note 02: a love(?) letter to isla vista ✨
a decade of reflection after my school went viral
Content Warning: Mass shootings, gun violence
🌴 heaven and heartbreak in paradise
Today marks 10 years since the Isla Vista shooting. A whole decade since our little community was ravaged by a self-described “incel” whose rage killed seven people and indelibly changed our school, and beyond that, the conversation around gun violence in the nation.
It’s a strange thing to be a part of a larger-than-life event, especially when you feel so removed from it. I have the luxury of not having it occupy my every waking thought, but I still have so many complex feelings about it. I know I said that this newsletter was going to be less personal and more professional, but this felt important to write. And I wanted to share it because gun violence affects all of us—even if not directly, we all suffer the psychosocial effects, which in itself is an indictment of how our government has normalized this climate of fear. This letter is a bit of a catharsis, for me and everyone else who went through this. There aren’t any good answers, but I’m hoping to contextualize it, because like it or not, this was a big, defining event. It haunts us a decade later, and until we get comprehensive, nation-wide gun reform, it will continue to haunt us.
My alma mater, the University of California, Santa Barbara, is famous for its campus—situated on sandstone bluffs cradled by the Pacific Ocean and surrounding wetlands, it’s a picturesque jewel of a university, with grassy knolls vivisected by paths for bicycles (students’ main form of transportation) and dotted with palm trees. At least, this is the brochure version.
But its lifeblood is its community. As any UCSB student knows, the real magic lies in Isla Vista, the little cluster of houses and businesses that begins just as you step off the campus, and stretches for just short of two miles down the California coast. It’s a community in the purest sense of the word—unincorporated territory, with its own arts and culture scene, imbued with a unique sense of pride. Somehow, even with 30,000 people, it still feels small and local. The campus belongs to the UC system, but Isla Vista belongs to the people.
I will take every opportunity to wax poetic about Isla Vista, because it is truly impossible to describe it to people who never lived there, to fully capture its allure (but we love trying). You just had to be there.
My friend Britt wrote my favorite tribute to Isla Vista back in 2018—whenever I read it I am instantly transported to a time when the world felt open and limitless, and I’d fall asleep listening to the distant sounds of ocean waves and people biking drunkenly through the streets:
Isla Vista sometimes felt like a dream—not in the definition of “a goal to aspire towards” (because this place is an absolute slum) but in a sense that it’s ephemeral, extraordinary. Sometimes I can’t believe a place like this exists—a mile by mile stretch densely packed with 30,000 twenty-somethings who are young and dumb and excited about everything. Things happen here that could never exist anywhere else. Where else could it be normal for someone’s house to fall into the ocean? Where we bike with oxygen masks amidst a fire and live within 300 feet of all of our best friends and sit on rooftops to people-watch at a party where we know the DJ?
The word “vibe” wasn’t yet part of the colloquial lexicon, at least not in the way it’s used today, but Isla Vista was, unquestionably, a vibe. To know and to love Isla Vista is to capture a spark of that lightning in a bottle, to be part of an ecosystem perpetually in flux but somehow maintaining its signature feel; its culture rich with traditions and eccentricities. It feels magical because you’re always so aware that it is a temporary home, but it still feels like home in the sense of belonging and simply being that few other places offer. Your life in Isla Vista is inextricable from the location itself; it is impossible to exist there without feeling like a part of it. It has its own language—I live on the 65 block of Sabado Tarde. Meet me at Bagel Cafe. Did you see what happened on Del Playa last night? We’re doing The Loop on Saturday.
It was a charming little beach town snow globe, an idyllic bubble that lent us both a sense of uninhibited (often unhinged) freedom, and the veneer of invincibility. A dangerous cocktail that was also so, so fun. It’s unlike any other place in the world. Its residents talk about it the same way New Yorkers talk about their city; they complain about its many (incredibly surreal) idiosyncrasies with inexplicable affection and a kind of verbal shrug—That’s Isla Vista for you!
