When I was younger, I used to take eggs from the fridge. I would hold them in my hands, watch, and wait. They never became chickens, which made me sad, but eventually happy, because it set me down the path of discovering milk.

The milk was always above the eggs in the fridge, so when I realized that eggs didn’t work the way I thought they would, I made a choice. I reached for the carton. Rather, I asked my mom if I could try the mysterious liquid of the refrigerator’s third floor. I was five. I was curious. And I was thirsty. And so I drank that 2% like my life depended on it.

By ten, I had made a fateful transition. Relegating watery 2% to the past, I made the transition to Whole. And boy did it complete me! But this wasn’t to last. After three years of blissful milk-consumption, I read an article on Aol.com that said milk could be a carcinogen. I didn’t want to get cancer and die, so I did the drastic: I stopped drinking milk.

It was only five years later, and not necessarily in my correct mind, but oh was it my right one, that I caved—not because I was any less scared of cancer; I just missed my milk that much.

You see, I’ve never broken a bone. I’ve never broken a bone, and, for years, I drank at least a tall glass of ice cold milk with every meal. Is this just a coincidence? I don’t think so. Spanning not only cultures, but also species, milk unites the creatures of the earth. As an infant, milk is the crucial source of calcium that sculpts the skeleton. As a college student, milk is the crucial source of moisture that makes Oreos taste much better. Milk, in all its forms, is not simply delicious. It is necessary.

Milk is not just a delicious, refreshing and nutritional beverage. It is also a colloidal-suspension, which sounds cool.

Move-in day, 2015: After unpacking my clothes and debunking my bed (with some help from my football-player suitemates), my mom and I decide to get lunch. Upon leaving my dorm, we pass a student sitting by himself on a bench outside of Bingham C. He has long, messy blonde hair, and wears a tie-dyed t-shirt and socks that don’t match. His focus seems impenetrable as he scribbles rapidly in a thick notebook. After a moment, my mom whispers, “I bet he’s some kind of genius,” nodding her head and tapping my shoulder proudly, as if to say this is what Yale’s going to be like.

A couple of weeks pass. I continue to see the mysterious student—always on the bench, always surrounded by half-sharpened pencils and crinkled papers. The consistency of his presence on the bench becomes a little joke among my friends and me, searching, like we all did in those early days of college, for a target on which to focus our nervous cynicism. But the snickers give way to a breathless awe as the seasons change and the wild-haired freshman’s rule over the bench becomes a rebellion against temperature as well as time. Awe soon becomes curiosity, and I begin to wonder: Who is he? What could he be working on while snow cascades around him?

When I muster up the courage to approach my classmate, I notice his notebook is full of what I assume to be conceptual math—complex curves, charts, letters, even the occasional number. Then I ask without so much as stating my name, “What’s the longest you’ve ever spent on one problem?”

I regret the question the second it slips from my lips. But he is cordial and takes a moment to think. “Four, maybe five months,” he responds. Relieved, and sensing a growing rapport, I ask what kind of problem could take so long to solve.

“Some problems are hard,” he says.

I giggle, but he isn’t joking.

“I’m Rob.”

“Milo,” he responds, extending a hand for me to shake.

***

The next time I speak to Milo, he is sitting on his bench underneath a heap of papers covered with mathematical formulas and musical notes. Not much has changed since I bumbled through our introduction some six months earlier. In that time, Milo’s presence on the bench outside Bingham has remained so steadfast that it has been dubbed “Milo’s Bench.”

It’s a brilliant day in February—the sun blinding, the air sharp. Milo wears a red shirt and blue pants. One of his socks is brown, the other white. Milo’s shoes have holes in them, but he tells me that doesn’t bother him. His voice is gravelly and jumps a couple of octaves when he gets excited. Veins of ice creep up the bench’s legs, and Milo picks at them as he speaks.

