I was on a radio show!!!! I’m famous!!!!
I was on “On The Verge” (Verge Campus’s radio show for BU) talking about college politics. It’s difficult being a celebrity journalist AND maintaining my personal/work life balance, but it’s so fulfilling.
Monthly Archives: February 2017
BETSY DEVOS CONFIRMED AS SECRETARY OF EDUCATION
Vice President Mike Pence cast a historic tie-breaking vote in the Senate today to confirm Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. The count passed 51-50, with only Republican support. 48 Democrats and two Republicans (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine) voted against DeVos.
It’s worth noting that the two Republicans who voted against DeVos were both from rural states, areas that would not benefit from DeVos’ heavy emphasis on “school choice”. For a really great understanding of education, I’ll link the New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast—the episode today centered around DeVos, with commentary from NYT education reporter Dana Goldstein. Very informative and quick.
Betsy DeVos isn’t new to the education scene. She’s a prominent philanthropist from Michigan who is a strong advocate for “school choice.” That means promoting charter schools and voucher-funded private schools as alternatives to public schools. On a personal level, she or her children never attended public schools nor took student loans. But to just dismiss her as entirely ignorant of education is not technically correct.
Something that “The Daily” touched upon was DeVos’ “school choice” policy. It would divert more federal funds from public schools to charter schools and voucher-funded private schools (a government voucher which uses public funds to be used as tuition for private schools). An issue, and one that is reflected in the “no” votes from Republican Senators Murkowski and Collins, is that some (particularly rural) areas do not have multiple schools from which to choose from. They might only have the one, traditional public school. So when funds are taken from public schools and funneled into these alternatives, that affects people who don’t have a choice in what school their kids can reasonably attend.
DeVos’ lack of familiarity with the particular policies of the public school system is what rubbed so many people the wrong way. She would not give a definite answer as to whether or not schools receiving federal funding should be held to meet a certain standard. She was unclear about the Individuals With Disabilities Education Law, which was a federal law that required students with disabilities receive an education specifically tailored to their needs. She, in an attempt to pivot, said that it would be up to the states to decide—(it’s already been decided; and it’s a federal law)—which Tim Kaine did not like.
DeVos is also a controversial choice because she did not complete her ethics review before the beginning of her confirmation hearing. Ethics reviews aim to eliminate or resolve any potential conflicts of interest, something particularly relevant to DeVos, who is a billionaire with multiple business holdings and investments. According to The Hill, DeVos maintained her interest in her and her husband’s investment group—one of the investments they made was in a company that claimed to have helped thousands of children with ADHD.
Pence’s tiebreaking vote is the first of its kind, with the Republicans unable to keep their narrow majority (they possess 52 of the 100 Senate seats) after the two aforementioned Republican senators voted against DeVos. According to the Washington Post, this is the first time a Vice President—who is the President of the United States Senate, something I learned from Veep and confirmed just now—has used his official power as tiebreaker to confirm a Cabinet nominee. It is also the first time in nine years (since Dick Cheney) that a VP has cast any sort of tiebreaking vote.
CONGRATZ PATS (?)
Most of the people I know are queers, cynics and ladies (and some various combinations of the three) so I was largely unaffected by the Heterosexual Roman Triumph otherwise known as Superbowl LI. Super Bowl? Super-Bowl?
*googles it* Super Bowl. But now all I can see is “super bowl” like “Gee, what a great bowl!” And I don’t mean to brag, but I know my way around a super bowl. Have you ever been to Paint Your Own Pottery? I’ve been. Twice.
I watched the Super Bowl in the way God intended—I made Moscow Mules, ate dip and kept saying to my friends, “I can’t believe it starts at 6:30.” Because seriously, I get that it was in Houston, but that’s a long time. By the time 6:30 rolled its lazy ass around, I was two Moscow Mules-deep and had accidentally chipped my nail polish on a tooth as I vigorously ate a tortilla chip.
Also full disclosure: I left after Gaga performed, was asleep by 10 p.m. and then jerked awake at 2 a.m. and checked my Twitter to find out that the Patriots had come from behind (gay) to beat the Falcons in OT (overtime) 34 to 28.
I first was very confused because my entire Twitter feed was just, “THE FALCONS WON THE POPULAR VOTE” and I had just woken up so the joke didn’t translate for me. But then I went on my Twitter moments and understood the ref. Funny (?).
I am very petty, so my immediate reaction upon waking up and finding out the Patriots had won was deep, unbending anger because that means that the annoying people I go to school with (i.e. everyone who isn’t a cynic, a queer or a lady) would be happy. I am very petty. If I were a Golden Girl, I would be Petty White. Also I’m very much over the Patriots doing so well. How can you root for someone like that?
