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CONSTRUCTIVE PROOF*
To a theorist-in-training, most experimental work looks like Arthur C. Clark was right: maybe there was some science in there but mostly it must have been magic. We sit in meetings and ask questions like ‘but can you pick out a specific energy state?’ and ‘can you excite this very narrow frequency?’ and ‘but interactions can be tuned, right?’ while imagining some large black box with many old-timey knobs a graduate student can fiddle with until at some other end of the set-up a result is spit out. Maybe printed out on some non-descript machine, on a roll of paper reminiscent of overly long drugstore receipts but instead of fast-expiring coupons your reward points count towards a better understanding of the universe.
A few years ago, on a Saturday morning, I ended up in a lab where a friend had been working, full four floors beneath my office, and was shocked by how industrial it looked. There was metal and glass and foil everywhere, and the vacuum pumps hummed loudly. I was even more startled when, at another time, a colleague pointed out I could just walk to the next building over and see a Bose-Einstein condensate for myself. I had been studying it for years and never once entertained the idea of trying to actually observe it instead of just writing down an eigenvalue for an operator acting on an eigenstate at my desk and calling that an observation. In New Jersey a few weeks ago, I held a topological metamaterial system in my hands. ‘If you hit this thing here, you can start a localized edge mode’ the scientist who made it said and it felt so humbling to remember how long it took to write the paper in which I used some of those words in a way that, luckily, the referees approved of.
In the five years I have been in graduate school, I have been refining two short explanations of what it is that I do: one for friends and acquaintances who haven’t had a run in with physics since high school and one for other condensed matter theorists who may not know much about experiments with ultracold atoms. When I meet experimentalists working with ultracold atoms, I tell them I’m a big believer in what their work can do. “My training is in condensed matter theory, but really, I’m a cold** atoms enthusiast. Condensed matter theorist during the day, cold atom proselytizer at night.” Sometimes they chuckle.
The appeal to a theorist, the spiel goes, is in the amount of control these ultracold systems offer. Traditionally, experiments dealing with cold, condensed, quantum systems involve a chunk of some material that is grown in a lab in a very careful way and then some electrons that can be thrown at it, or some sort of a microscope or maybe just very strong magnetic fields it can sit in. An experimentalists measures something about the material, the theorists tries to divine a model for a behavior that would explain the mechanisms behind that something based on the measurement. Ultracold atomic research works the other way around; the experimentalist can ask what sort of a system, a model, a theorist might like to have engineered in the lab. Richard Feynman was in favor of this early on, advocating for quantum simulators that could reproduce exactly the models we obsessively scribble on sheet after sheet of scratch paper rather than trying to match up assumptions with measurements made on things nature has thrown our way without explanation. It is remarkable that science has gone far enough to be able to do this: translate an equation into a tangible mess of lasers, magnets and atoms. Most of the time I probably don’t appreciate it enough; having so much control over the experiment that you can construct of exactly the model someone would like to see is really something like a scientific super power.
***
When we were developing the workshop, a collaborator suggested we distribute an Everyday Feminism article as a handout so now everyone in the room was quietly staring at a sheet of paper while mild-to-severe discomfort hung in the air. Standing at the front, by the raised podium meant for a professor, in an old suspender skirt and over-the-knee socks held up by precariously weakened elastic, I felt doubly uncomfortable and resorted to re-reading the article again. The second bullet point read “Understand and Accept Your Role in Oppression”. Underneath, the writer expanded
If I am aware of the ways in which I contribute to oppression in my daily life, I can seek the knowledge and understanding I need to act for change in ways that might actually have an impact.
And then, further down,
Much of the time, when people are asking you to “check you privilege,” they are not telling you that you should feel guilty about your identity. They are simply asking you to consider the ways that your words or actions are furthering oppression so that you can act differently.
While the phrase ‘check your privilege’ was more than familiar to me – I came of age at just the right time to be conversant in Tumblr and Twitter social justice discourse – no one had ever directed it at me. Counting down the seconds until I would have to look up and facilitate a discussion of the article, I realized that this was potentially a problem too, an indicator of who I have chosen to surround myself with and of how confined I have stayed to a few very comfortable societal ‘bubbles’. Who is going to call you out if everyone around you has as much privilege as you do? Does it mean much to think of yourself as a person willing to be called out if you engineer the opportunity away by sticking to certain cliques and social comfort zones?
During the discussion, someone shared: “This is bringing up a lot of stuff for me. Things I really didn’t realize about myself.”
I was attending a small conference bringing together nine programs working to further equity and provide mentorship in physics. The organizing team, which I was a part of, had started filling in the schedule of workshops months before I would actually be in that room. We all pitched ideas, we all wrote wish-lists, and we were all frantically checking in with each other a few hours before it all started because someone was bound to skip a slide or forget a sharpie or not be able to find their room. Since my home institution, and the mentoring program I am co-leading this year, hosted the conference, I was the first person to come in every morning and the most relieved when leaving last, at the end of the day in which nothing went too terribly wrong. Over the three days, I co-facilitated two activities and three workshops. The one dealing with privilege was the most difficult. In the early drafts of the schedule, it had been penciled-in as ‘I have privilege, now what?’ which was both my pitch and an honest question I have often asked myself. An older member of the team helped me refine it, and another offered to co-facilitate but it still felt shaky and fraught. This unease, however, was not due to us having done something incorrectly or not having prepared enough, rather it seems to be an inherent part of the discussion. There is just something terrible-feeling about trying to own up to the fact that ‘I contribute to oppression in my daily life’ is sometimes a true statement.
