Eye - Feb7 - Columbia Daily Spectator

The magazine of the Columbia Spectator
7 February 2013 / vol. 14 issue 2
the
eye
Millennial Love
Measuring the opportunity cost of dating at Columbia
photography by Lauren Field
by Alessandra Poblador & Yasmin Gagne
The magazine of the
Columbia Spectator
Editor in Chief
Rikki Novetsky
Managing Editor for Features
Alison Herman
Managing Editor for Optics
Laura Booth
Art Director
Suze Myers
Lead Story Editor
Zoe Camp
Senior Design Editor
Annie Wang
Head Copy Editor
Natan Belchikov
Associate Editors for Features
Carolina Gerlach
Parul Guliani
Kierstin Utter
Dunni Oduyemi
Eyesites Editor
PJ Sauerteig
Interview Editor
Gabrielle Noone
View from Here Editor
Adina Applebaum
Fiction Editor
Eric Wohlstadter
Deputy for Online Content
Kelly Lane
Deputy for Multimedia
Morgan Wilcock
Visuals Associate Editor
Hannah Sotnick
Associate Editor for Online Content
Amy Zimmerman
Production Staff
Katy Nelson
Adil Habib
Tian Saltzman
Aida Duarte
Eli Haims
Isabel Michaelides
Copy Staff
Jess Pflugrath
Spectator Editor in Chief
Sammy Roth
Spectator Managing Editor
Finn Vigeland
Spectator Publisher
Alex Smyk
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
“But why always Dorothea?” famously opines the
narrator of George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch. Professor
Bruce Robbins wrote the quote on the board, and continued
to explain: Dorothea is young and charming, our darling
protagonist. Eliot’s point, however, is that Dorothea –
or, rather, all the Dorotheas who exist in the world of
nineteenth century fiction – is always at the center of
attention. But who deserves to be the center of a novel,
anyway? By having her narrator ask the question, Eliot
provides the answer: Anyone. Dorothea is our perpetual
protagonist because she is the pretty girl we expect and
want, while we doom other characters to marginality
simply from our lack of interest.
The same is true of our time on campus. What becomes
popular is what students allow to become popular, which
is precisely the fun in crafting the sixteen pages that make
up The Eye every week. By deciding which content goes
into the magazine, we have the ability to determine, in a
tangible way, which topics and genres of writing receive
attention on Columbia’s campus.
I am proud to introduce a new fiction section in The
Eye. Our fiction will be short and punchy: a full story
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encapsulated on one page of the magazine. By featuring
undergraduate fiction writers, we will grant the proper
attention to artists who usually lack the opportunity to be
publicly acknowledged for their talents. The Eye does not
wish to replace Columbia’s treasured literary magazines.
Rather, we hope to provide a space where fiction writers
can be recognized more regularly, as opposed to only once
or twice a year.
David Foster Wallace once remarked, “Fiction’s about
what it is to be a human being.” A century before, Ralph
Waldo Emerson declared, “Fiction reveals the truth
that reality obscures.” But, even if just for a moment,
let’s forget our aphorisms. Sometimes at the end of a
long day all we want is a good story. Email your story to
eyefiction@columbiaspectator.com to get involved.
Rikki Novetsky, Editor in Chief
MILLENNIAL LOVE
Measuring the opportunity cost of dating
at Columbia pg. 07
by Alessandra Poblador & Yasmin Gagne
photography by Lauren Field
CONTENTS
03 EYESITES
EYE TO EYE
04 Waxing Poetic
IDEAS
05 Cyberspace Seduction
Emma Stein
FOOD
06 Man Meets Mushroom
Jack Klempay
FICTION
11 Blacktop
TELEVISION
12 Little Girl, Interrupted
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© 2013 The Eye,
Spectator Publishing Company, Inc.
Nicollette Barsamian
IDEAS
13 The Reblog Diet
20/20
14 Less Than Superman
Macklemore’s Revenge
VFH
15 Moving Pictures
Eric Wohlstadter
David Salazar
Andrea Garcia-Vargas
Allyson Gronowitz
PJ Sauerteig
Anne Steele
BIZARRE TREND ALERT
BY THE NUMBERS
by PJ Sauerteig
illustration by Brian Thorn
by Deborah Pollack
JEWISH SHOUTOUTS IN RAP
album cover is Ross’ face and fur collar blended
into a Star of David, and a standout track is
the vocal skit wherein a (fictional) rabbi, Peter
Rosenberg, congratulates Ross on his becoming a
man, the day’s “lavish spread provided by Wingstop,” and the “beautiful titties hanging out” at
the service. We don’t think anyone understands,
let alone wants to even begin asking the ethical
questions raised by these instances.
Ross isn’t alone, however, in his
fixation—A$AP Ferg (a confederate of A$AP Rocky) offers these lines in his trap
anthem, “Work”: “My
lawyer Jewish / He work
hard / He put in work
/ He put in work.” It
even seems like this
little trend is making
its way to Billboard
radio: Bruno Mars
(although not rap and
definitely not trap)
just released an album
called Unorthodox Jukebox. What conclusions
can we draw from all of
this? Admittedly few. Is
this parody? Is it demeaning? Is it appropriation or
appreciation? One thing is
certain, these guys aren’t getting
any gelt for their Judaic lexicon.
EYESITES
We don’t pretend to understand the contemporary rap game. The trends, the lingo, the references—so much is lost on us. But as of late, one
trend in particular has left us more baffled than
usual. We are referring, of course, to the current
affinity some rappers demonstrated for Jewish
culture. And we’re not talking about Jewish rappers, like Drake. We’re talking about guys who
wouldn’t know a lulav if it smacked
them in the face. Remember Rick
Ross’ monster album last year,
God Forgives, I Don’t? Then
you’ll remember these
lines from the track
“Presidential”:“Walking
on Jewish marble,
hand painted the
ceiling / Happy Hanukkah n***a, it’s a
wonderful feeling.”
We didn’t know
Jewish marble
was a thing, but,
then again, I’m
not in Rick Ross’
tax bracket. In an
even more inexplicable move, Rick
Ross followed up on
that album’s success
by releasing another
mix tape soon after—The
Black Bar Mitzvah. The
4 MOHI STAPLES THAT
SHOULD HAVE CLOSED
If Morningside Heights were in a perpetual
television series of Survivor, then winter break’s
season finale would have left many in a state of
shock and horror. Fan favorites, such as Absolute
Bagels and M2M, were booted, both leaving space
for new contenders and catalyzing the conversation about which other players we would have
liked to see voted off the island, instead.
1. University Hardware: If you’ve ever
wanted to know what it it’s like to be in
an airplane bathroom with nine random
strangers, shop here.
2. Uni Café: If you’re ever in the mood for
pizza, salad, eggs, soup, lasagna, oriental
noodles, a cup of Jell-O, cannolis, gelato, or
really anything edible for that matter, you are
in luck: Uni Café has anything and everything
on its menu. Ironically, most of it is only
that—edible. Did we learn nothing from Plato
about multitasking?
3. Brad’s: Proudly serving bland, uninspired
sandwiches that could put a coke addict to
sleep. Considering its pristine location, Brad’s
should try to conjure up more than muffins
and bottled water to woo the masses.
4. Häagen-Dazs: Pinkberry has and will
continue to crush you under mounds of
healthier toppings and post-yoga sin. Just
give up. Your forlorn employees gazing out
the window apparently already have.
FLOWCHART
ENTERING THE SUMMER WORKFORCE
Does the company pay
its interns in cash only?
by PJ Sauerteig
Believe it or not, the time
has already come for (most)
students to start securing internships and odd jobs for the
summer. But it’s not as easy
as dressing up for interviews
and sending out, “Hey! Still
haven’t heard from you...”
emails; it takes a little bit of
discretion. This week, The Eye
has prepared a little flow chart
to help you separate the promising jobs from the ill-fated
and the exciting internships
from the deceptive.
Does the company
have a website?
NO
DON’T TAKE IT!
YES:
Is it a lifeguarding
position at a
local pool?
YES:
Does it use exclusively Helvetica font?
NO
YES
DON’T TAKE IT!
TAKE IT!
MOVE!
there an 18+ legal warning
YES NO: Ispage
before logging in?
NO
YES
YES NO
YES:
DON’T TAKE IT!
TAKE IT!
