons on opening night? To Killian Hayes? Give me a break.

Might as well be the Cancun Heat because that’s clearly where their minds are. God. I’m actually an Orlando Magic fan. Don’t even put my name and the Miami Heat in the same sentence. They make me mad. They’re frauds.

Q: Is the championship window for Jimmy and Bam closed?

INSERTS! INSERTS! INSERTS! INSERTS! INSERTS! INSERTS! INSERTS! INSERTS! INSERTS! INSERTS! INSERTS! INSERTS!

ethnic minority, shouldn’t Jewish actors be prioritized when representing characters of their own ethnicity? At the same time, there is the opposing argument that breaking down whiteness into further categories for purposes that aren’t cultural can lead to other issues. Conti himself is not Jewish, but he is ethnically Italian. Herein lies yet another conversation. Are Jews allowed to play Italians? Are Italians allowed to play Jews? Historically, the answer seems to be yes—see James Caan in The Godfather for one of countless examples.

Aside from Conti, both Strauss and Izzy are portrayed by Jewish American actors, Robert Downey Jr. and David Krumholtz respectively. Oppenheimer, however, is played by Cillian Murphy, a man who is neither ethnically Jewish nor (abiding by the rules of this unspoken Jewish-Italian alliance) Italian. Murphy’s Irish accent even seems to poke through at times. In this very specific case, I argue for forgiveness on the basis of artistic purpose. Oppenheimer is different from his Jewish peers, separated from his religion and culture.

Perhaps Murphy’s own ethnicity makes this implicitly clear. Or perhaps this is all worthless, and Murphy’s ethnicity is irrelevant to the character he plays, especially since he plays him well.

Needless to say, the roles that Judaism and Jewish American assimilation play in understanding more aspects of this truly rich film cannot be understated. I’m always a proponent of re-watching, re-reading, re-looking, but in the case of Oppenheimer, I’d especially encourage that to better understand the film as a whole. ❧

Ask Joehoru is a weekly column where Joanna answers her Instagram followers’ questions. DM her @joehoru or watch out for a weekly question sticker on her story to get her thought-provoking answers.

A: No. They’re only 19 years old.

OVERHEAD

SUBMIT AN

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LETTER TO THE EDITORS

12

The Yale Herald

in response to: TO WATCH OR NOT TO WATCH, THAT IS OUR QUESTION Leo Egger, TC ’23.5, former Herald EIC

It is admirable that the Yale Herald is attempting serious arts criticism for undergraduate work on this campus. Student artists and theater makers deserve to be taken seriously, to have their work seen, engaged with, and criticized. In my experience at Yale, although the undergraduate theater scene is vibrant, there is little room for people to talk openly about the successes and failures of specific productions. I think the reason for this is self-explanatory: people are worried about hurting each other’s feelings or rustling the wrong feathers. This is misguided. Fear of criticism does Yale’s artists a terrible disservice. It stands in the way of our artistic growth, our learning, our preparation for the “real world,” and our community’s ideals of open intellectual discourse.

This is all to say, I was at first thrilled to see Mr. Millen and Mr. Bolchover’s column but found myself disappointed by their recent review of last weekend’s production of Hamlet. Of course, I am not an unbiased party: I played Polonius in this production and I find some of Millen and Bolchover’s assessments, particularly their judgment about specific performances, to be off the mark. (For example, I find their absence of praise for Mia Rolland’s heart-wrenching portrayal of Gertrude to be frankly astounding.) But c’est la vie, they have a right to their opinion and me to mine. Nonetheless, I think there are some failures of judgment in this review that should have been addressed both by the writers and the editorial staff at the Herald. Here, I would like to address elements of the review that I

saw as flawed and provide suggestions for reviewing undergraduate productions in the future.

At the most basic level, the review seemed to forget that this show was a student production, put together with under two thousand dollars scraped together from a College Performing Arts grant and the Elizabethan Club.

The review also fails to mention that tickets were free. Expecting to see “professional quality” performances across the board is misguided. That may be a fair expectation if you were seeing a show at the Yale Repertory Theater, or perhaps even a performance put on by professional theater students at the David Geffen School of Drama.

But in this Hamlet, the entire team is made up of full-time undergraduate students, many of whom are first years who have only been at Yale for a couple months. To judge performances on the same metric as those at the Yale Repertory Theater is absurd.

Instead of targeted attacks or praise of specific actors’ abilities, Millen and Bolchover should address specific choices they liked or disliked and provide reasoning for that assessment. It is very strange to me that nowhere in the review until the postscript is the director of the production, Sam Bezilla, even mentioned! Nowhere is the name of any designer mentioned, not even the lighting designer, Corinne Evans, whose work they praise for a paragraph! Perhaps the writers feel that the world doesn’t need another cut and dry production of Hamlet and that Bezilla should have taken more risks as a director? Does the conventionality

of the staging put too much pressure on individual performances?

What scenes don’t work and why?

What about the specific portrayals weren’t working? These would be more constructive arguments than random critiques of actors and their deliveries of specific lines.

This essay fails to follow the rules of theatrical criticism. What is presented instead is a work of conjecture. There is little attempt to recreate the event through language. The review provides almost no sense of what the show looked like or how production choices served the play. For example, what did the set look like? The opening paragraph says, “the costumes are vaguely period appropriate.” What period? Elizabethan? (The costume and set design were not in fact Elizabethan, but late 19th century.) The first version of the review said the play was “nearly unabridged” even though the show ran about 2 hours and 45 minutes.

The wording has been changed to “lightly abridged,” which is also untrue. An unabridged Hamlet runs 4 hours.

The writers and editors need to clarify the purpose of this critique. When this review was published, Hamlet had already closed.

It makes no sense, then, for the critical assessment to be framed in terms of recommendation, as stated in the final sentence. The goal for such a column should be to provide an analysis of the performance and to interpret and evaluate the artistic merit of the production as a whole. That would be fodder for artistic growth. ❧

VOICES

November 12, 2023

Faux Pas He wiped away the beads of sweat above his eyebrows and pushed back his thinning hair before opening the car door. Stepping into the dry air, he watched rays of sunlight dance through the cloud of dust his car had kicked up. As the last particles settled, he loosened his cheap necktie—he had tied it short this morning.

He made his way towards the shoddy wooden fence at the cliff ’s edge. Next to it, a sign read: Rebel’s Valley—KEEP BACK—Steep Drop, followed by some historical information he never bothered to read. He Graphic by Alina Susani

stepped over the fence towards the precipice with a practiced carelessness, and basked in the sensation he felt rising from the pit of his being. As he looked up at the motionless clouds, the sensation drifted from his chest, up to his throat and head. A slight grin formed on his lips. He looked down. Shifting his feet closer to the edge, his legs began to shake as he examined the rocky terrain below.

Typically, he would straighten up here, turn around, hop over the fence, and get back into his car. But today, the warmth of the setting sun beating gently on his neck and the cool updraft rising from the valley left him rooted to the spot. Entranced, he extended a shaky leg outward, planting his foot onto the nothingness above the valley.

A deafening gust enveloped his body. He closed his eyes, and waited patiently to jerk awake. Just one of those dreams, he thought. Soon his brain would throw him back into the stiff embrace of his mattress.

