TMM 3/30/18

Volume CXXIII, No. 11

By Navpreet Sekhon For the sake of anonymity, each name in this article has replaced the real names of students interviewed. Descriptions have been modified so as to protect their identity.

“It’s simple,” Robert tells me, “Just turn off your Wi-Fi and use your data.”

We sit in our English class, talking loudly around the oval desk in front of all our classmates. No one looks particularly uncomfortable; while we’re supposed to quietly work on our individual articles, students can’t help but to look up and weigh in on this sexy topic.

Robert, a white, relatively skinny guy, stands out as a large personality among most students because of how open he is. With his booming voice and constantly goofy smile, he exudes

Nonfictions Issue

Let’s Get It On(line)

confidence in his speech and quirky mannerisms. He’ll be the first to speak up on taboo topics, and we all expect to hear his opinion. “Boarders have it rough. No privacy, people around all the time.” I ask him why guys go through the trouble. “It’s really not that much trouble. And you’re maybe watching for fifteen minutes.” The boarder boys around the table nod in agreement.

“If you don’t watch it, you’re weird,” Joey chimes in.

Joey, of East Asian descent, speaks from the boarder perspective. He normally comes across as reserved and vanilla — he doesn’t bring up drugs or sex in conversation, and I don’t expect him to have opinions on them. Yet he does volunteer his opinion: this topic evokes conversation from all demographics. “It’s kind of odd because you’re relying on your imagi-

nation if you don’t.” I ask him about the problem with using your imagination. “You’re thinking of people you know.

I’ll use my imagination maybe one-fourth of the time.”

Again, boys nod in agreement. I ask the class how often they go through the Wi-Fi to data process. “Maybe four or five times a week,” one boy guesses. You’re all really comfortable talking about this in front of the teacher, I comment. Though she’s middle-aged and liberal, I expect students to have more PG conversations around adults.

“Well, yeah,” Robert laughs. “We’re guys. It’s just porn.” *** According to PornHub’s year in review of 2016, people around the world collectively watched 4.6 billion hours of porn — approximately 13 million hours per day. The site reports that 31% of view-

AGGRESSION, DIGRESSION

By Jeffrey Cao

Am I in the right place?

The corner of a rugged, brick warehouse juts out onto a dark stretch of Business Street, Hyde Park — ten minutes out of Milton, a little southwest of “Murderpan.” I slowly approach a large metal door, the kind you might expect has a little slot for eyes to appear and ask for a password. Large green typeface on a banner just above reads, HARD KNOCKS MUAY THAI; I’m in the right place. Pushing in, I find that the building’s inside is as rough-looking as its outside.

White plaster walls trail up to a missing ceiling, just wooden beams, rusted iron, and ceiling lamps. After a couple doors that shut too quickly and a set of squeaky wooden steps, I enter a bright but equally unfinished room: the Hard Knocks main training room.

The first thing I notice is that the whole place feels right out of a scene from Raging Bull or Rocky. Mats line the floor of an empty, square space for training, sparring, and viewing one-

THIS WEEK’S MEASURE, THANKS TO:

Friday, March 30th, 2018

self in the wall mirrors. Along the edges stand rows of beatup punching bags, the kind myriad sweaty, muscular fighters have already taught a lesson. Beside this area I find an impressively professional boxing ring; standing a couple feet off the ground, it’s lined with the familiar four matted corners and stretchy wire barriers. A sweaty middle-aged man dances lightly on his feet, jabbing an imaginary opponent on all sides.

He’s dead-focused: eyes squinted, elbows tucked in, shoulders square. A muscular, young instructor bursts through the door, strides past me, and slips on his gloves. At the sound of a loud, familiar boxing bell, the training session begins.

The exhilarating feeling I get watching the subsequent fight is nothing new. It comes close to the feeling I get riding a roller coaster, lifting out of my modest weight at the gym, or watching any good ‘ole fight scene in a movie; it’s a thrill. But general familiarity with this feeling draws out deeper questions of physicality and aggression, ones that might seem difficult to

talk about in times of relative peace: we most certainly don’t find ourselves in the wars of ancient Sparta, where children were taught at a young age physical discipline martial arts, and the “lunch money bully” has all but gone into hiding.

Hard Knock’s combination of martial physicality, along with its musty smell of sweat, has become characteristic and uncommon.

