IN SUPPORT OF THE BOOKS NOT BOMBS REFERENDUM
We write to you in a climate that demands urgency. On October 31, 2024, President Maurie McInnis published a statement accepting the Committee on Institutional Voice’s recommendations that university leaders “should refrain from issuing statements concerning matters of public, social, or political significance, except in rare cases.” Last Tuesday, November 5, 2024, former President Donald Trump was reelected, a result that has projected a frightening future for our national and university community. In line with the newly adopted policy of institutional neutrality, Yale University has not yet spoken on the election results. As we continue to move forward, we think about the privileges of political disappointment, when the horrors of genocide continue in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond.
As stewards of this publication, we are tasked to reckon with these national and global realities that challenge us to think deeply about the commitments we make to our campus community. We feel obligated both to write for the possibility that things can be different and to take action that points our community in the direction of justice. In a refusal to accept the status quo, the Yale Herald endorses the Sumud Coalition’s “Books, Not Bombs” referendum, an initiative grounded in the goals of Yale Corporation’s disclosure and divestment from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and a reinvestment of these resources into local scholarship from New Haven to Palestine. Alongside over 35 student groups, the Herald stands in solidarity with the demands of
the Books, Not Bombs campaign.
On November 5, 2024, the Sumud Coalition released a three-question referendum that calls on Yale students to consider our university’s investments, particularly in companies that produce and supply military weapons. If the referendum petition gathers signatures from at least 10% of Yale undergraduates within two months, it will proceed to a simple majority vote by the Yale College Council senators to determine if the referendum will be held. However, if the YCC rejects the petition, but organizers secure signatures from at least 20% of the student body—including the original 10%—the decision can be overridden, granting the petition the right to a referendum. The Books Not Bombs referendum does not come without precedent. In 2021, Yale took a meaningful step by disclosing its holdings in fossil fuel companies, recognizing the global climate emergency and the urgency of financial transparency. Yale has also previously divested from companies linked to apartheid in South Africa, genocide in Sudan, and mass shootings in the United States. The Books, not Bombs referendum, through its three central questions, now asks us to consider a similar demand regarding our investments in military contractors, especially those connected to ongoing humanitarian crises.
Question 1: Should Yale disclose its investments in military weapons manufacturers and suppliers, including those arming Israel? challenges us to demand greater transparency around
Yale’s investments in military weapons manufacturers, including companies supplying arms. Disclosure is an essential step in understanding the breadth of our involvement and influence as an institution in the ongoing genocide. Yale’s mission statement demands Lux et Veritas, light and truth, but without disclosure, the university’s commitments to truth ring hollow.
Question 2: Should Yale divest from military weapons manufacturers and suppliers, including those arming Israel? builds upon our institutional history of divestment from investments that uphold systems of destruction. Yale has, in the past, chosen divestment as a means of protest against structures that perpetuate apartheid, genocide, and violence. This question asks if it is time to extend that principle to our military investments, ensuring that Yale’s financial actions are aligned with institutional values committing us to justice and ethical responsibility. As Yale continues to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality, we urge the university towards divestment from their investments in weapons manufacturing—investments that are anything but neutral.
Question 3: Given the widespread destruction of schools and universities in Gaza, should Yale act on its commitment to education by investing in Palestinian scholars and students? encourages reinvestment. In the wake of widespread destruction in Gaza and the erasure of educational institutions in conflict zones, this question calls on Yale to support Palestinian scholars and students. Sustaining our scholars in regions devastated by conflict is not only an investment in global scholarship but in a lineage of knowledge that will live alongside future generations.
As Editors, we endorse this referendum as a chance for our university to reflect deeply on
where it continues to align itself in these times of global crisis. The Sumud Coalition’s “Books, Not Bombs” referendum not only offers a tactical path forward for our university to adhere to its founding principles, but more importantly, to divest from harm and invest in life. We are disappointed in the climate that we are writing in but choose to reorient ourselves toward the future.
We hold the words of Sara Marcus, who asks in her seminal text Political Disappointment to reconceive political disappointment as untimely desire: “a longing for fundamental change that outlasts a historical moment when it might have been fulfilled.” Marcus concludes, “To keep longing for a lost future is evidence of survival.” We urge the Yale community to engage with this referendum, consider its implications, and, ultimately, cast a vote in support of the creation of a different future.
Written by, Connor Arakaki and Madelyn Dawson, Editors-In-Chief
Signed by,
Tashroom Ahsan, Emily Aikens, Lu Arie, Sara Cao, Diego Del Aguila, Richie George, Gavin Guerrette, Oscar Heller, Eva Kottou, Amber Nobriga, Calista Oetama, Bella Panico, Malina Reber, Jack Reed, Jack Rodriquez-Vars, Alex Sobrino, Claire SooHoo, Sarah Sun, Alina Susani, Will Sussbauer, and Ashley Wang
Image by the Sumud Coalition
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
Dear readers,
We proceed from the cover letter of Volume 76 Issue 8 of the Yale Herald with stories that theorize and create alternative futures. We continue to believe in the enterprise of storytelling, the ways that our imagination, incision, and interconnectedness do not just remark on the state of the world— they reinvent it.
Our authors this week take the time to slow down, pay attention, and find connections to the people and places around them, tenuous or fleeting as they may be. Larry Dunn ’25 finds respite in the stillness and subtlety resounding through Haley Heynderickx’s sophomore album Seed of a Seed. In his hometown’s congregation, Richie George ’27 searches for what is tender in the extremities of religion. Mia Kohn ’27 goes to the
Yale University Art Gallery to clear her head and strikes up a conversation with a security guard, who gazes into the abyss by day and goes to therapy by night.
The two features of this issue interrogate what’s left on the margins of Yale’s institutional history, which we hope can be put in dialogue with our call to support the Sumud Coalition’s Books, Not Bombs referendum. Daniel Yim ’28 talks to Assistant Professors of Ethnicity Race, and Migration Tarren Andrews and Deb Vargas about the completion of the new ER&M building, in the wake of the program’s long-fought history for institutional support. And finally, for the cover story of this issue, Amber Nobriga ’27 investigates how Yale PhD graduate Kenneth Emory spearheaded archaeo-
logical expeditions in Hawai‘i—an exploitation configured by the radiocarbon revolution and Yale’s emerging relationship with the Bishop Museum, with impacts still felt today.
Like Amber, we accept that the path toward the future is long and winding. The future may even ring apocalyptic. And as Daniel writes of the new ER&M program building, we ought to think of our habitats of community as a gerund, rather than a noun: “always in progression, not quite complete.”
We hope these stories are an architecture of the future—a window that many hands have built together, for you to climb through.
Yours most daringly, Connor Arakaki and Madelyn Dawson
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
Connor Arakaki / Madelyn Dawson
Creative Directors
Alexa Druyanoff / Alex Nelson / Alina Susani
Managing Editors
Emily Aikens / Eva Kottou / Jack Reed
Reviews Editors
Sara Cao / Theo Kubovy-Weiss / Dorothea Robertson
Reflections Editors
Amanda Cao / Jack Rodriquez-Vars
Arts Editors
Diego Del Aguila / Ashley Wang / Everett Yum
Features Editors
Amber Nobriga / Calista Oetama / Jisu Oh
Culture Editors
Sophie Lamb / Alex Sobrino / Will Sussbauer
Voices Editors
Gavin Guerrette / Lana Perice
Opinion Editors
Richie George / Oscar Heller
Publisher
Bella Panico
Business Manager
Avery Lenihan
Design Editors
Michelle J Lee / Natalie Leung / Matthew Messaye / Malina Reber / Claire SooHoo / Sarah Sun / Nicole Tian
Photography Editors
Tashroom Ahsan / Natalie Leung
Copy Editors
Lu Arie / Elizabeth Chivers / Diana Contreras Niño / Cameron Jones / Irene Kim / Liz Shvarts / Alina Susani / Alina Vaidya Mahadevan / Reese Weiden
Staff Writers
Robert Gao / Richie George / Cameron Jones / Anna Kaloustian / Julian Raymond / Natalie Semmel
This Week's Cover
The Sumud Coalition
Larry
Hudson Warm on The Maiden by Kate Foster
Dorothea Robertson on David Gilmour's Luck and Strange tour
On the Garonne and Other Things That Run by Madelyn Dawson
Emerald on a straightaway.
Play ’Til You Can’t No More by Miles Zaud
The practice room panopticon.
Come Home to God by Richie George
On feeling the touch of God—and each other.
ARTS
On Splintering Wood and Falling Towers by Katya Agrawal Images for sale.
20 CULTURE
Jeremy and I Gaze Long by Mia Rose Kohn
Short Jeremy, in his blue uniform.
Restaurant Days by Tina Li
The opening of Nice Day Chinese and the future of takeout.
VOICES
A Christophany by Gavin Guerrette
A decanter, a stash of porno mags, and the tethers of faith. 28 OPINION
The Corporate Carnival by Richie George Corporate Erin will circle back.
11 PLAYLIST: What The Office Listened To On 11/07 by Herald Staff
Windows to Climb Through: Building Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale by Daniel Yim
Yale’s ER&M program finds a new home.
Pressing Pause with Haley Heynderickx
Larry
Dunn, GH '25
On the cover of Haley Heynderickx’s sophomore album Seed of a Seed, she is not the photo’s subject. Instead, an immense California red fir commands our attention, starkly outlined against rays of sun, illuminated like an angel descending from the heavens. The tree dwarfs Heynderickx, who stands, hands folded, small and off-center, almost blending in with the foliage that envelopes her lower half. As the cover suggests, Seed of a Seed finds Heynderickx in a profoundly humble mood, reflecting on a world at once much larger and much smaller than her own.
In contrast to I Need to Start a Garden, her debut album in which Heynderickx found solace from loneliness and stagnancy in our tenacious will to cultivate beauty and live life, Heynderickx takes a step back on Seed of a Seed, reminding us that the world has plenty of beauty to offer us on its own.
She pays tribute to her predecessors on “Sorry Fahey,” a reference to acoustic guitarist John Fahey, ostensibly a significant musical influence inspiring her technical but elegant bluegrass-y fingerpicked melodies. On the title track, she admits a bittersweet sympathy for her parents and grandparents, who didn’t know better but nevertheless tried, just as Heynderickx does today.
In daily life, Heyderickx slows down, zooms in, and pauses in perfect and complete moments. Meaning is found in “a glass of wine / and if I’m lucky, maybe a hand next to mine” on the title track, and on “Sorry Fahey,” she reminds us of the beauty in “the old coastline / and the kettle making you tea.” But appreciating that beauty requires intentionality. On “Gemini,” Heynderickx’s younger self has to urge her to pull the car over for a purple clover, to see it “as a gift / a gift I almost missed”. As she repeats on the final track, “Swoop,” “There’s an artistry in the day-to-day-to-day-to-day.”
Often, Heynderickx finds reprieve in a natural world which she gives its own agency and wisdom. She quietly observes a tenacious hummingbird with its precious nectar on “Mouth of a Flower,” and opines on “Redwoods (Anxious God)” that she’d “do anything to hear the redwoods talk.”
Heynderickx’s guitar compositions often convey a soothing lullaby-like quality, as in the ebbing waterfall of notes on “Jerry’s Song”, and her instrumentals are punctuated by subtle but powerful backing. A low cello grounds more than a few songs, and horns swell in the climax of “Spit in the Sink.” Her vocals are light and playful, ornamented with twists and turns, evoking a knowing glance and a wistful smile.
