Author Archives: Katherine Estoque

Pricing the Intangible

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What with all the excitement about gig internet, one gets the impression that more bits/second clearly results in a faster internet experience.  However in reality, bandwidth is not the only major factor that goes into determining internet speed: there is also latency.  The speaker made the following analogy: if bandwidth is the number of lanes on the road, then latency is the length of the road.  Bandwidth determines how much data you can transmit at once, and latency determines how long it takes data to travel from your computer to its destination and back.  If the traffic is too heavy for the bandwidth, then speeds will be slower, but even using less bandwidth the speed is constrained by the latency.  The effects of bandwidth can be seen mostly when downloading and streaming in HD — or if there are multiple people trying stream/game/browse at the same time.  For speed of communication in activities like gaming and voice/video calls, though, the latency is much more important.

This leads to the issue at hand in the speaker’s current research: right now, there is no price on latency.  Cable companies advertise and offer plans based on bandwidth, despite the fact that bandwidth is only part of the overall picture of speed.

This leads to an interesting question: How do you price something that has never been marketed before?  You could always just ask people how much they would pay, but money in the hypothetical is never quite the same as real money.  In some scenarios, you can ask everyone to pay a certain amount beforehand, and then use a lottery system to actually buy the item for a small number of respondents and refund the rest.  This adds a sense of reality to the money in question, but unfortunately isn’t feasible when the product is an internet connection.

The other method mentioned was to try to calibrate people’s over or underestimation by also having them make choices about things for which the market prices are known.  For instance, in addition to asking about latency, you might ask how much they would pay for bandwidth and phone storage.  This definitely sounds possible, but at the same time, trying to measure how much people would pay for a thing based on measuring how much they lie sounds a like a bit of a dubious technique.  It isn’t just the money that’s intangible, but also the product.  You can describe loading times and lag to people, but you can’t actually make them experience it.  I’m not sure that you can assume that people would over/underestimate the same with regard to something they know well (like storage) and something they’ve never really thought about before, much less bought.

The speaker said that the only prices on latency so far are “just made up”.  Aren’t all prices, though?  In the end, some company is going to have to just start trying it out.  It might be a risk to go through all the effort to try to improve latency, measure it, maybe come up with tiers, and then figure out which plans people will and won’t buy, but with online gaming and things like Skype only ever becoming more popular, latency is a factor that is only going to become more important.

Given the rate at which internet use, internet business, and internet technology are growing, it’ll be interesting to be able to look back in a few of decades and remember these changes.  I’ll remember the fight for net neutrality, I’ll remember when people dropped television for internet, and I’ll even remember when we were still trying to figure out how to charge for internet plans.

The “What” and “Why” of Successful Marketing

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Honestly, I don’t even like coffee.  Hate it actually.  Only find it tolerable with sufficient amounts of cream and sugar to effectively make it a milkshake.  So instead of talking about coffee, I will take this opportunity to take umbrage with the Ted Talk that the speaker showed in order to explain his business’s goal.

Said Ted Talk is by Simon Sinek, in which he claims that all truly successful companies start with a belief (“why”) rather than a product (“what”).  He claims that the “common” advertisement goes somewhat like the following: “We make great computers.  They’re sleek and easy to use.  Want to buy one?”  Then, an effective advertisement says: “We believe in challenging the status quo.  We do that by selling sleek and easy to use computers.  Want to buy one?”

I don’t know how to view this claim as anything other than inaccurate.   Nobody tries to sell things by just claiming “They’re great, do you want one?”  That’s ridiculous.  Just about every single advertisement, be it a commercial, an audio clip, or a magazine page, depicts some sort of image along with their product.  The woman using the detergent is a mom in a spotless suburban house with two perfectly groomed children.  The Spotify ad plays the sound of a lively party in the background and uses “cool” slang.   That’s what marketing IS in many contexts: selling a product by way of selling the consumer an image of themselves.

