Volume 75 - Issue 1 by The Yale Herald

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dearest reader,

It’s January, the year is new, insects are moving out of the cold and into our homes, and we celebrated Madi and Hannah’s birthdays in the Herald office. This year, there’s something incredibly soothing about imagining us all as microbes, the type that live at extremely low temperatures and are called psychrophiles. They live in glaciers and mountains, where they reproduce and form colonies in the cold. There seems to be a compelling sense of intimacy and seclusion inherent to their life-

styles. I imagine the closest we can get, as humans, is riding in a small red submarine in the depths of the ocean with a fuzzy sweater and five friends.

In this issue, we brave the cold, imagine we are riding a small red submarine, and write for you to read. Bella Panico, SY ’26, dissects Effective Altruism at Yale. In Arts, Eli Osei, MC ’26, writes on Lillian Broeksmit and Lizzie Conklin’s series of paintings entitled Picture in Picture. In Voices, Diego Del Águila, TD ’26, shares a fictional short

story, set in a world where everything disappears.

Read this issue before bed and after breakfast, before calling your grandmother and after doing your laundry. And find us next week outside your dining hall. We’ll be collecting valentines, love notes, messages you want to send to your crush or to your TF—all to be printed in time for Valentine’s Day.

Much love, Rafi + Arthur

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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/ Joanna Ruiz/Lucy Santiago

Design

Alexa Druyanoff/Angela Huo/ Helen Huynh/ Grace Kim/Kris Qiu/ Claire SooHoo/Alina Susani/ Liza Tsidulko/ Vivian Wang/ Tor Wettlaufer/Silvia Wang/Miya Zhao

Reviews Editors

Theo Kubovy-Weiss/Natalie Semmel/ Aidan Thomas

Reflections Editors

Eva Kottou/Jack Rodriquez-Vars

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

Ana Padilla Castellanos/Will Sussbauer

Inserts Editors

(this could be you! email!)

Copy Editors

Dayne Bolding/Zoe Frost/Jisu Oh/ Ece Serdaroglu/ Tessa Stewart/ Alina Susani

Staff Writers

Lillian Broeksmit/Kaylee Chen/ Elizabeth Chivers/Kate Choi/ Krishna Davis/Oscar Heller/ Helen Huynh/Cameron Jones/ Anna Kaloustian/Megan Kernis/ Sophie Lamb/Hannah Nashed/ Jisu Oh/William Orr/AJ Tapia-Wylie/ Amalia Tuchmann/Ellen Windels/ Ashley Wang/Avery Wayne

Web Editor

Kris Qiu

Business

Abby Fossati/Evan-Carlo Fowler/ Avery Lenihan

Calendar

Jess Liu

Photography

Fareed Salmon

This Week's Cover

Iris Tsouris and Sara Offer

Those who choose to ski instruct do so to ask for permission.

Icy Floes on the Housatonic by Lyle Griggs

Yearn less, study more, reinvent yourself, all from our cozy

May December: What’s Real and What’s Lost

Natalie Semmel, DC ’25, Herald staff

In May December, directed by Todd Haynes, an actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) arrives in a small community outside of Savannah, Georgia to shadow the woman she is preparing to play in an upcoming biopic. That woman is Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a woman who was caught raping seventh grader Joe Atherton-Yoo (Charles Melton) when she was 36. Elizabeth prides herself in her meticulous preparation for the role in an indie film and ingratiates herself with the Atherton-Yoo family.

Gracie consents to having Elizabeth follow them, join them for family dinners, and interrogate them about their pasts, hoping that the film will change public opinion of the couple. It’s immediately clear to the audience that Gracie’s trust is misplaced—but not because Elizabeth condemns the relationship between Gracie and Joe. Elizabeth takes the same intrusive and dehumanizing position that the press has taken toward Joe: she follows him to work; she doesn’t protest when Gracie forces Joe to act as her chauffeur. She even has sex with Joe. When Joe experiences discomfort and confusion after he and Elizabeth have sex, Elizabeth dismisses these feelings by saying, “this is what grown-ups do.”

Elizabeth replicates Gracie’s behavior and the behavior of the press, taking advantage of Joe, a child stuck in the body of a man.

Charles Melton Charles Melton, star of Riverdale and the Ariana Grande music video for “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored.” However, the film has also faced accusations of taking advantage of

a real-life case, that of Vili Fualaau, a now-forty year-old man who, at the age of twelve, was raped by his teacher Mary Kay Letourneau (at the time 34). Like Gracie, Letourneau served time in prison, but upon release, married Fualaau. Letourneau leaned into her ignorance and naivety—a word that Gracie self-identifies with in May December. Letourneau claimed she was unaware of consent laws, and in an interview that has resurfaced from later in her life, insisted that Fualaau was “the boss.”

In 2020, Letorneau died at age 58 after legally separating from Fualaau. Her story remains one that attracts a kind of almost voyeuristic attention. Does May December participate in that? Fualaau recently came out and said that he was “offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me— who lived through a real story and is still living it … If they had reached out to me, we could have worked together on a masterpiece. Instead, they chose to do a ripoff of my original story.” It’s an incredibly upsetting statement made by a man who has not only been a victim of rape for nearly his whole life, including his entire adult life, but also sexualized and exploited by the press. However, it’s also a statement that in a very meta way contributes to the content of the film—Elizabeth’s dedication to her role leads her to become involved with the family to an obsessive extent. She sees Joe, Gracie’s victim, as merely another prop to propel her performance to success. When she has sex with him, she wants to see herself as Gracie—as his longtime abuser.

The thesis of May December is that actors who involve themselves so heavily in the lives of their subjects are bound to get negatively involved. May December seems to use this thesis, however, as an excuse to not consider Fualaau— who can be argued to be the sub-

ject of Melton, who portrays Joe. The film could even be suggesting that had an actor like Melton reached out to and followed Fualaau, an uneven (to say the least) relationship could emerge. Coincidently, Melton and Elizabeth have a lot in common as TV actors trying to make a break in the film world.

Elizabeth’s statement that “this is what grown-ups do” comes after she refers to Joe’s life as a “story.” Joe insists that it isn’t—this is his real life. But while Fualaau’s story differs from Joe’s in some ways, the commonalities make the distinction vague.

It’s a hard line to draw, and one that is made more complicated by the tone of the film. May December was controversially labeled as a comedy by the Golden Globes. While the film’s subject matter is most certainly not funny, Todd Haynes, the modern master of melodrama, leans into this melodramatic tone, simultaneously mocking, commenting on, and riffing off of a soap opera. May December isn’t a horror movie, but something more terrifying, as Joe’s trauma is lost on all characters…and maybe even on the film itself.

May December is incredibly layered, especially when juxtaposed against Letourneau and Fualaau’s actual lives. Race, for example, plays another role in this adaptation. While Fualaau is of Samoan descent, Joe is half Korean and half white. Fualaau’s ethnicity is important because of the historic sexualization Samoan boys and young men face, an aspect of the story that is lost in May December. Race is also interesting when considering the casting of Joe and Gracie’s children, who are three quarters white and one quarter Korean, but all played by half Korean and half white actors. In reality, they wouldn’t ethnically look so much like him as they do in

the film. This casting might be a mistake, or a compromise for better performances, but the effect is that the kids are more connected to Joe. And, in the film and in real life, Gracie and Letourneau weaponize the “innocence” that accom-

SUBMIT AN

Yorgos Lanthimos is Weird (again)

Harry Greenblatt, DC ’24

After a brief detour into the genre of the historical biopic via the relatively strait-laced The Favourite (2018), Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has reentered his familiar stomping grounds of the strange, grotesque, and whimsical with his new film, Poor Things There are certainly points of continuation from Lanthimos’ previous project—Emma Stone again stars in another script written by Tony McNamara—but the content of the new film would make The Favourite’s Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman) shit her britches.

Part steampunk, part Victorian bildungsroman, Poor Things traces the life of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a composite woman created by the mad scientist Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Defoe) by splicing together the body of a pregnant woman and the brain of her unborn fetus. It gets weirder. After a period of confinement in Godwin’s laboratory-house in London, Bella’s engagement to her “father’s” well-intentioned assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) is disrupted when she elopes with the itinerant lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Their sexfilled adventure sweeps viewers

panies their white-womanhood.

At the very least, May December is interesting to watch and more interesting to think about. It’s a shame that so much thought around it is lost because of its release on Netflix—I embarrassing-

ly watched it downloaded on my phone while on an airplane. My recommendation is to watch it on as big of a screen as you can, and to be prepared to think about it for a long time after. It certainly deserves your attention. ❧

through bizarre, steampunk versions of Lisbon, Alexandria, Marseilles, and Paris.

Poor Things is carried by the charismatic performances of its lead. Bella is a type of character that Lanthimos has experimented with before, most notably in Dogtooth (2009), a deeply disturbing film about parents who imprison their children in their home. Poor Things can in some ways be seen as a sequel, with Bella as the daughter who attempts to escape at the end of Lanthimos’ earlier film. Stone brilliantly conveys the wonder, delight, confusion, and disappointment that are all inherent in her character, a precocious child forced into adulthood and thrust upon the world. The cinematography and mise en scène of Poor Things seem to embody Bella’s perspective; the frequent use of fisheye shots and the garish colors of the scenery remind us of what the world might look like to a child who has spent her life shut in a dark house.

Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderspoon is the ultimate slimeball, an erstwhile womanizer desperately clutching at the last vestiges of a younger self who might well have fit into the mold of Michel Poiccard in Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). Only momentarily does his charm mask his pathetic, deeply unfulfilled (and incredibly funny) inner self. Duncan’s parasitic tendencies are hinted at by his impos-

sible-to-place accent. Eventually, it becomes clear that he modifies it at each stop on the trip, taking on British, Spanish, and French tinges at the appropriate locations. Dafoe, meanwhile, is truly a delight in his role as Godwin Baxter, providing bitterly dark comedy through his unabashed frankness and its contrast with the mild McCandles. The only disappointment is Jerrod Carmichael, whose character Harry Astley is poorly acted and comes across as unbearably pretentious. Ultimately, this wild film has a serious topic at its core in its exaggerated (but, in the age of social media, increasingly relevant) contrast between a sheltered inner-girlhood and an outwardly adult-presenting body, eagerly hypersexualized and objectified by men. Poor Things’ investigation, unfortunately, falls short of adding anything truly substantive on this subject. Lanthimos toys with suggesting a second-wave feminist solution of sexual liberation—Bella wields her sexual appeal for her own sensual (and monetary) benefit—but whether this message is valid coming from a middle-aged male director is dubious. For all its eye-popping set design and flashes of genuine hilarity and tenderness, the film’s failure to deeply explore the questions it does such a wonderful job of raising (despite its gratuitous runtime) leaves Poor Things a bit stale. ❧

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Little Rope Yet Again Proves the Necessity of Sleater-Kinney

Madelyn Dawson, SM ’25, Herald staff

Sleater-Kinney hasn’t really been a riot grrrl band since 1996, and that’s being generous. Many would argue that they never were, and they’d probably be right. It was ’95 and it was Olympia, WA. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein were practicing in a studio off of Interstate 5, right next to Sleater Kinney Road. Tucker was playing with Heavens to Betsy, Brownstein with Excuse 17. A little local band called Sleater-Kinney bubbled under the surface. In just a few years, it was ready to erupt.

They released their self-titled in ’96, Call The Doctor in ’97. Their records were staples at local gigs, but not big outside of that. It wasn't until the following year, 1998, with the release of Dig Me Out and the addition of the inimitable Janet Weiss on drums, that the volcano of Sleater-Kinney finally blew. The trio of mod-feminist-punkers found their groove, settling into the perfectly Sleater-Kinney-shaped hole that Tucker could puncture with the fury of her vibrato, firing through the roof that Weiss’s drumming would blow off of any arena they played. They didn’t have to break through the glass ceiling; as soon as they started playing together, the whole thing would shatter.

This was almost 30 years ago, in a musical and cultural landscape that is near unimaginable now. And yet, here I am talking about Sleater-Kinney’s 11th studio album. Within seven years of Dig Me Out, Sleater-Kinney has not only remained relevant and artistically exciting, but they have cemented themselves as one of the most

important American rock bands to have ever done it. This all culminated in the release of the 2005 album The Woods, a near-perfect exercise in the excitement of rock songwriting, and a record even more urgent than the power chords backing their first punk experiments.

We know the story from here: the trio called it quits in 2006, came back in 2014 for the utterly invigorating No Cities To Love, put out a live recording of a Paris show in 2017, before releasing the less-than-stellar St. Vincent-produced rock-pop pop-rock The Center Won’t Hold in 2019. Shortly after they unveiled The Center Won’t Hold, the group announced that Janet Weiss would no longer be continuing with Sleater-Kinney, and would not join the band on their upcoming tour. Later, Weiss would cite a shift within the band’s dynamic as the reason she left; she no longer felt like a creative equal to Tucker and Brownstein.

After that, we only have 2021’s Path of Wellness, a directionless, indiscriminate project that may just be the group’s least exciting to date. Now that we’re all caught up, I think it is safe to say 2024’s Little Rope is, far and away, the band’s most inspiring post-Cities release, an immediate result of Tucker and Brownstein’s natural and irreplicable chemistry. The feeling of the two playing together transcends the band’s messy history, overcomes the moments of messy, uninspired songwriting, and conquers the immense grief upon which Little Rope was built.

When the two began recording the first songs that would appear on Little Rope, Brownstein received a call that her mother and stepfather had died in a tragic car crash while vacationing in Italy. As the album progressed, it became more than just a sonic collaboration between two longtime friends and creative partners; it became a light to shine

a path through grief, quite literally, a little rope, with room enough for two pairs of hands to hold onto as they pulled themselves out of a pit of despair.

Little Rope by no means approaches the flawlessness of The Woods, or even the paroxysm of femme-punk joy that was Dig Me Out. It doesn’t realize some past iteration of Sleater-Kinney’s potential, but rather a reminder that there’s still much to love about the group.

Little Rope is at its strongest when it’s turned up to eleven. Opening track “Hell” starts small, brooding, as Tucker almost whispers (or comes as close as she probably can to whispering), “Hell don’t have no worries / Hell don’t have no past. / Hell is just a signpost / when you take a certain path.” before the whole track opens up. Brownstein’s guitar wails along with Tucker’s vibrato, a confluence of pain and passion that can’t possibly be tamed. Part horror film soundtrack theatrics, part “Dig Me Out” for an eternally moving, ferocious future, “Hell” is good enough proof as any that Tucker and Brownstein are Sleater-Kinney.

Single “Say It Like You Mean It” is a battle cry, sustaining the energy with which it opens through its whole length. Tucker’s voice is clear, peremptory and biting, especially when she tells you to “Say it like you mean it.” There is no way to deny her what she demands with that thundering backbeat and quirky, sporadic riffing from her and Brownstein. Though the record is obviously not without its flaws, it sometimes becomes difficult to pinpoint precisely what is unsuccessful about it. Comparing it to their work decades ago seems to completely miss the point, reading the percussion as lackluster feels too obvious, too much of a projection of Weiss onto a recording that is intentionally crafted in her ab-

sence. There’s a messiness to the songwriting at times, too underwhelming to be chalked up to simply a product of the messiness of grief. I know they’re balancing sitcoms and husbands and the existential dread that comes along with having lived for half a century, but I keep yearning for them to open up, make their sound as big as it can possibly get without exploding out of the recording. And sure, the record is some type of performance of grief. Even yet, there is a difference be-

tween performing grief and using performance as a vessel to work through, get at, or somehow otherwise experience grief. At its strongest, Little Rope is all vessel. Not a drastic pivot from their recent soundscape, nor a return to form from back in their riot grrrl days, but simply a portrait of the two women precisely where they are at this moment in time.

There is a particular art of knowing when to end things. When groups don’t quite know how to master it, we get Mick Jag-

ger wailing on records like Dirty Work and A Bigger Bang. And perhaps Sleater-Kinney should have called it quits after The Woods, tying a neat little bow on a career characterized by a completely upward trajectory. But after listening to Little Rope, it seems that Tucker and Brownstein needed Sleater-Kinney, and showed us that even in 2024, we too still Need Sleater-Kinney. I just can’t keep myself from imagining what these songs would have sounded like with Weiss behind the kit. ❧

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A Ski Instructor's Manifesto

Sophie Lamb, JE ’27, Herald staff

The First Client

He’s in his 50s. Maybe 60s. About the size of a truck, chest armored with a Teton Pines Golf Course stitching, and beard soaked with foam from the pitcher of beer he’s nursing. He’s white. Blue eyes—the whole nine yards, an ex-lacrosse player at Harvard and heir to his dad’s billion-dollar weapons manufacturing company.

A self-made man. The mountainous, adventurous type. Goes to Austria to ski race with ex-Olympic gold medalists when he’s bored, except he gets so drunk by midafternoon that he ends up catapulting off a cliff and fracturing a femur. A man of the people. Skis in a Stio shell and 110 underfoot Black Crows. He knows the scene, asks me to tell him “where the good shit is,” asks me “where all the locals eat.” Claims to be a true Wyoming cowboy because he once paid $100,000 to go horse packing, despite being promptly thrown off his horse and into the Snake River where he sat, wailing, until two 17-year-old boys rescued him and nursed him with hot cocoa and peppermint schnapps. Sends his sons to wilderness camp so he doesn’t have to see them in the summers.

I don’t think he said a word to me over lunch. Hell, I don’t think he even spoke to his kid. He talked to a nondescript point on the wall above my head, as if I were the wallpaper, the floral-printed-slightly-peeling backdrop to his life of glory and glamor. He was obsessed with peeling me down, putting me in some box so he could take me out with the recycling. “Did your parents go

to Yale?” “Where in town do you live?” What’s the size of your house and your income bracket? How could you possibly have access to the same education, the same mountains, the same ski hill that I do?

