Summer 2025 Masthead
BOARD
MAYA LERMAN, CC ’27, Editor-in-Chief
CHRIS BROWN, CC ’26, Managing Editor
GEORGE MURPHY, CC ’27, Deputy Editor
ELI BAUM, CC ’26, Publisher
EM BENNETT, CC ’26, Illustrations Editor
ISABELLE OH, BC ’27, Illustrations Editor
SELIN HO, CC ’27, Layout Editor
DERIN OGUTCU, BC ’27, Web Editor
SCHUYLER DAFFEY, CC ’26, Literary Editor
LUCIA DEC-PRAT, CC ’27, Crossword Editor
ELIKA KHOSRAVANI, BC ’27, Social Media Editor
EDITORS
CECILIA ZUNIGA, BC ’26, Senior Editor
GABRIELA MCBRIDE, CC ’27, Senior Editor
EVA SPIER, BC ’27, Senior Editor
STAFF
BOHAN GAO, CC ’28, Staff Writer
MARIANNA JOCAS, BC ’27, Staff Writer
AVA LOZNER, CC ’27, Staff Writer
LILY OUELLET, BC ’27, Staff Writer
ROCKY RŪB, CC ’26, Staff Writer
ZOE GALLIS, CC ’27, Staff Writer
MARVIN CHO, CC ’28, Staff Writer
DUDA KOVARSKY ROTTA, CC ’28, Staff Writer
PRAHARSHA GURRAM, CC ’27, Staff Writer
LUCY MASON, CC ’27, Staff Writer
NATALIE BUTTNER, BC ’27, Staff Writer
MICHAEL ONWUTALU, CC ’27, Staff Writer
HANNAH LUI, CC ’28, Staff Writer
SARA OMER, CC ’28, Staff Writer
NNEMA ÉPÉE-BOUNYA, BC ’28, Staff Writer
CAROLINE NIETO, CC ’27, Staff Writer
TARA ZIA, CC ’26, Staff Writer
SAGAR CASTLEMAN, CC ’26, Staff Writer
KATE SIBERY, CC ’26, Staff Writer
SHREYA KHULLAR, CC ’26, Staff Writer
SAYURI GOVENDER, BC ’26, Staff Writer
JORJA GARCIA, CC ’26, Staff Illustrator
JACQUELINE SUBKHANBERDINA, BC ’27, Staff Illustrator
EMMA FINKELSTEIN, BC ’27, Staff Illustrator
ETTA LUND, BC ’27, Staff Illustrator
INES ALTO, CC ’28, Staff Illustrator
JUSTIN CHEN, CC ’26, Staff Illustrator
AMABELLE ALCALA, CC ’28, Staff Illustrator
IRIS POPE, CC ’28, Staff Illustrator
KATHLEEN HALLEY-SEGAL, CC ’28, Staff Illustrator
Comic by Em Bennett
Table of Contents
Letter from the Editor by Maya Lerman
Bwecommendations by The Blue and White
Summer Postcards by The Blue and White
The Case for Clunky by Nnema Épée-Bounya
On Mushrooms by Rocky Rūb
A Suburban Shrine by Elika Khosravani
On Waymos by Isabelle Oh
Where Archive Lives by Gabriela McBride
On Returning by Zoe Gallis
A Completely Unrequited Affair by Lily Ouellet
Cover by Em Bennett
Postcard by Selin Ho
Illustration by Ines Alto
Letter From the Editor
A typical issue of The Blue and White is grounded in one, very specific, sense of place—Columbia’s campus. Our magazines speak to, and are found in, the common spaces that hold shared resonances: in the cafe in Butler, on tables in Barnard Hall, in John Jay’s lounge, or slipped beneath dorm room doors. These spaces are familiar, inhabited, and shaped by our collective vocabulary. Coming up on the midway point of summer, I’ve found myself missing that mundane solidarity, as our shared semesterly routine is held in seasonal abeyance, and my friends, peers, and Blue and White team are scattered across the globe.
The idea to publish our first ever online-only summer issue was conceived, in part, to continue engaging our community in spite of spatial separation. At the same time, we hoped to grant writers the freedom to publish pieces that may stray from our usual Columbia focus. In the spirit of a summer break from routine, we’ve set aside our columns in favor of free-flowing style and minimal editorial oversight. Putting together this issue has been an immeasurable delight: Our summer pieces brim with creativity, and showcase the distinctive signatures of our writers and illustrators. Containing everything from anime-style art to poetry in translation, this may be one of our most fun issues yet!
Coincidentally, but not surprisingly, our writers chose to take a variety of approaches to writing about place—hometowns, vacation spots, and New York neighborhoods beyond Morningside Heights. In the form of short postcards, our writers offer windows into the unique geographies and contexts they’ve immersed themselves in this summer, sending letters from the wide world back to our collegiate community.
In our long-form section, Elika Khosravani offers a poetic reflection on the ambivalences of returning home after growing accustomed to university life. Zoe Gallis and Lily Ouellet describe a similar disorientation, not merely in physical space but also in words, as they explore their respective relationships to art and family connection in their native languages. Rocky Rūb situates us in space and time as he recounts doing magic mushrooms in Central Park during a tumultuous period in personal and collective history. Gabriela McBride cultivates political optimism through engagement with ephemera at the Interference Archive. In the face of the rise of AI, Nnema Épée-Bounya writes a defense of the nostalgia of physical media, while Isabelle Oh pens a cultural and political critique of self-driving Waymo cars in San Francisco.
Come September, we’ll return to living in the same space and reading the same texts. But before then, let’s take the time to close-read our surroundings, to gather the wisdom of places both remote and familiar. With every mile, every step, and every subway transfer, let us whisper to our cities, towns, and sprawling landscapes, and open our ears to what they have to say.
Maya Lerman
Editor-in-Chief
Bwecommendations
Media we think you would enjoy — but likely not as much as The Blue and White Magazine
Maya Lerman, Editor-in-Chief: Monsoon Wedding (2001). Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues. Shall We Dance? (1996).
Chris Brown, Managing Editor: FLCL (Hulu). Beowulf (tr. J.R.R. Tolkien). “ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Tokimeki Memorial, (Youtube).” The poker room at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino. MJQ Concourse.
George Murphy, Deputy Editor: Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). Sigur Rós, “Gobbledigook.”
Isabelle Oh, Co-Illustrations Editor: Early bedtimes. 4000 piece puzzles.
Em Bennett, Co-Illustrations Editor: Tite Kubo, Bleach. Dave Matthews Band. Multi-purpose tools.
Selin Ho, Layout Editor: Paul Rand, Design, Form, and Chaos. Jeon Jin Hee, “A Trivial Story.”
Sayuri Govender, Co-Literary Editor: Hanif Abdurraqib, “On Summer Crushing.” “Group Chat,” This American Life. Wegmans peaches. Taco Tuesday.
Gabriela McBride, Senior Editor: David Barsamian and Edward Said, Culture and Resistance. CEP, Drawing the Target around the Arrow.
Cecilia Zuniga, Senior Editor: Gatekeeping.
Nnema Épée-Bounya, Staff Writer: Lady Gaga, “Summerboy.” Gilberto Gil, “Refavela.” Calling yourself a polyglot.
Zoe Gallis, Staff Writer: The Rehearsal (HBO). Sun Kil Moon, “Neverending Math Equation”. John Berger, Hold Everything Dear. C.P. Cavafy, “The Afternoon Sun.”
Marianna Jocas, Staff Writer: Parthenope (2024). Julio Iglesias, “Me Olvide De Vivir.” Glass half full. Carrying cash.
Elika Khosravani, Staff Writer: Teresa de Lauretis, Alice doesn't. Taeko Onuki, MIGNONNE.
Duda Kovarsky Rotta, Staff Writer: Rita Lee, “Coisas da Vida.” Annie Ernaux, Look at the Lights, My Love.