The explicit identification of a company “belief” might be an effective way of creating and communicating that image, but in the end I don’t see how it’s much different from choosing particular models, particular imagery, and particular language to sell a product.  I don’t think people are really buying the idea of saving the rainforest when they buy coffee, because they have no idea whether that label is a reality and I don’t think most people are going to do extensive research to figure it out.  You’re buying the idea that you buy rainforest-friendly coffee.  Just like you might buy the idea that certain shoes will make you a serious athlete, or that a certain brand of peanut butter makes you a good parent.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”  I would say that people buy the image they like, and sometimes a company’s “why” may factor into that image.  I can come up with plenty of companies that are wildly popular for which I personally can’t identify a “why”.  So Apple’s is (or was) to “challenge the status quo”.  Perhaps Samsung’s is “to challenge Apple”.  Lego’s is “to inspire creativity in children”.  But what about Starbucks?  Or Target?  Or Coke?  Or Microsoft?  They have images, sure, but do those images include some sort of overarching ideological tenets?  If they do, I can’t come up with them.

To describe this mysterious “why”, Sinek uses terms like “the reason you get up in the morning”, and even goes so far as to claim that profit should be an incidental result for a truly influential company.  I am extremely skeptical of the idea that a company’s “why” is a sincere and intrinsic part of the company, as opposed to a deliberate strategy for selling the “what”.  The whole concept seems like an unnecessary and entirely too optimistic abstraction of what is essentially the central idea behind all of brand creation.

Comedy in the 1930’s

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Some of the things that I found most interesting in watching the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup were the ways in which the style of humor was similar to and different from more modern works.  The first scenes were fairly straightforward, and unfortunately timeless, political satire.  An entirely unfit, crude man named Firefly becomes the president of Freedonia by happenstance, and immediately sets about offending people and breaking his own decrees.  Soon though, the movie began heavily emphasizing a slapstick style of comedy that I can’t say I entirely understood at first.  The spies Pinky and Chicolini are hired by a rival country’s ambassador to help bring down Firefly, and their hopeless inefficiency and irreverence accounts for a large amount of the comedy in the movie.  However, the first time I watched Pinky quietly take a pair of scissors to his boss’s cigar and spread glue on the back of his pants, I thought to myself, “What an odd movie.  I understand that this is intended to be funny.  Is this what people thought was funny in the 30’s?”

Somehow, though, by the seventh time I watched Pinky cut somebody’s cigar/hat/pockets in half, it had become hilarious.  By the time the two spies have infiltrated the house Firefly is staying in, I was dying laughing. At this point there are two imposters and the real president all wandering around dressed in exactly the same nightgown and hat, just barely avoiding one another, and the spies’ attempts to avoid detection are incredibly entertaining.

There was a point, I suppose, when wordless physical humor had to be the dominant form of comedy in movies because movies were silent.  Hence the immense popularity of people like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.  The inclusion of Pinky (the mute nuisance) seems to be a nod to this history, and wonderfully demonstrates how even if a movie has words, humor can be achieved entirely without them.

On the other hand, the kind of humor I’m most accustomed to is based almost entirely in words.  Something like Douglas Adams or A Christmas Story comes to mind: though the situation may be absurd, the humor come across primarily through detailed and witty description of that situation.  That’s the entire premise of standup, too.  A “comedian”, today, is a person who stands up on a stage and makes people laugh just by speaking — like the opposite of a Charlie Chaplin, or in this case a Pinky.

Slapstick is something I associate with the likes of Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry.  I honestly can’t say that I’ve seen a whole lot of slapstick outside of cartoons.  Specifically, old cartoons.  Is slapstick something that has simply declined in popularity with time?  Or is it still around, but declines in popularity with the age of the audience?  I suppose this could be answered by examining the style of humor in  kids’ cartoons being produced today, which unfortunately I don’t know much about.

Even the verbal humor that was present in Duck Soup struck me as a bit unfamiliar, in that it was based almost entirely in puns.  Some of these came across well, but I suspect that many others may have gone over my head because I lack the cultural knowledge of a person in the 30’s.  In fact, some of the physical jokes have lost necessary context over the past 85 years as well.  For instance, there’s a scene in which the camera pans across a pair of women’s shoes at the foot of a bed, then a pair of men’s…and then four horseshoes.  The camera then cuts to a man asleep next to a horse while the woman is in a different bed.  I laughed, because it was absurd.