The Place

This is a landscape that eats people whole. It’s a hateful landscape; an angry, relentless, bloodsoaked valley, violated by highways and golf courses and chairlifts. It’s fantastic. Snow falls by the bucketful, settles over the landscape, buries houses, and softens the mountains. A home to romantics, like my parents, whose visions of America were not a gilded city but a snow-coated ski hill somewhere in the Wyoming Rockies. Romantics who will do anything for a lift ticket, wake up before the plows clear the village road to catch first tracks, drip hot wax over skis until their hands burn, dip into impossible tree lines until their muscles tear.

Those who choose to ski instruct—like my parents and I—do so to ask for permission. It’s for those who can’t afford lift tickets, who aren’t local enough, for the too old and too young. It is a means of asking the mountain if they too are allowed on it. A means of bypassing the iron gates that wrap themselves around the sport of skiing with 50% gear discounts, free lift tickets, ski training, and decent pay.

Going home to instruct over break, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I feel about this sport. I spent most of my work days teaching private ski lessons, glimpsing into the world of the top 1%; I also spent a rare few days in the mountains with my clos-

est high school friends, racing through powder fields and over pillowy cliff drops—finding ourselves morphed by some snowy god back to the magical, translucent things that once made us children. I have this piece of writing that repeatedly threw itself around my head on those days:

May I introduce you to the dance? Rise up along the skeletal backs of the Rockies at dawn—rise with the sun, with hot breath and sweaty palms, rise human and heavy. At the tops of these mountains, change. Slim yourself. Slow your breath, so that it may become part of the howling wind. Cool. Freeze. Make it so that snow does not melt when it touches you, but instead grows on your back, so you may metamorphose into part of the landscape. Finally—the fall. The utter collapse into gravity, into the valley below you, held by faint, thin lines struck into snow. Transcend. You are not part of—you are less than, you are departing, you are escaping, you are a mere streak across the mid-morning mountainside, so that the trees may forget you by noon.

Closely followed by: I feel like a part of me is torn off by this place.

The Bus Ride

They’re chemical reflections of me. Young, duck-taped, and tired, eyes glazed over with visions of twin mountain peaks. We sit, we lean into each other, releasing our confusing swirl of resentment and joy, gulping hot coffee until the bus windows turn white with steam. We hold in our bodies proof of this place: desperate, romanticization of the sheer joy of skiing, of living in a valley nestled between national parks and pristine rivers and breathtaking forests—and the anger we’ve inherited. I find home on these bus rides. Find the permission to belong, amid the rejects that have collected in the riverbeds of this valley and find flight in the oxygen-thin morning air. ❧

Icy Floes on the Housatonic

Lyle Griggs, BR ’25

Last week there were ice floes on the Housatonic. I watched them grind down the bank beneath Lake Zoar and make their way out to sea to bob among the buoys of the steel-cold Sound. I watched them from Route 34 and nearly ran my car off the road, craning my neck (manic, looking for deeper snow, playing with latitude and aspect, skis rattling in

the backseat) over the guardrails of river bridges: more ice floes, solid ice in flatwater stretches. If I’d made it as far as Kent there might have been enough to ski without scraping my battered bases on Connecticut schist. I turned around at Woodbury.

This week it’s cold again. Not the same bitter cold, but enough that the snowline is south of Long Island. With any luck, today’s Nor-Easter will leave us with five or six thick inches of snow, and tomorrow the plows will be out in force in New Haven. I’ll wake up at dawn to the din of metal on asphalt and the winter smell of diesel and snow. It will look like January. If I check the weather forecast, I will find that in the Pacific North-

west the weather is unseasonably warm: it’s raining in the mid-elevation Cascades. It’s raining far above sea level in Western Alaska, too, and in Iceland, and in most of Northern Europe, where snow has scarcely fallen outside of the high alps this year. Last week, during one of the lighter hours of the polar night, it rained above sea level in Greenland. Back home in Kansas, the high temperature tomorrow could break sixty. But for now it feels like proper January in New Haven. The snow piles up outside my window, whipped into drifts by a bitter Nor-easter wind, and my radiator sighs. Somewhere the world is burning, but not here. Here for a moment it is finally winter. ❧

Resolved to Evolve

The Culture Desk: Alex Sobrino JE ’25, Bella Panico SY ’26, and Emily Aikens TC ’26

New Year’s Resolutions: everyone makes them, some stick to them, but all of them reveal things about ourselves that we’ve neglected. We here at the Culture Desk have been thinking about the ways we could be better this year, so here are our New Year’s Resolutions (two weeks into January) because it’s never too late to tell yourself this is your year!

Working out:

Everyone makes this resolution. It’s a bit generic, which, if you’re me, means that you just need to do it harder than everyone else to make it meaningful. Last year my friend and I resolved to train for a half marathon. We got through about 8 weeks of training, running in the cold, our hands freezing on the canal trail, until the warm weather came and our runs became walks. Eventually, we would just sit on cross campus and soak up the sun. We never did run that half marathon, but it is January once again, and the canal trail seems to call our names.

Waking up early:

The sun sets at 4 p.m. If you get up at noon you miss it all. Reading a certain amount of books Haunted by that Goodreads book goal? Me too. Always feeling inferior when your section asshole quotes some indie (derogatory), gay (derogatory) Russian novel that you can't find in Barnes & Noble’s translation section? Me too.

Keeping a journal:

One can look to Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” and feel moved. But is carrying a notebook

all that practical? I wonder how one could ration their pages when the Moleskine cost 30 dollars to begin with. Taking a notebook out might just make you look pretentious (and that is not in line with resolution 14: ‘reinvent yourself.’) Maybe you read the same substack as me on January 1st telling you to keep a list of things that moved you. Do it on your phone, it’s a lot more unassuming.

Being optimistic:

Stop listening to your Daylist. It’s bad for you. Titles like “Gut-wrenching solitude kill yourself Thursday evening” might have something to do with your rapidly declining tolerance for humanity.

Fall in love:

A friend of mine told me that her resolution this year was to fall in love. It inspired me how she said it, as if falling in love is as much your decision as it is the other person's. Life is not about convincing people to fall in love with you, nor is it about convincing yourself to fall in love with other people, but finding someone else who joins you in the contract of love.

Yearn less:

Do not yearn over a skinny white man. Since it’s a leap year, you will have to subject yourself to one more day of pain if you fall for another vaguely indie (derogatory), emotionally unavailable, somewhat literate film major. For some of us, though, this is asking a lot. Delusions aren’t deconstructed in a day… or a year…or twenty years. As an alternative, don’t yearn over 2023’s skinny white man. Find a new one!!

Being more intentional:

One of us wrote this down as a resolution. I don’t know who, but I envy them. Personally, I have thought about every single action that I have ever taken in my life to an obsessive and concerning degree.

Being more social:

I have never been good at drawing the line between complete isolation and self-care, but by God this will be the year I learn. Solitude and melancholy are out. 2024 is for lovers only. Repeat after me: I will not rot in my room all day!!!

Study more:

Last year, my top song on Spotify was a deep house trance mix that I found while trying to write a paper. “Plasma” by Dr. Gabba has haunted me and everyone I have shown it to since. Spotify informed me that I listened to “Plasma” a whopping 431 times in 2023. Perhaps I ought to study less and go join a bluegrass band.

Answers to THEMELESS TOUGHIE, page 27

Spending more time with friends: I like this one.

Reinvent yourself:

While I was packing for college, a friend asked me what my resolution for the semester was. Usually it's to reinvent myself, to become someone the current me would never recognize: a more social, intentional, and mindful version of myself. I always come back from the semester not feeling too different than I did at the start, concluding I failed at reinventing myself at all. But perhaps there was never much to reinvent at all. Perhaps my resolution should have been not to reinvent myself but to start accepting myself.

We know that these resolutions will not help us achieve nirvana. Next year, we will still be doomed to the suffering of flesh and the eternal cycle of samsara. But at least we’ll be one year closer to self-actualization. ❧

Just Friends Though

Eva Kottou, MY ’26, Herald staff

Iassume the fetal position, taking their hands and clasping them in my own. I press my back against their chest. I can feel their rhythmic breathing rise and fall against my shoulder blades, each exhale tickling up my spine. My thumb moves in a circular motion around their thumb knuckle, capturing the one spot that has always reminded me of strength and security. I stare at the wrinkles in the space that lies between their thumb and index finger, wondering how many hours a pencil has been balanced there or how many Starbucks coffee cups have warmed that exact crevice. My pinky extends out, reaching all the way to the nail on their middle finger, feeling the brittleness against my own army green acrylics. I inhale the scent of firewood and smoke that grips their black winter coat. Undertones of Bath & Body Works’s A Thousand Wishes perfume trail from the

skin on their exposed neck.

Cuddling. It’s a weird concept and one that I have yet to master. To my boyfriend, this would sound like a usual Sunday night. Sorry to break it to you, babe, but these are descriptions of the cuddling sessions I have with my best friends. Cuddling with the homies is a prospect I never thought about until it just happened one day. The sharing of shot glasses on Friday nights, the squishing onto the common room couches during movie nights, and the perfect hugs after a tiring week have been all the preparation I have needed. I disagree with the idea that cuddling has to be romantic; why has the purity of bodily warmth and skin-to-skin reassurance been perverted into something inclined to sexual tension?