Do you live in a
Great Plains State?
Did the company representative smell
a little bit like methamphetamine?
NO
Is your boss an evil,
bearded, Swiss
monomaniac bent on
taking over east Asia?
YES NO
TAKE IT!
DON’T TAKE IT!
03
WAXING POETIC
EYE TO EYE
BARNARD ALUMNA ARIANA REINES ON HOW SHE MADE POETRY HER JOB
by Nicollette Barsamian
illustration by Kady Pu
Poet Ariana Reines earned her B.A. from Barnard
and went on to Columbia for graduate work. She has
written several books, including The Cow, which won
the Alberta Prize from Fence Books. She is also well
known for her work translating French texts, such
as Charles Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare. Reines’
subject matter ranges from the occult to performance
art, reflecting her diverse and conflicted reactions to
her profession. Michael Silverblatt of NPR’s Bookworm has described her as “one of the crucial voices
of her generation.” She is currently teaching a poetry
seminar at Columbia’s School of the Arts. The Eye
sat down with Reines to talk about the creative
process, the art of translation, and her experience at Barnard.
you love. It’s like sex. It is a much deeper reading.
You get closer to the mind and body of the writer.
That’s an intimacy that is really powerful. In that
sense, I think it’s rapture. But translating texts that
are problematic is painful. Translation is awesome
and amazing [but] I’d be glad to never do it again
unless it’s something that I really love. I thought I
could be a half-translator as my job, but maybe I’m
not literary enough to do it. Or maybe I don’t like
being a servant.
What draws you to poetry?
I ask myself this a lot. Do I even know
what poetry is? How strange is it to become
a poet? I had a hard time admitting it. I felt I
couldn’t say it out loud—it’s a feeling of essence. I love all kinds of literature. I read a lot
of stuff that’s not poetry. I love all kinds of
language and hearing people talk and all sorts
of accents. I hope to live long enough to make
all sorts of things—plays, screenplays. But there
is something about poetry. It’s super corny, but
it’s the heart of literature. I’m not interested in an
intellectual virtuosity without a heart. It just excites
me. It’s romantic. It’s a little bit of a delusion, but an
attractive one. It makes me weak in the knees.
You once wrote of your book, The Cow, “I wrote it
and a lot of other things. It has many big ideas inside
of it. It quotes from many sources.” How important is
it for you that literature look back to the past?
It was very important to me with my first book.
I felt like I had to pass all of history, especially literary history, through my body. That’s ambitious.
There was no way I could do it. I had wanted to be
a writer since I was very young. I didn’t want my
writing to be what I ended up doing, but I wanted
to do wonderful, beautiful things with language.
The quotations [in The Cow] are very angry. It’s not
quotation in the fully respectful sense, it’s passing
all of literature through a hamburger helper. It’s an
expression of grief and mourning. I feel less dependent on quotations now.
How do you feel about translating?
Translating came first out of love, then necessity, then guilt. Otherwise I’d do nothing. There’s a
part of me that is totally lazy and a part of me that
loves working. I love to joke that translating is like
doing ecstasy. It drives your brain, but it isn’t fun.
It fries your brain. I don’t have very much patience
for it. But it is a way to get intimate with a text that
04
“SOMETHING ABOUT POETRY....
IT JUST EXCITES ME. IT’S
ROMANTIC. IT’S A LITTLE
BIT OF A DELUSION, BUT AN
ATTRACTIVE ONE. IT MAKES ME
WEAK IN THE KNEES.”
You also wrote, “I am not a Francophile. I do not like
cheese. I do not like the Champs-Élysées.” So why do
other people like French culture so much?
For a lot of Americans, France has a bourgeois
attraction. It can be argued that it always had it—
that’s why we have the lingua franca, the language
of currency ... that used to be French. Everyone
spoke French. It was a cultural force across Europe.
It has a snotty, bougie, problematic colonial and
cultural history. No matter how many memoirs
there are about eating pastries, people still write
them. I [do] like thinking about the origins of the
novel, a phenomenon that happened in France.
You’ve written about your time at Barnard as
very difficult, with your mother and brother
having to move in with you. Do you think you
got the “college experience”?
I don’t think I had the typical college experience. I had lots of jobs, lots of on-campus jobs and
lots of disgusting things. But my dad was hostile
to me attending Barnard. And most parents like
their children going to these kinds of schools. But
the more you meet people, you see that they had
harder experiences. Maybe the majority had to hide
it. Maybe there were a lot of people at Barnard at
the time who had experiences as dire as mine.
I feel like I envied a lot of people. For a lot of
people, college is a great time and can be lots
of fun. It was fun for me, but it wasn’t easy.
It seemed like a totally awesome party for
some people. There is all kind[s] of privilege in the Seven Sisters and Ivy League.
Barnard’s administration and the people
I met were all extraordinary though. I’m
not a ra-ra school spirit type of person,
but I have a lot of respect for Barnard. All
institutions have their problems, but Barnard is focused on empowering women.
I’m teaching a class now [at Columbia].
I’ve only had one class, and it’s very eerie.
My memories are still embedded in this place.
A lot of good things and a lot of bad. I’ve been
thinking a lot about institutions and if this is the
best way to educate people.
So how did you go from student to poet? What is the
transition like and do you have any advice for aspiring
poets at Barnard and Columbia?
What forced me to be a poet? I took a poetry class
at Columbia. I hated it, but it was a great classic poetry
college experience. I also took a class called Imaginative
Writing at Columbia. While I was a student, I was dealing with all this shit that I didn’t know how to handle.
There are some real freaks to spend time with and share
writing with at Columbia. That’s a beautiful thing.
I became a poet when my brother went to the
mental hospital, and I freaked out. I quit the Ph.D.
program. I was trying to have a good experience at
Columbia, but it was shattered. I wanted to become
the artist I dreamed of becoming. A Proust without
the pain. A girl Nabokov. I don’t know what I was
thinking. I had to accept that I might never fit my ideal
and maybe I was deluding myself. It was also luck and
chance—I sent it [The Cow] out to friends, and it won
an award. Then I became a poet, not somebody with
a hobby. For anyone who thinks nobody will understand what they are doing, you never really know.
There is something incredible about surrendering to
the possibility. No matter how much you might doubt
yourself, you never know what will happen. There’s
no one way for a writer to be. a
CYBERSPACE SEDUCTION
by Emma Stein
illustration by
Suzanna Buck
We live-tweet our lives. We Instagram every
little morsel we put in our mouths. We update
our Facebooks to indicate what school we get
into, what classes we take, and what internship
we score for the summer. Even so, there’s one
digital step we can’t bring ourselves to take:
pursuing romance on the web.
For some reason, trying to find our match in
the ether of cyberspace feels sketchy, unsafe,
even uncool. But should it?
On Columbia’s campus, we’ve begun to
take baby steps toward making the Internet a
socially acceptable place to search for love. For
example, the recent founding of the CU Admirers Facebook page allows students to anonymously profess their ardor for others in ways
that vary from sweet to creepy.
While CU Admirers is a forum for simply expressing anonymous desires rather than realiz-
FOR SOME REASON, TRYING
TO FIND OUR MATCH IN THE
ETHER OF CYBERSPACE FEELS
SKETCHY, UNSAFE, EVEN
UNCOOL. BUT SHOULD IT?
ing them, some students are taking their online
dating more seriously. In fact, college students
are increasingly turning to dating websites such
as DateMySchool. Founded in 2010 by two Columbia alumni, DateMySchool is unique in that
it is available exclusively to college students,
offering them a sense of security they might not
be able to attain from traditional dating sites.
According to Melanie Wallner, the director
of public relations at DateMySchool, the site
has nearly 200,000 members nationwide and is
particularly popular at Columbia.
“We’re most popular at Columbia and NYU:
Over 30 percent of each campus uses DateMySchool, more than 50 percent of the dates
that happen at these schools are set up on
DateMySchool, and most of our success
stories have come from students from
those schools,” Wallner says.
But despite these figures, many
students are still reluctant to admit that
they’ve tried their hand at online dating.
A student from Lesley University in
Cambridge, Mass., who met her boy-
friend on the popular site OkCupid, acknowledges the stigma associated with online dating.