Harsh winters are nothing new for Milo, who grew up in in northeastern Massachusetts. While attending The Parker Essential School in Devens, Milo quickly finished the math curriculum. “The teachers were just like ‘Yeah, Milo, do whatever you want. We don’t have anything for you,’” he explains, raising his eyebrows. Milo’s precociousness earned him the freedom to explore mathematics more exhaustively: while his classmates were learning geometry, he was writing 20-page papers on “every possible detail you may want to know about trigonometric functions.”

But Milo is much more than a preternaturally gifted mathematician. As his high school English teacher, Sue Massucco said, “Everything Milo did, whether it was acting or playing with math, or writing poetry or building a pipe organ, he did with this joyful gusto for trying and learning and knowing and doing.”

Milo started playing the piano in kindergarten. By senior year, he wanted to know more about how the instrument worked. So, for his senior project, he built a fully functional pipe organ. From scratch—“like from pieces of wood,” Milo clarifies. Adding to the obvious difficulties of such an undertaking was the fact that Milo didn’t know the first thing about woodworking. Every morning, he took a train to a class at a cabinet-making school in Boston. He would return to Parker by the afternoon with all sorts of cuts and callouses, which he presented proudly as battle scars. He also filmed the entire process. And when he posted a time-lapse of the 300-plus hours of work on Youtube, he was offered a job at an organ-manufacturing factory. Milo took the job, then a gap year, and built organs for nine months before matriculating at Yale.

Once he got to Yale, Milo wasted no time diving deep into his favorite subjects of music and mathematics, taking graduate tutorials in rational analysis and classical music composition during his first semester. When he speaks of his interests, his musings reveal a mind that works as elegantly as the proofs it derives: “It’s hard to tell whether a piece of music is good. In math, it’s very easy. But what connects them is that in both, there’s a lot of potential for exploration” he says. One of Milo’s main criticisms of the math department at Yale is that “it seems like this directed field where it’s seen as more valuable to study a proof than to be able to put all the time in necessary to recreate it.” His eyes widen as he affirms, “I feel like math should be practiced as an art, but I often see people practicing it as a science.”

About an hour into our conversation, a woman with magenta hair approaches the bench. Milo waves. She nods at him enthusiastically, exclaiming, “You’re taking visitors now?” Milo hesitates a moment before playing along: “I guess so!” The woman turns out to be Emma Green, TC ’19, who was in Milo’s froco group. When I ask Emma about Milo, she immediately brings up a side of him I’ve yet to see: his wit.

“If we can just get a premise going, the jokes can roll on forever,” Emma says, remembering a riotous dinner in which they spent “a good 30 minutes discussing a scientific study in which we’d coerce the entire world into eating ceramic plates (he and I would, naturally, be the control group).”

I still don’t know what “eating ceramic plates” means, or why Milo and Emma would be the control group. But that isn’t really the point. As Emma explains: “Absurdities like that are so fun, and Milo totally plays along and adds to the absurdities, whereas other people are often just sort of like ‘umm…what?’”

It begins to snow. Inspired by the growing numbness in my legs, I ask Milo what I’ve meant to ask him since the moment we met. “Why,” I stutter, as snow fills my eyes, “do you do everything out here?”

“I just don’t like being inside,” he says. Then, after a pause: “It’s the closest bench to my room.”

***

“You missed office hours,” Milo says to a friend passing by. “Ugh, I know. Sorry,” she offers. After she leaves, I ask Milo what he’s teaching. “Oh, it’s just a silly class,” he says with a grin. Still curious, I catch up with Milo’s friend, Rachel Kaufman, TC, ’19 to ask her about the “silly class.” Her answer further undermines my impression of Milo as just some math whiz:

“It began one morning when I woke up to find a sheet of paper slid underneath our suite door. It was an announcement that I had been enrolled in an F&ES 999 course, taught by Milo. The class has since included a fill-in-the-blank test and an assignment, in which the instructions were to gather a leaf and write a 7-12 letter essay that described its ‘neobaroque qualities,’” Rachel says.

