Beyond belief: The talking heads of America have nothing nice to say about the youth. In verbal spasms of condescending gloominess, they describe us much in the same vein as their forefathers once described them: incompetent good-for-nothings who will bring the end of American values. In the final essay and letter of The Harper Review’s winter issue, Liam Eifert and Peter Sloniewsky push back against this moral panic. Rebutting the death of ideals, Sloniewsky follows Tocqueville in praising the “associational life,” a lofty yet vital element of democracy for which young people do and should take up the mantle, to save the country from despotism and themselves from apathy. Eifert, delivering the final word on partying, defends the intellectual life from “endemics of ennui” and unpleasurable truths. As he exhorts his associational comrades in belief, we must “hold fast in faith and harden not [our] hearts!” For us, the party is just starting.
Brady Santoro, senior editor
The party continues: Now in its fourth season, Winter Freeze has consistently delivered electronic music’s cult favorites to UChicagoans. Hosted by Major Activities Board, the student organization behind concerts like Summer Breeze, Winter Freeze contrasts its festival counterpart with a grittier, club-going feel. Last Friday, I rode the Green Line into West Loop’s Bottom Lounge, an unassuming bar that hid a large stage with plenty of floorspace for dancing. Winter Freeze was kicked off by an esoteric but electric set by Kofi Graves, fourth-year student and first-time winner of MAB’s annual Battle of the DJs. Chicago-famous prosperityroom DJed next, bumping crowd favorites like Charli XCX’s “Guess” and Addison Rae’s “Fame is a Gun.” The night ended with MGNA Crrrta, an up-and-coming NYC electroclash duo that draws from their Minecraft server roots, juxtaposing hyper-digital aesthetics with indie sleaze-inspired ethos.
Backstage, MGNA Crrrta’s Farheen Kahn and Ginger Scott told me this was their first show since releasing their new album, Beautiful Disaster. I saw them last December where epilepsy-inducing lights made their set feel less like a rave, more like a drug-induced animation. Topping a performance as frenzied as that seemed impossible but the pair more than managed, cycling from CDJ to centerstage as they danced and traded lead singer roles. Electronic music is often polarizing when it’s not gatekept or floating in digital purgatory, but Winter Freeze successfully drew in the uninitiated with its schoolwide postering and low prices, and kept them listening with its on-point artist selection. It’s a rare day when a UChicago student doesn’t succumb to the evil aura of the Regenstein Library—it might even thaw my winter quarter heart to see students showing up for their friends and chasing their curiosities, especially on the eve of finals week.
Mimi Mikhailov, contributing editor
Taking flight: My mother owns a custom T-shirt printed with stills from the film Wings of Desire. She taught me that everything director Wim Wenders did was perfection. It is true: I don’t brush my teeth the same way ever since I watched Perfect Days. I don’t feel the urge to cover silence with a podcast on “how to reclaim your spark.” Breakups are handled with much more sweetness now, with the monologue from Paris, Texas as the soundtrack to my thoughts. I see children, especially little blonde girls, as innocent figures making small jumps when they walk, as Alice did wandering in the Cities.
In the midst of finals, days spent in the library, Wings of Desire made me appreciate the unappreciated things in life— grey skies, delayed trains, repetitive disappointments. The need to cherish things gone wrong, because they remind us we’re alive. Wenders’ protagonist and guardian angel of Berlin, Damiel, longs to belong to such humanness: “It would be rather nice coming home after a long day to feed the cat, like Philip Marlowe, to have a fever and blackened fingers from the newspaper, to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck by an ear. To lie!” And Cassiel responds: “To be a savage!” Let’s all be. Let’s say no to plans that bore us, and feel immense joy at being able to wriggle our toes barefoot. Take pride in being where we are, even when the sky is grey and deadlines submerge our thoughts. Anxiety, grief: to be cherished rather than escaped.
Meri-Li Mercier, contributing editor
Commons’ knowledge: There are two reasons people aggregate and synthesize information for the ether: fun or informational influence. Reporting on a conference of “Wikipedians” in The Dial, Imogen West-Knights defends the first as the antidote to Wikipedia’s existential worry that its editors will soon be replaced by generative artificial intelligence. For West-Knights, community meetups where contributors nerd out about their niche contributions to the 25-year-old site point optimistically to Wikipedia’s ability to persevere in the face of AI. The site is valuable “so long as people—human beings—are having fun with it.”
But “fun” doesn’t satiate everyone. Take the novelist Ben Lerner: three years ago, he wrote a fictional essay for Harper’s Magazine about editing Wikipedia entries to subtly determine the language people used for current events. Despite West-Knights’ optimism, I wonder about the staying power of the world’s largest encyclopedia when its contributors are driven less by the quiet satisfaction of curating knowledge than by a desire to shape how its readership sees the world. Wikipedia may not be able to withstand AI’s encroachment if its editors are primarily motivated by that ambition, especially as AI’s ability to aggregate information rapidly improves. It is likely this desire for narrative power, and AI’s potential to disrupt our ability to attain it, that will shape the kind of intellectual production we prioritize—even for those who swear to never use it.
Elena Eisenstadt, contributing editor
Image: Hermann Göll, The Burning of the Library of Alexandria, woodcut print, 1876 (private collection).