The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/author/maxfattal/)
Max Fattal '25 is the current associate editor on The Sun's 142nd Editorial Board. Previously, he wrote for arts and served as assistant arts editor.
To some extent, the conversation, however tedious, is the point: the fact that we’re discussing the process or severity, rather than the policy itself — or god forbid the genocidal horrors Taal and others were protesting — takes up air and emboldens Kotlikoff.
What keeps you up at night? It’s like that dream where you show up to school and you’re wearing nothing but your underwear. Somehow, some way, you got to school, made it to the classroom — at one point you had the agency, some decision had to have been made. But now you’re here, and the agency you once had guided you to a place where choice has been lost. You are naked in front of the school.
It’s like Hunter S. Thompson’s broken wave — a recognition that to surf, to succeed in the world, necessitates knowing that the wave will break and recede and disappear.
I am already fully anticipating that the film will retap that repressed feeling of uncertainty and excitement that inevitably rears its head each time I consider my own identity.
I’m back at home, surrounded by artifacts of a person I struggle to recognize, and I’m digging through ground zero, my “library.”
At the beginning of this year, I watched Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II while diving into his filmography — he seemed to have recreated a clone hypothetical cinematically, and in doing so may have informed the subtext of my recurring dream.
In perhaps a libidinal display of masculinity (or maybe a preemptive pre-law hubris), I was attempting to tell a story (that is, accurately convey my internal monologue) with my conclusion already decided.
By capturing a sliver of the Arts Quad and starting from scratch, the campers remind us that there is always another way — that there can be a better way.
Today, The Sun is excited to launch Lifestyle, a new subjective department that aims to spotlight student life, advice and personal experiences for and from the Cornell community.
I’ve always liked watching movies alone; I haven’t had trouble going to the theaters alone since before I turned 18. But for a time earlier this year, I’d never done it quite so much, or in quite such a specific way.
As it gets warmer — and it has been warm — I always find myself as excited for the impending summer as I am a bit melancholic about the end of another winter. There’s a specific vibe that’s lost, and whose wavelength I can’t help but love. I tried tracing how I’ve followed that winter this year — from the neverending nights of Northern Europe, to the warm lonely Western dreariness of Los Angeles, to the frigid longing for spring inevitable in Ithaca. The throughline makes sense mostly only in my head, but perhaps you’ll be able to follow me down the rabbit hole…
1. Chinese Satellite by Phoebe Bridgers
I like those songs that you first and most listen to at your saddest.