Hannah Lui, Staff Writer: Toni Morrison, Sula. The Darkness, “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” Julia Masli, HA HA HA HA HA HA HA at The Public Theater.
Caroline Nieto, Staff Writer: Pinback, Blue Screen. Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart.
Sara Omer, Staff Writer: CG Drews, Don’t Let the Forest In. Bad Buddy (Viki). Banana Fish (Prime). Nanon, “Why Always Me?”
Michael Onwutalu, Staff Writer: A Tale of Summer (1996). Carême (Apple TV+). Robert Frost, North of Boston. Nilüfer Yanya, Dancing Shoes EP. Amaarae, “S.M.O.” Hilton Als, “Finding a Family of Boys.” “Nikki Beach, or: So Many Ways to Lose” (54:15), Industry: Season 3 (HBO). Barbara Krueger, Untitled (I Will Not Become What I Mean to You).
Lily Ouellet, Staff Writer: Texas Hold’em.
Rocky Rūb, Staff Writer: Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach (feat. Robert Wilson). To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar (1995). The Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Kate Sibery, Staff Writer: The Strokes, “Ode to the Mets.” Old friends meeting new friends. Men I Trust, Equus Caballus. Mister Softee.
Summer Postcards
from The Blue & White
Elika Khosravani - Madrid
I am dancing in a city of bears and strawberry trees and the kitchen window is cracked open and there is a red-weld pulsing through my veins, through the limestone lining my street, through the glitter garnishing the rim of my tongue and my shot glass, through my favourite junction of the M-40 highway. Daydreaming in a dingy bar, crammed between Santo Tomé and Piamonte, I am still in love. I am still, in love. Let it simmer under your tongue and under the Spanish sun.
George Murphy - Michigan
Going home is stranger than I thought it would be. I’m not used to the absolute darkness that falls after sunset anymore, not used to hearing trees tap my windows at night or to waking up to birdsong in the morning. I’ve forgotten how many fireflies come out after dusk, how cold the water is in the lake, and how much roadkill there is on the highway. I forgot how to drive for a second—and then I found myself turning the key in the ignition like no time had passed at all. I dust off old in-jokes with friends, my old bike, an ugly jacket, and it all comes back—except now we’re all almost twenty-something, and there’s nothing to do but drive around the lake in the melancholia of evening, waiting for a star to fall, for a party to start, for night to take hold of us again.
Gabriela McBride - Washington Heights
Dear Mother Cabrini,
I am back here with you again. I will dub you the name of the church on my boulevard. People and waves and arms and angles surround me and you and us down Fort Washington and Cabrini and 187th and 185th and Pinehurst and Broadway and down to the 1 back up and around to the A and the M4. You are nothing like a street in Brooklyn I return to once a year, reminding me how different I have become. You are not like a spot between Riverside and Amsterdam that stings with the aftertaste of a phrase spoken to me on a bench in a park on a stoop or by a garden gate. I find you are far too lived in for one memory to hold. Everything you contain swirls around me as I walk through you. On you? Up and down you. In one ear and out the other; something someone said to me there. A mix of so many colors they turn white, or something like that. You are soaked in the entirety of my youth. And you remind me of nothing. Instead, I see just what is here: The towering Elm that remains, the newly planted azaleas. In Fort Tryon my words do not come too fast or too slow. They flow gently off my tongue and don't get stuck between my teeth on the insides of my cheeks. I walk through the heather garden and I pause to pick a lambs-ear leaf. I wave hello to one person and then another. I leave the park and pass a store that’s closing and a store that’s opening. I notice a crack on the ground that’s been filled in. And although I have lived here all my life, something in our familiarity gives you a newness (and my newness spoke to your newness and it was a thing of endless).
Kate Sibery - Grand Central
If I think about it too much, I might start to feel like I’ve spent the entire month of June on the train. If I don’t think about it enough, I might miss my train. The woman sitting behind me can’t stop talking about her Magnolia trees—what they love and don’t love. They’re loving the heat but she isn’t. There’s a false sense of getting places on Metro North because I’m always headed somewhere I’ve been hundreds of times before. All I mean to say is here I am again pulling into Grand Central like I was several days ago and several months ago and most months since I was fourteen years old. The stretch between E. 97th Street and Grand Central that runs beneath Park Avenue still makes me feel like I’m making my way to the very center of the world. But then we stop in the tunnel, waiting for other trains to pass, waiting for a track to open up, and the anticipation lifts.It’s just another day on the train. I’ll get off and go to work. My boss Lynne will be eating breakfast at her desk—a piece of pie with whipped cream. I wrote a poem about it the other day on the train:
Lynne sits
at her desk
Another day
Another slice
of pie
It’s 9 a.m.
Duda Rotta - Sã0 Paulo
And as you try to decide whether you belong in the British rain or here, I remind you this city can be cruel. The motorcycles will swarm you, the heat will tire you, the fumes will burn your lungs more than all those cigarettes. You will try to look São Paulo in the eye and it will stare right through you. You will think you know your way around, take a shortcut, and end up entirely elsewhere, lost. I'm not sure this is the place it used to be. That corrupt mayor painted over the graffiti, we don’t go to the 824 house anymore. The sun here will blue your tattoos; you might miss the rain. But looking down upon the concrete sidewalk, you will remember that old poem. “A flower rose from the street!” Everywhere you look, my darling friend, there it will be. A small, yellow flower, bursting alive despite, or maybe from, the ugly and the nauseating. You will see it where you look. Your grandmother's earring, the roar of your father’s motorcycle. The clock in Paulista, stopping just for you. The beers, the butts, the bustling people afraid of the morning. The rock in the park, Flamengo, my parents, a seven-point star shining far away. That quiet moment you so love: driving with the windows open in the dead of night, listening to The Doors. Everyone is asleep, Jim Morrison is dead. St. Paul is the patron saint of writers: Come home. Quit trying to decide when you already know. You will come to regret this, and it is the best decision you ever made. Não adianta esperar. Send me a postcard, will you?
Zoe Gallis - Athens
My mother recently told me that if there was ever a moment in her life when she felt that she had passed the threshold from learner of Greek language and culture to native, it was when she felt moved by Greek music. There was something untranslatable in its sound, she said—something that, once she understood, unlocked a new sense of familiarity and belonging.
So now that I’m back home in Athens, I’ve been paying closer attention to the sounds that remind me that I belong here—that I have grown comfortable in this place. After all, I feel much more at ease in New York now, and I know this because of all of the different noises I have become accustomed to—sirens, subway announcements, the general hustle and bustle of a New York City sidewalk. In Athens, it’s the cicadas that erupt into chorus in the mid-afternoon, the gentle movement of the pine tree in the garden, the soft rise and fall of the sea. These are the sounds that make up the music of my everyday.
My mother’s comment also made me think about all the ways music has shaped our friendship: the wild concerts we’ve attended, the sweaty frat parties we’ve danced at, or even the songs we’ve played on my low-quality speaker in my dorm, tea in hand. This is how people become familiar with one another, too, I think. It is, at the very least, how I began getting to know you.
Now that we’re apart, I wonder often about the sounds that shape your days, whether you feel yourself growing native to somewhere, or if you’ll sound different the next time we speak.
