By “they” I mean the bells—at least if you’re walking, eating, or hoping to nap within a quarter mile of Harkness Tower. I also mean the culprits of this constant sonorous clanging: the Guild of Carillonneurs. Maybe you didn’t know that there were actual people playing the bells. (There are 27, though not all at once.) Maybe you didn’t know that every year, undergraduate piano prodigies line up for a chance to play the carillon, an instrument that requires perfect quadrupedal coordination to play and serves a built-in audience of the anxious and hungover. Maybe you didn’t know that after an exhaustive five-week heeling process, the Guild turns these hopefuls away in droves; only a select few are granted the power to climb the tower and chime out a Beethoven transposition, followed immediately by Doja Cat’s 2021 hit single “Kiss Me More.” 

I, like so many Yale students, am tortured by the chimes. If I cannot outrun them—and I believe me, I’ve tried—I must consume them. Who are these carillonneurs? Are they evil? Tone-deaf? Do they simply wish to be heard? 

When I asked Kimie Han ’23, one of the Guild’s co-presidents, about the bells’ secrets, she pointed out that the carillon was pretty loud: it would be difficult to hide any sinister goings-on from the public when we could hear every peal. This answer was fair and rational. But my investigation could not be stopped by rationality. I needed the truth: So I climbed a bunch of stairs. 

***

Zoe Pian ’25 led me up the spiral stone staircase within Harkness Tower into a concrete-floored cavern, where laminated placards hung from the ceiling. This, I learned, was the tower’s unfinished and presumably haunted second-floor museum space, filled with cardboard shrines to carillonneurs past. One poster informed me that the Freshman Bellringers Heeling Competition of November 16, 1964 offered its participants free beer.

We climbed up more stairs, this time metal; I remembered I was afraid of heights. We passed a series of carpeted practice/storage/hang-out rooms. A Christmas list from December of 2013 hanging on a wall revealed the Guild’s deepest desires: “Dear Santa, I have been very good and extra nice this year. I would really like to find one of these under the tree….” Someone asked for “soft, nice high bells.” Another simply wrote “ESCALATOR.” 

So these were their motivations. What about their migration patterns? I pressed Zoe for answers. She complied. Every other spring break, while many of their fellow students must content themselves with the beach, the Guild travels to the Royal Carillon School in Belgium—Bell-gium—like moths to the flame. While in Europe, they travel to monasteries and commune with the monks, who also play bells. This made sense to me as an activity for a monk. Less so for a bunch of twenty-one year olds. 

“Is it fun?” I asked. 

“It’s intense,” said Evan Hochstein ’23. Any sightseeing? “It was mostly just going from belltower to belltower and playing the bells.” Still, there was thrill: “Lots of climbing on very concerning staircases, I have to say.” 

***

Fun fact: the word carillonneur is very difficult to spell. It’s pronounced care-ill-on-UR. (“If that guy we met in Belgium wasn’t lying to us,” says Zoe.) 

Zoe was full of fun facts. I learned that the Yale Guild is not only prestigious but the first and only student-run guild in all of North America. (How lucky we are!) Matching Yale’s massive reputation is an equally large endowment—entirely student-controlled. So what kind of money are we talking? “Just give me a number,” I pleaded to Kimie. “I won’t tell anyone.” Then I had a stroke of genius. “Could you give me an over-under? Is it more than 30,000 a year?” 

“Yes,” Kimie smiled. I realized I had low balled it and totally wasted my over-under. 

What do they do with all that money? At least some of the budget, I learned, goes toward “Bell Maintenance”: a massive bill sent to the creepily-named company Meeks and Watson, whose minions have shown up twice a year since 1912 to perform their trade secrets on the machinery. My complete lack of patience for their janky website instantly foiled any attempt at serious journalistic inquiry. I took matters into my own hands and decided to examine the bells myself. 

Wikipedia had informed me that the phrase “For God, For Country, and For Yale” is carved into each bell, probably in case they wander off and need to be returned. But it was too dark in the

tower to confirm anything except that the bells were big. Really big. Their shadows loomed even in the dark. I worried for my health. 

“How big is the biggest bell? Is it bigger than you?” I asked Zoe. 

“Oh, that’s for sure,” said Zoe. It turned out that the bells weigh a total of 43 tons. I did not enjoy learning this fact. 

“How does it not all fall down?” I asked. 

“I don’t want to think about it,” said Zoe. She smiled. We continued the tour. 

***

The carillon is, to speak architecturally, weird. Each bell produces a minor third overtone, which is what makes them sound “sort of…,” Evan trailed off, searching for the right phrase. “Out of tune,” he finished. Didn’t they ever try to give the bells a different overtone? Like, a major one? Yes, said Evan, but the short answer was that the bells just didn’t sound right without the tragic resonance. I nodded. It would be terrible, the bells not sounding right. 

Zoe explained that the bells didn’t have dampers—once a note is hit, it will play until it’s ready to stop. The higher bells are so much smaller than the lower bells that their relatively shorter resounding period means a song with too many lower notes sounds terrible. To put it simply: “there are certain pieces that will never sound good.” 

Does the Guild then dictate what kind of piece can be played on the carillon? “Nope.” The thing about the bells, Zoe explained, is that you can practice to perfection on the console, but once you get on the real bells it will sound like you never practiced at all. Sometimes carillonneurs just give up and improvise. 

So what did Zoe think of the bells as an instrument? “They’re neat.” 

***

When Yale students learn that real people are up in Harkness Tower playing the carillon twice a day, they react strongly. 

“If a person lives in Branford I usually get, like, complete vitriol,” said Zoe. “I realize how loud it is. They’re not lying.” Julia Zheng ‘23, the other co-president of the Guild, agreed. 

Evan was dismissive: “A lot of people in Branford hate us. So you’re the ones who keep waking me up from my naps. If you’re taking a nap at dinnertime, that’s kind of on you.”

The bells are a public instrument. They mix with the noises of the world around them, forming a unique soundscape each time they chime. Everyone in the vicinity of Harkness Tower hears the carillon as it rings—the tone-deaf heartbeat of Old Campus. 