Against what Henderickx describes as a “consumer flood” vying for our time and attention, Seed of a Seed is a breath of stillness, a plea to get out of your own head, to look for gifts in the day-to-day, and to let moments thoroughly consume you. ❧
Deadly Women in The Maiden by Kate Foster
Hudson Warm, MC '27
Thelegend goes that in a billowing allwhite dress in November 1679, Lady Christian Nimmo was beheaded in Mercat Cross for killing her extramarital lover in a fit of rage.
She was one of 150 victims executed by the book’s titular Maiden—not the cloaked, pale-faced, purple-clad girl in the cover’s foreground, but the imposing, guillotine-like structure behind her.
A pre-French Revolution example of a beheading device, the Scottish Maiden decapitated criminal and political victims between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries with an iron ax blade prised with lead weights.
Scottish journalist and debut author Kate Foster centers her captivating revisionist novel The Maiden, deservingly longlisted for the Women’s Prize, around Lady Nimmo’s execution. The execution takes place in her village of Corstorphine on the outskirts of Edinburgh—a neighborhood that, to this day, wears the local legend in its sensationalized sycamore tree and the name of “White Lady pub.”
Lady Nimmo is one of our two narrators. The other is Violet: a vulgar but warm-hearted prostitute in central Edinburgh. The two are each other’s antitheses. Violet’s cheeks blush with a tacky pink—to simulate the look of pleasure, she says— while Christian, a socially polite lady, would opt for a nobler, paler complexion. Violet dwells in a brothel; Lady Nimmo, in Rose-
burn House. Both characters, like all seventeenth-century women, are at the mercy of men—a detail that feels grimly resonant in our post-Roe America.
Whether or not these women lived or breathed, Foster certainly speaks for the voiceless. The primary source Foster cites in her author’s note includes a man who calls the real Nimmo’s life a “godless” one. But, Foster thinks, it could not have been so simple. She must have been provoked, hurt, abused. All we know of Nimmo comes from the men in her orbit; Foster imagines a voice for the damned figure.
As a young woman burgeoning into her adulthood, Christian’s mother scrambles to arrange an advantageous marriage with a wealthy and worldly fabric merchant, who is repulsed by Christian’s body and the thought of consummating their union— for reasons never blatantly articulated. It is no surprise when she turns to her brooding, estate-owning uncle by marriage James Forrester. Their affair is desperate and uncomfortable to read, but drawn out propulsively. Still, no matter the laird’s tall love confessions and sweeping gestures, one woman cannot quench his fathomless need for intimacy: he habitually keeps lovers in an adjoined turret—a reveal that is skillful and slow but unsurprising, and the event that intersects Violet and Lady Christian.
The novel’s second paragraph already heralds Forrester’s contradiction: “The sheriff’s words clang, pious as the bells of St Giles’, all the way from the court back into the jail.” Foster establishes a dichotomy: the court, and the jail. The pious, and the criminal. The just, and the wretched. Yet the two concepts quickly muddle together and reveal a profound hypocrisy. Forrester is a leading figure of his town’s church but engages in deeds more nefarious than the women he rebukes.
Much of this story is an invention of Foster’s. The historical fiction novel allows the fiction to outweigh the history, but rather than weakening the narrative, the choice invites intrigue and imagination. The voices are modern, even anachronistic—“Time for another whisky!” Violet exclaims—but the emotions escape temporal bounds. Even if details are invented, the atmosphere certainly feels real, immersive. Here-
in lies one of Foster’s greatest successes: the reader can feel the sticky, lusty air of the brothel; the damp funereal grass; a sprawling lavish mansion and a claustrophobic jail cell.
The book includes a dual timeline. The first chapter is a breathless, desperate goodbye from Christian, positing the brutal end that will come full circle by the novel’s end. This prologue is useful: it establishes stakes and urgency. The same dual timeline snakes through the rest of the story, in chapters finished with broadsheet clippings. As the story continues, however, this later storyline proves itself superfluous and—towards the end of the novel, when the timelines converge—murky in its distinctions.
But the book’s impression was largely positive. In terms of pacing, whereas many novels find trouble in a muddled middle and develop a racing speed at the end, The Maiden’s center was strongest. The tension hung, thick and cloudy, through the throes of both women’s affairs—in anticipation of the crime the reader anticipated but had innumerable questions about.
Indeed, the crime acts as the centerpiece, the hinge, of the novel. It is a point of orientation for the length of the work, developing dimensions yet remaining an enigma. After the crime is committed, the culprit remains unclear for slow, drawn-out chapters. Even when the reader discovers the laird’s murderer, the mystery lingers. The question of who is eclipsed only by the question of why.
The story brims with sex; lust and sensuality are pivotal to the narrative’s unfolding. But the tone is more haunting than it is ever steamy. The book claims residence in a reader’s head for the weeks that follow: Violet’s raunchy dialogue, Christian’s moral ambiguity, and the final, murderous act. The characters are vivid and distinct, their gendered struggles historical yet timely— all culminating in a work of fiction that resonates with the contemporary woman. ❧
David Gilmour Searches for Solace on his "Luck and Strange" Tour
Dorothea Robertson, SY ’25 Herald staff
The day after a demoralizing Election Day, I found myself scaling the many escalators of Madison Square Garden to see David Gilmour, the former lead of Pink
Floyd. As I joined an overwhelmingly male, late-middle-aged crowd (typical long time devotees of Pink Floyd), I felt entirely out of place. But for two and a half hours, David Gilmour’s Luck and Strange tour offered exactly what I needed: a chance to forget the world outside and sink into his transportive, timeless music.
From my perch in the nosebleeds, I watched extravagant light and laser displays light up the arena while fog enveloped the stage. Gilmour was a dark, distant figure, barely discernible amidst the spectacle, but it hardly mattered. Gilmour’s music transcends the need for a close-up; it simply demands space to breathe. Sound reverberated through Madison Square Garden, and the arena was transformed into a cathedral, with Gilmour at the pulpit.
The show opened with “5 A.M.” and “Black Cat,” two gentle guitar- and keyboard-driven instrumentals that served as preludes rather than statements, their delicate guitar and keyboard lines stretching out like a morning yawn. Then came “Luck and Strange,” the title track of Gilmour’s latest album, which carries a sense of elegy beneath its stately chords. “When the curtain call is done,” Gilmour sang, his voice weathered but still resonant, “Morning always comes.” It was a quiet acknowledgment that life marches on, even when it feels like it shouldn’t.
The first set transitioned seamlessly into a medley of Pink Floyd classics from The Dark Side of the Moon: “Breathe,” “Time,” then “Breathe (Reprise).” It was here that the nostalgia hit hardest, the audience erupting in cheers at the first sound of those unmistakable chords. Pink Floyd’s music has always carried a subversive spirit—anti-war, pro-drug, and deeply skeptical of capitalism—and hearing these songs in 2024 against a backdrop of political disillusionment gave them fresh urgency. Yet Gilmour, ever the craftsman, let his guitar do most of the talking. His solos soared, mournful and transcendent, reaching every corner of the arena.
One of the evening’s highlights came in “Fat Old Sun,” a track from Atom Heart Mother that Gilmour has reimagined over the years as a vehicle for extended guitar improvisation. Starting with a warm acoustic strum, the song built to a psychedelic
crescendo, Gilmour’s electric guitar cutting through the layers of sound with piercing clarity. Every note felt deliberate, every bend and vibrato packing its own punch.
The set also made room for new material, including “Between Two Points,” a cover of the dream-pop song from The Montgolfier Brothers, which featured Gilmour’s daughter, Romany, on harp and lead vocals. Her ethereal voice brought an intimacy to the performance that contrasted beautifully with the grandeur of the arena.
After an intermission, The Great Gig in the Sky was a revelation, reimagined with four-part harmonies led by Louise Marshall’s gentle piano playing. Stripped of its original vocal improvisations, the arrangement felt contemplative, almost hymn-like, transforming the familiar into something strikingly new. This was followed by “A Boat Lies Waiting,” a tribute to late Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright.
Gilmour leaned heavily on material from his new album Luck and Strange, including “Scattered,” which closed the main set with another breathtaking solo. His newer songs, though less immediate than the Floyd staples, felt as if he were inviting us into his private musings on life and legacy. While the newer songwriting didn’t always reach the heights of his earlier work, the sincerity and craftsmanship were undeniable.
“Comfortably Numb” served as the encore and Gilmore’s final word on stage. As the band bathed the stage in stark white light, Gilmour’s solo erupted like a storm, its iconic peaks and valleys eliciting cheers from an audience that had waited all night for this moment.
As I shuffled out with the crowd, the reality of the world outside began to creep back in, but the music lingered, its echoes offering a strange kind of solace. Gilmour, now 78, may not have the vocal power of his younger days, and his newer songs may not carry the same cultural weight as The Wall or Wish You Were Here, but his guitar remains a voice unlike any other—one that speaks directly to the soul. ❧
Play 'Til You Can't No More
Miles Zaud, SY '26
Icouldhave left campus whenever, but why would I? There wasn’t much beyond its bounds except piney forest, and far away, a donut shop. If students did venture into the bear-infested woods, it was usually for a romantic tryst, though unwitting couples learned that not even true love could protect them from poison ivy, stimulating in all the wrong ways. Having deemed such romantic activities stupid, I kept within the smattering of Interlochen Arts Academy’s buildings—most of which did not interest me. The gym was full of objects too heavy to pick up. The cafeteria’s food looked the same when it went in as when it came out. And so, at almost any given point, I found myself inside of, leaving, or entering the practice rooms. This was no accident of campus design. The purpose of this boarding school was to make me a pianist.
Every fall, a fresh batch of kids serious about music arrives at Interlochen, a boarding arts high school in Northern Michigan— and that’s when those kids will discover that they are not in fact the wunderkind Mom claimed they were. The first thing Interlochen teaches these fresh-faced kids is that they might play some piano; maybe they can trot out some Suzuki or cough up “Moonlight Sonata,” but don’t expect the audience—an audience of older students—to clap for that sort of thing. I learned this lesson at fourteen, when I was shipped off to Interlochen for freshman year of high school, no larger than the single checked bag I lugged on the plane. The only way to progress was to follow the edict issued by
Interlochen’s piano faculty: practice four hours a day, and climb, slowly, out of ineptitude.
The practice rooms were in one big cell block of a building. Every time I entered, I was blasted with supercooled air from the threshold AC unit and the roar of about twenty piano pieces layered into a cacophony. Each practice room had a slitted window through which one could see all the other students in their respective practice rooms, creating a kind of panopticon. Room after room, hallway after hallway, students plunked away, cranked the metronome up a few clicks, scribbled on their sheet music, and plunked away some more. The best enforcer of the four-hour edict was neither the piano faculty nor my conscience, but the other students.
Few students made a habit of breaks, and those that did were made the subject of dinner-table gossip. Through the slit in my practice room door, I could see the less mentally fortified wandering around the hallway, perhaps trying to insert their pinky finger into
the holes in the perforated wall panels, just for the sake of doing something. It always seemed like a perfect fit, but stick your pinky in and you’d soon be contemplating a pinkiless life—an especially alarming prospect for the un-fingerinsured pianist.
What really pulled me back to the practice room, through Midwest thunderstorms or winter blues, was the thought of twenty pianos roaring on like a steam engine through the night, metronomes ticking faster and faster, while my own fingers idled. The urge to practice gnawed at me constantly and intensified the longer it went unaddressed. When I did practice, I felt a great release; I did not have to worry about anything else. Stepping into the hallway after a practice session, I’d feel the blissful relief of a sinner after confession (along with the self-assurance of knowing that I was really damn good). It was a heady cocktail.
The only thing that could tem-
room with a Steinway grand piano, which, if you know anything about Steinways, is a waste of a Steinway. Often this meant I would end up with some ancient honky-tonk whose keys were about as sensitive as a Whack-A-Mole machine. So one day, I made up my mind to kick Yue out. As soon as I knocked on his door, it was apparent that the vibes were as beachy as they
he wasn’t finished just yet, or that he wouldn’t be finished, ever?