Sayuri Govender - FiDi
I get to work and swipe my government ID, passing lines of people waiting for Section 8 assistance, for customer service for housing vouchers, for the housing lottery they’ve been applying to for decades. In my windowless office, I read endless reports on affordability, the housing shortage, burned with the one sentence fact that you need to make over $100K a year to truly be able to pay rent. That the “typical renter” is severely rent burdened—an agony muddled down into one sentence. My small team is full of PhD-ed sociologists advocating for affordability but in a scientific, objective, systematic method. The stories of New Yorkers are represented by numbers and no words. During a brief 30 minute break I eat my lunch at City Hall Park, the one with the proud-standing fountain. I gawkgawk at the skyscrapers like a tourist—so close to my face, so far reaching—the wealth around me and the disparity behind it. I sit with dozens of people in front of the looming white-domed hall, dozens of people hoping that the slow bureaucratic changes will someday reach them. It feels like everyone here was promised a role in or of change-making. It might be too slow to reach us. Sometimes I sit in the park for a second time after work, 5:00 p.m. needing to look at the sun after being inside with the fluorescent light bulbs. The squirrels are now burying acorns. It’s an exercise of patience. The unbearable heat continues its slow burn above us.
Sara Omer - Puerto Rico
Dear Mama Samira,
This was my first time travelling someplace without the warm embraces of uncles, aunts, and cousins waiting to greet us, and especially our first Eid Al-Adha away from the family and friends from back home in Brooklyn. Yet with every smile and twinkle of an eye we came across, my worries melted away like a popsicle basking in the Puerto Rican sun. I found myself sitting outside the balcony of our hotel every day, gazing across the sea in the early hours before sunrise, just existing. My family and I were all raised on islands; me in NYC and my parents in Tuti Island, Sudan. Here I was on yet another island. For someone who is terrified of the ocean, I always find myself attracted to the way it glistens under the sun’s rays, its waves crashing on my back in Coney Island Beach or the way it carried mama and her siblings to college as they canoed across the Blue Nile. I can even imagine you, umi, expertly stroking across the river in Tuti with your long, thick hair gliding all around you as you swam in the same water as the family that raised you before did and as your own adventurous children had when they were my age.
My biggest adrenaline pumping thrill here was sliding down the waterfalls in El Yunque National Rainforest. As much as I love the water, I have absolutely zero swimming skills. But then I remembered you, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. The Nile’s legacy runs through my veins. A mini waterfall got nothing on me.
I mustered up courage and went up, carefully attempting to sit as the cool water gushed from underneath me. As I accelerated down my mind drew blank and completely forgot basic swimming 101: Hold your breath.
Being a city girl, I have never in my life ever been submerged underneath any body of water, be it river or pool, willingly or unwillingly. I did not have time to say goodbye to the chatter of the colorful tourists around me, the green Sierra Palms, the fluffy clouds above me before I submerged into a world I was too scared to enter before. Suspended upside down—or maybe right side up, I couldn't tell—the pressure of the foggy water pressed against every inch of my body, fluctuating between existence and nonexistence.
It felt like I was under there for hours; memories came flooding in and out of my brain as if my life was flashing before my eyes. I was totally petrified, and yet I enjoyed every second of this fear, this privacy, this tranquil solitude away from the havoc in the world above.
A crack of my head above the water and the memories of the past zipped into those of the present. Yet again, I was able to see the color around me, the people, the foliage, the slippery rocks. The remoteness of being underwater felt so drunkenly good I forgot what it was like to breathe.
I’ve seen so many cool things in the few days I’ve spent here in San Juan: El Castillo San Felipe del Morro, Viejo San Juan, Vivo Beach Club, El Yunque; but out of them all the peace of being under the water is the experience I wish I could share with you. We can dive in, just me and you, away from the family drama and the chaos of living in Jeddah and New York and the frustration we bear as being women who are expected to be everything but ourselves. We can escape it together through the water by home.
With love,
Sara (your quirky American grandchild)
Rocky Rūb - West Village
Dear Dr. Anthony Fauci,
If you’re reading this, it’s too late. THE VACCINES DIDN’T WORK. The Trump administration has yet again failed to address the growing mind virus breaching the once quarantined population currently identified as “The West Village Girl.” I moved in at about their neighborhood’s border, which had previously been deemed by government officials as a “Green Zone,” before I started to notice very concerning symptoms (and terrifying evidence!) that the psychological infection has been coursing through my street’s apartment buildings—and now I fear it’s upon me!
It all started when the ¢99 pizza just three buildings over upped their price to $1.50, and I started to smell the fumes of squeezed fruit wafting in the humid air from a Juice Generation that popped up down the street. Soon after, I noticed that my two male neighbors in the unit next door had started to carry around pickle-ball rackets. Just recently, one of them was pacing outside our door mumbling, “It’s time to sell,” repeatedly under his breath. But things got serious last week, when I caught my roommate wearing light wash jeans with a white tank top. I suspect she’s just one paycheck away from booking an appointment at Drybar. I even saw, while watching tv (Love Island US of all things!) on my boyfriend’s computer, a tab open to purchase boat shoes and a Barry’s Bootcamp subscription! THINGS. ARE. DIRE.
I’m asking for you to take one last final stance, Dr. Fauci, for you just may be our last hope. Now that landlords are required to pay broker fees, I fear we may never see the cure.
Warmly and with what I hope are not the last of my freethinking words,
At-Risk of Infection and Scared
Illustration by Isabelle Oh
Nnema Épée-Bounya - Jamaica
Wagwan Reader,
Today I learned there are over 30 distinct types of mangoes, and that the fruit’s scent is as euphoric as stepping into the sea and being comforted by its warmth instead of flinching at its frigidity. On this island I am a disciplined disciple of my favorite form of mediation—tanning; I have become one with the sun as I let its rays melt into my skin. I can confirm that Bob Marley’s melodies sound infinitely better when you are looking out on his island with a belly full of sorrel.
I am particularly drawn to the phrase “soon come,” which I have heard often during my stay. The locals let it roll off their tongue to calm foreigners’ impatience, but one eventually learns that just because they say soon does not mean anything will happen quickly. Instead, Jamaica, the island “Out of Many, One People,” forces you to slow down and savor every step, every flavor, every sound.
Illustration by Isabelle Oh
Chris Brown - Atlanta
Driving on Highway 85 into Atlanta, there’s a point where the trees clear away; suddenly, you’re confronted with the totality of the city. It’s a linear city, and there on your left unfolds the beating heart of the South. A thousand times I’ve made that drive in my life, and 1000 times it’s moved me. That line of buildings held the dreams of my grandparents when they left the Mississippi coast and a hundred years of history. On a warm night, there’s still no better feeling than to drive in with the windows down and take in the light show. A vivid reminder that I’m home.
Eighteen miles away, in the sleepy suburb that raised me, I’ve returned to my oasis. Next to a shaded neighborhood pool is a portal, an enclosure of trees that hides a little Eden. A small clearing in the trees, a creek running, an unperturbed slice of nature in a city rapidly expanding. Trees aren’t rare here, but this kind of undeveloped space is. Whenever I’m home, I make a pilgrimage. I can drive now, which I couldn’t when I first sat on its fallen log and listened to the creek bubble. But still I walk, through the humid air and strong sun, until I reach my little shaded piece of heaven. The place where my thoughts run clearest. I’ve watched this area develop since I was a kid; fields have become duplexes, parking lots have become townhouses. I know that even this paradise isn’t safe forever. But for now, whenever I’m here, it’s mine. And I love it all the same.
There comes a point where every city becomes a place where you’ve lived, rather than one where you live. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become keenly aware that every time I come back could be the last before I leave for the long term, only to return on holidays and special occasions. There was a time when this city was the entire world. So this summer, I try to see everything with a kid’s eyes: the green of every leaf, the heat, the culture. One day, I’ll leave behind these buildings and my little oasis. But for now, for at least one more summer, I get to call home, home.
Hope you’re well. Love from the South.
Caroline Nieto - New Jersey
Dear childhood bedroom,
Being back home means I sleep in my bed with the creaky frame. The one I bought from Facebook Marketplace from a girl I used to ride the school bus with. Each time I toss and turn I hear its music and I wonder how long it took her to become fed up with it.
