Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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From the Archives
Features • Fall 2010
**I first heard about consulting in high school. One of my more serious compatriots casually said: “I’d like to be a speechwriter when I’m older. Or a consultant.” He nodded, his chin weighed down with the gravity of the task he imagined himself undertaking—consulting—and I nodded too. No idea what it meant.
Piecemeal, as I took on consulting internships of my own, I would begin to understand. It meant questionnaires and donor requests, or opposition research for my boss Laura and one of her five or six clients; it involved hours on the phone with unwilling golf tournament sponsors and pages of unread grant applications. Still, that understanding was limited: as much as I grasped the mundane tasks and detailed policy briefs, the way it all added up remained fundamentally vague. Consulting has come to encompass an increasingly broad swath of tasks; every basic function of a campaign—organization, administration, management—has been co-opted by the label. The person who might once have been called a “finance director” or “campaign manager” is now often simply a “consultant.”
The romanticism of the campaign, the hard work of volunteers, the adrenaline of the unknown before polls close: none of this is a myth. And yet the scheduled predictability of the daily grind shields a larger, more troubling mysticism. Rarely is there any doubt which client is going to win—or lose—come the primaries; there is no demand for people who might point out those uncanny truths. But the work continues regardless: adhering to the predictable schedules laid out by advisors, interns spend weeks learning just the right way to hold a client’s hand and make sure he dials twenty numbers before lunch. There is always a demand for the consultant, and the consulting intern: a candidate will find you so you can start calling him a client.
:::
Despite having its own yearly awards ceremony (the Pollies), a license for practice (the New York City Lobbyist Registry), and the attention of thousands of ambitious college students (the Ivy League), political consulting lacks a history as well as a cohesive purpose. An obscure advisor to President McKinley was the first political consultant: his only other claim to fame is his potential status as Karl Rove’s personal political role model. (Karl Rove denies it adamantly.)
Nevertheless, consulting constructs an identity founded less on its history than on its characters. The contemporaries of political consultants always seem to remember them fondly: the Pollies are a genial and bipartisan affair where most people leave with a prize, often for tacky videos or cookie-cutter direct mail advertisements. But as the years pass, consultants pass through history anonymously—James Carville, Mark Hanna, Joseph Napolitan—content with having risen from the footnotes of political campaigns to become body paragraphs.
I had never worked on a successful campaign when I answered the call of my first Craigslist ad. Most of the consultants I encountered were hired out of college (Ivy Leagues, or tiny liberal arts schools) with one of two aspirations. Some were like Laura, my most recent sub-boss: independent and so waist-deep in student government campaigns and political rallies that the workplace was an extension of her extracurriculars. Others were like Annie, or Blake—not sure where to go, but smart in all the right ways, good at dressing in business casual and professional enough that they figured they could coast for two years as consultants while getting a masters in something (Public policy? Administration?) before law school.
My new company—the Advance Group—was not really the company I wanted to work for. I wanted to work for a political campaign. I had done it once before and relished the afternoons spent jogging through the streets of Chinatown with flyers, moving up and down the fire escapes of Lower East Side tenements. I acquired six words of Chinese (enough to order dollar dumplings in groups of five) and about as much Spanish, which was more useful when actually campaigning. I hassled old women outside of supermarkets to sign petitions, and commuted two hours a day.
But we lost that campaign. My candidate—a slightly balding thirty-year-old—was not the incumbent, and this meant he was doomed to failure, something my high school sophomore optimism could not fathom until I sat despondently with the other volunteers at a bar and watched Paul tipsily thank all involved. Really, the journey had just begun, he said; this was the first step to reclaiming the Lower East Side and we should all just drink and be merry. L’chayim! One of the volunteers ordered a beer and looked expectantly at his fellow underage drinkers. I left an hour later.
Two years later, I stumbled across the Advance Group on Craigslist. It satisfied what I wanted, which was to have a win under my belt—to know what it felt like to see my candidate achieve a majority percentage on the TV screen. But instead of the feeling of unity I’d hoped for, I found myself with a group of clients who wouldn’t endorse one other, who fought incessantly in the Senate or Assembly. In fact, the only thing they did seem to have in common was that they’d all turned to us to help them with their campaigns. I started to discover a paradoxical need to not have a win under my belt: the innate ambivalence, the uncertainty, the Republican boss organizing for Democratic candidates.