When he opened his eyes, the terrain looked clearer than before. What a goddamn rat race I’ve been running, he thought, all to end up a pile of meat and bones in the middle of fucking nowhere. Not that it matters, nobody would even think to look for me. At

this thought, he wanted nothing more than to lash out—to feel anything besides the sun on his back and the wind against his face. But he was helpless and couldn’t even hope to make a scene about it.

He was never a religious man, but he figured now was as good a time as any to become one. He said a quick, honest prayer to every god, but the ground did not start to look any more like salvation.

As every intimate detail of the valley presented itself, he wished his life would flash before his eyes. He begged his mind to conjure up an image to inspire anything other than dread. He wept as his mind failed to heed his demands and begged for an end.

His wish was granted. Connecting with the ground, he remembered once hearing on the radio that we’re all made of star stuff. He returned home.

- Gavin Guerrette, BR ’25

13

COVER STORY!

The Yale Herald

Computer Crossdressing Charting the Trans Digital Archive Hannah Szabó, MY ’25, Herald staff

“T

14

he contemporary trans movement as we know it now—with all its accomplishments and failures—could not have come to be without the Internet.” This is the central claim of Avery DameGriff ’s newly released book The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet. Consulting archival resources from people and organizations across the country, like the promotional advertisement (below) for the umbrella Internet organization us too (United Sisterhood of Transsexual Outreach Organizations), DameGriff outlines the formation of the trans community’s online pres-

ence. Originally printed in the July 1989 issue of a Hartford-based trans newsletter Twenty Minutes, this flier epitomizes the shift of the movement from print to digital: “A new way to unify our community.

Imagine being able to communicate with other ts [transsexual] organizations across the country in a way never possible before… to end the communication gap in our community once and for all.”

Networks of communication among trans people are of immense practical importance. To be trans is to be defined by a condition that writer Andrew Solomon calls ‘horizontal identity’—a mark-

er that, unlike race or religion, is not usually passed down through families. Furthermore, one is not typically taught how to be trans, or how to raise a trans child, by one’s own parents.

When I asked my mother about her experience raising a gender-nonconforming child in the early 2010s, she pointed me to a few books (Lori Duron’s Raising My Rainbow and Diane Ehrensaft’s Gender Born, Gender Made, among others) but suggested that the email chains and Internet forums she was a part of during the years of my social and medical transition proved much more

FEATURES

November 12, 2023

helpful than these static print references. Through online groups, she could communicate instantly with other parents, seek information on doctors and lawyers, and participate actively in an exchange of advice and support.

The Internet was also helpful for me in my own path towards transition—not as a source for information, but as a site for identity building. In Mario Kart, I chose to play as the pink-dress-clad Princess Peach; while playing Poptropica, I gave my avatar long hair and high heels. Before I went to the Internet for answers, I went for gender-bending fun.

Online spaces, from forums to game services, can be liberatory for trans and questioning people not only because they allow them to connect across distances, but also because they offer this sort of disembodied experimentation with gender. In reference to trans icon Sandy Stone’s 1987 The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto (itself a response to trans-exclusionary radical feminist Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, published a decade earlier), Dame-Griff introduces the idea of “computer crossdressing”: experimenting with gender-deviant modes of presenting and socializing from the safety of one’s own personal computer. In their sociological project Digital Me: Exploring Possible Future Selves Online, published this year, co-authors Z. Nicolazzo, Alden C. Jones, and Sy Simms pick up on the Internet’s uniquely potent power for trans people, examining “how transgender people use the Internet, curating their digital selves in ways that could help them explore various possible gendered futures for themselves.” In the foreword, Jones reflects on their own personal experiences, remarking that “I went to the Internet to find what I could not in the books around

Trans existence is predicated on the severing of one’s present identity from one's past, an assertion of selfhood that is defined in the negative: I am not that which I was. me…When I could not find a comfortable space in my own queerness, I looked to the Internet for explanations, help, information.” And along with these factual resources, Jones found an online community centered around trans support: “intense isolation, what I felt in the real world, did not exist online. The opposite of isolation, how I experienced sorting out more of my own gender among trans folk online, felt like coming home to a house full of trans folk…through the Internet, I began to see prismatic proliferations of trans possibility and positivity.”

In chat forums, trans people created online spaces that fulfilled multiple purposes: information exchange, formation of community, and experimentation with identity. At a time before most American cities had public-facing organizations for trans people, these online forums allowed for an interconnected, international trans community. What exactly was discussed on these trans-focused forums, however, remains somewhat inaccessible. “The reality of web archiving leaves behind a necessarily incomplete picture,” writes Dame-Griff. “By design, many early bbs [Bulletin Board System] software regularly kept only a small archive of recent messages, while decentralized networks… survive [only] in dispersed bits and pieces.” The strength of early trans online spaces—that they re-

mained private from the outside world and separate from stiff institutions—also proved a weakness for those attempting to study these communities after the fact.

Dame-Griff ’s book is one attempt to piece the fragmented history back together. Drawing from resources like the Digital Transgender Archive (launched

by Northeastern University professor K.J. Rawson in 2016) and the Transgender Media Lab (based out of Carleton University), The Two Revolutions traces a key period of trans history. This effort is laudable, but remains firmly entrenched in the academy, as evidenced by the book’s publisher (New York University Press) and back-cover blurbs (all written by other academics).

Jamie Lauren Keiles’ Instagram account @sexchange.tbt is an attempt at something different. Billing itself as “an elite archive (1980-2011) of the twisted transsexual mind,” the account posts media found through many of the academic databases referenced above, as well as through Jamie’s own independent research for a book he is writing on the history of non-binary identity. In daily posts, Jamie features flashy, profound, and funny materials, ranging from newspaper clippings to screenshots of website home screens, with limited context.

There is no explicit attempt to narrativize or hypothesize—the ac-

15

FEATURES

The Yale Herald

Comic originally published in Cross-Talk, April 1996, created by Amy Sakurai.

16

count simply seeks to connect the contemporary trans Internet to its past.

Like Dame-Griff, Jamie has faced his own frustrations while navigating the archive. “There’s just a huge quantity of material,” he told me in a Zoom call in October, “And a lot of it is on sites that are really, really hard to access because they’re poorly archived or they’re not really searchable, or it’s just a big web of broken links.” Because of these difficulties, the majority of the conversations and posts on these forums and websites remain out of reach for scholars. “We have a lot of access to medical narratives of transness, and we have some access to political organizing going on in the late ’80s, early ’90s,” explained Jamie. “But like the actual thing, where trans people start organizing sort of self-reflectively as trans people, we have very little access to any of that.”

In many ways, @sexchange. tbt is an attempt to make the academic research of scholars like Dame-Griff accessible to trans people worldwide. The account became active in January 2023; by now, the account has over 20,000 followers, and a follower community that tunes into live videos and competitions like the “Most Transgender Name” award (‘Lilith’ won, with honorable mentions going to ‘Finn’ and ‘Kai’). The late-90s and early-2000s ‘proto-memes’ that

Jamie posts, often in the form of comics or graphics, feel as contemporary as they are funny. One user commented on a February 16th post of a 1996 comic strip (above) that “seeing a trans meme that feels modern, but in the format of a newspaper comic, is going to have me requiring outpatient care for the next week or so.”

To Jamie, this is exactly the point. While trans-focused 2010s were often attempts to ‘clean up’ the image of transness for the sake of political gains and increased representation, earlier archives reveal a trans aesthetic that is both racy and fun. “So much of my idea of what trans people were like was shadowed by this very corny image of Obama-era aesthetics,” commented Jamie, who’s 31. “I remember being scared when I was transitioning, thinking, ‘will I ever meet another trans person who’s sexy that I want to sleep with?’