It has been nearly a year since Milo and I last spoke. While he has migrated to a new bench—one on Rose Walk (the pedestrian path connecting College Street to Cross Campus)—Milo seems no different than the goofy genius I knew last year. His raspy laugh still commands attention as it communicates genuine contentment. He still plays the piano in the air as he speaks. He’s still wearing those same shoes—the ones that, months ago, had started to look like Swiss cheese. “They’ve become less water proof,” Milo admits, having since covered the holes with a thick slab of black duct tape.

As we catch up, trading stories from the summer over grilled cheeses in Trumbull, the form our conversation takes is more casual than it had been last year. Milo tells me about how after a summer of travel, he returned to Yale to “learn everything.” How’s he doing on that front?

“I am about halfway done with this task, if you don’t account for the things that I don’t know about,” he says.

Milo has tried many things so far this year at Yale, succeeding at some, failing at others. With someone who’s as exceptionally talented as Milo, you’d think he’d stick to what he’s so much better at than everybody else—math, piano, building pipe organs, designing zany classes and then teaching them etc. But this isn’t the case. While he wasn’t accepted into any of Yale’s improv groups, this disappointment hasn’t stopped Milo from performing.

Though you won’t see him on stage this semester, you’ll no doubt hear the product of Milo’s latest creative endeavor—joining the Yale Guild of Carillonneurs. For those who don’t know, these are the mysterious individuals who play the bells on the roof of Harkness Tower. And what will Milo be playing on Yale’s carillon? Milo’s isn’t sure, but mentions one of his favorite contemporary artists: Muse, whose music he goes so far as to liken to that of canonical classical composers like Bach and Beethoven.

Furthermore, there’s an element of performance implicit in Milo’s most obvious tendency: working on his bench without getting tired and without getting cold. In fact, Milo is by no means oblivious to the cult-like following his near-biblical presence on the bench has inspired. Just last Christmas, Milo posted a note on his froco’s door imploring everyone to take care of his bench while he was on break.

As Milo puts the finishing touches on his second grilled cheese, I ask what makes him happy. “I like learning things and making things, and I like being outside, too,” Milo says between bites. At first I think Milo is brushing off a lazy question with a sarcastically twee response. But his expression remains serious. He means it. Milo’s answer thus morphs from seeming sardonic to seeming sage, resonating with the kind of certainty that can only be expressed through such an economy of words.

And so Milo’s consistent choice of study spot may be no different than his pared down mode of communication—there’s no intricate explanation for either. For Milo, the bench is simply where he goes to think about math, to listen to music, to eat apples and greet his friends as they come home.

For the rest of us, the bench is where we can—even if just for a little while—share in the joy Milo derives from such modest pleasures. It is where we can appreciate what Ms. Massucco found years ago, when she realized, “what one learns from Milo is to look with wonder at the world.”

Though most may recognize the Neapolitan auteur, Paolo Sorrentino, for his luscious visual style, outlandish characters, and general affinity for the absurd, another motif informs the director’s work: satire. This is true of Sorrentino’s first film to gain national recognition, Il Divo—a dense political drama in which Sorrentino presents a window into the toxic bureaucracy of the Italian political system. This is true, too, of Sorrentino’s most successful film to date, the Felliniesque La Grande Belleza. While not as overt in its critique as Il Divo, The Great Beauty (La grande belleza)—which, it should be mentioned, was awarded the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film—has at its heart an uncompromising derision of the vapidity and artistic emptiness of the Italian intelligentsia in Rome.

Another, less prominent satirical thread in The Great Beauty is Sorrentino’s commentary on the apparent materialism of the Catholic Church in Rome. What seemed in that film like a comic aside has become the primary subject matter of the director’s latest creative endeavor: The Young Pope.

