It is no wonder, then, that the Womack Sisters' inseparable relationship with their family was immediately apparent as soon as I sat down with Zeimani, BG, and Kucha Womack ahead of their Baltimore concert alongside LA SOM and Thee Sacred Souls on Sept. 22.

"We're really close sisters," BG Womack said as they all greeted me, "So we'd love for people to just think of us as family."

Their introduction was cut short by the adorable sound of a young child running around the room and just generally causing a heart-melting ruckus.

"There's another Womack sister here. She's in training," Zeimani Womack told me as she picked the phone up from off the hotel room carpet. "But it's been a blessing to have [my sister's children] on tour, though. It reminds me of how we grew up because we were right there from day one with our parents, from the studio to the road."

Having grown up traveling from London to Kenya to Thailand following their parents around on tour as back-up singers, they never had the traditional school experience.

"[Our parents] would take a tutor with us on the road," Zeimani said. "So we all have just been together this whole time, and we have the strongest bond in the family."

"Built-in friendship," BG added.

The sisters never stayed in a single place for very long, which meant that the only people they could count on being there was their family. Naturally, that meant the sisters built deep, incredibly intimate bonds with each other and their parents.

However, those family connections wouldn't necessarily spell an easy time breaking into the music industry as they leaped from out of the shadow of their parents. After leaving their parents, who had settled down in South Africa, and relocating stateside, the sisters were forced to take on more unspectacular means of making money.

"[We've] work[ed] in restaurants to Ubering [and] being in care - because we've done babysitting, we've done elder care. We've done it all," Zeimani recounted. "We just started establishing our own lives and just [started] trying to see what we wanted to do… and that's when we decided: okay, yeah, we really do want to do music. It's not just the influence of our mother and father."

And even when they were making music, they didn't always find the music industry at its most cooperative, experiencing several major rejections by record labels pushing for a more "marketable" sound.

All of their persistence and hard work paid off, though, with the sisters' self-release of their debut single, "Darling" in 2017.

"[Darling] was when we figured out where we wanted to go," Kucha Womack said. "Our voice got stronger, and we were like, okay, it doesn't matter who wants us or doesn't want us. This is the direction we're going."

After a foray in more contemporary R&B sounds with their 2022 EP "Legacy," the sisters found themselves still drawn towards the classic gospel-soul sounds of their grandfather.

"We've always been influenced by everything from country to jazz music, hip hop and everything in between," BG said. "But for ourselves, we've always had the vision that we wanted to be an authentic version of soul music."

"We really wanted to pick up where [the Womack Brothers] left off," Zeimani said.

"There's a certain type of soul, and we were like, how do we merge that into the generation of today?" Kucha said.

They were still being pushed into a more modern direction, but always felt that giving in would have been trading their artistic, spiritual vision of soul music for digestibility.

Therefore, their signing to Daptone Records alongside such nostalgic, soul-driven acts as Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley, Jalen Ngonda and their tourmates Thee Sacred Souls was more a homecoming than a reinvention.

"[Daptone speaks] the same language. So when we met Bosco Mann and the whole crew, they were like, 'Oh, band? Horns? This is what we're doing,'" Kucha said.

"It's all live. It's all human beings operating instruments: real humans and real songwriters coming together and creating stories about life," Zeimani said. "We want to bring that back because that's where the real heart is. That's where the music feels different."

They cited peers like Olivia Dean and Baby Rose as joining them in this movement for authenticity in music.

The Womack Sisters are among a number of modern artists reviving traditional recording techniques, recording their self-titled album live in the studio with a backing band. This comes even after technological limitations have rendered such "straight-to-tape" recording methods unnecessary, and they're not alone. Acts all the way from post-rock darlings Black Country New Road to indie-folk singer-songwriter Adrienne Lenker have taken this approach to recording in the modern era.

"The recording process was very quick because we were ready to go - because we'd been rehearsing for months," Kucha said.

Recording live allowed the sisters to preserve something they felt is increasingly rare in today's music buisiness: real people coming together through music.

"It's no AI involved… We want to keep that alive because our human connection to each other is everything." Zeimani said.

"Because we use just the raw instruments, it's like we're connected to the future and the past," BG said.

One of the bonuses of playing with talented musicians all in one room was that, despite not being multi-instrumentalists, the sisters were able to easily communicate their musical ideas and make live adjustments through their voices. BG recalled Zeimani arranging the horns on several of the album's songs.

Of course, their emphasis on authenticity translates to an immense passion for their live performances.

"You gotta touch the people. I mean, playback's okay, but if you can, get the guys and the girls out on the road and really put together just a beautiful show. I feel like nothing brings people together and fills our hearts more," Zeimani said.

In particular, the sisters are excited to experience Baltimore, a city they haven't yet spent much time visiting.

"I love a lot of comedians out of Baltimore, so I can't wait. I was hoping we had enough time to hit some shows," Kucha said.

"Anybody have any recommendations for restaurants? Just drop them in the comments because we are foodies," Zeimani said.

Even though we don't have a comments section on our articles, be sure to keep up with our instagram and we'll pass on any suggestions! On top of that, I did refer them to The News-Letter's own Leisure section.

Before we said our goodbyes, I complimented Zeimani's "I ?‍? CHICAGO" shirt. Unbeknownst to me, it was actually merchandise from Harry Styles' upcoming Together, Together tour, for which the Womack Sisters will be joining the five Chicago dates.

"It really is special that we're performing in Chicago because that's where the Cooks originated. They came out of Mississippi, Clarksdale and migrated to Cook County, Chicago. That's where our grandfather was able to find himself musically and get off into the business," Zeimani said. "It's really special that he chose for us to do Chicago."

After the interview ended and I was forced to run to Hodson Hall, I was left with the overwhelming impression that the Womack Sisters were not only talented musicians bearing the torches of soul royalty, but also deeply kind and passionate people drawn together by their unbreakable bond as sisters.

Even if you don't get a chance to catch them at the Pier Six Pavilion next Tuesday (Sept. 22), Harry Styles fans might find it worthwhile to catch one of their Chicago dates as well.

In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Daniels described his involvement in the framework as an opportunity to provide feedback to the Trump administration's improved effort to address what they identified as preexisting problems in higher education. Daniels and the AAU have not officially endorsed the framework.

The new framework was released by U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on August 3. It followed a compact earlier this year that offered prioritized research funding to the nine listed institutions that agreed to the conditions. The compact was rejected by seven out of the nine universities it targeted and was overwhelmingly criticized as an overstep of the government in education. The new framework is seen as an amended and less aggressive version of the compact.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released an admonition of Daniels, the other university presidents involved in the statement and the AAU itself. A member of the Hopkins AAUP Chapter leadership voiced their concerns about the content of the framework in an interview with The News-Letter.

"[The framework] is just another attempt of the federal government to control how higher education functions and to put it under a series of political tests.. It significantly threatens academic freedom, the capacity of people to do their work, and the capacity of institutions to function independently and to conduct the kind of research that we're [currently] doing." the AAUP leadership team member said.

Additionally, the Hopkins AAUP Chapter leader described the manner in which Hopkins faculty and members of the AAU found out about Daniels' involvement in the framework.

"We were particularly concerned when we learned that President Daniels played a role in drafting this compact, and that this happened without any consultation or conversations with faculty," the AAUP leadership team member remarked. "We continue to believe that this is something that, regardless of the types of pressure that the Federal government puts on university administrations, Hopkins needs to stand firm in support of principles of shared governance… [The Trump administration] creates, sometimes, a false sense of urgency, and it is the role of university administrations to resist this and to insist on due process, because that's really the most important thing."

The Hopkins AUUP Chapter leader referenced Daniels' book, What Universities Owe Democracy.

"President Daniels wrote a book about what universities owe democracy, and that democracy needs universities. And we also believe that universities need democracy within. We need to stand firm to ensure shared governance in consultation with faculty and academic freedom," they discussed.

In addition to faculty response, representatives within the Student Government Association (SGA) brought the issue to the attention of the senate and executive at its fourth general body meeting on September 15. Jackson Morris, the Disability Caucus Senator and Chair of the Committee on Civic Engagement, gave a presentation on the framework as well as Daniels' response. His presentation brought Daniels' statements to the attention of SGA to determine what the organization's response should be and how the issue should be effectively communicated to students.

In an interview with The News-Letter, Morris discussed his motivation for giving a presentation at the meeting and highlighted the importance of spreading awareness about administrative actions.

"The reason I did this is because I want to get it in front of students. I want students to know that [as] student government…we act as your representatives," said Morris.

The News-Letter examined the contents of the framework in regards to previous actions or statements by Daniels and events that have happened under his leadership. The following bolded sections are taken directly from McMahon's framework and were chosen due to their relevance to Hopkins history and current events.

"Every prospective student is legally entitled to equal treatment regardless of protected characteristics, and credible accusations of covert attempts to evade the Supreme Court's ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard will persist as long as admissions criteria remain shielded from public view."

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) overruled Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), effectively overturning affirmative action. This court decision is especially relevant to Hopkins which immediately saw significant drops in the admittance of underrepresented groups for the Class of 2028, the first admission cycle following the 2023 ruling.