Sometimes guild members will deign to use this power for good. Evan likes to play popular or otherwise recognizable music for his wide and often unappreciative audience, even if he knows the song won’t sound fantastic on the bells, like the Minecraft song he’s recently added to his repertoire: “If I know that someone is going to be hearing what I’m playing and be like I know that song! I grew up with that song!, brightening someone’s day….” 

I smiled. I remembered leaving a grueling class in LC one afternoon and perking up to hear that someone on the carillon was playing the Pink Panther theme, my grandfather’s favorite song to hum in the mornings. This sentiment was a moment of weakness—and exploited at once. 

“I’m glad you’re writing about us,” said Julia, innocently. “We’d have overall better relations with people in the community if they knew about us.” 

Much like the bells, I had been played. 

***

To end our tour, Zoe treated me to a song she’d been working on called “American Gothic.” It was stately and peaceful. Zoe at the carillon was a whole-body experience: she pounded at the handles with her fists and feet, her torso swiveling, each hit submerging the room in sound. 

I took a second to tune in—to stop thinking about my thwarted naps, or my overdue readings, or the fact that I had failed to unearth even a little hard evidence of the Yale Guild of Carillonneurs’ completely obvious cunning and deceit. I felt the thrum of the walls, the floor, and the air. I thought of the whole campus: people listening, people stopping to listen. Just as the Guild had planned, I liked what I heard. 

The Guild of Carillonneurs does not endorse these statements.

The post COLUMN: College is a Joke appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I met Jack freshman year, when the two of us were the blondest members of a ten-person suite at the top of Farnam Hall. It’s been an eventful fifteen months since then. Jack foraged: he brought five stolen signposts, two working hand sanitizer dispensers, and a ten-foot-long pole back to the suite. Jack conquered: he became a competitively ranked geometry tutor for students in Lithuania, he ranked 700th in the world in the online geography game Geoguessr, and he would have won JE’s game of Assassin if he wasn’t faceblind. Jack made allies: using unsalted almonds from the Bow Wow, he trained the Old Campus squirrels to sit. They repaid him with unflinching obedience—and at least one tick-borne illness.

When I ask how that illness is going, Jack grins. “It’s really great. I need a conversation topic sometimes. ‘Jack, what’s going on in your life?’ Aw, I have Lyme disease. It’s because I was too invested in meeting some squirrels.”

Not that Jack’s interest in animals is limited to rodents. In Florida, his home state, Jack’s favorite pastime is yelling at alligators; he once went viral on TikTok for making a math pun while holding six lizards. The pun? “My friend in calculus today was trying to take the integral of -csc(x)cot(x). Why couldn’t he do it? Cuz he can’t!” (The integral of -csc(x)cot(x) is cosecant). It’s terrible, sure, but the video captures Jack’s personality pretty well. By the time I graduate with a bachelor’s degree in reading books, Jack will have completed a master’s in mathematics and befriended the wild.

For Jack, it’s more exciting if the squirrels remember him than if other people notice him training the squirrels. He knows it’s funny, but he would still do it even if it wasn’t. Is this the key to humor—not caring either way? When I ask Jack if he thinks he’s funny, he shrugs. After two and half semesters studying Jack’s supernaturally excellent deadpan, I still can’t tell when he’s joking.

I once heard Jack describe another human being as a “lovely, lighthearted chap.” If we’re just talking like that now, then Jack is impish, bashful, and wry. Some of his expressions are so exaggerated that they become farcical: a wide-swung snap, liberal use of the phrase “aw, jeez”. He speaks as if enchanté is flexible enough to capture every human emotion.

Jack often finds himself in strange situations. He thinks of them like side quests in a video game, or B-plots in a television show. “If you watch a TV show and the whole thing is just plot, that’s exhausting,” Jack says. “You need side plots to develop the characters’ morals and relationships.”

The side quest approach came in handy when he started college. Life became, in Jack’s words, “very plot heavy”; something needed to be done to make each episode unique. The main quest: Jack takes (or skips) graduate-level math courses, uncovering the secrets of the universe through equations. The side quest: Jack rollerskates eight miles to Quinnipiac University before learning how to break.

All this to say: Jack’s character is really developed. He spent a month memorizing the longest words in the dictionary for the middle school regional spelling bee. Then he was eliminated—on a short word. (What got you into spelling? “What got me out of it was ‘cashew.’”) Jack didn’t get into math until his sophomore year of high school. (Before that, what were you doing? “Being awesome.”) On a whim, he tried to solve one of the problems on a mail-in math competition and realized it couldn’t be completed without learning calculus. So Jack did what anyone would do: he learned calculus, which turned out to be “kinda cool.”

I ask Jack to walk me through how he thinks about math. The answer is he doesn’t think. Jack used to have an internal monologue, but he decided the redundancy was slowing things down: “I had to fire the guy that was doin’ it.” His brain has been silent ever since.

“Sorry, what?” I say. Jack explains. “You know in Ratatouille when he tries the cheese and it’s good, and then he tries the grapes and they’re good, and then he tries the cheese with the grapes and it’s like fireworks?” I did know. “Imagine you’re thinking about a math problem where it’s so abstracted that everything is all fireworks.”

But talking to Jack never feels like talking to a pyrotechnic calculator. He gives his friends’ feelings and grievances the same attention and focus he might give a math problem. He’s been dating his girlfriend for over two years, and his room is filled with her crochet projects.

“The moral of the story,” says Jack, “is to make more side quests, so everyone can watch your life and say, ‘Wow, the writers are really good.’”