From then on, I was consumed by a perverse desire for Yue to arrive and see me in his room, all settled in for what would certainly be a nice long time. To this end, I checked his room every time I went to practice, but chicanery be damned, Yue was there every time. I’d wave at him—it would
Yue wasn’t there, but sometimes the absurd goes unnoticed because it should not exist.
Under a soft-cover bass case, lying beneath the Steinway, lay what looked like a cadaver. The back of Yue’s skull made contact with concrete. His jaw was hyperextended, and his mouth gaped open like that of an unwitting bus-sleeper. The metronome was still ticking.
Designs by Alina Susani, ES '26
Come Home to God
Richie George, GH '27 Herald staff
The chorus drones a divine melody. Eyes flutter. Ears perk up. Incense fills the cathedral, from its stony corners to its highest ceilings. His love embraces the space. So God returns, again, to bless the forsaken. For churchgoers, the ceremony is a rebirth of sorts.
I float in a sea of entranced bodies, compelled by fervent supplication. My muttering fills the gaps between the priest’s call and the congregation’s response. Months have passed since I last entered any of God’s hallowed grounds. But I didn’t cry, squirm, or quiver. Instead, my mind turned towards men—transgressing this body, their body, and the body of divine law. My thoughts drowned out the chorus song. I couldn’t hear God’s voice.
I guess he made me stillborn. Now the priest approaches the pedestal for the sermon. He cracks the tome open, reciting the Book of Matthew. Each syllable steals into me, loosening lungs, lips, and limbs. The wooden pew manages to hold my body together.
I remember God’s touch again. It pierces through the hardness of good Christian teaching, tapping memories of my Nigerian Protestant upbringing. They steal me away from the sanctuary. I am suspended in the innards of my childhood church—a shoebox, not a cathedral. Images of my family populate my mind space. I watch this still life turn motion picture, as their likenesses jostle with the power of the Holy Ghost. But the chorus song forces my mind to return. Memory felt warmer than this place.
I stretch my neck to look up at Jesus. He’s wooden, instead of flesh. His body lies reposed on a bronze
cross. But his eyes can’t see my disdain. The pomp and circumstance is sickening. As the congregation recites the Creed, I whisper, why make all this majesty to worship the poorest of men? This cathedral was too empty to contain God’s love.
But we made God out of suitcases scattered in shoebox sanctuaries. His love spoke through the vocal cords of our screeching children’s choir. It was the lilt of the shoddy American accent we used for our white neighbors. It lined the pots of rice we ate after
what felt like a lifetime of ecstasy in a single service. God wasn’t as grand, or as beautiful, or as ostentatious as this place. We felt him, regardless. It was about his touch, not how we touched him.
But the priest’s sermon ends, and it’s time for communion. The nun enters the holy space. She passes the Bible to the priest. He kisses the Bible. Repeat: a kiss upon the Bible. The priest passes the Bible before the body and the blood. The congregation kisses the priest who kissed the Bible. The priest
beckons us to read. We must read the Bible to become Catholic. Pick up and read. Pick up and read. But my mother’s scolding overshadows his call. Their Bible is a knife. My hope, my fear, my love, and my hate spill out as tears. I unfurl, bereft of direction. I lay prostrate before the cross, parched for something called a future.
Suddenly, the priest commands our departure. But I couldn’t leave that place if I tried. My mind shattered in the sanctuary. It seemed the nun noticed, since she approached me after the service. It’s your choice to chart the next step, she says. Apparently, my Catholic faith could start today.
I flip through the Bible she hands me. If this Bible is a map of sorts, all I’ve journeyed through is the fullness of my mind, not the infinity of divine text. All I’ve known is sense at its most violent yet beautiful extremes. It’s all I have left besides a panoply of recovered images: human, divine, and otherwise. Now I make a soft kiss under moonlight, the matter of soliloquies. I turn a glance at ocean eyes into fiery want. I find the sinful sublime. It’s a cacophony of emotions, but it’s mine all the same. It sounds better than Gregorian chants.
I almost trip into oncoming traffic as I leave the cathedral. I know deep down that their Bible is not enough. I have to make something for myself, from myself. Catching my breath, I sprawl my tense body on a cold metal bench, like Jesus himself. I am overcome with sleep. Suddenly, I see an image of flickering candles around the sanctuary. My last thought: how do I become a body that not only flickers, but sparks? ❧
Design by Alexa Druyanoff, SY '26
On the Garonne and Other Things That Run
Madelyn Dawson, SM '25 Herald staff
Awound.Still cutting and cutting still. Green as long as I can see. Emerald on a straightaway. Emerald-colored tin foil. Crinkling under the white sun. A wound sliced deep and bleeding green. Green, how I want you green. / Green wind. Green branches.
A friend once told me that life could be divided into two phases: one before reading Romance Sonambulo and one after. Three years out of practice, I tried to translate it. I failed after the third verde. The word stretched across the front of my lips, taut like a rubber band pulled against my teeth. Somehow even that verde was unstable, shifting in meaning as it lolled through the poem.
***
Family has always also seemed to me a vague word. I am a daughter. I am not a sister, may never be an aunt or a mother. It was not just a family that drowned along the Garonne in 2018. A couple drowned. A mother, a daughter, a son, and a father. Another daughter drowned. These things are the same and they are not. They move in verde, changing with each translation.
Because I analyzed the texts. The rattling sound disrupts Plath's conflation between “womb” and “moon.” The iconicity of “rattles” creates a rolling voiceless alveolar stop that unsettles the assonance achieved by the interposition of “womb” and “moon.” Motherhood became sonic. I read somewhere that you should pitch your voice up when you talk to your child in the womb, that everything sounds lower from inside a sheath of your own pith and spongy flesh. I wrote it down, as if the possibility of re-
covering it a decade later might somehow answer all of my questions.
A few months later, it unraveled. I found myself in a country thousands of miles from my home, my only company strangers and near-strangers. One told me, don’t worry, you don’t have to play with my kids. Perfect, I didn't want to, and I smothered the thought as quickly as it arose. An exit sign, rose red and blinking in my face. I pretended I didn’t want it, but really, I just didn't want to want it, wanted to pretend that she said it for another person, so unlike me, who lacked that maternal instinct I so obviously possessed.
But when the time came, I took her words as gospel. When I sat in the pizzeria next to her, talking about grown-up things like cruise ships and religion, I would wince at the sound of a mommy that would pull her gaze. But I would smile big at her daughter when she took a heart-shaped smiley face sticker and planted it square in my palm. The wince was involuntary. The smile was not. Her kids were beautiful and she was beautiful and her husband was beautiful, the restaurant, the pizzas, the view of town from the window were all beautiful. But it did not feel natural. I failed the test. I head for the exit sign.
***
My mother told me once that when she was younger, her friend’s sister got pushed off the platform in front of a subway train. She used to tell me this to scare me out of wanting to go from Staten Island into Manhattan with friends when I was younger. I fucking hate the city she would tell me. It’s a cess-
pool. Every single time: fucking, then cesspool, then dead sister, like clockwork. Like the undiverted path of a river. Fucking at the source and a dead sister of a mouth.
Four years after the green wound took the family in France, Michelle Go died on the tracks in New York. Michelle was also a daughter. Michelle is the name of my mother, spelled the same way, with the double l. Died on the tracks. It’s strange how easy that is to say, how the sentence can be manipulated to avoid mentioning both the name of her attacker and the train itself. As if it was the subway track, that bitter gash, that was responsible. When I ride the L into Bushwick, I sometimes remember to think of her. How many times would she wait for you, / Cool face, black hair. / on this green balcony! There is nothing in this world more worth fearing than death, and yet. Yet a train barrels down its track, a boat sets itself on course down the Garonne. Such is the rush: unfettered, relentless, and forward. If I do have a daughter, I would want her to live forever. Or at least I would want it to feel something like forever. Forever in the post-Romance Sonambulo phase, until she too says My friend, I want to die / decently in my bed. / Of iron, if that's possible, / with blankets of fine chambray. ❧
On Splintering Wood and Falling Towers
Katya Agrawal, BR '27
Iexperience the world through images. If you catch a glimpse of my camera roll—forever at the cusp of its storage capacity—you will see collections of people lying on orange benches, shapes of shadow and sunlight, my father in his blue-and-white striped pajamas.
I call myself an “artist.” I am caught between my idealistic wish for artmaking to be a simple career path and my understanding that art does not ensure financial stability. My fantasy is that art will exist apart from the world of capitalist consumption.
It was with this thought in mind that I entered Galerie LeLong & Co. on 26th Street in Manhattan. Here, between September 5th and October 19th, Leonardo Drew mounted a solo exhibition, purposefully untitled. Though born in Tallahassee, Florida in 1961, Drew was raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He attended Cooper Union College and Parsons School of Design, and now builds installations from seemingly scrap material.
This fall, Drew split Galerie LeLong into two areas: a central installation space and a small room on the righthand side. Initially, the pieces of broken wood at the end of the hallway rendered the latter space invisible. As I walked into the installation, I found myself stepping on black-painted plywood skins and gazing at two massive towers of thinly torn sheets of the same material. As soon as the tallest of the two structures hit the ceiling, it curved over the viewer in a concave-down parabola. I felt enclosed, hugged by the wood. On the walls, Drew pastes more black plywood and other unrecognizable shapes of wood and plaster. It was as if the wall adornments constituted excess material that could not fit into the towers. Graphite tracings of these shapes covered the white walls. With these pencil lines,
Drew evoked outlines of brooms and hammers found on wood shop walls. I slowly began to assimilate into the ecosystem that Drew had created; black wood scraps permeated each plane of my sight. I was in Drew’s studio. I could smell sawdust, evidence of building. I had drifted into this intimate space of process—a space so often hidden from the viewing public. The work held me and asked my mind to wander.
A tour group on the other side of Drew’s towers, however, tore me from this fantasy. I cannot recall what the young guide and the elderly visitors were discussing. Regardless, the voice of the guide bombarded me with the acute awareness that I was standing in a store. The piece of art with which I had begun to engage in a relationship became impersonal. I was no longer in Drew’s studio. Fluorescent light bulbs and clean white walls announced themselves to me. I re-entered the gallery space.
Reflecting on my visit to the gallery that night, I realized that I never ventured to the other side of the
towers—the side that the tour group truly inhabited. To my subconscious self, the towers became objects that these elderly couples were purchasing. While I could not determine whether these individuals were art collectors, the institution of buying and selling that they seemed to represent felt separate from my lived experience. Perhaps my aversion to the capitalist enterprise of the gallery manifested itself, for me, in terms of what space I occupied.
The anxiety about consumption is central to the set-up of this installation. The gallery, in generic terms, is a public institution—open and free to enter. Simultaneously, it is a space in which to purchase art. Like any other gallery installation, Drew’s piece challenged the gallery’s commercial identity. His work most likely could not be sold and, even if it was marketable, it could never exist in the same way that it existed in Galerie LeLong, once moved.
It is common for artists to place installations in gallery spaces. Think James Turrell’s Night Passage or
Chris Burden’s Bed Piece, for example. In comparison, Drew imagines a different kind of intangibility into being. Turrell asserts the impossibility of holding light, and Burden creates an aura of discomfort. Drew, in contrast, stages a central tension between art-as-experience and artas-product. The massive quantity of wood suggests that this space is not simply designed for a single artist. Rather, it is a factory-like site of construction. It is a place to build and replicate those objects. Notably, this factory is not presently in use, leaving a post-apocalyptic site of industrialization standing in its place. The blackness of the plywood evokes charcoal after a fire. The wood is splintering and the towers are falling. Drew seems to fear the factory and wishes for its collapse.