The terrible feeling operates on two levels. The first is the more straightforward: learning that your action or inaction may have really hurt someone is awful in any context. Most of us simply don’t want to cause harm to others. The second is an issue of identity; a struggle to incorporate our role in the larger systems of injustice into the persona we have constructed for ourselves and not lose our mind to cognitive dissonances and tensions in the process.
While ‘check your privilege’ has become ubiquitous in discussions of those who fully endorse the sentiment, as well as those who find it misguided and unfair, and the Internet has allowed it to become precarious enough that it can serve as a prompt for honest self-reflection but also as just a really sharp full stop for any charged conversation, it seems that in addition to ‘check’, the verb ‘own’ might have to come into play. If checking your privilege is acknowledging that you have it, then owning it is pushing that acknowledgment a step further and realizing that you have to act on that knowledge even when it requires changing who you think you are.
In the United States, everyone is slightly obsessed with individualism and authenticity and being your truest self. When I was a teenager in Croatia, the kids I went to school with would use the English words ‘fake’ or ‘faker’ to indicate someone that was phony, inauthentic or just putting on a performance for the rest of us. (For instance, if you said you liked Iron Maiden but didn’t know there were tracks other than Hallowed Be Thy Name, Run to the Hills and Number of the Beast on the eponymous album.) ‘Fhey-ker’ – we’d sound it out with a hard k and a rolled r and the word was weighty and insulting. Ironically, we assumed most Americans were really phony and fake. Ironically because I now know that here in the United States as well, ‘faker’ is a heavy accusation.
Being truly authentic is almost always more complicated than it seems. In the time of social media and so much of our expression of anything being digital, there is always a decision to be made about how that authenticity is performed. Shifting our interactions to a virtual space powerfully underscores that authenticity as a concept may not mean anything when detached from the idea of performing it; it is after all at its core a statement about synchronizing what we put into the outside world with what we think we carry inside. Accordingly, every time we decide to post or share or like something that feels real and correct by the judgement of our guts, we are deciding that yes, this is who I am and yes, today I will be performing that person. The fact that there is truth behind it does not make it any less of a performance nor does it make the authentic self any less subject to a conscious construction process.
Recognizing that we get caught up in big picture systems that can lead to blame being assigned to who we are, or our action and inaction having consequences we did not plan for, puts the authentic self construct at risk. Consider the classic “there is not a racist bone in my body” spoken by a white person in power. This might as well be correct on some level, and certainly the person might think of themselves in that way and feel that that is them at their most authentic, but the bigger space in which that constructed self lives quickly renders those statements unimportant. It does not matter who you construct yourself to be if the place where that construction is happening makes certain facts about you into a hard pre-set. As a white person, you don’t have to be actively racist to benefit from racism. It is also true that no one sets out to think of themselves as ‘at my most authentic, I am a person that benefits from racism’. Checking our privilege, and owning it, requires that we confront the fact that there is more to the way we move through the world than the person we have assembled in our heads and called and performed as ‘me’.
On the second day of the conference, first thing in the morning, everyone was asked to participate in a community-building activity. Over fifty graduate and undergraduate students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty members split into small teams that where then again split in two. One half of each team went to another room and was given a model made out of Legos; the other half was just given Legos. With their phones at the ready, those seeing the model quickly started to explain how to reconstruct it to their team-mates in the other room. On paper, this activity sounded very difficult. In reality, all teams managed to complete the task in under an hour and were eventually reunited, each now proudly displaying two identical Lego constructions. The process was not quick, and it certainly took a while for the builders to make sense of the instructions, get familiar with possible building blocks and then actually construct something with the hope that it is correct. Their mildly frenzied phone conversations, quickly making the room as noisy as it could have been after an early weekend wake-up time, featured a striving for the right order and connections, but without any guarantees that could have been afforded by a more straightforward set of instructions. Instead, they had to learn how to communicate, how to describe and explain, and then still just sort of optimistically roll with their judgement calls.
This is a clunky metaphor, but confusing instructions and unexpected or unexpectedly jagged building blocks seem to be somewhat universal whether one is building Lego models, furniture or a sense of an authentic self. Being confronted with concepts such as ‘having privilege’ or ‘furthering oppression’ is sort of like realizing that you have been building on unstable ground or that the foundations of your structure might be susceptible to floods and none of this was ever mentioned in the instructions you started with. But the key to being good at building and engineering is reacting quickly, thinking on the spot and adjusting the design whenever necessary. If the new rules or building blocks are not folded into the process, the structure will just remain fragile and wobbly. Why should the construction of the authentic self be any different? Instead of letting new facts jeopardize its stability, maybe that stability can be renewed by making adjustments they imply a need for. It feels awful to think I can ever ‘further oppression’ but if I just flat out deny that, will the possibility not corrode the person I have constructed for myself as both a reality to perform and an aspiration to work towards? Why should I not want to change that person, give up the idea that it is only authentic and mine if I ignore the outside forces that are constantly trying to use and abuse it, if that would make it less fragile, more stable in a situation where it could act on something good?