Because my idea of trans people was so sanitized and squeaky clean and they always existed in conversations that didn’t have other trans people in them.” The account, Jamie claims, is part of a broader consciousness growing in trans communities: “trans people are realizing, it’s not just that we can exist but we also can have culture.”

Digging up and sharing these archives plays an important cultural and political role in the online trans community: it grounds the

group in a specific history, a structured aesthetic, and a shared language.

This return to a pre-2010s aesthetic and rhetoric has colored contemporary conversations on trans terminology. “I’ve really noticed that people are returning to using ‘transsexual,’” noted Jamie, “because it’s a word that cis people feel they ‘can’t say’ and [trans people] kind of have a desire to distance conversations within the community from public conversations about representation politics or moral panics over topics like trans women in sports.” Just as early trans online movements sought to create forums open to trans people but separate from often-hostile society, Jamie noted a current “desire to have a ‘trans word’ that only trans people can say, that names… the messier elements of transness.”

Transsexual is not the only word reentering the trans lexicon in online spaces. The name of Jamie’s account @sexchange.tbt (“tbt” referring here to ‘Throwback Thursday,’ the Internet trend 2006 of sharing nostalgic posts once a week that started in 2006) is a tongue-in-cheek reclamation of the term ‘sex change,’ which has largely been replaced with the term ‘gender affirmation surgery’ (gas). Discussing the username, Jamie referenced a tweet that lamented this linguistic shift be-

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2001 trans support website homepage sourced by Jamie Lauren Keiles

cause, unlike gas, ‘sex change’ was a “sexy and glamorous” word.

The reclamation of these old terms that are only to be used by an ‘in-group’ has allowed for the creation of a specific trans Internet aesthetic, one marked by subversion of simplistic and outdated models of transness. In pop star Chase Icon’s breakout single ‘srs’—an acronym for ‘sexual reassignment surgery,’ another early synonym of gas— she brags of her “custom made cunt” and samples Lady Gaga’s iconic February 2011 response to an interview question about her genitalia: “maybe I do [have a penis]. Would it be so terrible?” Promoting her new album this October, Kim Petras, a trans woman singer, posed for a photoshoot in hypermasculine drag. These camp performances of gender, resembling those posted on Jamie’s account, playfully rebel against contemporaneous nuanced conversations on fluidity and non-binarism.

Of course, this creation of a self-consciously performative trans

aesthetic does not fit the entire community; no verbal or visual language can. “I don’t think it’s like a linear thing in which categories become better able to articulate desires,” commented Jamie. “I just think people sometimes chance to be alive in a moment in which the categories are working for them or not.” In conducting his own research, Jamie spoke to many women, now in their 60s, who identified strongly with labels like ‘butch’ and ‘genderqueer’ that are no longer as commonly used. “These people hit periods in which the language of the moment worked better for them and they’ve hit periods in which it works worse.

Many of them hated being called ‘lesbian,’ they liked ‘genderqueer,’ and now they are annoyed by ‘non-binary.’” A cohering aesthetic in online trans spaces likewise has the potential to connect, but also to alienate, members of the community.

But even for those who do not find their identities represented in past or contemporary trans dis-

course, access to archival material can serve as a point of departure from which to understand oneself.

Trans existence is predicated on the severing of one’s present identity from one's past, an assertion of selfhood that is defined in the negative: I am not that which I was.

Knowing what one is not—how a certain label or form of embodiment is at odds with deep parts of the self—is facilitated by a shared, if flawed and ever-changing, language of gender as it has been constructed on the Internet.

Just as trans identity is both grounded in and defined against the past, so too must the trans movement engage meaningfully with its own history. The backward-looking work of trans academics, social media administrators, and Internet celebrities—collecting records of trans discourse in all of its racy, offensive, contradictory fun—is an essential step in the construction of a trans future. ❧

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Through Hawaiian Eyes

A Year in Reflection With Professor Hi‘ilei Hobart Joshua Ching, ES ’26

Translation Note: ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i is a multivalent language, in which meaning cannot be captured wholly by a single definition from the English language. Translations, however, have been provided for the sake of clarity for the reader.

‘Ō

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lena / turmeric sleeps beneath the thickness of her leaves.

As a bud, she is shaded from trickles of the autumn sun; as a dye, she stains the ends of the banner, languidly draped over the metal gate to her left, a deep and rich yellow that rivals the sun’s vibrance.

Her sisters, distilled and candied, are the syrup drizzled over cones of shave ice to her right, infusing their cinching and peppery sweetness in a biting cold.

Today, she lives at the Yale Farm; here, she will spend her evening celebrating the woman who folded her seeds beneath New Haven soil. But her one hānau / sands of birth, the rope that fastens them together in diasporic memory, is an archipelago—a continent and an ocean away.

• It is the afternoon of September 22, 2023, and a lively crowd of students, faculty, and community members huddle intimately beneath a wooden pavilion at the Yale Farm. In the quiet chill of the fall equinox, the compactness of our bodies keeps us warm. Brought to this space to celebrate the launch of Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment,

I am here in appreciation of the book’s author—assistant professor of Native and Indigenous Studies, and the first and only Kanaka Maoli / Native Hawaiian ladder faculty in Yale College, Hi‘ilei Hobart. Toward the end of the pavilion, she stands, dressed in vibrant yellow, making light conversation with prominent Indigenous scholars she has invited from across the continent and beyond to speak on her scholarship.

Cooling the Tropics is a work that charts the imperial infrastructures and technologies of the ice trade in Hawai‘i, confronting the thermal dimensions of colonialism, dispossession, white comfort, and the politics of food. For Dr. Noenoe Silva, the first Kanaka Maoli professor of political science hired at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and one of the invited panelists, Hobart situates her work in a revered genealogy of female, Kanaka Maoli scholars. “We’re all standing on the shoulders of Haunani-Kay Trask and Lilikalā Kame‘elehiwa,” says Silva, herself a trailblazing author of seminal texts on Hawaiian intellectual history. Silva continues, noting that she is “impressed with the ways that [Hi‘ilei] constantly makes use of the archive and ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i,” yet maintains the “relevance of the analyses that she’s making to today.” Constellating contemporary Hawaiian resistance movements with the throughline of refrigeration, Hobart, as Silva impresses, offers a new tool to analyze settler

colonialism in Hawai‘i, and critically confronts the possibility of an Indigenous, food sovereign future.

For Hawai‘i, American settler colonialism is not an event living in memory, but a gradual and ongoing process. Today, Kānaka Maoli from across Hawai‘i and the diaspora are rallying in defense of sacred ‘āina / land, fending off efforts to desecrate Maunakea with the construction of a Thirty-Meter Telescope on its slopes, protesting the poisoning of the largest aquifer on O‘ahu by over 40,000 gallons of leaked U.S. Navy jet fuel, and organizing for mass relief in the wake of the devastating wildfires in Lāhainā and other parts of Maui Komohana. “They're destroying the thing that all of us Kānaka love the best in the world, which is our ‘āina. They're poisoning it and they're burning it and they're building on it,” Silva asserts. But Hobart, Silva says, has “encouraged us to think about what we do now. How do we save our ‘āina?

How do we save your generation?”