In 2024, the University's undergraduate students and cultural affinity groups expressed discontent about Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Some called on the university to strengthen their commitment to creating a diverse campus. Daniels and former Provost Ray Jayawardhana responded to the judicial change with similar sentiment in a message to the university community on September 19, 2024:

"Last summer, when the Supreme Court issued its decision to restrict the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions, we shared our concerns that the change would be a significant setback in the progress we have made in building a university community that represents the extraordinary diversity of talented students across America," Daniels and Jayawardhana wrote. "The impact of the ruling on racial and ethnic diversity in this admissions cycle is profoundly disappointing."

Daniel's original disappointment in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is not reflected in the framework to which he contributed.

"How will your institution encourage intellectual pluralism in all its academic units? And how will your school ensure the research enterprise is dedicated to advancing knowledge, deepening understanding, and serving the American people who fund it?"

This section focuses on protecting free speech, promoting debate and encouraging open-mindedness. Additionally, it specifically calls for the promotion of intellectual pluralism, a phrase that has come to connote the increase of conservative representation.

This sentiment is much aligned with Daniels' history of thought. Daniels' argument in his book What Universities Owe Democracy, the mission of Hopkins' developing School of Government and the founding principles of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Agora institute all focus on increasing "viewpoint diversity." Last year, Johnnie Moore, a conservative evangelical leader who served under Trump as the Executive Chairman of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, received a visiting fellowship with the SNF Agora Institute. The controversial appointment created student backlash and culminated in a protest during an SGA meeting.

Another example of the University's efforts to increase intellectual pluralism under Daniels includes a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The AEI is a right-wing think tank known for its support of limited government and democratic capitalism. The AEI has historically aligned itself with republican candidates, but has been critical of Trump since his impeachments. Critics of the AEI argue that corporate funding from companies like ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers creates a biased structure for research development and policy agendas. Research controversies include the support of scholarly work that encouraged racialized perceptions of intelligence and climate change denial.

"And how will you guarantee that unruly and violent protestors do not harass students or disrupt classes, research, public lectures, and campus operations?"

Although the framework emphasizes the importance of political diversity in discussion, it strongly warns against the effects of "unruly and violent" protest. Peaceful protests and demonstrations are not addressed throughout the piece. Daniels has had a contentious history with campus protests throughout his presidency.

In 2019, Hopkins affiliates and members of the Baltimore community staged a sit-in in Garland Hall, a main administrative building of campus. The protestors chained themselves to the inside of the building for over a month in protest of the creation of the Johns Hopkins Police Department (JHPD). The JHPD was created despite significant opposition from students, faculty and Baltimore residents and remains highly criticized. The sit-in, disruptive but ultimately peaceful, was deemed a safety concern by Hopkins administration and was forcibly dismantled by approximately 80 Baltimore Police Department officers.

In 2024, Hopkins joined several other universities in demonstrations of solidarity for Palestinian liberation. The second encampment, following what protestors deemed failed negotiations, lasted 12 days. Protestors willingly disbanded after negotiations resulted in the University's promise to accelerate its process of divestment.

At the "Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya Liberated Zone" encampment in May 2025 protestors demanded that Hopkins cut ties with Israel, abolish the JHPD and keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) off campus. Unlike the 2024 encampment, when the JHPD was not yet active, this encampment was forcibly dismantled by the JHPD. Encampment members alleged that JHPD officers violated their code of conduct by causing injuries to students.

"University leaders must ensure that the research enterprise is oriented toward advancing the U.S. national interest-not our adversaries…American universities must put Americans, and American interests first."

This sentiment lays at the root of McMahon's framework: a recommitment to U.S. nationalism. The statement's premise seems to be radically opposed to the University's reputation as a leading institution on international public health. The Hopkins mission statement explicitly states that affiliates are meant to use research to "bring the benefits of discovery to the world," not to the U.S. alone.

Additionally, Hopkins has a higher percentage of international undergraduate students than most U.S. universities at approximately 15%. Combining undergraduate and graduate populations, the university's international student population reached 39% in 2023.

The statement comes amid increased anxieties about immigration regulation, confusion about ICE jurisdictions and the possibility of detainment, especially for international students.

In an interview with The News-Letter, the leader of the Hopkins AAUP Chapter described the insidious components of the framework.

"This [framework] includes, for example, threats to international students under the chauvinistic language of 'America First,' as if there is a contradiction between teaching American students and American researchers and international students and researchers," the AAUP Chapter leader said.

Conclusion

Other sections of the framework focus on the use of artificial intelligence in higher education, preparing students for the work force and making college affordable. These components were deemed more palatable by the leader of the Hopkins AAUP Chapter Leadership. While recognizing this, they also expressed sympathy for the difficult position Daniels is in.

"We do understand that many other universities, and Hopkins in particular, because of its reliance on federal funding, is most certainly very vulnerable, and that we are in the middle of a financial crisis. But universities have survived previous financial crises. We will weather this," they said. "But if in the process we lose what the University stands for, we lose our academic freedom, we lose our ability to run a democratic institution, we become subject to the whims of whoever sits in the White House, who controls Congress, Democrat or Republican, it doesn't matter. What has survived? What is our legacy?"

In an email interview with The News-Letter, Francois Furstenberg, Director of Undergraduate Studies for the History department, described his belief that Daniels had failed to stand up for the university.

"The first thing to say is how dismaying it is - how demoralizing it is to watch our university president kneel down as Donald Trump's administration works to seize control of the country's great research universities," Furstenberg said.

Additionally, Furstenberg describes his issues with the university administration as being reflective of issues of the nation's political state.

"But after seventeen years in power, President Daniels has successfully consolidated his control over large parts of the university, while dismantling powerful faculty bodies that had existed since the university's founding," Furstenberg added. "Authoritarianism is no better at the university level than it is at the national level. And none of us should be surprised to see its outcomes look so similar."

On Tuesday, September 15 Daniels released a Johns Hopkins Broadcast email calling for input on the University's response to the framework. In this message, he emphasized the importance of working with the Johns Hopkins University Council and receiving student input on the University's response to the framework. The message includes a feedback form that is featured on the Provost's website. The University plans to release a full draft of its response by mid-October. Hopkins affiliates will be able to leave comments on this draft.

Morris emphasized the importance of such documented proof regarding student voices about the reaction to Daniels' involvement and the final draft of the University's response.

"We have to make sure that there is evidence that student opinions were considered and that student opinions appear in the final version of the letter," Morris said.

Henry Serringer contributed to the reporting of this article, specifically regarding the interview with the SGA representative Jackson Morris. Honora Muratori is a News & Features Editor for The News-Letter and Executive Secretary for SGA. She did not contribute to any reporting about SGA in this article.

Editor's Note, September 15, 2026: The News-Letter reached out to the University for comments regarding this article but were unable to receive them before press time.

Taxi drivers and city regulatory bodies, on the other hand, were evidently not so happy. Taxi permits, which previously had been extremely valuable assets, were essentially nullified by this new company that strolled into their cities, gave away free rides and swept away the customers of a centuries-old taxi industry.

While professionals worldwide understood the plight of the brickthrowing Parisian cabbies, consumers were instead being incited into these apps by eyewateringly low rates - rates only made possible by Uber aggressively subsidizing rides while they racked up yearly losses in the billions.

By the time Uber made its first annual profit in 2023, it had racked up over $31 billion in losses over its 14-year history, a financial strategy only kept afloat by the company's debt and historical levels of equity investment. But profit was never the point of Uber's strategy: They weren't concerned with coloring their chart green at the end of the year because they were too busy entrenching their app and turning themselves into a verb.

It was only when Uber started rolling back its generosity that the facade surrounding our Garden of Eden began crumbling. The public could only watch as Uber unveiled arbitrary surge pricing, massive layoffs and, worst of all, plain old price rises. In fact, many of these changes came in no small part due to the company's decision to go public, subjecting the company's finances to much higher levels of scrutiny.

Once Uber became ubiquitous - just "the way" to get back from BWI - they were suddenly able to employ as predatory a pricing strategy as they wanted. This was the switch investors knew would happen eventually. But what does this story have to do with AI?

OpenAI and Anthropic are being raised in the same Silicon Valley tech startup world that Uber was. They get funding from the same institutional investors, and if their finances are anything to go by, these AI companies are following closely in their big brother's footsteps - burning through enormous sums of money in pursuit of hegemony.

The issue is that even though the Silicon Valley investors' growth-now, profit-later mindsets haven't changed, the nature of the object they are speculating on has. Taking an Uber doesn't drastically impede your ability to drive tomorrow, but using a chatbot to write essays makes us worse at writing essays writ large. Large language models (LLMs) deprive students of the process of thinking through their ideas, causing us to use less of our brain when writing. That is before considering generative AI's dishonest use as a wholesale circumvention of learning assignments.

Cognitive tasks like learning and critical thinking are inherently difficult processes, but the point is that by struggling through them, we get better and better. AI strips humans of this opportunity, and yet, its use is becoming increasingly ubiquitous among students as early as elementary school.

The objective of Uber's aggressive strategy wasn't to eliminate entirely the concept of people driving themselves around. Imagine what the world would look like if we had sold our cars at the sight of Uber's unbelievably cheap rides. Our school buses, subways and bikes tossed away for the convenience of rideshare startups? What would have happened once Uber became a public company and switched into their surge pricing, profit-making and fare raising mode?