It is odd to think that we are often so quick to want to change ourselves when we learn about healthier foods, or more efficient ways to get through our checklists but at the same time feel like our integrity as a person is threatened by uttering the word ‘privilege’. The fact that becoming a person who wakes up for an 8 am run or orders a salad instead of fries at a restaurant often involves buying products and giving in to capitalist advertising might have something to do with it, but mostly the distinction lies in our perceiving being fit as making us a good person but not necessarily a Good Person in the sense of some biblical, binary fight between tremendous opposing forces. Owning our privilege, and our place in systems that oppress others, is a reminder that being Good, or a force for the Good, is complicated and convoluted and difficult, that you have to keep checking whether that capital-G is as large as you’d like it to be. Ordering a milkshake does not make you Bad, but furthering oppression sounds like it just might. The way we construct the authentic self constantly changes and part of that change ought to be recognizing that there are choices when it comes to responding to the constrains society at large imposes on that construction. It does not make us any less Good to recognize that sometimes our construction has been faulty or shortsighted, as long as the next round of improvement and redesign is more effective.
***
If I were to disappear tomorrow, these things would help you reconstruct me, in no particular order
Research notebooks (Written in first person, in smudgy mechanical pencil, full of arXiV references and scribbles from meetings with collaborators, full of I statements when I’m doubting a calculation and ‘let us’ sentence starters when I am first taking one up)
Instagram stories and Facebook photo albums (nominally for the sake of my overseas family and friends keeping up with me but really just bolstering my vanity)
These letters (even the really early ones that I am now afraid to re-read)
Amazon order history (vitamin B12, make-up remover wipes, toner from some Korean company, socks, deals on big jars of tahini, impulse 2AM cookbook buys and a twice a year fancy nonfiction book for my future mother in law)
Contents of my closet (tight dresses and skirts I used to wear often that now make me feel self-conscious, that one yellow cardigan I thrifted for 6$ in New Jersey and now wear as a part of my teaching uniform, three pairs of ripped jeans, that one faux leather dress my boyfriend’s mom gave me and a slinky one my mom wore to a beginning-of-the-millennium New Year’s party, three heavy winter coats, a week’s worth of sports bras and way too many faded band t-shirts I cannot convince myself to throw away)
Texts to my boyfriend (redacted as necessary, overrun with references to graduate school, food and podcasts; the phrases ‘hey champ’ and ‘sleep well and I’ll talk to you tomorrow’ appear more times than I want to count)
Books, comics and magazines that I bought but haven’t read yet (piled by my couch, by my bed and on my kitchen table, one book permanently in my work backpack; most egregious offender: Gravity’s Rainbow)
Grocery lists and meal plans (on the back of scratch papers folded in half, like writing a vegetable sequence on the cover of a math textbook)
Vinyl collection (the heavy, sludgy records and Lucy Dacus are mine, the dirty punk and odd world music are my boyfriend’s, last few records we bought: Guitarwolf, Ten Years After, Russian Circles)
Badges from conferences and conventions I have saved and hung up (C2E2, APS March Meeting, APS DAMOP, a few smaller local workshops, half-marathon medal, all grouped in their respective, repetitive piles)
Best,
Karmela
* In mathematics, a constructive proof or a demonstrative is a type of proof that demonstrates that an object exists by either constructing it or giving a recipe for its construction. Often, mathematical proofs are more abstract and do not provide examples but rather rely on something like running into a contradiction in the case opposite of what one is trying to prove. As an example, suppose you are trying to prove that a single person can own a cat and a dog. Instead of some abstract argument about properties of cats, dogs and their owners, a constructive proof would simply consist of naming a friend who owns both.
** Physicists in condensed matter or AMO subfields tend to play it slightly fast and loose with the use of the word ‘cold’. More often than not ‘cold’ is really a stand-in for ‘ultracold’ and refers to temperatures of a few Kelvin (below negative four hundred and sixty Fahrenheit or negative two hundred and seventy Celsius) but sometimes it is also taken to mean cold relative to some specific energy (temperature) scale of the object being discussed. A typical example is that of neutron stars which are in themselves thousands of Kelvins warm, but their temperatures are very small cold compared to their Fermi temperatures which means that they can still exhibit the same macroscopic quantum behaviors as atoms cooled down to pico-Kelvin temperatures in terrestrial labs.