“It’s often seen as a last resort—something
to do when you’re all out of options and desperate to meet someone, or you’re too lazy to go out
and meet people in social situations,” she says. “I
personally am okay with telling people I met my
boyfriend online, because I am happy with the
way our relationship has progressed and the fact
that we met online does not make our relationship any less authentic.”
Rega Jha, a Columbia College senior, has
several friends who use DateMySchool. While
Jha acknowledges that a stigma against online
dating exists, she believes this sort of thinking
is outdated.
“I think a slight stigma might exist, yeah, but
only as much as it does in the rest of the world. I
have several friends who use DateMySchool, and
they’ve all found plenty of dates on there, some
successful, some not so much, some Columbians, some NYU-ers, but in any case—it’s just
another place to meet people, no more or less
valid than 1020 or Butler,” she says.
However, some students complain that
DateMySchool isn’t really all that useful.
“My roommate and I both signed up for
DateMySchool at the same time, and within 10
minutes of creating a profile, we both received
the same message from the same guy asking if
we wanted to hook up,” says Mary Cosgrove, a
junior at Barnard College. “We both promptly
deleted our accounts. I did not think this site
was useful at all for finding actual love, just
more hookups.”
But for students who are looking for just a
hookup, online dating sites may be a good option.
A Columbia College student who wishes to remain
anonymous uses Grindr, an all-male locationbased social network that allows gay and bisexual
men to find others interested in a hookup.
IDEAS
ONLINE DATING SHEDS ITS ON-CAMPUS STIGMA
“For a top-tier school like Columbia where
so many of us are striving to have really important roles in public and private sectors, it’s
kind of understood that romance isn’t a huge
part of that,” he says. “If I know I don’t want to
find a lifelong love, why should I deal with romantic attachments that will drain my energy,
especially when I can just use an app to find
anonymous sex?”
While he acknowledges that people may feel
embarrassed about using the app, he thinks it
should be more socially acceptable. “I have no
shame about having consensual casual sex ...
There shouldn’t be a reason that this isn’t just a
normal, positive interchange between persons
facilitated by technology.”
This should be especially true at a school like
Columbia, where students have access to the
larger community of New York City. For schools
located in smaller towns, like Princeton, online
dating and trying to reach out into the community make less sense.
Tiger Admirers, Princeton’s version of
Columbia Admirers, wrote in an email, “We’re
in an area where the only other people to meet
our age are basically other Princeton students,
so it seems silly to join an online dating website
when you should just be meeting people in person. Perhaps if we were located in a city where
there were lots of 20-somethings (like Columbia is, or even somewhere in Boston), it would
make more sense, and thus be considered more
socially acceptable and normal.”
While online dating may not be fully socially acceptable yet, the gradual romantic
shift toward the digital—demonstrated by the
popularity of CU Admirers—is at least helping
us grow more open with one another. And with
the recent Manti Te’o fiasco, perhaps that’s all
we can ask for. a
05
MAN MEETS MUSHROOM
FOOD
FORAGED FOOD MAKES ITS DEBUT IN FINE DINING
by Jack Klempay
illustration by Jiin
Choi
Foraging isn’t just for hoofed animals and
Bear Grylls anymore; in fact, it’s become increasingly popular at a number of high-end New
York restaurants.
Strangely, foraging has received a warm
welcome from New Yorkers, who seem to dread
weekly grocery runs and encounters with dirt.
This newfound acceptance is thanks to a handful of the city’s most progressive chefs, who
are working to make foraged cuisine a
mainstay in the restaurant world.
Among these is Mads Refslund, executive chef of the
year-old ACME restaurant
in NoHo. Like a growing
number of young visionaries in the culinary
world, Refslund calls
himself a forager. He is a
pioneer of “new Nordic
cuisine,” a movement
that began in Denmark
at the world-famous
Noma restaurant and
aims to limit kitchen ingredients to foods that can
be foraged: grown, caught,
or gathered locally.
Looking at ACME’s menu, it’s
clear that Refslund is something
of a genius when it comes to adapting unusual foraged ingredients for the
modern palate. Guests fawn over dishes like
the roasted bass with wild onions, thyme, and
nasturtium (wild watercress).
Refslund explains that his method for
imagining a new dish involves considering the
connection between smell, taste, and memory.
“The food’s not so weird that no one’s ever
heard about it,” he said. “Everyone’s heard of
pine, it’s just that they haven’t tasted it before.” Now they can, in ACME’s celery root
soup with apples and pine oil. “They know
the smell of pine, of fresh pine needles, and
of Christmas trees ... So people have a certain
taste in their head before they come here.” The
final product is a sentimental taste of Christmas. As Refslund puts it, “We’re working with
good memories and memories of childhood.”
Refslund’s style of cooking raises a number of
questions. How does he forage and farm in New York
City? How does he manage to gather ingredients in
winter, when many small farms shut down? Finally,
how does Refslund focus on finding ingredients
while simultaneously working as executive chef?
Refslund, however, says finding ingredients is
06
easy, insisting that “all you have to do is look
in your backyard.” During the cold season, he
skips over the farm and heads straight for the
woods, making at least twice-monthly visits
to New Jersey or Pennsylvania in search of this
season’s hidden plenty: juniper, pine oil, herbs,
tubers, and seaweed. The rest of the time, a
hired forager goes out and does the work for
him. No matter what, the ingredients are always freshly gathered when they are brought
in to the restaurant.
STRANGELY, FORAGING HAS
RECEIVED A WARM WELCOME
FROM NEW YORKERS WHO
SEEM TO DREAD WEEKLY
GROCERY RUNS AND
ENCOUNTERS WITH DIRT.
I can imagine the joy Refslund finds in those
woods. Every summer, my fellow Montanans
and I run through gulches and up shady slopes
in search of an elusive, noncommercial treat:
fresh huckleberries. As the sun sits high in the
big Montana sky and turns the dry hills to gold,
we sweat and bushwhack in hopes of finding
a patch that has not already been picked over.
Needless to say, no one returns home until well
after dark—hopefully with a bucket or two of
berries for pie, jam, or immediate enjoyment.
Foraging creates a new relationship with food—
an appreciation for and connection to its origin.
For many, this is the appeal of locally gathered
food. But New Yorkers may be attracted to foraged
cuisine by something else altogether: the image.
Josh Slotnick, professor of agriculture at the
University of Montana, is a firm believer in the
importance of an intimate relationship with
food. He explains, “If we understand where
our food comes from, we have a better chance
at having a food system that’s just, moral, and
acceptable on every level.” Foraging certainly
points the consumer in the right direction, but
Slotnick says that those buying into foraged cuisine don’t necessarily care
all that deeply about the history
of their food. He’s worried
that foraging could just
be the “trendy thing of
the day.”
Foraged food in
New York City has
become a luxury, a
delicacy reserved
for those with
the financial and
cultural means to
patronize a restaurant like ACME.
Slotnick cautions that
food should be more
than just a fashion statement, “although if the intent
is to eat closer to home and
have more contact with the history
of your food, that’s fantastic.” However, Slotnick also explains that “there isn’t
enough forageable landscape near a major population center to feed people in any sustainable or
substantial way.” Large-scale foraging can have
devastating consequences on fragile ecosystems.
From a sustainability perspective, urban agriculture is perhaps more practical.
Still, Refslund is resolute in his dedication
to foraging, if only for the quality of food it
produces. “I’m not thinking about price,” he
says, “and I won’t buy a lower quality carrot to
save money. I will always pick the best carrot I
can find.” Some might balk at how pricey these
veggies can get (salt-baked carrots with sliced
lardo and blood orange set customers back
$14), but they may just be persuaded when
Refslund explains how they’re prepared. The
carrots are slow-cooked on low heat for three
hours with juniper, and are turned over every
five minutes, like a cut of meat. “I have a lot of
respect for the carrot,” he says, “since I think
the flavor is better than that of meat!”
Carnivores, take note: The woods have come
to town. a
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Measuring the opportunity cost of dating at Columbia
In December, it was the crush of finals. In January, it was the biting
cold. And now, in February, it’s the John Jay Dining Hall-endorsed cosmic joke that is Valentine’s Day. Whether they accept their single status
with bold defiance or choose to mope around their respective rooms
blasting Adele on Spotify, for three consecutive months unattached
Columbia students have had reasons to wish that they weren’t so alone.
Being single is the default romantic condition of Columbia undergraduates, be they male, female, straight, queer, or somewhere in between.
