Construction Confusion
The inside story of Eaton Hall’s renovation — and Tufts’ architectural identity crisis.
Letter From The Editor
I miss the era of big, bold tear-out posters in magazines. Remember when your copy of Tiger Beat came with a complimentary shot of Zac Efron or Justin Bieber, perfect for taping above your bed? Flipping through a recent print edition of The Cut, I found a double-sided tearout of Bad Bunny on a ranch, pouting for the camera. The poster left me feeling wistful. It went right up on a friend’s wall, looming over her television.
Images used to be a finite commodity. Long before the days of Instagram and Google, seeing a striking photograph was just as luscious an experience as reading a good story. Maybe you remember such an experience; I think of Angelina Jolie in silver on the cover of Esquire or Kim Kardashian popping champagne on the cover of Paper. Now these photos and thousands of others — many produced by artificial intelligence — are plastered all over the internet. You’ll likely see a magazine spread posted on X before you see it in print. Celebrity posters
don’t need to be torn out of Tiger Beat; they can be printed at home.
For the second-ever edition of The Tufts Daily Magazine, we chose to narrow in on photography. The internet’s photo glut has made us worse viewers, less perceptive to the beauty of the images in front of us. So, I ask you: Take a second, and look at the photos in this issue. No, really, look . It’s a muscle many of us haven’t used in a long time.
Start with the cover. For this edition’s lead story, Matthew Sage dug into the previously unreported story of Eaton Hall’s renovation. He struggled to find a cohesive theme within Tufts’ architecture and detailed the campus’ identity crisis. So, we decided to put a model inside of Eaton’s glass box, holding up a sign to signal this confusion. (Maybe that model looks familiar…) From afar, the cover looks like a beautiful shot of Eaton’s new facade. But up close, you see that important question: WHO ARE WE? Shot by Peter Wolfe, editorial shots like these are rare for the
Daily — or any student publication, for that matter — to plan out.
There are even more inventive shots within this magazine’s pages. For Max Lerner’s story on dating apps, Wolfe snapped models simulating romance, phones in hand. For Dylan Fee’s story on wealth culture, Briana Chen captured some Canada Goose jackets in the wild. For Matthew Winkler’s profile, Chen photographed professor Frank Lehman in motion, hands on the keyboard. And, for Julieta Grané’s story on food media, a handful of Daily photographers went meta, compiling photos of other cameras taking pictures of food.
Of course, there’s also some incredible writing in the magazine, which we’ve spent months reporting, editing and refining. As someone who’s indulged in a few too many Fiddleheads at The Burren, Sarah Firth’s oral history of the pub is a personal favorite. Also, don’t miss Aaron Gruen’s quest to define “quirky” at the most quirked-up spot on campus: The Sink. I’m incredibly proud of the deeply compelling and readable features published within these pages.
Last semester, for this magazine’s inaugural edition, I wrote about the importance of sitting with good, long-form writing in the digital age. That message is still true: Take a second, log off TikTok and Instagram and allow yourself to linger in these stories. But we can — and should — do the same with photographs. Claire Wood, Aisha Karim and Josh Solomon pulled together the print layout in front of you, ready for your gaze to bounce from page to page. So, don’t just skim. Really look. I hope you enjoy what you see.
Sincerely,
Henry Chandonnet Founding Editor
The Tufts Daily Magazine
Looking for Love?
Tinder and Hinge have expanded the Tufts dating pool — and radically changed our outlook on romance.
Max Lerner Opinion Editor
Bowen’s Gate , a local landmark of love, looms large over Packard Avenue. Legend has it that if you kiss someone under the arch, you’ll marry them. Think of how many hearts have been forever joined right where you rush through to class. These days, instead of stepping under Bowen’s Gate, you’d have better luck stepping into the world of dating apps. Since their founding in the early 2010s, dating apps like Hinge and Tinder have swept the scene, seeming to replace any other way to meet partners. For some, the deluge of profiles leads to lasting matches; for many others, it begets fatigue, disillusionment and, ultimately, deletion. Tinder’s signature flame stamps many of our phones, but is the app only leaving us worn out?
Gone are the days of the meetcute; it seems that today, a Hinge match must suffice.
Dating in college was already challenging. Bailey Seaton, a sophomore, struggles to find a community of romantically-curious people.
“There’s no ‘singles who are looking for love’ group at Tufts,” she joked. Even more taxing, Seaton believes, is finding someone with the same long-term expectations. “Especially at the beginning of your college career, a lot of people are looking for one thing and one thing only, and they’re not here to be dating.”
Here’s where dating apps flourish. The defining quality of apps like Hinge and Tinder is that they allow the user to interact with profiles whose romantic expectations — whether that be merely a hookup or something more serious — are as clearly stated as their height and hobbies. Moreover, daters pick apps that suit them: Perhaps they download Tinder for hookups and quick dates, or move to Hinge for long-term love.
The Tufts bubble is tight, and any experienced dater knows that an on-campus breakup can amount to nothing short of social chaos. That leaves some students yearning for an outside supply of daters — another place where apps can assist. “Tufts is such a small community that people struggle to
figure out how to have the casual relationship they might want,” Emma Cohen, the CARE Office’s assistant director, said. “Lots of people are using dating apps to meet people off campus [because] it’s such a tight-knit community.”
On campus, these apps provide students with a buffer from the awkwardness of attempting — and, even more awkward, of failing — to make in-person connections. Cohen, who routinely talks to students and advises them on both romantic and sexual matters, explains common sentiments shared by students: “People will be like: ‘I was wondering if this person was interested in me. … They just swiped right on me on Tinder, now I know they’re interested.’”
But think about what’s lost in that flirtation. Instead of working up the nerve to ask a crush out, the curious student endlessly swipes with the desperate hope of instigating romance. Tinder claims they’re “on a mission to power and inspire real connections.” But have those connections really accelerated on campus? The students I interviewed, though divided, seemed pessimistic.
Leilani Bacchus, a sophomore who has tried Hinge and Tinder since entering Tufts, acknowledged the merits of the apps. “I think they can be a tool to meet new people,” Bacchus said.
But she worries about authenticity: “Sometimes the connections are more genuine in being able to talk face-to-face and have a natural conversation and a natural progression than when you’re on an app.”
Seaton’s view on dating apps was slightly more positive, although
not without a caveat. She thought that Hinge was particularly helpful for refining certain flirting skills. “It’s a good way to practice talking,” she said. “I enjoyed it for my ability to practice overthe-phone flirtation.”
Beyond that practice, though, Seaton was exhausted. “I can’t say that I’ve made many genuine connections from dating apps,” she admitted.
In fact, many people have been turned off from dating apps for this same reason. The New York Times’ Catherine Pearson called it “dating app burnout”: the feeling of fatigue after seemingly endless hours of swiping that lead to nothing.
I asked the students I interviewed whether or not this was a phenomenon they had faced. “I believe in dating app fatigue,” Seaton answered decisively. “You’re just swiping left [and] right; you’re not really seeing people for any depth other than like the way they look. … The faces start to merge.”