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: Every summer, my department asks for various evaluations. I am asked to self-evaluate and my advisor and the department head for graduate studies are asked to evaluate me, then there’s some crisscross shape that determines who gets to read some of these evaluations and who does not get to read any. I struggle with reading nice things about myself, I struggle with seeing that some evaluations were just never filled in, and I perpetually struggle to summarize what it is that I have actually been doing with my time. Looking back on the past month, I am faced with a similar problem as, objectively, I have been doing a lot, in fact so much that I was away from home for a large part of May and June for the sake of attending multiple conferences, but fail to identify particularly clear takeaways or discrete pieces of knowledge I may have picked up along the way. Conferences are to a large extent glorified instances of being assaulted by copious amounts of information so hopefully at least some of it secretly stuck to me.
First, I attended a small conference on quasiperiodicity and multifractality where I presented some of my work twice, saw four days’ worth of talks raging from very experimental to very mathematical, and talked to more senior researchers than at any other conference I have attended before. I was certainly not an expert compared to many in that particular crowd, but it did feel validating to have conversations with people who were, and I enjoyed the kind of informal research chatter that is much harder to come by at large conferences I usually go to. Someone suggested I try and apply for postdoctoral positions in Paris, I met another Croatian physicist studying abroad and had a chance to speak my language over a lunch or two, and a local experimentalist invited me to visit their lab once the conference was over. I doubt that I will be moving to Paris anytime soon but I did go visit the lab, riding the New Jersey Transit in and out of New York (where I had briefly stayed with my boyfriend’ parents) as if I actually lived there and this was all routine, and was quite blown away by the creativity of the work on display. Friendliness is underrated among scientists.
Three days later, my boyfriend and I were back in the Midwest but not to hang out at my apartment but rather for me to present different work at a different conference. This one was larger, bringing together AMO (atomic, molecular and optical) physicists from all over the world and flavored by that distinctive chaotic feeling American Physical Society meetings often have. I spent more time running from talk to talk, searching through the conference app on my phone for keywords like ‘microgravity’ and ‘quasiperiodic’ in the hallway, and less time talking to other researchers. The exception here was a surprisingly engaging poster session (yes, this system can be realized in real life) and one awkward lunch meeting with a collaborator and my advisor (never take your advisor to a taco restaurant). I learned that people are trying to cool crazy elements like titanium, that precise measurements of fundamental constants in cold atomic systems are still on the rise in popularity and keep getting more and more mind-blowingly good, that no one says ‘time crystal’ anymore but we are all still talking about driven systems, and that simulating topological materials is only getting better and better. It was a lot but luckily, I was not there alone, and Milwaukee proved to be quite cool in the afterhours.
The third of my three weeks of almost non-stop conferencing was the Access Network Assembly I have referenced above. Even though this was not a physics conference per se, it was most certainly intellectually engaging and full of new concepts and challenges. As one of the co-organizers I learned a lot about ordering food for a crowd of fifty and moderating hard conversations with people I have never met before. As an attendee, I was reminded of how limited and limiting centering my own experiences rather than questioning them can sometimes be, but also how much I have in common with so many other physicists and physics students even though it does not always feel that way. A week after the Assembly I did something I rarely do and blocked off an hour to actually write some thank you notes to many of the other organizers and facilitators as the little over three days we spent working together really made me feel as if I was growing.
And then everything returned to some semblance of normal and I was back at my desk, obsessing over spinning Bose-Einstein condensates with a hole in the middle, browsing experimental papers as a sanity check on upcoming collaborations, meeting with postdoctoral researchers who clearly know so much more than I do, and playing catch-up with my advisor who is about to leave for a year-long sabbatical but has decided on a date (end of February) for my upcoming thesis defense already. At this point in this section I meant to write something about semiclassical methods and electron orbits that I have been learning about during my weekend trips to the library, but just reading the past few sentences makes me question whether I have too much going on already – on the page and in my mind alike. Hopefully there will be a little more peace woven into all of this by the time I start writing another update.
LISTENING: As I was finishing up the essay portion of this letter, I was also finishing an investigative podcast from NPR called White Lies and while I was not impressed with it all the way through, the last episode was really striking and quite relevant to some of what I was trying to think about. The show presents the case of a white minister who was murdered in Selma, Alabama early in the Civil Rights struggle. His case garnered attention from the media and became a flashpoint for ugly, racialized conspiracy theories among some of the locals. The two reporters revisiting the story, both native Alabamians, lay out the actual facts of the case in lots of detail, conduct interviews with many people who were actually there when the murder took place and tell a really in-depth story all around. The narrative structure, however, is occasionally confusing and while every instance in which I was reminded just how recent all these events were had a powerful effect on me, I did find myself wondering whether framing the whole thing as a mystery was really the best way to go about it. The moment that really got me in the last episode, though, did not have that much to do with the actual case as much as it offered an example of what a true reckoning may sound like. In a very emotional and heartfelt segment, the two hosts simply state that their ancestors owned slaves, they enumerate how many and how much wealth that constituted. Without much fanfare, it is just a stark moment of grappling with history in a more honest way than delving into some contrived argument about ethics, inheritance and whether people and societies can truly change. This is not the most slick podcast to ever come out of NPR, but it is worth listening almost just for that last episode.