The exhibition’s press release comments, “At once monumental and intimate in scale, [Drew’s] work recalls post-Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrialized past and can be interpreted as reflective of the current environmental crisis.” Even the title of the piece, Number 427, alludes to the impersonal and reproducible, qualities often antithetical to artmaking. Perhaps, then, Drew does not call into question the entire project of capitalism. Instead, Drew criticizes the contemporary culture of mass production and mass consumption— which contributes to greenhouse gas effusion. Installation art may ostensibly be a way to escape the craze of producing ‘stuff’ for the market.
Still, though Drew erects this small revolution, he also includes a secluded room in LeLong devoted to what appear to be ‘sellable’ objects. On the white walls hang square conglomerations of the splintering plywood. While the wood pieces are not uniform in shape, they come together to form aesthetically precise grids. What once was chaotic is now clean and systematized. I can imagine one of these elderly couples making an offer, musing about hanging the work above their dining room table. I cannot blame Drew for the production of these grids. After all,
his square works are strikingly beautiful, powerful in their own way. More importantly, Drew is a 21st-century artist who needs to make a living. I do not walk away from writing with any clarity; where I may exist within the art industry is murky. Like Drew, I am stuck in contradiction: I attempt to create the experience of art as environment amidst a society devoted to things. The photo of my father in his pajamas lives in my camera for my nostalgia; it is not an image for sale. ❧
PLAYLIST : What the Herald
Office Listened to on 11/07
By Herald staff
1. “Fear, Sex” by Magdalena Bay
2. “Movin’ About My Ways” by Josh Wawa
3. “META” by 2hollis
4. “Hero City” by Cars Get Crushed
5. “Dazed in the Shallows” by Stranger Ranger
6. “Eulogy for You and Me” by Tanya Davis
7. “Something on Your Mind” by Karen Dalton
8. “Praise Jah in The Moonlight” by YG Marley
9. “On the Run” by Kelela
10, “Echolalia” by Yves Tumor
11. “3rd Planet” by Modest Mouse
12. “Balloon” by Tyler, The Creator feat. Doechii
13. “Drown Me!” by Junie & TheHutFriends
14. “Distribution” by The Hellp
15. “Deadlines (Hostile)” by Car Seat Headrest
Half-Life and Death in Hōnaunau
Amber Nobriga, SM '27 Herald staff
Translation Note: ‘Ōlelo Hawaiʻi—the Native Hawaiian language—is a multivalent language in which meaning cannot be captured wholly by a single definition in English. The Yale Herald has decided not to italicize words in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and instead to italicize translations in English, following the translation policies of Kanaka Maoli scholar Noenoe Silva. Silva writes in the introduction of her seminal text Aloha Betrayed that she does not italicize Hawaiian words in text “to resist making the native tongue appear foreign in writing produced in and about a native land and people.”
The author has provided translations for the sake of clarity.
Tole koa trees curled in anticipation as the interlopers stalked closer. On December 24, 1956, Kenneth Emory and his team of student archaeologists arrived in Hōnaunau, Hawai‘i. Pushing past the obstructive foliage, they arrived at their next excavation site. It is documented in the excavation’s field notebook as Cave #13. Located just within the southern boundary of Hōnaunau, the cave overlooked waves that crashed into the side of a cliff. To enter the cave, the archeologists climbed from the kiawe trunk to the ledge of the cave, using the grooves in the lava rock to scale the rest of the way up.
noted fragments of volcanic rocks littering the cave floor and piles of rubble where the cave seemed to have collapsed into itself. Near the entrance, he and his fellow archaeologists uncovered the bones of a child: “It appears as though a very small baby (or babies) were wrapped in white tapa and then placed inside a gourd container.”
cave. Beginning in the 1890s, archaeologists used fluorine tests as a method of finding the relative age of bones by measuring their fluorine content in laboratories. Bowen’s diary notes insinuate that the children were removed from their burial and packed away to await this examination.
Robert Bowen, a member of Emory’s excavation team, took detailed records of the excavation. His field notebook documenting Hōnaunau is one of 40 notebooks that comprise Emory’s collection, which can be found in the archives of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Mu -
Bowen’s field notebook described the team descending deeper into the cave, recording that the floor was strewn with bones. “Some of the bones seem big enough to be those of an adult—vertebrae, pelvis, ribs, scapula, etc.,” Bowen noted. “There were at least 5 children (5 frontals)...One frontal may be that of an adult.”
Bowen printed the question “Fluorine test?” in neat letters toward the bottom of the gridded page: the only hint to what could have happened to the Kānaka Maoli / Native Hawaiian children residing in the
Hōnaunau was a puʻuhonua / sanctuary located on the west coast of Hawaiʻi Island. According to the stipulations of the kapu system, which dictated how Kānaka Maoli interacted with each other and the land they stewarded, people escaping oppression and war could shelter themselves from physical harm within the walls of Hōnaunau, and those who had committed transgressions could come to seek forgiveness and protection from persecution.
Hōnaunau’s sacredness is not innate, however. Places become puʻuhonua, meaning that this protection can be unraveled and disInterviews have been lightly edited for clarity.
turbed. Hōnaunau’s mana / spiritu al power was said to be tied to the bones of aliʻi / nobility that rested upon the land. Because of this, the act of moving the bones is tantamount to stripping Hōnaunau of its ability to provide sanctity—destroying what made it consecrated in the first place.
At the time of the excavation, the Washington D.C. Evening Star had published an article titled “Fugitive Tests Sanctity of Hawaiʻi City of Refuge,” which traced fugitive George Leroy Page’s escape from the South Carolina penitentiary and his attempt to seek protection and immunity within Hōnaunau. Although this pilgrimage was contentious, the public outcry over Page’s invocation of Hōnaunau as a puʻuhonua served as evidence in the ongoing battle between the place’s dual identities as both an active living sanctuary and a National Historical Park. While Hōnaunau’s national status as such since 1955 relegated the site to a memory of a puʻuhonua, Page’s flight destabilized this claim. Emory’s excavation was not an autopsy of an ancient society’s ruins but an incision into the pulsing artery of a people’s refuge.
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leaving two cities leveled and at least 200,000 civilians killed on impact. Radiocarbon dating arose as a parallel invention in 1946, fuelling Emory’s conquest of Native Hawaiian
burial sites five years later. Trans forming an uncountable amount of iwi kūpuna / ancestral remains into specimens, Kānaka Maoli bones were seized in the name of scientific discovery. Nearly 80 years later, the citizens of Nishiyama, a Japanese city located 3,000 meters from the original detonation point of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, still experience heightened levels of radioactive material in their soil. Hōnaunau offers yet another incarnation of nuclear fallout.
The leading archaeologist of the Hōnaunau excavation, Emory, began working at the Bishop Museum in the 1920s and studied under Herbert Ernest Gregory, the former head of Yale’s geology department and Director of the Bishop Museum. He then received his PhD in archaeology from Yale University in 1946. Upon his return, Emory continued his career in documenting Polynesian cultures, which primarily revolved around ethnographic research and anthropological interaction, and solving the “mystery” of Polynesian origin.
Emory had been in the fieldfor twenty years, establishing a career primarily through the exploitation of Indigenous communities, when
archaeology in the Pacific stagnated during World War II. “[Emory’s] brand of anthropology had gone out of date,” wrote Bob Krauss, in the 1975 biography Keneti: South Seas Adventures of Kenneth Emory. “There were no more sages from whom he could learn about the ancient religion. Suburbs were being built over the old temples.” With the subjects
of his research quickly dying out and the cultural landscape of Hawaiʻi rapidly developing, Emory was not sure how to progress.
But across the Pacific Ocean, nuclear scientists developed instruments of mass destruction and made an irretrievable discovery. Willard Libby—Chemistry Professor at the University of Chicago, Manhattan Project contributor, and 1960 Nobel Prize recipient—had discovered that the decay of carbon-14 isotopes could be used to estimate the age of organic material.
This discovery catalyzed the “radiocarbon revolution,” a boom in archaeological expeditions that inspired Emory to pursue the “mystery” of Polynesian origin once more. Revitalizing the fields of anthropology and archaeology, the advent of radiocarbon dating brought new and greater attention to Pacific anthropology. According to Krauss’ biography, in 1951, Emory collected a sample of charcoal from the Kuliʻouʻou cave on the island of Oʻahu, marking the first carbon dating of a Polynesian artifact. The
both corporeal and cultural—no longer posed an impediment to
pearance of Native Hawaiians and their intimacy with their ancestral knowledge became a convenient
teers had, in Krauss’ words, become ty-six burial caves by the end of the year. This desecration of Hōnaunau was only a part of the larger war
waged against sacred spaces across the island chain. The publicity and media coverage of these excavations had expanding repercussions, with residents feeling inspired to take on their own expeditions. As Krauss wrote, “Teachers stumbled over lava flows to see petroglyphs, squirmed through scratchy lantana and thorny kiawe to view Hawaiian ruins, and generally had a marvelous time.”
The Bishop Museum was the primary sponsor of Emory’s expeditions. As the largest museum in the state of Hawaiʻi, the Bishop Museum was originally established to care for the royal family’s collection of Hawaiian heirlooms. By the 1950s, it had expanded to researching and educating the public on natural and cultural Pacific history. However, as Emory was beginning his conquest of Indigenous sacred places, the Bishop Museum found itself in an extremely vulnerable position. After the director of the Bishop Museum, Te Rangi Hiroa, passed away in 1951, the institution was left without a leader or sufficient funds to maintain its current programs. In this dire time, the Bishop Museum called on Yale University for assistance, invoking the long-standing relationship that the Museum has had with the University.
Yale first associated itself with the museum in the 1920s when the dean of the Graduate School, Wilbur Cross, recommended a cooperative research agreement between the institutions to university President Arthur Twining Hadley. According to Cross, the Bishop Museum served as an invaluable “outpost in the Pacific” for Yale. As the museum was considered an “affiliated part of Yale University,” the institutional ties between the Bishop Museum and Yale were both financial and structural. Correspondences between Te Rangi
Hiroa and Yale representatives in the years before his death indicated that the university provided the museum with an “annual appropriation of $8,000,” according to a letter in the Yale University Manuscripts & Archives. Additionally, in the inter-institutional agreement, it was stipulated that “the director of the museum should be a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University—appointed by the trustees of the museum but paid by the university.” To ensure the longevity of the relationship between the two institutions, the Yale-Bishop Museum Committee was established.
John Murdock, a representative of the Yale-Bishop Museum Committee, traveled to Hawaiʻi in 1953 and made the institutional changes necessary to prevent a proposed merger with the University of Ha -
waiʻi. This ensured the continuation of the museum’s current programs, including Emory’s excavations. Part of this endeavor included setting up the Bishop Museum Association, the institutional body responsible for fundraising that was led by the famed musician Ernest Kaʻai at its inception. Through these changes, the Yale-Bishop Museum Committee, and consequently, Yale University became inextricably intertwined with the excavations of Hōnaunau.
In this way, nuclear fallout does not disappear but instead disperses. It remains in the soil and embeds itself in the fabric of a place. It spreads to people, forever changing the chemical composition of their cells that are passed down from generation to generation. Foreign memories coil permanently in the most fundamental and intimate elements of our existence. In this respect, Hōnaunau resides in my body. As a Native Hawaiian, understanding this event becomes understanding my origins.
