mental health
Cornell Minds Matter Creates New Online Campaign to Share Mental Health Stories
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Gordis explained that the team wanted to make at least “one account where someone can look at a photo and read a caption and think ‘OK, I’m not alone.’”
Arts & Culture
YANG | Thoughts from the Subway
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I worked in a research lab at a university in my hometown this past summer and, for the first time in my life, experienced what it’s like to have a long commute — an hour and a half each way standing in a hot, humid, insanely crowded subway car. Most of my fellow commuters spent these long and miserable daily trips on their phones, either scrolling through Weibo (think Twitter) feeds, watching viral videos, playing online games, binging the newest hit TV series or reading trending articles on Wechat (a Chinese amalgamation of Facebook and Instagram). Hundreds of commuters with headphones on staring down at their smartphone screens was quite a sight be behold but also incredibly frustrating, especially when I had to transfer lines at one of the busiest stations downtown, and had to follow a massive crowd of people up flights of stairs to another platform, a process slowed down significantly by those who were too absorbed in their phones to even walk properly. Despite my frustration, and because social learning is a natural thing that we all do, a few days into this commuter life, I also started killing time by spending it solely on my phone, going through my Weibo feed more times than necessary, replying to comments, reading Wechat articles that I normally wouldn’t care for and, when all that was still not enough, busted out my VPN to go through Instagram and Twitter. Yet, as you may have guessed by now, aggressively working my way through every social media platform every morning and evening did not make me feel “more connected” to friends and family, all the articles I read did not make me significantly more knowledgeable in certain areas or enlighten me on social or political issues, nor did the viral funny videos make me happier.
Columns
DANBERG BIGGS | A Bit More Beard, or a Somewhat Fearful Ideology
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Thus there is a genuine terror, which I believe to be absolutely common, that my community might not think that I am the way I ought to be. This fear, I think, is at the heart of the aesthetic preoccupation that often drives our campus politics.
Arts & Culture
GOLDFINE | Ur Feelings Are Valid — Love, Instagram
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The emotional lives of girls are mainly myth and diagnoses and constellations and made-for-TV movies and bathroom stall graffiti, at this point. Girls’ pain is held at gunpoint by competing narratives of attractive, elegant frailty, attention-addicted poseuring and wound-dwelling melodrama. When a girl speaks about the way she feels, we quietly select from a finite archive of stories tell us who that girl is and why she feels like that — which is why you’ve probably heard a woman explain something she felt to you, clarifying, “but it’s not like that.”
The hyper-representation of female pain in our culture has rendered it a moot point. We can’t just be ourselves; we have to choose from IMDB’s Top 70 “Memorable Female Characters.” We can’t really just be ourselves, we can only be Anna Karenina or Sylvia Plath or Bella or Hillary Clinton or Jo or Katniss or Mimí or Precious or Lisbeth or Alaska or Scarlett or Sula or Carrie or Daisy or Elizabeth. Female pain is played out.
art
COLLINS| What Are We Fighting (Renoir) For?
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For readers who have not yet received their daily reminder of the intense strangeness of our modern world: a gang of protesters recently traveled to three museums to protest Renoir’s paintings. No, as Sebastian Smee notes in The Boston Globe, they’re not decrying Renoir’s anti-Semitism or any other related political issue. The “protests” focus purely on Renoir’s aesthetic, and the group’s name says it all: “Renoir Sucks At Painting.”
However, I struggle to call Renoir Sucks At Painting (R.S.A.P.) an activist group. It is, most simply, the material of an activist group, the elements of protesting deployed simply for the sake of deploying them. R.S.A.P.’s most impressive quality is the group’s ability to access every enraging, sophomoric, God-they’re-so-smug archetype that you would expect from aesthetic-focused protesters.