Bacchus described a process of deleting and redownloading the apps. “It’s one of those things that happens in a cycle,” she said.
Seniors Myles Silsby and Manek Khedia, the coordinators of the Sex Health Representatives, offered a grounding reality check to the state of consent online. Apps can cause people to falsely believe — or prey on others’ false belief — that merely being on an app implies consent to anything. “Consent needs to be
education gap. Some recent questions they’ve answered: “Is your partner on the apps behind your back?”; “Does consent begin before you even swipe?”; and “What are your texting icks?”
Love them or hate them, dating apps have radically changed the way we think about romantic connections. They inform whether or not you’ll
“Gone are the days of the meet-cute; it seems that today, a Hinge match must suffice.”
Cohen offered a more authoritative voice. “People get sick of swiping. People get sick of chatting with someone and having it go nowhere,” she offered. “I know I’ve talked to lots of students who have been on dating apps and now are taking a break.”
The magic of dating apps, though promising, seems too good to be true. Moreover, while meeting new people always comes with safety risks, online dating introduces new concerns like implied consent.
something that is reaffirmed and is specific,” Silsby said. “Just because you’re on an app doesn’t mean you’re consenting to XYZ.”
Most sex education courses avoid online dating entirely. Many remember putting a condom on a banana; fewer learned about consent and nude images. But apps have become wrapped up in our romantic lives, and thus, the Sex Health Representatives must address them. Khedia and Silsby pointed me towards the CARE Instagram, where they aim to address this
talk to someone at The Burren. They inform whether or not you’ll flirt with your class crush. They inform whether or not you’ll finally approach that special someone at a party.
Among the Tufts crew, many aren’t so happy with those changes.
All students interviewed see the downsides of online dating, from authenticity to self-image issues to consent. And yet, many of us keep coming back, redownloading against our better judgment.
“It’s a necessary evil,” Seaton said.
Architects of Academia
Is the new Eaton Hall a Greek temple or an Apple store? Inside Tufts’ architectural identity crisis.
MATTHEW SAGE News Editor
As I trudged down Talbot Avenue one early February morning, my gaze drifted up toward the mismatched buildings surrounding me.
To my left sat the Mayer Campus Center, nestled into the natural slope of Tufts’ iconic hill. Offering a primetime stage for social butterflies, the Campus Center was built in the mid-’80s and draws from the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed style, boasting three pagoda-like tiers clad in red tile and brick. Standing opposite the Campus Center — starkly, both in stature and location— was Pearson Chemistry Lab. The main structure was built in the 1920s in the then-typical style of a New England college, before architect Norman Fletcher adjoined the imposing Michael Lab four decades later. The concrete tower can be seen from nearly every part of the lower campus, awkwardly jutting out to remind students of its stark brutalism.
The two buildings seemed so disjointed, as if they were built without knowing they would stare each other down just a few dozen feet apart. The architectural mismatch extends far beyond Talbot Avenue: Barnum clashes with West, and Paige clashes with Braker. That’s not to mention the brand new Eaton Hall, demanding attention with its glassy face. It left me wondering: What, exactly, am I supposed to think as I walk past these buildings?
I took a final few strides past another jumbled collection of buildings — bricklaid Aidekman and Stratton, glass-infused Sophia Gordon and Granoff — lining the street and reached my final destination, 11 Talbot Ave.
I found my way through the narrow, winding hallways of the modest home-turned-home base for the architecture department, concluding my journey at the entrance of a sequestered office room. Professor Matthew Okazaki greeted me at the doorway for our interview.
Okazaki started practicing architectural design in 2008 and established his own architecture firm a decade later. I wanted to know what he thought of Tufts’ architectural design, so I asked him. Was it as incoherent as I thought?
He pushed back. “Variety is the spice of life,” Okazaki said. “Differences force us to make new connections — it also forces us to negotiate with each other about certain things. Especially in our era, productive friction is a good thing.”
In Okazaki’s telling, Tufts must decide between wanting to become like Harvard, America’s oldest educational institution and a symbol of “history, longevity [and] durability,” or MIT, often at the forefront of scientific research and innovation for a centuryand-a-half. A school’s architecture is a “symbol of what the institution is and stands for,” he noted.
“Maybe the direction hasn’t been decided,” Okazaki said of Tufts’ campus. “Most campuses have some kind of feel, whether it’s a Harvard or an MIT. … Brown does, Northeastern actually does to a degree now.”
Asked whether or not Tufts has a distinguishable feel in the same way as these other nearby campuses, Okazaki didn’t have an answer for me. By the end of our conversation, however, Okazaki and I had clarified the mystery I hoped to solve.
“I’m super interested: What is the campus identity at Tufts?” Okazaki said. “That’s the right question.”
The Academic Quad has long served as the heart of campus, dating back to its 19th-century donation by the school’s namesake, Charles Tufts. Lining the (only occasionally lush) lawn, students can find buildings as old as 1854’s Ballou and as new as 1991’s Olin.
Dare to venture up the Memorial Steps, and the stark white marble and neoclassical columns of Eaton come immediately into view. A portico adorned with an ornate marble pediment atop an imposing set of columns, the eastward-facing side of Eaton evokes a connection to ancient history.
Classics professor Anne Mahoney’s office sits just behind Eaton’s portico, offering a quaint view of the Hill and its Memorial Steps. She said the “Greek-temple looking architecture” of Eaton’s original wing was fairly standard among architectural practice during the early 20th century, when Eaton was built.
To confirm Mahoney’s account, I found myself flipping through the dusty, crumbling pages of magazines like The Architectural Review and The Brickbuilder. Sketches upon sketches grew out of the pages, Eaton among them. As I passed countless examples of early 20th-century neoclassical architecture, I was reminded that Eaton serves as a physical indicator of Tufts’ own past.
“The building has a lot of history in it,” Mahoney said. “It’s an old Carnegie library from when Andrew Carnegie was running around donating money to small towns and small colleges to build libraries. You’ll see a plaque about that on the second floor. It was
the first building to be purpose-built as a Tufts library.”
The original structure of Eaton Hall was built in 1908 and served as the university’s main library for almost six decades until the arrival of Wessell — now Tisch — Library in 1965, built to accommodate the collection’s growth.
Eaton is no stranger to major remodels. Following World War II, designers adjoined the War Memorial Library to Eaton’s northern wall as its first major upgrade. Although the addition preserved the original material palette — red brick, white stone — the second buildout sacrificed the ornate detail that defined the original library.
“Even if you aren’t sensitive to architecture, you can tell the older part is fancier,” Mahoney said, classifying the 1950 addition as “low-budget neoclassical.” “The newer part is still brick with white limestone trim, but the limestone trim is very plain. You don’t have fancy columns. … So the building was already sort of a hybrid.”
I also assumed that the white trim of the War Memorial Room extension was made out of similar stone to the original structure. Only after a tip-off from an architect, however, did I realize that it is merely wood paneling painted white.
Having last been refurbished 75 years ago, Eaton was in desperate need of a modern makeover to bring the building into the 21st century. In
early 2021, Tufts enlisted the help of firm Finegold Alexander Architects to conduct a “feasibility study” to find Eaton’s flaws and ways to fix them.
