Tali Kirschenbaum
Lead Copy Editor, Staffwriter
Civil Engineering + Engineering Public Policy, CIT '27
Bio
Tali is a judgmental bitch who prefers critiquing others' work instead of creating her own, which is why she mostly edits for readme. However, the rest of our writers are lazy and suck at their jobs (except Benner, of course), so Tali writes articles on occasion as well—usually when she can be a fucking nerd about something. In Tali's free time, you can find them procrastinating.
Fun Fact
Tali is a Carnegie Mellon nepo baby!
Previous Work
An Analysis of CMU's "Ring-By-Spring" Culture
As a former freshman, I know that most of you are coming into CMU with one goal in mind: marriage. You may think this is a far-fetched dream, but by winter break, your peers will be proposing left and right. Enormous patches of grass on the Mall will die from being crushed by all the knees of hopeful romantics popping the question. If you’re lucky, you’ll be on one side of this ritual or the other before March rolls around. If you’re unlucky, you’ll have to watch droves of men (and lesbians) dropping to their knees and wonder: “when will it be my turn?” Fear not: according to the Common Data Set, 95 percent of CMU students become engaged or married before the end of their first year of college. Anthropologists struggle to explain this phenomenon, with one saying, “We have no idea how this keeps happening. There’s no purity culture to speak of, but CMU’s students consistently seem eager to rush into marriage regardless. We suspect that students are afraid that if they don’t enter a committed relationship by the end of their first year, it’s never going to happen.”
And evidence shows that those fears are justified. CMU’s first year outcomes page, which shows students’ outcomes in the first year after graduation, shows that 95 percent of CMU students are engaged or married within a year after they graduate, meaning of course that not a single student gets engaged past their first year. Which means if you miss your shot in freshman year, you’ve got nothing to look forward to.
This “ring by spring” culture, as sociologists have called it, has been found to create stress amongst freshmen but greatly improves the morale of upperclassmen—or at least the 95% lucky enough to participate. For those who aren’t, depression abounds, life is hopeless, and nothing will go right ever again. “I think that’s an overreaction,” says a friend of the author. “I know she’ll get herself right eventually. She’s already starting to pull herself back together in her classes, even if she has to break down crying every weekend about how she’ll always be alone and no one will ever love her.” While parts of these claims are accurate, their implications are disputed.
REPORTS: CMU Nothing Like Jewish Sleepaway Camp
Freshman Ari Steinberg has spent every summer at Camp Ramah in New England since he was 9 years old, so he thought living in a traditional triple on the third floor of Mudge would be easy as alef, bet, gimel. And he was ready to survive a few weeks of 80-degree weather with no air conditioning. But as it turned out, being in the dorm was more like being in the bunk with the other friend group. “My roommates don’t want to play ultimate frisbee or Magic: The Gathering with me,” he complained. “But on the bright side, at least they aren’t flashing me every now and then when their ‘towels slip.’” Steinberg also found some trouble adjusting to the Mudge third-floor communal bathrooms, noting that while no one ever threatened to pee in a cup and splash it on him for taking more than 30 seconds in the shower (which he says is “not an exaggeration”), he’s disappointed by the total lack of conversations in the bathroom. “Sometimes I’ll hear somebody talking in there and get excited, but then it always turns out they’re just on the phone with someone,” he said. “At camp I knew everybody in my year and almost everyone in the year above and below me, why don’t I even know most of the people in my dorm here?”
Steinberg was also surprised with how he used his time after getting to CMU. “O-week felt like camp: a bunch of planned activities that I skipped because they were boring as fuck. Meals were kinda like camp too with them having us all eat shitty buffet food in a big room all together, but I kept expecting them to start handing out benschers before people could leave and doing Birkat. [Author’s note: the fact that I have to write an author’s note to explain what this is should make it pretty clear why this doesn’t happen. Anyway, go look at the glossary on page (whatever).] But once classes started, everything I knew came crashing to the ground. At camp, they only let us have an hour of free time a day, plus a few more on Saturdays. Here, though, everything is free time, but not free time that I can just use to chill with my friends. I have to do homework! My chugim never gave me homework….Oh, chugim are like classes, but at camp, and they don’t give you homework.”