Moreover, the lost feeling reinvigorates stereotypes of masculinity, boyhood, and surprisingly, manhood. With studies discovering decreases in physical aggression among younger generations, along with corresponding increases in other cultural trends, the rundown boxing ring begs a serious question: Where have all our fights gone? *** In a classic scene of the 1983 Christmas comedy film, A Christmas Story, the protagonist Ralphie and his friends Flick and Schwartz are returning from school when they find themselves in a snowy alley blocked off by a CONTINUED ON PAGE 6

ers are between the ages of 18-24, but it can’t report data of ages younger than 18 due to the illegality of minors’ watching porn. Therefore, data on the amount of teenagers who watch porn is limited, but a study conducted

by Brigham Young University revealed that 93% of boys and 67% of girls were exposed to porn before the age of 18.

Moreover, 87% of boys and 31% of girls said they use porn frequently. Most of us have run into it at some point, whether we saw soft porn in Fifty Shades of Grey or pursued porn elsewhere, we all know porn.

The history of porn, though, is less talked about and less available. Before the Internet, consumers retained porn through erotic magazines such as Playboy, or through renting erotic movies from the adult section.

Given the lack of access to

pornographic material, porn’s prevalence was much smaller than now — would teenagers go into their local rental store to check out porn? Most likely, no, they wouldn’t because the effort to get the material and risk for shame was much higher. Thus, the online porn business became a hidden driving force behind creating the World Wide Web, in particular, e-commerce.

Cue Christopher Mallick, a businessman who took advantage of the porn industry’s inability to correctly handle credit transactions.

Because online credit transactions often lead to both the credit companies and the internet companies losing money, those in the business had greater incentive to create authorized money transactions. In an interview with Business Insider, Mallick CONTINUED ON PAGE 7

Delivering the Scoop On Ordering At Milton

By Alex Chen

“Hi. This is your Doordash driver. I’m just outside a building called...‘Ware hall.’” With my phone in hand, I rush out of my room, through the lobby of Wolcott House, and out the tan wooden door to enter the dark of night. Standing just outside of the door, I feel the wind blowing in my face. I respond to the driver by telling her to drive to the flagpole, the one that sits between the large green quad and Hallowell house. She doesn’t respond.

I hear unrecognizable noises in the background of the call.

All I could assume was that she made her way back onto Centre Street and towards the flagpole.

“Can you drive towards the flagpole?” At first, she does not respond what I said.

I repeat to her, “Turn at the flagpole.” On my third repetition, she finally acknowledges me. As she approaches the turn to my dorm, I tell her to turn right. She drives right past the turn. “Stop,” I tell

her, trying to get her attention. She finally stops, makes a U-turn, and turns towards Wolcott House.

As the car approaches the black gate between the road in front of Wolcott and the parking lot beside it, I walk towards the car, ready to pick up my order of four cups of bubble tea. Sticking out from the driver’s side window is the doordasher’s hand clutching a cardboard four cup drink carrier with only three drinks. I look into the window and can barely make out her face. All I can see is the bright display of Google Maps on her iPhone.

In the passenger seat is a giant dog, barking at me while I attempt to grab my drinks.

When I ask for about the fourth, she claims that the store has messed up and offers to return to the store to pick up the fourth drink. She gives me an estimate of 10-15 minutes. As she pulls back towards Centre street, I walk back into Wolcott.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 6

The Amazing Student-Authors in Ms. Baker’s Nonfiction Class

Friday, March 30th, 2018

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The Milton Measure est. 1894

The CXXIII Editorial Board Editors-in-Chief Alexander Chen ‘18 & Nina Taneja ‘18

Managing Editor Patrick Huang ‘18 Layout Editors Charis Palandjian ‘18 Maya Thakore ‘18 Web Editor Anastasia Sukharevsky ‘18

Senior Editors Edward Sheehan ‘18 Soleil Devonish ‘18 Nina Subkhanberdina ‘18 Olivia Risoleo ‘18

