ROTATIONS
1. Thoughts Do Not Show What We Choose, but “See” What We Like BY: Te’
2. Drunkeness BY: Ganesh Anandan & Hans Reichel
3. Only Wanting To Melt Beautifully Away Is It a Lack of Contentment That Stirs Affection For Those Things Said To Be As of Yet Unseen BY: Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, & Oren Ambachi
4. Do You Bless It? BY: Th Blisks
5. Zozobra BY: Loe
6. U BY: DJ Seinfeld
7. Stand There BY: Tyondai Braxton
8. Blaze of Sobreity BY: Chewlie
9. Nicht Gefaehrlich BY: John Zorn
10. Bowed Clusters BY: Xylitol & The Leaf Library
11. Pills BY: ISMATIC GURU
12. Instructions for Playing: II. Instructions for Running BY: Joze Martinez -Hot Second
13. Cats BY: Zeno De Rossi
14. Dagger Eyes BY: Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Frederic D. Oberland
15. Walkin In, Walk Out (feat. Michael Kime) BY: Nice Girl
16. The Ultraworld BY: Wendy Eisenberg
American interventionism
The wastelands of forcing regime change
HANIYA SIDDIQUI & SIJIL JINDANI ASSOCIATE NEWS & POLITICS EDITOR & NEWS AND POLITICS EDITOR
Meddling in the affairs of ‘sovereign’ nations has long been a tenet of American foreign policy. The US engages in military interventions and intelligence operations throughout the Global South to prevent unfavourable or anti-US governments from coming to power. According to Dionysis Markakis in his book US Democracy Promotion in the Middle East: The Pursuit of Hegemony, this is integral to expanding and maintaining US global dominance. Countries that attempt to resist forceful integration into America’s political orbit are made into international pariahs, have their institutions destabilised, and their people starved and deprived of basic necessities.
Recent interventions in Latin America and the Middle East are consistent with historical trends. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was kidnapped in January and imprisoned in New York, after which the US began taking control of the country’s oil reserves. Cuba is actively facing a crisis caused by a US fuel embargo, which the Trump administration has said is intended to oust the current government. Most recently, America and Israel initiated attacks on Iran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, while simultaneously targeting civilians and infrastructure. These were launched after the Iranian regime murdered over 30 000 civilians protesting the repressive and fundamentalist government. The US government has justified the attacks by citing Iran’s nuclear activities (without evidence, according to the New York Times) and emphasising the need for regime change. On February 28, Trump posted on the alt-tech news platform Truth Social that the US’ intentions were “to destroy [Iran’s] missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.” Less than two weeks later, on March 6, Trump played king maker and intended to make “the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s)” given Iran’s surrender. These intentions are called into question, however, when considering the history of American involvement in Iran and their role in enabling the current regime’s rise to power.
Iran experts such as Ervand Abrahamian have highlighted the impact of US interventionism and Western capitalism in increasing the power of religious fundamentalists and paving the path for the repressive regime that America now seems so eager to topple. In his book titled The Cold War: A World History, Odd Arne Westad traces this back to US-Soviet geopolitics and control over resources. A major turning point was 1953, when US and British intelligence agencies orchestrated a coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh’s attempt to nationalise Iran’s oil reserves had threatened Western economic interests and prompted fears in Washington that Iran could drift toward Soviet and communist influence.
The coup restored the Western-backed Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose rule was supported by the United States for over two decades. The Shah’s repressive regime was characterized by the suppression of dissent, high levels of corruption, and a rising cost of living that left Iranians struggling. This had massive repercussions, as anti-imperialist and anti-West sentiment grew in response. Additionally, Westad suggests that America’s targeting of leftist groups in Iran disempowered them to the advantage of the clergy, contributing to the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought Ruhollah Khomeini to power.
Similar events have unfolded all across the Global South, including in Guatemala, Syria, Iraq, and
Cambodia. Since the advent of the Cold War, the US is confirmed to have been involved in over 60 such cases of regime change. The rhetoric is consistent across current and historical cases: democratisation, anti-communism, and US economic interests are cited as rationales for violating international principles of self-determination. And although Trump might be the current face of American aggression, intervention is a bipartisan endeavour. Take Obama’s actions in Libya in 2011, for example, after which the country became widely designated a “failed state.” This too, is common for nations that America ‘saves’ from their own governments: they become internally unstable, dependent on the US, or controlled by puppet or repressive leaders. Researchers such as Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten have argued that forced regime change is simply not conducive to democratisation, a claim that historical evidence supports.
None of this negates the brutality or the human rights violations of the Iranian regime or any other repressive government. But the historically demonstrated ineffectiveness of US tactics raises concerns about the effects of the ongoing crisis. Middle East scholar Vali Nasr recently discussed how the new leadership’s actions may be more extreme than Khameinei’s. The regime has not changed, despite the destruction faced by Iranians in recent months, and there is little evidence to suggest that this intervention will be any different from the others.
VUSAC year-end review
Initiatives, ratifications, and difficult finances
THE STRAND NEWS TEAM
As the academic year comes to an end, the current VUSAC Council is wrapping up their terms and beginning the transition process for newly elected members. The Strand takes a look at VUSAC’s activities this year, changes implemented, and concerns faced.
Equity and Food Security
VUSAC addressed equity concerns through some engagement with administrators and several initiatives. One of these was finding funds to get the VUSAC Pride Scholarship endowed, which will now come from Highball revenue. Another action implemented by Vice President Student Organisations (VPSO) Anya Ivantchenko, Equity Commissioner Hana Greenberg, and the Dean’s Office is equity training for clubs and levies. Ivantchenko highlighted in the Winter Semi-Annual Report that this initiative has “struggled to get off the ground for the last couple of years.” The Equity Commission put out a Feedback Form to determine students’ concerns but has kept most of the information anonymous. According to the Fall Semi-Annual Report, major themes of concern were food security, financial literacy, and physical accessibility. The recently implemented food pantry addresses some of these by providing students with free, non-perishable grocery items and recipe cards.
Another initiative tackling food insecurity is The Eat After Eight program, which has grown significantly under the portfolio of Vice President External (VPE) Isha Mathur. The program now runs three nights a week and has a regular team of volunteers, with about 40 students attending each night. During Winter semester, the Sustainability Commission facilitated a partnership with Friendlier to implement a reusable container program to reduce waste from disposable materials.
Cultural Inclusion
A concern that came up both during the Election Town Hall and through VUSAC’s anonymous feedback form was that the March 20th meeting was scheduled on Eid, sidelining and creating barriers for students who celebrate the holiday. VPE Mathur stated VUSAC execs had tried to work around Eid but that it was “just unfortunate” that it was not possible. During the Town Hall, Greenberg acknowledged the oversight, while taking the opportunity to mention the Equity Commission’s Eid event in collaboration with Residence Dons. Speaking to The Strand about this event, one student stated she “appreciates these efforts to incorporate my culture at Vic” but “hope[s] this will go beyond just celebrations in the future.”
Despite the involvement of the Dons, the Eid event did not receive any funding from the Dean’s Office, adding to ongoing concerns about the inconsistent treatment of different cultural identities at Vic. This issue was highlighted in Greenberg’s Fall Semi-Annual report and came up following Vic’s large-scale Diwali Dinner. Unlike previous years and most cultural events, this was a collaboration between VUSAC President Rohini Patra and the Vic President’s Office, with the admin contributing a substantial portion of funding. Notably, the Equity Commission moved to have their financial contribution to this event removed, as they were not involved in its planning. Following criticism from students about potential uneven treatment of different cultures and celebrations, Council committed to doing more large-scale celebrations and admin collaborations for other cultural occasions. The Equity Commission took on the responsibility for these and hosted Lunar New Year and Ramadan events. They confirmed to The Strand that their budget paid for the entire cost, without support from admin.
Accessibility
Improving support for disabled students at Vic was a major concern this year. Comments made at Caucus indicate that in addition to physical accessibility issues requiring admin attention, disabled students also directly experienced discrimination on VUSAC Commissions last year. Following a period of advocacy by VCU students during Fall semester, and a lengthy discussion at Fall Caucus, VUSAC voted in favour of creating an ad-hoc Accessibility Committee under the VPE portfolio. VPE Isha Mathur worked to create, promote, and hire this Committee. The Chair of the Committee was incorporated into VUSAC as a non-voting Staff member for the second semester. Mathur praised the efforts of the new Accessibility Chair, Raphaël Garneau, in the span of a few months. This includes work on a resource guide clarifying information on services available to students, collaboration with admin to increase visibility of accessibility
concerns, and improving accessibility in Vic spaces. As per the final VUSAC meeting on March 27, the Accessibility Committee has been codified into the VUSAC Constitution.