Steinberg did point out one thing that he felt really did carry over from his time at Ramah. “At camp, we have this concept called the sixth-week slump,” he explained, “where you’ve been at camp for six weeks out of the eight and you want to be having fun and doing all the camp things but really you’re exhausted and miss your parents and are so ready to go home and it’s so close, but you have to tough it out because as soon as you get home you’re just gonna hate your family again. Yeah, each half-semester is kinda like that. Oh, also the building right at the front of campus is the main office. Camp is like that too. Though Warner hall isn’t connected to a building with no AC where I can do arts and crafts. That one’s across campus a bit.”
readme tried finding other Jewish summer camp alumni at CMU to comment, but they seemed to all be at Washington University in St. Louis, which sources say is just like camp.
On the Four Questions
First of all, if you’ve ever heard of the Four Questions, chag sameach. If you haven’t, be grateful you won’t have to do them when you’re forced into joining your hypothetical Jewish friends (who are all older than you, obviously) at their several-hour-long celebration of a liberation they claim they all were at even though it was 4,000 years ago and also probably never happened at all (I can say that; most Jews don’t punish atheists for blasphemy these days). But before they get to telling you the story, the youngest person who knows Hebrew just well enough to do so will recite something we commonly refer to as the Four Questions. But there’s something people don’t seem to realize about the Four Questions: There’s only ONE FUCKING QUESTION. There’s ONE FUCKING QUESTION WORD and it’s at THE BEGINNING OF THE FIRST SENTENCE, YES, THE ONE THAT’S USUALLY PUNCTUATED WITH AN EXCLAMATION MARK AND SUPPOSEDLY THE ONE STATEMENT IN THE SET. NO, it’s ONE FUCKING QUESTION with FOUR FUCKING ANSWERS. NOT FOUR FUCKING QUESTIONS. “What makes this night different from all other nights” is a QUESTION. Does “On all other nights, we eat bread and matzah. On this night, only matzah” sound like A FUCKING QUESTION??? No, no. I’m not angry. If I were, it would be 100% justified. But I’m not angry. Not at all.
Campus Activity Report
Our usual crime reporter Abe James is not Jewish, so I have taken up the responsibility of reporting on recent crimes which may or may not be affecting the Jewish community at CMU. As a fill-in, I do not take this position lightly, and seek to report on only the most serious crimes plaguing our campus.
Non-Jewish amnesty recipient claims he and friends were just celebrating Purim
On Thursday, an amnesty call had the third floor of Morewood Gardens abuzz. Jason Zhou, the student for whom the call was made, spoke with reAdMe on the condition of anonymity. “Yeah, my friends and I were celebrating the Jewish holiday of Purim,” said Zhou. “We heard you’re supposed to drink until you can’t tell the difference between Mordechai, who’s the good guy, and Haman, who’s the bad guy. I guess I got to the point where I couldn’t even tell the difference between being awake and being asleep, though.” Zhou says he will “learn from this experience” and “use the exact same excuse next year.”
Afikoman gone missing, little Ricky on the case
Reports have been delivered to reaDMe that the afikoman in SCS professor Jonathan Wasserman’s home has gone missing! The Wassermans don’t know when the larger half of the middle matzah went missing, but investigators’ leading theories suggest that it happened sometime during the festive meal portion of the seder. rEadme reporters on the scene have been told that locating the afikoman is of utmost importance because the meal cannot end until it is eaten. However, investigators have stepped back from the case and are reporting that Professor Wasserman’s 7-year-old son Ricky is now leading the search. Professor Wasserman has announced that there will be a reward of a $2 bill and dessert for any who successfully assist with the search.
Hanukkah candle factory burns down
ReAdMe has received reports of an enormous fire which has engulfed the beloved Hanukkah candle factory in Monroeville, which served as a destination for many Pittsburgh-area Jewish preschool field trips for countless Decembers past. According to people familiar with the incident, the fire was started by a member of the quality assurance department, who accidentally dropped the candle on the factory’s repurposed industrial-era wooden floor, from where it spread across the hundreds of thousands of wicks and finished candles across the building. Though there were thought to be only enough candles to keep the fire burning for one day, the factory remained in flames for eight. Miraculously, no one was hurt.