Collegiate culture immerses us in stories of millennial singledom.
Everything from HBO’s Girls to the proliferation of articles on dating
culture has saturated our psyches with rationalizations for our endur-
ing loneliness. Especially since Columbia Admirers bombed our newsfeeds with evidence that kids all over campus are smarting for love,
affection, and even face-to-face human contact, the private question of
“Why are we so very single?” has never felt so immediate.
“Few college students in committed relationships” would hardly be
a newsworthy headline, but it seems that something more than college
angst is at play here. For decades, the college campus has been typified
as a place for young people to embrace their freedom before adulthood,
allowing students to dally among majors as they do among partners.
First-years quickly, if painfully, learn the ropes of hookup culture (“I
met him at Mel’s, why won’t he text me?”)—or, more likely at Colum-
by Alessandra Poblador & Yasmin Gagne
photography by Lauren Field
IN FOCUS
AND JUST AS WE PUSH
OURSELVES TO GET A
4.0 GPA AND A CUSHY
POSTGRAD JOB, WE
ALSO FIND OURSELVES
ROMANTICALLY
COMPETITIVE,
UNWILLING TO “SETTLE”
FOR ANYTHING LESS
THAN PERFECTION.
08
bia, the lack thereof (“Why do I even have a single?”).
To many students, these questions are moot—romantic disillusionment is discovered as early as NSOP. But
if college kids are supposed to flout relationships, why
are so many students at Columbia lamenting the lack
of love in their lives, be it fleeting or long-lasting?
Being an undergraduate at Columbia in 2013 is
a specific experience. It is worlds apart from that
experience in fall 1983, when the first coeducational
class arrived at Columbia College—or even from the
experience of 2003, before Facebook took the Ivy
League by storm. Just as our campus has evolved—
embracing gender-neutral housing and rising levels
of sexual diversity—so has the city that we inhabit,
rapidly gentrifying and growing increasingly costly
to live in. These trends are having tangible effects on
our dating culture that are worth analyzing; however,
for the purpose of limiting the scope of this article, we
narrowed our focus to the heterosexual community
on campus.
We met with JungHee Hyun, a senior at Barnard
and the current president of the Student Government
Association, in the lobby of the Diana Center. Fresh
out of an SGA meeting, Hyun explained how remain-
ing single is in many ways a positive affirmation of her freedom and drive.
“I chose to be single at a certain point in
college,” she tells us, referring to the end of a
previous long-distance relationship. “Doing
my own thing and sustaining this relationship was contradictory. At this stage in my
life, I wasn’t ready to give up anything.”
Columbia students, having worked so
hard to get here, commonly have their sights
set on ever-higher levels of achievement.
For many, that means putting schoolwork
and one’s career above finding time for a
significant other.
“Hopefully, I’ll have time eventually to
say, ‘Okay, the time has come for me to do
this [enter a relationship].’ But that’s an extreme privilege,” Hyun says. “Maybe I’ll get married
when I’m 28—but knowing where I am now, in seven
years, who knows what I’ll be doing?”
In 2010, the number of women surpassed men
in the workforce for the first time in U.S. history.
There are three women for every two men who earn
a college degree. Still, many selective schools subvert
the reality of higher levels of female achievement
by maintaining equal gender ratios in their student
populations. As students at a competitive university,
we’re pressured to succeed in every aspect of life. And
just as we push ourselves to get a 4.0 GPA and a cushy
postgrad job, we also find ourselves romantically
competitive, unwilling to “settle” for anything less
than perfection. In addition to having perfect grades
and a perfect postgrad vision, we seek the “perfect”
girlfriend or boyfriend—the cherry on top of the
Columbia dream.
A Dating Market Failure: The Challenge of Choice
To many students at Columbia, the Greek community is the hotbed of campus relationships—romantic,
sexual, and otherwise. Phil Ross, a Columbia College junior and a brother of Delta Sigma Phi, took an
inclined to pursue a relationship, no matter how much
we may want one in principle.
Postgrad Paradigms: From Competition to Compromise
Those of us that intend to stay in the city after graduation, however, will find ourselves faced with entirely
different concerns. We can expect to work long hours in
competitive industries, to shoulder an astronomical cost
of living, and to find ourselves completely exhausted.
Thus, the highly competitive nature of Columbia, accentuated by the innate stresses, thrills, and distractions of
the city, may leave us incapable of investing our temporal
scraps in long-term relationships.
Without exception, every student we interviewed
expressed the wish to eventually marry. As passionately as they all believed in the value of independence, and as dedicated as they were to the pursuit
of ambitious careers, not one subject denied the
ultimate desire for companionship.
We had almost finished interviewing Allison Lieblein,
a School of Engineering and Applied Science senior, when
she unexpectedly mentioned that she was engaged. Now
together with her fiancé for three years, she plans to
move with him to Columbus, Ohio, to accept a position at
General Mills while he pursues a graduate degree at Ohio
State University.
“The reason we’re getting married so young—and
I know that we’re young—is that neither of us wanted
to live apart,” she explains. “We were willing to make
compromises in order to live in the same place. Marriage
makes that easier.”
Lieblein and her fiancé applied to a wide range of
companies and schools so that they could head, together,
for the place where their offers best intersected.
“Instead of just saying, this is the best company, this is
what I want to go for—I put in a lot of time and energy to
make sure I had a choice, and so did he,” she says. “That
was important to me—that neither one of us was going to
make all the sacrifices.”
Though it wasn’t her plan from the start to marry so
soon after college, Lieblein noted the undeniable advantage of the arrangement. “We were able to meld our
career paths to each other, whereas if we had met later in
life, we might already be on separate paths,” she says.
Although her story contradicts the popular notion
that high-achieving students will put their own career
goals ahead of all others, Lieblein’s was the closest account we had heard to striking a balance between love
and ambition. Here
was a Columbia
student who appeared
to have “gotten it all”
through compromise
and collaboration
rather than through
competition. Had Allison found the key to
Columbia-sanctioned
fulfillment: committing early on, trading
the highest heights of
achievement for the
lasting support and
companionship of a
loved one?
munity. Although Ross knows fraternity graduates who
continue to play video games and beer pong into their
late 20s, he insists that “doing things associated with
immaturity doesn’t mean that their dating lives are also
immature.” He says that many fraternity graduates,
working mostly in finance positions in the city, remain
with college girlfriends out of a desire for stability in an
unstable job market.
“You could be doing 70, 100 hours a week—with that
kind of work schedule, once you have a relationship, you
try to keep it,” he says.
****
For another postgrad perspective, we sat at Nussbaum & Wu with Rachel Pratt, who finished her studies
at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences last May. She
embodied a nonchalant confidence, the enviable self-assured air of a young woman working in the city. We asked
THE HIGHLY COMPETITIVE
NATURE OF COLUMBIA,
ACCENTUATED BY THE
INNATE STRESSES,
THRILLS, AND
DISTRACTIONS OF THE
CITY, MAY LEAVE US
INCAPABLE OF INVESTING
OUR TEMPORAL
SCRAPS IN LONG-TERM
RELATIONSHIPS.
****
The same tradeoff surfaced where we
would least expect it:
in the Greek com-
09
IN FOCUS
hour off from preparing
for investment banking
interviews to discuss the
romantic framework of
the “fraternity man.”
As a financial economics major, Ross was
quick to offer a supplyand-demand explanation for the advantages
of men in the dating
market on campus. “Men
are spoilt for choice,” he
says. When you factor in
Barnard’s role within the
larger Columbia community, the emerging
landscape is representative of the gender ratios
that will be present in
the workforce when
we graduate: namely,
with more women than
men. As a result, dating
at Columbia is “a matter
of opportunity cost,”
Ross says, meaning that
a man at Columbia has
less to lose from seeking
multiple partners because of the sheer number of options
available to him.
A “geographical mismatch” accounts for the insular
nature of relationships in the Greek community, he adds.
“People who go to Mel’s are a certain kind of people supplying a certain kind of good ... The person that you have
coffee with or the person you spend the night with could
well be in a different club.” With “not many avenues to
meet people” other than the standard campus drinking
holes, he says, fraternity men often “exclude themselves
to other options.” The same is true for other students at
Columbia: There is no middle ground between the darkness of The Heights and the fluorescent lighting of Butler
209 on which to make a real connection with someone.