:::
In an office strewn with messenger bags and bike helmets, the interns sat together in a conference room-cum-kitchen-cum-office. We had rotating shifts and usually two or three weeks of overlapping schedules. When the intern season was at its peak, there might be five or six of us at a table, laptops in front of us, typing up briefings or responses to endorsement questionnaires while trying to avoid the busy phones by appearing busier than we were. Daily, we were sent up and down the green and red lines, to nail salons or campaign offices or union headquarters to pick up checks: always checks, rarely any other form of paperwork.
I saw the Bronx, Bay Ridge, Harlem, the Financial District—some familiar haunts, others only fleeting—through the eyes of a suited intern. I forgot how to be a New Yorker: my skin felt too big for me, my clothes always stuck to the small of my back, I was always carrying too much in my purse. I could still navigate subways. But when I had to walk, I stumbled in heels with dozens of envelopes, copies of ballots, and petitions under my arm as I grabbed lunch on the go. Caught in a rainshower and sprinting through Spanish Harlem to the safety of the 6 train—checks stashed under my suit jacket to keep from the damp—I imagined how much easier it would be to complete the same tasks in jeans and sneakers, sans the button down and faux-leather purse. I slipped five times on my way to work in one summer: the sidewalks around Penn Station are smooth and wide, and my heels almost always lost traction, sending me sprawling into the intersection.
When I wasn’t stumbling my way in and out of subways, I was firmly a creature of the office. Most of the interns—who didn’t share my simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm toward the novelty of the daily tasks and ambivalence about their ultimate purpose—hated the work. For me, dissatisfaction only truly hit when I interacted with my boss, Scott.
Scott was a big presence, the kind that regularly embodied that adjectives that define consulting: loud, rude, demanding, sarcastic, sharp. He got in trouble for voter fraud with ACORN and admitted it on national television; the names and contacts he picked up in state and local races became the company’s primary clients. None of the interns quit because we didn’t interact with Scott enough to care about his brass humor, the way the air conditioner was never thrumming quite loud enough to drown out his shout for his personal assistant, the way our wallets bled money for the Metrocards and dollar-lunches our stipends could not cover because we did not have stipends, the way his son was the only intern in the office being paid despite him never being around the office. We just filed disbursement reports, meticulously, looking at the money we weren’t making.
His personal assistant did quit, though. Mousy, shy, face framed by enormous glasses, Danielle was sent three days in a row to attempt to recover Scott’s impounded Chrysler, sent off with only a paid Metrocard and a bagged lunch. The fourth day she didn’t show up to work, and the fifth day I was told to write my own reference letter, since she wasn’t going to be back.
:::
The more that information is disseminated, and the greater the prevalence of media, the more important consulting becomes. Consulting satisfies our need for expertise—to hear sophisticated explanations for what we already know how to do—but it also reflects the way campaigns are changing. Now consultants sit and update Twitter feeds, create sleek websites from mass-produced templates that interns update daily, discuss strategy that boils down to where to solicit money from and how often. Their college degrees give them an acute sense of how to tell people what they already know. This was the consulting world, from my vantage point: the consultants had an uncanny sense for what was predictable, particularly as it was already happening. That candidates could ignore details so brilliantly and with such flamboyance seemed more than just myopic.
More frustrating was that really, at the root of it, we were still unable to figure out what made a candidate a winner. Once, my boss sat me down in an office with a client running for State Assembly and told me to hand him call sheets. “Just make sure he makes his calls,” said Lauren, his consultant. “He gets distracted.” Two hours later, the candidate—jovial, with a baby face and jerry curls—had completed a grand total of six calls before calling it a day so he could make it to lunch. The stack of call sheets he was meant to get through—at least fifty more—sat on my lap, unmarked.