For Professor Hobart, these questions guide her scholarship, but arise from a personal intellectual genealogy she views as unconventional. With a background in creative writing, material culture studies, archives management, rare books librarianship, and food studies, she claims to be “a scholar that never really seemed to clearly fit in the academy,” but is “always surprised at the places that [she’s] ended up by following [her] own weird, little tune.” And in the fall

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Image courtesy of Grace Cajski, BF ’24

of last year, it led her to the steps of Yale.

“Landing at Yale was a strange experience, because being at Yale was not a place I ever expected to be,” she recalled. Hobart entered Yale as one of the first three faculty brought on since the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program gained hiring power in 2019. The program’s independence was not serendipitous—through years of student protest and national activism urging for institutional change, including the coordinated resignation of 13 Ethnicity, Race, and Migration faculty, Professor Hobart’s hire was made possible.

Hobart joins Dr. Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), professor of History and American Studies, and the only tenured Native American faculty, in a rapidly expanding field of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale. Blackhawk, who chaired the search committee that eventually selected Hobart, sees her hire as part of a critical juncture for Native studies in the academy. “We can’t lose sight of the broader Indigenous commu-

nities—Alaska, Canada, Polynesia, Hawai‘i, Latin America, the South Pacific—who are also subject to both inquiry and scholarship production,” Blackhawk says. “So it’s wonderful to have a Native studies community that has a deep commitment to the contiguous United States but is moving into our vision of the field within not just regions, but themes and analysis that are particularly relevant to places like Hawai‘i.”

Upon arriving at this institution, Professor Hobart quickly found her spaces on campus—in the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program, on the Yale Farm, and in the growing community of Kanaka Maoli students she’s come to mentor. Within her first month, however, on a private tour of the Yale Peabody Museum’s collections, she discovered an assemblage of the mandibles and teeth of several unidentified Kānaka Maoli. Separated from a larger set of repatriated iwi kūpuna / ancestral remains, these mark the eugenicist origins of anthropological studies at Yale.

When Hobart’s eyes met the iwi

kūpuna, cramped in a sterile box and sealed with plastic wrap, she wept.

Over the summer prior, Professor Hobart conducted a series of research interviews with Halealoha Ayau, and wife and husband Kalehua and Mana Caceres, all of whom are prominent figures in Native Hawaiian repatriation work. Drawing on these networks following her discovery, Hobart learned that Ayau was facilitating a nearby repatriation at Vassar College in early October. She coordinated with Ayau and formed a plan to hand off the iwi to him for replanting in Hawai‘i.

In the two weeks following these developments, Professor Hobart gathered a small group of Kanaka Maoli undergraduates— Kala‘i Anderson, BK ’25, Connor Arakaki, MC ’26, and myself—to learn oli / chant and pule / prayer from the Caceres’, gather ‘ōlena and pa‘akai / sea salt, and sew our kīhei / shawl in preparation for Ayau to replant the iwi in Hawai‘i. On the day of the ceremony, as we stood in reverence around the iwi, shar-

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She challenges the university to reckon with the pedagogical gaps that Indigeneity has already bridged.

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ing the weight of a violent history, our hands fastened tightly to each other. And those iwi, through the work of Ayau and teachings of the Caceres’, returned to their home after 140 years of displacement.

Despite fears of overstepping her place or pushing the limits of the academy, Professor Hobart felt an urgent responsibility to act. A year since repatriation, she still affirms: “I knew, in my gut, that I was supposed to be at Yale to do that. And if that was all I got to do here before they told me to leave, that was okay.”

• As the sun begins to wane behind the treeline, seats under the pavilion fill and a crowd circumscribes its borders. I sit toward the middle, in line with the brick oven.The chalk board nailed to the oven’s side reads, “holoi‘a ka papa, kau ‘ia e ka manu / where there is food, people gather”; I am eased by its presence. Food binds the communities Professor Hobart has joined and created in her first year at Yale. For her, as a teacher and a mentor, food is a critical medium for Indigenous education.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty (er&m 316), one of Professor Hobart’s inaugural courses, confronts the industrial food complex as the invisible arm of American colonization, and argues that sovereignty is predicated on the self-determination of Indigenous foodways.

On the first day of her class last year, in the sweltering heat of a New England September, I stum-

bled into a crowded room in the hazy basement of William Harkness Hall. There were too few seats and a cramped central table; I was skeptical. I sat to Professor Hobart’s left as she unpacked her bag.

Jamie Seu, ES ’26, another Kanaka Maoli student I’d met in passing during the weeks prior, joined me by her side. As seats filled and the windowless walls closed-in tighter, Professor Hobart re-packed her bag and led us to a shady spot under a tree on Cross Campus. In the pillowy grass, we sat in community with each other. And as students traversed the desire paths around us, we spoke of the places we call home and our reasons for coming to this space.

Jamie initially decided to take Indigenous Food Sovereignty because of her fascination with the chemistry behind food and the TikTok algorithm that fuels her cravings. It doubly offered an opportunity to explore the Indigenous identity that her home rarely expressed. Between the few times she sees the Hawaiian side of her family, never having a concentrated space for Hawaiian cultural practice, and growing up with her Hawaiian-ness bookended by a percent sign, Jamie felt like she “didn’t have the legitimacy to back [her identity] up.” For many contemporary Kānaka Maoli, the fraught history of U.S. federal legislation defining Indigenous identity with arbitrary blood quantums—for capital “N” Native Hawaiians, it is 50%—forces ques-

tions of being Hawaiian enough under the shadow of a percentage.

“It was always described to me in terms of [blood] quantum. I didn’t even know what that meant when I was young. Plus, I don’t look Hawaiian at all,” Jamie recalled.

Upon arriving at Yale, however, Jamie found that bearing proof of her Hawaiian-ness was not an expectation, nor an inquiry. “There’s no ‘how much are you of this?’ or ‘prove it to me that you’re this,’” she says. “I don’t have to validate myself.” For her, the atmosphere of Professor Hobart’s class was an extension of that eased sentiment, providing breathing room to unravel tensions of belonging and explore her Hawaiian identity more thoroughly. “If I was ever worried about judgment, it wasn't going to be because I wasn’t enough,” she remarked with a smile. “Everybody just was as they are and that's the best you could bring.”

The Yale Farm, as both a classroom location and a pedagogy in itself, is central to the method of community-building that Professor Hobart routinely integrates into her curriculum. “As you become deeper invested in fields of study, and particularly within Native and Indigenous Studies,” Hobart said, “you learn that the embodied experience of being in and with the world is a form of theory, and it is a form of practice and it is a legitimate way of learning and teaching and being.” As we shucked beans, diced beets, and harvested tomatoes, our class became active agents in bringing life from the land for our sustenance, an intimacy that is often robbed by the mass cultivation of food for profit.

Jacquie Munno, Programs Manager of the Yale Sustainable Food Program credits Hobart with leading the farm to integrate Indigenous values and ancestral knowledge in their work: “Professor Hobart has given a depth and

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November 12, 2023

fullness to this learning approach that we’ve always aspired to,” she says. Through her Indigenous Food Sovereignty course, she has empowered students with the right to choose how and what they grow and consume. “The Farm doesn’t replace classroom teaching, but it enriches it immeasurably,” Munno says. Beyond articulating the intricacies of movements for Indigenous food sovereignty, Professor Hobart creates spaces grounded in place that make meaning between people. She lives the pedagogies her predecessors theorized.