Apparently though, at the time this wasn’t an absurd joke.  It was deliberate and pointed mockery of the Hays Code: a set of rules established by the organization that became the MPAA, governing the content of movies to ensure that they were not morally offensive or crude.  The Hays Code was in place from 1930 to 1968, and one of its decrees was that a man and a woman could not be shown in a bed together.  Hence, the man, the horse, and the woman in another bed.  I did actually know about the Hays Code, but as someone who isn’t living in the 1930’s, it didn’t come to mind at all.

Overall, Duck Soup was an entertaining film that provides an interesting snapshot of comedy in the 1930’s.

(An additional note with no connection to the above, but which I found entertaining: There is a scene in which Chicolini and Pinky taunt a lemonade seller by stealing his hat, which turns into an increasingly ridiculous game of hat-swapping between them.  Immediately, I felt like I’d seen this scene before.  Three men haphazardly swapping hats…  This bothered me for days, until I remembered that I have seen it — in Waiting for Godot, published 1953.  Was it a deliberate reference to Duck Soup?  Wikipedia’s footnotes tell me that indeed it was!)

Endless Options, No Solutions

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When considering what food products are the best to buy (disregarding price or taste), the first thing I think to ask is, “Well, which is the healthiest?”  From vitamin supplements to artificial sweeteners to crazy fad diets, health benefits and drawbacks of foods are constantly present in the consumer psyche (obesity epidemic notwithstanding).  However, with regard to fats, the answer to this question is apparently none of them.  There are, of course, the chemical categories of fats that we all know so well (saturated, unsaturated, trans), but within those categories there is no clear, well-supported health difference.  To your body, palm oil is no different from canola oil is no different from soybean oil.  Many of the issues that Jonathan Robins brought up in his talk stem from the fact that fats are somewhat a somewhat unique class of food products in that they are infinitely substitutable.

This has the interesting effect that all fats, especially similar fats like oils, compete in one market.  This opens doors to all kinds of fascinating intrigue around smear campaigns, government lobbying, subsidizations, etc.  Much of the world uses palm oil heavily, as the oil palm produces oil extremely efficiently and relatively cheaply.  Soybean oil maintains a strong hold in the US because it can be grown here, so our government subsidizes it.  The soybean industry also ran enormous decades-long campaigns a few decades ago claiming palm and coconut oil were hazardous to health.  The more well-defined differences between different oil products, however, are found in the places they are grown and their environmental impact.

After health, I might consider whether a product is locally produced or fair trade.  Before this talk though, it would have never occurred to me to consider the efficiency and habitat of the plants that the products come from.  Of course I’m aware that deforestation is a problem, but I’ve never tried to specifically weigh one crop against another in the grocery store.

Oil palms are 2 times more efficient at producing fat than coconuts, and 8 times more than soybeans, so that’s less total area of land required.  However, the land used is mostly in sensitive tropical forests in southeast Asia that have high biodiversity.  The first google search result for “palm oil” is a site entitled “Say no to Palm Oil”, which lambasts the industry particularly for deforestation of ecologically unique and sensitive habitats in Indonesia and Malaysia.  Soybeans though, are grown in large quantities in the Amazon.  Can you choose between 8 acres of the Amazon vs. 1 acre of Borneo?  Before the global shift to vegetable fats around World War II, we used animal fats — should we start hunting whales again?  What about cows and pigs?  Livestock farming takes even more crops and water than plant farming to produce the same amount of food, and its responsible for huge quantities of greenhouse gas emissions.  Soybeans produce animal feed as a byproduct — does that reduce the amount of land we need to feed the animals of the growing livestock industry, or does that actively contribute to the growth of said environmentally harmful industry?