To me, cuddling is safe. I have never quite felt comfortable on my own, often finding myself tugging at loose skin and wrap-

ping my arms around my waist in a make-shift hug. I try to keep myself warm but it never seems to satisfy that intense craving for external safety, the feeling that somebody is there to catch me, the desire to feel the warmth radiating from their heart. My best friend squeezes my hands a bit harder, tilting her head down to capture the crevice in my shoulder blades—we have learnt how to best warm each other. I bellow with laughter as I nudge her toes with my legs, instinctively finding her ticklish spots. We break apart for mere seconds as she pushes me away in faux annoyance, both of us laughing that we know each other this well. While this act of cuddling might randomly happen on a sub-20 degree Saturday night as we wait for SNL to start, it’s everything else— the laughter and tickle spots and scents reminiscent of home—that keeps us together. ❧

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.

The Joehoru 30 Under 30

Joanna Ruiz, JE ’25

It’s finally here. The second annual Joehoru 30 Under 30. Last year’s list was published on instagram. com, but I’m proud to say that this year we’ve made it to The Yale Herald, the most prestigious publication in the world probably. The criteria to make it to the Joehoru 30 Under 30 is simple: 1) Follow @ joehoru on Instagram, 2) Be under 30 years old, 3) Have a reeealllyyy good reason. Okay. Here are this year’s champions (in no particular order) and their reasons:

1. @jack.mft: “I love the dolphins so much and I’m so sad today boo ravens.”

This was really good. It tugged on my heartstrings. Met all the criteria. No complaints.

2. @ana_rosa_rodrigues_: “Winner of least Mellon seminars attended. Possibly joehoru’s Massachusettsian of the year.”

Ana was indeed my Massachusettsian of the year. Really deserved.

3. @lanadoesitbest: “Bc I love and adore u.”

Another really good reason. No argument.

4. @ajtapiawylie: “:3”

This was one bold and innovative.

5. @anniemeter: “lol”

Subversive and straight to the point. I’m a fan.

6. @a1ien8ed: “god speaks to me and he said i’m the best choice.”

Who am I to argue with God?

7. @andresrinconn: “I reply a lot.”

It’s true. Thank you.

8. @anappleadayk33psthedoctoraway: “I would nominate me but I fear my slay would outslay my competition so fiercely but if u want.”

Your slay was so hard I had to put you on here.

9. @lylegriggs: “Most balls dropped and bags fumbled”

2024 is your year!

10. @pilarbutter: “wasian representation”

Pilarbutter is the list’s Wasian representation for the second year in a row. Congratulations.

11. @akua._.agyemang: “ohio representation ✊��” New entry! Ohio!

12. @evancalderon: “I’m dating you…” “YESSSS I LOVE MY BF <3 <3 <3” - Evan as I was asking him for edits. This was previously a simple “Oh.”

13. @gabby_seidel: “im sexy and u love me” I do!

14. @joannabakerart: “upstanding member of the joanna community standing for our shared values… and gay…”

The Joanna community is so strong and big brained.

15. @gracethybulle: “Biracial. Big butt.”

So 30Under30-pilled.

16. @andreavs1209: “Because I’m sooo epic.”

True!

17. @luis.a.floress: “like.” No further explanation!

18. @theebookofdaniel: “Wiami Weat > OrLando Midgic.”

Yea. Yea. TURN THIS UP.

19. @dani2day: “Bcoz im a broward lover”

BROWARD VS. EVERYBODY

24. @lydiafmonk: “u have to have one catgirl pls pls pls meow meow meow.”

Meow meowww meow!

25. @prizedhen: “#joehorulie”

Well, yes!

26. [anonymous]: “Gayballs”

This person is applying to law school and does not want to be associated with “gayballs”. I respect it.

27. @aribarbellab: “i moved to broward for you.”

This means so much to me.

28. @yujisimo: “i play oboe.”

I LOVE OBOISTS.

29. @kath.oung: “How can i lose when I’m already chose.”

You’re right.

30. @madelyndwsn: “ ”

20. @legalizelaroque: “ ”

✳✳ Honorable Mentions ✳✳

@aly.moosa: “bc idgaf”

@morrisraskin: “morris is in two bands ��”

@kmiteee: “i’m sexy.”

@sleyluh: “bc who’s more slay and cunt than me.”

Who can say no to that face?

21. @jabby0_0: “Bc Im the biggest joehoru fan.”

Thank you, jabby0_0. I am a big fan of yours.

22. @jawwdinhersh: “I am under 30. I am under 30. I may have responded to this twice.”

You did respond to this twice. And it was wonderful both times.

23. @ingrid.mu: “[REDACTED]”

This was a really good reason but unfortunately it was information that could lead to my arrest so it had to be omitted.

@brighteyesfan: “Because I fought.”

Just cross-referenced my list with the F*rbes 30 Under 30 list. Turns out they have multiple 30 Under 30 lists in multiple different categories. Looks like they just give it to anyone these days. Well, at least the Joehoru 30 Under 30 actually means something. May you all go forth and conquer the world as you are now destined to. ❧

The WYBC GM is a friend to us all.

Moon Box

Iris Tsouris, DC ’25, Herald staff

The Future Fund Runs Out: on Effective Altrusism at Yale

Bella Panico, SY ’26, Herald staff

I n December of my freshman year, my friend and I dragged our feet into the last meeting of the Effective Altruism Intro Fellowship for the Fall 2022 semester. During our dinner a few hours earlier, she had explained to me that she was a member of the Effective Altruism organization—EA for short—where every Wednesday, in a basement room in WLH, she

spent an hour discussing everything from animal rights to utilitarianism to the existential risk of artificial intelligence.

Tonight’s topic: critiques of EA. At the head of the table, the fellowship leader, a Yale College undergraduate, sat with four of his fellows. I sat at a desk in a corner of the room. He was quick to remind everyone that the reading group

was far more effective when everyone did the readings, and then he directed everyone’s attention to a Vox article from the column titled “Future Perfect” written by journalist and Effective Altruist Dylan Matthews. The leader opened up his Yale EA Intro Fellowship document guide, which was modeled after other EA curricula around the country. The room fell silent as

he posed questions to the fellows. Since its start nearly 15 years ago, EA has built a global brand for itself, spanning over 200 chapters worldwide that focus on facilitating reading groups, mobilizing activists, and guiding Effective Altruists to their perfect career paths. According to its website, EA “is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” If that sounds vague, that’s because it is. Members of EA don’t unify around a particular solution to the world’s problems but around a way of thinking. Effective Altruists are passionate about a wide range of issues: preventing the next pandemic, providing basic medical supplies to those in need, ending factory farming, improving decision making, and helping create the field of AI alignment research. But the ways they go about this are far richer in thought than in action.

There is a particular archetype that joins EA. Following the lead of its founders, philosophers Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, who founded the movement at Oxford in 2009, Effective Altruists are typically young, highly-educated, agnostic, left-of-center, white men who are dissatisfied with politics and self-identify as intellectuals. For these people, EA promises a chance to discuss their ideas and finding ways to rationalize issues in order to solve them effectively. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto trading platform FTX, fit this archetype to a T.

Bankman-Fried was a student at MIT in 2013 when he met MacAskill through MIT’s Epsilon Theta (a co-ed fraternity at MIT where many of the original members of FTX first met). MacAskill was visiting MIT in hopes of spreading Effective Altruism to potential believers. Although a gifted mathematician, Bankman-Fried also

held a deep passion for animal welfare, so much so that he was seriously considering a career in the field. MacAskill explained to Bankman-Fried that he could do far more good in animal welfare if

Effective Altruists

are typically young, highly-educated, agnostic, left-of-center, white men who are dissatisfied with politics and self-identify as intellectuals.

he used his skills more effectively by going into finance and donating the money he made to charities focused on animal welfare. This idea, known in EA circles as the “earn to give” principle, was a key aspect of EA in the early days but has been slowly phased out of the movement.

During Bankman-Fried’s time operating Alameda Research (whose CEO was Bankman-Fried’s

then-partner Caroline Ellison) and FTX, a trading firm and cryptocurrency exchange, respectively, EA helped him gain credibility and investors. For everything EA had given him, Bankman-Fried tried to give back. In February of 2022, Bankman-Fried created The Future Fund, a subsidiary of FTX that made grants and investments to “improve humanity's long-term prospects.” By June, The Future Fund had donated 132 million dollars to charity and was projected to donate 1 billion dollars by the end of the year. Over a quarter of the grants paid out by The Future Fund went to charities controlled by Effective Ventures, the U.K.based charity chaired by MacAskill; 14 million dollars went to the Center for Effective Altruism. Additionally, Bankman-Fried paid out $200,000 to Vox in order to encourage them to write articles on EA, prompting the creation of the column “Future Perfect.” In 2022, both companies filed for bankruptcy. It was revealed that Bankman-Fried and other executives used billions of dollars in customer money from FTX to cover up financial failures at Alameda. The very public implosion of Bankman-Fried’s businesses has brought a lot of negative publicity to the global EA movement, amplifying criticisms of EA that have existed since its creation. Outsiders to the organization often view EA’s principles as very rigid. EA skeptics use a popular hypothetical scenario to highlight this idea: Let’s say you are walking down the street with five dollars in your pocket, and an unhoused person asks you for money. EA purists would say that you should not give that money to the person, but, in fact, keep it and donate it to an organization where you can be sure of how the money will be used. Giving the money to the unhoused person would be ineffective because you do not know how the

person you are giving the money intends to use it.