Ross estimates that the typical ratio of women to
men at a Greek life mixer is two or three to one. “Does
this give guys a power? Yes, I would say that,” he says.
“But many guys I know still want a relationship—they
just can’t find it.”
Noted psychologist Barry Schwartz explored this
phenomenon in his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice.
He argued that, in a society that “sanctifies the freedom
of choice so profoundly,” the “benefits of infinite options
seem self- evident.” However, as we consider the possible
pleasures available to us, we hesitate to commit to any one
option—leaving us paralyzed by choice.
In his recently published Atlantic article, “A Million First Dates,” Dan Slater applied this methodology
to a fixture of 21st-century romance: online dating. He
reported that psychologists have found three factors that
determine a successful relationship: satisfaction with
the relationship, investment in the relationship (in the
form of time, money, and emotions), and the “quality of
perceived alternatives.”
Students at Columbia are already overcommitted.
From their internships to their extracurriculars, from
their job applications to their studies, students find it difficult to make time to invest in a relationship, especially
with the pressure of the New York City singles scene.
Coupled with the availability of many “perceived alternatives” on campus, these circumstances make us less
IN FOCUS
her to confirm the hopes of many undergraduate
Columbia students for their postgraduation years: If
we remained single, would we at least find fulfillment
in the degrees we had labored for?
“That’s what we all think,” she says. “No one
cared in undergrad, but it seems like everyone wants
to be in a relationship now.”
Pratt is equally candid when speaking about what
she would demand financially of her partner.“I would
never date someone who would expect me to contribute more than 50 percent financially,” she says.
“The path that I’ve chosen to take has left me with
a lot of debt and I won’t get involved with someone
who will exacerbate that problem.” Her attitude feels
particularly relevant to the high-debt, postrecession
environment awaiting recent Columbia graduates.
Pratt says that she had already felt the
pressure to partner up while she was completing her graduate program. Out of 30 students
in the sociology department, she says, there
were at most four who didn’t have a significant other—a polar reversal of statistics in the
undergraduate schools.
“When people get to grad
school, there’s more of an
obligation to start solidifying your life,” she says of
her experience. “You don’t
associate being single with
having fun anymore—you
associate it with being
lonely.” And even when the
Columbia University stamp
of distinction or the demands
of pursuing a career don’t
get in the way, New York
City itself poses its own challenges to singles.“All of
the 30-year-olds here act like they’re 20, and the
40-year-olds like they’re 30. People are less inclined
to settle down because there are so many people here
and so much to do,” Pratt explains. Her description
aptly defines one of the great gear switches of adulthood: the end of sleeping around, and the start of
settling down.
Pratt is currently in a committed relationship,
but she points out that many of her single peers have
struggled to find a desirable partner in the city. Many
of the stresses of that search are tied to the politics of
interpersonal power.
For example, Pratt tells us, holding a graduate
degere raises one’s relationship standards: “Because
I graduated from Columbia, there’s definitely an
expectation to what I achieve ... We have specific
standards, and it’s harder to find someone that you
want to settle down with.” Currently, there are more
women than men earning master’s and doctoral degrees, creating an imbalance of achievement between
men and women in the postgraduate market. Although the effects of this trend have yet to be formally
documented, Pratt’s economics-style calculations
suggest that women expect their prospective partners
to meet certain standards that, increasingly, men are
failing to attain.
“If we’re looking for men who are a little above us,
it seems like men are more comfortable with someone
below them. There’s a little mismatch there,” she
continues, referring to the growing achievement gap.
“I’m sure there are tons of men who find it extremely
attractive to be with an equal—probably even men
“YOU COULD CUT THE
TENSION WITH A KNIFE
AT THIS UNIVERSITY.
WE’RE ALL COMPLAINING
ABOUT IT.”
10
that want someone who’s above them—but that’s not
what I’ve seen for the most part.”
All Work, No “Game”
In order to gain a fuller understanding of the
machinery of undergraduate Columbians’ romantic
discontent, we needed further elucidation of the
male perspective. Enter Ryan Contreras, a Columbia
College sophomore and our gregarious, theatrical
suitemate—a known romantic on our floor who is
always game, as he would probably say, “to shoot
the shit.”
With his perpetually amused air, Contreras sat
down in our Wallach lounge to tell us why so many
Columbia students are single. It is not only our preoccupation with work, but also our lack of that most
essential of romantic skills: “game.”
“We all worked very hard to get to this point, and
consequently, probably didn’t have a relationship
or something like that in high school—no TV-show
romance. No Degrassi,” Contreras says. “Now I have
barely enough time for my problems and my work
as opposed to another human being’s. I’m a math
major. There’s a bunch of dudes in my classes, and
you ask me how I’ll meet girls?”
He acknowledges the existential crisis of the
single Columbian as much as he mocks it. “You could
cut the tension with a knife at this university. We’re
all complaining about it. As Plato said—aren’t we all
just rent asunder from our other halves?” he asks.
Contreras believes the strenuous Columbia application process results in a population with boys
that “look for relationships more than hookups,”
even when the romantic geography of their campus
precludes relationships from growing. According to
Contreras, the most satisfying conversations about
romance he has had with friends have been those of
woe: tales of rejections, awkward mornings-after,
and a shared shortage of swagger. At Columbia and
Barnard, we revel in the sort of self-deprecating
humor typically found on New Girl or Workaholics:
there’s no Jersey Shore bravado to be found here.
Contreras explains undergraduates’ collective
loneliness by suggesting that it’s the result of their
childlike unwillingness to make themselves vulnerable. “A lot of people here are a little sheltered,” he
says. “People don’t know how to express that they
like someone, read the writing on the wall, that kind
of stuff.”
When prompted, Contreras denied that students
are put off by each other’s lengthy lists of achievements. “I’m just intimidated by women!” he says,
relative levels of success aside.
“We’re all like little boys and girls in adult bodies,
terrified of the other half that holds all the cards.
And then you have technology, Columbia Admirers,
enabling us to never overcome that little boy inside
of us. It is my daily duty to overcome that terror, and
I’m being as sincere as I possibly can,” he says.
That moment of sincerity was Contreras’ cue for
us to vamoose. Like any good, responsible Columbia
student, he had to get back to his problem sets, leaving us to contemplate his words of wisdom. Thousands of Columbia students pining for, yet terrified
of, love. Is it funny? Is it sad? Either way, it certainly
rings true. a
FICTION
BLACKTOP
BY ERIC WOHLSTADTER
photo by
Eric Wohlstadter
The highway was different than Linnie
remembered, widened and resurfaced, the
northbound and southbound lanes split by
a neatly mowed drainage ditch. Five years
back, if her father would have leaned across
the console of the U-Haul and predicted it
would look like this, she would have thought:
dementia. Then, the highway had been shelled
with jilted fenders and bottles of urine, relics
of the Escape. Now, it looked as if the roadworkers had chiseled through the broken
cement and struck granite.
The Escape. That was the nice way to put
it. Thousands of cars logjammed from New
Orleans all the way up to Shreveport. Hordes
of families venturing into the piney woods to
shit, returning to sunbathe on the roofs of their
unmoving vehicles as babies wailed and the
hurricane crept up behind them. Linnie thanked
God her father had gotten out early. She thanked
God he wasn’t yet too sick to drive.
She also thanked God she had made the trip
back with him, three weeks after the storm hit,
to assess the damage to her childhood home
and to see what if any furniture they could
salvage. They had recrossed the border from
Texas into Louisiana, had eased the U-Haul
southward over the litter-ridden road. Linnie
remembered thinking, This is not Mardi Gras,
where the beads bury the streets one night and
the next morning are gone. There are no streetcleaners to clear up this colossal mess.
When they got to the house, they found that
the U-Haul would be mostly useless. There had
been nine feet of standing water, but while they
had expected mold, they did not expect the
house to look as if it had been shaken. Furniture
clawed the walls as if trying to escape; the
pool table, the couches, the washing machine.
Everything overturned. In the kitchen, the
refrigerator lay open in a black gloop of rotted
food. The attic was the only area worth picking
through, but even that yielded worthless items:
a chest of 60’s-era maternity clothes, a set of
chipped fiestaware.
