University of Austin

In the spring of 2020, the pandemic catalyzed a startling personal revelation. As a begrudging student of Zoom University, I came to the realization that a college degree might not be worth it. Pre-pandemic Rikki was a dutiful, head-down student at New York University with a 4.0 GPA and her eyes set on law school. But when the world locked down in the middle of my sophomore year and my university still demanded full tuition for virtual classes, I began questioning everything. Although they certainly made a valiant effort at remote teaching, most of my professors proved too technologically inept to coerce twenty-five despondent teens to attend 8 a.m. Zoom lectures about medieval feudalism.

The prospect of my meeting with Peter Boghossian seemed to have angered the gods, so furious was the disruption to road and rail as I tried to make my way from Seattle to Portland. Torrential rain and flash floods summoned a ricochet of mudslides which abruptly terminated my Amtrak journey in Centralia, a middle-of-nowhere town in Washington State. There was no rail in either direction for at least forty-eight hours, no buses and seemingly just one Lyft — which I managed to slip into an hour later with a few other stranded passengers. Or perhaps it was the anger of very particular gods that rule over the Pacific Northwest, that hotbed of wokeness so concentrated you can feel it like toxic humidity in the air.