We are living in the age of AI convenience now - the Garden is lush with ripe fruit. We ask LLMs to make our grocery lists, generate search summaries and regulate our emotions because we can and it's free.

But what's free now will not always be free. The privileges we leverage to ease our cognitive load will not always be around. So what happens with OpenAI or Anthropic IPO and their C-suite flips the same switch Uber did? What happens when what we're losing isn't cars, but the very way we look at the world: our ability to use our brains?

By incorporating AI into our lives and workflows so deeply, we're not just trusting AI companies with our cognition today. We're trusting them with it indefinitely.

Is that a deal you're willing to take?

Steve Wang is a sophomore from Missouri City, Texas majoring in Biomedical Engineering. He is an Arts and Entertainment Editor for The News-Letter.

In his recent seminar on Sept. 10, Idan Blank set forth to test this assumption by "Understanding 'Understanding' in Language Models." As an assistant professor at UCLA, Blank's research suggests that language models may process some parts of language in surprisingly human-like ways while organizing other basic forms of meaning quite differently. At times, they may even reach a sensible answer through an alternative methodthat may havelittle to do with the reasoning we attribute to them.

Many question whether AI understands language at all. While some point to its fluent answers, others suggest a language model merely predicts the next word. Blank offered a different question: what parts of understanding emerge from next-word prediction, and how are they represented inside the model?

"All models are wrong... But language models, and specifically transformers, can master language better than any other model we've had from linguistics ... because they give us a computational representation of virtually any sentence, any linguistic input in natural language, and that is enough reason to at least take them seriously as candidate models, even if they turn out to not be great, and they allow us to test our theories with unprecedented resolution because we can feed them anything," Blank explained to the audience.

Rather than judging language models only through prompts, his lab inspects transformers (the foundational neural network architecture that powers modern generative AI) and compares their behavior with patterns documented in human language processing.

"Our approach is to break meaning or comprehension into much, much smaller chunks that we can handle that are both theoretically motivated by psycholinguistic theory and relatively well characterized in humans... In my lab, we study how language models understand, so we open them and look under the hood."

To start, Blank first asked whether meaning could influence the parts of a language model that process grammar. Consider the sentence, "The garden in the cat chased a butterfly." Its grammatical pattern is recognizable, but its meaning is strange because gardens do not chase butterflies. Transformers contain components called attention heads, which move information between words. Some heads appear to specialize in connecting a verb with its grammatical subject. If they cared only about grammar, the verb "chased" would treat "garden" as its subject regardless of how little sense that relationship made.

Instead, the language model gave less attention to the relationship when it was implausible; for example, it sometimes shifted its subject toward "cat." Humans have been noted to do something comparable: we do not sequentially process grammar and then meaning but rather meaning and context shape our interpretation as we read. This does not prove that a transformer understands language the same way, but it shows that a system trained through next-word prediction can develop a human-like interaction between grammar and meaning.

Thus, his second experiment probed deeper, looking at event roles. How do transformers represent one of the most basic elements of meaning ("who did what to whom")? Compare "A doctor pulled a prisoner" with "A prisoner was pulled by a doctor." Their grammatical forms differ, but both describe the same event. Humans are known to judge both as more similar to each other than to the sentence "A prisoner pulled a doctor," which preserves the first sentence's structure but reverses its meaning.

In Blank's findings, the models did the opposite. Across several transformers, their overall internal representations grouped sentences more strongly by grammatical structure than by the event described. Some attention heads could still identify the person acting and the person receiving the action, which indicated the relevant information existed somewhere in the network. However, it still did not become a prominent part of how the model represented the complete sentence. This showed that a system can contain the pieces of an idea without assembling them as humans do.

"For some sentences, you can recover the full syntactic tree of the sentence with reasonable accuracy, and that suggests that hidden representation of structure does not guarantee hidden representation of meaning," Blank highlighted.

What happens when our context grows: looking at not just language, but also visual cognition? Blank explained his current projectinvestigates whether a model combining images and language could infer why a person chose particular words.

Consider an experiment with images of three objects: a big hammer, a small hammer and a big cork. When humans are asked, for example, to choose the "big hammer," he reveals humans understand the speaker's intentions in distinguishing both the size and the type of object. When testing language models, they appeared to make this same pragmatic inference. For instance, they would expect the word "big" when the image contained a useful size contrast between two objects.

Despite this, there may still be a simpler explanation for the obtained results: images with more hammers also contained more hammer-shaped pixels. The model could appear sensitive to communicative intent while responding mainly to what occupied more space.

"At this point, I think we have like ten different experiments to try to figure out what's going on. I think tentatively... object salience really overshadows other things, but there is some small pragmatic [factor] underneath," Blank explained.

These projects resist a simple verdict. The first project found a human-like interaction between meaning and grammar in language models, the second found that these models could gain information about an event without necessarily incorporating it into its final understanding and the third project showed how it could use a visual shortcut to imitate an inference about human intention. AI understanding is not a single capacity that we can mark as present or absent; it appears unevenly across mechanisms and conditions.

"Even if they succeed, we don't know why they succeed, right? It's very useful to see that they succeed at something, but we want to know how. So that's why we look under the hood," Blank suggested.

A classroom model may explain a concept correctly, or it may merely recognize familiar wording. A research assistant may integrate evidence, or follow a superficial pattern associated with past discoveries. In a clinical setting, a recommendation that works for typical cases may fail when a patient no longer matches the usual statistical cues. Blank's research shows that the output alone cannot define which process produced it.

While AI systems may appear to provide many resolutions, Blank gives a reason for caution through his seminar. Human-like capacities can emerge from calculations and matrices without arriving at human-like understanding. Blank's conclusions highlight deeper questions regarding the features of our synthetic friend.

"They learn what event rules are because we find them in attention heads, but perhaps they don't represent them in a human-like way," Blank notes.

In a setting where the student body rotates every four years, many movements and student-led initiatives naturally lose momentum. Only half of the current undergraduates were present for the 2024-25 Student Government Association's open letter to President Ronald J. Daniels and administrators, which called for a 5% tuition reduction due to student challenges from ongoing construction. The News-Letter is the only media source that has covered this resolution. None likely remember the 2019 Garland Hall sit-ins against the University's implementation of the Johns Hopkins Police Department (JHPD), a private police force. The University's public records about the sit-in mostly, if not only, contain the administrators' responses. Construction and the JHPD's legitimacy still affect students and the neighboring communities to this day, yet the cyclical nature of student discontent remains hidden without proper preservation.

Let us make this clear: The News-Letter does not hope to be the only record for the University. Hopkins already has employees who take on the public-facing, breaking news role to cover innovations and changes on a 24-hour basis. However, editors of The News-Letter make sure that past and current student voices do not get lost and create a platform for workers, affiliates and neighboring Baltimore residents. The News-Letter adds alternate perspectives to the events discussed by other news sources, or we serve as the only source for ones that don't.

Lack of knowledge of important precedents in student advocacy can easily lead to its dilution. Conversely, previous students voicing their opinions encourages the environment of free expression, which the University administration deemed "a foundational value of our university and central to the Johns Hopkins experience" just as of last week in a broadcast email. The News-Letter preserves memories, allowing students in the present to engage with the University like how the generations of the students before have.

Other archival sources, of course, exist. However, internal University administrative records remain inaccessible until 25 years after their creation, including the "work product" of any administrative office or committee under the University. While administrative materials intended for public sharing can be accessed at the time of archival transfer, such as publications, recordings of public events and press releases, these documents alone do not tell a story. They simply show the information an institution wants its community to know at a given time.

This limits a key aspect of a comprehensive record: its ability to speak to present realities. Reading an internal document highlighting the truth behind University actions decades later likely will not carry the same nuance it does now, especially as relevance shifts alongside social, cultural and historical contexts among different student populations. And relying on University broadcasts to piece together an institution's history misses the conversations, thoughts and potential actions specific to that moment's unfolding - especially those that challenge the institution. The News-Letter precisely serves to capture these developments, providing a continuous, more realistic narrative to better understand why certain outcomes and perspectives may have arisen.

To visualize this role, we can examine physical accessibility on Homewood Campus. On the one hand, when searching physical accessibility and "Johns Hopkins University" online, the only University-posted voice that appears is from the Student Disability Services website, affirming to foster "accessible and equitable" student experiences. The website also features annual reports and data, but this page solely includes the percentage of students receiving disability services in a given year.

The News-Letter, on the other hand, has served as an active forum and facilitator of the accessibility movement. Many Opinions and Voices articles have actively highlighted the lack of disability discourse on campus, such as a 2021 op-ed titled "Disability isn't taken seriously at Hopkins." The author states that she has "never once... seen a visibly disabled student in a classroom at Hopkins, not even in a photo." Even further back in time to 2008, students shared their concerns over the slow progress of implementing accessible features on campus. The News-Letter allows voices like these to be recognized, and while that isn't the sole catalyst for change, having such concerns in writing acts as a propagator of discussion and an eternal reminder. Most recently, The Editorial Board advocated for a physically accessible campus in a piece published on April 20 of this year, following an investigation of how accessible routes prove highly impractical even today.