Shelly Kagan, Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale, presents an alternative approach: “There’s room for the moral view that says it is more important to give the five dollars to the unhoused person in front of you than to some charity, even if you were confident that [the latter would] do more good. There’s something about our essential humanity that you should not turn your face away from somebody.” Kagan, although not an Effective Altruist himself, has been looked to by the national EA community because of a seminar he taught during the spring of 2021 called “Ethics and the Future.” Kagan told me, “Some of my philosophical views have…broad affinities with EA. And, occasionally, my stuff shows up on reading.” The seminar’s reading list has been posted on the EA forum (a popular platform where many Effective Altruists can communicate) and has been added to a compilation of EA syllabi and teaching materials. Additionally, Kagan has two children who have attached themselves to the movement.

Yet, Kagan’s class challenged long-termism—the ethical view adopted by many Effective Altruists that focuses on bettering the long-term future—by providing readings that both support and deny the idea. Long-termism argues that existential risks, even extremely unlikely ones, are where we should be focusing most of our efforts because the infinite catastrophe of losing every possible human life multiplied by near-zero chances still comes out to doing infinite good in the long run. This thinking underlies much of EA’s emergent activities, specifically in the field of AI alignment—reducing the extinction risk AI poses to humanity. Skeptics of long-termism question our ability to foresee the future accurately and argue

that mathematically calculating future happiness results in what philosopher Derek Parfit called the “repugnant conclusion”: prioritizing a future where one trillion people live minimally happy lives over a present where 8 billion people can live well. Effective Altruists saw Kagan’s class as merely another platform to continue talking about their ideas in a more legitimate context. EAs thrive off being recognized and associated with esteemed academics at brand-name institutions; it gives them reputability—just look towards MacAskill and Ord at Oxford in 2009.

Following the fall of FTX, critics have called attention to the somewhat strange behaviors that some members of EA follow. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic even called EA a “cult.” They wish to spread their movement to every corner of the world; they want to educate those unfamiliar with EA by giving them free books and running fellowship programs, and they increasingly target young people. Kagan holds a more mild view: “[EA] is a group of people who have a shared outlook on life…I’d probably call it a philosophical view…Most of them believe in something like utilitarianism. The broader category is called consequentialism.” Utilitarianism is the idea that we must act in a way that will maximize benefit for the greatest number of people; consequentialism is the theory in normative ethics that states the moral value of an action or decision should be judged by its consequences. Whatever you call it, EA exudes an essence of insularity to those outside of the movement, with a unified ideology, tight-knit community, and set curricula. Bankman-Fried’s collapse did not start the issues within EA but, rather, exposed them to the public’s eye.

Yale’s relationship with EA goes far beyond Kagan’s teaching. The

Yale chapter of EA began in 2014 after one of the founders attended a lecture at the Yale Law School delivered by Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher and principal leader of the movement, on how to donate to charity effectively. A principal member of Yale’s EA chapter, who I will call John, told me that “The talk spoke to me… [Singer] referenced…students who were doing a very early version of earning to give, so giving away a pretty high fraction of what they were making to charity. I was inspired by that, because I thought, this is something I could do with my life. I was still trying to figure out my career. But the idea that no matter what I did, I should be looking to support some of the best charities on earth spoke to me. And things followed from there.” John described the early days of the chapter as “very scrappy,” saying, “It was a few philosophy professors and some college kids who were excited, for the most part.” Although the movement was incredibly young, EA groups were starting to sprout up at nearby colleges like Harvard, Princeton, and Denison.

John explained Yale EA’s early activities as “raising awareness. We held a few fundraisers on campus. We did…giving games, which is sort of like handing people money as they walk by and inviting them to donate to one of a few charities. We used that as an opportunity to talk about how you would choose a charity...” He continued to tell me that the reception of EA in 2014 was fairly neutral, given that the movement hadn’t yet gained a public reputation because of how new it was. He maintained, however, that “the biggest benefit of the club was introducing a bunch of people…to these ideas.” Among the founding group of EA members at Yale, “almost all of them are still involved to some capacity with EA.” John told me he “worked at Open

Philanthropy, which is a very large funder in the Effective Altruism space.” In fact, he told me he “met Sam [Bankman-Fried] a few times. I was invited to work at Alameda to research. I turned it down. It seemed a little bit too risky at the time. I don’t regret that now.”

Before we got off the phone, John sincerely thanked me for “telling his story.” The discrepancy between wanting to be recognized and wishing to remain anonymous seems to fall in line with a larger phenomenon in the EA movement: a misunderstanding of how to take accountability.

Nearly 10 years later, Yale EA still closely follows its original intention. I sat down with two members of the current Yale EA board, Arjun Warrior, TD ’26 and Asavari Saigal, GH ’26, who explained that Yale EA currently functions to facilitate reading groups that introduce students to EA’s ideas. Yale EA offers the Intro Fellowship every semester and summer, and according to the website, “Applicants should be driven to do as much good as they can, open-minded

and eager to update their beliefs in response to critical discussion and holistic evidence, and ready to commit about 3 hours per week across 8 weeks.”

Saigal was recruited to join the Intro Fellowship the summer before her first year. She explained, “For me, doing that fellowship was a lot less like being introduced to new ideas and more like, Oh, my God, other people are thinking the way I am thinking. So, I didn’t really think of it as learning, either. I thought of it more as finding it.” Saigal was living in India at the time, so she often joined the discussions in the middle of the night, finishing them in the early hours of dawn.

Warrior is currently the coordinator of the Intro Fellowship and tells me that the fellowship attracts all kinds of people: “There are a lot of people who have a really strong quantitative background, and [like] this idea that you can sort of use logic, use reason, use evidence to figure out what’s the best way to make an impact. And then there are people, [like me, who have]

this real sense of urgency about making change better…You open up the newspaper, and there are tragedies happening left and right. It can be paralyzing to recognize that there’s so much going on [as] you’re 19 years old, on the cusp of stepping into trying to figure out how to make a difference.”

Not all people who complete the fellowship will continue with EA, and that is not considered a failure. Saigal said, “If you continue with EA or not, that’s really not an indicator of the success of the fellowship. So as long as you leave with some sort of opinion on how to do good and start thinking about it more often. Just let that idea permeate into your life. That is when it’s successful.”

Yale EA also ran a semester-long In-Depth Effective Altruism (IDEA) Fellowship, which was discontinued in the fall of 2023. Beyond the reading groups, Yale EA organizes community-building events, like weekly dinners and retreats, in order to give those who have gone through the fellowship an outlet to continue to engage

In the world of EA, your beliefs are separated from your actions— this is how EAs explain how they feel about Bankman-Fried.

with EA in a less structured setting. Saigal said that recruitment did get harder, but she was mainly frustrated with the fact that Bankman-Fried was tied to the organization in the first place. Warrior shared a similar sentiment regarding Bankman-Fried: “He’s a bad actor, he did terrible things, and he deserves this negative attention. That doesn’t mean that the rest of us should stop trying to make the world better.” EA’s global brand shares a similar attitude and has made a show of arguing that the ideas of EA on their own are strong enough to prevail through this time of unfavorable attention through blog posts and changing rhetoric in their chapters. The official line is that Bankman-Fried was a bad person who did bad things and would have been a bad actor wherever he attached himself. In their view, EA is the victim, not the perpetrator.

Campuses in and around Silicon Valley are known to have a very strong EA presence, given that most of the work being done around them is related to, if not directly connected with, EA’s areas of interest. In comparison, Yale’s chapter is small. In the EA forum, there are 175 posts that mention Yale’s chapter, whereas Berkeley and Stanford have nearly 500 each. The bigger chapters have action groups “focused on running alternative protein research and… artificial intelligence alignment,” Warrior told me. At Yale, members “mainly just run…reading groups.” However, some members of Yale EA take it upon themselves to do more than attend their

weekly reading groups. Saigal told me, “I am part of a lot of Dwight Hall’s organizations. I am also on the board at the homeless shelter and the soup kitchen… It’s kind of hard to believe that I'm making a difference when I’m just like, talking about things. When you’re actually doing them, it’s different.” The choice to take action at Yale is in the hands of the individual member rather than that of the organization.

Even as they claim a separation between Bankman-Fried and EA, many EAs are clearly hesitant to identify themselves with the movement. For this article, I contacted several people who were once closely associated with EA at Yale and beyond. Some responded—more didn’t, saying that they were distancing themselves from the organization. But even the people who picked up my calls were hesitant to label themselves as “Effective Altruists”; to call oneself an “Effective Altruist,” one must embody and absorb the principles completely. It feels cowardly not to be able to stand behind an organization’s values. The Effective Altruists I spoke to talked about EA as if it were a spectrum, but if it is, in fact, a spectrum, there should be no issue attaching oneself to a movement that theoretically allows for a good bit of nuance. It appears that even though the EAs of Yale (and everywhere else) insist that membership hasn't declined and that they believe in the brand’s ability to persist against bad media attention.