And then the shooting happened, at the end of my sophomore year. It certainly wasn’t the first incident of violence in the community—in fact, Santa Barbara has a lot of eerie connections to violent crime. But it was the perfect storm of a school shooting and misogyny, two topics at the forefront of public consciousness following the particularly monstrous shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and the rising political profile of Donald Trump. It spawned an ugly new articulation of violence against women: incel terrorism.
I’ve tried to piece together my memory of that night, but I can’t. It’s not an emotional block but a logistical one: I’ve searched everywhere—my calendar, my photo albums, my email archive, the Associated Student Body events calendar, the UCSB Emergency Alerts history—and have found nothing. I truly have no record of what really happened, except for the accounts of my peers and my own hazy memory. But the stories filtered through the media have mythologized the event to such grandiose proportions that I can no longer distinguish between reality and the version of events packaged for headlines and rabid public consumption.
Part of this is the privilege of distance—I was nowhere near the shooting, and the only thing I do remember is that it was an ordinary night for me. It was a Friday and I was at home, probably Skyping my long-distance boyfriend at the time from the dim beige-colored bedroom that my friend Ali and I shared in our apartment. I don’t remember how I heard about the shooting unfolding—probably through Twitter or UCSB Emergency Alerts, which I never paid much attention to. This was one month after Deltopia—an annual community-wide block party—turned violent, and police had arrived armed with tear gas and rubber bullets. There was a stabbing a couple of blocks from my apartment the night of the riot, as I’d found out later. There were the usual platitudes doled out—“never walk alone at night,” “be aware of your surroundings”—but really, what else could we do?
That night I went to sleep in my normal world and woke up in an entirely different one. Everyone in the country was talking about us. The cognitive dissonance was difficult to process because to me, it had been an unremarkable night, but for other people—people I knew, people I shared classes with, people I passed on campus—it was a night that had irrevocably altered the course of their lives, a clear demarcation with a before and an after.
There was a flurry of activity; everyone was checking in with each other, trying to piece together what had happened, trying to figure out who the victims were and if we’d known any of them. Two of my friends had been at IV Deli, a couple of streets over from the sorority house he’d attacked. They’d heard the gunshots and hid in the aisles.
But it was more than that. Something had shifted. The beautiful sanctity of the snow globe had shattered and we had been thrust into the national spotlight. There was an undercurrent of disbelief—how could this happen here? It was surreal seeing our school’s name splashed across newspapers and cable TV chyrons, on the lips of celebrities and the President of the United States, watching news anchors wring their hands over “what could have been done.” Isla Vista had always belonged to us, but now it belonged to the world, too. For the first time we were seeing ourselves through the rest of the country’s eyes. To the world it was a news item, a data point used as political fodder in the national gun control debate, a tragedy that would eventually become a hashtag: #YesAllWomen.
But to us it was our home. Isla Vista has always had its flaws, its ugliness. It’s part of the reason we have such an absurd tenderness for it; in your brief residence, all of its grime and its shortcomings become familiar. Now, that familiarity was marred by a horrifying footnote. We were forever linked to the poster child for incel violence and a single, grotesque act.
I’m one of the lucky ones in that I don’t have any residual trauma from that night. But it’s impossible not to feel intimately connected to it, if only because that’s how the world sees us. To live in America is to always live one degree of separation from a mass shooting. We didn’t necessarily survive it, but we lived through it. And that was our only option, to live through it, because what else could we do? We would still bike to class every day, past the shattered glass and blood-stained concrete, past the flowers laid on sidewalks.
🤑 corrupt turtles all the way down
There have been 4,578 reported mass shootings in the United States in the years since Isla Vista. The extremely grim caveat is that I held off on calculating that number because I was certain there would be more before I published this (I take no pleasure in reporting that my instincts were correct). Up until 2020, this country averaged 362.2 mass shootings per year, which is about one mass shooting per day. In 2020, that number jumped significantly. There have been around 2,767 in the last five years. We now average 649.75 mass shootings per year, almost two per day. And despite some small victories, the number of gun deaths has only increased and the Supreme Court is bottlenecking any significant progress.