Side bar: my mother expressly rooted for the Atlanta Falcons because she “loves an underdog.” So some of my pettiness is probably genetic.
While watching the game, I was overcome with confusion and I had tried to learn as much as possible before the game. I didn’t even make any jokes about the position “wide receiver.” But as soon as the game actually started, all my learning went out the window. First of all, I didn’t realize what I was watching was the game until about a minute into it. Secondly, it’s kind of impossible to figure out what’s the game and what’s just a replay. Like, are they trying to make it more confusing?
Thirdly, I find it offensive that they disregard time as a concept so flippantly. Sure, it says “20 minutes on the clock” but those 20 minutes could be forty minutes. They took a “break?” “pause?” “time-out” with three seconds left on the clock. Could anything happen in that time, or couldn’t they just take those three seconds to get comfortable before the (what’s the in-between time called? Rest period?) started.
Gaga’s performance was very good. Very surprising, because I assumed she would play a lot more Joanne than she did (she just sang “A Million Reasons”). But Gaga is always subverting expectations, and instead of playing to the Texas crowd with her rock-folk-country album vibes, she served vintage queer Gaga.
She also subverted expectations by not going full-throttle political. A story circulated the week before the Super Bowl that the NFL was trying to muzzle Gaga’s political speech. Whether or not that’s true, we’ll never know, but the performance was very patriotic. And some reactions I’ve read online say that that was the most political and radical thing she could’ve done. That she could’ve softballed it and gone crazy-divisive and angry and scorched-earth. But instead she praised American unity and set the message as “We stand together.” That shows a lot of intelligence and restraint on her part, to not give into the anger of the people and to stand for something greater.
God, I love her.
Literally that’s it. Congrats Pats, but can we limit the masturbatory praise to this week? I don’t feel like avoiding articles about how amazing the Pats’ comeback is. Like, they’ve been in the Super Bowl forever; it’s not that amazing. It’s kind of expected now. They could take a leaf out of Lady Gaga’s playbook and give us something unexpected. And they could totally incorporate her football gear into their uniforms.
REVIEW of RIVERDALE EP. 2, “A Touch of Evil”
Grade: B+ for questions answered but also questions left unanswered.
Did I mention that until I was eight years old, I lived in a town called “Riverdale?” So maybe that’s why this episode of Riverdale struck so true with me. Because when my best friend, who’s just confessed her love for me, won’t answer my texts about a mysterious town murder, I also run shirtless to the house of the teacher I’m having an affair with. So spooky how similar I am to Archie!
The revelation that Jason Blossom’s death was due to him being shot in the face rather than drowning shakes the foundation of misty Riverdale. Seriously, there is some serious dust in the air in Riverdale High and I can’t help but worry for the kids with asthma. Are provisions being made for them?
Archie is racked with guilt over the knowledge he possesses. He knows that whoever shot Jason did it early in the morning on the Fourth of July. But he can’t open up to anybody because he only knows this because he was entwined in the arms of music teacher Ms. Grundy. Let us remember that Archie—despite his oiled, muscled body and jawline that protrudes out of the screen—is supposedly a high school sophomore.
The “living mannequin” twins ask Cheryl during science class (Algebra? Chemistry? Physics?) the very question I was wondering myself: Is Cheryl lying? Cheryl told the police that Jason fell into the water to get the gossamer-cloth white glove she had dropped. Later we find out that Jason was shot.
But more comes out—with a proctologist’s snap of her rubber glove, Cheryl reveals that they both fell into the river. Cheryl made it to shore—alone. But can we believe her? Something seems off with this blossom.
The school organizes a pep rally to honor Jason because why not, and Betty uses Veronica’s “I’m sorry” mani-pedi with Cheryl as a mani-petty.
And more comes out of the falling-out between Jughead and Archie. They were meant to go on a road trip (do either of them possibly have licenses?) on the Fourth of July, but Archie canceled and the entire summer was weird after that. Later, Jughead witnesses Archie and Ms. Grundy canoodling BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT CAREFUL AT ALL and confronts Archie. It seems like Ms. Grundy might be this episode’s titular “touch of evil.”
Archie, torn with guilt and also just shredded, wants to tell the truth about the Fourth of July. Ms. Grundy holds Archie in the palm of her hand and says no, claiming that she has feelings for him and this would ruin what they “have.” What they “have,” Ms. Grundy, is a jailable offense, you freak. Ms. Grundy is officially on my shit list. She’s emotionally manipulating Archie into not telling that creepy Principal Weatherbee about them because she doesn’t want to go to prison for child molestation.