Winning the War on Christmas
As we all know, Christmas is falling out of favor with the American public. “Merry Christmas” has been replaced with “Happy holidays.” Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts have replaced their Christmas-themed special cups and boxes with holiday-nonspecific red and green cups and boxes printed with tinsel patterns. Christmas movies are about 8-year-olds outwitting criminals invading their family’s homes and policemen thwarting terrorist operations rather than finding the true meaning of Christmas. The thought of it makes me shudder. With that in mind, the Jewish writers of reADMe have decided to join the War on Christmas—on the side of Christmas. With that, here are some ways that we, the true saviors of Christmas, will win.
Celebrate it for eight days.
We all know that one day of Christmas is way too short. However, twelve days of Christmas is just too much of a commitment for most people. I propose we meet in the middle, with eight. Why eight, you ask, when half of twelve is six? Well, six just sucks as a number, and five and seven are both odd, which is bad. This means that eight is the best number of days for a holiday as special and important as Christmas to be.
Light candles instead of a tree.
Christmas trees are a hassle for most families. In recent years, many have resorted to buying fake trees, or decorating other items that can sit in a corner or window. Instead of buying expensive trees and ornaments every year, buy a much cheaper singular item that fits eight candles (one for each day) and 44 very thin candles (so as to light two on the first day, three on the second, and so on and so forth, as one candle lights all the others). This will save money in the long run, and an enormous amount of time and effort spent preparing the tree.
Eat oily, fried foods.
The fact that I, as a Jewish person, don’t know whether Christmas has any foods strongly associated with it really exemplifies why Christmas is losing the War on Christmas. So what better than eating foods fried in oil? What’s more American than donuts, maybe even filled with jelly? What’s more Christian than shredding a potato and frying it in oil to make a sort of pancake? If nothing else will save Christmas, Big Cooking Oil will.
Gamble.
Americans are addicted to gambling. So addicted, in fact, that it is incredibly sensible to celebrate Christmas by betting real or chocolate money on a game of near-complete chance. By spinning a top akin to a four-sided die, with the sides decorated to commemorate the miracle of the birth of Jesus Christ, Christmas celebrations can be made fun again by playing over chocolate coins, or contentious by betting real ones. These tops can be wooden or plastic, but are most special if you make them out of clay.
Upperclassmen Found Dead from Common Cold, Unaware of UHS Move
If you’ve read any of the emails CMU has sent this semester, you would know that University Health Services has moved from the first floor of Morewood E-Tower to the third floor of the brand new Highmark Center for Health, Wellness, and Athletics, home of Community Health & Well-Being and Wellness & Meaning-Making Programs and the Ampersand Support Group. In a shocking wave of terrible news, however, numerous upperclassmen have been found dead near the former UHS entrance, piled up like the lanternflies near Walking to the Sky. “I had a really bad cold, so I wanted to come to UHS and get some cough drops,” said one deceased senior. “But when I discovered that UHS wasn’t at E-Tower anymore, I figured it wasn’t worth trying to find the new spot, so I just decided I wouldn’t even bother living anymore.” “Mine wasn’t even that bad,” said another, “I just needed an excuse to get out of here.” A number of other dead bodies echoed the sentiment, making it well known to all around that they were just done with this shit.
Carnegie Mellon Updates Enrollment Contract, Since Nobody Reads Those Things Anyway: Here are Some of the Details
In an email sent directly to students’ spam folders, Carnegie Mellon University has announced changes to the contract signed by all students upon enrollment. “Because no one is going to read this,” Provost Jim Garrett writes in the email, “we are proud to announce that we have made some of the biggest changes to this contract in Carnegie Mellon history. Read them (or don’t) here.” Below is a non-comprehensive list of the changes made:
Article 2, section 3 now states: “By attending Carnegie Mellon University, you agree to grant Carnegie Mellon University and all of its known affiliates full ownership of your image and likeness for commercial and recreational use. This ownership shall be extended to your first born grandson, if none is born between now and August 24, 2035 you may be subject to fines of at least 7% of Carnegie Mellon University’s net worth and jail time up to 50% of your tenure as a student.”