The post College is a Joke: Who are the funniest people on Yale’s campus? appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Did some Googling:

The crickets we hate are two hundred million years older than we are 

and they invented music

By “we” I mean everyone who ever lived after crickets

             which is everyone who ever lived

When we can’t sleep at night, that’s because crickets are singing, and by singing 

I mean fucking, 

I mean, they’re doing both, or what 

I mean is the singing precedes the fucking and by fucking 

I mean fucking a lot, because crickets are polygamous

which means they get more action than we do, and by “we” 

I mean me 

because it is rude to drag everyone who ever lived

into one’s personal problems

There are hundreds of cricket species on each continent                                         except Antarctica

                           sorry Antarctica

and some of them are extinct

                    sorry crickets

Sometimes crickets pretend to be other things, like leaves

which I do too

I mean, pretend in a general sense, not pretend to be a leaf

Sometimes crickets pretend to be dead

which I do not do anymore

If I were a cricket I would always be able to say what I mean 

as there wouldn’t be much to say

                     Sorry crickets

Two hundred million years of singing and leaves 

and sometimes going extinct

When I can’t sleep at night it is because I forgot to respect my elders

When I can’t sleep at night it is because crickets are dragging me into their personal problems

When I can’t sleep at night it is because I wish that I were alone on a planet of bugs

that I had also invented music

             and could not speak

    that I had never heard of everyone 

                                                  who ever lived

The post POETRY: Crickets appeared first on Yale Daily News.

***

Tor Olsson is a first year at Macalester College who doesn’t wear shoes — hence, “Barefoot Kid.” Two months into the semester, he is already a campus idol. Most of the freshmen — Tor’s classmates, hookups, enemies and friends, tablemates at his future alumni events — are somewhat devoted to him. He features in their TikToks and stars in their drunk group chat messages. They ask him to sign pieces of paper with his feet; They steal a pair of rainbow Puma slides from his dorm; They start and spread rumors that he got kicked out of the Whole Foods on Selby Avenue — no shoes, no service. Spotting Tor, even if he’s just sitting in Café Mac eating ketchup straight out of the packet, is a celebrity encounter. just ran into him in the science building, Lila texts me, barefoot king. He is a central part of life at Macalester, as fixed and as focal as the Twin Cities: Minneapolis on the left, St. Paul on the right and Tor in the middle, talking to everyone, his feet callused and filthy and bare. 

***

I’ve spent a grand total of 41 minutes on a FaceTime call staring at Tor, and I can report with confidence that for an enigma, he looks normal. If you took a child actor, some best friend on the Disney Channel, and stretched him out into a college freshman — over six feet tall, rail-thin, and sporting a haircut the internet lovingly deems “the white boy swoosh”— you would end up with a guy who looked like Tor. (I write “wholesome (?)” in my notes.) 

Tor is half an hour late to our interview. He’s late to most everything, I learn. There is a lot that’s more important to Tor than being on time: his religious studies class, the cross country and track teams, a global perspective on climate change, the six-foot long tapestry of a (fake) DaBaby tweet (“my dentist say im grindin even in my sleep”) hanging in his dorm room and the fact that I know that he knows that DaBaby was cancelled. We talk about bagpipes and astronauts and his recent meditations on spirituality, until finally I ask Tor how he thinks his classmates perceive him. He says, “So you’ve heard that around campus I’m sort of known as like the guy who walks around without shoes, right?” I have. “Which I totally didn’t plan for, actually,” he stresses. In fact, he’s sort of confused why no one else is going shoeless. “It feels so good. I don’t like my feet to be trapped. When I showed up at college there was so much grass — it’s like, why not?”

Tor is a firm believer in the barefoot lifestyle. Nonetheless, he does not proselytize — he doesn’t need to; We come to him. (“I should try it,” I say, very excited. “Don’t feel pressured to,” he replies.) He’s aware of the inevitability of snow — Minnesota winters are already hard enough for those wearing boots. “We’ll see when we get there,” he says. He’s either using the royal we or referring to the potential legion of unsolicited barefoot followers over whom he could reign. “We’ll get there later. We’ll hang in there until it’s too much to handle.”

***

In the middle of our interview Tor mentions that he is — get this — a representative for the Class of 2025 on the Macalester College Student Government, and I make the professional journalistic choice to not say Wait, what? out loud. Lila confesses that his candidacy caught her off guard too: “Mostly because when somebody has, like, a gimmick, I assume that’s their way of getting their name out there.” Tor already had a Thing — did he really need another? 

He can certainly multitask. People voted for him, of course — he’s a nice dude — and he speaks passionately — if vaguely — about how he wants to bridge the gap between the powerful administration and the student body and reach out to the first-year class. But scandal rocked the election cycle. Another candidate ran on the policy of mandatory shoes in Café Mac, targeting not Tor Olsson, good-guy political organizer, but Barefoot Kid, unhygienic communal diner. There were five seats available for Representative; When Tor won, his opponent did too.

***

How does it feel, barely two months into your first semester, to be inspiring negative ad campaigns, to be known for just one thing? Tor says he’s collected reputations like this his entire life. “Up until probably fourth and fifth grade, I was, like, always the super quiet kid; I just did not talk. I was sort of known for that. People just really had no idea what I was thinking,” he says. But they needed to find out. “Who is this kid? What’s he up to? For some reason, people find something to kind of, like, idolize me for. I sort of wish it didn’t happen as much.” Tor’s been thinking about it a lot, lately, and he can’t figure out what it is about himself — why this happens to him everywhere he goes. 

I think this is a little ridiculous. It is almost impossible to be innocent in the creation of your own cult of personality, one so flourishing that random students from other colleges write charmed essays about you. Maybe Tor doesn’t actively seek the spotlight, but I do think it has become the place where he feels most comfortable. It’s easy to imagine getting used to that attention, that individuality, that influence. Why wouldn’t he cling to a parodic version of his own behavior, especially in the first difficult months of freshman year?

After all, Tor is like his friends, his classmates and his interviewer: somewhere people don’t really know him, trying to figure out how to let them know him. He’s never done this alone before; He has a twin sister, and he didn’t realize how hard it would be to go to college without her. “We’re very similar,” Tor says. It’s unclear if she also hates shoes. “We know each other like we know ourselves, sort of, which is really crazy.” Being a twin can be defining. For better or for worse, you’re permanently associated with another person: one half of a whole, part of a package deal. When your twin is at Vassar, 1,200 miles away, who are you? 

