I’m usually a fast reader, but I took my time last week with a collection of essays by historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash. In Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Garton Ash blends his firsthand observations of political movements in various European countries (mostly in the former Soviet bloc) with broader analysis of European (dis)unity between 1945 and the present. I found the historical sections compelling but got dragged down in the final chapters, which deal with the current day and its multitude of problems. For more, check out my brief review at Goodreads.
Although my undergraduate institution had plenty of sororities, neither my friends nor I was in one—they just weren’t our thing, and it was easy to ignore that section of campus life if you chose to. Sororities at my school were fairly low-key; I guess they held rush events and various gatherings, but all I really remember is that the “sisters” seemed to own a lot of clothing emblazoned with their sorority names and logos.
Twenty years and one social media revolution later, though, sorority culture is thriving at certain institutions, first and foremost the University of Alabama. “Bama RushTok”—TikTok videos featuring Alabama sororities and their potential new members, or PNMs—has become an annual mid-August tradition, imitated by Greek organizations around the country. This year, media scholar and journalist Anne Helen Petersen brought Bama RushTok to my attention by spending a week analyzing it on her Instagram feed, and she pulled together many of her observations in a Q&A for last Sunday’s Culture Study newsletter:
16.) Why am I so invested in RushTok even though I knew nothing about it a week ago[?]
For the same reason it was so easy for me to write this post (even if it did take all damn day): Greek life (and its manifestation on TikTok) weaves together so many cultural and historical threads. As evidenced by my hours of Instagram coverage, you can pull one of those threads, pull another, keep pulling, and bunch everything up in a way that makes it impossible to smooth out again.
Contemporary Greek life is at once far more complex than the stereotype and also deeply rooted in that stereotype. It’s incredibly ornate and deceptively simple. It’s all so deeply, deeply American. And I’m invested in unpacking it for the same reason I’m invested in unpacking anything that shaped me as a young adult, whether that be a sorority or Presbyterianism or academia. Zoom in, and I see the very best parts of my life, myself, my heart. Zoom out, and I see networks of power and privilege that cloak themselves in the cute little dresses of sisterhood and belonging.
It is so natural to want to belong: to crave something, anything, that could ease your way during the most terrifying transitions in life. But it should also be natural for us to think more — like, a whole lot more, a whole newsletter or hours of Instagram Stories more, the rest-of-our-lives more — about any system animated so thoroughly by exclusion.
I watch these videos with a certain amount of horror—so much money, time, and effort spent on belonging to organizations that seem, to my cynical eyes, shallow and fake!—but they also fascinate me. Like Petersen says, I just want to understand the appeal of it all.
I’m certainly not immune from the subliminal powers of watching Bama RushTok: for the past two weeks, I’ve found myself resisting the urge to use Kylan Darnell’s signature phrase, “I hope you’re having a great day, not just a good day,” as a greeting. Hopefully that impulse will fade as the 2023 rush season disappears into our collective rearview mirror.
More on sororities, rush, and Bama RushTok:
Alaina Demopoulos, “‘I told her: your TikToks are cringe’ – the consultants who get teens into elite sororities”
Tressie McMillan Cottom, “In Alabama, White Tide Rushes On”
Amanda Mull, “Bama Rush Is a Strange, Sparkly Window Into How America Shops”
“When customers think of sushi, we want them to think of Kroger.” So says one store executive quoted by Jaewon Kang in a Wall Street Journal article about the supermarket chain becoming America’s top seller of sushi. Well … Kroger may not be the first place that comes to mind when I think of sushi, but their convenient little trays are my go-to dinner in a pinch.
Recommendations
China Stories
Bill Bishop, James Carter, and Cindy Yu, “Chinese Whispers: What Beidaihe reveals about the changing nature of Communist leadership”
Eliot Chen, “The Science Split? Can the U.S. and China still cooperate on the most basic science?”
Emily Feng, “China makes it harder for its Muslim citizens to go to Mecca, or anywhere else”
Yasheng Huang, “How to Kill Chinese Dynamism”
Kimberly Kindy, “State lawmakers move to ban Chinese land ownership”
Sabina Knight, “The Poet and the Historian: On Julian Gewirtz’s ‘Your Face My Flag’ and ‘Never Turn Back’”
Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu, “A Crisis of Confidence Is Gripping China’s Economy”
Vivian Wang, “Recreating a Bygone China, One Miniature Home at a Time”
Wanderings Around the World
Ratik Asokan, “The Long Struggle of India’s Sanitation Workers”
Sarah Marshall and Heather Radke, “You’re Wrong About: The Most Normal Girl in Cleveland”
During Athens’s most explosive decades of growth, the archeologists who ran excavations for the state archeological service were predominantly female; their work was often unheralded and unacknowledged. Now, in digital form, it’s coming to light.
Nick Romeo, “The Hidden Archeologists of Athens”
Standout Story
Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, posted a response to last week’s series at the Washington Post on human remains held by the Smithsonian, indicating that the institution will continue its efforts to return those remains to their communities:
As a historian, I have always felt that a full, unvarnished, honest telling of history is the only way for us to move forward as a people, as a nation and as institutions. All of us are profoundly shaped by the past, for good and for ill, and the Smithsonian — like so many other museums and universities — is grappling with a legacy once deemed acceptable but that is so clearly ethically wrong today.
The Post’s recent coverage regarding the human remains still housed in our collections is certainly illustrative of the Smithsonian’s darkest history. This is our inheritance, and we accept the responsibility to address these wrongs to the fullest extent possible.
“This is how the Smithsonian will reckon with our dark inheritance”
Bunch’s overall message is “Stay tuned for more info,” but it does sound like the Smithsonian will make a good-faith effort to redress this grievous wrong.
Feature photo: the Mackinac Bridge, aka the “Mighty Mac,” which connects Michigan’s Lower Peninsula (where I live) to the Upper Peninsula, or UP (where I’m vacationing this week), August 27, 2023.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 
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