VUSAC meetings also moved to a hybrid model this year, allowing non-VUSAC students to join through Zoom. There have been implementation and technical issues with this, and it is thus far unclear who on VUSAC is responsible for hosting the meeting and ensuring online attendees are able to contribute.
Budget and Finances
Budget ratification meetings were notably shorter this year. Itemised time limits were implemented during the Fall meeting, which some students suggested did not allow sufficient time to debate certain budgets. Additionally, concerns regarding transparency were raised about the fact that time limits were not published on the meeting agenda. Council did not implement these limits during Winter Budget Ratification, but set tentative time slots for clubs, levies, and VUSAC. VCU members were informed of these beforehand and could attend the meeting according to their allocated time.
Changes were made to the budgeting process for the Winter semester, as Budget Steering meetings were opened up to the entirety of VUSAC. In previous years, only the Budget Steering Committee made up of a select few VUSAC members could attend these meetings, with remaining Council members bringing their concerns to Budget Ratification. It was suggested during a Fall semester meeting that this process was contributing to the lengthy meetings (one of which reached 6 hours last year).
According to comments made at Winter Caucus, finances have been “difficult” for VUSAC this year. The first Finance Chair resigned and a new one was hired midway through the year. Several levies failed their Fall Audits, and comments and documents provided by levy representatives indicate that some were frustrated with the short turnaround time to submit documents and attend meetings for audits. Following concerns raised at Caucus, VUSAC confirmed that audits would be re-done.
Another finance concern was the portion of the budget allocated to subsidising Highball tickets. VUSAC’s Highball expenditure was $47 992 this year, around $15 000 higher than last year’s $32 960. Students questioned the rationale behind this decision and the expectations set for next year’s Council to maintain cheaper tickets by allocating similarly high levels of funding to the event. President Rohini Patra stated at Winter Caucus that she “wanted to break down the price and increase the quantity so that we still end up making the same amount of money.” However, Patra leaves open the question of the impact to profits given the significantly higher expenditure. The $15 000 increase in expenses suggests that VUSAC would require a similar jump in revenue to maintain last year’s profits. The Finance Chair is expected to publish a report with details on budget utilisation by the end of April.
Levies
VUSAC provides oversight to levies in terms of finances and governance. This year, VUSAC tabled all levy head honorarias until roles were transitioned to avoid issues with transfer that have come up in past years.
VUSAC also facilitated amendments to multiple levy Constitutions this year. The Strand’s and VicPride!’s Constitutions were updated to clarify certain roles and implement honoraria changes. VicXposure’s Constitution was amended to reduce honoraria for the levy’s heads, which had previously exceeded 30% of their funding and was thus not permitted under VUSAC’s Constitution. Additionally, The Victoriad has been merged with VicXposure and will now be able to operate with levy funding to produce their yearbook. The Victoriad has been running as a club for the past two years, but had been an official levy years ago.
Elections and Future
Spring 2026 Election results were ratified on March 27, 2026 at the Joint Council Meeting. The incoming executive team consists of Hana Greenberg as President, Kiara Moeskops as VPI, Baran Aghdesi as VPE, and Kaela Kaela-Marie Paty as VPSO. VUSAC will publish an election report in the coming weeks.
Don’t waste your assets
IRMAK ERALP, EVAN HEELER, & SOFIJA STANKOVIC COMIC ARTISTS & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
April is the cruelest month. As my term draws to a close, both as an undergrad and as Editor-in-Chief, it seems fitting to circle back to the man with whom my editorials began. As if T.S. Eliot himself foresaw this month of relentless exams, near daily rain as the temperature hovers between extremes, looming postgraduate unemployment, and impending recession.
Here at The Strand, we’ve turned to… other means to secure much-needed funds for the financial freeze lying ahead. As we strive to survive this time of toil and moil for oil, the sky-high percentage finals and higher percentage inflation, the wasteland shall not lay our organization to waste.
Will this be the longest day in history? No one is washing the dead. Let the dead wash themselves —I mean with blood flowing more freely than water. I hoard my treasure of water and use each drop with extreme care. Every drop has a role. Five hundred for washing the hair. Two thousand for the body. One hundred for the mouh. One hundred for shaving.
— Mahmoud Darwish, Memories
for Forgetfulness
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The Strand has been the newspaper of record for Victoria University since 1953. It is published 10 times a year with a circulation of 500 and is distributed in Victoria University buildings and across the University of Toronto’s St. George campus.
The Strand enjoys its editorial autonomy and is committed to acting as an agent of constructive social change. As such, we will not publish material deemed to exhibit racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or other oppressive language.
On losing the God complex And then, forgetting it for good
VICTORIA DUBROVSKY CONTRIBUTOR
Out of all the pastimes I have picked up during my first year at UofT, my proudest would have to be creative writing, and my least proud would (unfortunately) be doomscrolling on Instagram. Having only started using the app last year out of a desire to be as fully integrated into the university community as possible, this more acceptable alternative to Samsung messenger eventually turned into yet another time void. Hours dissolving into days like sugar cubes, accelerated by the teaspoon of my stirring thumb. My algorithm has taken note of these hours, and, noticing how I enjoy reading, began recommending me posts with a certain phrase that I am proud to say I can no longer find relatable.
“I ___ the God complex English class gave me,” is a sentence accompanying all varieties of reels and images. Whether missing, loving, or mourning, the decrepit wasteland of a life after high school unrelated to literature persists. High school English class not only gave these users a space to freely engage with literature unafraid of sounding ‘pretentious’ or like they are ‘trying too hard,’ but was also where they would be systematically rewarded with good grades and validation from teachers and peers for their hard work, who were perhaps surprised by their level of interest in a subject often dismissed. Now, these experiences are no longer mandatorily facilitated by institutions unless you are studying English or creative writing, which is understandably not for everyone. They must be sought out independently by taking the initiative to either find a writing and reading community or make one yourself. When one comes to believe that high school English class is the only meaningful opportunity for serious engagement with literature, or that pursuing these hobbies becomes pointless after that time, the countless opportunities offered can begin to feel effectively nonexistent.
I cannot help but see another phrase hidden under the wistful sheen: “I don’t want to take any of the risks associated with actually participating in writing by sharing my work or even just continuing to read outside of class and discuss my opinions with others. However, I do want to appear intellectual, creative, cool, and like someone who has good taste, so this level of required effort upsets me.”
Stop it. Get that image out of your head: your 16-year-old wordplay-obsessed self riding the high of changing the lyrics of a song to make it from the perspective of a character in A Streetcar Named Desire, making Blanche bawl “River” by Joni Mitchell (“I wish I had a riiiver full of liquor to driiiink from”). Because you don’t have to ride that high forever. You can still get praised for your writing, you just have to write! Not even all that well (at least by your own distorted standards), just in a way that the sincere curiosity, spark, enthusiasm, joy, angst, spite, fear, whatever emotion you want to go for, shows. No matter how bad I considered my personal essays to be, that timidity never seemed to appear in my writing—at least not based on how others responded to it. Simply releasing your work for others is enough for it to be recognised for the effort that it is, and once that initial fear is defeated, letting others see your writing becomes infinitely easier.
I was shocked the first time I sent a draft of an article to a student paper and received feedback complimenting my work. I became even more shocked at the sheer enthusiasm editors have for getting articles to be refined and published, and for authors to develop their writing voice. I’ve also received criticism, lots of it, and had to restructure significant chunks of my work. I’ve even gotten some of my proposed drafts straight up rejected from publishing. That’s the thing about the God complex. The moment when you feel you have earned it back, you must lose it again. If getting external validation from having your ego confirmed was the only reason you read and wrote, then maybe it is over. Maybe the challenge with starting to get back into literature and creative writing is that it goes against a God complex; that it is a constant working process to improve and to create and which involves being not above the world but firmly within it (and, at times, even under). Judged. Perceived. Known. But through that comes the objective which was being sought after in the first place. Appreciated. Recognised. Understood.
Alone in the wasteland What bereaves its body when it moves
MATHEO NADON CONTRIBUTOR
Everyone is dead. You are born completely alone. Would you feel lonely?