There is a strange party line within EA: devoting your time

to the EA movement does not necessarily mean you believe in the organization’s core values, nor does it make you a true “Effective Altruist.” In the world of EA, your beliefs are separated from your actions—this is how EAs explain how they feel about Bankman-Fried. Although Bankman-Fried supported the movement by creating The Future Fund and actively identifying himself with the EA community, they say he never truly believed in the principles of EA, or else he would not have done such a thing as embezzle customers’ money in order to save his own business. In fact, Saigal expressed a general frustration in the EA community about Bankman-Fried’s action: “It started conversations among us about why people feel like it's okay for them to use the term EA to do fraud and crime.” This is curiously naive—Time reported in March 2023 that EA leaders, including MacAskill, had been warned about Bankman-Fried’s questionable business practices. But as long as the getting was good, EA was happy to have him as an exemplar of how much good it was possible to do while also being rich.

Just two years ago, Yale EA had an office in the Bank of America building on Church Street that looks over the New Haven Green. High up in the tower, Yale Effective Altruists would meet with a sprawling view of campus behind them. Now, in a post-BankmanFried world, EAs gather in the depths of WLH, where the windows barely reach the sidewalk. ❧

A Letter of Concern

Dear Determinism,

Thank you for compelling me, those years ago, to raise my bed to its highest peg—for storage and a safe place for my head and arms to land when I began to crumble each night, debilitated and agency-less. The dust mites beneath that bed made hospitable companions as I was dragged amongst them daily to cry and cough and shake my hands in panic until they became numb. If you had not made me lift the bed early on, with the aid of my mother, I would have tried alone amidst one of those panics, and likely crushed my toes. But did you have to make it necessary at all? Could you not have left me to my simple sadness? Instead, you had to overtake it, escalate it, twist it, and so I lost control of my words and limbs and mind. .

Each day that year, the year with the bed, I wandered around my scoped world in search of some glittering compass, something to hang my hat upon. I saw only a blur, colors and shapes seen as if without my glasses, and I yearned to find agency. Astigmatism. Astigmatistic, I have found. A stigma, perhaps, self-inflicted—again, how perspective shifts. But now I realize it was you.

Some Day

It was not the first time I'd been stuck inside this thought-built maze—somehow, in these hedges of my own creation, I had lost the map. You must have taken it, right? Somehow, some way, some place, you stashed my agency—why? I mean not to lament, of course (I would hate to get in your bad graces), but please, if you would not mind, I would love to hear about what may have gone into this action!

I do wish to empathize, however, for you have no agency of your own. You are simply the name we have given to the unfortunate system which puppets our lives. You will perhaps find this bemusing, but there are many who do not believe in your power. You, Determinism, are defined by many as a doctrine, as a dogma in which will is stolen and lives are preordained. Some tie this to religion—their trembling beneath some God, or gods—others, such as myself, see you as an assembly of every gene and memory and self we have ever been. None of which we can control. I can nearly hear your laughter at our insufficient definitions; would you mind enlightening me to the nuances?

Herald staff

Malagueña

Diego Del Águila, JE ’26

Roberto Arellanos woke up feeling like he had slept for three years. He couldn’t dismiss the possibility: all the clocks in the city had come to a halt.

New Haven’s menacing silence, which had often cured his insomnia, now hinted at disaster. Trying the lamp proved futile. His cell phone, computer, and tablet wouldn’t turn on, and no electrical outlets worked. As he began to discern silhouettes in the darkness, he drew open the curtains. The sky was void of stars, seized by a haunting shade of purple. Cruelly extinguished, the vacant lampposts forced the moon to cast shadows, and there were no signs of life in any window. Nothing was right.

Roberto Arellanos left his room and knocked on the next door, behind which his friends normally rested, but there was no answer. He continued through each room of his suite, only to find books, backpacks, and perfectly made beds. The posters and photographs hanging on the walls had been abandoned.

Desperate, Roberto rushed downstairs. From the college courtyard, he saw the purple sky reflected on the dormant windows. No light, no lamp, no library, no silhouette peeked through the frames. Harkness Tower had never appeared so sharp, bared against the perils of the night, raising its pinnacle against the void of stars.

He considered that perhaps the area had been evacuated, that the bodies breathing life into this campus had been displaced to a distant land. He wondered whether it was a dream, but he couldn’t recall ever being so awake.

He ventured into the streets

with a catastrophic premonition. To his left, the billboard clung to a date: Nov. 27, 2023. Just two days ago, but the silence of the night seemed from another time.

Roberto walked in dismay, along the same path he did every morning. Neither the romantic howl of a dog, nor the echo of a drunkard’s stumble, nor the timid chirps of crickets penetrated the night. No cars disturbed the horizon’s solitude. No scooter, no cyclist, no passerby. Only his footfalls broke the silence that covered New Haven like a shroud.

Deep and desolate, the arches seemed to conceal demons. The expansive halls were graveyards of chairs; the police station was a graveyard of telephones. Roberto investigated the corners where silhouettes usually sought refuge from the threats of the night. The old minimarket, the hammocks, the benches, the terraces. The university was a void.

Desperate, he wondered if this was the reality navigated by poets. He ran for miles through desered avenues and stretches, beyond what prudence allowed a student, but no soul made itself present. He felt the breath of the night and the stillness of time. While the purple sky showed no signs of dawn, he sensed the memory of Mom and Grandma, as if he had already seen them for the last time.

Nonsense invaded him. How could one find meaning in a purple night, void of stars? How and what could he escape in an empty city? He imagined Lima desolate, Madrid deserted, Paris abandoned, and he couldn’t comprehend it. The world was never designed for this solitude.

He sobbed through avenues of absurdity until he reached a bay.

Among the shadows, he recognized the place, but it was no longer the same. Roberto knew there should have been lights there,

across the water, but there was nothing.

Despondent, he knew he was alone.

Roberto Arellanos knelt and pleaded for mercy, but he only received the indiscernible language of the moon, a complicit observer of catastrophe. Lying on the shore, he understood that he had lost everything. The end of the world had come, and he was there to witness it all, because only before a witness could there be an end.

He suspected that everything would soon disintegrate, that the bay and the streets he had traveled would return to the mountains of dust where everything began. Maybe in a blink, his consciousness would become nothing, or the symptoms of sleep would cradle him toward the nevermore. But nothing happened. Perhaps he was there for hours, or days, or years, seeking a new language in the purple, waiting for the night to end.

He attempted self-destruction, at the hands of the water and the rocks on the shore, but it was pointless. He understood that he was the last man on Earth, and thus he remembered what was prophesied by his ancestors in San Daniel. And it was true. It had fallen upon him. Roberto Arellanos was The Immortal. And thus, his craving for death grew, for the disintegration of oceans, cities, and rainforests. But there was nothing to be done.

He waded into the water and gazed at the horizon, murky and nebulous. Purple.

All his surroundings remained unchanged, as real as the palm of his hand, as real as the end of the world. Disheartened, The Immortal surrendered into eternity.

And then, in a second that could have lasted years, or centuries, or millennia, from some window on a distant shore, a light attacked the night. ❧

In One Volume Bound

Gavin Guerrette, BR ’25

I came to myself amidst the great pull, crest, and crash of an indeterminate, swirling mass. Leaping from the frothy boil, I graced the cheek of a lady. Welcoming the mist with a gleeful cry, she did not wipe me away. She splashed and frolicked in the wake; at her side, the movement went on. Later, she retired to the sand, laying flat on her back. In the beating sun, water droplets became specks of salt across her skin. I was soon to join.

Then the screech of chalk. My heavy eyes fell upon the teacher. He stood before the class, watching a pupil scrawl lines of translation beneath his copied Italian verse:

Nel suo profondo vidi che s’ interna, I saw that far within its depths there lies, legato con amore in un volume, by Love together in one volume bound,

ciò che per l’ Universo si squaderna… that which in leaves lies scattered through the world…

The teacher turned and caught me rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “Sorry, did we wake you?” His speech felt so remote. As did the touch of my hand on my face. I rose and left the classroom without a word. My footsteps echoed loudly through the hallway and stairwell. I reached the door, pressed my cheek against the cool glass window, and looked outside. A blizzard. I opened the door and stepped out.

Walking for some time in the snow, I arrived at a park. I saw shovels and toys strewn about the white ground. Yesterday, I had walked past a group of children

clearing the snow off the basketball court. They had since formed it into a mound, from which they had carved an igloo. I walked towards its entrance, squatting to look inside. Finding it empty, I sat upon the muddied slushy ground, and felt the wet seeping into my pants. Back against the igloo wall, I watched snowflakes descend through an opening in the roof. I let out a shaky exhale and paused for a blissful, silent moment.

Little footsteps and voices approached my hermitage. A young girl poked her head upside down through the roof. I held up my hands in surrender. She shrieked. I scrambled from the igloo. As I emerged, the other kids shrieked too. While I fled, my back was pelted with hastily assembled snowballs and insults.