People from other countries have zero grasp of how completely at the government’s mercy we are; they love to point out how insane our (lack of) gun control is, as if we’re not painfully aware of it all the time. I was explaining to my colleagues in Denmark that each state in the U.S. is like its own country—with its own laws, its own traditions, and its own culture—and until we have some kind of federal consensus, we’re all essentially on our own. American individualism at its finest. I struggled with writing this, because my job is to make sense of culture, but there is no making sense of something like this. We can speculate about motivations and cultural conditions and alternate timelines, but we know the solution to gun violence is to regulate guns. The data is irrefutable.
We are a deeply traumatized country. I’ve seen so many videos of Americans in other countries who panic at the sound of fireworks and confetti poppers, and it takes a second for them to readjust, to remember that it is not normal to fear for your life all the time. In no other developed country is the government so unabashedly hostile toward its citizens while masquerading as a free nation. In no other developed country are citizens told that a condition of their existence is that they may at any point be massacred by mass murderer with an AR-15, and the solution is “thoughts and prayers.” In no other country, developed or not, does the federal government outright refuse sweeping firearm reform despite a majority of its citizens favoring stricter gun control measures, because our politicians openly value money over human life.
As I wrote in my project about Mad Max: Fury Road and pop culture dystopias, dystopias are not just “things that feel bad.” They are a result of deliberate, malicious policy choices, ones that do not prioritize the well-being of citizens. Americans live in what’s characterized as a dystopian state—it’s not technically authoritarian, but basic rights are systematically stripped away through market forces and exploitation. Our government loves national security theater (e.g. removing our shoes at the airport vs. the actual failures of the TSA). We’re seeing this with the TikTok ban, which passed faster than any piece of legislation I’ve been aware of in my lifetime. Never mind that it was slipped into a foreign aid package supporting the Israeli government’s continued siege on Gaza, which the majority of Americans now disapprove of. Facebook continues to operate despite its proven invasion of users’ privacy and its proven interference in a presidential election, but the government instead chooses to focus on hypothetical threats. We are so angry, all the time, that the people in power continuously make choices that protect themselves instead of the people they’re elected (or appointed) to serve. It’s honestly a miracle we can get out of bed in the morning.
When you’re a part of something like this, living in an attention economy, everyone wants to tell your story. I remember that in the days after, there were reporters crawling all over Isla Vista, fishing for decent pull quotes. I remember feeling disgust for the people that leapt at the promise of 15 minutes of fame, disgust for the news outlets that were asking questions we hadn’t even had time to ask ourselves. Legacy is often discussed in terms of the things we create, but so much of it is circumstance; we forget that we’re often unwilling participants in a narrative that other people are always actively trying to write for their own satisfaction or comfort. In our case, we’re part of a legacy that affects every other person in America. It sucks that it had to be this one.
And if there’s one thing I can think of as a “lesson” from all of this, it’s that we cannot allow ourselves to become desensitized to horror; we cannot normalize the dystopian state. We deserve to go to school, to the movies, to the grocery store in safety. It’s not an unfair ask, no matter how much our politicians gaslight us into thinking it is.
🔗 open tabs (recent reads)
“Ghost in a Rhetorical Machine” (Reboot): I missed the initial +972 Magazine exposés on Gospel and Lavender but I read both to understand this essay, and they are both predictably horrifying. But as the IOF continues its assault on Gaza and the ongoing struggle to contextualize AI in the cultural climate looms, Fang notes that the “reification” and deliberate abstraction of AI serves as a convenient distraction from the mass terror being inflicted upon Palestinian civilians: ”Many of those who have raised the initial alarm at these revelations have implicitly accepted the Israeli military’s own framing around their usage of AI systems, which is a diversion even as it grabs headlines, conveniently pushing the debate towards questions of “is the AI ‘smart’ or accurate enough” when the fidelity of the system is not just besides the point but actively obscures it ... By being preoccupied by the purported technical intricacies of automated war-making methods one fetishizes them, precluding any substantive critique or action.”