At first, the answer seems obvious. Probably not. Loneliness usually feels like being cut off from other people, and if you have never known other people, then what exactly would you be missing? You would have nothing to compare your life to. No memory of friendship, no memory of family, and no memory of conversation. In that sense, it seems strange to say you would feel lonely in the ordinary way. But that does not mean you would be fine.
What makes this scenario so interesting is that it forces apart two things that normally travel together: the feeling of loneliness and the condition of social deprivation. In everyday life, the two overlap. People feel lonely because they lack meaningful connection, and that lack of meaningful connection often has real effects on their health and well-being. However, in a wasteland where no one else exists, those two ideas come apart. You may not feel lonely in the usual sense, yet you may still be deprived of something essential. That distinction matters.
Loneliness is subjective. It is a feeling. A person knows they are lonely because they experience loneliness. In psychology, it is often defined as perceived social isolation – not simply being alone, but feeling that one’s social needs are not met. Deprivation is different. Deprivation is not mainly a feeling, but a condition. It means the body or mind is missing something needed for normal development or functioning, whether or not the person is fully aware of it. The World Health Organization’s ICF framework is useful here as it treats functioning in concrete terms such as body functions, activities, participation, and environmental context, rather than as some vague ideal of being ‘healthy.’
This means a person could, at least in principle, be socially deprived without consciously experiencing that deprivation as loneliness.
Indeed, the wasteland is a useful example precisely because it highlights that possibility. If you were born alone, you might never think, “I miss other people.” You would not even know what other people are, but the absence of that thought would not prove that nothing important was missing. It might only show that some forms of harm run deeper than conscious recognition.
Research on severe early deprivation points in exactly that direction. Even when basic physical survival is maintained, the absence of normal social interaction, especially early in life, can lead to measurable problems in development. Studies of children raised in such conditions have found persistent deficits in social, cognitive, and emotional development, along with evidence of disruptions in brain development. There are also reports of weaker executive functioning, including problems with working memory, inhibitory control, and planning. The point, then, is not merely that isolated people ‘feel bad.’ It is that profound deprivation is systemically associated with worse developmental outcomes across established measures of human functioning.
Feeling lonely also has concrete effects, but these are not identical to the effects of objective deprivation. Loneliness has been associated with depressed mood, heightened vigilance for social threat, disrupted sleep, and broader health risks. Reviews in this area also argue that perceived social isolation can be a more important predictor of certain harmful outcomes than objective isolation itself. In other words, the feeling of loneliness is not simply poetic sadness. It has its own psychological and physiological profile.
So, it has been established that there is an important difference between feeling lonely and being socially deprived. The former is a conscious experience of social absence, while the latter is an objective lack of the social conditions under which human beings normally develop, and the wasteland experiment suggests that these conditions can come apart. A person born alone may not feel lonely, because loneliness usually involves some awareness of what one lacks. But they may still be deprived, because human beings do not seem to develop normally in total social isolation.
This raises an even stranger question: what if the brain could be fooled?
Suppose that from birth you are connected to a perfect simulation. Every social interaction is artificial, but as far as you know, it is real. You are effectively raised in the Matrix. Would that count as deprivation?
Here, the question becomes less empirical and more philosophical. If the simulation reproduced every developmentally and psycholog-
ically relevant feature of human interaction (conversation, attachment, reciprocity, emotional co-regulation, even touch) then it becomes hard to say what exactly would be missing. If all the functions of real human connection were present, then calling the person deprived would start to sound less like a scientific claim and more like a metaphysical preference for ‘the real thing.’ At that point, the burden shifts. The question is no longer whether simulated social life feels real. It is whether there is some deeper feature of real human connection that no simulation could ever reproduce. That is a much stronger claim, and it is much harder to defend.
At the moment, there is no clear empirical way to settle that question. We do not have experiments in which human beings are raised from birth in perfect, undetectable simulations. What we do have is strong evidence that real social deprivation in childhood is associated with serious developmental costs, and strong evidence that loneliness, as a subjective state, carries its own distinct harms. Nevertheless, the perfect Matrix case remains speculative. It is a philosophical question built on top of empirical ones.
That brings us back to the wasteland. The most plausible conclusion is not that the isolated person would feel lonely in the way most of us understand loneliness. It is that loneliness and deprivation are not the same thing. You may not miss what you have never known, but that does not mean you do not need it.The tragedy of the wasteland, then, is not necessarily that the last person would sit there consciously aching for companionship. It may be something worse. They could be shaped by a deep absence they are unable to name.
Should humanity colonise space?
Whether leaving Earth is a necessity or an irreversible mistake
ZACHARY XERRI & ZIAD NASHED SCIENCE COLUMNISTS
Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.
— Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Few quotes capture the optimism behind space exploration better than this one. For over a century, scientists, futurists, and philosophers have imagined humanity expanding beyond Earth. Today, that idea feels increasingly realistic. Yet, as the technology for space colonization advances, a deeper question emerges: not simply whether humanity can colonise space, but whether it should. Philosophy offers several ways of approaching this question depending on different ethical frameworks like utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and deontological ethics.
From a utilitarian perspective, the morality of space colonisation depends on its consequences. Utilitarianism evaluates actions by asking whether they maximise overall well-being. Establishing human settlements beyond Earth could protect humanity from existential threats such as asteroid impacts, nuclear war, or environmental collapse. If human populations existed on multiple planets, a single catastrophe would no longer threaten the entire species, maximising humanity’s long-term survival and prosperity.
However, utilitarian reasoning also raises concerns about who actually benefits from colonisation, especially in its early stages. The immense costs of interplanetary travel mean that the first people capable of leaving Earth would almost certainly be the extremely wealthy or those sponsored by powerful institutions. Space colonisation could therefore begin not as a collective human project, but as a privilege reserved for a small elite. Under utilitarianism, colonisation would only be justified if it benefits humanity broadly rather than serving as an escape route for the few.
Virtue ethics approaches the question differently. Rather than focusing on consequences, it asks what our actions reveal about our character. Colonising space might reflect admirable human traits such as curiosity, courage, and the desire to explore. Humanity’s history of ex-
ploration has often driven scientific discovery and innovation. From this perspective, expanding beyond Earth could represent the continuation of humanity’s natural drive to learn and discover.
However, if colonisation is driven by profit, prestige, or the desire to escape Earth’s environmental crises rather than solve them, it may reveal irresponsibility, vice rather than virtue. Additionally, the language of ‘colonisation’ echoes the history of imperial expansion on Earth, raising concerns that humanity might reproduce similar patterns of exploitation in space. From a virtue ethics standpoint, space colonisation may therefore be ethically troubling if it reflects an unwillingness to take responsibility for the planet we already inhabit.
A deontological perspective raises yet another concern. Deontological ethics focuses on duties and moral rights rather than outcomes. From this viewpoint, the key question becomes whether humans have the right to transform other worlds for our own use. Some ethicists argue that humanity has a moral duty to protect environments that may contain unique scientific or biological value. If microbial life exists on Mars or other planets, introducing Earth organisms could destroy ecosystems that evolved over billions of years.
Taken together, these philosophical perspectives give a complex answer. Utilitarianism may support space colonisation if it secures humanity’s long-term survival and benefits the greatest number of people, while virtue ethics raises concerns about the motivations behind expansion and deontological ethics questions whether humans possess the moral right to alter extraterrestrial environments at all.
The debate about space colonisation ultimately reveals something deeper about humanity itself. The question is not only whether humans will reach other planets as technological progress increasingly makes that possible, but also what kind of civilization will arrive there. Whether space colonisation becomes an act of progress or simply the extension of humanity’s past mistakes will depend not on rockets or engineering, but on the ethical choices humanity makes before leaving Earth.
The Death of Morality
On May 27th, 2024, Israel struck a refugee tent in Rafah, which it had designated a safe zone, and murdered at least 45 displaced Palestinians.
Videos emerged of onlookers helplessly throwing sand on the flames as it engulfed the trapped survivors. One witness described the incident as “tents were melting and the people’s bodies were also melting.” The same day, University of Toronto executives reasserted their views on the genocide in a conversation with encampment members: a political issue. Their stance stripped Israel’s actions of their human rights violations and settler colonial aims, and reduced it to a “war between Hamas and Israel.”
The International Association of Genocide Scholars declared that Israel’s policies and action in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide as asserted by the United Nations. United Nations experts labelled Israel’s attacks on the Palestinian education system as “scholasticide.”