***

Tor finds comfort in how no one is feeling settled. He could let go a little of the self-consciousness, the social anxiety, when he remembered that everyone was feeling the same — more comfortable with the scheduled academic periods than the nebulous free time for socializing, all worried about how they were presenting themselves to each other. 

Many first-years might try to give a polished, collected, blandly nice first impression; For his, Tor emailed his future cross country teammates about how he couldn’t do a cartwheel and was planning on bringing bright pink leopard-print sheets for his dorm bed. He thinks the transition into college helped him to stop overthinking his interactions with others: “The fact that no one’s really comfortable, no one has a lot of people to talk to … that helped me let go of a little bit of the social anxiety.” 

I can’t say the same, and I don’t know any other freshmen who can either. After a year and a half spent alone, college is an overcorrection: whether we’re learning, sleeping, eating or using communal bathrooms, we’re constantly with other people. It’s exciting to be face to face again, but it feels like we have to relearn it from scratch: “Be present in conversation, make facial gestures like you’re listening — these things that you haven’t thought about in a while, putting it all back together piece by piece … that’s been overwhelming,” Lila admits.

The pandemic still isn’t over, and it likely never really will be. Everyone could be sent home the moment positive testing rates climb too high. What’s the point of getting invested in these relationships, this place, the person you’re becoming in this new phase of your life? How do you go cold turkey from a year of online everything — when you didn’t have to pretend that you were okay, that you were someone functioning well enough to put shoes on every day — to an entirely new environment, away from home, that constantly demands from you the social and academic fluency you lost in March of 2020?

***

Tor Olsson has made a pretty enviable name for himself; he is, by all accounts, a charming, entrancing conversationalist, a thoughtful, spontaneous friend and a genuine stand-up guy. In the grand tradition of weird extroverts, he wouldn’t make a bad cult leader. He’d find fame rewarding, Tor tells me, if he could be some sort of spiritual leader, inspiring people to separate themselves from their societal constraints. Once, when studying with his teammate Nick, Tor said out of nowhere, “Yesterday, I sat in the fitness center and closed my eyes and tried to levitate for ten minutes.” 

Nick: Do you mean meditate?

Tor: No. Levitate. Like, float.

Nick: What are you—how could you do that, Tor?

Tor: Well, I don’t know, but it felt like my soul was leaving my body, so something was happening.

Nick laughs recounting the story. He thought it was ridiculous — but he was sort of convinced. “I’m like, ‘Okay, now I have to try that. Now I have to sit for ten minutes and try to levitate.’ He’ll just say stuff like that. And I love it. Cause now, now I have to think about …” Nick trails off. “What if one day he gets it, you know? What if one day he just floats off the ground? Cause if anyone could do it, he could.”

***

I decide to become Tor’s first long-distance disciple: I spend two hours one evening walking barefoot around my own campus. I get attention, which I love, and cold, which I do not. I think I would recommend it. It is, as promised, freeing. It’s also anxiety-producing, and odd, and fun, and scary, and on top of all of that it kind of hurts — it feels, in other words, the way navigating the new is supposed to feel.

The post NONFICTION: Tor Olsson’s Reputation Precedes Him appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“Seriously, who?”

Nobody in particular. But he was going to get married, he announced, because he had looked it up and he could. It was true. In Tennessee, you didn’t need a guardian’s permission once you turned 18, and he had already done everything else on the checklist. Jules and I went to the supermarket and cheered when he won three dollars on a 9’s in a Line lottery ticket. We rolled our eyes  — actually, I rolled my eyes, Jules just laughed — when he spent his winnings on a pack of cigarettes and coughed up a lung in the parking lot by the shopping cart return. We held his hands while he received a lower back tattoo of Wile E. Coyote from a sketchy guy downtown, and we even waited outside the elementary school while he voted, talking about how weird it was to watch Tyler perform a civic duty. This was all that was left.

“Okay,” I said, “Good luck.” I hoped that would be the end of it, except Jules came back out carrying assorted sliced fruits and a gigantic carton of Goldfish crackers, and he brought it up with her: “I’m gonna get married, isn’t that great?”

She said: “Yikes.” She said: “That’s gonna be expensive.” She said: “And a real headache to annul.”

And then she said, “Fucking entertaining though. Can I be your witness?”

Delighted, Tyler started to pull himself back up the deck, beaming as he squirmed his way to a perch on the railing. He was such a terrible mixture of compelling and embarrassing that it hurt me to look in that direction. It was settled. He was getting married. My original point still stood: To whom?

Tyler thought about this, his whole body swaying back and forth in the breeze of Jules’ backyard like a windchime. He was probably high, I realized, and Jules too. I felt like an idiot for figuring it out too late — and for being annoyed, even though I had told them I didn’t care what they did as long as it wasn’t in front of me. “It’s not about the person,” Tyler said. “It’s about the statement.” Jules hummed in agreement.

“What statement?” I asked, resisting the urge to massage my temples or pinch the bridge of my nose or any of the other things old people did when they were stressed.

“I’m eighteen, right?” said Tyler. “I never thought I’d make it that far.”

Which was the sort of grandiose thing he would tell us that he didn’t mean, that was sort of concerning and sort of annoying at the same time. Tyler had never been sick, suicidal or in any way prone to danger. If he hadn’t thought he’d make it to eighteen it was because he hadn’t bothered to consider that there were moments beyond the one he was currently in. I tried to shoot Jules a look, but she was on her back in the long grass stuffing her mouth with Goldfish. I was going to have to check her for ticks afterward.

“And we,” Tyler was saying, “need to celebrate life. Especially you, Mason.”

I flushed a little; this was an old argument about me abandoning them for college that I wasn’t winning. Their post-graduation plans were never scholarly and constantly shifting. Last I’d asked, Jules assured me she had some social media sponsorship “locked down, basically,” and Tyler was wondering if he’d get free Cherry Dips by working at the Dairy Queen.