“[We considered] a ‘Mini, Midi, Maxi,’ renovation,” Regan Shields Ives, Finegold Alexander’s principal designer on the project, said. According to Ives, the team proposed a range of possible renovations, ranging from surface-level changes to a complete exterior addition, which “is ultimately what we landed on.”
Finegold Alexander has remodeled practically every type of building, from public libraries and town halls to synagogues and churches across the country. It is known for its work preserving and elevating historic buildings with the use of modern elements, making it an attractive firm to work with on the Eaton remodel.
Early on, the Finegold Alexander team realized that Eaton suffered from problems of accessibility and general efficiency.
“We were really looking at how we could take the existing building and — through a renovation transformation — make it as energy efficient as possible,” Ives said, pointing out that a new mechanical and electrical plumbing system was needed and had to fit within the “existing building envelope.”
Then there was the building’s interior, filled with narrow winding hallways and a multitude of small offices. Ives notes that this layout was “probably not in the
optimal configuration for 21st-century higher education,” and that much of the project was spent better fitting the interior for its inhabitants, like the anthropology, classical studies and sociology departments, among others.
“There wasn’t a lot of wiggle room within the building to expand, so we had to really be creative in the layout and use of the building,” Ives said. “It’s like stuffing 10 pounds in a 5-pound bag.”
Students who have visited Eaton since its renovation will have seen this creative restriction play out on its three separate floors. Much of the interior walls still stand as brick-laid reminders of the building’s history yet are contrasted with the modern touches of glass and aluminum that frame its classrooms.
These details are reminiscent of the modern lobby and hallways of the Joyce Cummings Center, a behemoth of a building that was completed in 2021. That style, marked by bright colors and shiny, relatively sparse walls, even extends to the granular detail of the type of toilets used. The hallways of Eaton and the JCC are a far cry from the more traditional, intimately condensed interiors of buildings like East and Braker.
“You’re designing for students of today’s age that feel comfortable in spaces with color and more contemporary or modern furniture [and] interior finishes,” Ives said. “It was agreed upon with Tufts and the planning department that that was the same kind of language and vocabulary that we wanted to carry through.”
One student I spoke with, junior Savvy Thompson, didn’t feel the same way after I caught her on her way out of class one afternoon.
“The glass paneling? Whatever,” Thompson said. “But what the hell are we doing with these carpets? Why is it orange everywhere? I just don’t think it looks aesthetically pleasing.”
Ives said that the team wanted Eaton’s new interior to “represent the time that we are in now and not try to replicate
something to make it feel like it was from the 1900s.”
“It’s a big part of our architectural expression and vocabulary in general,” she said. Ives pointed out that the construction process retouched much of the outside brick to bring it back to “its original form,” but completely updated the building’s interior to reflect the contemporary era.
From what I could discern, the design philosophy behind Eaton’s remodel exists in both the past and the future — a combination that plays out across Tufts’ campus. As Ives’ colleague, Steve Walnut, put it, Eaton is a “microcosm” of Tufts’ general attitude: maintaining connection to historicism, while pushing the campus toward “what it can be.”
Maybe, then, Tufts doesn’t have to choose between Harvard or MIT.
The idea of iteration, not replication, extends to Eaton’s new exterior. Venture around the marble columns of Eaton’s original structure, and you’ll be met with a strikingly modern glass façade added in the remodel. The external addition, comprising 18 panes of glass framed by zinc-colored aluminum, was designed by Payette, an architectural firm recruited relatively late into the renovation process.
While planning for a new elevator — an addition which was prioritized, according to senior campus planners, to bring accessibility up to modern standards — architects ran into natural constraints. Elevators are, “by their very nature, quite disruptive,” Peter Vieira of Payette said. He explained that the most cost-effective place to put one was, in fact, outside the building.
Tufts’ campus planners also tasked Payette with a rather unorthodox objective: Turn the side of Eaton into the building’s front entrance. The two original components of Eaton — the Carnegie Library and the War Memorial Library — face 180 degrees away from one another and fail to open into the main pathway of the Academic Quad
— what Vieira called “the most iconic campus space.”
In the telling of both campus planners and Payette, the stylistic disparity between Eaton’s preexisting sides needed fixing. While Vieira said that the aesthetic issue wasn’t necessarily a primary motivator for the remodel, he acknowledged that the old plain-brick siding was “rather nondescript and didn’t really have the kind of monumentality the fronts offer.” The simple face was not considered “a particularly well-resolved joint” between the two halves and failed to make sense of conflicting designs.
“One side was quite elegant, and the materials used were of a significantly higher quality than the other half,” Vieira said. “So you had some funny juxtapositions of things that look similar yet, upon close inspection, were actually pretty different.”
The difference between Eaton’s old and new brick caused the team to rule out using the same or even another brick type for the remodel, which risked perpetuating the original clash. And since the new elevator still needed a protective shell, the glass box was born.
Vieira said that glass, a “neutral material,” was chosen specifically to bridge the gap between the building’s juxtapositions.
“We’re trying to not take away from the authenticity of and the integrity of the original building,” he said. “[Glass] can be a very sympathetic material to actually enable one to appreciate and see more of the authentic historic fabric in a way that, if we had used one of these
other materials, … it would compete a little more with them.”
Vieira called the glass box a “gasket,” meant to bridge the visual distance between old and new. He said that it “clearly [needed] to function and be understood as a contemporary addition that’s not original to the building, yet do it in a way that respects the original building.”
A particular feature of the wide glass windows struck me as I walked past Eaton one recent evening. I could see the silhouettes of two or three students, all silent as they toiled away on their laptops, illuminated against the dark sky only by a soft interior glow.
Architecture professor Diana Martinez has her reservations about the new Eaton. In her opinion, the remodel was practically efficient but suffered creative pitfalls.
First, she noted that Eaton now resembles many other recently renovated buildings in the area. “The interesting thing is that it sort of replicates what Tufts is doing to a lot of buildings on campus — placing this glass block in the middle of a building with a more conventional palette of materials,” she said. “That is the going strategy right now, and in a lot of ways, it’s the easiest strategy to bring light, vertical circulation and a number of different needs.”
Eaton’s resemblance to other buildings is not by mistake. Payette, which took the lead on the building’s exterior renovation, also helmed the vast expansion of the Tsungming Tu Complex in 2017. The TTC, known as the Science
and Engineering Complex until last year, is flanked by a massive structure covered almost entirely in glass.
With Tufts’ architects seeming to pursue the style across the redesign projects, Martinez made clear that she isn’t necessarily against this combination of old and new. And yet, “I wish there were other ways to solve the problem,” she said. “Unfortunately, what I think it looks like is you’re just sticking an Apple store in the middle of a traditional building.”
Thompson lamented the loss of Eaton’s uniform traditional style but said she appreciates the remodel’s building quality and level of detail. This, she said, is usually reserved for STEM buildings like the TTC and JCC.
“I would have liked them to keep the old style, but that’s really hard to replicate,” she said. “I don’t mind the glass. I thought it was going to look terrible, and I think they integrated it well with the older parts of the building.”