The University of Toronto’s response was not grounded in any reasonable moral principle. For students, the question remained of how to convince an institution, a soulless structure, of basic empathy.
Yet, UofT ostensibly adheres to two crucial guidelines that dictates its policies and procedures. The first, The Procedures for the Human Rights Review of International Projects (2025) holds that, “certain proposals [can] be declined in countries with governments with clearly unacceptable human rights records.” The second, The Policy on Social and Political Issues With Respect to University Divestment (2008) states investments should follow the “Yale University concept of social injury.” Per The Ethical Investor, “social injury” relates to “activities which violate, or frustrate the enforcement of, rules of domestic or international law intended to protect individuals against deprivation of health, safety, or basic freedoms.” Israel’s human rights violations clearly meet UofT’s policies for divestment. So what’s driving UofT’s moral callousness?
The sidelining of moral principles are rooted in the neoliberal structure of the institution, made possible by the corporatisation of universities following their federal defunding. These principles have evaded criticism because of its normalisation, but it is essential not to take neoliberalism as a given truth and critique its foothold in the university’s governance.
The neoliberalisation of universities is a recent phenomenon in the United States and Canada. In his book, Academia, Inc, Jamie Brownlee argues that profit is the guiding principle for the neoliberal university’s actions and policies. In an interview with The Jacobin, Dennis M. Hogan labels Ronald Reagan the pioneer of this institutional model because of his defunding policies in the 1960s and 70s. While governor of California, his policies were in reaction to the rise of leftist student activism. Reagan saw student mobilisation under the banner of anti-war and civil rights protests as “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates” partaking in actions to do “with rioting [and] with anarchy.” In attempting to discipline the students, Reagan slashed funding and aid to universities across California.
The punishment for intellectualism and leftist student activism extended to Canada in the 80s. Undergirded by capitalist aims, the Canadian government and its business leaders believed the purpose of universities was to better Canada’s economic strength. However, they viewed university policies and actions as adverse to this. Courses relating to gender, race and social inequality were “useless” because they failed to address market demands. The university was a failing public institution and required a radical transformation. In his essay, Digital Diploma Bills, historian David Noble argues that capitalist elites held that “the universities had become too important to be left to the universities.” Following the 1970s, the state began defunding universities with the intention of making them vulnerable to market forces. Hence, universities would redirect their resources from overtly political curriculum to those that benefit knowledge-based corporate industries.
Canadian universities shifted towards private sources of revenue through donations, partnerships, and investments. Between 1986-87 and 2001-02, private revenues increased by 167 percent, with much of this increase being “corporate donations, non-governmental grants, contracts and investments.” By 2009, public funding dropped to 58 percent from a substantial 84 percent in 1990, while private donations, grants, and bequests occupied 10.8 percent of total university revenues. The sudden and significant reliance on private funding entrenched corporatisation and neoliberalism in Canadian universities.
The university’s reluctance to take a stand on moral and political issues is similarly reflected in its endowment investments. As of 2024-25 income from investments alone constitutes 12 percent of Victoria College’s revenue, and 37 percent inclusive of real estate. Additionally, the 9 percent percentage share growth of these revenues since 2015-16 is testament to the institution’s growing reliance on private sources of revenue. This privatisation has corporatised the university’s financial decisions. Calls for divestment on moral grounds are adverse to the cost-conscious calculus of university administration. A recent example is Victoria College’s ongoing divestment from its oil well in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Although President Rhonda McEwen claimed that divestment was a “top priority for the board of regents” in a late 2022 interview with The Strand, the property had been operating and producing revenue since its bequest in 2003. In the winter 2023 caucus, President McEwen revealed the reason for not divesting earlier was fear of financially burdening the college’s funding of academic and extracurricular activities. This supports Hogan’s argument that universities depoliticise their endowments and choose investments primarily on the basis of their income. Hogan claims “there is no real ethical finance capitalism,” as it is inherently exploitative. Universities only concern themselves with divestment if “it becomes a PR issue or they just feel gross about it.”
Importantly, UofT and Victoria College are not victims of the government’s policies because of their acquiescence. According to the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Federal Government contribution per student adjusted for inflation dropped from $3 291 to $2 007 between 1992-93 and 2015-16. As mentioned above, the OCUFA claims that Ontario universities are “far short of the Canadian funding average.” More recently, Doug Ford’s decrease of the portion of OSAP funding as grants from 85 to 25 percent has further financially burdened students and universities. Yet, UofT does not push back against government defunding. Instead, the institution entrenches itself in corporatisation and neoliberal ideals. An exemplar of this is former UofT president Robert Prichard: between 1990-2000 Prichard attempted to restructure the university into a “market driven, deregulated, competitive and differentiated [product mandated] system.” Prichard held that relying on government funding discouraged universities from producing skilled labor and services necessary for market demands. Brownlee points to the inclusion of business executives on the boards of Canadian universities as another example of the entrenching of neoliberal academia. This strategy is rooted in the philosophy of ‘managerialism’ where private sector corporate management is necessary for efficient budgetary and accounting processes. The increasing dominance of business executives on the board has emboldened corporate management values over social, moral and academic concerns. Discourse over university decisions has largely shifted from academic centred issues of “well-equipped libraries, low faculty/student ratios, open democratic governance procedures [etc]” to performance in the “delivery of knowledge and skilled labour to the corporate economy [...], the dollar value of incoming grants and the level of research commercialisation.” On the University of Toronto governing council, five out of eight of the alumni governors and 12 out of 18 of the lieutenant governors are businesses executives, including the Council Vice Chair Sandra Harington who is the director of Extendicare and the Bank of Canada, and the Council President Anna Kennedy who was Chief Operating and Chief Financial Officer of KingSett Capital. Similarly, the chair and vice chairs of the board, property committee, and finance and audit committee of the Victoria College board of regents come from prominent business backgrounds. In a 2022 Strand interview, President McEwen noted that her power on divestment “isn’t as high as people think.” The corporatisation of leadership and acceptance of managerial governance models by the university has restricted its stance on political and social issues. Their framework of ethical commitment is founded on contemptuous pity and public image rather than moral understanding.
Neoliberal Academia:
at UofT KARIM BUTT
We can observe the same shift at UofT and Victoria College through their financial statements. As of 2024-25, Victoria College credits 40 percent of its income to donations, real estate, and investment, and UofT credits 15.3 percent to private donations and investments. On the other hand, direct government funding comprises 26 percent for UofT and 1.7 percent for Victoria College. In a recent statement, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Association remarked that the 2026 provincial budget neglected the financial demands of Ontario universities. They argue that the significant lag of per-student domestic students from the national average, nearly $7 000 per student, “doesn’t provide the adequate, stable funding for universities required to serve Ontarians now and in the future.”
The reliance on private revenue has had a two-fold consequence of implicating universities in the interests of private donors and being cost-conscious in their investments. Private donations and partnerships carry the expectation that institutions align with their values. UofT significantly relies on donors with ties to Israel, two such examples being Peter Munk and the Azrieli Foundation. Munk’s philanthropic portfolio is not limited to the eponymous Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy; he has openly donated to Israeli institutions such as Honest Reporting Canada and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The Peter and Melanie Munk Charity has historically based its donations on its view of the university’s objectives. In the Memorandum of Agreement for the construction of the Munk School, the foundation conditioned its 2011 gift of $15 million on “the donor’s determination” of the university’s progress from independent performance reviews. The charity continues to financially aid the Munk School with its most recent donation of $17.5 million in November of 2025. Similarly, the Azrieli foundation funds an annual $90 000 stipend for the Azrieli Brain Medicine Fellowship, while publicly claiming to “support transformative philanthropic institutions across Israel.” As UofT relies on private donors for its revenue, cutting ties with donors associated with Israel would risk the capital growth and sustainability of its programs and institutions. Even platforming critiques of Zionism and Israel’s actions risks deterring donors who view such discussions as hostile to their perspectives.
The solution to moral indifference in institutions is student movements. Historically, UofT students have stood as a bulwark against the university’s neoliberal policies and reforms. In 1983, students organised under the “Anti-Apartheid club” and called for the University to divest from holdings with ties to South Africa. Despite the university’s attempt to cut a deal on the grounds of a partial divestment, students continued agitating for full divestment. One student protestor claimed, “the University had a moral responsibility for its effect on the surrounding world.” By 1988, student pressure had influenced council members, and former President George Connell was forced to allow a vote on the issue of divestment. The vote’s result led to the divestment of investment holdings in 1998, and eventually pension funds in 1990. 8 years later, students protested tuition hikes caused by Mike Harris’ defunding of post-secondary institutions. Between 1990-98, tuition rose by 140 percent, out of which 60 percent was during Mike Harris’ term. Then educational minister John Snobelen explained the defunding as a strategy to create a “useful crisis to push for school reforms.” Student backlash from protests in 1998 forced the next Premier, Dalton McGuinty, to freeze tuition fees and increase funding in the sector by $6.2 billion.