When I lie awake at night, I’m weighted down by the cream crochet blanket my grandmother made me years ago, its loops made rough from rounds of washing and drying. Sometimes I like to poke through the holes with my fingers and think that her hands were there once, too. Each stitch of the pattern was a ball of yarn once, the only difference now is their arrangement.
When morning comes, I wake up to the hum of my ceiling fan or cracks of light in the shape of my window panes. I roll out of bed and it actually croaks, beckoning me back. I can’t stay forever.
What I can do is what I can’t do anywhere else. I can get coffee for my dad and I at the bagel shop and sit at our kitchen table and drink it. I can walk into a barn that sells paperback for two dollars. I can drive my sister to work and pull over on the way back at the farm by the all way stop. I’m lucky when I catch the horses out of their stables. These days I have the time to take their picture.
After a day of filling and killing time I lie down to kill it with my eyes closed. As I drift to sleep I know a few things. I know my way around this room even on the darkest night. I know that I’ll hear the swishing-by of cars outside my window all night. I know that in the morning, I can do it all again. I know where I am.
Thanks for keeping me warm at night,
Caroline
Illustration by Em Bennett
The Case for Clunky
Embracing physical media in the AI age.
By Nnema Épée-Bounya
Numerous times over the last few months, I’ve considered getting a flip phone. Some of the open tabs on my laptop include searches for a vinyl shelf, an article about the film camera Veroca uses in Walter Selles’ Ainda Estou Aqui, cheap DVD players, and the difference between Kodak Gold 200 and Ultra Max 400 film. My recent obsession with physical forms of media has been sparked by recent developments in art and technology. If the last decade and a half can be described as a push to have everything at our fingertips, including photos, locations, AI-generated summaries, then maybe I am a part of a growing counterculture of young people embracing the clunky, the elaborate—the physical. The last few years and months have seen AI and its myriad uses (some helpful, many not) redefine and maximize digital convenience at the expense of ethical and environmental implications. The push back against current technological trends—especially AI—was not simply born out of a bitter reluctance to adapt to an increasingly digitized world, rather, there is a palpable nostalgia in older forms of technology and physical media. Nothing quite captures the essence of a fond memory like a grainy film photograph or the fuzzy static that fills the room when you begin to spin your favorite record. I often find myself looking through old photos of my parents’ road trip across the states with their friends when they first moved here for college. There is a particular photo of my parents, looking straight into the lens as they lean towards each other in the front row of their first car, that always sticks out to me. In this picture, my parents are younger than I’ve ever known them; they seem like people I could see on Low Steps. Being able to hold these memories that don’t belong to me up close feels like crossing into another world and makes me hesitate to join the current culture surrounding technology—instead embracing the old.
Illustration by Isabelle Oh
On my desk sit three vinyls and a pile of DVDs I ordered from the Criterion Collection. The Criterion Collection is a film distribution company committed to distributing DVDs and Blu-Rays, as well as restoring and licensing films. The Criterion Collection’s mission connects high-quality physical media to the heart of the medium of film itself, as they believe that allowing people to purchase and view the films the way the director intended is crucial to respecting the films and their messages. My purchases from Criterion were slightly preemptive as I don’t have a DVD player. However, my impulsive purchase suddenly seemed extremely justified when I learned that Netflix plans on introducing AI ads based on whatever you are watching that will automatically play when the screen is paused. My Criterion edition of The Royal Tenenbaums, which includes deleted scenes and commentary from Wes Anderson and the cast, is incapable of adding environmentally wasteful updates like this one because I now own this movie—it is not in the hands of AI obsessed CEOs because it lives on my desk, forever frozen in time. This is how DVDs, vinyls, CDs, and Blu-Ray have become practical and smart investments for the AI-weary, birthing a counter-culture that prioritizes physical media. Nowadays, so much of our life is trapped on our devices, which can add unwelcome features at any time. The permanence, simplicity, and ownership physical media offers feels alien compared to the powerlessness of current technology.
Although many forms of physical media have become practically extinct within our generation, the concept of physical media is not completely foreign to us. Quietly tucked away in my basement are stacks of thick and dusty photo albums, chronicling one of my parents’ trips to Paris when they were teenagers, my fourth birthday party, my brother’s first steps, an uncle’s wedding, and so many other stories and memories. Photo albums of this kind are in so many basements, attics, garages. The ritual of occasionally pulling one out from its hiding place and wondering who that person is holding you as a baby is a sacred, yet endangered experience. Now, rather than heavy photo albums, we have a gluttonous amount of photos in our pocket at all times. I don’t need twenty pictures of the same view, or half an hour to capture the perfect selfie, but with our phones rendering the art of photography so unromantic and casual, it makes one question: why shouldn’t I have five identical pictures of my dinner? I often wonder how many memories will be gone forever when the “cloud” that I don’t quite understand inevitably implodes in the year, say 2060 (I’m being optimistic here). Of course, there are so many positives to having these memories easily accessible rather than in cobwebbed corners, but so many moments being in the hands of an entity capable of disappearing at any given moment unsettles me. Perhaps this is just my response to things I don’t understand: I retreat to the comfortable, the reliable, the familiar. But perhaps it is something deeper—a desire to hold and truly own my life.
Illustration by Em Bennett
In an episode of the podcast, Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, the host asks his guest, Jia Tolentino, after an extended conversation about her essay on a college internship in Venice: “At 19, what did you need to air out of the house?”
She starts, “I think—”; but before she goes further, I think there is something to hold on to here. This particular subject/verb combo is anything but atypical. In fact, it’s probably the most common precursor to all contemporary dialogue of our global culture (though I’d need a linguist to check that). In the first writing workshop I participated in, two of my peers commented that I seemed to use this phrase as a way of deflecting. The deflections made it harder to trust me as a narrator, revealing my insecurities about stating my opinions and preemptively shielding myself for being proved wrong. At least, that’s what I think the two women who identified it were trying to say.
Jia Tolentino, on the other hand, does not start her sentences with I think because she thinks she’s wrong. She’s one of the most confident writers I follow (and that’s why she holds the top spot as my favorite millennial). Rather than submitting prematurely to doubts, she is submitting to the fact that she is a different person now than who she is describing. She isn’t succumbing to anything except for the temporal difference between her psyche then and her psyche now. This probably doesn’t seem much different, but I promise it is. It’s contextual, and had I not cut her off, one can see when she finishes her response to Fragoso’s question about what she had to air out of the house at 19, that Tolentino does not deflect, but instead leaves open ended:
(I think) it was seeing who I was with no one around me and no familiar context and no purchase on anything. I have an instinct to drive myself to this anyway, it’s one of the reasons I like hallucinogens so much, it’s that you kind of get pushed to your edge and you feel the same feeling as like, ‘every window’s open!’, like there’s nothing but bare experience here, and like sort of my metal is being tested, my like fortitude, my ability to retain stability in the midst of like profound waves of dazzle or fear or terror—I enjoy seeing what’s left and remembering that what’s left is actually a huge amount, and I think that’s what it was, that’s what was being aired out.
Rather than “I think, therefore I am”, it’s “I think, therefore I am building my schema based on my past experiences and trying to infiltrate a consciousness of my past self who I no longer am.” She says, “I think,” because she has changed. At the same time, analyzing her dialogue is a lot different than analyzing her writing. The key difference being unconscious colloquialisms and intentional, astute decisions to inscribe a permanent relic of the author’s thinking at the time. I suppose it’s a bit trivial—or hopefully just nuanced—and mostly a fixation I have that is distracting from what I really want to say, which is that I, too, have done hallucinogens to drive myself to that bare experience Tolentino is talking about.
…
The first time I did them, I don’t think I consumed enough to even consider it a microdose. But the second time, the same day of the 2024 NYC Marathon, two days before the 2024 Presidential Election, under a large oak tree in Central Park, laying down over a place and time in the middle of a tense and critical shift of terrain, culture, season, history, and collective trauma, I was definitely trying to air some things out of the house.