There are seemingly infinite facets of the issue to take into account, and no clear way to weigh them against one another.  Nor is there any obvious way to just reduce fat usage overall.  The world population that needs to be fed is only ever growing.  Fats aren’t even only used in foods, they’re also used in production of plastics, detergents, fuels, adhesives, and any number of products used in everyday life.  Apparently we do have artificial fat substitutes, but I can only seem to find information about compounds that are designed to mimic fat without the health detriments, as opposed to exactly replacing natural fats (much less replacing fats with the intention or potential for large scale implementation).  Could the future lie in synthetic fats, just as enthusiasm is growing for lab-grown meat?  I’m sure someone out there with more knowledge than me is either working on it, or could say why not.

“Anyone can cook.”

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When I moved away from home to come to college, I was actually kind of excited about learning how to be an adult.  Sure, I was also looking forward to not having my parents breathing down my neck about grades and how late I stayed out, but I was eager to prove to myself that I could survive on my own.  Part of not being treated like a child anymore is, well, not living like a child anymore, so I was secretly kind of expecting to be able to live what I considered an “adult” life.  Learning how to cook was one of the things that I was most looking forward to.  I’m capable of making more desserts than any human should consume, but for some reason “real food” has never been on my radar.  I can make cheesecake, but not spaghetti.  Cooking struck me as something that should be fun, delicious, and a vital part of learning how to keep yourself alive.

Unfortunately, I underestimated the…Cornell-ness of Cornell university as well as perhaps my own immaturity.  There is no time here for things like morning trips to the gym.  There is no time here for things like maturely sipping tea and reading novels in cafes.  There is definitely no time here to go out, buy ingredients, and make yourself a nice homecooked meal every day.  No, I do not live like an adult here.  I don’t even live like a child.  I live like an animal.  For dinner today, I sat in the basement of Olin and ate most of a bag of “x-tra cheddar” goldfish.  When I do eat “real food”, it’s dining hall food.  It’s kind of hard to justify the time and money and effort that goes into making actual meals yourself, when you’ve already paid for a meal plan.  Which is not to say that our dining hall food is bad — but I never got around to learning how to cook.

So, with that said, on Saturday I attended a cooking workshop at the Cornell College of Human Ecology’s food labs.  The instructional portion of the workshop, though brief, was actually really informative.  I am proud to say I knew all the cup/tablespoon/teaspoon conversions, and I knew how to measure flour.  However, I honestly did not know what a saucepan was before now.  Every single recipe that has instructed to me to use a saucepan?  I’ve been using a frying pan, because I guess “pan” sounds like something flat to me.  I learned how to chop vegetables (who knew, there’s more than just hacking at it like the killer in a horror film). You should keep vegetable and meat cutting boards separate, different knives are for different purposes, minced is smaller than diced, etc.  The actual cooking portion of the workshop was really fun, and I was impressed to find that every one of the foods we made as a group turned out at least decent.  We all left with a packet of simple recipes that we could try at home.

Overall, though, I think the biggest takeaway from this workshop is that even if you’re short on time, supplies, and experience, cooking shouldn’t be impossible.  As demonstrated by one of the recipes, you can make a whole pasta dish in one pot in about a half hour.  Eggs are always a good option, and you can put anything in an omelet to make it a full meal.  Once you’re confident in making a few simple foods, there is endless variety.  One piece of advice that I particularly liked was the notion that you shouldn’t be afraid of using the microwave.  I’ve had it ingrained in me (mostly by my grandmother) that real cooking never uses the microwave.  Like the microwave is “cheating” or something.  Ovens and stovetops though, are less accessible in a dorm, much slower, and often not a practical option for making quantities of a single serving for a single person.  It is possible to find a happy medium between Cup Ramen and a steak dinner, and “good” doesn’t necessarily mean “complicated”.

I wish I had time in my schedule to take an actual food lab class at the College of Human Ecology, but even if I don’t I’ve been encouraged and inspired by this short lesson that I did get to take.  So, tonight’s goldfish aside, I’ve decided to attempt to cook myself a meal at least once per week for the rest of the semester.  We’ll see how it goes.