A&E Editors Kalaria Okali ‘18 Jack Delea ‘19

News Editors Desi DeVaul ‘19 Nicholas Taborsky ‘19

Opinion Editors Eva O’Marah ‘19 John Albright ‘19

Sports Editors Caroline McCarthy ‘18 Andrew D’Ambrosio ‘19

Photo Editors Rebecca Karlson ‘18 Leo Jin ‘18

Faculty Advisor Liz Matson

News Leo Jin ‘18 Kailee Silver ‘18 Daming Cui ‘19 Maria Geroukos ‘19 Cameron Hoffman ‘19 Charles Leonetti ‘19 Alexander McEvoy ‘19 Samantha Bateman ‘20 Kiran Biddinger ‘20 Ethan Furdak ‘20 Ainsley Iwanicki ‘20 Leydn McEvoy ‘20 Idone Rhodes ‘20 David Shaw ‘20 Jack Sullivan ‘20 Cece Zinny ‘20 Eliza Dunn ‘21 Ian Glick ‘21 A&E Kelly Han ‘19 Michael George ‘19 Gracie Chiang ‘20 India Claudy ‘20 Katie Conn ‘20 Madeline Fitzgibbon ‘21 Photography Caroline Magann ‘18 Hannah Neri ‘18 Alex Paul ‘18 Lily Reposa ‘18 Arianna Bravo ‘19 Michael George ‘19 Kelly Han ‘19

Opinion Jeffrey Cao ‘18 Catherine Gallori ‘18 Jack Weiler ‘18 Alana Greenaway ‘19 Yunqing (Star) Hu ‘19 Cade Rose ‘19 Alexander Shih ‘19 Dariya Subkhanberdina ‘19 Ugur Gurol ‘20 Sophie Lachenauer ‘20 Andrew Ma ‘20 Pari Palandjian ‘20 Olivia Wang ‘20 Jana Amin ‘21 Shannon Kim ‘21 Sports Jack Pacheco ‘18 Steve Walker ‘18 Will Bucci ‘19 Dylan Hickey ‘19 Lou Barber ‘20 Zane Bookbinder ‘20 Blair Englert ‘20 Ben Monnich ‘20 Kavi Shah ‘20 Colin Baker ‘21 Humor Andriana Velmahos ‘18 Anthony Gallagher ‘18 John Minicus ‘18 Jack Sloane ‘18 Dylan Volman ‘18 Spencer Graham ‘18

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If you would like to begin receiving copies of the Measure via email, please send your email address to Anastasia Sukharevsky at:

anastasia_sukharevsky18@milton.edu Letters to the Editors Please either email our editors or mail to: alexander_chen18@milton.edu & nina_taneja18@milton.edu The Milton Measure 170 Centre Street Milton, MA 02186

Nuance Over Simplicity

Every year, seniors from the Crafts of Nonfictions English course submit nonfiction work to share to the greater Milton Academy community. The course is unlike any other English course. In it, students almost solely write — only reading examples of various types of nonfiction work. Throughout the year, students write both short and long essays, including a long feature piece that typically explores social phenomena or societal norms.

In a time when headlines and soundbites are replacing longform writing and traditional journalism is fading away, we as a board believe more than ever that students need a platform to share their thoughts and opinions. For that reason, we are excited to print this special Nonfictions issue and showcase the work of senior writers. Additionally, since a typical backpage would defeat our purpose in printing this issue we surveyed Upper School students earlier this week asking for their thoughts on last week’s March for Our Lives and gun control. Using this survey, we created a back page that reflects the feelings that Milton students expressed.

Journalism and writing are avenues for people to advocate for their beliefs and opinions. Change can only be made when others are aware of problems in our society. Explaining problems require nuance and detail.

On March 26, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student newspaper editor Rebecca Schneid spoke on CNN’s Reliable Sources. She said, “The purpose of journalism is to raise, you know, the voices of people that maybe don't have a voice…I think that in its own right journalism is a form of activism.”

Often at Milton, we as students fall into rhythms of homework, sleeping, eating, and socializing. In the midst of busy seasons with sports, arts, extracurriculars, it’s difficult to separate the importance of the world outside Milton from the importance of a test or a game the next day. With college and various pressures on the horizon at all times, these rhythms blind us from engaging deeply with nuanced issues that are fundamental to our society, nation, and to humanity at large.

A resounding theme in 2018 is the power of youth — the most powerful people in the world constantly attribute change to the efforts and strength of young people. In the stressful, minute by minute environment of Milton, thinking about events seemingly distant from our own realities is not typically a priority.

We need to step back from school, express ourselves and engage, whether one’s activism is through writing, marching, speaking publicly, social media, or whatever else. We need to step outside our own perspectives and go beyond issues that might not directly affect us. Yes, we need to think about gun control but let’s not forget police brutality and black lives matter. Yes, we need to think about women’s rights but let’s not forget LGBT rights. We can’t do any of this without truly listening and seeking out the voices of others — just as Nonfictions students did this past winter.