He went on to win his election. The other candidate whose work I did—he would lose. Tall, a little gangly, with a fluffy and poorly styled haircut, he would lock himself in the office for hours at a time, making dozens of calls in three different languages. His donors included Ed Norton and Matt Damon, but when I called unions, desperate to win their endorsement, they would point out the obvious: he was certainly qualified, but he wasn’t an incumbent. Didn’t have access to the Hispanic base. Laura’s trepidation whenever his future prospects were discussed was obvious: “He’s one of the ones you actually want to win,” she said to me over lunch, a month before he actually lost.
Those were the minds behind the campaigns we managed. The consultants of my office might not run fundraising events, but they were are a constant presence, collecting checks and chatting up donors. Blackberries were a familiar presence, perched on tables within easy reach. I’m pretty sure the Blackberries weren’t company-issue, but boxes of phones sat in the supply closet of the Advance Group, next to standard FedEx folders and extra letterhead. They came with the territory of consulting: unnecessary, for show, potentially useful in a more successful future in which the clients who won weren’t established incumbents. Half a dozen phones lay individually wrapped in boxes, waiting for use.
:::
The only thing consulting does not lack is a paycheck. You won’t see it as an intern, but you’ll keep coming back, thinking it’s waiting for you, hidden in some desk. As such an intern, you might find yourself hired after the following exchange with an associate consultant:
“Well, what do you think you would like to do here?”
“Um, I like politics. I’m really familiar with New York politics.”
That will draw a nod. “What really inspires you?”
“Sorry?”
“All of us in the office, we have something that just—just makes us tick.” He will wave a long arm in the direction of the ceiling, that place where all things that make people tick must come from.
“Oh.”
“Mine is labor relations. Working with unions. Labor-related protests and organizing are just incredibly compelling.” Expect an expectant look.
“I like, um, education. I’m really familiar with education.”
And finally, the telltale beam. “Great! We do some of that. When can you start working? And do you have any questions?”
Happy to be offered a job, you will not think to ask at the time: so what do you actually do? When did you realize that this was what made you tick? But you will quickly become very good at asking other questions, when they sit you down in a conference room and tell you to answer the phones: “Advance Group, how can I direct your call?”
**
Fiction • Spring 2023 - Decoy
Edited by Talia Blatt
Sheila Heti is a Canadian novelist, playwright, and essayist. The Fiction Board of The Harvard Advocate met with her over Zoom the morning of December 15, 2022. We spoke about her novels and children’s books, theater, mushrooms, reading her diaries in The New York Times, artificial intelligence, and how maybe everything is just fiction.
Features • Fall 2024 - Land
ROMANCE, PART ONE
Before he died, the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, complained of back pain. A pain, he expressed, that began at the base of his spine and bloomed outwards, a pain ancient and vestigial. He held the interlocking bones in his back desperately, as if his hands were the last thing holding himself up. He expressed the pain to his valet, who went to call a doctor. No sooner than the doctor was summoned, the Architect of India collapsed. It was six thirty in the morning.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
I asked the board to generate a question they would ask their fear. CBT and creative writing prompt books sold at Barnes & Noble seem to have re-connotated this kind of exercise, so no one entertained me. Instead they made many thoughtful-but-sprawling remarks on fear writ large that I have done my best to pin down and translate into generative questions. Below is our response to ourselves. —Tess Wayland, Features Editor 2025
Features • Winter 2016 - Danger
I was out of shape when I showed up. I had kind of thought I was done. I had already made it through the hoop that counted, the admissions hoop. I had stuck my landing; now I could relax. They don’t tell you when they accept you that hoop-jumping is the official sport of the College. Especially at the beginning, I had this sense that I was in fact a hoop-jumping recruit, a scholarship kid. I had to keep jumping to earn my spot here. I would later talk about the sport in terms of the fix: that dopamine rush as your toes have cleared and you realize *you’re through*. In those first monthswe were all obsessed with recreating the experience of that first successful jump.
You get the sense that you have to join a cult to make it here. There are a lot of options for what cult to join, but you have to join *one* or you’re never gonna have a Real College Experience. Unless you have really great roommates. If you have really great roommates, you’re exempt.
To join a cult, you have to jump through that cult’s hoop. When you meet people here, you look at their bodies. You look at what muscles they have where, whether it looks like they could make a particular jump.