On the topic of reckoning, I was also reminded of this episode of On Being where the writer Rebecca Traister and Avi Klein, a psychiatrist who works with men and couples, engage in a conversation about the place for men and men’s healing in the #MeToo era. I was somewhat reluctant to listen to this conversation as some petty part of me really does not want to care about the feelings of men that may have made more or less conscious mistakes, but I am glad I did listen. The complex subject of what should follow-up so many very public reckonings was really discussed with care here, and without letting subtleties slip. In the same vein, this older episode of Still Processing on effective apologies is definitely worth revisiting,
I picked up two other new podcasts in addition to White Lies recently: Running from COPS by the same team that had previously made Missing Richard Simmons and Surving Y2K and iHeart Radio’s Ephemeral. I have had my share of complaints about Dan Taberski when he was searching for the belovedly flamboyant workout guru and when he was telling dramatic stories about the turn of the millennium, but in Running from COPS he really shines as a great storyteller and an engaging host and interviewer. Part of it is most certainly that there is very little personal in Running from COPS so he does not get bogged down in his own experiences. The show benefits from that distance and allows for others’ stories to underline everything that is absolutely wrong and bizarre about shows like COPS. Looking at the facts by themselves, this show should be fairy depressing and only further shake one’s desire to engage with any media ever again (COPS represents, trough severe selection bias, such an unrealistic overview of what kind of crimes happen and who commits them that it might as well be fiction) but it is, instead, quite binge-able and well made enough to offset some of the bitter taste the content leaves in one’s mouth. Ephemeral is quite the opposite as I have not really noticed anything particularly clever the host may be doing in his role but have also found it to be very thoughtful and almost comforting. It deals with cataloguing and highlighting artifacts that may have been forgotten or are on the edge of forgotten, like a TV station that was once big enough to compete with those we readily remember now and then just evaporated from collective memory or a whole industry of ‘foreign’ records made by immigrants from the former Ottoman empire in the ninety-teens, which makes it similar to Kitchen Sisters and lends it the same sort of subtle gentleness. It does not get explicitly political, but of course deciding on what is kept and remembered is political by default. This makes Ephemeral engaging beyond the somewhat minimal approach to narration where the host really does not interrupt or interject that much and all the listener gets is a story about an artifact told by a (rare) person who cares about it (a lot). This sort of caring is, I guess, just something I am consistently weak for.
Finally, since June was Pride Month, I want to recommend in this feed collecting queer-centric WNYC podcast episodes in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, this really great exploration and explanation of pronouns on Call Your Girlfriend and this episode of the Allusionist detailing the very confusing history of the word bisexual.
On the music side of things, I have been listening to this 2016 record by Phobocosm a fair amount and have also been turning to the French synth punk duo Black Bug surprisingly often. Phobocosm is very much a band that I would like, a classic mix of black and death metal checking off all the boxes on how loud, how heavy and how harsh it is. An acquaintance recently asked me whether I listen to this sort of thing when I’m angry and I was really taken aback because I very much listen to it as a source of comfort. Black Bug is none of the things that describes the familiarity of a band like Phobocosm. It reminds me of my very limited exposure to acts like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus, or at least what I think those bands would sound like with a lot more pep and a little more punk. Black Bug feels retro in a way I can’t quite describe and also fun enough to be work music rather than something that makes me wish I was the kind of person who can dance or, on the other side of the spectrum, in a mosh pit at that very moment. I think their eponymous record is my favorite of theirs so far.
WATCHING: Since the past few weeks have been filled with conference travel and weekends with my boyfriend in-between, I actually got around seeing quite a few movies and TV shows so here’s a breakdown of some thoughts and impressions.