Friday, March 30th, 2018

By Daniel Xiao Harvard Square, Cambridge — the classic epitome of privilege. Even the MBTA’s red line — notorious for the muggings at the Ashmont station and its dirty and rickety train cars passing through towns fondly nicknamed “Murder-pan” — succumbs to the surrounding luxury. Rather than the usual dingy station made up of a concrete slab embroidered with gnarly loogies and shoe-massaged gum, the Harvard Square station features heating, a multicolored tile design for the floors, and bright lights hanging from the high ceiling. And yet, the subway station is a mere tease of the luxury waiting upstairs on the streets.

Reaching the summit of the escalator, I am overwhelmed by the crowds zig zagging through out the square. Swiveling my head, I see diverse groups of people rushing off in different directions through the center square towards the different attractions — Harvard Bookstore, specialty bakeries, and the latest chic restaurants — but all are wearing the same clothes: half are flexing a Canada Goose jacket worth hundreds of dollars with a pair of leggings and Timber-

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Distant Worlds Feet Apart

land boots while the other half are sheltered in thick designer pea coats, expensive dresses or dress shirts, and polished dress shoes and high heels.

The view is not much different while passing by the store fronts. Looking in through the windows, the bright, white washed stores bustle with activity. All the tables at Sweetgreen fill with the well dressed, buried on their latest smartphone while munching their ten dollar kale salads. At Shake Shack, the line stretches to the door with customers willing to spend eight bucks on a burger with a side of fries for three dollars and a drink for two. And at the center of all this activity lies the prestigious Harvard University where the world’s brightest and most privileged students attend for their higher education.

But even this environment is not immune to poverty.

Stepping out the red line, The homeless man seeking shelter from the cold outside greets me, his belongings gathered in dirty bags around him. And just as the glamour of the station extends onto the streets, so do the homeless. Along each streetcorner lies the homeless sprawled out on torn up blankets,

hauling their belongings on a shabby grocery cart. But this phenomenon does not only include grown ups; young adults and youth also fall victim to homelessness. Out of the 3,384 homeless counted in a census on Boston’s street, 61 were homeless youth, a 52.5% increase from the 40 homeless youth reported the year before. To combat this emerging issue of homeless youth, Y2Y, a Harvard student led initiative tucked in the basement of a church a half mile walk from the bustling center of Harvard Square, provides overnight and thirty day shelter space for those ages 18 to 24.

As I walk down the alleyway lined with Harvard’s huge bookstore towards the First Parish Church housing Y2Y, the street lights seem to taper off, darkening as I near the end of the street. The people seem to have disappeared too — the commercial atmosphere left behind on the other end of the alleyway.

As if Y2Y isn’t hidden enough in the basement of a church secluded from the commercial streets teeming with the elites, Harvard Square goes one step further to conceal the blemishes of poverty, tucking the main entrance of the Y2Y program in one of the church’s hidden side

doors.

I finally find the entrance to the program and am buzzed into the lobby after a short introduction over the intercom. The lobby reminds me of any other back entrance to a church — cramped and wreaking with the musty smell of soggy wood — but tucked in the corner is the refreshing sight of a modern metal staircase leading to the basement.

Tamjid greets me halfway down the stairs, composed in his unwrinkled khakis, neatly combed hair, and square glasses. As the student leader of the program, Tamjid bears the weight of the logistics and success of the Y2Y program on his skinny shoulders.

As we cross the threshold into the Y2Y Homeless Shelter space, my expectations are all dispelled. After reading online that Y2Y was located in the basement of a church, I had imagined a cramped space caked in dust. The windows, if any, would be smeared with dirt and mud, streaming in weak brown hues of light. The bedding situation would be falling-apart cots and sleeping bags with little privacy. But my imagination ran too wild.

“Along the right wall are the bathrooms and showers,” begins Tamjid as we set off on

the tour. “These bathrooms and showers are all gender neutral to make everybody feel included since a lot of homeless youth are part of the LGBT community.”