For Jamie, these practices are baked into the legacy Hobart has and will continue to leave on campus. “[She] reminds me of what they tell you every time you go somewhere—leave it better than you came,” Jamie says. “That philosophy speaks to her.” As our first class comes to an end, I watch Jamie hand a bag of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, an unspoken memory of a shared home, to Professor Hobart. And, for the first time amid the frantic agitation of first year, I am at ease.

• There is a movement in the silence that falls over the crowd; it is in the blades of Sycamore shed that fold and flutter from the sky, the rustle of underbrush in the whispering wind. Professor Hobart walks to the podium at the end of the panel table, thanking Dr. Blackhawk for her introduction. She begins with expressions of gratitude—to the panelists, her colleagues, her students, her family, and her mentor, Dr. Audra Simpson (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk), professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. As she reaches Simpson’s name, she waves a binded packet of readings, littered with annotations and highlights, from her time in Simpson’s class.

Before repatriation and Indigenous Food Sovereignty, before Yale, Professor Hobart was a stu-

dent at Colby College. In her senior year, her mother passed away.

Over the months that followed, she went home and made sandwiches at the deli down the street from her house. She later accepted a position as a secretary in an office. “It was fine,” she recalled.

But, determined to reclaim agency, she didn’t want “somebody telling [her] what to do at a desk for the rest of [her] life.” So she applied to graduate school. After obtaining her master’s degrees in Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture from Bard Graduate Center and in Rare Books Librarianship and Archives Management from the Pratt Institute, she decided to pursue further studies. As she entered her Food Studies PhD program at nyu, her father passed away.

The following summer, she committed to reading a stack of 20 books on Hawaiian history.

Once she reached the bottom of the stack, she realized it wasn’t enough—so she sought more beyond the bounds of her institution. Professor Hobart sent a cold email to Dr. Audra Simpson, one of the only Native scholars in the academy at the time, who taught a course called Settler Colonialism in North America at Columbia University. Entering her class through a consortium agreement, Hobart saw the course as a “space to work these things out for [her] self.”

For Dr. Simpson, Professor Hobart was “making connections between materials that others hadn't” and bringing the “language from Food Studies—the language of taste and sense” to analyses of the infrastructures of settler colonialism. Praising the care and attention she brought from her expertise in archival work, Simpson recognized Hobart’s “personal aptitude for research, for working with archives.” This manifested in a term paper that analyzed the introduction of ice into Hawai‘i,

using the menus of Queen Lili‘uokalani from a mid-1800s dinner in ‘Iolani Palace.

Given Hobart’s unconventional academic background, Dr. Simpson encouraged her to pursue the topic further. Despite, per Professor Hobart, its inconvenience “for [her] department, for [her] advisors, for everybody,” Hobart insisted that doing this work was a necessity. Today, that dissertation has evolved into a book that demands critical evaluation of our institutions, and intentional action from within and beyond them.

For Professor Hobart, Dr. Simpson’s push, and the accommodations of her advisors and department, encouraged her to take her work into her own hands. “I understood what it meant to ask questions that were important questions for [myself], specifically as a person,” she said. “It took me a really long time to have confidence that the questions that I was asking didn't have to be other people's questions. And in fact, why would I want to be asking the same question as someone else?” Continuing this lineage of mentorship, Professor Hobart has begun doing the work of informing the future through an orientation to the past.

“I really want to empower students to think their own thoughts and to ask questions about the world that makes sense for who they are, and who they want to be. I think I focus on that so much because I needed to learn that lesson.”

• To the sound of applause, Professor Hobart returns to her seat and gives way to Dr. Jean O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), professor of History and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, the first speaker of the panel. As silence trickles over the crowd, a familiar face taps Hobart’s shoulder. Bodies shuffle to face the exchange. Mikiala Ng, PC ’24, a Kanaka Maoli senior, gently holds

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Image courtesy of Grace Cajski, BF ’24

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a lei po‘o, a crown delicately woven with strands of raffia, adorned with marigolds, shrubbery, lavender, and sage from across New Haven.

For a moment, a stillness washes over the pavilion. Professor Hobart swivels to face the panel, her head tilted downward as her knees plant in the soil. Mikiala, placing the lei to Professor Hobart’s forehead, fastens the crown, lashing a knot with the dangling braids of raffia. Professor Hobart rises and embraces Mikiala; they are bound like their lei po‘o.

Mikiala arrived to Yale at the eclipse of the covid-19 pandemic, as one of only two Kanaka Maoli students in her year. “Sophomore year, my first year on campus, was insanely difficult. Academics are one thing, but transitioning to being on campus, away from home with all my family…” Mikiala pauses. “I was struggling to find support, get by, insanely homesick every day. There was no one else, at least in my circles, around me that was from home and/or Native

Hawaiian.” As we converse in the attic of the Native American Cultural Center (NACC), I am humbled to follow in her footsteps, and I recognize the privilege of not being the only Kanaka Maoli in the Yale bubble.

In the spring of 2022, Mikiala, who was a peer liaison for the NACC at the time, met Professor Hobart at a welcome event celebrating her hire. “I was so excited to have someone from home, in a faculty staff role, to look up to since this whole time, it’s really just been me.” Having taken Race and Indigeneity in the Pacific (ER&M 373) and now a student in Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Mikiala feels a renewed sense of belonging in the academy—and has been pushed to think critically about both colonial histories and her own personal ones. For her, it comes down to “the confidence that she has in me and in all her students, and the compassion and encouragement she gives us to write about what really interests us, to ask the hard

questions, to expand our thinking and our ideologies, and the way that we frame things when we think about ourselves.”

The day before the book launch, Mikiala and I are sitting in the second floor of the NACC. I flip through economics notes as she pulls stems of lavender from a teal bucket, snipping their ends, and fastening them to a woven raffia base. To her right is a Kanaka Maoli first year plucking at a guitar, and to her left, two more converse over readings. In the waning hours of the evening, the walls sing a chorus along with us.

For Mikiala, lei-making is part of a familial lineage. “I learned lei-making from my Puna, my grandmother, who passed away last fall. I think it’s coming up on a year now.” She reminisces about the last lei she made with her Puna and the encroaching fear that she’d lost her touch somewhere between Hawai‘i and Yale. She remembers her Puna glancing over at the lei she’d woven, speaking through a

OPINION

smile: “Yep. Just like how I would do it. Actually, I think you’re better.”

“Lei-making is such a special part of me, but also, a big part of my family and keeping my Puna alive and remembering her and all that she taught me,” Mikiala continues. Our cheeks are tearstained, and the room falls quiet.

“Anytime there’s an opportunity to make and give a lei, I think of my grandma and how much aloha she was always giving to people. The best way to preserve her legacy is to do that, to give aloha. And so getting to make a lei for Kumu / teacher Hobart was such an honor.” The lei, fastened tightly to the crown of Professor Hobart’s head, beyond raffia and marigolds and sage and lavender, is woven with fibers of aloha, reciprocity, and care.

For Professor Hobart, Kanaka Maoli scholars have been her anchor in the changing tides of the academy. Hobart seeks to pass this stability onto her students. “So much of it is following the example that you folks are all doing,” she says. “You show up with so much aloha.” But for Mikiala, and the growing number of Pasifika students in Yale College, Hobart herself is that anchor, who will leave “a legacy that has not been seen on this campus before.”

