Welcome to The Phoenix’s weekly digest. Every week during the quarter, you can expect our writers’ takes on some campus happenings.

For our inaugural post, in the form of an email to our editor in chief, you’ll find our resident satirist OWEN YINGLING’s gripes about HASAN PIKER’s talk at the IOP last week.

Sir, After attending the IOP event with Hasan Piker, I am convinced that the UChicago free speech beat is not worth the precious time of a senior editor. Had I asked ChatGPT to predict the dialogue for the event, what happened is exactly what it would have generated. That’s disregarding, of course, the dramatic heckling from a semi-famous Jewish rapper who appears as a playable character in NBA 2K11.

You must reassign the beat to one of The Phoenix’s junior writers. I learned nothing about Hasan that I couldn’t have gotten from five minutes of googling. Sure, he threw out some fiery lines: “ICE equals Gestapo,” “Bernie Sanders is kind of right wing,” “Judaism has nothing to do with Israel,” “[he] was vindicated in saying that America deserved 9/11,” but that was expected.

After wasting a few grueling hours that will never be returned to me, I am convinced there must be more to effective public discourse than inviting a controversial speaker and letting them rip unchecked. Forget about intellectual discussion; the moderator’s last question, “What’s something people don’t know about you?” sounded more like an icebreaker you’d have to answer during O-Week. The students were even worse: they seemed more interested in getting personal advice. It also seemed like many of them were there only to look at Mr. Piker rather than to hear him.

The event was partially redeemed only by hearing Mr. Piker urge the crowd to “be cool.” Alas, if we were “cool,” I suspect he would have been facing an empty room.

After enduring this event, I feel it would only add insult to injury to make me write something about it. And I suspect our audience would feel the same way about reading it. We should kill the article. Or at least, please just get me off it.

Best,

Owen

Stay tuned for next week’s edition. In the meantime, if you have other thoughts about Hasan’s talk (satirical or not), we want to hear them! Write to us at thechicagophoenix@gmail.com.