As we near the back wall, I’m astonished to find a honeycomb-like structure spanning from floor to ceiling. Carved into the wall are small cubicles, reminding me of the cramped display cells for dogs and cats in pet stores, but upon closer examination, I realize these are actually the sleeping spaces for those in the program. Tamjid must have seen the concern on my face because he instantly pitches in “we spent a lot of time with designers to create a space that would look inviting while also maximize the number of cubicles for residents.”

As we round the corner, I come across the sleeping quarters for staff during the night shifts. The rooms remind me of the dorm rooms at my school — dim, cramped, and messy. Finally, the back wall is lined with hygiene equipment — shampoos, soaps, laundry machines — and the kitchen. Tamjid explains “as far as the kitchen goes, it’s a pretty standard industrial kitchen.” And amazCONTINUED ON PAGE 5

Driven Into Unfamiliar Territory: The Ethics of AI

By Jonah Garnick

I am driving in the rightmost lane of I-93 North.

My windshield is filled with a blue sky, and the few skyscrapers which make up Boston proper puncture the sky ahead of me. I am not venturing into Boston proper, though; I am headed to Cambridge.

My eyes dart from mirror to road to mirror, and my hands choke the wheel. I don’t drive particularly fast, but I am nonetheless a fairly nervous driver. Nervousness which probably stems from how others may recklessly handle these two-ton, highspeed death machines.

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy driving; I do.

When traffic has abated and that danger of a fatal collision is off my mind, I find myself relaxing, relishing my time in the car. For me, it’s a kind of meditation, where, in doing something fairly mindless, I can allow my mind to wander.

Driving contains a thrill to it, too, due, in part, to the peril of it. It is perhaps the most dangerous activity most Americans conduct on a regular basis. And because of this fact, it is also the only activity where most Americans hold their lives in the palms

of their hands. This feeling of control over one’s existence is an intoxicating one. It’s the layman’s base jumping, the everyday American’s free solo climbing.

Over the hundred years that span between the car I am driving and the cars Henry Ford manufactured, much has changed. Cars today are faster and more efficient. They have airbags and seatbelts, backseat TVs and heated seats. Some even have refrigerators — a flagrantly unnecessary byproduct of rampant American consumerism. But in those hundred years of innovation and ingenuity, the steering wheel has remained a staple of the automobile.

Now, artificial intelligence threatens that one constant.

Companies like Google and Tesla have created safe, self-driving cars that remove the human operator and render the steering wheel obsolete. Soon, driving will, if existent at all, become a kind of pastime of sorts, the kind of thing I’ll fondly recall to my grandkids.

Soon, not only will computers be able to perform certain tasks better than human beings but they will have the kind of general intelligence that makes computers smarter than human

beings. There are dangers in replacing human beings with technology, though, physical and ethical ones. There must be. *** The term “Artificial Intelligence” is thrown around a lot but nailing down a hard definition is tough. One reasonable definition delineates AI as any kind of program that can make a decision which normally requires human intelligence. This can include anything from as simple a program as the iPhone calculator app to the software of a self-driving car. Artificial intelligence is all about the attempted replication of the miracle of human thought.

Attempts to explain the “miracle” of human thought thread through most of history, and, for most of that time, the explanation was otherworldly. Ancient Greek philosophy, thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, ascribed man’s unique thinking abilities to a god-given soul. We see this kind of thinking arise in Judeo-Christian theology, which holds that man’s capacity to reason was god-given, too. While many held that the origin of man’s ability to reason was divine, many supposed that our capacity for thought isn’t so out of the ordinary. Enlightenment think-

ers, like Gottfried Leibniz, saw human thought as akin to mechanical calculation, like algebra or calculus. More recently, in the same vein as Leibniz, human thought has come to be understood scientifically as the result of evolution. Human beings evolved to have large, complex brains and nervous systems, which allow us to think and imagine and reflect and talk. What we do isn’t exactly distinct from animals or otherworldly; it’s just better.

Attempts to actually replicate human thought pervade humanity’s culture but have remained entirely unfulfilled.

The Turk, an 18th-century, Hungarian chess playing machine, beat the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte but was found to be a hoax, operated by a man holed up in the machine. Stories, like that of Frankenstein, also depict man creating thinking creatures.

Explaining human consciousness still remains much of a mystery, but as secularism and physicalism become more widespread, so too has the belief that human thought is just a complicated collection of synapses, hormones, and chemical reactions. And so, some say, if our brains function just off electrical currents and chemical

signaling, maybe this could be replicated in a computer with chips of silicon.