Meeting Gorbachev – We saw this documentary, the latest from Werner Herzog, mostly on an impulse during our trip to Milwaukee where I was attending one of my conferences. We flew into town early so our first night ended up being something of an impromptu date night including Ethiopian food, frozen yogurt, pool and this hour-and-a-half, surprisingly nostalgic dive into Russian communist history. Having heard Herzog discuss this movie on NPR, I knew he was not going into it unbiased and that his convictions about policy related to Russia right now are quite strong and bordering on unpopular. Having seen the movie, I now also know that Herzog’s fawning over the titular Russian stateman is completely genuine, and that it makes him into a somewhat ineffective interviewer. To be more direct, the best parts of this film are those that put the Herzog Gorbachev conversation in context rather than those actually featuring their dialogue. The story of the Soviet political machine paired with garish, overly theatrical footage of mostly funerals from Gorbachev’s early days of being one of its cogs, is presented so masterfully it often seems unreal. To a millennial like me, the whole thing is also very informative so when Herzog was not trying to get Gorbachev to recite poetry and or mourn his deceased wife on camera, I felt actively engaged with parts of Soviet history that had seemed really blurry to me in history class. But Herzog just can’t help himself: as much as he excels in telling Gorbachev story through cutting together archival film, he also dominates the interview, even interrupting Gorbachev at times, and the man he is trying to mythologize does not get to shine as much as I would guess Herzog wanted him too. It’s a shame, really, because when the camera lingers on Gorbachev, and when he is allowed to take time to process what is most certainly coming to him via an off-screen translator, there is a lot of sparkle in his eyes, and one begins to notice the laugh lines around them. There is something very animating about the man, and very intriguing, likely more than worth making a movie about.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina season 2 – As our time together is often gifted to us by a school break or a holiday, my boyfriend and I tend to focus on a single show at a time and binge it in however many days we have in the same location. We stuck with Chilling Adventures of Sabrina longer than I anticipated since neither of us was overly enthusiastic about it as we were finishing up season one a few months ago, and in the end, I am really not sure that the second season was worth our time. More bluntly, this show was upsettingly disappointing and disappointingly upsetting and really did not deliver on anything about it that seemed promising in early episodes. Yes, it features queer and trans characters, but they don’t get any personality beyond their marginalized identity which is wielded against them in an almost cartoonish fashion at times. Yes, it has feminist themes, but they are so clunkily executed that the characters have to explicitly tell us that the misogynists in the story are in fact misogynist. Even when the dialogue is not so on the nose, the arguments are shallow and, in the end, so much of the female characters’ actions revolve solely and only around the men in their lives. Possibly most offensively though, the show has no sense of humor nor do the writers seem to be at all aware of how campy and over the top it is. So much of what does not work about Sabrina could be remedied if it did not take itself so seriously and did not set up its story as some paragon of Twitter wokeness or whatever it is that folks behind Netflix thought they were selling us by making it. Such a waste of what at one point seemed like a good idea and a cool aesthetic riff on a classic character.
Chernobyl – When people at parties heard I was physicist they used to try and talk to me about the Big Bang Theory, now they just ask me to explain the horrors on display in HBO’s Chernobyl. In fact, I learned about the show at a birthday party in Brooklyn where everyone was more of a ‘real person with a real job’ than me and my boyfriend yet someone still managed to claim that a microwave oven can split an atom. I did not expect us to actually watch the show after that but once we started, we were quite sincerely glued to it.
There is not much to say about Chernobyl other than that it is horrendous in content and executed extremely well regardless. It is cold, clinical, systematic and does not hold back. The level of skill on display may in fact be the only thing working against it – at multiple moments we found ourselves discussing why and how a certain vignette was folded into the larger plot rather than what actually happened in it. This is not to say that there is no subtlety to Chernobyl, but throughout the show it is quite clear that the viewer is never meant to forget just how awful this all was. The fireman and the unwilling soldier storylines serve to underline this even if their emotional resonance is limited by the fact, we really don’t get to know these characters at all. The final episode of the show impressed me the most, however, by taking a lot of time away from the personal tribulations of the few main characters that we do get emotionally invested in and giving it over to a long, science-y explanation of what actually happened to the nuclear reactor that started it all. This show pulls off the kind of science talk that would usually seem overly didactic, dry and forced with incredible skill and ease. Even as a physicist looking to escape physics outside of work, I found myself really enjoying most of it.
However, the depiction of the scientists is where my biggest nitpick with Chernobyl lies as well. Namely, one of the characters (and I do appreciate her being a woman) shown to be instrumental in working out just what happened in the titular disaster is in reality an aggregate of what was a very large number of physicists and engineers working around the clock. To be more precise, this show falls into the same trap that many depictions of real science triumphs do – it portrays a few scientists as unambiguous heroes when in the real world science is always a team effort, especially when it is being constrained and intimidated by both politics and, well, the obvious horror of parts of it going wrong.
I heard a podcast host recently conjecture how one of the thematic strands in Chernobyl is exactly the connection between the (body) horror and thinking that science can triumph over everything or that political systems surrounding it can be honed so well as to remain static and infallible. Maybe being melted from the inside out by radiation is a side-effect of too much hubris. Being punished for thinking you have mastered something so much bigger than yourself is not a new idea, and certainly one that anyone who has grown up religious was bound to encounter, but I’m still mulling it over when it comes to Chernobyl. The whole thing was a product of such a specific set of circumstances that it is hard to argue that exactly that, very singular, scenario should have been prepared for. At the same time, every ingredient that led there was a failing of an overly confident individual. So maybe it is the conflict between the individual themselves making decisions based on their personal failings and the fact that they have to be a part of a collective (and we’re talking communist Russia here) and that these actions can compound and affect the collective that makes Chernobyl so compelling right now – we live in a culture where bad judgement calls by some can indeed hurt many but no one’s guts have melted and fallen out yet.