But, like Martinez, Thompson added that she isn’t a fan of the way the look of the Tufts’ campus is generally headed.
“They’re taking away some of the historic beauty and, in a way, taking away some of the tradition of the school in favor of novelty,” Thompson said, although she acknowledged that the histories of educational institutions aren’t always positive.
I spoke with another architect, Doug Johnston, who helped develop Tufts’ 21st-century style. A principal architect with the firm William Rawn, Johnston helped design Sophia Gordon and a (now outdated) campus master plan in 2004. Johnston was familiar with the state of Eaton prior to the redesign and commended the architects’ bravery for approaching an interior that he called “a complete disaster” that was “bungled so badly over decades of reworking.”
Because he had yet to tour the remodeled building, Johnston declined to comment on the success or failure of the project. He did, however, describe the redesign as a “very bold approach” to combining contemporary design with traditional architecture. He said
that redesigns generally come down to whether the client wants a building to be a “revered and cherished part of its past” or instead make “a statement about the boldness of its future.”
From pictures, he confidently guessed that the Tufts team of architects opted for the latter.
When I asked the campus planners and Vieira about this potential statement-making motivation, both parties pointed back to the original goals of the remodel, reiterating that they built the addition to match the functional goals of the project.
Tufts is facing an architectural identity crisis — one that doesn’t have an easy solution. Maybe its buildings represent the humble New England college it grew from, or maybe they show a glimpse into its research-focused future. What’s clear, though, is that the campus planners’ combination of old and strikingly modern doesn’t quite satisfy that question.
For some, a lack of consistency across buildings means Tufts “doesn’t feel like a college campus, [instead] it just feels like a collection of buildings,” as Thompson said. “When I walk through campus, I see a place that’s still figuring itself out.”
Gaze out from the grand glass windows of Eaton, and the remainder of the Academic Quad will rise up to meet you. You’ll see, as
Johnston pointed out to me, a full array of colors on display: the birch yellow brick of Miner and Paige, the burnt red masonry of Packard and the greyscale slate of Barnum. To some, like Thompson, this looks off.
On the other hand, Johnston said, this variety allows architects more room to experiment, free from the restraints typical with working on more intricately planned campuses like those at Washington University in St. Louis and Duke University. Because of this freedom, however, Johnston said the campus is defined by something more intrinsic: its scale.
“That’s, I think, what makes it a neat place architecturally,” he said. “The buildings have a scale that grew from the first buildings on campus.”
That relatively modest scale, he continued, complements the “spirit of humanism and consciousness” at the core of Tufts’ institutional ideals. “There’s a connection between the way that the buildings on the campus are not imposing, are not intimidating [and] are not so grand in their scale that they overwhelm. That enables the students to be a little freer and a little more comfortable there.”
Johnston paused after saying this to me. “Does that make any sense?” he asked, worried about sounding too poetic.
“That’s exactly the type of answer I was hoping for,” I replied.
PHOTOS BY PETER WOLFE
Settling the Score
Frank
Lehman brings the music of John Williams to a hill far, far away.
MATTHEW
WINKLER Arts Editor
As a child, Frank Lehman’s favorite gifts were tape cassettes of classical and film music. “Kid Stuff” was a standout. The tape compiled recordings of film composer John Williams leading the Boston Pops through film scores: “The Wizard of Oz,” “Pink Panther” and plenty of “Star Wars.” The young Lehman listened in a vacuum of innocence devoid of hierarchy: Williams’ villainous “Imperial March” from “Star Wars” stood as an equal to the symphonies of Antonín Dvořák in the ears of the second grader. At this early stage, he knew film music only as music.
“I was just obsessed with this stuff and didn’t make a hard-and-fast distinction at any point between film music — music for screen media — and the orchestral repertoire,” Lehman reflected. “I hadn’t seen ‘Star Wars’; I hadn’t seen ‘E.T.’ I had no idea who the Pink Panther was. I just loved this music, and I probably at that point sensed something extremely evocative and expressive about it, and fell in love with the sound of the orchestra.”
Decades after discovering orchestral music, Lehman maintains the
same love for both film music and the classical repertoire. Far from discarding the “Kid Stuff” of his youth, Lehman turned it into his career. He became a leading theorist on Williams’ music, now teaching his scores to students as an associate professor of music at Tufts.
Film scores aren’t exactly popular in the tight-knit circles of classical musicians, who relegate them to low-brow status. Arnold Schoenberg, the famed composer who formed the ideological basis of 20th-century music academia, derided films as “the lowest kind of entertainment … mercilessly suppressing every dangerous trait of art.” According to one of his students, he didn’t believe that music for the movies “can ever be good.” By the turn of the 21st century, scholars such as James Buhler and Scott Murphy helped introduce film scores into the bloodstream of music academia. Since then, Lehman has played a significant role in the recent scholarly attention paid to Williams’ work.
While the death-signaling “dun-dun” from “Jaws” may not have the same high-art reputation as a Gustav Mahler symphony, it has the benefit of being a part of pop culture. That
has lent Lehman’s theoretical analysis popular success: His work has been featured by The New Yorker, cited in fandom YouTube videos with millions of views and published by The New York Times. In academia, his first book, “Hollywood Harmony,” made waves by comprehensively applying advanced music theory (look up “Neo-Riemannian theory”) to the film music canon.
Lehman’s next project, and perhaps his biggest, will be the first large-scale, serious academic treatment of all nine “Star Wars” scores, titled “The Skywalker Symphonies.” His mission statement reflects his own childhood discovery of these scores, where Williams stood level with Beethoven. “[‘Skywalker Symphonies’] is about taking these scores really seriously,” Lehman said. “As seriously as you would any work within other, more time-tested, respectable canons, such as classical music.”
Calling the “Star Wars” scores “symphonies” is a provocative choice, one that many classical music scholars might turn their noses up at. But Lehman contends that Williams’ scores should be taken as works of art — both by academics and casual viewers.
“If you are a lifelong ‘Star Wars’ fan, you’ve sat through a legitimately symphonic experience,” Lehman said. “[You’ve had] two-plus hours worth of sustained, often wall-to-wall orchestral music written in a vein that would have been completely familiar to concertgoers of a certain strain of romantic, operatic, programmatic style of music. … I consciously write in a way that is as appealing, exciting and evocative as possible using the tools not just of music notation but the English language.”
Lehman’s first live “symphonic experience” of Williams came in the form of a bar mitzvah gift. A Massachusetts local, Lehman’s parents took him to Tanglewood to see Williams conduct the Boston Pops. He finally heard his beloved “Star Wars” scores
played live by a world-class symphony.
“After that seventh-grade Tanglewood reward concert where I got to see ‘The Asteroid Field’ played and I got to see [Williams] off in the distance, I said, ‘All right, Mom and Dad, we’re going to see Williams on film night every year.’ And I did that,” Lehman recalled. Flash forward to 2018, and Lehman published a case study of “The Asteroid Field” in the journal Music Analysis.