• As the panel closes, Jacquie Munno comes to the podium to acknowledge the many hands that have prepared the food sitting fresh on a nearby table—pizza made with kalua pig brought by a student from Hawai‘i, shave ice, gazpacho, and iced tea. She acknowledges the marigolds hung from the pavilion’s roof, strung by students from Indigenous Food Sovereignty. And she invites Helen Shanefield, SY ’26, Jairus Rhoades, SM ’26, and myself to perform a hula, dedicated to Professor Hobart, before the crowd. With my

shoes lined along the oven, my feet meld with the soil beneath me. We dance, and it feels good to be here in this space, to share in it with other Kānaka Maoli, to be in the presence of a woman canonized as an academic hero for many. In the hours that follow, we eat, and laugh, and exist, and take up space in ways that unwrite and rewrite history.

Like the ‘ōlena that tethers the people, place, and foods of the book launch, Professor Hobart is a tether of community. She has formed unconventional connections that serve as the basis for new forms of critical, embodied practice. She has brought with her not only the revered Indigenous scholars of her generation, but also a genealogy of knowledge that flows in every word she lives. She challenges the university to reckon with the pedagogical gaps that Indigeneity has already bridged.

She brings an informed vision for the future, with bits and pieces of aloha spliced into the canvas she paints for her students. And for Kānaka Maoli, she has not only eclipsed their displacement, replanted them in ‘āina, but become a testament to the value of Hawai‘i in an academy and institution that is antithetical to Kanaka Maoli existence.

The day after the book launch, Professor Hobart and I trade the comforting breadth of the farm for her intimate, air-conditioned, and windowless office in an unassuming building behind Toad’s. This is the ER&M program’s building.

Post-its scatter the walls of her office, forming a self-proclaimed conspiracy theory board for her new project. Prominent Hawaiian names line the bookshelves behind her. In her presence alone, I bear witness to history in the making. We begin speaking about the book launch, but she is at a loss for words. “Every corner of it was thoughtful. I’m still trying to

figure out how to process it, to be honest.” She pauses, but we share the silence together.

“These places are complicated places and they’re not perfect places. And I will not feel the way that I felt yesterday every day in this institution. I know that, but I’m going to hold on to it for as long as I can.”

• ‘Ōlena rises from her slumber.

Her roots cling to unfamiliar soil. As the shadow of night falls on her bladed leaves, the pigments she’s left, and the syrup that leaks through plastic bags in secret, she stands in the stillness of night.

And in the soil caught between the soles of shoes, she leaves pieces of her ‘āina with her visitors—who have, in presence, left pieces of themselves with her.

She is a seed of Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart.

And here she will rest and she will grow. While their conjoined lineage is on an island and in an ocean, in a history of loss and revival, they are fastened not in diasporic memory, but in the diasporic present. They are seeds of emergence.

No ku‘u Hawai‘i, mau a mau / For my beloved Hawai‘i, forever and always. ❧

Answers to DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH, page 27 T N T R A D I O P R O W T H A W E D A A A O N I O N I A G O R E L I V E M E R R I A M W E B S T E R E X I L E S I N T E L A L E C E D A M T E R I N A A N A N A L O G G H O S T G E N E M A P P A P E R A I R P L A N E G A R T H T O T E M R E L A X A B N E G A T I V E A N E M I A A N I F O E E M O J I A W E I D I D N O T R O A M S A C C R A L O N E O K R A L I B E R T Y B E L L A J A R S T U N E S S E X I R A Q I S U B S I S T B O Y T A P A S Y U P T S A P H O T O S T O L L P L A Z A S A D R E P H O O H A T I E I N G A R D E N C E N T E R S E X P O S E S I R I S H E R R A N D D I N E A C H T S T A B D E L I L E T M E C R A W L S G A M E D T H E S Y S T E M M A N A M A U B E R E A G E R E S T E N D R U N E E L S D O O N E R H O

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Questions on Blood Jisu Oh, TD ’27, Herald staff

C

atherine opie talk 5pm down the ramp is what the chalk blares at me from a sign propped a little too low to the ground, wobbling on wooden legs outside the Yale University Art Gallery on Monday, October 9. I squint as I walk closer to it, enough to see “to theater” squeezed in timid, cramped letters between “the ramp” and the wooden frame of the sign. I veer to the left, down the ramp, and into a rather orange theater. The name of interest rests in the middle of a black screen: “Catherine Opie.” Something about it is subdued, a little blank in comparison to the chalk grinded onto the sign outside. I squint again. “2023” is written under her name, smaller and centered.

And here we are, now—Catherine Opie. 2023. She walks up to the stage amidst a decent volume of applause. The screen is suddenly too bright; I squint again, catch a glimpse of brown hair and half of a ruddy face shone in the light, the other half shadowed against the curtains. Catherine Opie. 2023.

Breathing and together.

Opie breathes through her mouth. She projects a childhood photo of herself onto the screen and declares the child as “already a huge dyke,” standing cheerful and slanted against a midwestern suburban setting. She had picked up a camera at age nine, and never seemed to have stopped, receiving an mfa from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 1988 and immediately capturing award-winning collection after collection. In her talk, Opie courses through 32-ish years of her art, weaving in and out between polit-

ical movements and the aids crisis as well as a stray Guggenheim Fellowship, briefly mentioned between moma features. (But what are big names, really, to an artist driving across America for a good landscape shot, or to a mother photographing her son, grinning upon a stool?) She talks about the concept of an identity reliant on a setting, coursing through her eras and works of photography with a perpetually calm, if not slightly nasally, voice.

In Self-Portrait/Cutting, Opie’s back is to the camera: a childlike portrait is cut into her skin, with two stick figures in skirts holding hands in front of a house. Blood trickles in a crimson streak down one wall of a house; one wing of a seagull; one edge of a triangle skirt. Though in Self-Portrait/Cutting she stands with her back to the camera, she faces the lens in Self-Portrait/Pervert. “Pervert” is etched onto her chest, letters curling as if they were drying; needles enter and exit the breadth of her arms; a leather mask covers her face. In both portraits Catherine Opie bleeds. I stare at the photos, wait for the domed drops of blood to seep and run. They stand still.

“The identity becomes the body,” I hear Opie say. “The body becomes the architecture.”

“I made them because of identity,” she continues. “Because of aids, because of what blood means.” Opie had photographed queer communities in California during the devastating aids crisis, developing one of her most renowned collections—Portraits. In each photo, her friends stand unblinking in front of Opie’s camera,

certain against a sharply colored background. Her friends were dying; Opie had a camera.

But what does blood mean? We are left wondering as Catherine Opie moves onto a different collection, fumbling with the remote every now and then. She circles the laser haphazardly around the swamps tucked in the bottom of a mountainous landscape, amusedly pointing out the details buried within her work. For the latter half of her series Portraits and Landscapes, Opie fractures a scene into vertical sections, sequencing images and playing with focus so as to dip into abstraction. She continuously defines America through the often overwhelming, intensely intimate textures of the country’s terrains. My eyes flit from the glowing screen to the photographer herself, breathing into the microphone, half-shadowed in the corner of the stage. She grips the remote and waves her hands. The screen abruptly displays a blurry scene of Niagara Falls (Untitled #9). “Oh, I did it again,” Opie says off-handedly. The screen goes back to the mountains. The laser circles the swamps. I shift in my orange seat, rolling my neck in a vain attempt to snap a crick out of it. She never explains the blood.