This idea, of replicating thought in silicon, is traceable all the way back to the origins of the computer. Alan Turing, the father of the computer, devised a test of intelligent behavior for computers.

Instead of trying to determine exactly what “thinking” is, Turing thought that, more important, was a computer’s ability to imitate thinking.

A good enough imitation, Turing posited, is effectively thought. His test, the Turing Test, was to have a human converse with a computer, and, if the person couldn’t tell whether the conversation was computer-generated or input by another human, then the computer was effectively thinking.

Back when Turing devised the experiment, in 1950, computers were slow and inefficient. And, while many at the time supposed that strong AI — computers as smart as human beings — was not far off, truly intelligent computers were still decades away.

Strong AI truly became possible, in the past decade, because of three developments: more available data, faster computers, and “neural netCONTINUED ON PAGE 7

Friday, March 30th, 2018

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Underground and Groundbreaking: Boston’s Urban Farming

By Emma James

I never thought I’d be cutting seventh period class to spend an hour in a metal box on Court Street. But after a bike and a T ride and a mile walk, there I was, eating a radish grown from germination to near-maturity in Downtown Boston.

“I really wanted to close the circle on growing from seed to harvest.

We’re growing as close to the restaurant as possible, the only way you can in the urban environment without a rooftop,” says Mary Dumont, the nationally-accoladed chef who opened her newest restaurant “Cultivar” early last summer. Besides boasting sustainable, whimsically-seasonal cuisine and interior, a centerpiece of the establishment is this hydroponic garden — without soil — just outside the historical Ames Building.

The box, created by Freight Farms, a South Boston “agtech” company enabling people to “grow food anywhere,” looks like the inside of a spaceship: foam-lined panels, “towers,” hang from the ceiling surrounded by walls embedded with LED lights and shelves holding seedlings, buckets, and other gardening tools. This smaller model of

By Jane Yang

their “Leafy Green Machine” hydroponic garden container can actually produce two hundred heads of lettuce per week when in full swing.

As the little room hummed with temperature-regulating vents and the gentle drips of water, I could hear the care under her strict, matter-of-fact tone. The chef-turned-scientist of sorts admitted challenges with mastering the hydroponic element in a busy restaurant context. Questions of what to grow, how to put it on the menu, whether it will be delicious and financially-sound take precedence in a sustainable business model. In addition, getting City Hall approval for the structure was a challenging process due to the Court Street building’s historical status, but more so due to the “very concerned citizens that are very concerned about literally everything,” including, apparently, a literal garden.

Even with all the exhaustive efforts, most of the produce Cultivar needs is still supplemented elsewhere, from hydroponic, “microgreen” (smaller than “baby greens”), and urban farms in and around Boston. But, through it all, “people that work here really understand where the food comes from,

they can play a role in it,” Dumont shared. “They can now become our farmers, farmers of their own restaurant.”

Suddenly, the $35,000 investment means something more.

On that Tuesday afternoon early in December, the baby lettuces and radishes slept. Plants in the Freight Farm experience the night period of their sunlight cycle during the day: electricity rates, especially in a city, go down at night, and daytime employees have an easier time working with the plants if the LEDs aren’t on full, sunlight-equivalent blast.

Humidity, temperature, even wind are all controlled in a similarly ingenious way, this small-scale technology simulating the natural processes that our food production has been subject to for millions of years.

These plants at this time of day, in the bitter winter of Boston, just shouldn’t be in sunlight cycle, they shouldn’t be growing at all. That tiny, delicate radish, well, that’s just a snapshot of a greater initiative to bring the food back to the city. But, like the niche vocabulary I’ve already dolloped along the first page, the business of natural food production in urban spaces isn’t as accessible as it seems

simple.

Whenever you see a tomato labelled “organic,” or a farmer’s market, or even a Whole Foods, you know to expect a thirty percent price increase. From the onset of the Industrial Revolution, hyper-American emphasis on efficiency caused healthy growing to become obsolete in the face of factory farms, pesticide-ridden practices, genetically-modified species; naturally, the effort to bring back Earth-friendly food production must come at a cost to someone.