How to Run a “Charity Event”

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I did not attend the Cat Video Festival because I wanted to watch cat videos.  I mean, I like cat videos just as much as anyone who has ever been on the internet.  I spend an inordinate amount of “studying” time watching cat videos.  I have seen all the famous cat videos.

I went to this event because I heard that it was sponsored by the Tompkins county SPCA and the Cornell Feline Health Center.  My entire childhood, my family and I were very involved in our local humane society — we did all the fundraisers, we fostered kittens over the summer, we volunteered at the kennels.  I’ve cleaned all the litterboxes, gotten all the scratches, and seen all the happy human and feline faces when a kitty goes to a new home.  Sometime in high school, though, that all ground to a halt.  We moved into a smaller house with only room for our own cat.  I was in band and NHS and IB/AP classes and all the crap that kids do to get into Cornell, so I couldn’t make it to the shelter every week.  Etcetera.

So, recently I’ve been wondering how I could go about getting involved again.  I don’t know if I would have the time and I don’t know how I would get all the way out to the SPCA regularly (the annex is in the mall, but the main building is apparently out by the Ornithology Lab).  I don’t even know if they accept volunteers, but regardless it’s something I’ve been thinking about.  The Tompkins County SPCA website is currently under construction, and has none of the relevant information.  So, I attended this event hoping to learn more about the organization, get information about how to get involved, and maybe even make contact with any staff members present.

Unfortunately, that’s not what the event turned out to be at all.  There was no SPCA representation.  Instead, I got to suffer through 20 minutes of small children being told to perform things like a “sexy meow”.  We learned some useless trivia such as how many toes cats have.  Then we literally just watched an 1.5 hour-long, mediocre compilation of cat videos.  (The videos themselves were fine, I just thought they were edited together somewhat haphazardly.  I thought the division of the videos into “genres” like action/adventure was peculiar, some videos were shown without proper context, some had repetitive content, and some inclusions I thought were just odd.  “Boots and cats” beatboxing, while mildly entertaining the first time you see it, is not a video about cats.)  Aaaand then we stood up and left.  That was it.

Now seeing as the average age of the audience was about 8, I understand that some of the topics that I expected to hear about may not have been appropriate to cover.  For instance, it might be frowned upon to tell a bunch of five year olds that 1.5 millions shelter animals are euthanized per year, because then you would have to explain euthanization and, you know, death.  The importance of spaying/neutering might have been left out because then you might have to explain where babies come from.  A moving video with graphic depictions of animal cruelty would probably have been out of place.

However, there were so many other important things that could have been talked about!  This event had (at least for the first 5 minutes or so) an entirely captive audience of largely children, and they didn’t think it valuable to actually teach those children ANYTHING about animal adoption?  Or the local shelter?  Or even cat ownership in general?  There was one singular video in which an owner advised getting an animal from a shelter and not a breeder, and that was the most useful part of the entire event.

How many animals enter shelters in the US per year?  How many are adopted?  What do you do if you find a stray animal?  Make sure to get your pets microchipped and vaccinated.  Don’t feed your cats milk, and use break-away collars.  Most shelters take donations of food and supplies as well as money.  Many shelters take volunteers, including children with parents.  It would have been wonderful if at least a minute or two was used to show pictures and videos of the cats currently available for adoption at the SPCA.  For god’s sake, pretty much the only thing on the local SPCA’s website at the moment is a bulletin about a camp specifically for kids 9-12 about learning how to take care of animals!  But no, no mention of that either.

10% of the proceeds from the event went to the SPCA, which is nice.  I do have to wonder where the other 90% went, but then, I’ve never run a charity event so maybe 10% is a realistic goal.  In any case, it seems like they could have raised far more money with any amount of additional effort put into the actual fundraising.  What about selling cat toys/bowls/collars?  Selling t-shirts and stuffed animals from that store they were partnered with?  Cat face painting?  Bake sale?  Maybe none of those things could have been profitable, I don’t know.  But for god’s sake, they didn’t even take approximately 3 seconds to ASK THE AUDIENCE FOR DONATIONS!

