Author: Jo Moses

These are questions that are relevant to all journalism, crime journalism especially, so as the staff of the Campanil we sat down to try and answer some questions of our own. I told my colleagues what I had watched and read, and I asked them: as consumers, potential true crime fans and as journalists, how can we cover sensitive and sensational subjects without exploiting them?

When I proposed a review of CBS’s “Silence of the Lambs”(1991) sequel series “Clarice” (2021) at the Campanil’s weekly pitch meeting, I assumed that I’d just be writing a couple thousand words about how the show turned out to be a trash fire, as expected, and didn’t rectify any of the transphobic messages of the film upon which it is based, as expected. Having watched the first three episodes of “Clarice,” I can report that while both of those things are technically true, the show somehow manages to fail in even more new and interesting ways.

The world is burning beneath our feet. In the United States alone, institutionalized racism has a death toll that grows higher every day, prisons mimic modern slavery, immigrants are kept in internment camps at the border, the environment has no protection from the corporations destroying it, and we are being ravaged by a deadly pandemic with negligible government support to mitigate its effects — all as we desperately try to crawl out of the quicksand of fascism into which our country is sinking. At the Campanil, we are not simply impartial observers to this apocalypse, we are also a part of it. We too are impacted. Our staff is diverse, with many people of color, queer people, disabled people, women and trans folk. This week we met as a group, looked at the state of the world, and asked: “What do we do? As journalists, what is our responsibility?”

Since the 1810 sale of S&J Fuller’s first manufactured paper doll, children and adults alike have loved these two-dimensional toys. Whether paper dolls are detailed depictions of characters like S&J Fuller’s “Little Fanny” or simply blank slates for the player to style, they have always been fun for anyone with nimble fingers and a sense of fashion to project their imagination onto. Humans love to play dress-up, and it’s no surprise that our passion for paper dolls, a traditionally analog pastime, has flourished in the digital age. 

The 1991 film from director Jonathan Demme is a hard watch — particularly if you’re sensitive to deeply problematic portrayals of trans and gender-nonconforming people. It has received unrelenting scrutiny for its portrayal of transfemininity, and it was at the center of a controversy that exploded immediately upon its release.

On Nov. 5, 1.4 million people mourned as Castiel, one of the star characters of the CW’s “Supernatural,” was cast into “super Hell” immediately after his long-awaited queer love confession to Dean. Since 2005, fans have championed the show as LGBTQ representation, confident in the impending success of the implied queer love story at its center that was sure to be resolved. But instead of reciprocation, a kiss, or even an open ending, viewers got a comically stoic climax to their long-anticipated romance. 

As college students, we have all been told time and time again: do not go into the arts. We live under capitalism, where our value as people is directly correlated with how much we’re paid. As corporations turn into media conglomerates and media conglomerates turn into monopolies, economic opportunities for creatives are shrinking. Terrified parents have only increased their pleas to their artistically inclined children, begging them to get degrees in something “useful.” However, quarantine has forced us all to reconsider what it is we deem useful, and to reckon with the massive role that entertainment media plays in our quarantined lives.

Our understanding of sex and gender has come a long way in recent decades, as well as our understanding of the power that teaching about it carries. Teaching outdated ideas of sex and gender is a tool in the pedagogy of oppression. This is in part why the fight for LGBTQ rights and acceptance has come for academia, a place often thought of as a liberal echo chamber but which can, in reality, become a breeding ground for outdated, essentialist sentiment, particularly in the sciences. Fortunately, institutions of higher education continually concede to pressure from activists to acknowledge that the idea of teaching hard, unbiased truth in the sciences is unattainable as long as the ruling class gets to dictate what is truth and what is fiction. 

Mills students have been anxious since Oct. 6, when the President’s Office sent an alarming email informing students that the Mills administration had “began conversations to consider deepening Mills’ long-standing partnership with UC Berkeley.” The email seemingly referred to Berkeley’s need to expand and Mills’ lack of financial sustainability, claiming that the goal of an expanded partnership between the two institutions “is to sustain the socially-driven mission of Mills College and enable UC Berkeley to serve more California undergraduate students.” Worried students swarmed the virtual town hall with many questions on their minds, namely this: were UC Berkeley and Mills merging?

The general election is coming up quickly, and in addition to casting our vote for the president, Californians will also have to decide on a number of propositions regarding state policy. These propositions don’t get nearly as much coverage in the media as the presidential election, so it can be overwhelming to open your ballot on election day, having only the complex and obfuscating proposition descriptions to guide you.