At the time, Linnie had been shattered,
heartbroken. She watched her father step
over and through the rot, watched him bend
his arthritic back to unearth a soggy photo, a
broken dish. She stood in the entryway for a
long time, hugging herself. Then, she pulled
him out and drove him back to Dallas. Two
months later, he was in a nursing home. Three
months after that, he was dead.
It was only later, years later, that Linnie
realized she had retrieved something else from
the trip: a piercing memory of her father. It
seemed to be the only one she fully possessed,
the rest blurred with time and stripped to
feelings of happy, sad, cold. But this memory
was irregular, unyielding. Linnie could conjure
up the exact clothing her father had worn
(short-sleeve button-down and jeans) and what
his breath smelled like (breathsavers and cedar
wood). And it was this clamant recollection that
caused her to refuel the old Impala, his own
escape vehicle, still sitting in her garage, and
make one more trip down to the city she had
grown up in. She wanted to see the house again,
to place him there, to experience what, five
years back, she had so blindingly squandered.
But the highway was different, new, and this
dismayed her. It did not even have the bones of
the old highway, the structure completely done
away with. This highway was unrecognizable, a
highway built for streamlined electric vehicles
and trucks pulling shiny motorboats to touristy
beaches. Linnie feared that the city would be
unrecognizable as well, that it too had been
completely demolished and resurfaced, buried
and built over. She regretted selling the house.
She should have held onto it, should have been
the last one there, standing on storm-beaten
wood, pitching cries at towering matrixes of
metal and glass. My God, she thought, I buried
pets in the back of that house. A dog and two
cats. She remembered crying over their graves.
Were they still there? Or had someone paved
over them? Or were the bones long gone,
having floated out of the earth five years ago
and mingled in the debris? Huddled in that
doorway, her father peripherating the wreck,
had Linnie overlooked them all?
The car jumped and veered. Linnie pulled on
the steering wheel and righted it. Instinctively,
she grabbed the rearview mirror. She had heard
of funnel clouds that were not funnels at all but
great round masses that gather cars and houses
as they roll. She expected to see a darkness
approaching behind her, ready to swoop her up
underneath it. But behind her was empty. She
looked back in front, both hands on the wheel,
and settled into the seat. Then she realized:
she had reached broken road. The highway was
itself again. a
Eric Wohlstadter is Events Editor of Quarto
Literary Magazine and the new Fiction Editor of The
Eye. He resides emotionally in Dallas, TX. The Eye is
now accepting 900-1,200 word fiction submissions.
Send your story to eyefiction@columbiaspectator.com.
11
IDEAS
THE REBLOG DIET
EATING DISORDER COMMUNITIES MIGRATE TO SOCIAL MEDIA
by Andrea Garcia-Vargas
illustration by Hannah Sotnick
I was 16 years old the first time I came across a
pro-anorexia website, covertly looking at the web
page in case my parents came in. Dozens of images
flooded the screen—girls in underwear with jutting
clavicles, the skin over their ribs stretched taut. Pictures of A-list celebrities and nameless models alike
were plastered across a variety of other pro-anorexia
and pro-bulimia websites. The websites fawned over
these women, labeling them as “thinspiration,”or
“thinspo,” for short. The forums proclaimed anorexia
and bulimia were lifestyles and provided tips on how
to lose weight.
For a couple hours a day, I would feed myself on
these images and bits of information. At the time, I
disliked my body and didn’t know better. After limiting my calorie count to just 800 a day—less than half
of the minimum 1,800 recommended by the USDA—
only made me feel worse, I quit and never went back
to the websites again.
My story was an easy one. Other people’s stories
are harder.
Today, the world of pro-anorexia, pro-bulimia,
and thinspo is expanding from stand-alone websites
to various social media platforms, including Twitter,
Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. More and more
people in these “eating disorder communities” are
using Tumblr and hashtags on Twitter like “pro-ana,”
“pro-mia,” and “purging,” in addition to keeping
tabs on how many calories they eat a day and how
close they are to their UGW—ultimate goal weight.
With just the click of a button, these sufferers can easily find the same photos I did.
These communities are catering to a population
of young people, overwhelmingly women, who are
insecure, struggle with their body image, and may
suffer from eating disorders. The media has been in an
uproar over these communities, wondering what social media platforms should do. The debate boils down
to a single question: to block or not to block?
Facebook, the world’s largest social network,
has almost completely obliterated all pro-ana and
pro-mia groups from their website. Instagram, on the
other hand, has begun to monitor these communities
more passively; if users search for hashtags like “bulimia,” “ana,” or “thinspo,” a graphic content warning
and a link to the National Eating Disorders website
appear—though users can still click through the link
and see the enabling images and phrases.
“If [social media platforms] begin censoring content other than that, then they begin restricting some
of the only outlets these girls have to vent,” Adrienne
Hein wrote over Skype. Hein, who is based in Ann Arbor, Mich., is the creator and owner of Fitspo.net and
the manager of its Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Fitspo.net is a form of “fitspiration,” a movement
which typically focuses more on healthy eating and
exercise as opposed to starvation.
12
While online
forums are easily accessible, they aren’t
the only spaces for
venting, according to
Dr. Evelyn Attia, the
director of Columbia’s Center for Eating Disorders. Online
forums and treatment (which often
includes individual
or group therapy)
might provide
venues for sufferers
to vent, but medical
attention can counteract the dangers
of eating disorders
where online forums
can perpetuate
or worsen them.
“When a group of
people who are ill get
together, it’s possible that there’s some kind of comfort in the shared symptoms instead of connections
around the shared struggle to overcome the symptoms,” says Attia. She later adds, “It is the challenge of
all clinicians to help people move forward and not stay
where they are, or worse, move backward.”
After talking to Sydney, a 16-year-old girl in Ontario who keeps a pro-ana Tumblr, Attia’s statement
makes perfect sense. Thanks to her Tumblr, Sydney
and other girls (whom she calls her “ana-buddies”)
encourage each other across cyberspace to achieve
their weight goals. To Sydney, eating disorders are
a lifestyle—a lifestyle that helps her get closer to
achieving her ultimate goal of being thin. I asked
her what she had to say about the consequences of
consuming only 500 calories a day. She explicitly acknowledged that “pro-ana is not necessarily healthy
because you can die from it.” But in spite of this, “I
don’t care that it is not the healthiest choice. I lose
weight fast this way.”
How can we counteract this virtual enabling? Britney Cutler, who manages a Tumblr with a directory
of all the fitspiration Tumblrs from her home in San
Diego, is unsure of where she stands. To an extent,
she believes that social media platforms’ efforts to
make it more difficult to access pro-eating disorder
communities could be “a good thing.” “Obviously,
there’s Google and the Internet, so if people want to
[find thinspiration], they can,” she says. “But it’s a lot
more difficult than if you’re on a Tumblr for 18 hours a
day and you can just click on ‘track tag’ for ‘pro-ana,’
‘pro-mia,’ or ‘purge.’”
That being said, Cutler is very much opposed
to censorship in any form. Both Hein and Cutler
expressed fears of a “slippery slope,” since blocking
the existence of these tags, pictures, or communities
could present a danger to free speech. Cutler further
THESE COMMUNITIES ARE
CATERING TO A POPULATION
OF YOUNG PEOPLE ,
OVERWHELMINGLY WOMEN,
WHO ARE INSECURE , STRUGGLE
WITH THEIR BODY IMAGE, AND
MAY SUFFER FROM EATING
DISORDERS.
nuances the critiques of pro-ana and pro-mia by
pointing out that the existence of the tags isn’t necessarily “bad”—one of the friends who inspired her to
be fit regularly re-blogs eating disorder recovery posts
and inspirational messages and then tags them with
“pro-ana” and “pro-mia,” so the very people who
are searching for thinspiration instead stumble upon
much more positive content.
Blocking pro-ana and pro-mia from social media might seem like a quick solution, but one thing
remains clear: Their existence is only a fraction of
the problem of eating disorders. In Attia’s words,
whether a person has constant access to the Internet and thinspiration websites or lives in a small
isolated place makes little difference: “It’s important for everyone to realize that no one’s protected
from eating disorders.” a
Check out the accompanying video on the Columbia Center for Eating Disorders and Research at
eye.columbiaspectator.com. Video by Eye Multimedia Editor Morgan Wilcock.