The show, which stars Jude Law and Diane Keaton, will air on HBO on Jan. 15. But if you’re like me, and you can’t wait to see the latest from the man who brought us that eeriest and most gorgeous of films The Great Beauty, you can find streaming options through a Google search. What you’ll see in the first episode (admittedly, the only one that I’ve seen) is Sorrentino’s most daring, blatant, and exciting—yet ultimately least successful—satirical effort.

Let’s establish some context. The Young Pope is not, as I’ve mentioned, Sorrentino’s first foray into the universe of satire—or even satire aimed at the Church. The Great Beauty features a side story about a Mother Teresa-like character, who is presented as a highly-touted yet seemingly impotent figure. But then something unbelievable happens: the main character, Jep, stumbles upon the Teresa-like woman performing an actual miracle. And so what begins as a tame, vaguely comical representation of the Church becomes a portrayal smacking of nothing short of reverence.

Then Sorrentino released the pilot of The Young Pope, an episode that, without giving too much away, concerns (as promised) a young and exquisitely petulant Pope, Lenny Belardo (played by Jude Law). With the exception of a single—if imaginary—speech in which he fantasizes about proclaiming from the papal balcony a sermon of remarkable (and, no doubt, deeply sinful) progressivism, Belardo is an insufferable pig, a chain-smoking, rude, thoughtless, absolutely irredeemable broken promise of a human. And this, I think, is supposed to be the show’s charm.

But The Young Pope isn’t surprising just because of Sorrentino’s history of mild reverence toward the Church; the show is also surprising because of Sorrentino’s history of making good cinema. In other words, the pilot is awful. Its critique of the Church is superficial—pornographic, even, relying on the cheap shock factor of having a Pope drink diet coke and make nuns cry for no reason. This is awful for two reasons: first, it’s pointless, frivolous comedy; second, it’s pointless, frivolous comedy about, of all things, the Catholic Church—an institution that, it’s pretty safe to say, has invited some real ripe opportunities for satirization throughout its multi-century history. The Young Pope is offensive for all of the wrong reasons, chasing after insipid gasps instead of thoughtful commentary.

South Park is a show that has often been called offensive. And, of course, it has been offensive. But in South Park the offensiveness is layered; in Sorrentino’s show, it is not. That is to say that when someone is offended by something in South Park, it is not only (when the show is successful) that they have heard or seen something shocking, but also that they have been forced to consider an alarming yet undeniably real and painful aspect of society. The same cannot be said for the humor of The Young Pope, which relies purely on superficial gags to convey its perverse, mean-spirited brand of televised trolling.

I would have expected better from the man who brought us the subtle Il Divo, the enlightening The Great Beauty, and, if we’re going to name all of them, the plain fun Youth. I’ve only seen the one episode of The Young Pope, but if Sorrentino continues the baseless mocking tone of the pilot throughout the rest of the 10-episode miniseries, then the auteur will no doubt lose many fans, including me.

I can assure you that there will be no greater contrast on Yale’s campus this November than the one in the lobby of The Study Hotel, where, interspersed with the slick, modern furniture and continental decor, resides the The Yale Undergraduate Photography Society’s dazzling fall exhibition. But this contrast isn’t simply the fact that such a vibrant show currently occupies a hotel. In fact, what is at the core of the exhibit is a rigorous demonstration of the capacity of photography to be an immensely diverse medium. Variety of geographical location, variety of compositional qualities, variety of mood: variety of all varieties is, ultimately, the unifying thread to the exhibition.

To give you an idea of the kind of diversity I’m talking about, think an image of a sunset in Southampton placed next to a scene from the Serengeti. Simply in terms of geography, the exhibit will transport you

from a beauty store on Chapel Street to a martial arts show in Beijing, from a temple in Bhutan to a chapel in Stockholm. If the photos weren’t so deeply rooted in the places in which they were taken, the show might strain beneath the weight of its own ambition. The take-away may well have been so flat and vapid as, “Wow, Yale students are really well-traveled.”