Tyler scooted off the railing and tipped gently onto the grass, and Jules crowed with glee and tried to shove a handful of Goldfish into his mouth, and he was saying no no no no no, both of them laughing so hard they shook. I stood to the side, sober and boring and wishing I wasn’t. I tried to distract myself by digging each seed out of my watermelon slice with the nail of my index finger. Then I said, “Whatever, I’ll marry you.” Just to insert myself back into their world, just to pretend I had ever in my life been uninhibited, had ever just said what I felt like saying, ignorant of any consequences. 

Tyler smiled sweetly, like he’d known all along I’d say yes, and he said, matter-of-fact: “Mason, you are my best friend in the entire motherfucking world.” Jules pitched a handful of Goldfish at his face in mock retribution.

It sucked, because that was exactly what I wanted to hear.

I stood in front of the only full-length mirror in the secondhand store trying on a suit jacket that was too long in one arm and too short in the other while Tyler thumbed aimlessly at the tie selection hanging from the ceiling fan, taking occasional breaks to jokingly check out my ass in the purple corduroy pants he had made me try on. He had been like this ever since the proposal. It was funny, for him, to play with my hair or stare into my eyes until I flushed and asked what was wrong with him, to really seem to be serious about this whole wedding thing. 

“Come help,” I said to Jules, who had no patience for men’s fashion. She was slumped in the gross armchair in the corner, a really impressive slouch, something that was going to give her a spine condition later in life. “Tyler is harassing me. And I honestly don’t think I can get this off of my body.”

“There’s comfort in knowing what you’re going to be buried in,” she told me, not looking up from her lap. Ninety percent of the time Jules was no help at all. She was always on her phone, which she only owned for two reasons. The first was so she could edit memes where each star sign corresponded to an unflattering picture of Jake Gyllenhaal, posted on an incomprehensible Instagram account she’d been running since sophomore year; the second reason was so she could send paragraph-long texts of the passive aggressive variety to her long-distance girlfriend. The relationship was older than the Instagram account and far more arcane. When the girlfriend put her in a particularly bad mood, Tyler and I would pretend my dad had asked us to clean the shed and leave her to watch Lord of the Rings in my basement, go to the batting cages and miss every single shot or see if he could eat the entire bag of mini Babybel cheeses in under three minutes this time.

I turned to him now. “In sickness and in health,” I said. “In good times and in bad. In please-get-over-here and in help-me-take-this-stupid-thing-off.”

“These ties,” he replied, “are simply not ugly enough.”

Jules announced from the corner that she had finished analyzing our star charts. She was a little worried about Tyler’s Pisces moon and my Scorpio rising, but it would probably all be fine. She sent us our corresponding Instagram posts. My Jake Gyllenhaal was eating an ice cream cone and Tyler’s was receiving a foot massage. They were really, really terrible.

It was so hot we hung out in the air conditioned Kroger. Tyler, who was impervious to human sensations, felt fine, so he wandered around to find the cereal while Jules and I stuck our faces inside the freezers. “The ceremony has to be tasteful,” she said to me while I wondered how unhygienic it would be if I licked the ice crystals forming on the popsicle boxes. “Are you writing your own vows?”

“No,” I said. She fixed me with a look, the same one she had been giving me since we were in kindergarten and I told her I couldn’t come to her Hot Wheels themed birthday party. “What’s that for?”

“I’m only giving you my blessing if you write your own vows.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said. Jules rolled her eyes and took a grape popsicle out of one of the boxes. “Uh, are you going to pay for that?”

“It’s not that hard,” she said. “Just be nice. And … heartfelt.”

I didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so I went looking for Tyler and found him in Grains. Tyler liked to bounce around the aisle, touching his fingertips to the familiar boxes. “I’ve eaten this one,” he told me, “And this one, and this one too. It was fine. No Captain Crunch. But still good.”

I tried not to watch him flutter or think about how I was leaving in a month in the same way I tried not to pick at my hangnails — I was doing it before I could stop myself, and I was somehow surprised when it hurt. “Why are we doing this?” I asked. 

Tyler was engaged in a speculative thought exercise wherein he contemplated which box of Captain Crunch looked more like it might contain the special prize: a blue plastic toy parrot he would immediately throw out after he found it. Sometimes I tried to ask Tyler serious questions like this, when his conscious mind was occupied with sugar and his subconscious mind might be prone to answering.

“I have a really good feeling about this box,” said Tyler. But the face I made in response must have been close to upset because he stopped being goofy for a second and a half — a giant effort, for him. “I like having you in my life, dude,” he said, facing away from me; he was pretending to be very interested in a box of Reese’s Puffs. Tyler’s voice was different when he wasn’t joking — it was quieter, and it cracked. 

Then he looked back and grinned. “Even though you’re kind of uptight, and sort of gangly.”

“Thanks,” I said, half annoyed, half something else. “Are you writing your own vows?”

He responded: “Do you think I could pull off fingerless gloves?”

I thought about it for a second. “Honestly, yes.”

Jules looked it up and found out that the license from the County Clerk was $97.50. I was already worried enough about student loans; I wasn’t going to pay for Tyler to ditch me at the altar when the joke wasn’t funny enough to him anymore. Tyler didn’t mind. He said, “I always knew I’d be a sugar daddy one day,” and he broke open his Lightning McQueen shaped piggy bank and came up with $27. 

“Shit,” he said. “And we have to pay for rings.”

Tyler was better at wedding chicken than I was. “It’s not a big deal,” I said. “Cause we’re not going to need them.”

“Yeah it is,” he frowned. “You’re my fiancé. I can’t have people saying I don’t treat you right.”

He thought the ring pop was a cliché. Jules agreed. “I guess I owe you a wedding present,” she said, “so rings are on me.” She bought two bronzeish bands at the pawnshop that cost her four bucks each. I liked mine, even though it was probably going to give me gangrene. It would be nice to look at when I left — a reminder of the summer.

Tyler wore the fingerless gloves to City Hall. They were neon purple mesh. I had a suit on, at least four sizes too large, that Jules promised made me look like David Byrne. 

So we were really going to do it, then. “I think this is progressive,” I told them both. “In terms of outdated standards surrounding platonic male affection.”