I returned to the empty classroom at dusk and slumped, sopping wet, back into my chair. Looking to the board, I read another translation:

A quella Luce cotal si diventa, Such in that Light doth one at last become, che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto that he can never possibly consent è impossibile che mai si consenta… to turn therefrom for any other sight… ❧

Lucia and Serapion

Arthur Delot-Vilain, DC ’25, Herald staff

ARTS

Picture in Picture

Eli Osei, MC ’26, Herald staff

Icanuse my fingers to count the number of times visual art has moved me. Not because its mediums are inexpressive or because its practitioners aren’t innovative. Often the art is fresh and transcendent. Usually the artists are brave and revolutionary. But I struggle to grasp the visual, to let its colors and images sit with me, because I do not understand it. I never learned to paint. I lack the patience needed to draw. I’ve spent the last eight years taking photographs, but without any formal training, I feel undeserving of a formal title and would only call myself a photographer after identifying as a fraud. Each time I stand before a painting, I stand before a wall. I hide behind years of inexperience that stack themselves upon each other, refusing to connect. And yet sometimes art grabs me with so much force that I’m pulled through the wall and into the work’s world. Such a pulling began on the top floor of the Murray Art Gallery when, on a breath-chilling Sunday, I walked in, unwrapped my scarf, and came face-to-face with a wet floor sign. It was a yellow sign with a rectangular canvas, painted with a palette’s worth of different blues, attached to each side. The blues’ swirls moved in and around each other, individual entities but without beginnings or ends. Arriving, I looked at them, trying to figure out what this meant. I felt a pang of sadness when—after thirty seconds of examining the two-foot board—I realized that I was totally unequipped to do so, that I’d have to make something up.

Lillian Broeksmit and Lizzie

Conklin’s Picture in Picture was a collaborative series of paintings conceived by the two artists over the course of a semester. They worked on four canvases, rendering a series of figures in motion, before trimming out the negative space. The first panel depicted a human-like figure resting against a tree. Sitting, with its hands on the tree’s base and one leg crossed over the other, the figure looked down into the literal empty space. The figure had no face, no fingers, no toes, and few definable features. It was an outline with skin that blent between light and dark pink, pressed against a tree comprising various greens. From the moment I looked at it, I felt I understood its pain. Yet the root of this pain remained elusive to me. I couldn’t work out how the form became the feeling.

I took a step back, giving myself a moment to think about the room’s layout. Each of the panels was suspended in the middle of the room by thin pieces of wire attached to its top two corners. Standing before the first, one could see the other three through it. I looked at the back of the room, at the black plexi-glass with grey branches painted over it, and then brought my eyes back to the front. I found the faded figure.

Thinking I looked silly in my silence, I struck up a conversation about the artists’ subjects. Lizzie’s interests lie in the human world and Lillian’s in the natural one. When making the series, they worked on the same canvas at the same time, painting around each other. Lizzie would paint the figures and Lillian would paint the

settings. When a part of the piece looked too much like one of their particular styles, the other artist would have a go at it, balancing things out.

It was a marvelous feat from the front wall to the back, with painted leaves that looked like real ones and trees that looked like humans, soaked in a consistency that would be impressive from one artist but felt miraculous from two. I imagined them painting, lost in a dance, twisting around each other, creating in silence, completely buried in the art. Standing in the middle of the hallway, between the panels, I too was in the art—but using the guise of criticism to keep myself removed from it.

Lillian said that she likes trees because of the silence that they hold. They were around before us and they’ll be around after, and she said she’s sure they know something we don’t. I smiled softly as she spoke, maintaining my coolness, feeling that this was my way in. I could write a piece comparing Lillian’s understanding of trees to my understanding of painting; dissecting the impenetrability of the two, how while there is beauty in both, meaning inherent to them, a separation between the viewer and view means that the viewing is about admiration not emotion. With this, I felt I could call it a day. But Lillian went on, saying that the moment you introduce a human subject, the work becomes psychological. Lizzie added that she likes to paint human figures because they give people a way into the painting. She enjoys when people come to her with particular interpretations of her paintings, opening the pieces up by grasping things that even she had missed. She comes to art with a total openness. I came to see hers with my blinders on.

Psychological. A way into the painting. Opening the pieces up. I ran the words through my mind

and resolved to try again. I am not a frigid person. I cry everytime I hear Maggot Brain. The wall was an excuse to ignore my wordless thoughts. Standing before the paintings once more, I worked to knock it down.

Again, the figure: this time thought about what it’s like to be at your lowest, searching for the strength to carry on. To be down, out, wrapped around yourself, pressed against the earth as the world moves on. What it’s like to share the weight. To let the natural world support you as you support yourself. To cut out the noise.

I looked through the frame at the second panel, what I took to be human-looking foliage dancing in the wind. I felt that there was freedom after rest.

I moved further forward to look at a panel with a man, seated, leaning over a lake. He stared into the water, and I stared at him. No grand idea found me, no totalising narrative or theory of aesthetics, but the painting moved into me without a thought. Its blues flooded through me, scrubbing my insides and washing my head clean, so that after the painting had left, after that feverish moment characterised by empathy for the figure and love for the world, I felt completely calm.

As Lizzie and Lillian took the panels down, I stood content in my clarity. The exhibit was being put away around me. I had stood in the middle of their world. Lillian laid out a large piece of thick paper, and Lizzie rolled the panels into it. I wanted to say something sentimental like, It’s all art, but thought felt like enough.

After saying my goodbyes, I walked up the stairs, ready to return to the unremarkable. Exiting, I caught a glimpse of the wet floor sign and slowed down my walk before remembering that it was part of the show. I stood by the door and looked back at the sign, losing myself in the blues while I could. ❧

Photos courtesy of Henri-Nicolas Grossman

Wickee What? Why Vinyl Is Here to Stay

Theo Kubovy-Weiss, BR ’26, Herald staff

Listening to music is not what it used to be. Before the music age, curating a music library was a deliberate, thoughtful practice: one that was costly enough to require serious forethought; one that required maintenance and care; and one that commanded active attention to know when an LP needed to be flipped. This is in stark contrast with the streaming age, which has banished music curation to the back burner— libraries are now bloated, filled with half-finished and fully-shuffled playlists that ask of their listeners no more than the push of a button. There is no doubt that this new model of consumption has made music listening more accessible. But this convenience has diminished the music’s value in the process.

While price reduction and variety may be beneficial in the realms of food or fashion, these changes have an inverse effect on music. Music is an art form that thrives off of repetitive consumption, careful deliberation, and meditative analysis. Incentivizing listeners to disregard albums and instead consume an endless sludge of ear-wormy new singles disregards the care that goes into the music-making process. Playlists, especially AI-generated ones that draw from all pockets of the music world, have all but eliminated the possibility of forging meaningful connections with musicians and their music.

The same careful listening of vinyl can be emulated on streaming platforms by playing albums in full, going back to familiar favorites, and the like. But with a daily selection of fresh, digestible tracks delivered directly to your home screen, it is

REAL AUTHENTIC (HERALD STAFF) DAYLISTS:

Ethiopique tizita tuesday late night

Happy pop bilingual tuesday early morning

Freaky escape room friday late night

Saudade pilates morning

Mallgoth punkish monday morning

Scream situationship wednesday afternoon

Eighteenth century viking thursday evening

Baseball football tuesday afternoon

hard to maintain the discipline not to eat what you’re being fed, especially when that fodder is carefully designed to be addictive, catchy, and easy on the ears.

If you need proof of the power of instant gratification, look no further than Spotify’s newest feature: Spotify Clips. The app’s newest addition emulates the story features found in many social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. It allows users to discover new music through five-second snippets. With five-second pleasure-center bombs at the tips of their fingers, listeners are tempted to forgo the old-school process of finding new

music in exchange for the pleasure of constant stimulation.

Without a doubt, vinyl is a more burdensome medium than digital streaming. But the care and devotion it requires ultimately ends up benefiting the listener. Ten dollars on Spotify gets you an overwhelmingly eclectic selection of music that values breadth over depth; ten dollars at a record store will get you an album to be pored over for a lifetime. In time, money and attention, vinyl asks far more of its listeners than digital music does. But in meaning, passion, and emotional resonance, the return is immeasurable. ❧

ACROSS

1. Directionless

THEMELESS TOUGHIE

7. Home of Penelope, in myth

13. Carrier

Jem Burch, JE ’25

15. Theater chorus

16. Queen's defense

18. Hottest desert in the U.S.

ACROSS

1. Directionless

19. Taipei to Seoul dir.

20. Table collection?

7. Home of Penelope, in myth

13. Carrier

22. Lemon's home

15. Theater chorus

23. Spill the tea

25. Pull at

16. Queen's defense

26. Magic words

18. Hottest desert in the U.S.

27. Went after

19. Taipei to Seoul dir.

29. Nothing

20. Table collection?

22. Lemon's home

30. Lets, for example

puzzles. Some of them get published in the New York Times Some of them get published in the Yale Herald

Answers on page 9

23. Spill the tea

31. Growing inventory?

34. Flossing, et. al.

25. Pull at

26. Magic words

35. No-hope chest?

27. Went after

36. Anna of Lost in Translation

29. Nothing

37. Like some smiles

30. Lets, for example

38. Daughter of King Lear

31. Growing inventory?

42. Zoomers

34. Flossing, et. al.

43. Fall off

35. No-hope chest?

36. Anna of Lost in Translation

45. Theater district across the Pond

37. Like some smiles

38. Daughter of King Lear

46. Diploma alternative (abbr.)

42. Zoomers

DOWN

1. Selling points?

4. Tolstoy's first name, in Russia

28. Cares (for)

32. Friendly introduction?

30. Cutting edge?

47. Infant outfit

43. Fall off

49. Related group

50. British hood

45. Theater district across the Pond

52. It sets precedent

46. Diploma alternative (abbr.)

54. Arctic coat

47. Infant outfit

55. "Same here!"