Thankfully, this isn’t the case. Instead, what’s perhaps even more striking than the show’s geographic variety is its range of mood and composition. There are images of intensity, like Meg McHale’s, BK ’17, stark photo of two boys heading to work in the fields after school. The boys’ tense yet resolute expressions, coupled with McHale’s revealing title, “Men,” convey the sense of desperate urgency beating beneath the image’s surface. There are also images of exultant repose, like co-curator (along with Alice Oh, PC ’19) Kaitlin Cardon’s, TD ’19, “Berber in the Sahara,” in which an ornately-clad drummer watches as his music inspires jubilation. As far as compositional variety goes, one particularly arresting example is the juxtaposition of the gritty realism of Rebecca Finley’s, SM ’20, “Pretty in Punk,” in which a young woman blows a gum-bubble, with Rosie Shaw’s, CC ’20, “Home—,” a honey-lit pastoral scene practically dripping with warmth and nostalgia. By eschewing any sense of thematic continuity, the exhibition affirms its central purpose of revealing the expansive yet infinitely personal nature of photography.

As Susan Sontag remarked in the essay “Melancholy Objects,” “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” If you make it to The Study this November—as I hope you do—you will no doubt experience the truth of Sontag’s words. More than simply being the cheapest worldwide adventure around (save, maybe, for Around The World in 80 Days), this exhibition will provide you with the rare opportunity to slip into another’s shoes so that you may return to your own with a new perspective.

“The L&B Lap” is a painfully familiar routine to anyone fond of the seclusion afforded by the study nooks in Sterling Library’s L&B reading room. In case you’re not familiar with “The Lap,” it goes something like this: walking along the left side of the reading room, you pause by each of L&B’s cozy alcoves. Upon seeing the strewn pages or unaccompanied backpack of occupancy, you continue to the next one. And once you’ve stopped to peek into every nook, you turn back, resigning yourself to a desk, a long table, or maybe even Blue State. I can’t be the only one who sees something wrong with this picture. Why not share the space? What’s so wrong with two strangers studying side-by-side?

The appeal of these nooks is apparent: surrounded by books and dark wood paneling, your options once inside are few—read, write, think; this is not a social space. And yet, while study nooks are not exactly social hubs like Bass Cafe or the tables of Blue State, there is no reason that when one person is quietly working in one of the alcoves, it is not the standard operating procedure to join this person. Worse still, a library patron will often leave their stuff in one of these nooks, knowing full well that when they return no one will have infiltrated their hard-won space. Considering each nook is outfitted with enough chairs to accommodate at least five people, this social convention is both impractical and irrational.

As absurd as this phenomenon sounds, it really does happen. While writing this piece in (you guessed it)an L&B nook, I experienced the swift glance and pivot of no fewer than six other library goers who chose not to share the space with me. We shouldn’t have to skulk down the left side of L&B hoping to see a completely vacant  nook, when we could simply join one another in these obviously coveted study spots.

There are, of course, basic conventions of politeness that we should still follow. I’m not proposing that anyone with a laptop should loudly barrel into a nook with no announcement. That said, I know that anyone who frequents L&B has been frustrated to be forced to seek somewhere else to work, when they found their desired nook populated by just a single student.

When I reached out to some friends regarding their experiences with L&B Nook Politics,

their opinions were decidedly mixed. Some, like Margaret Grabar Sage, found little issue with the prospect of being joined by a stranger in one of the nooks, explaining “I think I would be annoyed if the person didn’t say anything, but if they came in and were like ‘hey, can I sit here’ I would obviously say yes.” If someone had only asked, two people and not one would have been able to use the nook. No lap. No Blue State necessary.