This event could have been a wonderful platform to teach an audience of largely children all about how they can take care of their animals and get involved in their community.  Instead, it was a mindnumbing 2 hours of squealing over how cute cats are, with absolutely no regard for how we can make their lives better or care for them properly.  The organizers of the Cat Video Fest seem to have put absolutely no effort into make this event in any way informative or valuable to the community.  In fact, is it possible to put NEGATIVE effort into making an event meaningful?  Because it seems like it would had to have been a deliberate choice to hold an SPCA benefit that doesn’t even once MENTION the role of the SPCA.  To conclude: have I learned something from this event?  Absolutely.  If you can get ~600 people to attend a charity event, then you have a wonderful opportunity to give those people helpful information about your cause and get them excited about your organization.  Do not squander that potential.

A show that is unfortunately exactly what it says on the tin

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Watching the Vagina Monologues was overall an experience that I’m glad I’ve had.  Many of the stories were extremely valuable stories to hear.  The two that I found the most powerful were the story of a Bosnian woman  who was raped over and over to the point of physical mutilation during the war in Yugoslavia, and the story of an old woman who was mocked by her first date for getting aroused at a kiss and then lived the rest of her life as a virgin out of shame.  There were funny moments, touching moments, and plenty of the “scandalous” discussion of sexuality that the title promises.

The first time I watched a girl have a fake screaming orgasm on stage, I was taken-aback and impressed at the audacity in exactly the same way that the very title “Vagina Monologues” is intended to take-aback and impress.  However, the eighth time I watched a girl have a fake screaming orgasm on stage, I was beginning to be less impressed.

I was disappointed with the lack of variety in the messages of the stories that were told.  I was also disappointed in the failure of the show to address some very important modern issues related to sexuality and sexual health.  Not including the intro and conclusion, on the program I count 4 acts that covered: genital mutilation, rape in war-torn areas, childbirth, and violence against transgender women (I suppose was a nice gesture, but it came across as a sorry attempt to gloss over the fact that the very premise of the rest of the show seems to define womanhood as having a vagina, which is inherently exclusionary to transgender women).  These acts were rather smothered among the remaining 13 acts that ALL conveyed the general message that “Your vagina is yours, unique, and natural. You should not be ashamed of it or of sex.”  Which is not to say that that’s a bad message.  It’s true, and it’s something that should be known.

However, as Sara pointed out beforehand, the Vagina Monologues was written out of a 90’s movement — and that was very evident.  I can only assume that dispelling the shame and mystery about sex for women was a huge, huge deal at the time.  This is 2017 though.  I was born just after the Vagina Monologues premiered, and I’ve been hearing things like this my entire life, I suspect due to a mass movement to normalize comfort with your body and your relationship with sex.  Your body is yours, sex should be fun, etc.  Maybe there are other countries, or other places in this country, where this message is still new and risqué.  Maybe I speak from a limited perspective as someone who grew up in a non-religious household in a liberal city.  Ultimately though, I don’t think that sex and orgasms are the mystery that they might have been to women who grew up 40 years ago.  A 3 second google search returns 27.5 million results about “how to have an orgasm”.  Everything from Cosmo articles to Web.md to a Columbia University advice column.  Any porn site (or for that matter any general media site like tumblr or reddit) can instantly show you people having sex any way you could possibly want to see it.  BDSM, gay/lesbian, group sex.  Advice and communities and information and straight up porn about anything you could possibly be into.  I assure you, to those of us living in the modern world, sex and sexual organs are not a mystery.

For instance, one section of the show was introduced as the story of a homeless woman who was interviewed in a shelter.  The section then went on to mention absolutely nothing about homelessness.  Or homelessness and sexual assault, dealing with periods as a homeless woman, or homelessness and its prevalence among the LGBT community.  Now, the story that was told instead was in itself a powerful one to tell: a young girl is taught that her vagina is something to be hidden and ashamed of and then raped at the age of 10.  However, save for the sentence or two about the rape itself, the vast majority of this story continued into a long, detailed account of the woman’s one-night stand with a female neighbor, through which she learned to love sex.  Then, this story was sandwiched in among a dozen other stories of very similar focus.  A woman goes to a workshop and finally finds her clitoris.  A woman has sex with a partner who thinks her vagina is beautiful.  A woman finds that she likes being a professional dominatrix more than being a lawyer.  Etc.  Etc.