I’ve experienced few days more beautiful than that one. And it stands as this moment I can’t help but idealize in comparison to the nauseating revolutions we’ve all been riding around since Donald Trump reoccupied the White House in January. The compounding variables which amplified the day in their own singular ways absolutely contribute to what made the day memorable. What’s blurry is whether the mushrooms I ate were such a determinant factor in what made the impression of it so intense. Nonetheless it was all very hopeful.
Addison Rae recently said that she doesn’t like to give dating advice because all relationships are very unique. There are many reasons why this could mean nothing and should be disregarded, including the fact that she said this in her recent Chicken Shop Date appearance, hosted by Amelia Dimoldenberg. But she seems earnest, in a good way, and I feel similarly about substance use.
Mushrooms are the only substance “harder” than marijuana that I’ve tried. Which, of course, makes them exciting. But they also exist as this almost separate entity from other drugs for their therapeutic reputation. It’s like how mushrooms and LSD have extremely similar effects on the body, yet I wouldn’t take LSD if I wanted to speak to God, and when I eat mushrooms, I think He’s trying to speak to me. This is also about time and place: I think of God when I think of mushrooms because at the time, I was transfixed by my relationship to religion (or the lack of this relationship that I grew up with) during a period when I was convinced that I was going to die soon.
Leading up to the trip, I had been seeing a therapist once a week for about two months to confront the anxiety that was manifesting into this fear, though I never told her this. She reminded me too much of my mom.
I’ve been trying to shake this inclination—to match pitch with the frequencies my counselors want to hear—but awareness famously is not salvation. So it’s best for me to keep these relationships parasocial. Instead, I fixate on thinkers who seem to have worked out the problems I’m going through in their own writing, hence, the heavy references to Tolentino. Before her, it was Mary Oliver, and before her it was Didion (Joan, duh). Somewhere in between them, there seemed to be answers in rereading Salinger’s Franny and Zoe, and I hesitate to admit that in proximity I was strangely attached to David Foster Wallace. It’s less a desire to be told what to think and more a need for permission to think in these ways.
It's a pattern I’ve developed of trying them on and stealing their voice until I can tell what pieces of them I want to keep forever. And I feel permitted to do so because Didion used to do the same thing with Hemingway, so confidence must be something we can borrow until it’s our own.
At the time of the climactic, profound, and life altering trip, I was much less confident. Overwhelming feelings of doom will do this to a person. I wrote, after the fact, “I seemed to unconsciously ask the universe: “Is death scary?” and, “Why is it that I’m so afraid?” The sparrows perched on the oak tree echoed answers that bounced around the space the psilocybin carved out inside my head. Time seems to always be running out, and when I take mind altering substances it is easy to think that the grass will pull me prematurely into the afterlife. A sign that maybe I shouldn’t be taking mind altering substances.” Actually, this was the very reason I needed the substance. It’s all very degrading, but so is the act of writing. And it gets a person to that “bare experience” Tolentino was talking about.
This is just a more literary and tautological way of talking over the scientific research that should instead speak for itself. In a CNN article, How psilocybin, the psychedelic in mushrooms, may rewire the brain to ease depression, anxiety, and more, Sandee LaMotte describes exactly what the title proposes. It’s a good metaphor for establishing the relationship between science and prose writing on the topic of mushrooms. Science writing is necessary, and without it, it would be reckless to consume such substances without the proper research about its effects. It's a helpful generalization. But the experience is uniquely subjective in a way that only prose can describe. It’s not the same as communicating the beauty of it, the clarity in your surroundings.
For instance, during a trip, I look at the flock of sparrows sitting in the oak tree branches and they assume the power of a jury of my peers. They have flown to this perch together, entering into my gaze from their deliberations with the verdict to some question that I had forgotten I’d asked. I create narratives in my mind to process what I see and somehow feel that I’ll be found guilty, or wanting. When the sparrows tell me to look no further, I don’t know what to do except close my eyes. When they tell me it’s happening, I reopen them expecting the world to collapse on top of me.
Animals are instinctual, and bird migration patterns foreshadow the movements of the planet before we can feel them. This is scientific, but it’s a disservice to communicate it without poetic appeal. And it’s good to realize these things and to spend prolonged moments magnifying our fascination with it. But it’s just as important to come back down to earth after the fact. To wake up the next morning and distinguish that these are all just threats designed by myself for myself and the real questions I should be asking should have nothing to do with when the world is going to end and everything to do with what I’m going to wear to work in the morning. What is happening cannot be stopped, but we can give attention to it.
The past makes you feel like somebody else. Mushrooms create corporeal distance between the consciousness and the body’s present state. Thus, it accelerates that paradoxical hindsight effect that my professors are always bringing up in creative writing classes. Closeness to time makes the feelings vivid, but distance brings you clarity, and trustworthiness, and often, a better perspective. Doing mushrooms marries these all together in the five(ish)-hour period it takes to fully pass in and out the body, and when I do them, I don’t need the years I usually do to process the present moment holistically. Which is not to say that this essay wouldn’t be written ten times better if I tried again in five years; this effect is inexorable.
It’s too optimistic to take a full swing in this direction and say that it makes us into our own role models. That would be a dangerous ceding of power to substances which universally pose (even the slightest) risk of dependency and abuse. But changing perspective, if only for the moment, brings the subject one step closer to personal cogency. It’s an omniscient development, even if just temporarily induced, that convinces the consciousness to trust itself. And this phenomenon is powerful.
None of this could very well matter to anyone. Some days it doesn’t matter to me. The trip isn’t married to existentialism, and I want to take mushrooms at the club but I’m worried that I’ll be thinking about God on the dance floor. Maybe He’d like that. It’s hard to say, and I implore anyone who is tripping soon to ask this on my behalf. But it’s too unique and even if we ask the same questions and get the same answers there will be something missing in our translation to each other. When we come back down from the trip and into our bodies again, the shift is felt kinesthetically, and as our brains rewire, the nuances of the answer cannot be shared.
Then again, I am but a novice mushroom user and a less than amateur psilocybin scientist. Which is essentially the crux of this argument. That on mushrooms, I think I have the answers to these live questions which are constantly changing. I leave the trip more confident and more certain. Two weeks after that hopeful day in November, when I tripped under that big oak tree in Central Park, the world had already made another fold on itself, and I wasn’t questioning God anymore but more about how time will never linger on the good stuff and how tight my grip on it should be and if I can trust they will happen again. Change used to be the answer but that has changed, too. This is, of course, the fault of those who seek meaning out of the ordinary. But there’s always a chance something will be there, and I’m always scared of missing it.
On Mushrooms
Airing some things out of the house.
By Rocky Rūb
A Suburban Shrine
On dreams, dissatisfaction, and discovery.
By Elika Khosravani
This is how I remember time spent in my hometown: Crawling across a football field and listening to the crickets whistle in the weeds. Holding my breath against the mechanical Marlborian motions of my friends. Watching moths swarm in spirals beneath the floodlights. The worn knees of my jeans, the sharp sting of grass at my ankles and my bruised pride. A taxi thick with drunk laughter spilling out the windows and onto the highway. Prayers scratched into the side of a bus stop sign. Holy water trickling down my chin, purifying the stilted soil of my suburban shrine: a childish tit for tat, soaked in the damp traces of bottom-shelf communion wine.
My hometown is a universe that eats itself up, a vacated guest room that is cut and carved and contoured until it caves into itself. Nestled somewhere in Spanish suburbia, it was far too small for all the dreams I held inside my head.