At Tufts, Lehman proselytizes the Williams gospel to any student willing to hear. This fall, he will bring a galaxy far, far away to the Hill once more with his beloved class The Music of John Williams and Star Wars. The class, open to all regardless of musical background, has not been offered since the spring of 2022. Lehman’s endearing passion makes the course popular among students.
Senior Abby Sommers cites Lehman as one of her favorite professors in her time at Tufts. “I could sit and listen to him talk about [Williams] for hours because he’s so passionate about it — it’s contagious,” she said. “I love watching him get excited about explaining these kinds of concepts, because he’s just so… I don’t know, he’s just the best.”
Sommers, a self-proclaimed “‘Star Wars’ nerd,” first studied under Lehman in the spring of 2022. Most students dread midterms; for Sommers, it was her favorite moment of the class. The exam asked students to identify musical leitmotifs, a short theme often associated with a character or idea, from the scores of “Star Wars.” “This is like what I do when I’m bored on my laptop,” Sommers said. “I pull up a Sporcle quiz, and I do this kind of thing. And now it’s my midterm for class!”
Unknown to Sommers, Lehman shares her love of exploring John Williams fandom on the internet. During our third conversation, Lehman developed a familiar sparkle in his eye and gleefully pulled up an archived version of an early 2000s
John Williams fan website. Bright green neon text splattered across a black background recalled a simpler era of the internet. A website fully created and written by adolescent Lehman lacked the academic polish he would come to develop but embodied the same passionate nerd smiling in front of me.
He triumphantly read off a review penned by his tween self for the music from “Empire of the Sun”: “Played wonderfully on the piano with flourishes from the winds now and then, the mazurka is warm and comforting. The composition couldn’t fit its title better.” After reading, he tried to condemn his writing for a lack of musical analysis. But his critique could not hide his smile.
In graduate school, Lehman sheepishly admits to changing his cell phone’s ringtone to different MIDI versions of Wagner’s leitmotifs. “I loved the way that there’s so much to know about that music,” Lehman said. “[It had] an appeal for someone who has an encyclopedic disposition. Knowing all the leitmotifs, remembering all the cross references, keeping track of all the Rhinemaidens’ individual characteristics, … that appealed to some part of my brain that now I’ve transferred onto ‘Star Wars.’”
But fandom can beget real musical analysis — something that any student of Lehman knows well. When rewatching “The Empire Strikes
Back” with friends, Sommers paused to tell their group of the thematic similarities of “Star Wars” leitmotifs. Sommers remembered with a smile, “I was like: ‘You know, the ‘Across the Stars’ theme [for] Anakin and Padme starts with the same interval as the Han and Leia theme, but it’s a minor interval because it’s a little bit more of a tragic love story.’” Conversations among opera enthusiasts about the works of Wagner, Puccini and Strauss are not so different from such an analysis of “Han Solo and the Princess.” Those classical discussions are normally confined to scholarly journals, seminar rooms and opera halls; Sommers employed the same technique over popcorn.
Amid 4 p.m. sunsets, below-freezing wind chills and an inundation of exams and term papers, Lehman’s office brightens an otherwise gloomy Tufts winter campus as an eternal flame of passionate conversation. Whether he’s gleefully discussing musical queues from “Star Wars” with students or banging out a passage from a forgotten composer on his upright piano for the whole department to hear, a childlike joy is inescapable in the presence of Lehman’s warmth.
“It’s been very gratifying, actually, to see that people are interested in seeing this stuff written about with a degree of sophistication,” Lehman concluded. “This is music that, in the best possible way, is meant to be accessible.”
PHOTOS
A Burren-ography
The Burren has defined decades of Tufts nightlife. Its owner — and a handful of gleefully buzzed patrons — reminisce on the bar’s origins.
SARAH FIRTH Deputy Features Editor
The music never stops at The Burren. The wooden booths are filled with the warmth of easy company and free-flowing drinks. The coatroom, far too small for the crowds that fill the bar, always becomes a chaotic tower of jackets by night’s end. A stone’s throw from Tufts in Davis Square, The Burren beckons students and locals alike.
McCarthy told me a story from when he first arrived in Boston. After spending time in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia in 1986, his father told him to connect with fiddler Larry Reynolds up in Boston. After playing together at the Village Coach House in Brookline, Reynolds invited McCarthy to play with him at a party on the Cape. It turned out to be Rose Kennedy’s birthday party.
“I end up staying for like three days. [Reynolds] left me there because I started hanging out with all the Kennedy cousins, and they’re like, ‘Don’t go anywhere,
That could all change soon. An upcoming apartment development project threatens to change the pub for years to come. But while The Burren’s future remains unknown, its legacy is made permanent in the minds of generations of Jumbos. The Burren has defined Tufts nightlife for decades, making it a spot worth reminiscing about.
Tommy McCarthy owns The Burren with his wife, Louise Costello. Born in London to Irish parents, McCarthy moved back to Ireland as a child and has family roots in County Clare and County Galway. The Burren’s name originates from the rocky karst region of County Clare. His father was a traditional Irish musician, as is his wife, whom he met playing music at a pub in the States.
let’s play more music,’” McCarthy laughed.
In 1994, while living between Boston and Ireland, McCarthy was asked to fill in for the lead violinist of the Irish band Arcady for their U.S. tour. Following their performance at the Somerville Theatre, the band tried to find somewhere to socialize, but at only 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday, every place — save for Johnny D’s — had already closed.
he and his wife, Louise Costello, were staying in Brighton, McCarthy took a day to walk around Davis Square and seriously consider Elm Street for a pub. With that, The Burren was born.
The Burren may not be a student bar by design, but every Thursday night, it becomes an unofficial Tufts gathering spot. Senior Vir Bhatia is one among the masses of students descending on Thursdays, typically visiting from 11 p.m. to midnight.
“I like walking in and bumping into six other groups of people who are my friends, who I didn’t know I was going to see there,” he said. “You hit a good round of daps, some good hugs. ‘Valerie’ is playing.”
For Bhatia, the two key factors to a great “Burren Thursday” are the quality of the backroom band and how many people are there. “The third eternal criteria is, ‘How drunk am I?’” Bhatia said.
“The first thing that occurred to me was, ‘You’ve got this beautiful theater that holds almost 1,000 people, and where do people go before or afterwards?’” McCarthy said.
The band ended up at the Rosebud, but the idea for a pub lingered. Later, when
Asked what they love about The Burren, almost everyone I spoke to pointed to the live music. McCarthy told me that he hopes Massachusetts Avenue might become for the Boston area what Bourbon Street is to New Orleans. In addition to The Burren, McCarthy and Costello run The Bebop near Berklee College of Music and are opening McCarthy’s and Toad in Porter Square.
“I’d love to see some stage music all the way from Davis Square to Berklee,” McCarthy said. “We put a bit of music in
PHOTOS
BY SARAH FIRTH
here, [people] might turn off the televisions, stop watching politics and rubbish and bring us back to a normal way of life.”