While Cheryl straddles Petty Betty to do her makeup, she asks a lot of questions about Polly, Betty’s sister who went insane and now lives in a group home. Yikes. Yikes. Things escalate (not sexually) and Cheryl accuses Polly of killing Jason. But in that moment, there’s something cracked in Betty. Something raw. You can see it in her face as she rises up against Cheryl, and something dark blacks out her eyes.
New Theory: Polly, the unseen sister, is the secret half-sibling of Cheryl and Jason. Think about it—without reason, Mrs. Cooper is so against Polly and Jason. And there’s something incestuous about Cheryl and Jason—sipping out of the same milkshake, wearing coordinated outfits. Could it that sibling love runs deep in the river of relatives? Cheryl and Jason, and Jason and Polly?
In a fun little aside, we see Betty’s mom (Mom Cooper) bribing the coroner to get the straight truth-tea of Jason’s autopsy. “Marbling of the veins, signs of scavenger activity, ligature marks on both wrists, and a hint of cryo-necrotic preservation.” I don’t know what any of that means but I’m pretty sure that—plus the whole “bullet to the face” thing—means that Jason didn’t die of natural causes.
At the pep rally, which was always a horrible idea, Cheryl is overcome with memories of Jason. She sprints away and Veronica comforts her, Petty hovering just beyond the doorway.
“Jason, he was supposed to come back,” said Cheryl, sobbing in the locker room. Veronica mouths the words.
Come back.
And suddenly, Cheryl’s anger at Betty makes more sense. “I think your crazy, tweaked-out sister killed him.” Was Jason going to meet Polly? Was Cheryl covering for him?
And did Jason actually meet Polly in the woods? Or was someone else waiting for him there? Someone with a motive to kill him, maybe someone whose sister was driven insane by a relationship with Jason?
Did Betty kill Jason?
But before we can get an answer to that: we get an answer to last week’s burning question—Who gets arrested?
The answer, kind of surprisingly, is Cheryl. But also not that surprisingly because she was the last person to see him alive and she already fudged the details of what had happened. But her willingness to accept that she’s been arrested (but never came forward) proves that she believes herself to be responsible for Jason’s death. Whether she actually caused it, I don’t believe to be the case. But her twintuition means double the guilt.
OBSERVATIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR NEXT EPISODE:
- If both Betty and Archie have iPhones, then WHY ARE THEY USING SOME WEIRD SMS SYSTEM? THIS INFURIATES ME.
- Archie’s sweaty, shirtless body flipping around in bed=peak.
- What alternate universe is this where a sophomore in high school can leave the house in the dead of night and all his parental guardian says is, “Where’d you sneak off to last night?” If I did that as a sophomore in high school, or NOW, I wouldn’t have legs the next day.
- Btw, the fact that he calls her “Ms. Grundy” instead of her first name (“Pamela” I’m presuming, or something else terrible) proves that HE SHOULD NOT BE WITH HER.
- “Watch it, Wednesday Addams,” is my favorite new diss.
- Only Cheryl Blossom could end her threat that her brother’s killer will end up in the electric chair with a hashtag. #RiverdaleStrong
- “I am devastatingly handsome in that classic pre-accident Montgomery Clift kind of way,” says Kevin Keller, and so say we all.
- What is that “Max Where the Wild Things Are” beanie that Jughead is wearing?!
- “Let’s honor the memory of our murdered classmate, Jason Blossom, with a pep rally and a sexy cover of “Sugar, Honey, Honey” by Josie and the Pussycats!”
- Also the song “Sugar, Honey, Honey” is by the band, The Archies. Very spooky.
- “Butt out, closet monster, you have forfeited the right to take the higher road,” Cheryl
- We also learn that Moose, the sexually fluid guy who wanted to have sex on a riverbank, has an official girlfriend named “Midge.” That is such a “beard” name.
- Also I would like to say that I used a locker room all throughout high school and was never hit on by a football player named Moose. I would find this more insulting had I not looked like a thumb in high school.
ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: MY NIGHT WITH REPUBLICANS
Names have been changed, except the name of that nail polish. Originally submitted as a piece for my Columns & Editorials class.
Last night I went to my first College Republicans meeting. I’m working on a story about political engagement among college students post-election, and when researching political party groups on campus, I found out they were having a meeting that very night.
I don’t know what I thought I would be walking into, but it wasn’t what I assumed. Okay, I knew what I thought it would be—a Nazi circle-jerk, or an anti-Obama pile-on. I expected Make America Great Again hats and enough Vineyard Vines to clothe an entire village.
