Google is running an experimental version of Earth. ChatGPT wants to write your emails. DALL-E understands that happiness is the softest green and will show you photos of someone who doesn’t exist. A decoy is an imitation or a temptation, used to distract and capture. For the DECOY issue, we want to be misled, lured, ensnared between the fictitious and the real.
“I don’t see a line between fiction and nonfiction,” Sheila Heti tells our fiction board. “Even material, tangible things are a kind of fiction: we don’t see the space between the atoms which make up the couch. We don’t know what the world is to itself, which makes it all a fiction.”
In this issue, the Advocate conquers the unreal. The Art Board published eight beautiful black and white pieces of art this cycle– Alice Carpenter’s landscapes are hazy and dreamlike; Allison Cekala’s foxes are segmented portraits of the wild. Owen Rival and Dumebi Adigwe have people falling over each other and into themselves– you can’t tell what is human and what isn’t.
Inhumanity finds its way into DECOY’s prose as well: Frank Liu of the Features Board writes about fetish in his piece, “Pup Play.” “Pup play is setup, but it sets damaged men to love,” he writes. Can we find authenticity in the performance? Can we find authenticity in ourselves?
This issue turns the authentic inside out, rewears the genuine with the tags on the outside. With selections like “MIND YOUR OWN BIZNIT” and “time amendment,” the Poetry Board rejects convention, plays with grammar and dialect until you question the poem-ness of Poetry entirely. The real, it seems, emerges from imitation and re-creation.
In DECOY, the Fiction Board re-imagines the double. In Sweet Girl, Jen Julian’s protagonist takes a coat from her doppelganger. The priest of the Knoxville, Iowa diocese begins to spiral. Alayna Becker’s protagonist opens a mirror onto another mirror and confronts an infinite version of herself. They asked Allegra Goodman to create a Russian nesting doll of her life and Madeline Cash to tell us the last movie she watched in theaters. Spoiler alert -- it was Infinity Pool.
This is a landmark semester for the Advocate: fifteen years after the original, we’ve redesigned and re-launched our website: www.theharvardadvocate.com. If you’re lucky, you might be reading this there. And yes, maybe we can wax poetic about the millions of artificial neurons making somewhat-artificial art, but this issue promises a different kind of decoy. We aren’t interested in the foundationally fake, the hollow renderings of something human. This is something else entirely.
At the very top of the very first copy of the Harvard Advocate sits our motto. Veritas nihil veretur. Truth fears nothing.
If truth fears nothing, then this issue is the nothing that truth fears.
The Harvard Advocate proudly presents: DECOY.
2025