Another current example of The News-Letter's archival role is the ongoing reporting of the construction of the Data Science and AI Institute (DSAI), announced in 2023. The News-Letter has posted articles alluding to this multi-year project every year since, with references to University real estate acquisition (2024), its impact on the residential community (2025) and, most recently, a deeper dive into the construction project's destructive influence on local residents (2026). Anyone reading now, or in 25 years, can directly see how the community's attitudes towards DSAI have evolved since its announcement and construction, along with the increasing capabilities of AI compared to two years ago. However, when examining University-produced records, readers only see the mission behind the project, an overarching project timeline and promises made during its construction.

As you can see, this article has been embedded with links. We hoped you clicked on some of them;a lot of them come from The News-Letter. This isn't to say that they all come from us -the editors of the 2026-27 Editorial Board -but rather that this has been a collective effort from the past generations of editors, dating all the way back to 1896. For over a century, students followed up on interviewees, whether over email, telephone or in person, to depict a more holistic story. We recognize that the default state of a university's student community does not necessarily include a student newspaper. The News-Letter only exists because of the shared responsibility of countless writers to write the University's history, year after year.

Equally important to our role of preserving the historical record is our commitment to eliminating censorship. A comprehensive picture of a movement or a story can only exist if our contributors can write without fear of retaliation from others or the University. We are immensely proud of our financial independence from Hopkins, and we will actively work to minimize barriers for students to write for us - freely and honestly.

To all Hopkins students: Write for us. You don't need any other qualifications than being a student. If you are someone who wants to contribute to telling history, reach out. The News-Letter exists for you and continues to exist because of you.

1. Moving my body every morning

I love sleeping. This summer, there were days when I genuinely slept for 11 hours straight and still wanted to sleep more. Unfortunately, that lifestyle is only reserved for the summer after high school graduation and doesn't exactly work in college, so I've been trying to start my mornings with some movement.

Most days, that means going to the gym for a quick workout: a simple stretching routine, followed by 10 minutes of cardio to get my blood flowing and then some weightlifting. Mind you, I definitely am not an expert when it comes to the gym. But getting my heart rate up wakes me up, regardless of whether I'm tired, stressed or just not feeling ready for my classes. When I don't feel like going to the gym, I just take brisk walks around campus, getting my steps in through the stairs and hills scattered throughout.

There's also a small bonus to establishing this routine every morning: greeting the security guard on my way out and in. Whether it's on the way to the Wolman Hall gym downstairs or toward campus, I always pass by the security desk where the guard is diligently keeping his post. At first it's awkward because no one really expects a greeting from a one-second passerby, but it's definitely worth it! Starting the day off with a simple "Good morning" sets a warm tone for the rest of the day.

2. Scheduling something small for the end of the week

Whether it's visiting a new restaurant in Charles Village or checking out a cafe at Inner Harbor, having something to look forward to motivates me to work harder in the days leading up to it.

This past week, it was a Friday Trader Joe's trip with two of my friends, Connie and Zia. My snack stash was almost empty, not to mention that my mint gums, which were the only things keeping me awake in those long lectures, were also running out. As all three of us were frantically trying to keep up with our readings, assignments and club applications, our Trader Joe's trip kept our sanity intact.

By the time Friday evening finally arrived, we had completed all of our assignments due that week, plus some more for the following week, and had made satisfactory progress on our extracurricular tasks. And apart from the devastating realization that the Blue Jay Shuttle doesn't take rides that far uptown (or anywhere uptown, for that matter) and that there are no dinner places near the store, it was a fun excursion outside of campus. Since we didn't want to spend extra money out of our allowances booking a $10 ride to and from Trader Joe's, we did a massive haul of items and even had a "Trader Joe's sponsored" dinner: microwavable butter chicken rice, microwavable chicken soup dumplings, microwavable gnocchi and Trader Joe's chili oil.

So, apparently, all the motivation I needed to finish my work was a confirmed trip to pick up mint gum and a 100% microwavable dinner to be eaten in the common room.

3. Calling friends and family back home

A little bit about me for this: I'm from Singapore. Having lived there for 13 years, it's more or less where I consider home. Now, if you know anything about Singapore, you'll know that it's not only located on the other side of the world but also has a drastically different climate, culture and demographic from anywhere in the United States, including Baltimore.

As thrilled as I was to begin college life free from the burden of college applications and the constant nagging of my parents (sorry, Mom), I've definitely been feeling the homesickness come and go.

The best remedy for this is calling my friends and family from back home. Oftentimes, I'll go out to the common room for a spontaneous call to my parents and grandparents. No matter how short the call is or how little I may really have to talk about, seeing their faces and hearing their voices always makes me feel closer to home.

Other times, I'll call my high school friends. Most of them have also started college outside of Singapore, but calling them still brings back fond memories of home. When I'm settling into bed or waiting for the last few minutes of the dryer to finish, a quick call to friends and family makes me feel better.

4. Hunting down free stuff around campus

I say I love free food, but honestly, I love anything free. Shoutout to whoever started the @jhufreestuff Instagram page! Especially in the beginning of the semester, there are so many events and random pop-ups offering free items. During orientation week, there were sessions giving out free pens, free stickers and free food. On the first day of class, there were free bears that we could stuff ourselves on the fourth floor of the Bloomberg Student Center, and even a little mission to collect stamps across the four floors to earn free sweatpants.

After going through the Student Involvement Fair, I not only filled out a dozen interest forms and learned about all the student organizations at Hopkins but also grabbed free stuff while at it! By the end of the first week and a half, my desk was filled with tote bags, foldable bags (perfect for groceries), stickers and cups. And though I might not need them all, they make great gifts for my parents and grandparents back home, who are always down to collect Hopkins-themed things. In fact, I already have a small bag filled with all these free items to hand to my parents when they visit for Family Weekend in October!

My friends and I were quite literally hunting down all of these things down in those first few days, and while there may be fewer events like this as the year progresses, I have no doubt we'll continue going on these side quests throughout the rest of the month whenever possible.

5. Walking around campus during sunset

This last one is pretty mundane, but it makes me happy nonetheless. The Hopkins campus has a very classic feel to it, with its deep red bricks and marble architecture. And I absolutely love sunsets - so much, in fact, that I have a folder in my photo gallery dedicated to them. I've also been told that walks fix most things. So, obviously, the three together are an unmatched combo for me.

Whenever I want to wind down after dinner or temporarily take my mind off of work, I'll go on a walk around campus around 7:30 p.m. I've seen some phenomenal shades of orange, pink and purple above Shriver Hall while standing across the Wyman Quad. It really is a breathtaking scene.

College can feel like there's always something more to be doing, but these little things remind me to slow down and enjoy the process. I'm still familiarizing myself with the new country, getting to know more people and adjusting to the academic environment at Hopkins. But with these five little things, Baltimore is feeling a little more like home.

After an introduction by library staff, Wilson read an excerpt from Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea:

"In an era of so many dizzying transformations, it is more valuable than ever to remember that the world has not always been as it is now," Wilson began. "Turning back to antiquity can help us to imagine the unimaginable worlds of the past and also to reimagine our own rapidly changing society… We need to pay ever closer attention to language and consider the power of words to persuade, instruct and entertain."

Wilson and Mhealllaigh then discussed the essence of translation. Instead of treating the process as a direct, one-to-one retelling of the words on the page, Wilson invited listeners to see translation as a performance and an experience. By translating with these factors in mind, one can bring new life to the work in another language and another time. This also suggests that not only are the absolute meanings of words important, but that the sonic qualities and rhythms of translated works are valuable as well.

Since The Odyssey was traditionally passed down through oral retellings for centuries, Wilson wanted her English translation to carry the same feeling it did in the original Greek, evoking similarities to the performance of an epic poem. This led her to adopt the iambic pentameter characteristic of English drama.

Furthermore, Wilson and Mhealllaigh explored the many metaphors of translation, including dressing up a text in new clothes, pouring the text like wine into a new vessel, dancing across a tightrope as one tries to balance the many truths of the text or working as a necromancer to revive the essence of an original.

One of the most famous Homeric epithets is that of "the wine-dark sea." Historians have debated for centuries about its origin and meaning, since "wine-dark" is not immediately intuitive compared to modern descriptions of the ocean as "blue." Wilson provided her own analysis of the phrase.

"Oînos is wine, and óps is a face or an eye. So more literally… it's a wine-faced sea or wine-eyed sea," Wilson described. "I love the idea… that the wine or the sea is looking back to us… almost like a goddess… because that verbal detail of óps also comes in these epithets for Hera (cow-eyed or ox-eyed) and Athena (bright-eyed or owl-eyed). So the sea is part of that list of divine or semi-divine figures whose gaze is scary and weird."

Besides commentaries on The Odyssey, Wilson's new book also contains essays analyzing classical Greek and Roman comedy and its relation to modern comedy.

"I wanted to intertwine a discussion of the often very, very artful and intricate lyrics of hip-hop into discussions of both Athenian and Roman comedy to showcase we actually do have poetic genres which use rhyme, and rhythm, and performativity, and multiple different metaphors, and linguistic cleverness and outdoing your rival comic poet, which of course is a theme of ancient comedy," Wilson said. "We may think of comedy in too narrow a way if we think only of the sitcom… So part of the theme of the book also is that there are gaps and there are connections between modernity and antiquity, and they're not necessarily where you expect them to be."