Not everyone I spoke to felt the same way Margaret did. Nell Gallogly defended the idea that while “it definitely wastes space, it’s also the best feeling to have that nook to your self, so I respect the first-come-first-served model.” Nevertheless, I wonder: aren’t there other places on campus in which one can be alone without, in the process, barring other students from joining in quiet study? Nell’s emphasis of the simple human desire to have a space just to oneself suggests  that perhaps there’s a more tectonic force informing the social expectations that keep us from sharing nooks.

If this mysterious social force is truly foundational, then it must apply to more situations than just nooks in L&B. To explore this notion further, I contacted a psychiatry professor who, on the condition of anonymity, explained that “people have an innate sense of dimensionality (distances between strangers and the boundaries that are uncomfortable to cross), which you can witness in the library, in coffee shops, buses, trains, any public space that has options for seating.” Given this psychological context, it makes sense how our general apprehension regarding sharing spaces extends itself to L&B. Furthermore, it makes our apprehension to share nooks in L&B understandable. But something can be understandable and irrational at the same time, which is exactly the case with our fear of sharing the nooks in L&B.

You might be wondering: is this piece really just about sharing little rooms in a library? I am well aware of the simplicity of my proposition that we should share the L&B nooks. This is not an earth-shattering idea. And it shouldn’t be. We should be able to share Yale with one another. Whether we’re occupying a nook in L&B, a table at Koffee, or a bench on Cross Campus, by creating these invisible screens around ourselves, we’re only providing each other with an irrational inconvenience.

First you hear the bass, an electric heart pumping through the arteries of Corona Park. Then there’s the enormous sign in glimmering type welcoming everyone to The Meadows 2016, New York City’s newest music festival. And then there’s the line to get in, which is not a line. It’s a slow-moving wave of people whose outfits fill the spectrum from inventive—glowing get-ups of self-stitched fabrics—to offensive—nauseating combinations of dashikis on pale skin. Haven’t there been like six Buzzfeed articles telling us to stop doing that already?

Walking into the festival itself is like entering a bizarre, man-made microclimate. Small clouds hang impossibly low, speckling the concrete expanse with a pungent haze. A rush of warm air emanates from around the stages where festival-goers become a singular mass of movement and where the ring pops are probably not the kind you sucked on as a kid. It all kind of looks like what would happen if Wes Anderson made a Bon Iver music video using a camera phone: colorful, mysterious, and hazy, but ultimately devoid of depth, choking on its own gleeful ambition.

All that said, when I attended The Meadows in New York City this weekend, I didn’t expect to be writing about it. Why? I guess I was a little embarrassed to be there. Going to a music festival like The Meadows—such a cushy and extravagant affair—is clearly a mark of privilege that no one should be shoving in anyone else’s face. More selfishly, I worried I simply wouldn’t have anything original to say. Yes, there were pushy kids scampering about. Yes, there were shitty beers that cost as much as a three-course meal at Ivy Wok. Yes, there were corporate tents the size of residential colleges. (Is there really a difference? Looking at you, Franklin Templeton College.) All valid. All true. All vaguely embarrassing.

Still, there’s a reason I’m writing this piece. He is a musician. A rapper. He is the man from Fayetteville, North Carolina who, last Saturday, showed me without the slightest suggestion of banality what it means to be sincere.

He is J. Cole.

***

Taking the stage at exactly 8:45 p.m., Cole donned a jersey with a rather obscure message: white letters on a metallic green background spelling the name “Megan Rapinoe.” I didn’t recognize the name at first, but after a quick Google search you’ll find that Rapinoe, an American soccer player, made the news recently for kneeling as the national anthem played before a game. Having immediately raised the stakes by making such a charged gesture, Cole wasted no time in launching into a searing portrait of masculinity, the almost unbearably personal saga, “Wet Dreamz.”