Though I tend to make my appearances at The Burren on Thursday nights, I shook things up and went on a Monday night instead to check out the weekly Irish session. In the corner near the front bar, a crowd of at least 20 musicians were packed into a booth that could comfortably fit five. The players were turned inwards, facing each other instead of the crowd, with a couple of drinks on the table. I wanted to draw closer to see what was happening on the inside. McCarthy told me he first met his wife while playing at an Irish session at Kinvara. Watching this session, I could understand exactly how this happened.
“[A session] is like a good conversation,” McCarthy said. “You sit around the table, and if you’ve got boring people, the conversation is going to be boring. If you’ve got good musicians, the session is going to be great.”
That night, I met Helen Kuhar, an Irish tenor banjo and rhythm guitar player. Originally from Seattle, Kuhar moved to Boston to study stage management at Emerson College and attended her first session at The Burren four years ago.
“[The Burren is] a legendary establishment in terms of live music in general but especially Irish music,” Kuhar said. “You will come here and see people you know and love and play amazing music literally any night of the week.”
Standing in the crowd listening to the session, I talked to Haleigh Black, who’d come up from Birmingham, Ala., to tour for her album “Bend.” Kuhar encouraged Black to come along with them for her first-ever visit. “I’m so excited by The
Burren,” she said. “I don’t know what to do, because I am enjoying just listening to the music, but I also want to be part of it.”
In the same corner of the bar, I met Gwen Johnston, a public school art teacher and professional musician. Johnston became interested in Irish fiddle music after seeing a busker in England and started attending The Burren’s Irish sessions in 2023.
“This place is really where I got my start playing in Boston sessions, and it’s been a really important place to me,” Johnston said. “I’ve made friends here, had heartbreaks here.”
Later in the night, I struck up a conversation with Pat Regan. He had a thick Irish accent and was visiting his son in Boston. Like McCarthy, he’s from County Galway. “[My son] plays here every Monday night,” Regan said to me. “It’s his only connection with the [Irish people]. There’s a good few here.”
The Burren’s atmosphere seemed to strike a chord with Regan, especially the pictures of Ireland and the musicians. This was his third time visiting the pub. “They’re clever people, really, because if you were an immigrant, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by some of those pictures,” he told me.
McCarthy’s wife is responsible for all the pictures that cover The Burren. Every time I go, I see something interesting on the walls I’ve never noticed before.
“I think a lot of the pictures that were up there 20 years ago are still there,” McCarthy said. “If you put a picture of someone up there, and then they go back to Ireland [and say], ‘My picture’s on the wall!’ and you take it down, they come back, they won’t be too happy.”
The familiar booths have their own memorable backstory. While painting a
home near Harvard Square, McCarthy spotted built-in seating he loved. “I always had it in my head: If I ever opened up a pub, I’d use that style of bench,” he said. So, when he finally opened The Burren years later, he knocked on the door of that house with a carpenter and asked to take measurements.
The old instruments around the bar are real instruments that symbolize the importance of live music to The Burren, and the importance of The Burren to live music. Some come from musicians; others come from an instrument dealer named Jack Griffin in North Cambridge.
“As soon as he hears I’m opening another pub, calls me, ‘I got some instruments for you,’” McCarthy said. “He’s not looking for any money from it. It makes him feel proud that his instruments are hanging in our bars.”
I had the chance to visit McCarthy’s newest pub in Porter Square under renovation. From the moment I stepped inside the construction site, it felt like an unmistakable extension of The Burren, with the familiar benches and orangey walls greeting me. Yet, there was an undeniable freshness to it. What struck me first were the large windows that stretched across every wall. The corner lot’s building seemed almost designed to invite passersby in, as if the entire street was a part of the bar’s extended space. The windows were like an unspoken invitation: Look inside, feel the energy and come be part of it.
Rest assured, McCarthy’s will have live music, just like The Burren before it. “When we opened the Burren, it brought a lot of life,” McCarthy said. “We turned the lights on in Davis Square.”
Quirk Culture
Patrons of The Sink — the most quirked-up spot on campus — give their thoughts on the notorious Q-word.
AARON GRUEN Executive Investigative Editor
If you ask someone to describe Tufts in one word, odds are they’ll say “quirky.” I’m guilty of using that term too, but I never paused to consider why.
Sure, Tufts is a liberal arts university in Medford/Somerville, one of the most progressive communities in
one of the most progressive states. But similar to other overused adjectives, like “woke” or “cancelled,” quirky is used so often — and so nonspecifically — that it’s beginning to lose meaning. I wanted to rediscover a definition, so I decided to go to The Sink, what I think of as the quirkiest place on campus, to understand what the term really means. I began by asking patrons of the café to define the word.
Kady Seck, a first-year, thinks quirky means “outside of the box,” being someone who “doesn’t really fit into societal norms and attitudes.” Sophomore Nayan Talwalker doesn’t think it has a “set definition.” Fellow sophomore Elanor Kinderman couldn’t quite describe it. “It’s definitely based off vibes,” she said.
I had hoped to find a definition of quirky that went beyond “weird” or “over-the-top,” so the answers I received weren’t satisfying me. The only thing students agreed upon is that The Sink is indeed the zaniest place at Tufts. So, I decided to take a different approach: Instead of directly asking people to produce a definition, I asked them to describe what makes The Sink quirky.
“I always see people wearing interesting outfits and stuff at The Sink,” Kinderman told me. “It just feels very artsy compared to other places on campus.”
As I interviewed Kinderman in The Sink, I looked around at some of the “interesting” clothing she was referring to: garish jewelry, clashing colors, outlandishly baggy pants. Every person looked unique.
“There’s a big range of weird, different personalities that show up here. Not weird in a bad way, but weird in a fun way,” Willo Sheldon, a senior, said. “I might have a bias — I work here — but I see a ton of people who have really cool outfits on.”
Outfits are an essential factor of quirkiness because they’re the most prominent way we show our personalities. A bizarre outfit might tell you everything you need to know about someone before they open their mouth. For example, when I asked Talwalker to mentally conjure a quirky person, he described a person wearing “a very colorful jacket with spikes.”
But if you spend time in The Sink, you’ll also see a lot of ‘normal’ outfits. For every person wearing a spiky jacket, there’s someone in jeans and a plain T-shirt. This raised the question: Can you be quirky on the inside only? Junior Elijah Albert-Stein is not so sure.
“Quirkiness has to present in some way. You’re not quirky if you just have little weird thoughts inside your head,” Albert-Stein said.
Under Albert-Stein’s definition, simply wearing silly clothing or having strange fixations also doesn’t cut it: You have to be internally and externally weird to be quirky. One’s hobbies or pastimes might point to internal eccentricity.
“They do all sorts of things,” Talwalker said. “They’re a varsity athlete, first of all, but then, at the same time, they’re a dual degree student with the SMFA … and they’re in a band, and they’re the captain of the pingpong team.”
I was surprised that Talwalker mentioned sports, since senior Alexa Brust considered athletics non-quirky. She points out that Tufts lacks the defining ‘football culture’ of a Big 10 school.
“We don’t value traditional college things, like football and fraternities and sororities. We value more culture and different types of clubs,” she said.