When asked about her choice to translate a particular work, Wilson replied that she would read pre-existing translations and consider if her own perspectives, experiences and knowledge would warrant a new translation of the work before starting a project.

The two panelists moved on to discuss Wilson's "rules for the translator" in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea.

"If the original makes you laugh, cry, feel excited, get goosebumps, feel puzzled, get bored, be charmed, etc., then the translation should try to create those effects on its readers. If the original has moral or ideological tensions or complexities, those should be legible in the translation. All great works of literature have such complexities. Translate the ambiguities," Wilson stated.

Closing her talk, Wilson acknowledged that the limits of translating language will prevent every ambiguity or complexity from being fully conveyed.

"There's no such thing as a translation that uses none of the original words and yet is identical. That doesn't exist. It's not a thing. So starting from the position of impossibility, I think, helps one understand both how much chutzpah it takes to do it, and also how much humility you've got to have. We are doing something impossible, and we're doing it anyway."

The discussion was followed by an open question-and-answer session and subsequent book signing. Wilson is currently working on a new translation of The Odyssey.

Friday

Summer Sounds, Belvedere Square, 6 p.m.

Summer Sounds returns to Belvedere Square with a performance by Mambo Combo and local food vendors. The outdoor evening brings live music and food together for a casual start to the weekend. Admission is free.

Ali Wong Live, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, 7 p.m.

Comedian Ali Wong brings her stand-up comedy show to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for an evening of live comedy. The performance offers a chance to see the acclaimed comedian and actor in Baltimore.

Saturday

Free Yoga on the Lawn, Cylburn Arboretum, 8 a.m.

Start Saturday morning with free outdoor yoga at Cylburn Arboretum. An instructor from Coppermine Health & Fitness leads an all-levels class on the lawn near the upper Vollmer parking lot. The weekly class runs through September, and no registration is required.

Baltimore Book Festival, Irvin Luckman Memorial Park, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

The Baltimore Book Festival returns to Irvin Luckman Memorial Park with author readings, panel discussions and family-friendly literary activities. An additional book celebration will also take place at Waverly Commons. Admission details vary by event.

Sunday

Morning Yoga: Underwater Flow, National Aquarium, 8:30-9:30 a.m.

Morning Yoga: Underwater Flow offers an early morning yoga session inside the National Aquarium before it opens to the public. Led by local instructor Marissa Walch, the all-levels class takes place near the Dolphin Discovery underwater viewing area, with aquarium admission included afterward.

The experience combines yoga, meditation and mindfulness with the National Aquarium's marine life. Guests can explore the exhibits after the class and may see animals during their active morning hours. Space is limited, and participants must be at least 12 years old. Guests should bring their own yoga mats.

The Milton S. Eisenhower (MSE) library has been closed since July 9, 2024 for modernization renovations. Before the current project, the building underwent only one modest renovation in the 1990s since its doors opened in 1964. The updated architecture is meant to better serve the 26,000 students and 7,500 faculty members across nine University divisions. Planned improvements include updated building systems and infrastructure, a redesigned interior with more natural lighting at lower levels and expanded accommodations for community members with disabilities.

The renovated MSE will have upgraded spaces for seminar, group study and teaching. It will continue to house print collections, provide research consultations and produce instructional support and data.

To bring more natural light in throughout the building, many solid concrete interior walls will be replaced with glass, creating a brighter and more open interior. A vertical shaft originally constructed to facilitate the replacement of mechanical equipment will become a glass-enclosed grand staircase. The staircase will be topped by a walkable skylight designed to bring sunlight to D-Level, approximately 50 feet beneath Keyser Quad. A light fixture will illuminate the space after daylight hours.

Accessibility has also been a large focus of the renovation project. The eastern entrance of the building facing N. Charles Street is being lowered by several feet. A university spokesperson informed The News-Letter that the redesigned library will include adjustable-height tables, multiple types of seating and more widely spaced bookshelves. Further, materials will be placed at more accessible heights to support more independent and universal use. An signage system compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) will use visual and spatial cues to improve navigation throughout the building for individuals of all abilities.

A University spokesperson wrote, "Accessibility is a cornerstone of the renovations, with the project designed to meet, and where possible, surpass ADA requirements."

Modernization specifics were informed by student and faculty input. At town halls in 2021, community members discussed the importance of improved lighting and additional private study areas beside the grand hall in Brody Learning Commons. Some graduate students and faculty had concerns regarding the moving of print materials off-site because physical collections play an important role in their research, as previously reported by The News-Letter.

In 2023, the University estimated that the approximately 182,000-square-foot renovation would cost $100 million and take two and a half years. At the time, University officials outlined plans for improved Wi-Fi, additional power outlets, dedicated graduate-student spaces and improved Special Collections facilities, which priorcoverageby The News-Letter discussed.

In a statement to The News-Letter, a University spokesperson described the goal of the proejct.

"Current students will be a part of Hopkins history by being among the first to make the new student center and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, their home away-from-home," a University spokesperson said.

Renderings of the renovations can be seen on the library's website.

SNF Agora Building

The SNF Agora Institute at Hopkins, founded in 2017, is continuing construction of its building on Wyman Park Drive according to the University spokesperson. The institute brings together scholars and members of the public to study democracy and promote civic engagement and inclusive dialogue. However, the building is already being used as a space for some professors to host office hours such as Dr. Ruth Braunstein's Introduction to Sociology class.

According to the University spokesperson, the building's design seeks to convey "transparency, connectivity and inclusivity" and encourage collaboration between researchers and members of the broader community in promoting civic values and democratic ideals. The spokesperson did not give The News-Letter a projected opening date for the building.

New location for Early Learning Center

In an email to The News-Letter, the University spokesperson wrote that the Early Learning Center reopened on August 31, 2026, moving from Wyman Park Drive to a larger facility in the center of the Homewood Campus. This relocation was partially motivated by the beginning of construction for the Data Science and AI center, which will utilize the land formerly occupied by the Early Learning Center.

The childcare center serves children and families of University faculty, staff and students. Its new building contains indoor play spaces, an outdoor play area with natural features and shade trees, administrative offices, workspaces and conference facilities.

According to the University spokesperson, the facility is on track to receive gold certification from the Office Leadership Engagement and Experiential Development and is designed to improve energy performance. Natural lighting and updated health and safety features were incorporated throughout the building. The University spokesperson described the forces behind the relocation.

"This thoughtfully designed space will foster an environment that encourages exploration, experimentation, critical thinking and collaboration for children," a University spokesperson wrote.

University student centers are not a modern development. English universities like Oxford and Cambridge have had student unions since the early 1800s, while Houston Hall, built in 1896 at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first modern student center in the United States. Other universities followed this trend, establishing student centers throughout the 20th century.

The growth of student centers on college campuses nationwide reflects the increasing emphasis universities are placing on fostering student life outside of the classroom by encouraging students to to socialize. By housing dining halls, meeting rooms for student organizations, event venues and study spaces in one centralized location, student centers help promote a stronger sense of community.

Past student centers

Nonetheless, unlike its peer institutions, Hopkins did not establish a formal student center until 2025, a fact that the University administration was cognizant of while planning the BSC. Yet the problem that the BSC was designed to solve is nearly a century old. For generations, Hopkins lacked a formal, centralized gathering space. Some buildings emerged as informal student centers merely because they combined various functions, but none of them lasted as comprehensive student unions.

For instance, Levering Hall, which opened in 1929, had a cafeteria, meeting spaces, student publication offices -such as for The News-Letter - event spaces, social activities and more. Later, it became a space for civil rights activism and political discussion due to the work of Chester Wickwire, Levering Hall's Executive Secretary from 1953 to 1984. However, Levering was originally built as a non-Hopkins affiliated YMCA and remained as such until 1969.

Merrick Barn, the building behind Brody Learning Commons, also served as a center of student life in the 1900s. Its three floors contained lunchrooms, a barbershop, The News-Letter office and theater performance rooms. However, following several donations in the 1980s, the building was renovated primarily for theater, ending its role as an informal student center.

In 2001 the Mattin Center was introduced as a building for the arts, including dance studios, music practice rooms, rehearsal spaces, Swirnow theater and the Digital Media Center. Similar to Merrick Barn, Mattin mostly served the arts community and was eventually demolished in 2021 to make way for BSC.

Charles Commons, now called Scott-Bates Commons, which opened in 2006, was also an effort to introduce more student spaces and to transform the area into a college town, like Georgetown or Harvard Square. However, the project faced mixed reactions by students and the nearby community, who criticized Charles Commons for being architecturally inconsistent with the surrounding neighborhood, concentrating more students in residential areas and limiting student independence due to its housing and dining model. Today, the building is a dining hall and second-year dorm.

For the most part, these various buildings did not fulfill the purpose of a student center like those of other universities. At other campuses, student centers were more than just a central space: they became the origins of campus movements. For example, Cornell students occupied their student union (Willard Straight Hall) in 1969 to protest systemic racism and the lack of a Black Studies program, and NYU students performed a similar occupation at their student center (the Kimmel Student Center) in 2009 to protest their university's budget and tuition policies.