The UofT student body is capable of making tangible changes in the institution’s policies. Students have been at the forefront of a decades-long resistance: students fighting for the university’s divestment from Israeli occupation and South African apartheid shared the concern of the university’s moral callousness. The University of Toronto can not present itself as a bastion of progressive thought while succumbing to neoliberal academia.
Lunchbox for the apocalypse The Strand guide to preservation
SHIVANTIKA SHEGAR ASSOCIATE SCIENCE EDITOR
Picture this: the world, in all of its peculiar glory, decides to end tomorrow. Imagine that this sudden apocalypse came with the token doomsday tragedies—barren, withering farmlands, desiccated fisheries, ration lines sprawling on and on and on. Imagine, somehow, that you survive. Over time, though, a question remains: What food will survive with you? Supply lines to grocery stores and supermarkets might have been severed, and diseases might have ravaged cultivable cropland. Fresh produce will go first, the water-concentrated tomatoes and cucumbers and melons bursting with rot, shriveling with decay. Then the raw meat and fish. According to Michael Sulu, an expert in food chemistry at University College London, “[m]ost foods, not all, spoil for the same reason—because of the growth of microbes.”
So, then, which foods promote rapid bacterial growth and which ones don’t? Are there certain chemical properties that determine this? Which food products can sit untouched for months, years, centuries, even, and still remain edible?
Here is a short list of some of these imperishable foods, for whatever purpose you might use them for (i.e. what to start hoarding when the doomsday sirens go off and the world starts to thaw over):
Honey
Honey is known for its virtually eternal shelf life—it does not spoil over time. During the excavation of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, archaeologists discovered jars of honey that were up to 3000 years old. When they tasted it (which was certainly a choice), they found it to be perfectly edible and sweet. Honey’s eternality is likely due to its low water content; after bees collect flower nectar (up to 70 percent water), they ‘fan’ the honeycomb with their wings to induce evaporation of the water from the nectar, dropping water content to about 17 percent. Another factor that prevents honey from spoiling is its acidic pH. This is primarily due to gluconic acid, which is produced by the interaction of bee enzymes with honey’s glucose molecules. This combination of low water concentration and high acidity renders the substance dehydrated and unable to promote bacterial growth.
(Bog) Butter
According to Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at University College London, “[v]ery fat-rich foods can be preserved for a long time. [...] Things like butter and cheese, tallow or oils.” This is primarily due to the hydrophobic, water-excluding nature of fat, which makes for a terrible bacteria breeding ground. A historical example of this is ‘bog butter:’ highly fermented butters that were unearthed from the peat bogs of Ireland and Scotland. Nine known butter samples were dated to the Iron Age, and three to the Medieval Period. It is thought that ancient people buried their butter in the peats as a means of preservation or to hide it from thieves. Bog butter is still theoretically edible due to its fat content and the acidic, oxygen-free bog water’s ability to prevent decomposition. In a modern experiment that involved the burying of butter in a bog for three months, those who tried it noted its gamey, salami-esque taste.
Food with preservatives
Predictably, food products containing preservatives are adept at…well, being preserved. An example that famously demonstrates this is the last McDonald’s Big Mac in Iceland. When McDonald’s closed all of its Icelandic restaurants in 2009, one man decided to purchase his last hamburger and fries. As of 2019, the meal is on display in a glass cabinet at Snotra House, a hostel in Southern Iceland. While the burger’s paper wrapping appears aged, and the Big Mac is wilted and pale, mould has not yet set in. While this is a clear indication of the volume of preservatives used in McDonald’s recipes, it is also a demonstration of the power those preservatives possess. Calcium propionate, for example, is used to prevent bacterial growth on bread, and sodium benzoate to deal with mould on cheese. But, of course, a diet that consists of primarily preservative-laced food is far from a sustainable one.
Seeds
Hidden in Svalbard’s dark, snow-capped mountains, pulsing with a defiant green glow, is perhaps the symbol of the apocalypse itself: the Global Seed Vault. Or rather, a symbol of the possible salvation within it. The Global Seed Vault (casually dubbed the ‘doomsday vault’) was opened in 2008, and contains millions of seed samples from approximately 930 000 dif-
ferent food crops behind a colossal steel door. The seeds are kept as a safety depository, allowing humanity to restore essential crop varieties in the case of natural disasters, pandemics, war, or operational failures. They are stored in a subzero-temperature environment, inside of vacuum-packed silver boxes that are stacked on towering floor-to-ceiling shelves.
Something far more important than the physical properties of the seeds, though, is what they represent. When you conjure a seed, you conjure life, conjure growth, conjure sprouts of green pushing through the dark. You forge images of fruit gardens, of tree branches leaning towards one another to fend off a storm. An interesting thing about the Global Seed Vault is that it contains seeds from every corner of the world. Any country, territory, or organisation is welcome to send seeds to the vault, and there are no limitations based upon geopolitical tensions or matters of statesmanship. It is as if, for a moment, we can be children again, planting seeds in sandboxes, rebuilding a world together and watching it grow.
CREDIT//HEATHER GREEN & ELVIS KAISER
We cannot kill
What’s Killing the Poets?
On what won the audience at Dramafest (but not the awards)
SOFIA TERESE GLANTZ ASSOCIATE ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR
Onthe last night of Dramafest, I said a little prayer of thanks that the tiny American liberal arts school experience would not be lost on me at UofT. Dramafest, which took place from February 25-28 at Hart House Theatre, featured student-written plays from drama societies across all three UofT campuses. Every night, most of these plays dealt with one of the many ongoing issues in the world, be it rising totalitarianism just south of the Canadian border or the social fallout of COVID-19 on students six years later. Every playwright had something to say, and Dramafest gave everyone the stage to say it. But by the end of the last night, the constant stream of political allegories began to fade into each other. That is, until What’s Killing the Poets? took the stage.
What’s Killing the Poets?, produced by the Victoria College Drama Society and written by Vic’s own Isabella Aquino, was the final show of Dramafest and the best possible closer. The play follows two timelines: a band in 1974, fighting against their label for the right to create music about causes they believe in, and those same musicians (or those who are still alive) in 2032, trying to find purpose in a world taken over by AI music.
Poets’ fearless expansiveness made it stand out on the Dramafest stage. Surpassing the fifty minutes allotted to a Dramafest performance (and thus disqualifying it from awards), the one-act play developed fully fleshed out characters, mobilised complex set pieces, and juggled complicated tech (which did not quite deliver), immersing the audience in its world. Although the complex staging ultimately pushed the time limit, Poets refused to sacrifice its integrity for the festival, usurping the stage for its own means. The freedom Poets displayed on stage came from Aquino’s own writing process. They told me that Poets was written merely for the practice of playwriting; without any expectations about the future of the play, they wrote from a place without bounds… and full of anger.
Poets was always going to be a play about AI, but the future Aquino was imagining for the play did not yet exist when they began writing it. Almost a year later, however, the AI-filled Billboard Hot 100 foreshadowed for 2032 is forming in 2026. Aquino, a first-year music student and jazz drummer, wrote the play to address the frustration and hopelessness they felt about the future of the music industry under the influence of AI. Struggling with the idea that the field they were dedicating their life to would eventually neglect humanity, they decided to manifest that anger into art that would call for action and provide a solution. “I want to be the voice that tells people what they need to hear when in that [despondent] mindset,” they explained.
After submitting their draft to Dramafest, AI began to creep its way up the Billboard charts, only adding urgency to the hope that Poets would
be staged at Dramafest. Suddenly, the audience and the actors themselves were living within the dystopia of Poets. “I’ve never felt more desperate to get a message out there,” said Aquino.
On the precipice of losing music to AI, Poets took the stage at Dramafest, supported by a cast and crew of young artists and musicians – those most urgently feeling the doomsday of AI as they watch their passions fade into artificiality. The actors embodied the dread of every character, not because they were great actors (though they were), but because it is the same dread they feel every day. The cast of Poets was absolutely phenomenal – especially those playing the band members. There is a world where the final blackout was 20 seconds shorter, and Laurie Campbell won the Donald Sutherland Award for Best Performance.