Article 4, section 5 now states: “All Carnegie Mellon students are responsible for all actions taken by the University and its donors, including but not limited to: creating robots to shoot innocent children in the Middle East, research done by the English Department, and the existence of David Tepper.”
Article 5, section 21 now states: “By paying tuition or receiving financial aid from Carnegie Mellon University, you acknowledge that you will never again have free time. Instead, all of your time will be devoted to your classes, your professors, your TAs, and this university, because your heart is in the work.”
Article 7̴̢̞̘̐̒̚, section 6̵̢̫͔͒̈́͆̾͐̀͆͆͜͝͠6̴̢̜̥̩̰̭̽͑͗͆̀̎͑̎̇ͅͅ6̷̹̋́̆̑ states: “In the event of an altercation with Satan, you agree to forfeit ownership of your undying soul for the usage of bargaining and other forms of commerce. Failure to do so will result in a meeting with a disciplinary board and potential expulsion.”
Article 8, section 1 states: “The contents of this article are false.”
Article 9, section 7 now states: “By attending Carnegie Mellon University, you agree to accept the African-American man who is part of the Walking to the Sky statue, commonly known as Daddy Thicc, as your lord and savior, and agree to bow down to him any time he enters your line of sight.”
While these additions make up just a small portion of the contract, they are expected to cause absolutely no change to campus life, despite their seemingly dire nature. This is because no student, including the one writing this article, read the contract in its entirety, meaning that these provisions are unenforceable, if they are even real.
readme introduces the BoothBuggy
It’s Carnival, and as a new organization on campus, readme has decided that we want to try engaging in all of the Carnival traditions! Of course, we are a small organization, so we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to do everything. However, as a group of people who like to think we’re funny, we have decided to look for loopholes in any rules we can find in order to participate in it all. Pedants that we are, we found section 6.9 (yes, actually. You can look it up.) of the Sweepstakes bylaws, which dictates buggy size:
“No buggy shall have at any time any dimension, parallel to the centerline of the buggy, greater than 15 feet including that buggy's pushbar. No buggy shall have at any time any dimension, perpendicular to the centerline of the buggy, greater than 6 feet.”
This means that any buggy smaller than 15 feet long, 6 feet wide, and 6 feet tall is acceptable. Because of this rule, and because of a surprising lack of small Asian women willing to drive a buggy for a satire publication newspaper, we have decided to be assholes and build a buggy out of a booth. The BoothBuggy—because what else would we call it?—is exactly the maximum dimensions a buggy can be, fitting a driver of approximately average height sitting in the front, and when parked, features a buggy driving simulator for curious tall people, since in order for it to be a booth it has to have some sort of game, right? Unbeknownst to our guests, however, the simulation involves them being locked inside the BoothBuggy and actually sent for a lap around the course. “Incredibly realistic!” said early reviewers. “It really feels like I’m moving at 40 miles an hour while trapped inside a giant box!” Other beta testers are suing readme to cover their hospital bills.
README Found to be Plagiarizing the Tartan
Have you noticed an increase in the quality of README’s articles recently? That’s no accident. You might think it’s because our staff is getting more experienced at writing satire legitimate news, right? NO!
We in the editing staff felt a strange sense of familiarity while reading over our previous issue to prepare it for publication, and upon investigation (which consisted of multiple sleepless nights fueled exclusively by Monster Energy during which we pored over every issue of every newspaper ever written), we discovered that every single one of our writers has lifted their content directly from the 16th issue of the 118th volume of the Tartan, published on March 11, 2024 (notably the day before our fourth issue was printed). We greenlit the issue anyway, which may have been a faux pas on our part, but why should we, the innocent editors, take any responsibility for anything bad that happens? Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me in every single article written in an entire issue, shame on the writers.
What have we, the editing staff, decided to do about this? While we do intend to take our time making the right decision during this very difficult time for our organization, we have summarily shot Benner Rogers, who we thought was our only reliable journalist, for this betrayal. We apologize for our lack of oversight and for this great violation of the integrity of our organization.
Disclaimer: This article was heavily inspired by the plagiarism notice in a 1998 issue of The Lancet.