“Come on,” said Jules.

“Dude,” said Tyler. “Shut up.”

He had written his own vows, as it turns out: I promise not to bring our marriage up in front of your parents unless it would be really funny. I promise to tell you all my thoughts about geckos before anyone else, except maybe Jules. I promise to stop judging you for the stupid fucking way you eat a watermelon.

I had too. I promise I will not stop bitching about the fact that you don’t recycle. I promise to eat the gumball eyes you don’t like out of your Spongebob icees. I promise one day I will learn the difference between geckos and every other type of lizard. 

We fought over who got the marriage certificate for about half a minute before realizing that the only solution was to give it to Jules. She promised to frame it when she got home.

“Where to next?” asked Tyler, admiring the ring on his finger.

“I guess I’ll claim you on my taxes.”

He looked horrified. “Do we have to do taxes now?”

I was supposed to have started packing by now, but Jules said in honor of our one week anniversary she’d drive us to the lake, and that sounded more fun. We fought over the music on the ride up, built sand-drip castles with dozens of towers, and competed to see who could get a leech stuck on their skin first (Tyler won). I made us reapply sunscreen every two hours. 

I started to bury Tyler in sand, which seemed like a good idea until I remembered how much of his body I had to touch to do it. He watched me the whole time, quieter than I had ever seen him, probably quieter than he had been since he learned how to talk. When only his head was sticking out, I said, “Did you know that us being married means I get a ton more financial aid now?”

He smiled. “Nope.”

“And I’m no longer required to live on campus next year. I could live with you. If you wanted.”

“Wow,” he said, “That’s crazy, I had no idea.” He was so very pleased with himself.

Jules had taken a candid of Tyler and I to send to the long-distance girlfriend, snapped right when Tyler broke free from the sand coffin. I didn’t look stressed at all in the picture, not about sunscreen or college or marriage or anything, and Tyler looked like he always did: like he was trying to make me laugh.

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By Audrey Kolker

Maybe it’s all two minutes and 33 seconds of the “Statistics” video, maybe it’s the fact that he does, actually, look like a pointy Italian shoe that was turned into a real boy by a witch’s curse, maybe it’s because I’m a contrarian at heart — whatever the reason, I love to hate Timothée Chalamet. His bony little body. His presence in every movie I’ve seen in theaters since 2017. The stupid accent on the stupid first “e” in his stupid French name. You don’t see me walking around telling people to call me Audrée.

Tell me I don’t get it. Tell me how boys who look like they have TB are really hot. Tell me I didn’t see that one movie where he’s randomly a heroin addict and Steve Carrell is his dad — he gave a really moving performance in that one, actually. Tell me the scene in “Call Me By Your Name” where he did unmentionable things to a piece of fruit was high art. I don’t care. 

As he dominates the cinemasphere, I humbly submit: We are rewarding a theatre-kid-class-clown hybrid with the attention he wants more than anything else in the entire world, and we’re already paying the price. I mean, here is a man who gave like eight women at New York University chlamydia. I have no source for that: it is a blatant rumor that all New York City kids spread ritually. I believe it with my entire heart to be true. And since when is fragile beauty a substitute for talent? He gestured his way through “The French Dispatch,” he felt so out of place in “Little Women” and I fell asleep during “Dune,” which is probably on me, but I feel like he could have been better. 

I don’t like to see Timothée win. Unfortunately for me, the universe doesn’t seem to care. Whatever. Let Timothée stare down at us from magazine covers and piles of box office revenue — I’ll be glaring back.

A Divide as Sharp as his Jawline: What’s Up With Timothée Chalamet?

By Angelique de Rouen

Whether you know him as Smokecheddathaassgetta or Lil Timmy Tim, it’s needless to say that Timothée Chalamet has made his mark on the industry. Film geeks and horny Gen Zers laud him as the great movie star of our generation. Okay well, technically he’s not in our generation but he’s just two years over the deadline, so he gets a dean’s excuse for this one. As a bilingual actor who is over 5 feet and 8 inches, he definitely has pretty much everything going for him — don’t worry, short kings, you still have a place in our hearts. However, there is still plenty of debate about whether or not Mr. Chagalamoo deserves the hype. Personally, I have heard some people say that he could make them part like the Red Sea, and others say that they have the feminine urge to snap him like a twig. All I can say for both of these awfully violent descriptions is … are y’all okay?

On a more serious note, I feel like as of right now, Chalamet deserves to enjoy his time in the spotlight. With my utter lack of research, I don’t find him to be particularly cancelable. He’s just a guy who had a fun time with a peach and potential cannibal on camera, and now he’s really famous. And I love that for him! Is this a strange career path? Oh abso-fucking-lutely. But hey, he’s definitely “Dune” a lot better than me right now, so who am I to judge? I’m hoping he continues to ride this wave for as long as he can — we have a pretty nice and healthy parasocial relationship going on right now. He makes movies, and I write about him in my college’s daily newspaper. I’m rooting for us! But no matter where you lie on the Chalamet-o-meter, one thing’s for sure: Timothée knows how to keep things nice and peachy.

Cultivating a Chalamet Cult

By Abigail Dixon

I was first introduced to Timothée Chalamet in “Lady Bird” when I was 16, and all I felt toward him was outrage at the apathy of his character. My infatuation bloomed only later, after meeting — and falling for — a Chalamet-esque boy in real life. From this perspective, I could suddenly appreciate the appeal of the combination of cool intelligence and boundless absurdity that had sent the internet into a craze. Now, I’ve almost watched “Dune” three times, and that’s not because of the stunning cinematography. 

Because of the latency of my love, I can sympathize with those who do not understand the hype. Looking at static pictures, it is easy to passively pick apart his features, from his comically wide jaw to his overgrown eyebrows. But on the silver screen, a clenching of the bone here or twitching of his brow there conveys the most subtle, yet crucial emotions that most actors fail to deliver.

The sharp accuracy of Chalamet’s acting pierces through me each time. He affects me so thoroughly, I am often unable to watch one of his movies without pausing it an absurd amount, from when he sheepishly looks at the ground to boldly confesses his love. I still have not managed to finish watching “The King,” and that film premiered in 2019. 