Ultimately, Hopkins fell short of creating true student centers with these attempts. Their solution was to create BSC. BSC today remains primarily a study area, contrary to the administration's stated goal of creating a student union that would foster a vibrant community. However, with the renovation of the Eisenhower Library and the resulting shortage of study spots, students have had few alternatives.

In an interview with The News-Letter, Sophomore Aishani Garg explained how she mainly utilizes the BSC.

"I mostly use it for studying and the ambiance, and to get good local Baltimore food that's better than the dining hall. I also like how we can rent rooms for our clubs," Garg said.

BSC's construction plan

Hopkins formally announced plans for a new student center in March 2019, when President Ronald J. Daniels introduced the project during a campus party on the Beach. The announcement followed a long campaign for a student center by the Student Government Association (SGA), which began in 2016 and included a formal proposal, a peaceful rally and a student referendum.

The administration framed the new student center as a response to student concerns. A University spokesperson described the process of planning BSC in an email to The News-Letter.

"Before design began, JHU partnered with a consulting team to conduct a year-long exercise to gather input from students about what they wanted in a student center. More than 1500 participants attended the 18 formal engagement sessions," they wrote.

However, in 2014, several years before SGA's campaign, the University was already outlining plans for a student center similar to what the BSC is today. In a presentation emailed to The News-Letter from a trustee meeting held on December 11, 2014, the Hopkins administration identified the need for a student center and advocated for the creation of one.

The presentation listed several desired design elements for the new student center, such as outdoor areas, dining spaces, a print center, dance studios, music practice rooms and student organization spaces for SGA and other groups. It also envisioned the building as a replacement for Mattin Center. All of these elements are present in the current BSC, but they had been established by 2014.

Some student concerns were still factored into the University's 2014 plan, as the presentation outlined the findings of a study conducted by the architecture firm Sasaki in collaboration with Hopkins, that surveyed students, faculty, staff and community members.

"We heard: 'There is no center of gravity for student life programs.' 'Students do not have enough spaces for fun.'... 'Students lack a focal point.' 'Student services should be more accessible and consolidated,'" the presentation stated.

In the presentation, the University also examined student centers at other top-ranking colleges, emphasizing that Hopkins was one of the few in the top 15 U.S. universities without a student union.

"Our research shows that when compared to the Ivy+ and other peer schools, JHU's student life facilities are not on par with most," the presentation stated.

The presentation also analyzed precedents at other institutions, examining the facilities each building had and displaying several pictures of their interiors and exteriors. Then, the presentation meticulously listed the pros and cons of current buildings at Hopkins.

In August 2021, the University broke ground on BSC. It was originally scheduled to open in the fall of 2024, but it was delayed to January 2025, and then to summer 2025. Four years after groundbreaking, BSC officially opened on August 25, 2025.

In an email to The News-Letter, a University spokesperson described the reasons for the multiple delays.

"During construction, far more bedrock was discovered on the site than anticipated. Additionally, to achieve sustainability goals and provide an accessible facility inclusive to all, the design team's solution buried much of the building into the hillside, requiring more excavation than originally envisioned," the University spokesperson wrote. "Bedrock was chipped away in a manner that minimized noise and vibration so as not to disturb our students and the surrounding community, slowing construction as a result."

BSC represents a significant change in student life at Hopkins. For nearly a century, students relied on buildings with specific functions -BSC was the first building formally designed to bring many of those pieces together under one roof. However, the history behind the BSC is complicated, from construction plans beginning in 2014 to student campaigns beginning in 2016. Today, a majority of students use BSC for studying instead of its intended functions. Ultimately, the role and legacy of BSC is still to be determined amid Hopkins' long history of student centers.

On a second watch with a friend in my dorm this year, I considered how the snake is a duplicitous symbol, perfectly teeing up the rest of the film; how the snake acts both as the biblical serpent representing sin yet also, in eating the frog, embodying a necessary, natural cycle, and - I'm getting ahead of myself. Did I enjoy the movie? My response to that would be: Leviticus is the rare sublime sublimation, a fast pass from evaluation straight to analysis. There is, in my opinion, no debate if this movie is "good" or not - it's masterful. The more worthwhile question is what each of its many moving parts may mean.

So I continue: From the snake scene - a coin whose one side is "sin," the other "a necessary act of nature" - we follow the boys into an abandoned mill. The viewer will notice, in Leviticus, a keen eye toward setting, which no doubt holds meaning. For American readers, the scenes of rural Victorian Australia evoke Rust Belt pastorals. Precious seconds of the film are paid to posing factories amid smokestacks, telephone wires canopying the underpopulated town.

Naim and Ryan are typical high school boys, trying on masculinity like their fathers' too-big overcoats: tossing stones at discarded junk in the abandoned mill, roughhousing, pinning one another to the ground and - kissing?

Ryan acts differently in school than he does when the two are alone. Something about being inside the mill, it seems (especially as they return to it, like a crime scene, constantly), grants the boys access to a different breed of intimacy.

The choice to make the town ex-industrial is distinct. The large factories, how they impose themselves upon the town, evoke a masculinity, yet the fact that they are defunct signifies how this masculinity is only a shell, hollowing itself out and resulting in the same-sex acts harbored within.

The town is a Christian community. Immediately after the scene of Naim and Ryan kissing, we are brought into a church sermon; in a later church scene, we learn that Naim's dad is dead. This second instance of a missing masculine presence further supports how the film problematizes religious arguments blaming homosexuality on the lack of "manly" influence.

Later, arriving unexpected at Ryan's house, Naim catches him in the backyard with the pastor's son Hunter, and here enters one of the film's strange motifs: a stone-throwing game, where the opponents stand apart duel-style and hurl rocks at one another's chest. The stranger part is that, after this act of consensual and mutual violence, Hunter and Ryan kiss.

Much is happening beneath the hood of this, on the surface, childlike game. The critical elements are that: 1) the players enter willingly and are always in full view of the other and 2) they are unable to move from their fixed position, or to avoid the rocks' blows.

The first part speaks to the fact that romantic relationships are built upon a mutual agreement; however, in queer relationships, love is only purchased with pain. Still, the bond of these lovers is stronger because they can see each other suffering by one another's "love" - the stones - and they willingly stay. Weathering the pelts in the name of being able to face your lover is, after all, romantic.

Yes, romantic relationships are choices; however, one's sexuality is not. As banal as this sentiment is, in Leviticus, it becomes refreshing precisely because of the bare-bones way that message is delivered. Quite literally, the boys cannot change their orientation in this game. They do not face away, twist or contort to avoid the rocks - it seems to be against their silent understanding. Here, an inability to change oneself spatially spells also an inability to change oneself sexually.

Jealous and vengeful, Naim outs Hunter and Ryan to the town pastor, Hunter's father. In a spectacle the entire congregation was welcomed to, Hunter's house becomes the work site of a "deliverance healer," who flippantly performs what he calls a routine ritual on the boys. Ryan behaves almost mockingly until the healer extinguishes his somehow-holy Zippo lighter, at which point both boys writhe and spit bile.

Strange things happen after the healing. Ryan and Hunter are both assaulted by invisible entities, all that's left of Hunter being his severed head in an attack that Naim witnessed from hiding. When he reports it to the police, they dismiss Hunter's death as a hate crime, which leads Naim's mother to summon the deliverance healer for him. Naim, too, is attacked by the invisible entity afterward - but, from his perspective, it was Ryan.

Thus, halfway through the film, the horror's true mechanic is revealed: in the tradition of movies like The Ring, It Follows and Smile, some entity embodying the form of a romantic love entices victims before killing them. But this time, it's only those who have seen the deliverance healer - that is, queer people.

Since the curse takes root, there are only two scenes of undisrupted happiness between Naim and Ryan, though both occur on buses.

Ryan gives Naim a hand job on the night bus home. The significance of this setting is that the bus serves as a liminal space, an area of transition. One could argue being queer is itself a liminal experience: everyone holds different beliefs on the humanity of queer people, so their existence and rights are in flux. Just as gum sticks to gum, liminal spaces are conducive to liminal experiences. Therefore, blissful queer existence can only happen, in Leviticus, in an area of transition, such as a bus.

Hunter's sister blames Ryan for ostensibly turning her brother gay, and Naim for telling her parents. She lures them into a beating, which they escape, but Ryan tells Naim that he won't see the real him again. The next night, a fake Ryan comes and speaks to Naim through the mesh of a storm door. Things seem to almost function under vampire principles - until "Ryan" breaks a fist through the door, ripping Naim's hair out.

More intriguing differentiations in Leviticus compared to the rest of the horror movie canon grow with each scene. While everyone has different interpretations and analyses for why, the indisputable fact is that vampires have become symbols for sexuality - if you need proof, look to Twilight.

However, there's still an element of consent in that vampires need to be invited in. While that expectation lulls the viewer into a false calm, that security is quickly shattered. This stacks onto the movie's mounting evidence that, when it comes to one's own orientation, there is no consent asked to "be gay" - it just happens, helplessly.

Following Naim's final conflict with the entity, he tells his mother that he and Ryan have been getting hurt since the deliverance healer. When his mother only says she can't help, that they told her it cannot be undone, Naim realizes that she knew what the deliverance healer would do to him. She defends her behavior by claiming that she was told it would help him, adding that she won't be around forever. "We need fear, Naim," she rationalizes. "It's how we survive."