In the rose bloom of adolescent fascination, I often found myself untethering from the world around me, drifting away mid-conversation into visions of some make-believe adulthood. I flirted with the thought of wading through crowds like skipping over stones in the creek behind my grandparents’ house, of stumbling home with sun-swollen shoulders, of rainstorms charging against my ribs—moments imagined so vividly they almost became memories of a life unlived. Within every parallel universe and new rabbit hole I lost myself in, a hole grew inside of me, too. Like a whirlpool of negative space, driven by a deep disdain for my hometown and an even greater anticipation of what was to come. I tried to satiate this hunger—not exactly with, but through: affection, attention, Blues, circadian rhythm neglect, dive bars, East Village tarot readers, hand-rolled cigarettes, love letters, poetry, psychedelics, sex, sweat, tears, Zamrock. Nothing did the trick; and even here, now, in “what was to come,” I am writhing in limitation. Time slinks by, humming an adamant tune, tapping its claws on its know-it-all watch: It will carry on and I must follow along.
Every summer, I return home. And during the summer, an ache returns slowly to my ribs. I grow sluggish with hope and apathy. The world spins more slowly in the heat. In June, I only crave snow and sleet. I want a glacial dissolution, so quiet and earnest that even solstitial deities cannot bear it. But it is still summer and the air is hot and heavy and the skin under my bra straps feels taut and I know tomorrow I will be sunburnt. I wait for the sunlight to split my lungs open. The sky is endlessly blue, so wide it could be a grotto, and I am somewhere inside it, lost. So I dream, and dream, and dream, and keep dreaming. But this time, my dream sheds its smoke-stained skin and asks for another chance. A hometown heatstroke strikes the promise of rebirth into my heart. Heat-dazed eyes linger longer on every sidewalk, sleepy street lights shedding light on everything I grew up hating.
Now, I am back here, but the disdain is somehow subdued, softened by a recognition of the buried wonders this place has always held, a legion of lessons I was too restless to recognize before. And with every lesson unearthed, I loop a golden thread from my town's center to my soul. I preach, but only the pavement listens, like an anchor that no longer ails me but points the way home. I used to think this town was hollow, but it turns out it was filled with small gospels I was too unperceptive to name, things I now know to be true, like:
Illustration by Ines Alto
I. Hearing someone say your name for the first time is a gift; how their tongue wraps around the consonants, finding their footing around the syllables. Treasure it.
II. Lay your head on your grandmother’s stomach and feel the rise and fall of her breathing.
III. Make a wish each time you turn your necklace’s clasp from front to back.
IV. Turn every desire into ambition.
V. Leap from a cliff with the lake still far below, and savour the infinity of falling—the head rush as you slice through the watery stillness.
VI. Seduce a stranger and then cry the entire walk back home.
VII. Cut your own hair and regret it instantly. Let your friend fix it over her bathroom sink, three beers in. Listen to the steady snip of her scissors, the hum of a broken radio, the birdsong on her windowsill.
VIII. Sit on the shower floor until the water goes cold, until your fingers feel numb.
IX. Memorize your brother’s phone number.
X. When the summer returns, as it always does, go everywhere. Go nowhere. Go home. Sit on the broken porch swing and remember there is truth in everything you write.
An infiltration of driverless cars.
By Isabelle Oh
Illustration by Isabelle Oh
My first Waymo encounter was somewhere in my neighborhood in San Francisco, around my junior or senior year of high school. At the time, they were a novelty even to those of us in the Bay Area.
I wasn’t tuned into the tech industry in a way that would have notified me of the appearance of autonomous vehicles. Similar to most San Franciscans, I assume, the appearance of Waymos and similar vehicles was random, unexpected, and unprompted.
It was a slow trickle, starting in residential neighborhoods with monitors sitting behind the wheel. At that point, multiple companies had prototypes roaming the streets. Some had bike-rack-like rigs with spinning sensors, while others had tall, camera-encrusted apparatuses on their roofs with more spinning sensors mounted above each headlight. I watched as prototypes were replaced with slightly altered versions, as monitors became obsolete and the driver seats emptied, as cars with certain brand names disappeared while others multiplied. I drove around them when they pulled over for no reason, cast a glare at the empty driver’s seat while speeding past. But they weren’t just annoying. I’d watch as the steering wheel moved of its own accord. I imagined the acceleration and brake pedals moving like those self-playing pianos in old Westerns. It was eerie and unnatural.
I remember driving by an intersection and looking over at the cross street. A truck was trying to pull out of a grocery store loading dock and two Waymos were approaching in opposite directions on either side of the truck that now blocked half the street’s width. Both attempted to circumvent the truck, but neither could continue as they would otherwise collide with the other. It was a stand-off; neither could make the first move. One vehicle couldn’t wave the other on to pass. Cars with drivers behind their wheels had begun to clog the street, with the truck and the two Waymos at an impasse. I passed the odd situation before I could witness its resolution. Slowly, I realized, these robots had begun to blend in.
Even before the more recent acts of Waymo-trashing related to the anti-ICE protests taking place throughout California, people were frustrated by these robots infiltrating the streets. Over winter break I saw a parked Waymo with blue tape wrapped around each sensor and camera. Two summers ago, a Waymo was stopped on a busy street. Someone had put a traffic cone on its hood, hazard lights flashing in the dark, confused. With no driver to flip off, the whole car became the victim of road rage. Rumbling beneath these small acts was a feeling that the cars were at best tolerated, and at worst completely unwelcome.
As protests in Los Angeles and around the country have ballooned in reaction to law enforcement kidnapping people off the streets, many have noted that Waymos and other driverless cars have been overwhelmingly vandalized, burned, and otherwise destroyed. Destruction of property has long been a part of civil unrest, but burning autonomous vehicles felt targeted, purposeful in the spray painted words “Fuck ICE” emblazoned on every melting car door. Burning Waymos, their signature bright white paint with bulbous, beetle-like sensors and cameras protruding out of the bumpers and roofs engulfed in bright orange flames and billowing black smoke, have become symbols of a deep-seated frustration and anger toward those whose intentions are at best unknown and at worst malicious and hateful, against law enforcement and Silicon Valley tech bros, and an incursion of a technology thrust upon a city struggling for basic human rights at a pace far faster than what anyone was and is capable of keeping up with.
I’ve talked to many friends who have come to appreciate Waymos. They’re helpful when getting home late at night, sometimes a bit cheaper too (a whole other conversation about putting many rideshare drivers out of work). They make up for some of the lackluster reach and reliability of Bay Area public transportation. They offer a form of independent mobility around the city, especially for those with disabilities. Autonomous vehicles are not an inherent evil; they’re useful, even.
But despite the value autonomous cars might bring, images of burning and graffitied cars still plastered headlines. Setting fire to what is essentially a giant battery is dangerous and toxic, but the act is symbolic, even if violent. Cars are a regular sight in San Francisco, and most certainly in Los Angeles, yet the inclusion of cameras and sensors pointed outward at pedestrians, homes, other cars, watching and tracking the surroundings of these driverless vehicles evokes that of beetle-black eyes. Though perhaps not built for surveillance, it certainly felt as if the city were being watched in yet another covert way, and people started reacting to that discomfort.
As protests continued throughout the first full weekend of June, Waymo began instructing, or programming, its vehicles to avoid certain parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities. Expressions and acts of frustration had escalated from traffic cones on hoods or tape over sensors to fires and smoke. For those past few weeks, people had been viscerally reminded of their lack of control in the city they called home. But for the past few years, the trickling in of autonomous vehicles was a subtle but incessant poking that the places we called home can be trashed, manipulated; that shared spaces are no longer truly safe, but crawling with far away entities with no real interests in making it a better place to live.
Many elected officials and some protest organizers have called for the protests to remain peaceful. Yet every popular movement opposing discriminatory and malicious treatment of individuals, though all with some element of violence, has eventually been regarded by history as a net good. I don’t yet know if I still possess the same faith in the course of history, that we can pull ourselves out of this spiral toward an irreversible reliance on artificial intelligence, out of this nation’s inability to truly treasure humanity and human life.