The cults recruit every semester. They run training programs that last most of the semester and culminate with the Jump where you either make it through the hoop and into the cult or you don’t. Sometimes there is a preliminary hoop that happens halfway through training, and if you don’t make it, you aren’t allowed to try to make it through the final hoop that semester. Every cult has its own hoop—different shapes, different heights—and each training program is tailored specifically to the cult’s hoop. Sometimes training for one can make it very hard for your muscles to learn to jump through a different one. Some hoops are easier for certain body types.
It’s a big deal. At the very end of College there’s always the prestigious Hoops prize which I think is for the senior who has jumped through the most hoops. If you get that you can do whatever you want. Then you definitely don’t have to jump through any more hoops.
I knew pretty early on which cult I wanted to try out for. I went to the Intro Training meeting. I was shaking a little bit when I walked into the culthouse—it felt important and intimidating, like the very wood was charged with gravitas. I looked at all the older affiliates and thought they looked much cooler than me. They were sitting around a heavy wooden table, with the Big Kahunas sitting in the middle looking important, looking out at us. All the jumpers were on the floor. All the affiliates spoke with the same cadence. Perhaps they spent so much time around each other that one had adopted another’s distinct manner of speaking in turn until everyone spoke with the same unified nuances. This was true of a lot of the cults: You could tell who was in what by how their voice sounded. All these affiliates made it through the hoop, I thought to myself. This terrified me. I imagined their bodies tensing up with nerves, sprinting and vaulting and *clearing the hoop*, muscles taut. I imagined the smiles on their faces when they stuck the landing. Some of their bodies had since gone to seed. Once you made it through the hoop, I guessed, you didn’t really have to stay in shape. You didn’t have to worry about much at all: In a cult, you had it made. People *respected *you.
At the training meeting, we watched all the old videos, in which famous old affiliates, long graduated, cleared the cult hoop with *style*. I felt my toes pointing in my boots. I was anxious to prove myself. I was on *fire *with it. At the end of the meeting, the Big Kahunas looked at each other and took the big group of us jumpers into a small locked room in the basement of the culthouse. We were all huddled in the doorway—I went up on my tiptoes to see over the group in front of me. And there it was.
“Of course, it will be higher,” said the Big Kahuna. It was old and made of a warm brassy medal and extensively engraved. It was a small hoop—not more than three feet in diameter—but I heard they kept it relatively low down. This was good, because I was not very tall. It seemed like it would weigh a lot and hurt a lot if you messed up your jump and crashed into it. I looked back at the other jumpers. They were all shiny-eyed. Some of them were already in very good hoop-shape. I was going to have to train very hard, but I really wanted it.
I spent long hours doing the calisthenics the cult’s trainer recommended.
There are rumors that affiliates lower the hoop for jumpers they like, for jumpers who look like they would belong in the cult. I didn’t know whether to believe them or not, so I tried to dress like the affiliates and try to get the cult trainer to like me, just in case it helps. I got to know some of the other jumpers during our training sessions and we would laugh in hushed voices about the vocal tics of the cult trainer or the Big Kahunas’ pretensions during the Intro Training meeting. I felt connected to these other jumpers.
A couple days before the preliminary hoop, I cried over lunch with an older friend who had cleared a number of well-respected hoops. Sometimes around here it feels like everything's about who's jumped through what hoops. I asked why we even needed cults. If there were no cults, I told him, we could just*spend time together *and get to know each other in the normal way and not spend our time sniffing out who was worth knowing based on what cult they were in. He nodded patiently and told me that all of these things had occurred to him when he was a young jumper. This complacency made me terribly angry: Once you were enfranchised, once you were in, there was obviously no motivation to do anything about it. I imagined myself, suddenly, years down the line, a complacent affiliate, watching all these freshmen making the jump they’d trained for months for and missing the hoop and knowing they would spend another semester on the outside. Don’t let me be that person, I told myself. A small voice said, *But if you make it, of course you will be. *
I made it through the preliminary hoop, which was just like the final one but larger, easier, made of a flimsier and more forgiving material, and kept training hard. I watched my body change. I woke up to aching muscles I didn’t know I had. I dreamed about that final hoop. There it was, dusty, winking at me from the basement of the culthouse.