I heard whispers of Poets from the cast for months while the play was in production. Though I did not receive any spoilers, every comment made it clear that the cast believed in the importance of the play. The cast was a true team, and you could feel their collaboration and sense of responsibility in the love between the band members, the earnestness of every connection (familial and platonic), and the raw anger behind the core of the play: the protest scene.
Somehow surpassing the sheer talent of the acting in Poets, the beating heart of the play was Mick’s (Gabriella Garvin) acoustic ballad, protesting the closing of a local music venue. Standing in front of a microphone, under the spotlight, with the rest of the musical accompaniment shadowed at her side, Garvin delivered an homage to the tradition of bards and folk protest, a heritage derived from Bob Dylan himself, with a core of poetry that brought me to tears.
When Aquino told me that this was the first song they ever wrote, I was shocked. The song was not only the emotional core of the play, but also embodied the ambition that set Poets apart from every other play that premiered on the Dramafest stage. Ambition that led to an expansive universe that seeped into real life. Ambition that empowered the audience to leave Hart House Theatre angry and mobilised. Ambition that, I sincerely hope, will lead to a remount of this play in next year’s campus theatre season. In the span of just 50 minutes, the audience felt every ounce of urgency, anger, frustration, and love that the cast had been stewing in through months of production. The arts are facing an existential crisis, one that cannot be solved without mobilising art’s greatest weapon: imagination. There will never be a better time to mount What’s Killing the Poets?. We need art that goes beyond allegory, art that imagines a better future, and that mobilises us to fight for it. We need What’s Killing the Poets?
Mirages of the self The solitary quest in American wasteland cinema
ANDREA YIP CONTRIBUTOR
America’s wasteland—the sprawling deserts and badlands of Nebraska, Texas, and South Dakota—have long provided the backdrop for some of the most compelling films of post-1960s American cinema. From the frontier of the traditional Western to the hot, dry terrain of the neonoir, the desert film confronts us with our own mortality, isolation, and identity. Within a landscape defined by absence, there is little to observe but the self.
Neo-Westerns extend the familiar binaries of classic frontier narratives—man versus nature, good versus evil—by turning these conflicts inward. What emerges is a focus on moral ambiguity and self-confrontation, where the terrain reflects an internal struggle as much as a physical one. Films such as Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders), Badlands (Terrence Malick), and No Country for Old Men (Coen brothers) follow characters moving through these environments in pursuit of revenge, spiritual clarity, or personal success. These journeys, however, rarely offer resolution; instead, they emphasise the isolating nature of individual pursuit. The desert becomes a space that reflects and intensifies a broader cultural shift towards individualism. The prolonged solitude experienced by these characters echoes the conditions of contemporary life, shaped increasingly by digital communication and post-2020 social isolation. Their wandering in search of meaning mirrors the logic of modern hustle culture, where fulfillment is framed as a solitary endeavor. Even when these narratives gesture towards a return to civilisation, their protagonists remain fundamentally alone, navigating a social world that prioritises personal advancement over collective belonging.
In Paris, Texas, Travis Henderson is presented as the archetypal wanderer, moving silently through the desert, disconnected from both language and identity. His physical disorientation reflects an internal rupture, driven by a need for reconnection with his estranged wife, and a plot of land purchased from a photograph. Throughout the film’s opening stretch, he wanders aimlessly, carrying the weight of his fractured family as he walks towards his imagined homestead. Yet this pursuit of a lost past positions his journey as an individual attempt at meaning that cannot be sustained through simple reconnection. In this way, Travis’ fixation on what once was reflects a broader cultural tendency, particularly among Generation Z, towards nostalgia—especially of one’s past self—as a means of constructing identity.
A similar sense of aimlessness defines Badlands, though it is one shaped by illusion. Kit Carruthers constructs himself through cultural stereotypes, turning his journey through the badlands into a performance of individuality. The wasteland is representative of the absence of external structure in his life, allowing his actions to unfold without much resistance from an outside collective. While the film initially frames Kit’s pursuit of meaning as romantic or liberating, it gradually reveals the emptiness underlying such autonomy. The lack of consequence and direction suggests that self-defined purpose, when detached from social grounding, becomes hollow. Individualism here reflects not freedom, but instead the absence of meaningful constraint.
In No Country for Old Men, wandering takes the form of evasion. Llewelyn Moss initiates a relentless movement across the desert, driven by the belief that he can control his own fate through calculation and escapeism. This pursuit of individual gain quickly collapses as Moss is overtaken by forces that exceed his understanding. In contrast, Anton Chigurh embodies an extreme form of individualism, governed by a rigid, self-contained logic that operates independently of social or moral structures. The desert does not offer clarity or transformation, but instead exposes the limits of personal agency as a condition of inevitability rather than choice.
The patterns of wandering and isolation that define these films extend beyond their narratives, reflecting a cultural shift towards intensified individualism. The wasteland, marked by emptiness and absence, operates as a visual and conceptual analogue for contemporary social conditions in which connection is fragmented and meaning is framed as forced personal responsibility. The individual journey, stripped of communal context, becomes cyclical and unresolved, reinforcing the desert as both a physical and ideological wasteland.
These neo-western films often feature a sort of ‘return to civilisation,’ where characters are forced to confront themselves through the mirror of another. Civilisation is frequently positioned as small or insignificant against these deserted landscapes, reinforcing the idea that the individual is left to navigate personal circumstances alone. By stripping away these external systems, it reduces motivation to a singular personal objective—one that propels the individual towards a distant, and often unattainable, point of resolution or clarity. In doing so, the return to civilisation does not restore connection, but instead underscores the persistence of isolation.
We can draw parallels from the desert film to Moses’s forty-day journey through the Sinai Desert, a period of wandering that serves as preparation for leading the Israelites to the Promised Land. In this context, the desert functions as a space of spiritual testing and transformation, isolation becoming a necessary condition for transcendence. The absence of distraction allows for a confrontation with purpose, identity, and faith, positioning wandering as a meaningful, and even sacred, process. However, unlike this Judeo-Christian model, where the journey ultimately culminates in collective deliverance, modern-day individualism resists such joint resolution. We may be encouraged to go through a similar period of introspection, yet instead with the ultimate goal of bettering oneself, of being able to handle the hardships of our capitalist existence, and in total to complete more in our individual work and career settings. The promise of fulfillment remains elusive, reframing the desert not as a pathway to higher meaning, but as a space where the limits of individualism are exposed.
Modern-day isolation, shaped by the rise of digital communication, can be understood as a contemporary extension of the cinematic wasteland. Today’s social landscape is marked by a different kind of absence, whereby constant connectivity masks a lack of meaningful interaction. Social platforms that promise connection instead encourage performance, situating the individual at the centre of their own, carefully constructed, narrative. Like the wandering figures of the desert film, individuals move continuously through these spaces: scrolling, posting, searching, driven by the expectation that fulfillment can be achieved through personal effort and visibility alone.
The emphasis on individual success, branding, and productivity reflects the same logic that drives the wanderers of Paris, Texas, Badlands, and No Country for Old Men: a belief that meaning must be constructed independently, and that forward movement, no matter how aimless, signals progress. Such movement rarely results in genuine fulfillment. Instead, it produces a cycle of striving, reaching for the peak of a mountain that grows with every step.
These films offer less an escape into a distant environment than a reflection of the world already inhabited. By exposing the limits of individualism through the stark isolation of the desert, they reveal a parallel condition in modern society—one in which the pursuit of personal fulfillment often leads not to connection but to a deeper and more pervasive sense of solitude. The wasteland, it seems, has not disappeared; it has simply taken on a new form.
Best places on campus to survive a nuclear war
An unfortunately-prescient guide to UofT’s best fallout shelters
MAX FRIEDMAN-COLE STRANDED EDITOR
You know, I wrote this pitch call as a funny play on the Wasteland theme, but with recent political developments, it’s become more potentially relevant than I’d anticipated. If it’s 2027 and you’re currently using this newspaper to shield your head from the irradiated soot-rain of what was once Toronto, then feel free to put the blame on me for presaging all this – in all likelihood, I’ll be dead by then. Anyway, just in case things haven’t gotten quite that bad yet, here are a few of the best places on campus for weathering a nuclear war.