Chalamet’s charm still extends beyond the screen: his hypnotizing self awareness exudes an aura of comfortability — confidence without arrogance, self-consciousness without insecurity. This alluring balancing act is one that is only recently seen as attractive in men. People are looking less for a protector and more for a companion. The embracing of sensitivity in harmony with masculinity rather than discordant with it is what has allowed for the rise of this newly desirable archetype. Chalamet is the figurehead of the movement, and although it took me a while, I am following him devoutly.

Ten Things I Hate About Timothée Chalamet

By Jacqueline Kaskel

I don’t care how you pronounce it — with a fancy French accent or a butchered American one. Timothée Chalamet is my generation’s most absurd and uncalled-for obsession. I pride myself in saying that I have never seen a Timothée Chalamet movie. And it’s not that I haven’t tried. Believe me, I have. When “Little Women” received its crap ton of accolades, I put it on my list — who didn’t? But I never got around to it. People told me to watch “Call Me by Your Name,” too, but life happened. “Lady Bird” has been on my Netflix watchlist for far too long. I’m not even ashamed to say that I bought the book “Dune” — not to read in preparation for the movie, but to enjoy as a substitute. And I’m definitely not ashamed to say that I only learned he was in “Interstellar” a few days ago; though, to be fair, I’ve never actually seen the movie.

While I’m sure he’s got talent, I don’t see the need to cast him in every single new movie. He’s a twig for crying out loud. A goddamn twig. Don’t tell me that his jawline and cheekbones could cut diamonds. That boy still looks like a child. A very sharp child with the beginning of a rat mustache and too much hair product. Are you telling me that the world — most notably the female population — is swooning over a 25-year-old actor who hasn’t yet gone through puberty? And do you know what gets me the most? He’s playing Willy Wonka in the new 2023 film “Wonka.” Think about Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp. Now think about Chalamet. Am I missing something there? Shouldn’t he be portraying Charlie? Or maybe the director cast him solely for his resemblance to the traumatized adolescent Willy Wonka in headgear from the 2005 movie.

It seems like Chalamet should be sticking with his teenage heartthrob roles for the time being — he definitely does not strike me as someone who could play a leading adult role. But what do I know? I severely lack both a proper Chalamet education — which I do not plan on rectifying — and the qualifications of a casting director. And so, to all the Chalamet fans out there that I have offended today, you are welcome to carry on. Love him. Kneel before him. Swoon at his French. He was only ever yours to begin with.

Timothée Chalamet: the revival of the movie star

By Christion Zappley

Timothée Chalamet is known for many things. Some may even say that he is a renaissance man. He is a mathematician — see his highly advanced lecture on statistics; rapper — see his Roman’s Revenge performance; and even an advanced computer scientist — see his recently discovered professional technology reviews. But, to most, Chalamet is an actor, and, an amazing one, at that.

I personally discovered him during the 2017 Academy Awards season when “Lady Bird” and “Call Me By Your Name” were up for prestigious accolades. Both films featured the legend himself. In “Lady Bird,” Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, Chalamet played Kyle, a supporting character in the second half of the film who dates the protagonist, Christine. Chalamet embodied the persona of someone who reads books at parties, studies “A People’s History of the United States” — as if anyone actually read that book while they were in high school — and scoffs at capitalism while having enough money to not have to worry about it. He was uncaring, inattentive and absolutely full of himself. Yet somehow, Chalamet managed to make an entire audience still care for Kyle as a human being and the issues he faces with his terminally ill father. That same year, Chalamet was Oscar nominated for best actor for his performance in “Call Me By Your Name” where he played an artistic, sensitive and caring teenager who discovers his own sexuality and identity one summer in Italy. By the end of the film, you feel the pain of Chalamet’s character, Elio, as he cries in front of a fireplace to a Sufjan Stevens song. When the credits rolled after this scene at the New York Film Festival, Chalamet’s performance inspired the longest standing ovation in festival history. At the young age of 20, Chalamet proved that he could carry a complex, emotionally-rich film on his own. 

These were just Chalamet’s breakout roles, which only hint toward his full capabilities as an actor. He has kept up with the likes of legends such as Steve Carell, Frances McDormand, Oscar Isaac and more. He has already established himself as a dominant duo alongside Irish actress Saoirse Ronan — which needs no further elaboration if you have seen the field scene at the end of “Little Women.” They are an onscreen couple instantly reminiscent of powerhouse predecessors such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway and Viola Davis and Denzel Washington.

Whether you think Chalamet is overrated, his accolades speak for him. With the simple addition of his name to a project, support is nearly guaranteed. For example, the newly-released “Dune” is based on a 1965 novel. Those who have read it famously consider the book as dense and complex, while many others have not heard of the text at all. But with Chalamet and superstar Zendaya’s faces on the poster, it was a guarantee that people were going to watch. According to Screen Rant, the film took $41 million during its opening weekend in theaters and was streamed by 1.9 million households on HBO Max.

Chalamet is a glimpse of what the future of cinema will hold for actors of our generation. There is lots of discourse about whether movie stars are a dying concept. Critics say individual actors no longer have the starpower to draw out audiences just for them. But from 2017’s “Lady Bird” and “Call Me By Your Name” couplet, to “Dune” and “The French Dispatch” filling current theaters, Chalamet has proven that this claim is untrue. The movie star can return home to the silver screen. “Dune” is currently streaming on HBO Max until Nov. 21. Both “Dune” and “The French Dispatch” are currently screening at Criterion Cinemas in New Haven.