Daniel HoSang, professor of American Studies and faculty advi -
sor to the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, believes that the desecration of Hōnaunau burials was “not an outlier.” Eugenics and scientific racism are embedded in the genealogies of the academy. The methodologies existing before World War II that were used to substantiate the superiority of the white race remained largely unchanged and unquestioned after the war. Therefore, the afterlives of eugenics still exist within these disciplines and institutions today. HoSang explained that the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and World War II illuminated the consequences of scientific racism. “Even though there might be some assumption that there was a kind of liberal consensus against the [concept of race]…[these methodologies] are part of the regular practice. And those practices extended from work in botany and ecology to anthropology,” said HoSang.
“That was how you practiced science—you gathered human specimens.”
Systems such as these reduce casualties of fallout, namely Indigenous bodies and spaces, to necessary byproducts of scientific study. “In the name of scientific discovery, you can take whatever you want, you can categorize it—it’s all for the greater good,” HoSang said. “That is the norm.” Through this lens, Emory’s exploitation of Hōnaunau must be viewed in conjunction with the institutions that perpetuated these norms and shaped his methodologies. His actions represent the teachings of Yale’s archaeology department and the wider interweaving narratives of eugenics and scientific racism that persist within American academia.
As both a student and a Native Hawaiian who experiences the lasting effects of Yale’s presence in Hawaiʻi, the path towards achieving reconciliation and restitution
can often feel unclear. HoSang believes that simply existing within the institution is not enough. “I think that’s a kind of convenient story because it doesn’t require you to do anything else. And it also doesn’t acknowledge the interest the institution has in incorporating lots of different people as a way to legitimize its innocence,” he said. The increased representation of underserved communities in Yale’s student body is not evidence of systemic change. Yale cannot absolve itself of its complicity in Indigenous violence by merely allowing Indigenous students inside its walls.
Since the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the Yale Peabody Museum still holds the ancestral remains of at least 700 Indigenous people, with 53% of these remains available for repatriation. Over the past 34 years, according to Peabody Museum Repatriation Registrar Jessie Cohen, the museum has repatriated the remains of 460 ancestors to over 38 federally recognized tribes. In a response to the Yale Herald , Cohen wrote that recently, the Peabody Museum added two new staff members whose responsibilities are solely dedicated to repatriation.
The Yale Peabody Museum must comply with new federal regulations instituted by the Biden administration in January 2024, mandating tribal consultation and a five-year deadline to update inventories on human remains and Native American objects. Using a regional consultation approach, the Peabody Museum has completed consultations for ancestors and funerary objects from Florida, Maine, and parts of California. Full inventories of collections containing ancestral remains have been completed in six states, with an additional six states inventoried between 5090%. In response to recent federal regulations, the Peabody Museum claims it has initiated consultations
with 45 federally recognized tribes. “We remain dedicated to working with tribal communities to reunite ancestors with their loved ones,” Cohen wrote to the
Although HoSang acknowledg es the importance of speeding up this process of returning ancestral remains, he argues that an equally important inquiry is interrogating “what all these things are doing here and what were the assump tions behind it.” In this way, repa triation is not the end of repair: the violence of archaeology still exists within museums and academic in stitutions in the form of unques tioned histories. Without critically interrogating these institutional pasts, affected communities are un able to articulate the damage they have sustained, effectively hinder ing the path to recovery.
This path is long and winding. When Emory was asked to com ment on Page’s attempt to reinvoke Hōnaunau’s status as a puʻuhonua, he claimed that Page was “150 years too late,” and “[Hōnaunau’s] protection ended when the Hawaiian [kapu] system was abolished in 1810.” Emory conceived of Hōnaunau the same way he conceived of the children resting within Cave #13—dead. He thought Hōnaunau and the bones resting within its caves existed merely as a relic of a long-destroyed belief system, culture, and people.
The atomic age began with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and continued with the excavations of Hōnaunau. It is still unclear how it will end. In unveiling this end, Emory’s claims about Native Hawaiian existence may be denied. In Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions, R. P. Turco, O. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan imagine this future as a global nuclear war. They theorize that upon the impact of multiple nucle -
ar warhead. Her hunger, fueled by rage and vengeance, will rain down on the civilizations of the world as nuclear waste. Her mouth will en gulf the world, and we will fall into the dark expanse of her stomach.
Designs by Madelyn Dawson, SM ’25
Windows to Climb Through: Building Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale
Daniel Yim, ES '28
The building hid in plain sight. No signage marked the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration department’s space at 82-90 Wall Street, and only a granite breezeway distinguished the building from its neighbors, Stoeckel Hall and Common Grounds. Apart from that and a few signs marking Yale property, unsettling reminders of the University’s low-profile incursions into New Haven spaces, very little announced the department’s presence. Unsure if I’d found the right place, I hesitated outside for several minutes before stepping in.
I took a narrow staircase up to the second floor, where a portrait—one of a girl wearing a foil covering, torch in hand—greeted me, a decolonial spin on Lady Liberty: already evidence of customization in a new space. From there, I wandered over to the office of Assistant Professor of ER&M Tarren Andrews (Bitterroot Salish, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), a scholar of the early medieval North Atlantic and one of the department’s latest hires. On her door hung a bulletin board, where she pinned poetry: “This is a difficult place / to hold ground,” reads Jenny L. Davis’s “Gifts Between Ghosts,” inches away from an Anglo-Saxon beekeeping charm. Inside her office, unlikely shelfmates packed her bookcases: books on the Vikings stood alongside Sarah Hernandez’s We Are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition, a work recovering the literary record of Oceti Sakowin (formerly known as the Sioux) women. Her dog, a gentle Great Danoodle,
greeted me even before she did.
“Brecon!” Professor Andrews called. She’d named her dog after the Brecon Beacons, a Welsh mountain range. I found similar signs of Professor Andrews’s intersectional scholarship everywhere in her office decor: I let my gaze linger on an illuminated manuscript on her wall, just beside a photograph of a Native dwelling.
Sunlight streamed through two floor-to-ceiling windows, warming the room on an otherwise chilly day. Brecon trotted up to where I sat opposite Professor Andrews and began to curiously sniff my arm as if examining a stranger in his territory. I laughed, catching sight of a Manjula pothos’s leaves snaking toward the shelves below. In her freedom to decorate, I could tell that a new office—like any new room—meant a new energy, a psychological as much as a physical change.
To understand the significance of the building in the wake of widespread protest, institutional neutrality, and a national shift toward curricular conservatism, we must look back nearly six decades to the ER&M’s origins in student resistance. Student demands for ethnic studies began with the Third World Liberation Front, a student-activist coalition that formed at San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the University of California, Berkeley in early 1968. Following the November 1968 dismissal of SFSU’s George Murray—a Black graduate student, English lecturer, and the Black Panther Party’s Minister of Education—the Third World Liberation Front struck for an ethnic studies program, complete with hiring power and total control over its curriculum. Its global, “Third World” vision cut across racial and national boundaries, part of the Front’s broader anti-imperial ambitions. Strikers at UC Berkeley rallied for a similar program, though they pushed for a “Third World College” rather than simply a department within the existing institution. According to the original proposal, the “college” label would
grant the ethnic studies program necessary autonomy—without it, a “white majority” could control and sanitize any attempt at a “Third World studies” program. Violence erupted through both schools: Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, called in the National Guard to defuse strikes at Berkeley. Helicopters dropped tear gas canisters on protesters, leading to mass arrests and hospitalizations.
SFSU and UC Berkeley responded to this pressure by creating an ethnic studies college and department, respectively, in 1969, and the movement spread eastward. After other schools in the University of California system, the University of Washington, and the University of Colorado Boulder adopted similar programs, Yale founded its own.
The push for ER&M to become an official program at Yale began in 1992, after Yale students passionate about decolonizing the University’s humanities curriculum approached Michael Denning, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies, with a student-designed Asian American Studies syllabus. As the number of proposed curricula expanded from one to six, Yale began to reach out to scholars for part-time professorships, positions that developed into more formal appointments as interest grew. In 1998, along with designation as a double major, Yale gave its ethnic studies program a name: Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.
“Ethnicity” and “race” sound somewhat similar, perhaps more in line with the “ethnic studies” or “critical race theory” at the forefront of familiar debates in public education. Their connection to “migration” may seem tenuous at first glance, but including “migration” globalizes the major’s concerns. ER&M imagines and grapples with indigeneity, ethnicity, nationality, and race around the world, inevitably leading to questions surrounding how entire populations move, change, and diversify. In this way, ER&M calls for an interdisciplinary approach, one that also considers how “disciplines”
themselves emerge as products of empire in academia.
ER&M’s interdisciplinary (maybe antidisciplinary?) spirit, however, received little attention from Yale. ER&M acted as diversity insurance against negative publicity, and the University often relegated it to the margins of its academic landscape—a neglect that took on a geographic dimension as much as a scholarly one. Before moving onto Wall Street, some of the faculty worked out of a few offices at 35 Broadway. Resembling a warehouse, the former program building sits behind Toad’s Place, an active nightclub. Sandwiched between that and the Off Broadway Theater, the building’s near-inaccessible location spoke volumes about Yale’s attitude toward the program: even scouring Google Maps produces no images of its actual entrance.
Given that most instructors also held joint appointments with other departments, many chose to work in separate, more appealing spaces. Only now can faculty work alongside each other—a welcome change, and a crucial one, at least for Professor Andrews. “At any institution, having a dedicated space is a signal of institutional enfranchisement. I think that’s hyper-true at a place like Yale, where space is at such a premium,” she said.
Though the difference might seem minor at first, ER&M’s lack of departmental status stunted the major’s growth for years. Designation as a department comes with a host of privileges, most notably hiring power—up until recently, Yale required ER&M to appoint faculty jointly, with no slots exclusively for the major. Most problematic of all, the lack of a dedicated space signaled the University’s apathy toward ER&M’s future—a source of frustration for many of the program’s faculty. Especially given ER&M’s increasing popularity with undergraduates, questions surrounding departmental independence and hiring power grew more urgent by the year.
Tensions peaked in March 2019, when 13 professors withdrew their
labor from the program, citing a lack of administrative support for ER&M’s work. ER&M’s lack of departmental status meant faculty from other disciplines “volunteered their labor” to support its work—a model “unsustainable” for ER&M’s future, as professor of American Studies and thenchair Alicia Schmidt Camacho put in a press release. It took an outpouring of support from student protestors and scholars nationwide, many from fellow Ivy League institutions like Brown and Dartmouth, for the University to re-evaluate ER&M’s departmental status. With the review came plans for five new tenure-track positions: in fall 2022, Professor Andrews joined the program, along with Hi‘ilei Hobart (Kanaka Maoli),who teaches Indigenous Food Sovereignty (ER&M 316), Deb Vargas, who teaches Latine feminist and queer studies (ER&M 356), and Leigh-Anna Hidalgo, who teaches Latinx studies. Most recently, Gana Ndiaye joined ER&M as an Assistant Professor, teaching Race, Religion, and Transnational Mobilities (ER&M 444).
Even now, several victories into a decades-long fight, uncertainty lingers: protests in defense of ethnic studies erupt regularly at colleges nationwide, and legislative controversies over the field’s pedagogical necessity rage even in the most progressive states. When conservative challenges to its scholarly merit threaten its place at Yale and beyond it, ER&M’s status now depends on more than any defense the department can sustain alone.
Though Professor Andrews began work as a postdoctoral researcher in 2022, years after ER&M gained its independence, the program’s history echoed through our interview. Questions of space came hand-in-hand with questions of institutional recognition and Yale’s attitude towards ER&M students and faculty.
Space signals support: not only an acknowledgment of presence, but a sign of approval, maybe even appreciation. Moving into its own space puts
ER&M on equal footing with the older, more singular disciplines it draws from—literature, history, sociology, and more. At the same time, moving into a new space also raises weightier questions surrounding land use and dispossession. “Yale [is] a ‘land grant’ institution, but we are on land that Yale has because of Indigenous disenfranchisement and genocide,” Professor Andrews said. “In that sense, it puts the question of ‘land’ in a complicated relationship not only with ER&M but with the institution at large.”