LITTLE GIRL, INTERRUPTED
by David Salazar
illustration by Kimberly
Flores
The first time I heard of Alana “Honey Boo
Boo” Thompson, I was watching a clip from Toddlers and Tiaras—the youth pageant show that
would lead to the spin-off Here Comes Honey Boo
Boo, making the six-year-old a household name.
Initially, it’s easy for someone unacquainted with
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to dismiss it or ask
themselves, “Why would anybody watch this
shit?” But fans—and one of the show’s producers—might ask the dismissive viewer to take some
time and “redneckognize” the underlying appeal
of the show.
Considering all the strange things the Honey
Boo Boo crew gets up to, it would be easy to see the
show as exploitative. It captures on camera exploits
like the Redneck Olympics, Honey Boo Boo’s niece
being born with an extra thumb, and the family
making “sketti,” a spaghetti dish with a sauce made
of ketchup and butter. Together, it sounds like a
CONSIDERING ALL THE
STRANGE THINGS THE HONEY
BOO BOO CREW GETS UP TO,
IT WOULD BE EASY TO SEE THE
SHOW AS EXPLOITATIVE.
recipe for the perfect guilty pleasure series, but
for some fans, what others might lambast as pure
trashiness is precisely why they tune in.
“It’s exploiting them because it’s making them
look weird. If they’re a fine family, why do they
need a TV show?” says Calvin Hu, a School of Engineering and Applied Science junior who watched
the first season of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
“The way you watch Honey Boo Boo, it’s not like
a documentary. When you start a documentary,
you’re like, ‘I want to learn about nature or the
Civil War.’ When you start watching Honey Boo
Boo you think, ‘I want to make fun of some people
in that part of America.’”
Indeed, a lot of people might watch the show
with a touch of schadenfreude and more than a
little irony. And, as Time’s television critic James
Poniewozik noted in his review of the show,
“That’s the show’s selling point: holy crap, would
you look at these people!” Poniewozik isn’t the
first to notice this about the show.
In September, The Daily Beast interviewed one
of the show’s executive producers, Tom Rogan, who
acknowledged this possible appeal of the show, but
also ruled it out as a reason people watch it.
“[Here Comes Honey Boo Boo] runs counter to
their expectations; where they tune in expecting
train wreck TV, and what you have is a loving, very
cohesive, supportive family that is really enjoying
each other and having a great time,” Rogan told
The Daily Beast, adding that “you get caught up in
the fun they’re having, and in their enjoyment of
each other.”
And while that may sound like the sycophancy of a person doing his job—defending
the show he works on from what might be valid
criticism—the argument is more common than
one might imagine. As Poniewozik noted in
his review, “While I was creeped out by the
way Honey Boo Boo was framing the family and
presenting them to us, I couldn’t help loving the
Thompsons themselves.” Rogan’s claim, then,
isn’t completely unsound. Fans of the show do
find the family endearing, and see the show as
an interesting look at a family that people aren’t
used to seeing on TV or in real life.
“It’s just really genuine, and she never wins pageants. But she loves it and she thinks she’s beautiful
and each of them think they’re beautiful, and I
love that because obviously most of TV doesn’t
represent normal-looking people,” says Paulina
Pinsky, a Barnard sophomore who admits to
loving the show. Part of the appeal, she says, is
that “their situations aren’t solved by buying a
Chanel tennis racket or buying a Bentley,” as on,
say, Keeping Up With the
Kardashians and other reality shows that document the
lives of the uber-rich.
Of course, it’s hard not
to focus on the possible
long-term effects of being
so young and headlining
a reality TV show, especially
one that isn’t regarded with genuine affection but rather with something
akin to disdain. The Onion pointed this
out in a fake op-ed, jokingly attributed
to Honey Boo Boo, titled “You Do, Of
Course, Realize That This Is Going To
End Very, Very Badly,” which points out
some of the possible drawbacks of early stardom
and the family’s lifestyle.
“It is definitely good that people enjoy
gathering around the television and laughing at
my chubby cheeks, and my tacky family, and
all of our hysterical antics,” the article reads.
“Just so long, of course, as people are aware
that there is no possible scenario in which I will
grow up to be a functional human being who is
healthy and psychologically well-adjusted. Or
successful. Or anything but a sick punch line,
or worse,” it continues.
With examples of the lives of child-stars going
awry on full display thanks to the likes of Lindsay
Lohan and Amanda Bynes, with their various run-
TELEVISION
HONEY BOO BOO AND THE POTENTIAL PITFALLS OF REALITY TV
ins with the law and illegal substances, it makes
sense that the writers of The Onion article
foresee similar consequences for Alana. But an
interview with Alana and her mom, June, on
Dr. Drew’s talk show earlier this year, indicates
this might not be the case. Despite her mugging
for the camera, Alana admitted that she “hates”
when fans approach her and answered with a
loud “no!” when asked if she likes being on TV.
Where Honey Boo Boo’s story will go remains
to be seen, but according to TMZ, she’ll be helped
along by a trust fund when she comes of age—one of
five set up by her mother, into which she deposits
the show’s earnings to help Alana, her three other
daughters, and her grandchild. That’s enough to buy
a lot of sketti. a
13
20/20
LESS THAN SUPERMAN
by
Allyson Gronowitz
For cancer patients, aspiring cyclists, and
the surprisingly large number of kids with an
affinity for yellow silicone bracelets, Lance
Armstrong was an inspiration, a paradigm of
the unconquerable nature of the human spirit.
In the words of my personal hero, Boromir from
The Lord of the Rings, one does not simply ...
survive cancer and go on to win the Tour de
France seven consecutive times.
But the thing is, one really doesn’t.
With each new round of allegations over the
past decade, I dutifully accepted Lance’s protestations of innocence. I wanted to believe that his
key to winning was determination. I wanted to
believe that his stubborn, unwavering will to live
was wholly responsible for his miraculous recovery and athletic ass-kicking. I even tried to defend
him with seemingly indisputable arguments such
as, “Well, of course he’s on drugs—the guy had
freaking cancer!” (Give me a break here, I’m an
English major.) But in the recent interview with
Oprah, the truth came out: Armstrong’s superhuman strength was actually more “super” than
“human.” With this, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency
stripped him of his seven titles, and I had to radically reconsider my admiration.
It’s been said that we will forgive our athletes
for absolutely anything except cheating. However
morally twisted this sounds, it is at least consistent
with our image of professional athletes as embodiments of athletic perfection. When Michael Vick
was convicted for dogfighting, his conduct was
vociferously condemned, but bit by bit, fans began
to brush over Vick’s ugly extracurricular activities
in order to focus on what he does (or doesn’t do) as
the Eagles’ quarterback.
But Armstrong falls short on both personal and
athletic fronts. For cycling aficionados—really,
devoted followers of any professional sport—Armstrong violated rule number one: “Thou shalt not
cheat,” thereby desecrating the sacredness of
the race. In his cringe-inducing interview with
Oprah, Armstrong defined cheating as “gaining an
advantage over opponents,” and since “everyone
was doping,” he didn’t feel like he was gaining
any particular advantage. Well, Lance, if everyone
jumped off a bridge...Actually, he’d probably be
the one pushing them off in the first place.
Although it pains me, I have to say that Lance
Armstrong is a jerk. He’s a big bad bully who
might as well kick kittens as part of his morning
routine and casually steal candy from children.
Cheating may be the most unforgivable crime an
athlete can commit, but for someone like Armstrong, a guy whose public image extends well
beyond the realm of cycling, his actions are unforgivable on the human level, as well. Not only did
he cheat, but he bullied others into cheating, all
while mercilessly ruining the lives and careers of
those who attempted to expose him.
And yet, I still can’t forget the other side of Lance
Armstrong—the part that founded Livestrong, raised
millions of dollars for research, lobbied Capitol Hill,
and devoted himself to philanthropy. Can we separate
the man who heroically battled mankind’s most nefarious epidemiological enemy and lived to tell the tale
from the man who systematically tormented those
who attempted to expose his dark side? Even as a former devoted fan, I have to say: no. His work on behalf
of cancer survivors may be admirable, but Armstrong
has a challenging mountain to climb before he can be
accepted as the hero he once was. a
MACKLEMORE’S REVENGE
by
My first exposure to Macklemore came in the form
of his song and video for “Irish Celebration,” a bawdy,
brawling ode to the rapper’s Irish heritage. Sampling
Beirut’s “Scenic World,” the song’s brassy instrumentals inspired YouTube comments such as, “Siq
beat—makes me proud to be Irish!” Fun fact: Beirut’s
music is largely influenced by Balkan music, not Celtic
drinking songs. What ignorance! This, combined with
Macklemore’s less-than-inspired lyrics like, “Put a
pint up everybody sing a song,” was strike one for me.