49. Related group

56. Get back

50. British hood

57. Made an estimate DOWN

52. It sets precedent

54. Arctic coat

55. "Same here!"

1. Selling points?

56. Get back

2. '70s TV actress Stevens

57. Made an estimate

3. Swear

5. Not up yet

2. '70s TV actress Stevens

3. Swear

6. Charged

4. Tolstoy's first name, in Russia

5. Not up yet

7. "The Wild Duck" playwright

8. Clip

6. Charged

7. "The Wild Duck" playwright

8. Clip

9. Dynasty during which paper was invented

10. California roll ingredients

9. Dynasty during which paper was invented

11. Fair fare

10. California roll ingredients

11. Fair fare

12. Poses

14. Began

17. Fantastical transport

21. Star's entourage

17. Fantastical transport

21. Star's entourage

24. Knows someone

26. Pre-fax communications

28. Cares (for)

30. Cutting edge?

32. Friendly introduction?

33. Can opener?

34. Couldn't

35. Start of a story

34. Couldn't

35. Start of a story

36. Newton

39. Fair vehicle

40. "Gotcha."

41. "Don't bother."

43. Holiday pancake

44. And the following (abbr.)

47. Talk to the press, perhaps

48. "Even you!?"

44. And the following (abbr.)

51. FDR-era program

53. Lover of Harry

47. Talk to the press, perhaps

48. "Even you!?"

51. FDR-era program

53. Lover of Harry

Jem Burch creates crossword

wed. 1/31 thu. 2/1

ATTEND: Colleen Shogan. The Archivist of the United States discusses the politics of history and records. 2 p.m. 77 Prospect St., A002. Register on csap.yale. edu.

In the Pines. A collaborative Americana music series featuring an open bluegrass jam, bluegrass group Audrey Mae, and one rising folk act. 6 p.m. Cafe Nine. $10. 21+. Tickets on cafenine.com. Hélène Grimaud. The New Yorker-acclaimed pianist performs Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. 7:30-9 p.m. Morse Recital Hall. $12. Tickets on music-tickets. yale.edu.

COMPANY. Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Tony-winning comedy centers the bachelor Bobby and his 35th birthday party, thrown by his married friends. 7:30 p.m. Shubert Theatre. $58. Tickets on shubert.com.

ENGAGE: Sketching Yale. Bring your drawing supplies and document Haas Library through sketches. Guided by an MFA student. 1:30-3 p.m. Paul Rudolph Reading Room, Haas Arts Library.

mon. 2/5

ATTEND: Designing "Shining Light on Truth". Discussing the curation of New Haven Museum’s exhibit, centering the role of enslaved and free Black people in New Haven and at Yale. 4-4:30 p.m. Online. Register on bit.ly/48SK7CA.

Jarrett May. A flautist’s Master of Musical Arts degree recital. 7:30 p.m. Sprague Memorial hall.

ENGAGE: Beyond the Binary. A weekly group for non-cis students to discuss gender and community. 5:30 p.m. Office of LGBTQ Resources.

LGBTQIA+ Book Club. Read and discuss queer literature. 6 p.m. Never Ending Books, Volume Two.

Game Night. A night of ludo, carrom, and good food, hosted by the Bengali Student Association. 7:30 p.m. Asian American Cultural Center.

CELEBRATE: First Day of Black History Month. ATTEND: African American Connecticut Explored. A panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of the first essay collection to center African-descended people of Connecticut. 6-8 p.m. New Haven Museum. Register on newhavenmuseum.org. Double Negatives. Esther Choi, whose work explores how concepts of nature are shaped by worldmaking practices, talks pictures and petroaesthetics. 6:30 p.m. Hastings Hall.

Boys Don’t Cry. Kimberly Peirce’s first feature film tells the true story of Brandon Teena, the victim of a transphobic attack in Nebraska. 7 p.m. HQ LL. Bob Marley Birthday Celebration. Mighty Mystic, a leader in the international reggae scene, pays tribute to Marley. 8 p.m. Cafe Nine. $12. 21+. Tickets on cafenine. com.

tue. 2/6

ATTEND: Food as a Climate Solution. Speakers discuss food futures and agricultural innovation, from cultivated meat to insect protein. Vegan catering provided. 12 p.m. Kroon 319. Register on Yale Connect.

Islamophobia Yesterday and Today. Rozina Ali, a journalist whose work focuses on the Middle East and South Asia, conflict, and immigration, thinks through similarities and differences between the post-9/11 and post-10/07 eras. 4:30 p.m. HQ L01.

Lyndon Ji. A pianist’s Master of Musical Arts degree recital. 4:30 p.m. Sprague Memorial Hall.

ENGAGE: Take It Easy Tuesdays. Relax with coloring and cocoa as part of YC3’s monthly series dedicated to making space for rest. 2 p.m. Silliman Good Life Center. Register on Yale Connect. Volunteer with Sunrise Cafe. Wake up early to welcome guests and serve homecooked breakfast free of charge. 6 a.m. Dwight Hall. Register on Yale Connect.

ATTEND: Seeing and Being Seen. A conversation on how classical music can be a catalyst for change. 12-1:30 p.m. Peck Multipurpose Room, Schwarzman Center. Register on schwarzman.yale.edu. Caragh Thuring. The visual artist, whose work interweaves history and the future, and the abstract and representational, talks her process and projects. 12 p.m. Online. Register on Yale Connect. Ghibli Movie Night. Miyazaki and snacks with Yale’s Anime Society. 7 p.m. WTS A30. Linda Oh. Dynamic jazz from the double bass extraordinaire, Grammy winner, and featured musician in Pixar’s “Soul.” 7:30 p.m. Morse Recital Hall. $11. Tickets on music-tickets.yale.edu.

Groundhog Day Show. Just Add Water interrogates shadows, winter, and time—musical-improv-comedy-style. 8 p.m. Hopper Cabaret. Register on Yale Connect.

ATTEND: Darshan Trio. Creating a visionary mosaic of chamber and new music. 4 p.m. The Dome, Schwarzman Center. Register on Yale Connect. Barry Dingle Comedy Showcase. In case his name didn’t crack you up enough. 6 p.m. Never Ending Books, Volume Two. Snow Job XLII. Combining music and sketch comedy, Mixed Company presents their 42nd winter jam. 7 p.m. SSS 114. Register on Yale Connect.

Club Cunt. Post-techno, gabber, and hot dance remixes, courtesy of connecticunt magazine. 9 p.m. Cafe Nine. $5. 21+. Tickets on cafenine.com.

ENGAGE: Eighth Annual Mega Bowl of Birding. Scrounge up as many bird species as you can in a 5-mile diameter and win birding glory. 6 a.m.-5 p.m. Contact closcalz@optonline.net to participate.

2/4

ATTEND: Opening Reception. Celebrating three exhibitions, from a visual kaleidoscope of Caribbean culture to meditations on figurations of the Black body in America. 1-3 p.m. Ely Center. Closing Reception. Marking the end of RENEWAL, an exhibition exploring hope and the process of reinvention. 3-5 p.m. Kehler Liddell Gallery. Cinema Night. An unknown movie in New Haven’s coziest third space. 7-10 p.m. gather. ENGAGE: New Haven Flea. A vendor pop-up haven for antique, vintage, and kitsch treasures. 2-5 p.m. East Rock Brewing Company. Sunday Brunch. Queer community and good food. 12-2 p.m. Office of LGBTQ Resources.

ongoing

The Colored Museum. Composed of eleven “exhibits,” this show undermines stereotypes new and old of what it means to be Black in contemporary America. Lighten Theater. Feb. 1-3. Tickets on collegearts.yale.edu.

The Christians. After delivering a radical sermon, Pastor Paul attempts to keep the church and his marriage from falling apart. Sudler Recital Hall. Feb. 1-3. Tickets on collegearts.yale.edu.

FAMILY ACT. From photography and painting to animated computer graphics, four members of the Frucht family showcase their artistic talent in an exhibition. City Gallery. Feb. 2-25.

Illustration and Original Design by Cleo Maloney

THE HERALD BLOCKLIST

(things we hate this week)

Fanduel Freeplay

Thank you, but I am so addicted.

Hard Launch Missile-forward language.

Plagiarism Hypocrisy

Jk. Nerd.

Reading

Dshfkjshaf lgfrngherlhb jhjkghg.

Movies

Too long.

That shit’s just chocolate?

Laura Gilpin

Twice as many heads up my ass as usual.

The Lightness of Being Totally unbearable.

Red Velvet