While participation in Yale’s own colonial legacy further complicates the paradox at the heart of the department’s goals—to challenge the University while also integrating itself into it—Professor Andrews considers ER&M’s self-awareness one of its greatest strengths. In fact, she describes this tension as “productive,” sharpening the department’s ability to both reimagine and work within the University’s power structures. Spatial enfranchisement only streamlines this process, enabling the department to conduct this critical work with greater ease.
New offices also come with more practical benefits. Most offices at ER&M’s previous home, 35 Broadway, lacked windows—a striking, unappealing contrast to the new building’s glass exterior. Adequate lighting, far from a convenience, proved crucial to so much more than the program’s rigor. Scholarship, though an intellectual project, demands that a healthy body support it, and what seems like an inessential ergonomic comfort contributes so much to productivity and general well-being. Beyond these necessities, however, Professor Andrews sees spatial unity—as simple as sharing an office—as essential for developing a departmental culture. “What does it mean to have an office?” she asked me, drawing attention to a reality so mundane that I’d often missed its radicality. Not just an office—what could it mean to share a space? To work across the hall from a colleague,
to physicalize a departmental or disciplinary association?
“I’m on leave this semester, but I can still come here and join a rigorous, compassionate intellectual community even while I’m gone. I’m still interested in this question of what it means to be in a space together, as a department,” Professor Andrews said. Literal proximity helps form and enrich a departmental identity—even when one spends time away from it.
Describing these connections as “unnameable,” she pointed out how the possibility of sudden encounters could enrich her work. Trips to the printer and stops by the coffee machine turn into chances to tap into an intellectual community: “These small moments you can’t quantify, that you can’t put in a proposal for what it means to have a space—these add so much to ER&M’s intellectual rigor.”
***
For Deb Vargas, Associate Professor of ER&M and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale’s institutional support signals respect for ER&M’s origins in student activism— the work of young people who wanted to reshape what higher education looked like. I spoke with Professor Vargas in an interview just a few doors down from Professor Andrews’s office. Both co-taught Introduction to Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (ER&M 200) in the spring of 2024, and I noticed a near-telepathic harmony between their academic philosophies, even in interviews I conducted separately.
“It’s important to see these programs as the result of young people’s charge to the academy—a call to universities to open up to new methods, alternative histories, new approaches to thinking about power,” Professor Vargas said.
Professor Vargas’s diverse research interests engage a range of fields: queer studies, feminist studies, Chicana/x, and Latina/x Studies—work that inhabits both the core and periphery of what ER&M seeks to accomplish. In her office, framed posters of Latinx
musicians, the largest one of Selena, the “Queen of Tejano Music,” rest against the wall. On her door, an inverted image of South America that reads “Another world already exists”— perhaps interrogating the Eurocentric latitudinal biases even cartographers act on—occupies the poster’s center, a message bolder than the brushstrokes that outline it. From her door frame hangs a chain of origami cranes, patterned according to the Palestinian tricolor. “When I think about space, it’s important to see that genealogy [of students], the possibility of transformation in academia,” Professor Vargas told me.
Traditions of student resistance and calls for curricular reform also sustained ER&M at key moments in its history: from the start, undergraduates played a crucial role in shaping the curriculum they hoped to study. Even following the faculty resignations, student and alumni protests—most notably at a gala dinner for the Asian American Student Alliance’s semicentennial conference in 2019—proved instrumental in prompting administrative review. Five years later, I am struck by how students—who belong to the institution they aim to reform— continue to reshape Yale from within.
The ER&M building is the latest victory in a fight spanning decades, rather than just a solution to a new problem. Each square foot the department has won draws on a legacy of resisting academic marginalization.
At the same time, Professor Vargas believes in treating ER&M’s project as not just historical, but also current and ongoing. The building marks a major milestone for the department, but the push for recognition continues: “We’re very familiar with historical moments that seem very dark and that have also produced the most beautiful literature, art, and theory. In addition to teaching this work, it’s also critical for us researchers to continue producing new questions and theories.”
Such moments demand mobilization—an uncomfortable and inglorious duty, only heroic in hindsight. In
this sense, ER&M’s ambitions extend beyond academia. Professor Vargas considered these moments opportunities for beauty—at least, opportunities to find meaning in ugliness. At the same time, I couldn’t help but also think of art that disgusts and scholarship that horrifies, all the more necessary in a historical moment so set on polarization yet so afraid to take a side. ***
ER&M’s new building arrives in the wake of increasing public scrutiny toward freedom of expression in higher education. On October 30, 2024, Yale President Maurie McInnis released a statement recommending that faculty “refrain from issuing statements concerning matters of public, social, or political significance.” She declined to comment on Donald Trump’s reelection in the following week. Her removal from external politics continues a broader trend among peer universities in the wake of the Israel–Hamas war: hours before President McInnis’s email announcing a Committee on Institutional Voice, the University of Pennsylvania’s interim president announced similar intentions. Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Connecticut, among other schools, began reviewing comparable policies as well. Though phrasing varies across institutions, “neutrality”—a label that originates in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report—underlies almost every public comment. Oddly enough, the original Kalven Report intended to open up space for dissent and contrarianism, rather than refuse responsibility for it.
Yale’s new stance—or lack thereof—on what breaks out in the “real world” feels complacent, even cowardly, post-election. Now more than ever, the University needs to stake out clear positions and priorities to support the community it houses, educates, and oftentimes intrudes on. Yes, President McInnis’s communiqué clarifies that the University intends to comment on public issues pertinent to its mission, but the institution’s silence on other is-
sues complicates this selectivity. Especially for ER&M, whose scope covers topics both within and outside the policy’s protections, the announcement guarantees no easy future.
Trump’s reelection lends these uncertainties much greater urgency. Trump’s campaign—and the policy proposals it outlines as part of Project 2025—confirm his intentions to continue his attacks on free speech; pull funding from “divisive” curricula; and resuscitate the widely discredited, ahistorical 1776 Commission that pushes for reductive, “patriotic” scholarship at the expense of scholarly integrity and at-risk public schools. What exactly a second Trump administration means for ER&M, Yale, and private institutions at large also remains unclear, especially following the 2023 repeal of affirmative action in college admissions. Recognizing the precarity of the department’s newfound independence, Professor Andrews considers the power shift a reason for concern.
“We often put departments like ER&M under the microscope for such questions because of the perception that ER&M and DEI are one and the same,” she said. Conflating the two diminishes and corporatizes the intellectual standards that ER&M holds itself to, reproducing a logic reductive of ER&M’s confrontational mission. On top of this, it risks dismissing ER&M as performative rather than systemic—a label especially damning as universities turn to nonintervention for relief from protest.
With academic freedom under fire across the board, institutional neutrality—or institutional silence—seems contrary to the University’s mission. On one hand, academic freedom demands a kind of neutrality: professors produce scholarship for public, not private interests. Their work, rather than benefiting a politician or a corporation, benefits the public. In exchange, the public permits academics the privilege of isolation. ER&M, however, proves that this separation is impossible, and that public engagement cannot come from a place of isolated
neutrality. “Institutions are made up of actors, and those actors are not neutral,” Professor Andrews said, pressing for not just academic freedom, but scholarly responsibility.
Even with this in mind, both Professor Andrews and Professor Vargas find reasons to believe in ER&M’s vision. At the very least, they intend to maintain a cautious optimism: “[The] election certainly gives us an opportunity to revisit everything—the ways we teach, what the vision of our program will be, our accountability to communities outside of Yale,” Professor Vargas said. Questions that the incoming presidency already raises—regarding immigration, historical amnesia, and nationalism in a multiethnic world— call for the expertise that ER&M, for decades, has provided.
Though a setback in some regards, both professors consider the election a reason to fight even harder for a “multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial” world that the program espouses and the scholarship that advances it. Professor Andrews, a language revitalization specialist as well as an Indigenous Studies scholar, sees President McInnis’s new policy as an opportunity to shift institutional priorities: “We sometimes rely too much on language to do the work of solidarity, when in fact solidarity—while it starts with language—is fundamentally an act of labor.”
Pledging in words means nothing without action. Just as President McInnis’s report takes care to mention, Professor Andrews stressed the difference between “neutrality” and “silence.”
“Even if neutrality is just silence,” she said, “the institution can still take the work of support in multiple directions, even if it doesn’t say anything about doing that work.” Labor happens with or without a public announcement. Especially for ER&M, scholarship extends beyond the academic vacuum and participates in a world external to Yale: community organizing, public advocacy, and awareness of a space that ER&M both borrows and
creates—these all remain at the forefront of the department’s mission.
***
Several days after the interview, I spent hours familiarizing myself with the space I wanted to write about, switching locations every hour or so. I memorized the emergency floor plan. I wrote bits of an overdue essay in an empty seminar room. Just before dark, I stopped by Senior Administrative Assistant and Registrar Tatjana Cisija’s office and noticed a sign in her window: “Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.” It was the first departmental identification I’d found on the entire floor. Marking presence, existence despite erasure—it was a more radical assertion than I’d ever given any window graphic credit for.
It took me back to Professor Andrews’s office decor, marks of an academic niche that ER&M occupies. Only in this space could I expect antique copies of the New Oxford American Dictionary to touch covers with Paul D. Kroeber’s The Salish Language Family, both at home even in different languages. With a location to return to—at once a home and a landmark— comes a sense of belonging, itself a form of permanence.
“Now that we have this space, hopefully we’re harder to get rid of? If a department doesn’t have a space—” Professor Andrews stopped, as if contemplating the possibility. “Well, once it ceases to exist on paper, it ceases to exist entirely.”
It’s easy to feel cynical. Professor Andrews, however, wants to believe in space: expanses to share, not necessarily to occupy; staircases that reveal more stories, narrative as well as architectural. It helps to think of “building” as a gerund, not just as a noun: always in progression, not quite complete. Between “building” and “built” entire histories change hands. Like the verb that never finishes, ER&M looks upward. Even while creating space, it acknowledges the space that it still needs to fill. ❧
CULTURE
Restaurant Days
Tina Li, PC '27
They are golden and they are lucky. They are dragons, cities, and palaces. They pack up General Tso’s Chicken in plastic rectangular containers and white rice in white boxes. For low costs, bags are filled with big portions, ready for pickup in 10 minutes or delivery in 20. Most likely, on the sides of those bags is emblazoned, several times over and perhaps slanted or wiggly: “HAVE A NICE DAY.”
Americanized Chinese restaurants have always been both a victim and an upholder of stereotypes. In some extreme cases, I have witnessed accusations of cat hair on our food while working at my parents’ restaurant or people mocking our workers’ broken English, but to a certain extent, traditional Chinese takeout restaurants typically stick to the tried and true. Most of them prefer the same takeout box designs, their walls feature similar dim LED displays of food, and their menu items are numerous and alike.
Nice Day Chinese, a modern take on Chinese takeout, aims to champion the ideal of Americanized Chinese food—affordable, quick, savory—while embracing the stereotypes. The name itself plays upon the classic takeout bag, and its mascot is a silhouette of the golden fortune cat that presides
over Chinese takeout restaurants, persistently waving its paw.
The newly-opened New Haven branch of Nice Day Chinese, located on Elm St. by Tomatillo and Maison B. Café, succeeds Ivy Wok, a takeout restaurant that for two decades provided warm comfort food for students after late night studying or partying at frat row. Yong Zhao, M.ES ’08, GRD ’14, M.Phil.’15, and Wanting Zhang, M.ES ’11, husband-wife CEOCOO duo of Nice Day Chinese, praised Ivy Wok as one of their favorites when they were graduate students at Yale.