Opie has experimented and captured what it means to be alive within yourself, exactly where you are and how you are. She twists our perspective of queer identity, of mountainous landscapes, and of Walls, Windows, and Blood— her most recent collection. Opie’s work uses images from the Vatican and its signature museum, uniquely questioning how to activate each object in photography. The walls are somber and cut severely into the expanse of the photo; their security cameras peer down with an assumed power. The windows, serene and fractured by light, toy with the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church: they look out into the

setting, in order to determine what space to occupy. Opie dips into each unique, vivid, distinctively tangible quality that sculpts an identity from the surrounding place: the Vatican, the mountains and swamps, neon signs in the countryside, suburban Ohio. The self is distinctively placed in the setting, and identity, and culture.

Here you are, alive and breathing.

What does that mean?

At the end of her presentation, several audience members pipe up with questions amidst awkward segments of silence. “I like wandering,” Opie replies to a question I’ve forgotten. “I love being lost; hate the GPS.” When she’s in a certain area for a new collection, she feels a need to learn the place: “It’s about carrying the gear with you and noticing what you keep looking at over and over again. Then,” she says, “you decide what you want your body of work to be.”

I close my eyes, consider Self-Por-

trait/Cutting: the red streaks, dark and thick in the Vatican, thin and diluted on her back. I think about what instrument she used to cut herself, imagine the steel sword used to strike the holy body scraping across her own skin. I watch the blood run down the pale expanse of flesh; feel it course through mine.

It follows me when my eyes open.

Blood is within her, within me, coating the walls of the Church, charged with a pulsing energy to be, please, something—anything.

I still don’t know what blood means. She continues talking— ever calm, ever patient. I jerk my head to the right and feel the echo of my neck cracking. A hand raises two rows ahead of me, silently beckoning Opie’s attention. Her eyes flit over to my side of the theater, slide from the hand suspended in the air to my head still tilted to the right, then back.

I gather my things and leave.

Catherine Opie wanders on. ❧

OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD!

Vatican and simultaneously reflect the self. And now we arrive back at blood—I sit up in my seat.

She clicks to the next slide. The final portion of Opie’s holy trinity sequences fragments of artwork from the Vatican museum in a “blood grid.” Every photo focuses on an illustration of blood in various paintings and tapestries, aligned in a three-by-four grid.

They unflinchingly bare gruesome yet expected scenes of gore and pain—reflecting, in a way, the bloody violence of the Catholic Church. As Opie clicks through several blood grids, she scrutinizes the textures of blood. “You can tell the painters had a good time with the blood,” she says. “It was their moment with abstraction—you can feel the painter being released.”

She pauses at one image. We observe it together: a thick gash, bleeding profusely from the dagger still stuck in the wound; a palm marked with the bloody remnants of a nail; a crimson arc of blood splattered on a sword. While my eyes focus into one photo, then at the whole grid, and then back into another, I faintly hear Opie talking. Something about how she never understood why her works were asked for trigger warnings, when the Vatican museum blatantly displayed gory images.

Abruptly weary, I close my eyes from the thick aftermath of blood and the voice still vaguely bewildered at the idea of interrupting art. I open my eyes blearily to a sickening feeling that I’d missed something. I blink groggily; I quietly clear my throat. I listen.

Opie is still flicking through images of her actual work, brushing through each slide with a somewhat absent-minded indifference.

The real experience must be better, we are meant to presume. With its skin, with every glistening drop of blood real and in front of us. Her photography serves as a means to look onto oneself, and into one’s

“You guys ever play colonist.io?”

ARTS

November 12, 2023

25

WHAT DO YOU THINK? DO YOU EVEN CARE? SEND PITCHES TO ARIEL.KIRMAN & DAVIANA.ZAMORA

OPINION

OPINION

26

The Yale Herald

Resolved: Pittsburgh’s Debate Scene Sucks Oscar Heller, ES ’26

W

hen was the last time you thought about Pittsburgh?

Unless you’re from there or have had any interactions with a middle-aged Steelers fan intent on telling you about the good-oldsteel-curtain-days after their fourth Iron City Beer, it’s probably been a while. And I don’t blame you, mostly because after years of meeting new people and telling them that I’m from Pittsburgh, I’ve become accustomed to their raised eyebrows and tilted heads and the almost universally scripted, “Wait, is that near Philly?” But for the next few minutes, I invite you to think about my hometown and a smaller world within it that even fewer people think about: policy debate.

I would bet that a good number of Yalies know about policy debate, and if you do, I also wouldn’t be surprised if you’re rolling your eyes or wincing a little reading this.

As a species, policy debaters are… eccentric. At the biggest and most important debate tournaments in the U.S.—Glenbrooks, Michigan, Emory, the Tournament of Champions—these kids read 40-to-50page Word documents at around 350 words per minute (that’s like reciting the entire Pledge of Allegiance in about five seconds). The best have trained for these competitions by paying to go to weekslong summer programs at universities like Michigan, Georgetown, Gonzaga, and Michigan State where all they do is policy debate: nothing but lectures, speaking drills, practice debates, and builtin research time, day in, day out.

It’s almost religious, and always all-consuming.

The best of the best kids have a coaching staff, not just teachers who coach debate on the side after a normal seven-hour school day.

These coaches are usually former high school policy debaters who majored in communications and remained locked in academia for a while, only to venture out and help some high schoolers find evidence about possible nuclear war scenarios or other extinction-level events. And good Lord. The best of the best of the best have been doing this since the sixth grade so that by the time they get to high school—when most people are just starting—they’ve already racked up years of experience. And none of this would even be possible without extensive travel budgets—something most Pittsburgh policy kids don’t have. So if this sounds exclusionary, it’s because it is. The kids I’m talking about—the ones primed to dominate national tournaments every year, the ones getting recruited by Harvard and Georgetown—usually come from a few policy debate powerhouses, like Montgomery Bell Academy, Peninsula, and Berkeley Prep.

Pittsburgh is a policy debate dead zone at the high school level, which some might find surprising, given the historic success of the University of Pittsburgh team. But high school isn’t like higher education. One part of the problem is funding: most policy kids in my hometown don’t get to travel across the country for tournaments. Another part is finding judges skilled enough to understand the particular jargon of policy debate. But a huge portion lies in a recent conservative wave

led by two former debaters, James Fishback and Matthew Adelstein.

They think debate has become overly sensitive and unsurprisingly, they’ve conjured a false image of policy debate as the ultimate site of leftist brainwashing. In his article “At High School Debates, Watch What You Say,” Fishback defends a so-called objective debate space, one that shouldn’t interrogate the assumptions or ideologies of the debater—a separation of art and artist. But thinking that one can somehow separate someone who makes arguments from the arguments they make is about as naïve as thinking that the result of a debate round in a random high school in the midwest will actually cause the US federal government to enact policy change. We are all composed of particular, subconscious biases that affect our decisions, and there is no such thing as an “objective” human.

What, then, is the point? The point is to question the reasons why we might prefer to run certain arguments over others, to use debate as an educational tool through which one may actually unearth and unravel their subconscious biases and assumptions.

That is the true purpose of policy debate, but it’s obfuscated by this conservative sect that’s too scared to see the transformative part of the activity yet so powerful that really good Pittsburgh judges—who will remain anonymous—are getting banned in light of it for the entirety of the 2023-2024 season.

