| Vassar College's student newspaper of record since 1866
Volume 165 | Issue 1 | January 29, 2026 | miscellanynews.org | | Welcome to The Miscellany News' weekly email newsletter! Each week's articles will be delivered right to your inbox. If you know of anyone who would be interested in receiving this service, please share it with them at this link. | | JACKSON HREBIN | On Monday, Jan. 19, dozens of students, faculty and community members gathered in the Villard Room for Vassar College’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Breakfast. President of the College Elizabeth Bradley, Deputy to the President and Secretary of the Board of Trustees Wesley Dixon and Associate Dean of the College for Student Growth and Engagement Wendy Maragh Taylor organized the event and delivered remarks. The speakers shared personal stories, discussed their desire to foster a more inclusive college community and spoke about the significance of King’s legacy. | | Jackson Hrebin/The Miscellany News. | HADLEY AMATO | On Jan. 20, the Dutchess County Legislature met to discuss their plans for the upcoming year and hear from constituents. The Tuesday night session was packed tightly with newly elected and re-elected legislators fresh off of November elections, as well as dozens of community members who braved the cold to make their demands known. | | Annie McShane/The Miscellany News. | | ALLISON LOWE | Vassar College recently approved a new major in dance. In the coming years, the Dance Department will expand its offerings beyond its current correlate sequences in Dance Performance and Dance Studies, allowing students to declare a dance major. Prior to this decision, the Dance Department had been the only performing arts department at Vassar to not offer a major. | | Image courtesy of Miranda Shandell ’29. | | MELODY HAMILTON | As a music major, I have endured months of my peers excitedly buzzing about their work on an unfamiliar opera called “Computing Venus.” So, when I finally found my seat in the maze-like Martel Theater last Thursday, Jan. 22, I was expecting quite a show. As the LED stars illuminated above an old-fashioned telescope, a distant, more frilly version of Vassar unfolded before my eyes, and by the end of the show, I completely understood my peers’ infatuation with the piece. It was truly remarkable to see such a carefully crafted work written about a piece of history that once unfolded at this very school. | | Image courtesy of Marta Karpovich ’29. | | GRACE FINKE | The key to success is a combination of self-confidence, charisma and a creative hustle. That is, at least, according to champion table tennis player Marty Reisman. Reisman’s notoriety is due to both his talent and the extreme measures he took to achieve success. His eccentric life has recently been dramatized in Josh Safdie’s 2025 film, “Marty Supreme,” a brilliant mess of overlapping storylines that cleverly satirizes extreme desperation in the name of ambition. | Annie McShane/The Miscellany News. | | LORA JANCZEWSKI | Over winter break, I wanted to bake my own birthday cake with my family. When I suggested this idea, my sister began asking ChatGPT for a cake recipe. I was apprehensive at first—surely there was no reason to immediately turn to artificial intelligence (AI). But within seconds, we had a clear and straightforward chantilly cake recipe: ingredients, instructions, estimated duration—all of it listed. We went out to buy the ingredients and returned home to find that we had missed some. No problem, though—my sister just told ChatGPT that we forgot the buttermilk, and it instructed us to use a mix of milk and yogurt. Oops, we added the sugar into the dry ingredients instead of the wet. That is fine! Just make these adjustments. After multiple tweaks and changes to fit our convenience, we had our cake—perfectly accurate in the eyes of ChatGPT, but not quite the dessert we signed up for. | Image courtesy of Noa DeRosa-Anderson ’28. | | MAKENNA BROWN | Returning home for the holidays, familiar faces I knew so well glinted with curiosity and questions, as if I were an exotic animal on display, estranged from my natural habitat. I became perceived but not felt. Present yet unrecognized, I adopted the role of the out-of-town visitor, existing amid interactions permeated by recollection. The comforts of home blurred themselves in conversations that flowed differently, in details I observed like a stranger to the land, entangled in the rhythm of routine I used to seek.
| | Image courtesy of Makenna Brown ’28. | | WREN BUEHLER | For years, we’ve laughed as David Attenborough narrated birds absolutely fumbling: singing the wrong notes, gifting trinkets that aren’t even that blue or fucking up that weird wiggly thing that some of them do. But recent ornithosociological surveys reveal that many male birds are growing resentful with recent declines in avian courtship fomenting the spread of incel ideology. We reached out to several self-described avian men’s rights activists for more. | | | Image courtesy of Charlotte Willenbring ’29. | | | BENJI BOYD | Vassar students arrived back from holiday break to find one last freshly unwrapped present awaiting them here on campus. In the six weeks we were gone, the new admissions building has shed its housewrap to reveal an exterior that we can call neither sleek nor rustic, maximalist nor minimalist. What we do know is that the Dede Thompson Bartlett Center for Admission and Career Education (which we’ll surely all start calling “the Dede” sooner or later) is sending shock waves rippling across campus as students, faculty and the more seasoned structures on the block share mixed reactions.