There was only one MAGA hat but, I assumed, they all had some in their closets. There were a lot more women than I expected, at least half but maybe more. Traitors to their gender, I thought. How can they side with someone who is so anti-women? And there were people of color. Stockholm Syndrome, I reasoned, or internalized xenophobia. The white, presumably straight, guy in a quarter-zip and Patriot’s baseball cap was soaked in so much privilege that anything he would say was bound to be offensive. But in what’s usually the case, per the principle of Occam’s Razor, the simplest answer is usually the truest. They weren’t brainwashed or spies or masochists. They were just Republicans.
The meeting began with typical housekeeping. In light of the new presidency, they hoped to up their meetings from once every three weeks to something more frequent, and then they bandied around ideas for speakers they could get for their semesterly big function. Bill O’Reilly, I learned, is a BU alum, and one girl thought he was worth reaching out to.
After, the conversation turned to discussion. The latest news: The inauguration, and who among the group had attended. The nomination for Supreme Court of Neil Gorsuch. They said it was a “Merrick Garland type of decision,” meaning a more centrist pick that both sides could agree on. The immigration ban, which a College Republicans executive board member, Rocky, said (a common response) was “executed very, very poorly.”
Marianne talked about the immigration ban, sharing that her boyfriend (a green card holder from a “non-white, non-Christian” country) was afraid that if he left America, he wouldn’t be let back in.
Getting visibly upset, she said, “No one should be afraid of that; that if he left for Engineering Without Borders to do work in Africa and came back on a connecting flight through Dubai…” She trailed off.
A lot of the conversation, the feelings of dealing with rabid liberals who operated purely on emotion and attacked without information, was uncomfortably familiar to me. The sense of defeat when having a conversation with someone on the far other side. Frustration with how polarized everything seems to be. Swap any of the names, and I could’ve easily been sitting in on a group of liberals talking about zealous Republicans.
“It’s hard being the elephant in the room, literally and figuratively,” said Robert, one of the club’s executive board members. That earned major laughs from the members, and even a surprised one from me. Who knew Republicans could have jokes? He was answering in response to Lydia, a Chicago native who was relieved to find a group of like-minded people in such a liberal city.
“So it’s nice to have, well I don’t wanna say the word “safe space” but…” said Robert, laughing again.
They were tired of being demonized, of being labeled as Nazis or homophobes or xenophobes or racists or misogynists, and the list goes on and on. To be fair, it’s a pretty long list. Tired of everything being labeled “the end of the world,” a sentiment, they pointed out, is always expressed by the opposing political side to the president. But the sense that I got from most of them was that their primary motivation for voting Trump was either loyalty to the Republican party or fiscal.
Robert told a story about his Republican parents and his upbringing in Michigan. His mother grew up in Detroit in the sixties and seventies, and was witness to the decline of the industrial community.
“When we heard “Make America Great Again,” that’s what we associated it with,” he said. Not the takeback of the country from diversity, but the bringing back of industrial jobs into areas that are starving without them.
When I asked the group if they felt a disconnect or conflict between being a millennial and being a Republican, their hands were raising before I even finished the question.
“I’m socially more liberal, but fiscally more conservative, so I identify myself as more of a moderate,” said Stacey. That sense, that as Republicans they were most caught up in fiscal matters, seemed to resonate amongst everybody. And when Stacey said the (I assumed) most-hated statement, “I voted for Hillary Clinton,” no one recoiled. No one threw anything at her. Her conflict, between Republican and millennial, was one with which they could all identify.
When people hear the name Republican, felt most of them, they assume white nationalists and xenophobes. But it’s “a wide tent,” said Max, and Republicans are much more diverse than people are willing to believe.
One of the last questions I posed to the group was “Is there something you wish you could tell the other side?”
“Ask questions,” said Rocky. Be able to have a conversation. Be open to having a conversation.
Stacey offered a story from her time interning for Governor Charlie Baker. “Many liberals are turning more moderate, to be able to work with a conservative government,” she said, “And that’s really good to see.”
“Thanks for being willing to listen,” said Louis, the communications chair, when I thanked them for their time.
At the end of the meeting, two girls gingerly approached me. “Um, can I ask you something?” one asked, a woman of color.
“Yeah!” I answered, trying to be friendly but predicting (even after all this) that it might be something rude or blunt or homophobic.
“I was staring at it all meeting; where is your nail polish from?”
I looked down at the minty blue color. “Isn’t it great? It’s called ‘Babe Blue.’ But I don’t know the brand. Sorry!”
She looked genuinely anguished, because it is such a cute color. “Oh, okay. Thanks!”
And when I got home and logged on to Twitter, I saw my liberal newsfeed through different eyes. How would the College Republicans see this? They would say probably that it’s catastrophizing everything. And they might be right.
The Wunderkindof 