Everyone has songs that they don’t or can’t listen to. Sometimes it’s because of a memory associated with the track, a line that is offensive, or simply a sound that bothers them. For me, “Wet Dreamz” is one of those songs. But it’s not because of anything Cole does wrong; rather, it’s that Cole gets his message so painfully right. Through a combination of rich imagery and intense, unflinching narration, Cole tells the story of an inexperienced guy who strikes up a romance with someone whom Cole describes as a much more experienced girlfriend. His lyrics paint a virtuosic image of youthful exploration, disarming the listener with astonishingly delicate lines like, “But if I told the truth I knew I’d get played out son / Hadn’t been in a pussy since the day I came out one.” And his honesty evokes an almost visceral reaction, culminating when he reveals at the end of the song that it’s the girlfriend’s first time, too.

Like a thump in the gut, Cole’s fearlessness to relate his own struggles with insecurity challenges the listener to snap out of the delusion that all rappers have sex like Big Sean, who only complains about getting laid too much. And so perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this kind of long-dick-swinging masculinity is that, finally, one can get used to it. It can even be a reassuring voice to have around from time to time, which is why, when Cole raps so realistically about a different brand of self-aware, vulnerable masculinity, it’s totally jarring.

I used to cringe immediately upon hearing the opening line, “Wasn’t nothin’ like that / Man it wasn’t nothin’ like that first time,” and would proceed to ask whoever was playing the song to skip it. But something about last Saturday was different. This time, when Cole leapt into those first rhymes, so did I, screaming them at the top of my lungs. In fact, somehow I knew the whole first verse. And then I knew the chorus, too. I was in it now, malleable, free to think and feel however Cole wanted me to.

And so the set continued until the music stopped abruptly and without explanation. Then the lights went out. Murmurs filled the reconstituted parking lot behind Citi Field. But just when people were starting to think something had gone wrong, the stage was lit by a milky, lilac glow. A stool appeared. Slowly, Cole walked back on stage, took a seat, and started talking.

He began by introducing himself. Adorable—as if anyone there didn’t know who he was. He told us a little about his career, his family, where he’s from. He told us how New York, and specifically Queens —the borough where the festival was being held—was important to him. How he went to college nearby at St. Johns, how tonight would be his “last show for a long time.” The gasps were audible, but were cut short when Cole launched into a secular sermon, asking each person in the audience, stranger or best friend, to lock arms.

Cole touched on many things in the speech that followed, from social justice to personal appearance, but what unified each disparate topic was Cole’s underlying, undeniable sincerity. Thus, what made this moment so special was how counterintuitive it seems in retrospect: here was this celebrity talking down from a stage to thousands of regular folks as if he was one-on-one with any of us. I know I felt it. I’m sure others did, too.

How did Cole create this enchanting effect? My theory is that he earned the credibility to speak so candidly about clichéd subjects like “being beautiful the way you are,” because he doesn’t just do it between tracks. No, he’ll tell the crowd to love the way you look and then rap in the next song, “Never let ‘em see you frown / and if you need a friend to pick you up, I’ll be around / and we can ride with the windows down, the music loud / I can tell you ain’t laughed in a while, but I wanna see that crooked smile.” Almost all of his songs reflect the same ideology he promoted during his Meadows speech. Katie Liptak, FKA ’19, put it best by saying, “He didn’t just say all those nice things, then go off rapping about other stuff. He backed it up, using his music to flesh out his genuine-seeming message about taking some time to appreciate women who are overburdened and undervalued.”

***

I won’t pretend to know the most about rap music. I don’t. But something about Cole’s ability to combine a speech that teetered on the brink of corniness with some real moving music gave me pause. Forget what the advertisements say. The Meadows and music festivals like it are really just enormous cash factories. They’re pricey. They market themselves to a select demographic. But sometimes you can have an experience at an overtly capitalistic event that can help you forget that you’re at such an overtly capitalistic event. Last Saturday, I witnessed one man get more than a thousand others to lock arms solely based on the conviction that what he was rapping about was true and meaningful. Whenever J. Cole decides to return to the stage, many people will be confused to see the man from the Ville trade sexy backup dancers for a stool, sacrificing swagger for sincerity. But I will not be one of them.