Jessica Jones season 3 – I wasn’t wowed by the first season of Netflix’s Jessica Jones, so I came to the show’s second season late and was pleasantly surprised. Consequently, I jumped on season 3 very soon after it was released, hoping that it kept its forward momentum. Despite some clunky plot points and one occasionally underwhelming villain, this final season of Jessica Jones did not disappoint. As in season 2, I was really captivated by Trish Walker’s story, now maybe even more central as an example of the fall of a classic tragic hero than Jessica’s, and the writers clearly recognized its potential as well. There are a few fully Trish-centric episodes, but Rachael Taylor excels in almost every scene, on par with Krysten Ritter who is really fantastic in the titular role. Plot-wise, this season meanders a fair amount and for quite some time it is not clear who the central villain is or whether there will even be one. Partly, this is not too troublesome as in addition to Trish, the viewer is also given plenty of chance to get into the Jeryn Hogharth storyline and Jessica’s new love interest is compelling as well. But this does become a problem once the villain is revealed, and he does not add much more charge or coherence to the show than it had while it was just cycling through the lives of the main cast. Gregory Sallinger seems to be written as a quintessential 2019 villain, a white man who feels entitled to people’s respect and marks everyone more successful than him a ‘cheater’. Clearly, whoever came up with his character has read a thing or two about ‘incels’ on 4chan, and were it developed better this would have not been a terrible idea to bring into a show that is, at its core, always been about dealing with trauma, rejection, pain and loneliness. We are to believe that at some point Sallinger has had a taste of at least some of that, and that has turned him so greedy for a recognition of his overachieving. He also serves as a contrast to Jessica’s new lover Erik who is such a sweet portrayal of how people can respect each other’s boundaries and communicate well and still look good on screen together that I was willing to forgive the inconsistencies in his character’s backstory. Further, Sallinger is just not that scary as a villain and all of his tricks start to feel very old very fast. Towards the end of the season, I found myself waiting for episodes centering on his conflict with Jessica to take turns to one of the other more emotionally charged strands of the plot and the final episode in a sense validated that by having Jessica fight someone very different. It is possible that Sallinger’s distaste for superheroes and their ‘undeserved’ power was meant to underscore the bigger theme of the season, namely what it means to try and use your powers for good when you have never before been stable enough for real heroism to even be an option, but the show would have made that point in its finale or through Jessica, Trish, Erik and Malcolm (on a really confusing moral roller-coaster this season – probably one of the least strong parts of the season) regardless. Lackluster villainy aside, this was an enjoyable watching experience and I am genuinely sad to not know whether this story will continue, and with this cast, anytime soon.
Killing Eve season 1 – This is the kind of show that got positive buzz from virtually every media outlet that commented on it but despite its ‘queer, female, assassins!’ hook it took me a while to actually watch it. Consequently, I knew what to expect: strong performances from really good lead actresses, lots of clever, snappy dialogue, some pretty camera work and a story of intrigue that might also be a parody of other such stories. Killing Eve is all of that, and it did not bore me, even managed to be surprising at times. It’s a clever show done right and a clever show that does not need to constantly, needily remind the viewer that it is clever. Sandra Oh’s character is delightfully bland and predictable (that whole failing marriage storyline) when she needs to be but equally successfully impulsive and hotheaded when there’s space for it. Her colleagues walk the tight line between caricatures and fully fleshed-out characters at times but never really fall on the wrong side. Fiona Shaw in particular triumphs as an MI6 department head and Oh’s friendship with her colleague played by David Haig was really touching. Jodie Comer steals the show as the assassin Villanelle though, and her handler Konstantin comes in at a close second. She gives just the right amount of artifice and just the right amount on instability that though it is obvious that the viewer probably should not empathize with her, it is impossible to take your eyes off of her in any scene. You don’t develop a crush on Villanelle but she still makes you invested on some is-this-wrong gut level. Beyond good casting and clever characters, Killing Eve plays with espionage and assassination tropes and both pushes them to their absurdist, almost comedic, extreme (like bringing together a bunch of assassins for a mission that ends in in-fighting and not at all the kind of murder they were tasked with) and employs them to move the plot forward (like using the villain’s tragic back story to put her in a vulnerable position fertile for one last showdown and twist with the protagonist). It is not always clear where the writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge draws the line between satire and honest plot and I worry that this will be a problem for the show in the future, but it kept my attention enough that season two is now very high on my to-watch list.
Fleabag – This is another Phoebe Waller-Bridge show that got a lot of praise in the media, and even more than with Killing Eve, it was all very much justified. Fleabag is short and binge-able which is trouble because it is also nasty, heavy, depressing and often downright filthy. When people say they can’t turn their gaze away from something ‘just like watching a car crash’, this is the kind of thing they are probably talking about. But Fleabag is also really smart, really emotional and feels incredibly real and authentic in that sort of raw way that one can only sometimes get from talking to extremely close friends. Of course, this is not Waller-Bridge’s reality, but she is remarkably convincing, her bad jokes really endearing, her struggles absolutely devastating and the moments when she breaks the fourth wall do feel conspiratorial and cheeky rather than just a storytelling device. It is hard to explain what this show is about without giving it all away but it manages to touch on everything from sisterhood to art to feminism, and never lose a level of gross nostalgia that is rarely seen in shows trying to say something about what it might be like to be a (sad) young woman today. This is maybe the biggest draw of Fleabag, it is not trying to make a statement, just very honestly recounting absurd yet relatable experiences pushed to their extreme, and always keeping it all very, very human in the process. You know how sometimes you find yourself in some stupid situation, really find yourself because steps that lead you there are honestly hard to recount, and when you try to imagine the situation from third person it sounds like it could never be real, maybe scripted at best, but there is no way to run away anyway? That’s sort of what all of Fleabag feels like. Unless you’re absolutely terrified of sex on screen (there’s lots of it and it is never good), do watch this.