Final hoop day was less of a big deal than I thought it would be: They hauled the thing up into the big main room on the second floor of the culthouse and you waited in line until it was your turn to jump. You made it through or you didn’t, and then you landed.
When you're looking at a hoop—even a low hoop, even a hoop that everyone makes it through eventually—you're thinking a couple of thoughts. You're thinking that this hoop is the measure of your worth as an individual. You *know *that this isn’t true—you know that there’s a lot of chance and variables you can’t control that go into whether you make it or not—but you inadvertently can color the result as the ultimate reflection on your innermost self. Do I deserve this, you’re thinking, or you’re not, because you’re focusing too hard on the jump itself.
I made it, and I stuck my landing, thank god. The cult trainer and a couple of other affiliates marked notes on clipboards. A Kahuna carefully measured my final distance from the hoop, which was discouragingly small. Other jumpers had jumped further. There was some polite applause, and I was ushered into a room downstairs to wait with the other jumpers who had made it.
Because I was a freshman the cult swallowed me pretty cleanly—I didn’t have many strong attachments. After I became an affiliate of my cult, I saw those other jumpers—the ones I’d gotten to know who hadn’t make it—around the College. They didn’t really want to talk to me. It was okay: Suddenly I had a place to go, somewhere I felt a little bit special every time I walked in the door. The culthouse felt like it was a place of magic. It radiated out from the hoop stored in the basement, permeating everything we did and said inside the culthouse. I felt lucky to be a part of all of it.
A week or so after I made it through the hoop, a Big Kahuna mused that he was jealous: He wished he could be a new affiliate again. I stared at him, wide-eyed, and asked why he’d ever want that. Big Kahuna smiled and said that as a new affiliate, everything felt so magical and shiny and new. Over time, he said, with more responsibility, the magic wears out. I have a song for you, he said, and hooked up his phone to the speakers to play a song which repeated a single lyric to an infuriating beat. “You can normalize,” a voice said over the sound system, “Don’t it make you feel alive?”
I thought about that glowing hoop in the basement. I couldn’t imagine normalizing any of this. We have this notion that we can reach out and grab the self-assurance of affiliation and hold onto it forever. Really we can only take validation in doses. The feeling always fades, and then you need a little more. You find yourself another hoop, but there are always diminishing returns: Suddenly the same dosage won’t do it for you anymore. It’s like when you get stronger and suddenly the ten pound weight doesn’t make your muscles burn. You get something heavier. It seemed like if you wanted to feel like a real part of the cult, you had to be a Kahuna.
Becoming a Kahuna meant another jump—this time through the separate intracult hoop, which was a different deal entirely. This one was very large but was some kind of a polygon, a scalene triangle, they said, so it would be easy to guess the angle wrong and get stuck. The Kahuna hoop was set out annually and the jump was set to happen about a month after I became an affiliate. Luckily for new affiliates they kept the hoop pretty low. (It was higher, of course, if you wanted to be a Bigger Kahuna). I was still in good jumping shape and made it right through.
As a little Kahuna, I had new responsibilities.
I could play my own music over the speakers in the culthouse. Suddenly I couldn’t hear the different cadence in the voices of the Big Kahunas and couldn’t tell if I’d adopted it or not—it just felt normal. At first, cult-ural acclimation is confusing and weird and stilted, and then it’s natural, and then it’s just like breathing, and then you can’t imagine *not *doing those things. You can’t remember a time when you didn’t know to play this song or drink that drink. I *was *starting to normalize. There is something really satisfying about feeling like a part of a place just by knowing its little customs.
But that humming golden hoop in the basement just felt like an old hump of metal. For so long I had felt I was catching a glimpse of something furtive and beautiful that belonged to all of us, partaking in a set of customs and aesthetics decided by a Big Kahuna long ago. Now, another little Kahuna and I would play a certain song and then someone would ask for that same song a couple days later. We could do things that had never been done before, and affiliates might like them, affiliates might do them with us.
This was exciting, but it was also hard to be in awe of something we were making. I wanted that reverie back.