Here, a bow is tied on the throughline of a nuanced yet not uncommon trend across queer media: mothers, in a deluded attempt to "help" their sons, truly become their sons' first aggressors. (See the Italian film Fireworks, based on a true story, for another example.)

Naim's mother goes inside a gas station. When she returns, Naim has disappeared, her frantic search and screams for him crescendoing. The scene cuts to Naim, who has walked to a bus stop where he finds Ryan; as they tacitly, instinctually confirm one another's authenticity, they board the bus leaving town.

When, looking out the window, Naim sees the fake Ryan standing on the horizon, he lets it be just a blur passing by before - sharing earbuds with his, in no exaggeration, star-crossed lover - he rests his head flatly on a sleeping Ryan's chest.

In a perhaps unsatisfied review from my friend with whom I watched this movie for my second time (and his first), I find an ending more fitting than any I could write on my own: "Wait, but no matter where they go, it's just going to be the same thing all over again."

No matter where we go, it will be the same thing. All over again.

I was sitting with a group of people, some familiar and some unfamiliar, at my first-ever Thanksgiving in the U.S. As we went around sharing what we were grateful for, I took my sweet time. I am generally not a grateful person. I nag. I complain too much. I demand more from my life. God. The universe. Science. The power above us! Or in general, from me!

So I carefully phrased it and shared: "I am grateful for the opportunities I have now. For the woman I became because of those opportunities. The first woman in my family to set foot on U.S. soil. The first woman in my family to pursue a master's abroad. The first woman in my family to cross oceans. And the first woman who's expensive in all regards! Dreams, priorities, and choices! But I am also grateful for everything that led to this moment. Because I feel, 'My grandparents walked, so my parents could run. My parents ran so that I could fly!'"

When I think about it now, my parents have not just run; they also drove. Atlas. TVS. Suzuki. Maruti. When I say "my parents," I mostly attribute it to my father because he earned for my family, drove me to school and then bought a car and drove us around comfortably. As safe as it was, it was also equally restrictive. I could only get down at those stops my father made. And his stops were always on his terms: no parking, too tired, a U-turn he wouldn't bother with. Once, my mother and my younger sister wanted him to stop at a nursery to look at plants. He waved it off as if our wanting was already something he'd decided was foolish. He always had a narrative of us. What we needed, what we didn't, what was worth stopping for and what wasn't. And we, the women of our family, were supposed to live inside that narrative, because to him, that was protection. That was love. And because it was love, because we loved him back, we couldn't fight it. But love and misogyny, I've learned, are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes they ride in the same car.

My mother was a passenger princess. And she never complained about it. She was a homemaker. Still is. Do I disregard her? I wasn't sure. But subconsciously, I have felt I have judged her my whole life. That she wasn't the role model I aspired her to be. That she was neither the princess nor the queen. She was my mother and my father's wife. Why wasn't that enough for me?

As an adult and as a woman, I empathize with her now. If I were her, I would have made different choices. And if I were her friend, I would advise her to make different choices. She discontinued her education because her father asked her to, for marriage, for a household, for promises made on her behalf before she could make any of her own. She stayed with a man whose love, however real, came with conditions she never agreed to. She cared for a home, a mother-in-law and two daughters, and she quietly set aside the woman she might otherwise have become. These were not just choices. They were sacrifices, and the difference matters.

But unfortunately, I was her eldest daughter who held her captive in the dock of my judgment. I wished she would voice her anger more and speak her disappointment more loudly, because her silence sometimes felt like it suppressed mine, too. And when you can't find that voice at home, you look for it elsewhere. You find it in friends, in mentors, in oceans you cross alone. But none of it quite replaces what you lost back home.

What I forgot, for too long, was that she was quietly building the home I could leave. She got us, my sister and me, out, away from the joint family, into the city, into convent schools, into lives with options. And when relatives at family functions would needle us with that particular brand of cruelty - why aren't we working in the kitchen, why aren't we serving middle-aged men - she would answer not with apology, but with quiet pride. Educated girls. They'll do bigger things. Bigger than what the patriarchy expected us to do and be. Even her disappointment was a disguise for protection. I just wasn't paying attention.

What infuriates me is the question of where she ends and I begin. Am I just the sum of all the things she couldn't have for herself, her education, her voice, her choices? Is my life in some way hers, redirected? That thought unsettles me, because it makes me wonder if anything I've built is entirely my own.

And then comes the weight of it, because if I am the continuation of what she sacrificed, then I am also responsible. Every opportunity I hesitate on, every dream I talk myself out of, every time I play small, every time I take a detour, and every time I pursue something I want, is that a betrayal? Of her? Of the version of herself she folded quietly into me? I feel it most when I almost don't apply, almost don't go, almost don't try, and almost fight for my own desires. The almost is where her ghost lives.

But then I pull back further and ask the larger, lonelier question: Is this just what a life is? The total of what was handed down, expected, sacrificed and survived before you arrived? Is generational accountability just another name for the human condition, none of us ever fully free, all of us just carrying what came before us a little further down the road?

I don't have answers. But I feel all these questions in my body every single day.

Ugh! I sigh at the pressure!

When I question my worth as a woman, it always starts with the image of my mother in the passenger seat, letting a man drive her life. Why can't I perceive that image as love between two people - the very people who raised me to be this judgmental woman? Maybe because I was taught to look at the steering wheel and the driver's seat as the only parts that matter, while her quiet presence in the passenger seat was the cabin air that kept the rest of us breathing.

Is it possible that the very opportunities she sacrificed to give me are the same ones that make me look back at her life and find it lacking? That her greatest gift to me became the lens through which I failed to see her clearly?

Ugh! I sigh at the privilege!

She was never given the education, the language or the emotional space that duty never freed her to find. And yet she had her own wisdom: "Don't waste your words on people like that. There's no point. They'll either envy you or call it arrogance." So, I never fought. I never confronted. I just built. That was her medium. That was her answer to every question she never got to ask out loud. And the woman underneath all the roles she was handed - the wife, the daughter-in-law, the mother - I like to believe she would have wanted me to ask them anyway. To ask them loudly, in the rooms she never got to enter.

I continue to carry her expectations: go further, don't settle, don't be a passenger in your own life. And yet I think she also carried a quieter wish that the world would be gentle enough that I wouldn't have to fight so hard, and that I let someone drive me around, out of love. I never sat in her passenger seat; I watched it from the back. But somehow that seat became the ceiling of my imagination. I learned to drive once. I didn't keep at it. I wonder now if that's a coincidence, or if I was always waiting for someone to take the wheel the way I watched someone take hers. Now that I reside 8,600 miles away from her, I carry her, her thoughts, her legacy and her pain in my heart and in my mind. God forbid, let it stop with me.

Janani Vaiyapuriappan is a second-year master's student in Biomedical Engineering from India.

1. "All My Friends" by LCD Soundsystem

The intro might sound like a car alarm or the perfect beats per minute for your evening jog depending on your mood. But, after all the anticipation, "This is how [the song] starts." Once you get into it, you'll feel the thrill of forging new connections and embarking on a new adventure.

2. "Dog Years" by Maggie Rogers

Do not even tell me you like Maggie Rogers until you've heard this one. Or, if that name doesn't ring a bell, let me change your life really quick. An encouraging ballad over instrumentals that feels like a full friend group's midnight car ride with the windows down is the best way to describe it. Put this on when you need a pick-me-up or possibly the best getting-ready song to date.

3. "Cico Buff" by The Cocteau Twins

Sometimes you need a vibey, unintelligible song to embrace academic weaponry (or mysteriously walk around campus). You may walk out of lab with nothing but a tear-stained copy of questionable data, but at least you look like an absolute boss while doing it.

4. "oh yeah?" by Steve Lacy

Aside from arguably being the song of the summer, Lacy's hit juxtaposes the "tragedies and wins" in the pursuit of leaving home and starting fresh. Also, this track is so reminiscent of "Bad Habit" and will immediately sweep you out of Homewood and back to high school (for better or for worse).

5. "Never Going Back!" by Phoebe Bridgers

When homesickness and nostalgia hit you like a semi truck in the middle of a Bloomberg Student Center study session, you can always count on Phoebe… to likely make you feel worse.

6. "It Isn't Perfect But It Might Be" by Olivia Dean

If you're still on the hunt for your rom-com autumn or you just keep failing to embrace your inner Bridget Jones, this song will do it for you. Or, if you're holed up in your dorm room over a problem set, you can at least imagine crisp walks through Central Park in an outfit straight off your Pinterest feed - right? All jokes aside, Dean's track is centered around embracing imperfections and finding the tenacity to move forward past failures - just a few vital reminders we all need.

7. "Day Dreaming" by Aretha Franklin

It's a song for when you wake up and the sun is oh-so-perfectly dappled through the clouds and dances across the sidewalk or for the day when you have one class because, ultimately, those produce a similar mindset. Aretha's buttery smooth vocals and the flute glissandos will put an infinite amount of pep in your step.

Now, all that's left to do is put in your wired headphones (Air Pods aren't obvious enough) and jam out to the playlist that will make sure you smoothly glide off the rollercoaster and get you through this first set of exams. Also, it probably would be a good idea to study.