Brust defined quirkiness as “being confident and not conforming to the norm.” To her, Tufts is quirky because we value a wider range of interests, with our quirkiest peers simply displaying their inner selves more conspicuously.
But since it’s so bound up with personal expression, Sheldon sometimes feels that there’s a pressure to be quirky. They find quirkiness at Tufts “a little overrated.”
“People want to be deemed as quirky, and people want to be deemed as different,” they said. “I feel like community is important, and sometimes the want to be quirky or sticking out is overwhelming and leads to exclusion.”
Sheldon’s note about “quirky competitiveness” raised the question: If everyone is quirky, what does non-conformity look like? It changes depending on the context.
For example, in Alabama, where Kinderman hails from, standing out is sometimes frowned upon. She said
that at home, being called quirky would probably register as an insult.
“I’m from a place where I had a very different style compared to everyone else,” Kinderman said. “Everyone dressed the same, and I didn’t do that. So me and my friends, I guess, were quirky compared to everyone else in my high school — but here, not really.”
In other words, the term can operate as an insult or a compliment, depending on where it’s used. At Tufts, quirkiness might be an asset; elsewhere, it might be a target on one’s back.
Since location often determines whether someone sticks out, I asked students which spaces on campus
“Our student body may just be more quirky because we ’ re more accepting, or even encouraging, of difference.”
they consider the least quirky. A consistent answer was the Joyce Cummings Center.
“Architecturally, it’s very corporate future-y in a way that shuns quirkiness,” Albert-Stein said. “I think quirky people go there to die.”
Unlike the somewhat bland STEM spaces, The Sink has a whimsical, improvised aesthetic. The intense red mood lighting and memes plastered on the walls are a bit garish, but they give the space a distinct personality. Others pointed to STEM buildings’ patrons as evidence of non-quirkiness.
“Every time I go there, it just feels so … computer science,” Kinderman said. “Everyone’s just working, and they all seem so miserable. … Everyone looks a little dead inside.”
Indeed, the noise and energy of The Sink is palpable, compared to the JCC’s relative silence. The buzz and whir of espresso machines mingle
with indie music and intense conversation. The most common noise at the JCC is hushed conversation. People are focused on work.
Sheldon agreed that engineering buildings lack eccentricity, but they don’t consider all engineers conventional.
“I do think there’s hella engineers who are quirky and cool,” they said, considering potentially even less quirky locations than the JCC. “I’m trying to think of more places around here that have straight male populations…”
In drawing a comparison between non-quirkiness and heterosexuality, Sheldon made it impossible to ignore the relationship between quirkiness and queerness.
“Quirky people are drawn to queer culture because it’s a safer space in which to be quirky,” Albert-Stein noted. “Queer spaces are more accepting broadly, and therefore it’s easier to be quirky in them.”
The words “quirky” and “queer” designate that which is outside the norm, and they hold connotations of personal expression and creativity. But the words’ association also means that quirkiness, like queerness, can be marginalized.
The ambiguity of the word “quirky” makes it hard to pin down a definition. On the one hand, it can refer to specific traits — artistic, whimsical, outgoing — but it could also mean that someone is strange, or even perverse.
Quirky, therefore, is not a descriptor of what someone ‘is’; it’s more a descriptor of what they aren’t. That is to say, quirky does not refer to a specific aesthetic at Tufts or anywhere. Our student body may just be more quirky because we’re more accepting, or even encouraging, of difference.
Though Tufts is in a progressive state and has a progressive student population, The Sink is still a refuge — a place for self-expression without negative repercussions. “I think it’s just a very welcoming, comfortable space,” Talwalker said.
The muffins are also quite good.
Money Matters
At Tufts, class isn’t only in the classroom — it’s in what we wear, where we go and the things we don’t say about money.
DYLAN FEE Executive Features Editor
Canada geese are often seen roaming Tufts campus — and not just the birds. On a chilled Thursday in February, I counted 27 different people wearing Canada Goose winter jackets. A parka with that logo patch will cost you around $1,000, which means I saw some $27,000 strutting around campus that day.
I also saw a variety of other brands from Uniqlo to Carhartt, Columbia to Patagonia. Some wore beat-up, seemingly secondhand coats; other brave souls wore no winter coats at all. Sure, some of these outerwear choices come down to style. But we can’t ignore the thousand-dollar goose in the room: Our jackets reflect a willingness to pay. This variety in winter apparel is one of the many telling signs of the apparent wealth gap on Tufts campus.
This socioeconomic split is not just speculation; 56% of Tufts students pay full tuition without receiving financial aid, while the other 44% receive an average of over half of their tuition in aid. That’s not to say all of the 56% can easily afford every cent or don’t have financial struggles of their own, but it does mean that there exists a stark difference between the lives students are able to lead both within and outside of these ivory walls.
Take, for example, this hypothetical question: What would you do if you were handed a check for $100 right now? Personally, I would put it toward my next grocery bill or rent payment. Ryan, a junior at Tufts, said he would
pay off some of his student loans. Others would choose the saving route. Tarkan, another junior, stated, “It would sit in my bank account. I wouldn’t use it immediately.” (All students’ last names have been withheld so they could speak more freely about money.)
Sofia, a sophomore, was more focused on the necessities of her internship in the veterinary field. “I would probably put it towards giving my rabies vaccine because it’s $800 dollars and not covered by insurance,” she said.
These answers, while all practical in their own right, reveal how these respondents think about money. Asking for an on-the-spot answer to this question gives away whether or not someone has an expense they need covered at the forefront of their mind.
Tufts is afraid of talking about money. I’ve seen the taboo in my own life; I reserve my money talk for close friends or those with similar financial backgrounds. Sure enough,
of the 14 students whom I asked to interview, only three said yes — even with the promise of first-name-only anonymity. However, when asked in an anonymous survey, 29 were willing to respond.
For Tarkan, conversations surrounding money happen only when there is an expense to be split among a group of people, such as groceries or housing bills.
“[I don’t have] casual conversations [about money],” he said. “It’s something you talk with your friends about — I feel like I wouldn’t talk to a random classmate about it.”
In Sofia’s living situation, she gets to see financial discussions between people on both sides of the wealth gap firsthand.
“Two of my roommates are on more opposite ends of the [wealth] spectrum,” she said. “There [are times] where one of my roommates will want to go out and do something or go on a trip, and my other roommate isn’t able to financially do that, which is fine. But sometimes there’s a little bit of tension because of it.”
PHOTOS BY BRIANA CHEN / THE TUFTS DAILY
Ryan, who’s abroad in London right now, drew a comparison between how people talk about money at Tufts versus where he is now.
“Generally, it’s a little bit more difficult to talk about money on the Tufts campus, just because there’s such a wide range of different backgrounds that people are coming from,” he said. “But with my closer friends, it’s a little bit less of an issue.”
He also emphasized that the majority of people he considers close are in a similar financial situation to him (at least, from his vantage point).
Wealth is also comparative, making it all the more sticky. Classes aren’t distinctly drawn social groupings; they’re amorphous and depend on those around us. (Think of how many people designate themselves as “upper middle class.”) It begs a question: Who exactly is rich at Tufts?