On Waymos
Illustration by Isabelle Oh
On 7th Street and 5th Avenue, tucked into a residential street in Park Slope, lives the Interference Archive. The archive welcomes you from first contact. There is no barrier to entry; in fact, it’s sometimes hard to find someone to tell you what you can or cannot touch. Volunteers bustle in and out of the front door, neighbors and visitors drop off materials, and students engaged in research sit in the back, combing through box after box. The archive is an open stacks collection that relies completely on donated materials and volunteer work. It focuses on preserving the cultural production of radical social movements throughout time, often those that fell between the cracks of mainstream historical narratives.
The space isn’t a museum, a memorial to old ideas, or a gravesite for outdated publications. It’s a living, breathing space for practice, activity, and dissemination of information. Interested in more than just documenting activism, the space nourishes the past, present, and future of grassroots movements and radical struggles, moving with time. While a traditional archive might ask visitors to wear gloves or not to touch things at all, Justin, who’s volunteered at the archive for two years, spoke to me about the value of visitors’ physical contact with the ephemera. “We want people to touch it. If it falls apart, that's what happens.” He explains that the physicality of the materials isn’t necessarily what’s important, but rather “the idea of the material. We'll recreate things we have to.”
Amelia, another volunteer at the archive, similarly emphasized that the materials at the archive are not just for being looked at, but for being used. “While yes, we’re literally preserving the paper and stuff, but also, preserving the function. I think that sequestering something away does objects a disservice. Activating the materials is so important.”
Beyond engaging the materials, Interference Archive actively works on mobilizing its community to transform theory into action. Staffing follows a non-hierarchical structure. At least once a week, an exhibition, workshop, or material distribution event is held in the space: This Is Not A Local Struggle, a look at ephemera produced by the national Stop Cop City movement, a Palestine Lives exhibition organized with Archivists and Librarians for Palestine, and earlier this month, a Know Your Rights materials distribution event, where attendees left with stacks of printed pamphlets, zines, and red cards to distribute to their neighborhoods. Each of these events are open to the public, and in this way, learning from the materials it holds, the archive is also involved in the creation of new materials, spreading the ideas it preserves, to the world outside itself.
Working as a volunteer at the archive this summer has been a reminder that learning about the past is not a passive act, but rather an ongoing dialogue. As a history major at Columbia, I am far too familiar with a certain approach to history that has a reverence for the oldness of things without applying it to our present, or acting upon that present.
As fellow students, awakened by historical and theoretical tools which Columbia gives them, face intense institutional and police repression for engaging in civil disobedience, I feel more and more convinced that the University is losing its function. Like the Interference Archive, the university should be a living, active space; a place where ideas are applied to practice.
I’m reminded of Randolph Bourne, an essayist, social critic of the early 1900s, and a Columbia student, who, more than a hundred years ago, wrote an article for the Spectator criticizing Columbia’s labor practices and treatment of custodial staff. After receiving a critical response from a professor for having overly utopian expectations for the University, Bourne responded in the paper writing: “I would say that I emphatically do expect my University to be a place for ‘trying out Utopian schemes…’ I expect it to be bigger and better and braver and more generous in its treatment of all its fellow-workers, than private business organizations run for profit” (Spectator Archives).
While mainstream narratives aim to minimize and condescend student movements into insignificance, the archive can act as a way to remind us of a tradition of analogous moments in years past. Must we be reminded every ten years that we ought to feel like a part of a constituency? That there have long been calls for participatory democracy? That receiving an education is to come to demand better of the institutions around us? If the can university is no longer a safe space for students to fully and critically engage with the past, alternative spaces like the Interference Archive might serve as a partial remedy.
During my first shift working at the archive this summer, I found a box labeled “Student Movements” containing a yellowing copy of the Port Huron Statement, falling apart in my hands. In it, next to a description of a democratically run university, an annotator had written “How Long!?”
Not yet.
Where Archive Lives
On ephemera and utopian schemes.
By Gabriela McBride
Towards the end of Homer’s Odyssey, we witness the titular character return—weary and transformed by his arduous years away—to a home that has changed in his absence. What follows in the closing books of the epic are a series of tender and difficult moments: Odysseus’s dog, Argos, upon reuniting with his owner, wags his tail for a final time; the loyal Penelope reluctantly watches suitors compete to replace her beloved; the devoted son, Telemachus, helps his father in his disguise; and the ever-nurturing nurse, Eurycleia, continues to care. We become witnesses to these scenes which unfold in the wake of Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, and which do the slow and meaningful work of recognition.
This summer in my hometown of Athens, Greece, I have been trying to do much of this same work—I have been trying to remind myself of what once felt familiar. My Greek has always lingered at the edges of fluency, present but partial, often buried under all of my English education. It has, nonetheless, undeniably shaped my upbringing, and when I moved from Athens to New York for college, I carried “Greek” as a label that was supposed to explain something about who I was, even if that something remained unclear to me. While at Columbia, I have explored this confusing feeling in many ways: through reading, freewriting, academic essays, conversations with other international friends—but all of my efforts so far have been in English.
Illustration by Isabelle Oh
Now, back at home after a tumultuous semester away, I have one more avenue to explore, the one that intimidates me the most—the Greek language. So, this summer I have decided to become an archeologist of sorts and I have decided to start excavating deep down to where my Greek lies, uncovering the simple words, the ones I know best, and arranging them into poems. In essence, I have been attempting to do the hard work of recognition in hopes that I might encounter my Greek self.
Writing in a language that you’re not confident in is, as one might expect, a frustrating endeavor (I have six English synonyms for every word I know in Greek). It is also an experience that brings to the surface quite a lot of shame. Maybe Greek wasn’t the language I was schooled in, but it was the language that surrounded me as I grew and changed for the first eighteen years of my life; I should know it better, I tell myself. In the hours I have spent getting just a few lines down on the page in Greek, I am haunted by the question: What if, after all this digging, there isn’t enough of me there to find?
The first and most difficult obstacle was—as with everything—beginning. Setting out to write poems in Greek for the first time required a kind of confession, a willingness to admit and be faced with all that I don’t know. For this reason, I kept my attempts strictly private. Despite the fact that my writing remained between me and the page, what kept me returning to the craft was, in all honesty, my feeling of shame, the feeling that I should know better. But what followed that initial feeling was a hope that sustained me: Each time I would finish writing or translating a poem, the language felt a little more like my own again—like I had wiped the dust off each of the words and held them in my hands anew.
There are many things about Athens, aside from the language, that remind me of the time I have spent here. After all, life is not only made up of words, but of places and people, and I am reminded of this every time I visit the spots where I used to be a regular, or I see the faces of my hometown friends and extended family. Unsurprisingly, once I started writing in Greek, this is the meaning my poems took on, their content often reflecting the experience of a hot Athenian summer and the familiar characters that I grew up with. Threaded through each of them is also a palpable nostalgia and an earnestness unique to expressing complex feelings with a limited vocabulary. My poems say what they mean because that is all they can do. What emerges from their sincerity is a clear image, not of who I am, but of all the years I have spent becoming.
Τα Χρόνια
Τον Αύγουστο
Τα πράγματα στέγνωναν γρήγορα:
Τα σώματά μας
Σκληρά από το αλάτι.
Τα τζιτζίκια ανακοίνωναν
Το απόγευμα.
Η μία μέρα γινόταν δύο,
Κι έτσι, κάπως, πέρασαν τα χρόνια.
Η μνήμη όμως κρέμεται
Σαν βρεγμένο λινό στο δέρμα,
Και μου λείπουν τα πάντα
Όλη την ώρα.
The Years
In August,
Things dried in no time:
Our bodies
Stiff with salt.
The cicadas announced
The evening.