Dear Time magazine, Timothée Chalamet is just a hot guy

By Caroline Parker

Here’s my hot take: I don’t like Timothée Chalamet. I don’t like his smarmy, New York-style pretentiousness. I don’t like his faux philosophical answers to straightforward press questions. I don’t like how the entire internet has decided that he is the second coming of Marlon Brando. He’s talented, sure, but I don’t think he’s the amazing actor we’re being led to believe he is. He always plays dark, broody intellectual types and consistently relies on more powerful performances by his female costars. I didn’t like him in “Lady Bird,” I wasn’t impressed by his performance in “Little Women” and I don’t have time or energy to watch him hike through the desert for two and a half hours in “Dune.” I’ve tried to endear him to me by learning about his life. After a quick dive into the world of celebrity gossip, I learned that he’s a nepotism baby who was the Typhoid Mary of a supposed chlamydia outbreak at New York University. 

I’m sure he works hard, and he seems to treat his fans well. I respect him for that. I just don’t think he deserves the lauding he gets. Last month, Chalamet covered Time magazine. The publication vaunted him as a “Next Generation Leader” alongside activists, advocates and pioneers. When I saw the article, I actually laughed out loud. Even among actors of his age, I wouldn’t consider him a leader. He isn’t pushing boundaries like Zendaya or Hunter Schafer. He doesn’t do extensive charity work like Emma Watson or Selena Gomez. The article mentions his climate change activism, but the mention is in passing. There’s nothing to chronicle there. No one thinks of Chalamet first when questioned about young environmental advocates. Chalamet’s brand is built on looking pretty and getting lucky in his projects — of course his powerful parents help too. Putting Chalamet on the cover above actual change-makers told me one thing: Time magazine is desperate for readers.

Of course, if Chalamet asked me out, I wouldn’t say no. I’m principled, not blind. There is that chlamydia thing to consider, though.

Timothée Chalamet: An Icon Growing Before Our Eyes

By Sophia Groff

Since his leading role in the 2017 romantic drama “Call Me By Your Name,” Timothée Chalamet’s career has been set on an exponential upward trajectory. His performance in the film as Elio Perlman earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor. At 22 years old, he became the category’s third-youngest nominee in history, forecasting that the budding actor had a sensational career in his future. 

2017 was a busy year for Chalamet. Aside from starring in “Call Me By Your Name,” he also appeared in a number of other popular coming-of-age films, including “Lady Bird” and “Hot Summer Nights.” He later starred in the 2018 emotional drama “Beautiful Boy,” earning a Golden Globe Award nomination, among other prestigious recognitions. 2019 was another year of success: Chalamet played Henry V of England in “The King” and joined the cast of “Little Women” to play Theodore “Laurie” Laurence, a performance that was met with widespread acclaim. These roles, among others, quickly earned him recognition as one of the youngest, most popular and most talented actors of our time. 

Now in 2021, Chalamet has reached new levels of success once again. His career seems to thrive more and more every year as he continues to impress American and international audiences alike. His most recent films — “Dune” and “The French Dispatch” — have also met positive reviews. A new take on Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel from the sixties, “Dune” has appealed to readers of the book, Chalamet fans and science fiction lovers alike. Director Denis Villenueve did make some controversial changes, including the pacing — “Dune” is only part one of the novel’s storyline. Time is split between awing the audience with impressive, high-budget visuals and tugging at their heartstrings with tense character moments fraught with danger. However, some viewers feel that the recent adaptation left out crucial elements of the novel, brushing over key political context and world building that was essential to the storyline. Still, Chalamet’s performance as Paul Atreides was stunning, and his on-screen chemistry with actors Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Furguson, Jason Momoa and briefly, Zendaya, is undeniable. 

Regardless of your opinions on his latest films, Chalamet’s talent has become recognized worldwide. The 25-year-old actor has already seen levels of success of which most people can only dream, and it is safe to say that his career is still only just getting started.

The Timothée Tabloid 

By Anastasia Ibrahim 

In my mind, I’m already dating Timothée Chalamet. Actually, we’re married. And while I might have been a little bit apprehensive about sharing him with 50 percent of the female population aged 18-25, I’ve come around to it. I’m cool now.

Like a classic Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost love story, he’s cinema’s sweetheart, and I’m the stuffy Ivy League student — minus the successful career. Also like Johansson and Jost, Timmy and I met on SNL. He was the irresistible SmokeCheddathaAssGetta, and I was one of the 14.8 million views on YouTube. But I am not the 99%. I did not fall in love with him because of the elegance of his name and nothing else. I recognize his merit.

Because besides his perfect name, face, life, fashion sense, aura, heritage, hairline, (impeccably-sized) ears and the universe not only working in his favor but bowing down at his feet, he’s a humble, hard-working, talented young actor. He’s versatile. Not only on screen (the “Rap Roundtable” skit, “Little Women,” “Dune” and “The French Dispatch,” just to name a recent few), but also on my Instagram explore page. I never know which Chalamet I’m going to get. Black and white Time Magazine Chalamet? Paparazzi-photographed coy teenage sex appeal Chalamet? Ratatouille meme Chalamet? (If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth the Google search). Another tool in his toolbox — no — he is the tool in his toolbox. Pedestrian TV called him the “internet’s boyfriend,” and well, yeah. He’s the standard, the prototype now. Whenever my friends ask me what I’m looking for in a man, I respond ‘Chalamet’, and just like Jennifer Lawrence reacting to Lady Gaga at the Golden Globes, they respond “Oh. Oooooh.” It’s immediately understood; no questions asked. When it comes to Timothée, there’s no room for taste disputes. He’s a universal actor, a global citizen, and everybody’s type.

Not to mention, his appeal and remarkable talent is underscored by his meekness and charisma. He’s witty, kind, and never acts ostentatiously. He blushes with an awkward smile whenever he’s complimented in an interview and gives off the impression that he has no idea how famous he is. In fact, he’s so unaware of his fame that despite a powerful celebrity fanbase (among them are Zendaya, Emma Chamberlain, Kendall Jenner, and Jimmy Fallon), he doesn’t follow any of them back on Instagram. And the reason is crystal clear– he feels unworthy. 

Oh yeah– he also fucked John Mulaney’s ex-wife– right after Mulaney made jokes about her being in love with him in Seth Rogan’s 2018 “Hilarity for Charity” special. Chalamet’s a Pete-Davidson-level romantic power player. Honestly, what’s there not to love about him? 

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