And yet, for a play that is so heavily and even exclusionarily centered on the literal, physical vagina, it included absolutely nothing about abortion rights.  Nothing about birth control.  I suppose many of the stories could be interpreted as sort of oblique references to the importance of sexual knowledge, but there was absolutely no advocacy for effective sex education.  Planned Parenthood was not mentioned once.  There was a brief section on how short skirts aren’t invitations, but the discussion of campus rape that followed took the general attitude that, “You can get raped even if you do everything right.”  Which is true.  It is not, however, the strong stance on combating rape and sexual harassment that I wanted to hear.  There was no discussion about protecting your friends and helping strangers out of bad situations, no mention of the decision to press charges or not, no hotlines or ways to get support mentioned, and not even any general discussion about the meaning and importance of consent. Despite the pages in the program about the “V-day” movement, as far as I remember domestic violence was mentioned only in a 10 second remark expressing pity towards a girl who didn’t think her abusive relationship was a problem.

With the massive recent changes to our idea of what gender is, being a woman isn’t about having a vagina anymore.  This production, in the modern times, could have been a great platform to talk about what exactly femininity is and the roles that it plays in our lives.  Even aside from more discussion of sexual harassment, consent, and domestic violence, there are so many topics that could have been interesting, inclusive, and relevant.  Why are things like sports and computers considered inherently unfeminine?  Why are so many things largely enjoyed by women considered infantile and stupid?  What about the pressure to have children and “settle down”?  What about rights for parental leave?  Women in STEM?  What about body image?  Makeup and clothing?  What about the idea that both being “too feminine” and being “not feminine enough” seem to attract scorn?  What about media and self esteem?  I understand that no singular show could address all of these issues to any reasonable depth, but to address none of them?  This production was not about femininity, about being a woman, or about women’s issues.  Instead this was, as I suppose the title promised, a play that was very literally about vaginas, complete with vagina pictures, vagina stories, vagina descriptions, and vagina metaphors.

I suppose this was simply not intended to be the show that I wanted it to be.  Maybe it was just a bit outdated and really didn’t aspire to do anything but raise awareness for female genitals.  Maybe it was intended to be very sensitive to the opinions of anti-abortion/anti-birth control portions of the population, and therefore not bring up those issues.  However.  HOWEVER.  The ending was particularly baffling.  To conclude this show in which just about no controversial issues were addressed, the performers all gathered on stage and shouted, “This is what democracy looks like!”, as though they’d just rallied us all with a defiant and poignant political statement.  I did not feel particularly rallied.  Or perhaps I did, but more by what the production failed to say rather than by what it said.  The Vagina Monologues is a show that leaves all the worms safe and cozy in their cans.

Immigration Policy vs. International Cooperation at Cornell

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Last Wednesday, I attended a panel discussion held by a law professor, the director of the International Students and Scholars Office, and a Pakistani journalist.  They discussed Trump’s recent changes to immigration policy, as well as specifically what actions Cornell has taken and what resources are available at the school to students who may need them.  The beginning of the panel largely focused on reviewing exactly what has happened.  There have been three executive orders which have imposed a 90 day ban on nationals of 7 Muslim-majority countries, a 120 day ban on all refugees, and an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees.  There are plans for a border wall with Mexico, and more aggressive immigration enforcement policies have been put in place.  Advice for international travel was discussed as well as the role of the ISSO at Cornell.  Raza Ahmad Rumi, who fled Pakistan after an assasination attempt by Sunni extremists, expressed concern at growing Islamophobia and its adverse affects on international cooperation and “homegrown” radicalization.