Burwash Dining Hall
One of your most important priorities in selecting a fallout shelter is ensuring that you have a large supply of uncontaminated food and a way to protect it. Luckily, Burwash Dining Hall has you covered, with a selection of food so bizarre and off-putting that none of the various threats of a nuclear war are likely to change it for the worse whatsoever. Creeping radiation? No match for whatever cutting-edge chemicals make up the undifferentiated cinderblock of so-called scrambled eggs in the Burwash breakfast trays. Roving bandits? Just pelt them with a rock-hard samosa or impede their path with the gallons of grease from the pizza station. Giant radioactive cockroaches? They’ll quickly be outcompeted by the even larger and more aggressive cockroaches that live there already. Burwash Dining Hall has all the supplies that an intrepid wasteland survivor could ever need, provided you have the capacity to choke them down yourself.
Varsity Centre Sports Bubble
Though it may look like the Michelin Man’s left testicle, the white dome erected on Varsity Field throughout the winter is a great potential option for nuclear survival. It has filtered air, a great deal of athletic equipment to stay fit and ready for danger, and it may even boast the potential for farming if you can find any dirt left under the horrible, knee-skinning
rubber turf. Taking up residence in the Sports Bubble post-nuclear-war may be difficult, though: rumors across the wasteland tell of a pack of horrendous mutants, devoid of higher thought and motivated only by a thirst for violence, that have claimed the Bubble as their territory. But once you get rid of the student athletes, living there should be great!
Robarts Library
Robarts may well be a great place to ride out a nuclear war, given it already looks like it was built to survive one. The austere concrete gamefowl is currently a bit of a stain on our skyline, but if there’s no skyline left to stain, its thickset stolidness may well make it an effective and imposing base of operations. Furthermore, you’ll have enough entertainment to last you the rest of your life, provided you consider entertainment to be the perusal of ancient ecclesiastical manuals, dry social theory, and biographies of other biographers. Making Robarts your stronghold in the wasteland provides you with the opportunity to be the steward of one of the world’s largest remaining collections of knowledge – or to use it as kindling/toilet paper if you’re differently inclined.
Mississauga Campus
Ruins everywhere the eye can see. Gaunt, ashen figures picking their way through the destruction. A cloud of toxic despair hanging over the populace. All hope lost. Such was the condition of UofT’s Mississauga campus before the nuclear bomb hit. After, however, it may well be a great place to go! The remaining survivors will likely greet an emissary of the Great City as a messiah, and no band of rogues or tyrannical neo-government will ever think to look for anything valuable in the boroughs. Sometimes, survival comes at a great cost, and one of those costs might well be moving more than forty minutes away from downtown. Just make sure to avoid the Gardiner Expressway on the way there, even if it wasn’t in the blast zone – trust me.
Rating UofT toilets
The best and worst places for your waste to land
VICTORIA WAI KEI LI CONTRIBUTOR
7/10, Trinity College 2/F (inside Steeley Hall):
Out of sight, just like the love of my life! Hidden in Steeley Hall at an unsuspecting corner, it seems exclusive but merely pretends to be. In reality, anyone can push past the heavy, antique doors that bar the place. Once you reach there, the toilet stall is divided up by only a small, thin piece of barn-like wood. It looks like a stable but it is not so stable. Hilarious. 7/10.
1/10, Bissell Building 1/F:
It is so clean because nobody knows it exists—just like the criminal record of my last situationship. It is spacious and bright, and has mirrors for catwalk outfit checks. Everything about it is quite perfect, except a sense of impending doom that stems from me not believing I deserve good stuff. Not a joke at all, but it gets one point for making me clown! 1/10.
9/10, Innis College basement:
Besides sinks that look like urinals, the Innis washroom hides an optical illusion. From the washroom’s innermost end, only half your body shows in the mirror, because the glass you are looking into is not the one your body is in. The half-you, however, splits into three full-yous as you walk from the stalls to the sinks. Now, just turn around to your right, and they duplicate into five! If you can’t find your other half, this is where you should go, because who needs a soulmate when you have five pieces of yourself staring back at once? There is something truly beautiful about the way this washroom disturbs the mundane and challenges reality in our absurd world, just like a banana taped on a wall. Come here to escape from social media and complete yourself. Delulu is the solulu. Comedic gold, it would’ve gotten full points if it were more deranged: 9/10.
4/10, Hart House basement (opposite Arbor Room):
This is where little white bots eat your bloodied period products. All you have to do is wave, and they rise up with their square mouths opened. It pains me that I cannot pat them for their hard work, because then the non-touch efforts for hygiene would go to waste. It pains me equally to think about where my incidental fees went to and where not. Yet, on a positive note, these lil’ guys are lovely reminders that technology can aid humans instead of replace us. Too cute for the butts that make jokes: 4/10.
5/10, Goldring Student Centre 2/F (opposite Wymilwood Lounge):
Boring but endearing, she reminds me of my inner child. Located above the first floor and a couple steps below the second, she does not know where she belongs. She stays away from the crowd, but eagerly watches minglings in the Wymilwood Lounge from a distance. Everyone forgets about her. Fortunately, there are windows by the eave that peer through the roof into the sky, so she can always raise her head and dream. She might be a clown but we should be nice to her, so she’s only getting a 5/10.
10/10, University College basement: Its innermost stall, sitting right next to a giant window, remains unwalled from potential peeping gazes—dysfunctional just like your childhood home. To use or not to use it, however, is never the question. The stall’s lavishly graffitied wall proves it to be a favourite among other traumatised uni kids. You will indulge your peers’ daddy and mommy issues while you anxiously shit, and entertain yourself with words from your predecessors. It is the perfect place to ruminate on existential crises and, finally, feel human. Absolutely diabolical: 10/10.
Anthropocene Steam of Rice Gruel
CHARIS LI CONTRIBUTOR
Oh my love, there is ruin
That I have dipped my toes in
A polluted connection
An exploitative relation
No matter how much I do
I can never untouch you
Pure water mixes with oil
Estranged from truth, taught to revel in constant toil
Product foundational over quality
To be loved is to be a commodity
No matter how much I do
I can never untouch you
This is the anthropocene, isn’t it?
Told survival is to be significant
Waste upon waste upon waste
Forced to hunger for food I do not want to taste
No matter how much I do
I can never untouch you
Hurt follows unhealed hurt
Synthetic love on precious dirt
God is change
Yet I stay impure and strange
No matter how much I do I can never untouch you
Death by UofTears
L. F. SHUBERT CONTRIBUTOR
Ursula the undergrad, a fortnight dead Forgot seas of students, the “Cs get degrees” itch And the Quercus notifs. The Canadian cold Stripped their skin of all colour. A precious inch Of prestige persists in a mâché degree Processions of parents attend the queue Before begrudging a post-graduate life Consider undergrads, who were once as happy as you.
CHARLIE SHEEN ZEN MASTER
On being asked: “What is the eye of the genuine [teaching]?”
Zen Master Charlie Sheen said:
“There’s no warmth on the outside.
Warmth is without words. It hits you with a stick.
I asked, ‘The stretch where my cloths were off, I simply couldn’t distinguish my throat from the bacteria in my throat.;
Directly pointed to the sleepwalker.
You could build snow up to your waist from the sleepwalker. If you can sit with thirty-seven limbs, that is birth. Thus, all preceding and succeeding are spidery, not thinking, and held like hands who did half-seek.
Mind is your floor, splattered with extremely fine conversation. To attend to this moment as the sun, the moon, and all these empty cans of beer, all of this is warmth.
And the gateless gate is now living, and now relentless and stupid. Just now, it is perfectly round. You: ‘What is each boundless and biting at us?’
Because you appreciate highly eccentric repetitions of every-day warmth.
Those who follow must be a species of verbal.
There was a collision in the coming and going of mind. Then again, undivided. A single particle is sufficient. That is birth.”
On being asked:
“What is the eye of the genuine [teaching]?”
Zen Master Charlie Sheen said:
“One durable orgasm. Like a hawk between his fingers does and lasts forever For the first time.
I’m never drinking again, But we are other of, and undrones, you suppose, hissing at the side and thereafter to cease. Dove knots with such a muskrat,
decompressing, gathering the colour of rose by mouth, by afternoon.
Yes, the duration of the worm steals into it, because we cross. We hardly give at all.
But I spare you the thirty blows of the staff you deserve. Shut up unless I ask you
Whence all the Buddhas cum.”