P. S. We've watched an embarrassing amount of MasterChef in the last few weeks as well and my boyfriend insisted I mention this for the sake of real honesty when I mentioned finishing up this letter. I hate how wasteful, how meaty, how falsely dramatic and how classist MasterChef is. But I also can't resist the temptation of yelling at the TV about food. It's like watching soccer but way worse.
READING:
The White Album by Joan Didion – I had to renew this book three times in my local public library, but I finally finished it over a long sequence of lunch breaks and sneaking in time to read here and there while at work. The last time I tried to write about this book, I had more to say about Didion’s style than the content of her writing. Having finished it, I am less smitten by how clean and precise she can be and more conflicted by the punchlines she chooses to employ her skill towards.
Some of what Didion is interested in is just odd, like dams and water control systems or shopping center theory. I was surprised by her genuine affinity for moving around large amounts of water, sitting in greenhouses or fantasizing about which department store her shopping mall would house, but these inane obsessions do serve to humanize her and make her cultural criticism seem slightly less harsh. Additionally, they again showcase her prowess as a writer – she can make any scene seem intriguing and compelling. Many of her essays are broken up into scenes, maybe reflecting the fact that she is also a screenwriter and seeing the way she assembles a narrative from bits and pieces that may not seem connected but pack a lot of color was somewhat inspiring. Didion is easy to read but nevertheless manages to say so much.
However, as I got deeper into the book, the more her rigidity, subtle classism and hints of a lack of empathy showed in some of the essays and I started to wonder whether I can dislike her but still admire her craft. In reality, it just her essay on the women’s movement that is quite horrendous and disappointed me very much by obfuscating some good and valid points with an overall tone of dismissal, disdain and what seems like serious misunderstanding. There is so much nuance in the way Didion thinks through architecture and highways systems, and the state of Hollywood, yet she is so quick to claim that women can solve their problems by just not playing victim so much, as if everyone had the means and opportunities that she clearly does. I’m not willing to let this essay slip but I do recognize that it is a good reminder of how cultural commentary does not always fully age well and how one can be very astute and critical about their time yet still fall prey to its shortcomings. At the end of the day, I don’t have to like Didion to admit that she was onto something more often than not and to take notes from her style.
(P. S. I came to this book because it was discussed on Supercontext and some of the discussion in that episode touched on the lack of commentators like Didion today. Please send recommendations if someone Didion-like or Didion-adjacent but more current comes to mind.)
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker – This past spring I read more poetry than probably ever before and apparently; I still have that particular reading bug under my skin. I grabbed this book in one of those frantic oh-no-they-close-in-five-minutes moments that always catch up with me when I’m trying to bribe myself into working on weekends by hiding in the comics section of the local public library which, once I read it at an uncharacteristically quick pace, seems somewhat appropriate. Parker’s poetry is full of emotion, sometimes grating and loud, sometimes sad yet somehow still obnoxious. Have you ever met a girl that you hate for her complete lack of holding back but also secretly really want to be that way? Parker’s poems are something like that girl and they really grabbed me (and I don’t even care about Beyoncé). Here are a few lines I liked, from the very end of the book, conveying some calm after all the anguish, passion, pettiness, love and partying that populate some earlier pages. (However, it is really hard to pick out anything out of this collection as it feels very coherent and in need of being consumed as a whole.)
“One day you’ll care a whole lot you’ll always take vitamins
And exercise without bragging and words will fit perfectly
Into your mouth like an olive soaked in gin
The glory of an olive soaked in gin and its smooth smallness
A gloss will snowfall onto your cheeks, the top of your lip
The sidewalks will be the same, evidenced
Combing your records you’ll see the past and think OK
Once I was a different kind of person”
EATING: We ate a shocking amount of really great vegan food in Milwaukee, including sushi, somewhat upscale small plates meal in a European style bistro, really good brunch and berry pie, we tried everything at one of my favorite vegan pop-ups in Brooklyn and we helped put together a dim sum feast at a friend’s house after returning to Illinois. In other words, all the conference and travel chaos of the past few weeks had been interspersed with seriously good eats and that brought me a lot of joy. Unfortunately, all of this was followed by an unexplained bout of digestive distress that has been on and off plaguing me most of the spring but has now gotten bad enough that I cannot just ignore it and hope it goes away. As a consequence, following a few really frustrating doctor’s appointments, I have been eating a pretty limited array of plant foods and took a step back from Instagram (where all the meals look unbounded and perfect and everybody’s stomach is perfectly flat afterwards) which has typically been my primary source of inspiration and platform of choice for everything food related. I hope I’ll feel better soon and have something to share here but for now all I can do is advocate for potatoes, cucumbers and the occasional tofu scramble for when you feel like you’ve, very painfully, swallowed a whole balloon.