When the floor was opened for discussion, one of the first questions asked was one that I’ve been wondering about for months now — How on earth is one supposed to keep on top such rapid developments?  Trump has only been president for a month, and every single day brings new controversy, new changes, and new outrageous statements by his administration.  The proliferation of sensationalist and sometimes outright false news stories only compounds this issue — as does the counterpart claims that any and all news by any news outlet is “fake news”.  The panel recommended the New York Times and the Washington Post as reliable sources, as well as Global Cornell.  I had no idea Global Cornell even existed, and I was quite pleased to find that the website keeps a succinct but updated summary of the course of Trump’s immigration actions, including the full text of the initial order itself and the decision of the Ninth Circuit Court.  Global Cornell also provides an extensive list of resources for legal assistance, counseling, events, etc.

As for what Cornell itself has been doing, the university has filed an amicus brief arguing against the executive order, along with 16 other universities.  In November, Cornell declared itself a “Sanctuary Campus”.  In letters from interim president Hunter Rawlings, Cornell has repeatedly asserted its commitment to all of its student regardless of immigration status or nationality.  However, the panel briefly discussed the practical limitations to what Cornell can do to protect its students.  One DACA student asked, quite simply, “How easy would it be for Cornell to be forced to give out my information?”  The answer to this question was rather unsatisfying, and seemed to rely largely on the fact that we’re an isolated campus far from any immigration office, and the fact that our campus has apparently not seen an immigration enforcement officer in recent memory.  Unfortunately, we’re living in times when the precedent of “recent memory” doesn’t appear to be reliable.  DACA is untouched…for now.  The courts have put a stay on the travel ban…for now.  Reportedly, Trump will unveil a new draft of the order sometime within the week.

I’m left with a sort of itchy feeling that I really ought to be doing more than refreshing news sites and muttering about the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.  Doing what?  I don’t know.  Neither I nor my family is directly affected by immigration policy.  I’m a 19 year old student.  I’m not even a law or politics student — I’m a prospective chemist taking 21 credits.  I feel like I have no time, money, knowledge, or services to contribute.  BUT, I suspect I could find some if I were given a specific goal to contribute to.  So, if there is someone out there who is more actively involved in protecting our community’s (and our country’s) spirit of international and inter-religious cooperation, then please let people know how to get involved!  I suspect there are many like me on campus and in the wider community who would love to be doing more than grumbling if presented with the opportunity.

The Marvel of Preservation

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I greatly enjoyed Eileen Keating’s talk about the Flora Rose, Martha Rensselaer, and the history of the College of Human Ecology.  Before attending, I had absolutely no idea who Rose house was named for, and it was wonderful to learn about our house’s connection to the history of home economics and women’s education.  That said, however, I’m not particularly well versed in the history of New York nor the history of education.  So, while I can recognize that the contributions to women’s rights and Cornell University made by Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer were immense, I suspect that I lacked the context to properly feel the weight of the photographs I was holding in my hands.

The thing that fascinated me most about the presentation was the fact that we have those photographs.  We have photographs, letters, bulletins, pamphlets, a desk, and all sorts of small or everyday objects that one would generally expect to have been thrown away or lost at some point in the ~85 years since they were produced.  We have those artifacts simply because someone took it upon themselves to save them, and now together those bits and pieces allow us to construct a remarkably detailed and vivid picture of who these women were and what they did.  I would imagine that this is an invaluable resource to anyone who has an academic or personal interest in the history of women’s education, women’s rights, education politics, Cornell history, or New York State history.  This thoroughly impressed upon me the incredibly important role that archives play on the Cornell campus.

This process of continual preservation continues even today, as demonstrated by the request that we send in to any posters, fliers, pictures, or other materials related to student groups on campus.  Archiving now extends into the digital as well, including both University pages and student websites.  In another 85 years, it is unlikely that I am going to be the person whose odds and ends will be trotted out for display at talks and exhibitions.  However, out of population of ~14,500 undergraduates, it seems nearly inevitable that someone on this campus will be.  And for whoever among us becomes a historical marvel, it seems likely that Cornell University will have an unparalleled record of their life and accomplishments, because there are people like Eileen Keating here who go to great lengths to keep and preserve all manner of materials, even those that may seem insignificant in the present day.