Suddenly I was on the other side of the Intro Training meeting. I was very conscious of this reversal, but it didn’t really feel like a big deal. It felt hollower from the other side: The affiliates at the table were all familiar faces. I wondered if we seemed intimidating and cool to the jumpers. I couldn’t imagine we did. We were just goons.
I was put in charge of training a couple of jumpers that Spring. I turned to older affiliates for training programs and held as many extra practice sessions as my jumpers wanted. I cared about them. Not one of my jumpers made it.
And then there are the would-be affiliates who were told from a young age that hoop-jumping isn't for them. Their bodies weren't built to jump through hoops, affiliates used to think. Moreover, maybe the hoops weren't made to allow their bodies through. This is a complicated problem which can't always be solved by changing the shape of the hoop (the shape of each cult's hoop is sacred, so sacred). From the inside, I badly wanted to believe that mystique and inclusivity were not mutually exclusive.
At the College, the absence of a cult can feel like a deep insecurity that leaves you open to a kind of death: the death of being just like everyone else. Or at the very least, it’s like being the only vegetarian at a BBQ restaurant or the non-smoker on the smoke break, except instead of cigarettes we’re talking about achievement-crack. I admire these people who do the College without it.
Sometimes I worry that one day I will be old with all of the spoils of my hoop-jumping career sitting around me and wish I had spent my life on something other than the stupid sport. I consider the arthritis some long-term hoop-jumpers get from the repeated exertion. I’ve already had one bout of this arthritis.
But the spoils can be sweet: the feeling of communal self-worth; a kind of special inclusion in something magical and secret; a humbling sense of one’s own privilege to be a part of the group. I think some of it also really does come from all those good things we talk about in our pre-jump speeches: from having a community in which to invest your energies, a thing you have come to care about altruistically, for its own sake. The big old world, from inside of a cult, was whittled to a manageable size.
I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive—the community-mindedness and the validation —but I worry that the latter is addictive.
I decide to go for a bigger hoop. A lot of people expect that I’ll have no trouble making it through—I’ve never missed, have I? I’ve done a lot for the cult and the Big Kahunas will recognize that and put the hoop lower.
I don't make it through the hoop. A tie on my jacket gets caught on one of the odd polygon’s corners and I hang there, half in half out, for much too long before they figure out how to get me down.
People normally don't get stuck. When they take me down, everyone’s sympathetic. It’s okay, they tell me. We’re still your family.
The other little Kahuna makes it through and becomes a Big Kahuna. I feel a little bit left behind, and then again, I’m happy for him. I’m happy for the cult; I know he’ll do great things as a Big Kahuna. But I’m sad that I won’t get to do them with him. I didn’t know how to look at this: The cult was in great hands, but those hands weren’t my hands. It didn’t need me.
These things are really fucking messy psychological experiences. They never sound good politically: In this article, I inevitably come across as overly ambitious or a traitor to my cult or allegiant to a problematic power structure. We talk about all this in such sanitized terms: Are cults objectively *good*, or objectively *bad*, for the College community as a whole? I think the real answer is much more nuanced—the structure as it is has oscillated between giving me a home and a sense of magic and breaking hearts (mine, others’). My time as a jumper and then as an affiliate and then as a Kahuna—an absurd trajectory which is completely illegible outside of the College—has given some meaning to my subjective and individual experience. I think there are conversations about these groups that aren’t making it into the discourse (the politically-incorrect, subjective, biased experiences of people inside and out, which get sterilized into strong political statements). I think we too often conflate ambivalent subjectivity with emptiness, uselessness.
Let’s end with a tally. I have gratitude for the strength I gained from jumps, successful and not, and gratitude for the family the hoop gave me. I worry about the way that love for the sport itself can tear this family apart. I worry about cult-ures of exclusivity and the lines (perhaps arbitrary) they draw between the inside and the outside. We dance across these lines (which make all of us uncomfortable, inside or out) with buzzwords like “inclusivity” and scathing op-eds and small acts of kindness toward our hoop-trainees. I think there are fulfilling ways to be in and around this cult-ure without hoop addiction. I am still trying to find them.
2026