“Sofia Coppola’s Latest Release? A Lip Balm.” (The New York Times): As reported by both All Caught Up by Nikita Walia and Feed Me by Emily Sundberg. At first glance this feels like a random venture, especially amidst the explosion of celebrity beauty brands over the past couple of years. But given that a) personal taste and curation have gained tangible power as cultural currency over the past decade(s), b) Coppola’s trademark film style is hyperfeminine and aesthetically indulgent, and c) artists nowadays are always seeking ways to expand their cultural footprint, it’s a genius move (for what it’s worth, the $43 tinted lip balms have already sold out multiple times)—Coppola is quoted in the piece as saying “I’m making a world that I want to look at and share.” The anecdotal lede of her playing cosmetic chemist in her childhood bedroom to achieve the perfect “berry-stained lips” she saw in a movie is just...chef’s kiss 🤌🏼.
“Gilding The Cage” (The Review of Beauty): And on that note, Jessica DeFino wrote an excellent point about the hypocrisy of mass-producing “art”: “I like how she uses the aesthetics of female adolescence to draw the audience into the turmoil of female adolescence. But this collaboration corrupts that. Compromises it, cheapens it. Does art about the gilded cage of girlhood have merit if the artist is selling the gilding?” The commodification of art is always a hot topic, and I’m curious to know if she thinks that non-beauty merch also cheapens the value of Coppola’s body of work. Criticisms of beauty culture are very valid, but in the process of “creating a world,” where is the line between adorning a bedroom to look like Marie Antoinette’s and adorning the self?
“The K-Pop Plastic Surgery Obsession” (The Atlantic): This is so interesting to read ten years later, in light of Korean influence’s exponential growth in the West. But the part that stands out to me is the fact that an American doctor performed the first (now-famous) double eyelid surgery in Korea, to “help” Asians better assimilate into Western culture: ““The Asian eyelid produces a passive expression which seems to epitomize the stoical and unemotional manner of the Oriental,” he wrote later in The American Journal of Ophthalmology. The surgery quickly caught on. Its first clientele were Korean prostitutes who were trying to appeal to American soldiers.” It reminds me of how Chinese food in America was deliberately made saltier and fattier to appeal to Western palates, and how a lot of Westerners classify Chinese food as “unhealthy” or claim that it gives them headaches because of the MSG (a racist myth). A lot of people, myself included, bemoan the normalization of plastic surgery, but the truth is that we are removed from the context of South Korean culture and therefore not in a position to judge. Especially because the root of it may be Western imperialism.
“The Singularity of Allison Williams” (WIRED): I actually really enjoy celebrity profiles with two caveats: that they’re written well and that the celebrity is interesting (the former often compensating for lack of the latter). This profile of Allison Williams fulfills both—it’s a thoughtful encapsulation of Williams, who is a great actress and also a clearly brilliant PR strategist (I actually found this profile because I was searching for her masterclass-worthy response to the accusation of “nepo baby”). But the main reason I enjoy celebrity profiles is that I think they’re such an underrated art form. It’s fascinating (and revealing) to see how writers decide to capture a person’s essence and their body of work while also diligently promoting the celebrity’s latest project, and I love that this writer acknowledges the symbiosis of the relationship (perhaps a result of it being from WIRED, which I initially thought was a surprising choice for this kind of piece)—while the celebrity is the subject, they are also the creator, perpetually constructing a public image and navigating the interview(s) while thinking about how this piece will fit into it. Williams excels in this kind of relationship because she not only sees it as a crucial part of her job, but she understands that it works best when the press are viewed as co-conspirators, not adversaries. They are not battling for control of the narrative but helping shape it together (strategists will spot a branding lesson in there 👀). Fame is such a weird thing, and the best celebrity profiles acknowledge and examine this in interesting ways.