Where Ivy Wok was dim and cozy inside, with humble orange walls and worn-in black chairs, Nice Day Chinese takes a step into the future: shiny white tables, a disco ball reflecting onto a cartoon mural, and a glowing red LED display of their cat mascot. Walking inside, their minimal and modern aesthetic distances the restaurant from tired stereotypes of Chinese takeout. Depending on the time of day, pop, techno, or jazz filters through the overhead speakers as the staff—mainly New Haveners—prompts you to order with a QR code.
With four branches and a fifth opening soon in West Haven, Nice Day Chinese was established in re-
action to the decline of traditional Chinese takeout restaurants across the country, an optimistic attempt to preserve—and even proliferate—Chinese takeout as a staple in American culture. The children of Chinese immigrants are growing up to attend university and secure well-paying jobs, leaving their parents to retire and sell their restaurants.
Zhao and Zhang met at Peking University in Beijing, before coming to study at the Yale School of Environment; on campus, they met co-founders and received a startup grant to launch Junzi Kitchen. While he makes the directorial and marketing decisions, Zhang is in charge of executing them. “She’s the best multi-tasker I know,” Zhao said.
Their menu consists of traditional Americanized Chinese comfort food—General Tso’s chicken, fried rice, and chow fun—but also dim sum and more elaborate dishes like golden fish filet and soup dumplings. Their takeout bags can be spotted all around campus, and on a weekend night, wait times to get a seat can be up to an hour long. “Our design for Nice Day is: imagine a perfect local Chinese restaurant. So a perfect local Chinese restaurant is very local, which means American or local Chinese
immigrants will find their food in the same place,” Zhao said.
The first time I visited, they invited me to join their dinner— steaming plates of egg and tomato, noodles, and beef. While we ate, Zhao showed me a video of the automated kitchen they are piloting at the Brooklyn Nice Day Chinese branch: a complex system of mechanical grabbers, pots, and tubes that prepares food and cleans up after itself. The kitchen was clearly efficient and ingenious, yet I was struck with unease by how the automation might forgo authenticity and intimacy. I thought back to my parents’ restaurant and how my mother was friends with all our regulars, who came every day to buy a lunch combo and catch up with her.
Zhao was quick to object: “It's always easy to romanticize people's work, especially local handwork. But if you're the one who does the handwork, then there’s nothing to romanticize.”
I remember Sundays in my parents’ restaurant, hunched over a dozen boxes of freezing cold shrimp, peeling with numb and reddened fingers before going back to eighth grade the next day. I used to overload my schedule at school
to avoid working, and my parents spent so much time at the restaurant that the smell of chicken wings permanently lingered on their clothes. Yet, however stressful and grueling, our work at the restaurant defined their lives and my childhood. To see it replaced by machinery chilled the warmth of my nostalgia.
But Zhao’s gaze was steely. I wonder if he was thinking of his family.
“It’s not by choice, it’s sacrifice. You can’t romanticize sacrifice.”
***
Among the Chinese diaspora, Fuzhounese people are praised for their tenacity and sacrificial hard work as restaurateurs. The reason an inordinate number of Chinese restaurants are owned by Fuzhounese immigrants, Zhao explained to me, is due to the “civil microfinance system” that they have established. Fujian, a mountainous and seaside province, has very little farmland for people to work. Villagers, in order to support their families, borrow and lend from each other to immigrate to America and start up businesses.
“I have so much admiration for Fuzhounese restaurateurs—
they are so hard-working,” Zhang said. “They brought Chinese food to everybody in America.”
I never thought of my Fuzhounese parents as “restaurateurs”—the term seemed to apply only to owners of Michelin-Star restaurants who fret over aesthetics. The only plating my family’s restaurant cared about was how much white rice and beef and broccoli could be squished into a plastic container. But I realize now that it was an art, a balancing act: my parents raised two children and worked 80-hour weeks all while maintaining stock and cleanliness and staff.
The traditional Chinese takeout model is inefficient, labor-intensive, and plain back-breaking. Oil burns mark my parents’ arms, and my mom suffers from varicose veins in her legs; the doctor’s only prescription for her was to work less. Even if Americanized, cooking Chinese cuisine is not easy, and many takeout restaurants feature menus with hundreds of dishes that chefs must memorize. Owners hide a lot of their costs in overtime work and even child labor, Zhao said. “It’s just not gonna make money.”
Design by Alexa Druyanoff SY ’26
However, Zhao emphasized the need for these types of humble takeout businesses. American consumers typically have never encountered traditional Chinese food, he said, and the Americanized Chinese restaurants are the “entry point.”
“Our food is the most important cultural communication: it’s not political,” Zhao said. “In today's world, America needs more inspiration. . . . China, as one of the main competitors of America, will provide not only competition but also inspiration.”
With the relationships between Chinese immigrant restaurateurs and their customers poised to disappear, the brand trust of a chain restaurant may have to replace the trust of intimate friendships. “It’s not going to be 100% replaced. A lot of emotion will be lost,” Zhao said. “It’s a hard exchange, but it’s inevitable. Better than nothing.”
I left the restaurant after we finished eating, but not before Zhang handed me two coupons and a light-hearted offer for my parents to work there when they close down shop.
Over October Break, I brought my family to meet Zhao at the Nice Day Chinese branch in Brooklyn. I wanted to see the automated kitchen in person and also thought that my mom and relatives, always on the hunt for new business ideas, would be interested.
Zhao took us around the restaurant, which had no dining space, only a kitchen staffed by a little army of machines. As orders rushed in online, metal grabbers pulled ingredients from the fridge and dropped them into big rotating pots, which began mechanically stir-frying vegetables and meats as tubes fed in sauces and oil. A Chinese chef was present as the sole supervisor, occasionally pressing some buttons or preparing ingre-
dients while a local worker packed up orders for pickup and delivery. They were calmly handling what seemed like an intense dinner rush—something that would take six people and buckets of sweat at my parent’s restaurant.
My family was fascinated by the contraptions, recording them at work and peering into the tubes and machinery. Sharing plates of Hunan Beef and noodles, Zhao answers their questions about profit margins, marketing strategies, and the future of Chinese takeout restaurants.
“We cannot just put ourselves in a box. We cannot just stay in history,” Zhao said to me back in New Haven. “I have the opportunity to change the narratives of Chinese food in America, to become the first public Chinese food company in America. To become the most important touch point of Chinese culture—this is a very historical point that I can try and become the helm of.”
Perhaps Zhao is a tech apologist. But the old guard is retiring, and someone—or something—needs to take up the mantle. Nostalgia-inclined people like me might occasionally miss the rustic charm of hole-in-the-wall and family-ran restaurants, but as Zhao said, “it’s not romantic, it’s hard work.”
Amidst generational shifts, Nice Day Chinese promises to continue the legacies of their predecessors. If its model proliferates, my parents can retire knowing that their vocation will survive— but without the grueling work and sacrifice. Chinese takeout will continue to introduce Americans to Chinese culture and unite communities.
If we need automation and outsourcing to achieve that, then I welcome this future. ❧
Jeremy and I Gaze Long
Mia Rose Kohn, GH '27
Igoto the paintings when my vision feels too strong, when my skin feels too tight and I need to confirm that I’m not alone. I skip the elevator and take a rambling route. I start with the ancients—the Babylonian lion with angry pupils and the Greek synagogue tiles, the grove of old stone heads and naked torsos on new pedestals. I flee through the double-height arch and up the dark brick stairwell. When I reach the glass doors, I forget to push. I pull. I do remember to turn left, though, because there’s another naked torso equipped with an especially large penis. He’s so close to the doors I have to turn. Maybe I’m scared of penises, or maybe I’m just gay. Either way, I prefer this floor. After this guy, there are fewer penises and more people: moribund gladiators, Venetian peasants, our old chums Eve and Adam. Then I pass Turner, Van Gogh, Degas. New stairs. Up I go. Then I’m in America. There are no penises here in American Art to 1900. George Washington is exceedingly clothed. Up another flight and modernism kicks in. The gallery is light with white walls and light wood and I’m lighter up here.
So is Jeremy Hudman. Short Jeremy bounces toward me in his blue uniform, striding tall through Contemporary Art.
“How are you?” I ask. Remember, I come here because my skin is tight and I’m alone.
“More great than Frosted Flakes.” I love that so much I stop moving. Jeremy has a flat head and vast smile. Does he have a favorite painting?
“Why, yes I do,” he says, “but it’s a corner, three paintings.” He whisks me to his spot. “Three different paintings, done by different artists at different times. But they talk to each other.”
We form a square with the paintings, two in front and to the left on the adjoining corner walls, one to the right
on a freestanding wall. Jeremy points to the right, to the slumped woman on her drooping couch in a green hoodie. She’s a painter, the painter, I assume. She’s huge on the wall and covered in paint stains, phone in hand, earbuds to brain, heavy temple tilted on fingertips.
“So she’s in therapy,” Jeremy explains. She looks familiar, like my therapist—former therapist, actually. Dr. Turbentino moved to Philadelphia. Same messy blonde bun, round glasses, and Birkenstocks kicked off bare feet (Dr. T always wore shoes, though). To the right of her couch, there’s a shy, turned-around canvas, lit by and tilting up towards the window behind Dr. Turbentino. Beyond the black panes, there’s just blue. She’s in the sky. She’s nowhere. She’s in Teletherapy. That’s the title, Jeremy tells me. I miss Dr. Turbentino.
“And she’s staring into the abyss, as Nietzsche said,” Jeremy says, pointing left. I didn’t know what Nietzsche said; I had to ask Jeremy. When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. We turn to gaze long into the abyss: an ink spill of a photograph behind reflective glass. Black, so black I can see as in a mirror myself and Jer-
emy and Dr. Turbentino behind us. Halfway across the abyss, to the right, emerge thin stems of sailboats. A dock. Some gray water, too, shining, but not brightly. Jeremy spins back to Dr. Turbentino.
“When this one was placed––I want to say a year-and-a-half-ago—I kept noticing, while she was in therapy, she was looking at herself.”
Jeremy’s right; she is looking at herself, mirrored cleanly in Nietzsche’s abyss. Did he piece this story together?
“Yes, I did. Because I read philosophy.” Jeremy tells me he was listening to Machievelli’s The Prince when we started talking, through his earpiece. He swivels to the third painting.
“Because of all of the negative selftalk, she shatters.” We gaze at a tropical travel magazine that exploded and settled into three large diamonds, punched in the eyes by two spouts of black paint. They run down, enraged heads of sopping black hair. Three shattered mirrors, embedded in the canvas, part the palm trees like snake eyes. Untitled Escape Collage, Rashid Johnson named her progeny. I can’t see Dr. Turbentino, only Jeremy and me, our eyes all scattered in the shards.
I need to look back at Jeremy. I’m a little off balance, but I can’t blame it all on Rashid. I have two sprained ankles— dance injuries, I tell Jeremy.
We step back.
“That’s the whole therapeutic process. Believe me, I’m in therapy right now. Doing some heavy stuff.” His eyes are wide. “Oh, and notice she’s wearing open-toed sandals. This is gonna sound kind of weird, but think about what feet represent in movies.”
I’m not sure.
“Usually, feet represent a character’s soul,” he says. “She’s opening up her soul and trying to find herself within the void.”
I ask him what he thinks of Dr. Turbentino’s rearward canvas. He has a theory, of course. “Her canvas is unusable right now.”
I tell Jeremy that I'm in therapy too.
“You know what it’s like. When you start, you’re all blocked up.”