So yes, Pittsburgh’s policy world certainly needs more money, more educators, more everything. But it also needs a serious reconsideration of its telos: a reorientation to a vision of debate that seeks to undo our hidden biases. And if Fishback is so intent on making debate as objective as possible, is this not the best way to do so? ❧

INSERTS

November 12, 2023

Diamond in the Rough

Jem Burch

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Answers on page 23.

27

wed. 11/15

thu. 11/16

ATTEND: Transatlantic Artistic and Intellectual Bromance. Siphiwo Mahala examines the connection between Bloke Modisane and Langston Hughes. 4-5:30 p.m. Henry R. Luce Hall, R203.

Leighton Pierce. Exploring architectures of reception and embodied cognition in an artist talk and world premiere of three short films. 4 p.m. HQ L01.

Fandango at the Wall. A documentary on the Fandango Fronterizo Festivala, followed by a performance of jarocho. 6-8 p.m. Henry R. Luce Hall.

ENGAGE: 295 x Accent Writing Workshop.

Share your words with other student writers and learn about submitting work to the two magazines. 5 p.m. Asian American Cultural Center.

Plant Propagation Night. Hands-on workshop on how to propagate vegetative indoor plants. 6:30 p.m. Marsh Botanical Garden Greenhouse.

ATTEND: Caricature Collectors in Conversation. Private collectors and curators share stories of their pursuit of 18th and 19th-century British caricature and satiric prints. 3-5:30 p.m. Sterling Memorial Library, International Room.

Chewing the Fat. Two speakers discuss their work in food access, abolition, and land sovereignty over warm drinks.

3:30-5 p.m. Yale Farm.

Goodbye Julia. Film screening and discussion with writer and director, Mohamed Kordofani. 4:30p.m. HQ Lower Level.

Yale College New Music Concert. Presenting Art Song VII, new works written in conjunction with the Beinecke exhibit “Art, Protest, & the Archive.” 5:15-6:15 p.m. Beinecke Library.

Whose Revolution? A talk on the Centennial of Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture. 6:30 p.m. 180 York St., Hastings Hall.

mon. 11/20

tue. 11/21

ATTEND: Anne Boleyn: Life and Legend.

Exploring the enigmatic, controversial queen of Henry VIII and her legacy in conjunction with Hannah Oblak’s student research exhibit. 4 p.m. Zoom.

Register on bit.ly/3u0PHTV. ENGAGE: All Heart. Support Food2Kids by sipping on beer born from a collaboration between Counter Weight and Dockside Brewery. 4 p.m. Dockside Brewery and Waterfront Biergarten.

Heels Choreography. A free dance class for those of all levels, taught by a creative professional. Bring your own heels! Free food, free STI and HIV testing. 6:30 p.m. APNH, 1302 Chapel St. Mixtape Match. Three rounds of bingo, but with songs and a winning pot. $2 per card. 6:45 p.m. The Cellar, Hamden CT. Sacred Harp Singing. Join in or listen in on open shape note singing. 7 p.m. Never Ending Books, Volume Two.

ATTEND: Dan Blakeslee, Allysen Callery, Avi Jacob. A dose of folk from three eastcoast musicians. 8 p.m. Cafe Nine. $15.

Tickets on cafenine.com.

Head with Wings. “Textured, ethereal, and blissfully haunting” prog rock pushing the bounds of modern rock from a band with origins in New Haven. 8 p.m. Space Ballroom. $18. Tickets on spaceballroom.com.

The Kevin Saint James Band. A collective of local jazz musicians collaborating with a saloon-singer in a night of classic jazz favorites. 8-11 p.m. Christopher Martin’s Restaurant and Pub. ENGAGE: Open Air Holiday Market. Take a daytrip along the coast to browse unique gifts from artisan makers, then taste winter ice cream flavors, soul food, and more. 2 p.m. Sweet Hill Farm, Gales Ferry CT. Knit n’ Sip. Bring your knitting supplies, then nurse a not drink and converse over your current project. 6-8 p.m. gather.

sun. 11/19

ATTEND: Old Town Road. Music critic Chris Molanphy discusses the publication of his newbook,anexplorationof LilNasX’s breakthrough single. 5:30 p.m. Institute Library.

Fall Festival. A night of performance from student groups, raising money for fighting food and housing insecurity in New Haven. 6 p.m. SSS 114. Tickets on Yale Connect.

Smoke Signals. On its 25th anniversary, watch this coming-of-age comedy as it road-trips through the American west from the Coeur d’Alene reservation. 7 p.m.

HQ Lower Level.

Yale Harvard Yale: Leftover Turkey Sandwich Show. Pregame The Game with an improv showdown between Yale’s The Fifth Humour and The Purple Crayon, versus Harvard’s On This Ice. 7 p.m. Dunham Laboratory Auditorium.

Yale Harvard Joint Glee Club Concert. World premieres, folk songs, and traditional college songs. 7:30 p.m. Woolsey Hall.

ATTEND: The Game. The game.

Maia’s Music Room. Join in or listen to this trans jam session with local musicians. 7 p.m. Never Ending Books, Volume Two. ENGAGE: All Things Possible Knitting Circle.

Whether you’re on your third sweater or can’t hold a needle, knit or crochet with a casual open group. 10:30 a.m-12 p.m.

Possible Futures.

Bin Sale! Dig around for your next outfit to impress your section crush. 11 a.m-7 p.m. Witch Bitch Thrift.

Lovey Dovey. Paint and witnessaone womanburlesque show. 8 p.m. gather. $10. 21+.

ATTEND: Dim Light Series. Live jazz from Seldon’s Plan and the New Haven Jazz Underground. 3 p.m. Ely Center.

Breathe/Burn. Featuring a solo cello and orchestra elegy for Breonna Taylor. 3 p.m.

Lyman Center for the Performing Arts. $10. Tickets on newhavensymphony.org.

The Works of Max Reger. Performed by Matthias Maierhofer on Yale’s Newberry Organ. 7:30 p.m. Woolsey Hall.

ENGAGE: Silent Book Club. Enjoy your current read over hot drinks, surrounded by fellow book lovers. 12-2 p.m. gather.

Trivia Night. Flex your knowledge and win prizes. Signup 6 p.m. Trivia 6:30-8 p.m. Fussy Coffee.

ongoing Fiddler on the Roof. Following Tevye, a poor milkman who tries to protect his five daughters as he raises them in Tsarist Russia. Nov. 15-18. Tickets on collegearts.yale.edu.

Fairview. In this play produced by Collective Consciousness Theater, the Frasier household slips into the tumult of family drama and white supremacy.

Erector Square, 319 Peck St. Building #6 West. Until Nov. 19.

THE OTHER PART. Mixed media art and clay work by Sheila Kaczmarek. City Gallery. Until Nov. 25.

nov. 15, 2023 To submit events for inclusion in the Herald calendar, contact Jess Liu at jessica.liu.jl3679@yale.edu

Illustration and Original Design by Cleo Maloney

OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! !

OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD! OVERHEARD!

sat. 11/18

“I’ve quit having recreational sex.”

fri. 11/17

THE HERALD BLOCKLIST (things we hate this week)

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome For sale: baby shoes worn, like, a few times.

IVF Buy local.

Susan B. Anthony Did she do enough to condemn Hamas?

Human Rights What about rights for my pussy.

Grain Shortages Fealties sworn are at an all time low.

Scarcity Mindset Live más.

Speech and Debate Clubs Bro convinced me I came.

No Nut November Your socks miss your jizz.