Unlike fillers, which use synthetic materials to restore facial fat volume, fat grafting relies on tissue harvested directly from the patient's own body. The procedure typically involves removing fat from areas such as the lower abdomen and processing it before carefully injecting it into regions of the face that have lost volume due to aging or hormonal changes.

"By definition, a graft means there is no blood supply to the tissue ... I would harvest [fat] in a non-traumatic way [from a donor site] … and then I would reuse it in a way to volumize the face, where, through hormonal changes and aging, the patient has lost some volume," Quan said.

Quan explained that one of the primary reasons why she incorporates fat grafting into her practice is the field's shift toward more natural methods of facial rejuvenation. While botox and hyaluronic acid fillers remain an effective treatment option, fat grafting offers an alternative that uses the patient's own tissue instead of manufactured materials.

"We have tried to shift into a more organic and natural way of harnessing the body's natural stores to revolumize an area rather than using a man-made gel ... Once it's incorporated, it becomes a part of you," Quan states.

However, not every patient is an ideal candidate for facial fat grafting. Quan explained that successful grafts rely on both adequate donor fat and a healthy recipient site capable of supplying the transplanted tissue with nutrients. Patients who smoke or have conditions that impair circulation may experience lower graft survival rates.

This procedure also requires patience. Unlike fillers, which produce immediate results, fat grafts gradually establish a new blood supply over several months before their final outcome becomes apparent.

"If someone wants an immediate fix… they're probably not a good candidate. But for someone who can have six months to a year to really work with me on the re-volumization, I think they're a better candidate," Quan continued.

Quan noted that fat grafting is commonly used to restore volume to the temples, cheeks and chin, which are areas where the deep fat pads naturally diminish with age. By replacing this underlying support, surgeons can restore and improve facial contours while still maintaining a natural appearance.

Since some of the transferred fat is expected to not survive, Quan must balance accounting for this expected loss with avoiding excessive augmentation.

"I expect about 50% of it to not take, but I wouldn't want to do too much because that might look a little unnatural. Again, this is something you can add on to, but it will be very hard to subtract from," Quan emphasizes.

Apart from affecting graft survival and appearance, careful placement is critical in reducing the potential complications of facial fat grafting. Quan explained that blood vessels and nerves travel through specific anatomical planes of the face, which surgeons must consider when determining where to inject the fat.

"Anytime you inject them in the face… the most important thing is, first of all, you want to make sure you know where the blood vessels are and where the nerves are, and you don't inject first of all directly into a blood vessel."

If fat obstructs a blood vessel, the tissue supplied by that blood vessel can lose its blood supply. Quan explained that one of the most serious complications surgeons consider is the loss of vision, particularly when injecting around the eye.

"The thing we worry most about in facial fat grafting is loss of vision," Quan said. "Some fat can escape into a blood vessel that leads to the ophthalmic artery, so we just have to be careful where we place the fat."

Beyond restoring facial volume, Quan believes the future of fat grafting has an important role in regenerative medicine. She explained that harvested fat can be further processed into stem cell-rich preparations that may improve the appearance of very fine lines on the face, which is something that cannot be achieved by fillers.

"I think the field is moving towards more autologous tissue, more stem cells and more regenerative medicine over the past ten years ... not just to volumize, but also to rejuvenate," Quan said.

As research into regenerative medicine continues to advance, Quan believes that plastic surgery will increasingly rely on the body's own tissues to restore both appearance and function.

"To be able to use a little bit of that fat that we don't want and to put it in a place we do want, I think that's a very cool cycle of innovation and knowledge… and that's kind of the quintessential tenet of our field."

1. "We're Going to Be Friends" by The White Stripes

"Fall is here, hear the yell

Back to school, ring the bell

Brand new shoes, walking blues

Climb the fence, books and pens

I can tell that we are gonna be friends"

It's a classic back-to-school anthem. Like all other freshmen, I'm settling into college, navigating fresh starts and making connections. In this song, The White Stripes capture the vibe of starting a new year perfectly.

2. "400 Lux" by Lorde

This dream-pop-esque song makes you feel genuinely alive. College is the formative years where you're not quite a kid but not quite an adult, and "400 Lux" captures this feeling perfectly. It's great to listen to when getting ready to go out at night.

3. "Love Songs on the Radio" by Mojave 3

It's the best study song. Its calming melody is beautiful to listen to, and it captures a peaceful fall day perfectly. Fun fact: the members of Mojave 3 also wrote songs for the Shoegaze band Slowdive.

4. "1979" by The Smashing Pumpkins

This list wouldn't be complete without (what is in my opinion) one of the best alternative rock bands ever. The Smashing Pumpkins is actually coming to Baltimore on Oct. 3! "1979" is a coming-of-age anthem that correlates with the end of summer, perfect for listening to while walking around campus watching leaves fall.

5. "Young Dumb & Broke" by Khalid

The title says it all. "Young Dumb & Broke" is a song about lacking experience and maturity (along with all the other pitfalls of youth) but possessing an indomitable and carefree spirit, which we should all aim to have.

6. "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys

It's a feel-good song. Known for being in the hit rom-com Love Actually. It's a good reminder that love is all around, and it's overall very pleasant to listen to.

7. "Let it Happen" by Tame Impala

Life is full of deadlines, relationships and responsibilities, which can cause a lot of stress and uncertainty. "Let it Happen" is about surrendering dependency to things out of your control: what's meant to happen will happen! Try your best and don't be hard on yourself - a good notion for the upcoming academic stress that is bound to occur.

8. "These Days" by Nico

It's a peaceful and nostalgic anthem to listen to, and a reminder to slow down and appreciate everything because life moves fast.

9. "Thats No Fun" by Steve Lacy

It's a contemplative reflection on the idea of change, the only constant variable in life. Learn to connect with everything in life while accepting that nothing lasts.

10. "Meet Me At Our Spot" by The Anxiety, Willow and Tyler Cole

It's a song about escaping stress or a heavy heart with a dear friend. As stated by President Ronald J. Daniels at convocation, college is a place where many people find lifelong connections. Imagine all the people in your life you will love who you haven't even met yet!

11. "Summers Over Interlude" by Drake and Majid Jordan

Majid Jordan has done several collaborations with Drake, most notably on "Hold On, We're Going Home," "Stars Align" and "Summers Over Interlude." Serving as a peaceful tune amid several rap songs on the transformative album Views, it captures the transition phase of summer into fall.

12. "Icarus" by Fana Hues

It's a very soulful song, and Fana Hues is very underrated. She was featured on Tyler, the Creator's "SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE," which is how Idiscovered her in the first place.

Thank you for reading through my comprehensive list! Best of luck to this new year!

The meeting began with a presentation from the SGA Judiciary Committee outlining their responsibilities. The five-member court, which currently contains two vacancies, reviews formal complaints, interprets SGA governing documents, issues binding decisions and serves as the final avenue of appeal for SGA matters. It also hears appeals of election rulings issued by the Committee on Student Elections.

Civic Engagement Committee Chair Jackson Morris presented a comprehensive view of the U.S. Department of Education's recent "National Call to Action" with the hope that the SGA can make an informed decision about whether the issue is important enough to act on. The letter, sent by U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to U.S. university presidents on August 3, asks universities to publish a statement by the end of 2026 addressing seven topics: transparency and merit in admissions, free speech and open inquiry, intellectual pluralism and academic vitality, affordability and student outcomes, academic rigor in the age of artificial intelligence, protection of research from foreign influences and the prioritization of U.S. interests.

Morris acknowledged that many of the letters' stated goals, such as protecting open debate and tuition transparency, were worthwhile. However, he was concerned about the final two questions regarding foreign influence and U.S. exceptionalism as well as their potential implications for international and immigrant members of the Hopkins community. "While the words 'international' and 'immigrant' do not appear in this letter, it is impossible to ignore [them] in the context of this administration's attacks on U.S. citizens and limits on noncitizen and international student enrollment, work authorization and subsequent residency and citizenship," Morris said.

Morris argued that the University's response will be better and much more representative of the community if students play a role in crafting it. After discussion, members proposed meeting with the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost, conducting an undergraduate survey and contacting registered student organization (RSO) leaders to gather opinions. SGA did not reach a formal decision on the issue during this meeting. Morris offered to serve as the point of contact for members interested in developing a more concrete action plan to be voted on.

Following this discussion, SGA passed a bill for a prospective student organization fair on October 2 on the Beach. The event will give proposed organizations an opportunity to recruit members needed to apply for recognition. Organizers plan to invite more than 200 students who attended information sessions about creating new organizations, and provide ice cream at the fair. Senators also passed the Accountability Act, which changes attendance and accountability procedures for SGA members.

Senator Mamadou Thiam introduced a bill requesting partial funding for Phi Delta Theta's fourth annual Crab Fest during Family Weekend. Fraternity Representative Reagan Sam claimed the event served over 500 people last year and usually raises about $10,000 for the LiveLikeLou Foundation, which supports amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research. Some senators' were skeptical of the event, noting that 12 bushels of crabs remained after last year's event.

Lastly, public member Sean Durkis-Dervogne proposed the Budget Reporting Act. The bill would require the treasurer to publish a more detailed summary of SGA's spending each semester. The reports would break spending down by RSO and expense categories without identifying the allocation received by every individual organization.