CUEVA DE LAS MANOS
LVX ÆTERNA
SEBIN CHO CONTRIBUTOR
Waterboard at seven, Legacy parkade at eleven; she reclined in her seat, black plastic smoked to crystal, and with hand like pale candelabra reached for my arm under the gridded flicker.
‘You haven’t talked to me all day.’
‘I’ll be leaving to-morrow.
‘Perhaps I could——’
‘I don’t think tonight, I couldn’t.’
‘It’s all the same, really.’
‘Besides, various——’ Vague party fled the scene before midnight, then communion with syrup and Maynards peach; fifty and twelve rolled in with fatigue, and declining gambit, retreated to the station.
Dampened patterns of Persia insinuating mould. Fluorescent glare above washed the walls out white. Blanched doors lined the sides, hiding sordid images within, eighteen or twenty-three, twenty-six or thirty-seven; the furthest receded before my steps that rose to meet it, hysteric, holding off the Polish frame to bar me entrance.
The divan on which she lay, adorned with faded florals with an unguent sheen, hinted musk and fever and broth. The stale glow from the sink reflected off the silk of her slip, revealing the geography of her scarred complexion; she sat propped on bare elbows, eyes wide shut and looking in need of anesthesia. The walls, discoloured with rot, yielded to my fingers advancing with care, and the synthetic antiquity of Arabia concealing deformed architecture beneath; the cooler let out a convulsive whir and at once she charged, wrapt her arms around, shoving me under, pushed out into the floorboards, paralytic, whispered in an unknown tongue before a shriek.
Under the sterile sustain of tubes above the aguey throb subsided to a soft hum. Tiled floor underneath supported no fixture than my bent form dozing off in delirium: ‘I’ve squandered away my pearls,’ sacrilege burnt into the cracked screen, then the eternal strobe of red, green, and blue assaulting the epileptic at the stake. Pure acetylene rising above the stalls lingered in double-dewed dawn, then dissolv’d to Paradise.
Alphabet Sentences: T-Z
THE FIRST THING THAT COMES TO MIND SOMEONE WHO’S DEAR TO YOU
There were oceans in your eyes. There were veins in his wrists and veins in the prairie foliage. There, there, you came from the isola, from the curve of your spine, from the cellophane still in the freezer. Therefore, we share a heart. These are my hands, and they’re longer than a tunnel reaching through your skin. These planes never occupy such a position that can be expressed by simple indices, or so you said, mouthing along to the electric octaves that pearled the wall. They breathe shadowy when you lay towards me. They flow flowerlike through coil and capacitor. They’ll house us in an immense coal-tar cavern, sell our voices to metaphors. This face continually refers back to related inputs, disaggregated particles shed against the frosted distance. This iris I saw, throwing my voice and feeling the curve of the flute. This is how we stand now, where I have waited for you without recourse to past or oncoming totality. This is synthesis, backstroking hairs back against the grain of the linoleum floor. This is the waiting. This is the watching. This raises the question, which distinction of me? This water gathers in gloom, sourcing into the white of the horse’s eye. Those words must always exist, who else could teach us to count? Though the gaze threatens to collapse into present tense, I know the ciliary muscle flexes needlestrokes more generally. Through the convex pool of the window pulled to the stars, I’m cooling my forehead and leaning down to kiss the collected moisture. To strum any of the ringed hands, your cover blows through a tiny gateway in the junction of the spine and the skull. Today, I cannot cross. Touch begins with the second event. True movement, under the guise of repetition, substitutes the condition of love, you for I and vice versa. Try it this way: the gather-scatter sounding of mircovoid accretion, or rather, it stands for the free circulation of desire between Weierstrass points (for our purposes, “us”). Turned weltering in his legbone, he’s offal conjoined in One and in the Infinite! Turns again. Turns again. Turns. Turns. Turns. Turns. Two words are old and waiting to be seen. Underlying interests occlude their own origination. Understand the tactile experiences of the same sentence rubbed and re-rubbed along my earbone. Unroll, in any case, brightness in an eye-blink sensing yourself as you enclose us in seeing.We are moving our lips in a single flat event thinning out in a crease over the planes of the wall. We find ourselves nightswimming. We kept one sprig between our foreheads, fingers like rabbit wire enclosed into a field of fractions. We listen to each other breath beneath the overhead light, while threads of phosphorus are nicking our nerve endings open. We make no distinction between spheres, superimposed upon the grid, all exits are also an entry. What I mean is that its dorsal tract trafficks in clandestine wetware, and you intuit the eddied infrastructure as proprioceptive pulse. What I’m trying to say is, the interpretations of such units are, in one word, innumerable. What we wanted: varicose veins, neon lights, and carbon rings. When is the gaze directed towards the moon? When it’s ten toes down. Where we pooled, interlinking liquid veins, or what you referred to as “the cutting-room experience,” anyways, it’s pure ballistics now anyways. Why do animals choose to recognize when other animals die? Without any fucking bones linked up, he flicks lucent out of my fingers and into another. Yes, you. You and I and vice versa: the complex plane. You and I: The inverted print presented alongside separation negatives and solarizations. You are shifting and therefore there is the chair made accessible, therefore the chair withdraws. You can run with your mouth open. You cannot make my face out from the night even as it’s puncturing open my blue eye. You desire I as I desire you… consider the vector spaces worming their way up the gravel. You double grief when you drown towards me. You see: the fake animal (in this case, the deer) steps, with trepidation, to clear your body spread like a patient etherized upon a table. You were always - am I the right kind of person? - you were always so… You were shadowing the circulation of organs, itself a detour in the circulation of eclipsing bodies. You. Your face sank down to the rawness of the bone. Your face skating the tobacco rapids, steeped in my poems and stealing the white from my bones. Your freckles are dissolving into vibrations of light before I swallow. Your slender body your our vibratile settle you and exchange in elliptical introspection. Your spine, a logistic curve slicing the akali-metal sea? You’re not lightning yet, you kept your composition. Zipping the carbon cycle tight, you take in every point at once.
VI. UNREAL CITY MMXXV
DIANA NAGPOREWALLA CONTRIBUTOR
The skyline is sharp and jagged So when smog slaps it, Rain bleeds, thick and oily and hesitant when Every clock broke last week in Lundentūn; This went unnoticed by all except the fellow too bored to kill himself.
Omnispasmodic forgot where he was going – (Where was he going?) The destination is of little consequence so long as he keeps moving.
Ghosts descend the escalators like penitents
How months in the calendar went missing
missing.
ATTENTION PASSENGERS
Someone. murdered all his friends. and put them all. in little boxes and put all their words. in little boxes. and all their faces. In these little boxes ATTENTION
SERVICE DELAYS
ATTENTION ALL ALL PASSENGERS ATTENTION DELAYS SERVICE DELAYS
An emotion is evoked, one small enough to be eclipsed by a flea egg SERVICE DELAYS I must ask my algorithm what they think about this.
At his feet the reflection in the Unidentifiable Puddle of Liquid! ™ Looks at Omnispasmodic for longer than anyone else ever has.
ATTENTION ALL PASSENGERS (Where was he?)
ATTENTION ALL PASSENGERS THERE ARE SERVICE DELAYS (WHERE WAS HE GOING?)
You have 18 unanswered notifications!
missing
Is it because;
A. She is holding orange juice
B. It is 100% orange juice
C. Then it must be 0% not orange juice
D. When she bought one, they gave her another Free!
Omnispasmodic looks at her teeth and PASSENGERS
What was he angry about? (Where? Going?)
His phone rings only to remind him that it can while He is watched by the camera lenses in the eyes of little gods. And every time he remembers how he feels about that (Was he? Where was he?)
Something distracts and one forgets you know, one forgets where one is and where one is going, forgets that ring ring ring
The perfect choreography of the half-alive: Trained to flinch on cue, click repost, and oh look the kettle is boiling… (Breaking news does little to break anyone you know) Headlines have bloomed withered and died long before breakfast
(Orange juice is 50% off right now)
Is your grief yours, or is it merely recommended? Spectators to their own unravelling The ghosts applaud politely as the feed refreshes.
A train appears before him And Omispasmoidic dully accepts its invitation The sky flickers overhead
Poor connection
The video will resume automatically when the connection improves. -the moon buffers behind smoke.
And huddle separately beneath pulsing fluorescent bulbs. E io ch’avea d’error la testa cinta dissi: ‘Maestro, che è quel ch’i’ odo? e che gente è che par nel duol sì vinta’ They do not talk about
The woman on the wall holding a jug of orange juice is the happiest woman in the world.