I wasn’t a fan.
Strike two came when I heard “Thrift Shop.”
To me, the song seemed as if Macklemore, trying to
catch the wave of “underground” tastes, had shown
up a few years late to the hipster convention and was
trying to sweep around for any frat boys or blog-fresh
suburbanites just as late as he was. He represented
everything that was wrong with the hipster movement—principally its hordes, clamoring but also
doing an overly obvious job of clasping onto the tired
aesthetic. Silly clothing! Irony! Hooray!
“And We Danced” was strike three. In my mind,
perhaps the only thing worse than cultivating a
(questionably) “alternative image” is to pair it with
14
Black Eyed Peas-style lyrics—i.e., using phrases like
“really, really, really good time” in one’s chorus.
He had struck out.
But then I watched the video for “Same Love,”
and I was forced to reconsider my call. After “Thrift
Shop” had already dominated Billboard’s number
one position, Macklemore could have easily written
another beer pong bump. But he didn’t.
Instead, he produced a track advocating for LGBT
rights and attacking socioreligious hostility toward
the gay community just as the state of Washington
was debating whether to legalize same-sex marriage. This is by no means the easy move for an artist
attempting to gain the spotlight in the hip-hop/radio
hits industry. His choice reveals (what I believe to be)
something much more deliberate and self-aware going on behind Macklemore’s curtain.
What if he used mindless lyrics in “And We
Danced” simply because he knew people would
listen to it anyway? What if, to the horror of “musicsavvy” Tumblr-ites everywhere, Macklemore actually
understands how bad a light “Thrift Shop” shines on
indie culture? What if the song isn’t a desperate appeal but a meta critique?
PJ Sauerteig
I can only imagine he secretly chuckles at all the
“in the know” blogs that gut him for being a poser
and that aren’t nearly as savvy as they think they are.
And they can’t be all that savvy if they’ve failed to
identify the trail of breadcrumbs he’s left behind. In a
music scene so obsessed with genre, he has successfully created a frat party smash hit, a noble protest
song, and a wannabe hipster anthem, all within a
year. And while each has its respective merits, his
work’s collective genius lies in the Chuck Close-style
collage it renders of a giant middle finger—to genre, to
“hip” listeners, to oblivious listeners, and to expectations in general.
It’s easy to dismiss Macklemore, but I don’t think
we give him nearly enough credit—not necessarily as
an artist, but as a social critic and an astute stuntman.
To dip into such varying social tastes and succeed
brilliantly each time is impressive and alarming. His
eclectic marathon run raises questions about artist autonomy and public standards, and makes us
wonder if this out-of-nowhere Seattle rapper with a
hip haircut is infinitely smarter than we think. Then
again, there’s always the possibility that we’re just
getting dumber. a
VIEW FROM HERE
MOVING PICTURES
A RAILWAY JOURNEY FROM COAST TO COAST
by Anne Steele illustration by Hannah Sotnick
Los Angeles Union Station is the closest you
can get to a Grand Central of the “other” coast.
The majestic old structure boasts Spanish stucco
and missionary mosaics that perfectly typify the
Westerns I used to re-enact as a kid. This is the
kind of place that can intoxicate the imagination
and resurrect latent daydreams as dusty as the
West in which it was built. Dragging suitcase and
self along the aisles, I could very well have been
a runaway, plotting my escape to Albuquerque (a
place that was, to my 10-year-old self, the closest
to “exotic” an American city could sound).
It was August 2012, and in a stroke of bleeding
romanticism and nostalgia for times I never lived
in, I took a train from LA to New York.
I managed to shush the critics (realists) by
telling them it was cheaper than a cross-country
flight, but if time is money, then I bankrupted
myself at least five times over on the very first
day. Including the stop in Chicago and the delays
in Michigan (the train in front of us ran over 200
cows planted by a luckless farmer desperate for
government reimbursement), the trip took more
than 70 hours. Somehow, I managed to sucker
my cousin Julian into coming with me and, as an
act of “Aw, shucks, you kids have fun!” generosity, my aunt and uncle gave us a sleeper car for the
journey’s first leg. The car alone fulfilled every
Agatha Christie fantasy I’d ever had—complete
with seats that transformed into bunk beds and
picturesque views of the American frontier.
Long-distance trains are roughly divided into
four sections: sleeper cars like ours, Greyhound
bus-style seats that we curled up in during the
second half of our trek, a dining car complete
with booths in the style of ’80s diners (apparently a testament to the number of shits the
government gives about upgrading its infrastructure), and the gloriously windowed viewing decks that drown their occupants in golden
light during that one perfect hour before the sun
falls beneath the sky.
Meals were by far my favorite time of day,
not necessarily because the food was far better than the Tom’s Restaurant chow I’d been
expecting (though no doubt this helped my state
of mind and stomach immensely), but because
of the people we sat with. Because of space,
lonely pairs are asked (read: commanded) to sit
with each other, forcing interactions that begin
awkwardly, but end in a beautiful unraveling
that I don’t think I’ll find anywhere else for a
long time. Unlike college students during a hurricane, people traveling by train don’t get belligerently drunk when stuck in one place with
the same people for over a day. They get nostalgic, vulnerable, and candid in a way that only
the freedom of finality can bring. Why not bare
it all? Hell, you wanted to talk about it anyway,
and it’s easier to confide in a stranger than in
people who actually care.
Case in point: The day we hit Albuquerque
was the day we met Lucas. He’d joined the army
out of high school, allowing him to cross over
the Mississippi for the first time in his life. We
sat with him in the observation car for hours;
he told us about how he’d found his best friend,
how sonic booms make his heart shiver, and
how he was going to be deployed to Afghanistan
on his 21st birthday.
“I’m one of the few guys that doesn’t really
drink ... But I promised my mates that I’d take
one shot, then get on the plane,” he’d said, a
bit ruefully. His birthday was in January. By
now, he should be overseas.
I remember finding it being difficult to fall
asleep on the second night of the trip when,
unexpectedly, he handed me a copy of what he
professed was his favorite movie: Good Morning, Vietnam. “I think it’s a comedy. It’ll make
you laugh,” he said, “you’ll fall asleep.” Something tells me, though, that he knew he would
never get it back, because when I woke up
(with the circular DVD–unwatched–imprinted
on my cheek), we had passed Oklahoma City
and Lucas was gone.
He was but one of so many that I encountered on the Southwest Chief and Lake Shore
Limited, that quixotic dream of an adventure
that left me a little bleary-eyed and overwhelmed as we stepped into Penn Station,
ever-teeming and chaotic, even at midnight on
a Tuesday. Riding the 1 train to campus, I found
my eyes wandering from face to face, unconsciously searching for the same vulnerability
that I’d been privy to in the days past. I hardly
expected to find it in their hardened subway
scowls—but surprisingly, I did: in the young
man giving up his seat to an elderly woman, in
the smile you can’t help but aim at the kid in a
stroller, in the dollar begrudgingly handed to
the man in the mariachi band, both parties all
too aware of the fact that the melody has been
replayed hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
It’s there. I saw it, and smiled.
Kerouac was right when he said that taking
a train in the States is in no way like going on a
road trip. There’s no room for whimsicality: you
can’t open the windows of your car just to feel
the wind pummel your tear ducts, or pause to enjoy a particularly stunning view. It’s passive and
almost cinematic, like a theater you can’t escape.
But as you lumber along in the iron giant, subject
to the whims of a machine you can’t control,
the people you’re with eventually blend into the
scenery. You begin to associate the hail of New
Mexico with the almost-soldier, the mountains
of Colorado with the retired shoemaker. As you
watch the movie of America pass you by, you’re
living a movie right there on the train, caught
between the dream of a blank slate and the tick
of a clock that counts down the seconds until
your return to reality. Until you are again with
people that already know you, and will continue
to know you, until the pull of the road takes you
away again.
Good Morning, Vietnam still sits on my desk.
I’m hesitant to watch it, just in case it sucks. a
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