My ankles are hurting now. I’ve been standing for more than an hour. I ask Jeremy if he’ll be here later. He won’t. He has therapy. ❧
Design by Sarah Sun, PC '25
A Christophany
Gavin Guerrette, BR '25 Herald Staff
A stash of porno mags. Stacked damn near three feet tall…
It was a brisk October afternoon at Saint Ignatius Catholic Day School. In a brick wall corner of the schoolyard stood three older boys with their hands shoved down their slacks, braced against the cold. They talked quietly amongst themselves and watched the younger boys play. Walker had assembled his friends for something gravely important, though he refused to tell them what until they were all together. Stephen and James stood beside him, waiting impatiently for Georgie to arrive. Walker had a propensity for leading the boys on sinful forays, and this was sure to be another. The problem, though, was that they were never caught. It was almost preferable to be dragged by your ear to the desk of some stern-faced nun than to steep unchaperoned in your sin. At least then the matter was no longer between you and the almighty God alone.
Last spring Walker had convinced them to sneak into the school’s church to steal wine from the tabernacle. It hasn’t been blessed yet, he told them, so God won’t mind. Crouched behind the altar, he poured wine from the crystal decanter into a plastic cup as he looked to the boys with a grave face and said, Christ bled for thee. They passed the cup between the four of them. It emptied slowly between objections, then was refilled hastily. Having drained the decanter, they placed it neatly back in the tabernacle and stumbled out down the central aisle. Every subsequent mass when the priest tipped the chalice into their mouths it burned down their throats and tumbled their stomachs. Christ bled for thee, he would say.
Georgie arrived in a huff with a handful of loose papers. “Bombed Latin,” he said, holding up a sheet
doused in red ink. “Father Malloy wasn’t too happy.”
“Barba non facit philosophum, Georgie boy,” Stephen said, swiping at the whiskers atop his lip. Georgie swiped back and the two began to wrestle.
“Just get on with it, Walker,” James chided. “These brutes will be at it all day.”
“Alright, alright,” he said, and Georgie and Stephen disentangled from one another. “Gentlemen, I’ve gotten word of something we might like to ‘borrow’ from the janitor.”
“And what might that be?” Georgie asked.
“A stash of porno mags,” Walker answered. “Stacked damn near three feet tall. Matthew caught a glimpse of it the other day before the closet door closed.”
“Three feet?!” Stephen gasped. “My God, he must be beating that poor thing like it owes him money.”
Design by Alexa Druyanoff, SY '26
“I’m out,” James said quietly.
“Oh, come on,” Walker said. “You haven’t heard the plan yet.”
“I don’t want any part of this,” said James. “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It’s in the Bible, man.”
“Didn’t hear anything about the left,” Stephen laughed.
“You, my friend,” James said glaring towards Walker, “want accomplices in sin.” He looked towards Georgie and Stephen, “And you are all too willing. I’ll walk with Christ.” He left without turning back.
“You’re my hero, James, truly,” Walker called out. “Come find me when your balls drop!” He turned to the remaining boys, “Look at him and Jesus holding hands. What a Christlike young man.”
“So about the porno mags…” Stephen said.
Walker went on to tell them the plan. Stephen would spill a carton of chocolate milk in the cafeteria, summoning the janitor, while Georgie, waiting by his closet, would slip in unnoticed before the door closed. Walker, naturally, would keep watch in the hallway and run interference if necessary. Stephen was happy with his role and Georgie, despite assuming the most risk, was quite willingly tempted by Walker, for reasons that confounded the other boys.
They took their positions during lunch. Georgie looked sheepishly down the hallway towards Walker who gave him a thumbs up and flashed a grin. An announcement was made over the PA system for the janitor and he shot forth from his closet with a bucket and mop. Georgie stuck his foot in the door, looked quickly left and right, then slipped into the small room. As the door closed behind him, it fell completely dark and the lemony chemical scent stung his nose. He felt around for a light switch to no avail, his hands grasping a stack of magazines, one of which he rolled
up and shoved into his slacks. Giving the small closet one last pass, he felt the pull cord of a fluorescent lightbulb grace his cheek. He gave it a tug and the room was illuminated. Sitting before him on a small stool was Jesus Christ himself, who said serenely, “I know your secret, my child.” Georgie fainted.
He awoke to Walker, Stephen, and James at his bedside and felt an icepack atop his forehead.
“He lives,” whispered Stephen coyly. “Thanks be to God.”
“How’s the head?” Walker asked.
“How’s my head?!” Georgie cried. “I saw Jesus fucking Christ in the janitor’s closet.”
“Hmph,” James chortled. “If only.”
“Yeah, about that,” Walker started. “We had a sit down with the sisters. Apparently the porno stash was a sham.”
“Then what is this?” Georgie asked, pulling the magazine out from his slacks. “Oh. An issue of Cleaning and Maintenance Monthly.” Stephen and James bursted out in laughter.
“You were supposed to have a chat with fake Jesus about the dangers of masturbation,” Walker said gently. “A sort of morality play.”
“They put Matthew up to it.” Stephen said. “He gave Walker the plan.”
“Should’ve known that little kiss ass would set us up,” Walker said. “But, on the bright side, you hit your head so hard that the sisters decided to call it even.”
“You’re a real team player, Georgie boy,” Stephen said. The bell rang loudly, causing Georgie to wince.
“That’s our cue,” Walker said.
“See ya Georgie,” James said.
“Feel better,” said Stephen. And the two left.
Walker took Georgie’s hand and said, “I’m sorry,” then let it fall. He moved quietly to the door and Stephen was left alone. ❧
The Corporate Carnival
Richie George, GH '27 Herald staff
Scroll through TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. Comedian Lisa Beasley repeats her star-studded performance––adopting a persona she calls, “Corporate Erin.” “Corporate Erin,” or Corporate Erin Thropolis, is more a sentient AI than a real person. She is smothered by bulky, conspicuous lanyards. She rambles on about missed “deliverables” and “client desks” with an acrid corporate accent. Each video features some crisis––real or imagined––for which her intervention––helpful or unhelpful––is necessary. As Erin enacts her managerial duties, her attempt at a laid wig lifts in jest. Lisa Beasley is beloved by almost 500,000 followers, including myself. One of Lisa’s one-off shticks has turned into her international brand and a new gospel for Corporate America. Through her, the corporation could spark laughter, instead of disdain.
As the “Manager for Managerial Managers at Managers of McManagement,” Corporate Erin is the indecipherable, middle-management operative. She talks with an exaggerated vocal fry, skewing professional, plastic, and almost pedantic. “Corporate speak” offers her a limited yet expansive vocabulary. In meandering monologues, she abuses language through odd, circuitous constructions: “bandwidth,” “close the loop,” and “circle back.” They resist meaning. Each sentence trails off, left unresolved, despite the urgency of her managerial commands. Don’t leave the meeting; don’t take maternity leave; don’t forget to add your father’s funeral to the “death portal.” But, sorry, I misspoke. Erin calls them recommendations.
Still, nothing lurks beneath her rhetoric. Regardless of her mandatory Zoom meetings, you will never penetrate her plastic frame. Erin stares with dead eyes, an awkward face, and a smile expecting your (silent) approval.
“Corporate Erin” is a farce at its extreme. She adopts the quintessential behaviors, values, and idiolect of the corporate “manager.” But she intensifies it past comfort. Her comedy unspools the distortions of post-industrial life, from its obsession with care to its cruel empathy to its fickle attempt at inclusion. It is simultaneously indecipherable yet utterly recognizable. It starts to peel away at the patina of the boss beneath the clown.
And viewers respond. Comments reflect a variety of emotions: anger, fear, frustration, amusement, joy, revelry, and anxiety. Their total effect is bewilderment. One commenter noted, I’m so triggered, and I also can’t stop laughing. My body is confused
“Corporate Erin” is a comedy made through the violence of self-recognition. Her dry gulps vibrate phone speakers. Her bulging eyes pierce glass screens. Another video loads; another video loads; another video loads. This isn’t your boss, but Erin repeats it the same. It’s the feeling that matters, not where and when you feel it. The Internet and its digital along with physical architecture structure time, space, and feeling with algorithms, circuits, and loops. She captures an algorithmic feeling by reproducing “triggering” intimacies. Each virtual meeting reminds the viewer of their boss, with each intensity heightening recognition. It’s an eerie transparency. Virtual spaces ought to offer you a mo-
ment to breathe, but Corporate Erin brings you back to zero state. Capital’s face is digitized, as you, the viewer, are turned into (but, already, were) the worker beholden to its tasks. Commenters note that they stopped watching because of PTSD from corporate work.
Still, the vast sense of difference draws the viewer back in. Corporate Erin is, evidently, not the viewer’s boss. She’s a faithful copy but only a stand-in. In fact, she’s under your control. Laugh! Mock! Scream! Revel in her fantasy––she’s always been yours, hasn’t she? She can’t belittle, command, or antagonize you. Her job is to amuse, entertain, and even jest––and it’s for you. You surveil her. You circulate her. She’s “the boss,” but you’re in power.
“Corporate Erin” becomes the worker’s cruel panacea. She offers a strategic distance (and distraction) from their predicament. You can express fully, in all your variegated emotions, absent the authority of a wealth-wielding overlord. But the double character of these freedoms is fleeting. It authors a fictive role reversal, supplanting the worker/viewer above “the boss,” above exploitation, and above capitalism. Just watch another clip.
This is the emotional tenor of Corporate Erin’s social existence. Each view repeats the same consumptive feedback loop––satisfying the worker/viewer with one more release. And there are enough commodities to consume. Watch her daytime features on the Tamron Hall show to see her wacky, personable look! Buy her book, “Circle Back Follow Up Close The Loop: Corporate Dictionary Vol. 1 by Erin Throlopolis,” to learn corporate speak! Buy
So dance in front of her hall of custom-made mugs like “Corporate Gulp,” “Circle Back Follow Up Close The Loop,” and “This Meet ing Could Have Been An Email” in her swag store! (You can drink coffee with them.) Place a “Gulp” sticker on your company Mac to read the newsletter she sends at 9:01 each day! “Corporate Erin” isn’t just the woman behind the screen. She repeats capitalism’s les sons of production, consumption, and circulation. It’s a carnival, of course. But you have to clock in the next day.
Her mimetic comedy elides pol itics in its excess. She demands the existence of the post-industrial workplace for her own existence. There cannot be redress, or reck oning, under this logic. There isn’t a revolution in the corporate car nival. You have to find it in con sumption and the corresponding release. In doing so, she becomes a willing spectacle for the worker/ viewer. It’s a symbolic victory for the viewer and a real defeat for the worker. Ultimately, her mockery is a critique that ends up justifying capital––placing it just outside the bounds of substantive critique.
Lisa Beasley hit gold with “Cor porate Erin.” She’s been sponsored by Microsoft and Jared Jewelers. (Fortunately, you can’t buy blood diamonds from her “swag store.”) Her comedy paints capital beau tifully, but its impressionism dis torts the conditions it attempts to describe. The allure is dangerous. The digital comic becomes the ultimate source for conflict and self-consciousness, not the sys tem at large. “Corporate Erin,” in all her trendy iterations, emerges as capital’s chorus, negating itself through performance, jest, and parody. She’s an unassuming safe ty-valve for the worker/viewer’s destructive passions––directed towards socially productive ends. In the end, we become her “elite employees.” The reality principle doesn’t feel much harder than this.
Design by Alexa Druyanoff, SY '26 and Alina Susani, ES '26
BLOCKLIST
(Things we hate this week)
Dieresis
Reëlect your mom.
“Creative” Writing Waitlist warriors of the world unite.
Adaptations of the Bacchae
Please stop trying to be Anne Carson.
Enjambment Shut the / Fuck up.
The Past
A grotesque animal.
The Future
Not looking very female.