| | EVAN SEKER | Scene 1: An EMPTY MISC OFFICE. EVAN ’28 soliloquizes to an unseen audience. His voice is humorous despite the grave tone he uses. | | Annie McShane/The Miscellany News. | | J. LINCOLN DAUER | The Daily Wire’s flashy, buzzword-filled headline “Woke New York College Allowed Burlesque Troupe to Mock Christianity in Campus Chapel” frames the story it tells as a clear case of institutional disregard for Christian students. Yet a careful reading of the article itself reveals that its central claims rely less on evidence of discrimination and more so on a rhetorical conflation of offense, blasphemy and unequal treatment. Once these categories are disentangled, The Daily Wire’s narrative begins to unravel. | | EMMA DAROSA | Anywhere you go on campus, you can find people doing all kinds of different things: reading their horoscope in the paper, writing a discussion post seven minutes before it is due and maybe kissing each other. What are people doing most of the time, though, more than any of that other stuff? They are on their phones. Yeah, yeah, nobody wants to read another self-adulating article about how screens are ruining our lives, whatever. Phones suck! I hate nothing more than when I am sitting with a group of people, and nobody is talking because everyone is on their phone. I am not immune or anything. I think I have found a really obvious solution to the phone problem on this campus—doing hobbies for attention. | | Annie McShane/The Miscellany News. | | SOREN FISCHER | The law can be an incredibly powerful tool. It has been used to sanctify collective goods, such as universal suffrage, and collective bads, such as the normalization of resource depletion and environmental pollution. It has structured societies, resolved disputes and at times, served as a mechanism for expanding rights and protections. But law is decided by those in power, and power, by its nature, is not synonymous with goodness. | | SYDNEY JONES | I am sick of talking about AI. Maybe you are sick of reading about AI. In spite of the fatigue from the last few years of generative language models’ rapid development, I write this article for the very reason of defending this process: writing. AI has no place, and should not have a place, in the future, taking writing away from the hands of humans, no matter how clumsy and slow we may be. I am frustrated by AI’s claim over the em dash, Oxford comma—although I cannot include one for AP Style Guide reasons, please imagine an Oxford comma here—and generally catchy, but ultimately disingenuously, “nuanced” sentence structure. Seriously—give me back my em dash. | | Sydney Jones/The Miscellany News. | | JACOB CIFUENTES | The past few years have been challenging for the social atmospheres of colleges and universities. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement—pro-Palestine advocates calling for institutions to abstain from financially supporting Israel—and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts have been under attack from the Trump administration. Orders from the President attacking higher education have included the withholding of federal funding, the gutting of DEI, the elimination of student visas and even deportations of international students and legal residents. It is certainly a scary time to work at or attend a college, and yet some aim to turn the temperature up a few notches higher. | | HENRY FRANCE | For most, the Vassar winter break is a long and leisurely hiatus. But for many winter season student-athletes, the break is just a brief pause. The men’s and women’s basketball teams, men’s volleyball team, men’s and women’s squash and men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams reported back to campus early for practice and competition. Many athletes arrive days after Christmas. After a historic fall season, including four conference champions and six national championship tournament qualifiers, winter and spring teams are teed up for lofty expectations. | | CASEY MCMENAMIN | Last year, I wrote my first article for The Miscellany News, reflecting on my lifelong experience as a Chicago Bears fan. The Bears had just squeaked out the ugliest of wins in Week 1 of the 2024season, secured against a mediocre Tennessee Titans team led by Will Levis. Caleb Williams did not look like the Heisman Trophy-winning No. 1 overall pick quarterback that was promised to deliver the Bears Faithful their first Super Bowl in 40 years. Despite Williams winning the first game of his young career, there was little hope for Bears fans. As my friend Gavin Akoto ’25 and I watched the game from our couch, there was a hint of déjà vu in the air. As experienced fans of the Blue and Orange, we had seen this story many times. We had lived through the screen passes of Matt Nagy and Mitch Trubisky, we had cheered as Justin Fields scrambled for a 60-yard touchdown, only to fumble the ball or miss three open receivers on the next series, and finally, we had suffered through the torment of Matt “Dweeberflus” Eberflus. We knew that pain and loss were coming. We could never have guessed that a year and some change later, our beloved Chicago Bears would be one score away from heading to the National Football Conference (NFC) Championship game. | | Image courtesy of Anika Mueller-Hickler ’26. | | | | |
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