💎 little gems (recent favorites)
Research 101: Public Classes & Workshops (NYPL): Access to the New York Public Library card offers many wonderful things (I’m a big fan of Culture Pass, but you can also rent instruments, book studio time, check out vinyl records, and stream movies!), but I just found out about their classes thanks to (of all things) their LinkedIn. Some of their offerings remind me of my local library’s when I was growing up—English language learning classes, technology instruction—but they also have classes that educate you on how to navigate their massive collections of information. I recently attended the “Intro to The New York Times” and “Getting Started with Archives” classes, and they were excellent—the librarians taught us how to use their databases (the NYPL has subscriptions to 800 of them) to find information in various journals and publications, and how to read archive filing info to find documents. Maybe because I’m relatively far removed from academia, most of my research is online, so it’s nice to kind of returned to a more old-fashioned, hands-on method. And the classes are free and open to the public, and all information is accessible with a library card (cue Arthur song, IYKYK).
Wild ramp butter: I had never heard of ramps until a couple of years ago when my friend mentioned her obsession with them, but I finally procured some through the local farm stand that I volunteer at on the weekends. I think their popularity is due in large part to their rarity—they’re wild, which means they’re foraged, not farmed; they also take seven years to reach full maturity and their season is very short, so quantities are limited. They’re sometimes called “wild leeks” or “spring onions,” and have a mild garlicky-chive flavor when cooked down. I made some delicious compound butter with them in order to preserve them as best as possible, and it is wonderful on a toasty baguette (my latest thing is just buying a whole baguette, slicing it, and freezing the pieces for easy use).
Bryant Park Dance Party: As much as I despise summer days in New York, summer nights are magical. The mood is simultaneously languid and electric—people are willing to stroll casually instead of rushing for the heat indoors, and there are so many outdoor activities that the energy in the city feels transformed, revitalized. Silent discos are my favorite summer activity, but I’ve wanted to go to Dance Party for years because they actually teach you the dance steps, and this year was its 10th anniversary. My friend and I went and learned the Lindy Hop (poorly) and my sister and I went to Charanga, and it was so much fun and an excellent people-watching opportunity. I don’t miss clubs and bars but dancing outside is something I’ll always love.
This campaign at the Venice Biennale: The Biennale is arguably the most important contemporary art exhibitions, and famous for its avant-garde approach to exploring social and cultural issues (I actually attended Art Biennale in 2022, and it was indeed very weird). And in a brilliant real-life example of art in context, to keep the Russian occupation of Ukraine in the headlines and illustrate “the fragility of peace,” agency Bickerstaff.743 placed hundreds of posters and banners featuring WWII-era bomb shelter maps—a fixture of civilian life in Ukraine over the last couple of years—across Venice: “In this way, we wanted to remind that we can enjoy art and Venetian evenings only as long as the civilized world is united by common values and can repel aggressors.” I’m always curious about art in times of distress, especially because sometimes that’s all you can do.
Connections (NYT Games): I used to be a daily crossword solver but now I usually just do the Mini because it’s a lot quicker and it has a leaderboard (my record time is 0:07 😎 DM me to join my leaderboard; I genuinely enjoy the competition and only like three of my friends do it daily), but my favorite lately is Connections. If anyone attended my session from Sweathead’s The Do Together 2022, you’ll remember I did this as an lateral thinking exercise, inspired by a website called PuzzGrid. I do wish it had some kind of leaderboard or at least a way to automatically share scores with friends, because as of right now I just text them individually to five different people. And then I complain about it to the same people. I am slowly getting back into the full crossword, because I have my eye on the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament next year, which all of my friends say is extremely nerdy (like that’s ever stopped me from doing anything). Has anyone competed? I need to know just how serious the competition is and what the vibe is. Let me know.
💖 jenny
If you feel compelled to support the fight against gun violence in the United States, please donate to organizations like Everytown, Moms Demand Action, and Sandy Hook Promise, who are consistently doing good work.
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