I asked all interviewees and respondents of an anonymous survey to place themselves on a scale from 1 to 10: 1 is the least affluent, and 10 is the most. The scale is based on their perception of their socioeconomic status relative to other Tufts students.
Tarkan, who came up with the initial idea of the scale, clarified the importance of bounding the scale to the Tufts population and its wealth distribution rather than that of the entire country or world. He gives himself a 6 on the Tufts wealth scale.
Sofia put herself at around a 6 or a 7, and Ryan did as well — though, as he spends out of his savings while abroad, he currently sees himself at around a 3 or a 4.
For the 29 respondents to the anonymous survey, their numbers ranged from a 2 to an 8. When asked whether they received financial aid, respondents’ answers generally lined up with their placement on the scale. (Aid recipients generally ranked themselves from 2–4; non-aid recipients generally ranked themselves from 5–8.) Interestingly, no respondent was willing to say they were the richest at 9 or 10, or the poorest at 1.
Wealth is also about perception. There are calling cards for richer students, from their name-branded jackets to their elaborate spring break plans, but relying on these metrics could lead to false judgments.
For Sofia, she believes her choice of extracurricular activities skews the way people view her financial situation.
“People think that I’m better off than I am because I ride horses specifically, which is not necessarily true,” she said. “Riding horses is a big financial investment, and that’s not something that you’re able to do without money. But I also think that people think I’m super wealthy because I grew up riding horses, and a lot of it was [that] I worked at the barn and got free lessons.”
From the outside, Sofia doesn’t think her wealth status is a dead giveaway, except for in the winter, when her Tufts Equestrian jacket is the only warm coat she owns.
And coats may not be the perfect tell, either. Three out of the 14 survey respondents on the more affluent side of the scale had jackets that were thrifted or secondhand. And there were some cases — for North Face, Carhartt and Eddie Bauer — where people on both sides of the spectrum repped jackets of the same brand.
Based on clothing and outer appearance, Ryan drew a comparison between
Tufts and the school he attends, the London School of Economics and Political Science, which he views as having a “pretty similar” socioeconomic background to Tufts.
“I think at Tufts, there’s a tendency to hide the amount of wealth that you have,” he said. “At [LSE], I think there’s more of a tendency to show it off. People are spending more. … People are going around in designer clothing. It’s definitely a little bit more like showy culture.”
As Ryan understands it, this difference in the displaying of wealth between the two campuses is in part due to the career aspirations of its students. LSE students studying finance may be more willing to flaunt than their liberal arts counterparts.
Sure, a stark financial gap exists on campus. Take The New York Times’ word for it: 19% of Tufts students are in the top 1%, compared to just 2.9% of students in the bottom 20%. But we might have more in common than we think; of the 29 respondents to the survey, a significant majority said they were going home or staying at Tufts for spring break, rather than an extravagant location. So, next time I see a Canada Goose on campus, I won’t run the other way — unless it’s the bird, of course.
Feed the Algorithm
Is every foodfluencer posting their overnight oats a journalist?
JULIETA GRANÉ Staff Writer
Long before Gigi Hadid sent fans racing to buy tomato paste and red pepper flakes for her namesake pasta, Julia Child introduced Americans to crêpes. Child’s legions of fans, tuning in every week for her newest episode of “The French Chef,” sprung to culinary action. Cooking supply stores strained to meet the sudden demand for crêpe pans. Among theose millions of fans rushing to try their hand at the thin pancake: the mother of Denise Drower Swidey, a culinary producer and ExCollege professor. “My mom is a terrific home cook, and she made terrific meals for our family,” Swidey said. “Julia Child was her inspiration.”
Food media looks different these days. Sixty-second Instagram clips have replaced Child’s hour-long episodes; the TikToking Wishbone Kitchen has supplanted Martha Stewart. And yet, viral recipes can still cause ingredient shortages.
Chefs, food journalists and social media creators each play a role in shaping what we eat, but their influence and legitimacy are constantly debated. Is culinary school still necessary when a well-shot Instagram reel can launch a chef’s career? Are food journalists being replaced by influencers? To untangle these media webs, I asked some Tufts alums in the field to dig into the recipe for relevance.
Hannah Smokelin started her food Instagram in the spring of her sophomore year. A student in Drower-Swidey’s class, “An Insider’s Guide to the World of Food Media,” Smokelin jump-started her account for the
final project. While the account was initially a fun pastime during quarantine, Smokelin later saw a professional calling. “It was a really good combination of my interests in cooking and photography, and I found it really fun to style [food], make it look nice and take a picture,” she said.
Five years later, Smokelin now works as a test cook and book recipe developer at America’s Test Kitchen. Smokelin’s ‘foodstagram’ never went away. She honed her page, posting the food she made during culinary school, and even used it to get a job. After reaching out to the chef at a restaurant she was interested in working at over the summer, Smokelin was told he wouldn’t normally be hiring anyone in the middle of the season. “But [he] was really impressed with some of the stuff [he] saw on [my] Instagram,” she remembered. “That was a moment for me where I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, he actually really looked at it, other people could be looking at this too.’ And that’s when I thought that this could be a portfolio.”
“I am the type of chef that is free-flowing. I work off of intuition and not a lot of recipes,” sophomore and food content creator Devon Mastroianni said. She started the account at age 12, posting “really terrible photos with cringy captions.” But, like Smokelin, the account was professionally lucrative: She got a job in food media public relations thanks to her experience with food photography and Drower-Swidey’s helping hand. Online food content on social media can also educate audiences. Lucy Simon, special projects editor at Food & Wine, hosts a video series focused on drinks on the magazine’s Instagram and TikTok pages. The show uncorks the world of wine with blind taste-test videos and teaches
doomscrollers to make the ultimate boozy milkshake. “Maybe someone who doesn’t know anything about wine feels a little bit more empowered because they’ve learned,” she said.
Both America’s Test Kitchen and Food & Wine are legacy media institutions, dating back to the ’70s and ’80s when print was king. No more: Many young people now think of Bon Appétit for its YouTube clips more than its glossy pages. Smokelin and Simon have seen this rocky transition close-up.
What sets legacy media apart from the foodfluencers? “The variety of content we produce [at Food & Wine] is what sets us apart from individual creators because our stories will be brought to life in person, in print, on audio only, in video, online when you read it on your phone,” Simon said. “There are so many different ways that we are able to bring things to life, and we also produce so much more content — our output is enormous. It’s just a different ballgame.”
Smokelin sees social media used for inspiration during the cookbooks team’s monthly brainstorming sessions. “Considering what recipes are popular and what people want to see definitely impacts thinking about what recipes we want to develop,” she said.
Simon notes that Food & Wine often taps content creators to appear on their Instagram. Just where is the line, then, between a legacy title and a TikTok reviewer? Simon tries — and struggles — to draw the boundary. Food content creators are “the folks who are recipe developers and are using social media as a tool for showcasing their craft,” she said. “The term ‘influencer’ is a little bit nebulous.”
P hone eats First
Photos By: veronika coyle, aisha karim, sophia khan, rachel liu, john murphy and elise samson