One day became two,
And somehow the years passed.
Memory, though, hangs
Like wet linen on skin,
And I miss everything
All the time.
On Returning
Meditations on bilingualism from a summer spent at home.
By Zoe Gallis
A Completely Unrequited Affair
Translation and other inheritances.
By Lily Ouellet
Illustration by Selin Ho
French may be the language of love, but for me it was always a completely unrequited affair. Between my dry, stretched-out winters spent in Quebec, and harsh, humid summers in Louisiana, the language never quite sank in. Childhood trips to Quebec were long, bookended by the familiar exhaustion of transnational travel, where the snow fell dry and light and the sky flattened early into a grey that clung to the buildings of the old city. There, French swirled around me, existing only as soft voices pooling, unlike home in Louisiana where the French is noticeably harsher, choppier, and sounds best in a gravelly voice. We would gather in relatives’ houses and talk. Or rather, they talked.
I always understood some. I had, after all, spent days in school absorbing classroom-related vocabulary and conjugation charts. But unlike my younger cousins who have always glided easily between French and English, I recognized French words but not the shapes they took together, the small shifts of tone or the casual Quebecois contractions that make it sound alive. For them, the two languages lived together in the structurally bilingual cities of Ottawa and Montreal. For me, they lived on opposite sides of a very wide, fast-moving river.
Alone in Louisiana, when my dad spoke in French, I would cry or scream until he stopped. My brother slipped into fluency by some plasticity of the brain that I lacked; the hope of my parents was that I would hear enough to shape the sounds instinctively, as he had done. I instead rejected what little was given, accepting only the fragments that already lived in me—half-formed, mostly domestic, my dad’s tired commands and Quebecois swears. But these never cohered into fluency, floating separate and inefficient. When I try to force them out, the attempts come out inelegantly like a cat coughing up hairballs, involuntary and vaguely embarrassing.
…
Despite the fluency of my brother, my French deficiency didn’t become apparent to me until middle school, when my French teacher, a strict Belgian woman, approached my desk. She had a stiff white bob that hovered around her face when she walked, and the sharp lines of her face made smiling seem anatomically impossible. She frightened me so deeply that my body flushed before every class, a red stain crawling up my back and, if I was unlucky, onto my neck and face. It was a lesson on depuis.
Depuis combien de temps apprends-tu le français? She asked. How long have you been learning french?
Depuis cinquième année, I choked out, the rash already showing itself on my cheeks. Since fifth grade.
She dismissed it. Unsure of where to go next, I tried the same phrase embedded in a full sentence, to no avail. She waved me off, sharp and final. I opened my mouth like a fish. Tu apprends le français depuis toujours, she said. Depuis ta naissance. Since you were born.
There is a particular hell reserved for language classrooms, but this was a special kind of low. How had I ended up here, paired with kids who started a year ago? There were other sixth graders already in French IV, I thought clumsily, while my so-called native tongue remained several paces behind. Even now, at Columbia, it seems every fifth person was sent to a Lycée somewhere, with vineyards in Provence or Nice or wherever the weather is good for grapes.
…
Early this summer we went to Quebec, due to my dad’s belated admission that he despises snow, cold, and ice. It was also my grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday, and marked ten years since my dad had seen his family or boarded a plane. Aside from my eight-week stay in Quebec City the summer before college (another well-intentioned but failed attempt at French immersion), none of us had returned. We were now all to gather in a discount winter ski-lodge just north of Quebec City.
This trip worried me immensely. Would everyone expect that Barnard’s Intermediate French I and II had done what family, childhood, and geography could not? In the Chicago airport, as we were waiting on our connection to Montreal, each time the speaker went off I would try to translate the announcement before the gate agent. Perhaps knowing how to say boarding soon would lead, eventually, to a real conversation. I spent the plane ride going over everything I might need to say, verb tenses and conditionals I had learned but long forgotten. I checked the small amount of slang I knew with my mom.
My parents and I pulled up to the lodge in a rental Nissan. Everyone hugged us, teared-up, and maneuvered around the awkwardness of elapsed years quite easily. Yet despite my efforts, my mouth locked up, as if the presence of this family, who had known me long before I had any words at all, made all phrases retreat. My French teacher materialized over my shoulder, arms-crossed with an infinite spectral judgement. Suddenly stripped of any bravery, I instinctively reverted to my usual habits. I didn’t want to confess, not with my silence, and certainly not out loud, how stubbornly the language resisted me. So, they spoke to me in French, and I responded in English. It was, in this sense, familiar.
…
At breakfast, the smoke from the bacon continued to set off the fire alarm. Every half minute, its wail pierced the room with a sharp, synthetic shriek, and every half minute I had to wave a thick, folded towel beneath the detector to make it stop. I spent this time trying to digest where the conversation was going. This was the real work.
The best possible outcome was if my dad, who speaks the most and the loudest, began to tell a story in which I was there. If I could understand his setup, I could parse out the punchline, prepare to laugh at the correct word, and show the appropriate expression of amusement. If I could keep pace without any sort of translation, it was enough of a victory, a demonstration that I can belong with simply good timing and pattern recognition. After successfully pulling off this maneuver several times, thanking god for my dad’s fondness of a good retelling, I felt a surge of pride.
But this safety net quickly dissolved the moment my dad ran out of stories. With no shared history to hold me, I was back to catching fragments and nodding haphazardly. I began to count minutes at the table until I could leave. I knew it was shameful that I wanted to escape from breakfasts with my perfectly pleasant family—but at what level would I ever know them if we never communicated? A relationship can only go so far through nods and smiles, I thought pitifully. I complained to my mom that night, drained from continuous translation: “They’ll never know who I am in English,” I said. Her lips turned downward, confused at my admission: “What are you talking about? They already do.”
It seemed no one could figure out exactly how much I understood; I hung in linguistic purgatory, stuck somewhere between fluency and not. Because of this, my cousins took on the role of translator, a role for which I was eternally grateful, flicking their eyes toward me mid-sentence to see if I needed help. My dad began paraphrasing entire anecdotes in advance. Sometimes, someone would say something that made the entire table erupt with laughter, and then, when the moment passed, my dad would turn to me: “Did you get that?” I’d shake my head the smallest I could, the shame in admitting my fake-laughter burning into my cheeks. “Fourrer is like, quebecois for ‘doing it.’” he’d say. My father translated sex jokes just for me.
…
I was so afraid of confirming, once and for all, that I didn’t belong, that I was never fooling anyone. Elegance in a universal language I didn’t speak wasn’t exactly something I could fake—my hefty American accent, my hesitation, and the way I laughed slightly too early at everything weren't hiding anything. My family saw through every feeble attempt I made at perfect fluency, which was obvious by the way they continued to sporadically translate for me even though I naively thought I appeared to understand everything.
Everyone looked out for me and did seem to know the exact amount I understood. This wasn’t because I was performing well, but because they already knew me “in English.” I was too anxious to see it—I wanted to prove that since I’d studied French my entire life, I had something to show for it. But no one was ever waiting for proof, as they already understood what I knew and adjusted, not in pity, but in our own language, meeting me where I was. My uncle brought me the desserts I liked, warm cookies from their cherished family bakery, and my cousins curled up with me and watched English Top Gun. My aunt took visible delight in the use of French idioms, pausing each time to turn to me and explain what they meant.
After a few days, I began to look forward to my personal translations. What I once saw as an acute marker of failure began to feel like a fluency of another kind. I began to notice everyone more in their languages, just like they noticed me, the rhythm of their laughs and small beats before silence. My dad moves his arms more when he speaks French, and enunciates less; my brother always sounds mildly surprised and tilts his head slightly upward. My cousin has a tendency to begin yelling mid-story, or laugh so hard that she has trouble even getting it out. I can now read stories through their hands alone. It is, aptly named, our language of love.