Despite the heroic connotation of “green spaces” and “city-grown,” today’s trendy priority on environmental development and sustainability is a little more complicated than just moving the food to the neighborhood. If the leaders in Boston’s growing urban farming scene — a national model we’re watching unfold in real time — don’t ensure equality for all, it might just hurt those that need food the most. ***

“When we talk about environmental justice,” news source Grist explains in three-minute video with a bright, youthful voice over nearly-childlike graphics and stop-motion animations, “we’re talking about how we

can break down the system where those who are already disadvantaged because of their race and economic status are made poorer because they’re unable to profit from the resources that the world depends on, and are made sick, or worse, by the environmental contamination that comes with extracting those resources.”

With the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, marginalized Americans, often low-income and from communities of color, began to assemble against the many systemic threats to their life, liberty, property, and health.

The Memphis Sanitation Strike in 1968, recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as the first incident of protest against “environmental injustice,” erupted in response to unbearable sanitation plant danger and disproportionate poverty across Memphis. The rhetoric was further supported by Toxic Waste and Race, a 1987 United Church of Christ study that examined the relationship between waste siting decisions in the United States and race. That study concluded that race was the most significant factor in siting hazardous waste facilCONTINUED ON PAGE 14

What Are We Doing When We Cut Our Hair?

Mr. Chen’s bright red, spiky pompadour cut looks mismatched with the wrinkles around his eyes. Sitting still on a faux leather armchair, I watch locks of my hair falling with each of his snips.

His voice distracts me from feeling the sharp, cold metallic surface of the scissors sliding gently by my neck. When he asks me to guess how long he has been cutting people’s hair, the young apprentice, who has the same haircut as Mr. Chen and has been silently observing us, laughs and answers for me, “Before you and I were born.”

Mr. Chen tells me that he became a barber1 because it was “the easiest job.” “Unlike working hard in a factories or in the fields, you just cut people’s hair.” I can tell from Mr. Chen that his accent that he is not from my city, so I ask why he decides to settle here. He says he used to own a hair salon back home in the 1980s, when China was recovering from the economic depression after the Cultural Revolution and no one had much in their pockets. He wasn’t one who was “brazen enough” to accept money 1 There is no distinction between barbers and hairdressers in China.

from his fellow townsmen when they came to him for a haircut. Giving free haircuts most of the time, he could not sustain the business and had to move to a city with strangers whom he could comfortably charge his customers. Mr. Chen’s mindset-- the sense of obligation to give free haircuts--is perhaps a unique character of Chinese social relationship.

To both him and his fellow townsmen, feeling at home may equate an absence of monetary exchange, an ide that I also naturally relate to.

Yet it still saddens me, knowing that Mr. Chen’s intimate relationship with his people is also what compels him to leave home.

Moving to Xiamen, Mr. Chen has been a barber here for 26 years now, and he starts every sentence with “back then.”

“Back then, beauty schools didn’t exist. I just stood and watched people cutting hair for a year.”

“Back then, there weren’t ionic hair straighteners. We mixed flour with perm solutions and fix the wetted hair on plastic boards.”

“Back then, people only dyed their hair into the two most auspicious colors: bright red and bright yellow.”

As I laugh at my own

imagination of a crowd looks like a mixture of ketchup and mustard from above, I also relate to the sense of nostalgia in Mr. Chen’s tone. He joined the industry in the late 1970s, when hair salons first appeared in China and when getting one’s hair done is likely the most fashionable thing one can think of. The prosperity of the business symbolized the beauty boom that emerged after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, during which the pursuit of beauty was a taboo. When the initial craze faded, salons began to compete by introducing the newest western technologies, techniques, and styles: taking a glance at a Chinese disco in the 1980s, you may see everyone wearing an Afro haircut that origins from the African-American communities across the Pacific. Locally, Xiamen’s hair styling business was experiencing its own golden age because of the city’s soaring economy; “everyone tips lavishly without even blinking,” Mr. Chen reminiscences. Then, when the economic bubble burst, he was still here, along with his fellow barbers, witnessing the rise and fall in the life of his customers, of the neighborhood, and of our city.

When the conversation pauses, I stare at myself

in the mirror, conscious of my exposed forehead, realizing that Mr. Chen may be one of the few who sees me without the cover of my slanted bangs. I see him in the mirror, too. I feel his right hand is holding a pair of scissors against the skin on the right side of my neck, but I am strangely unconcerned about what a shiver of his hand may do. I lean back and listen to a mom sitting next to me complaining to her barber that her 5-year-old hates veggies.

I know that I soon cannot resist telling Mr. Chen about my stories, either. “Feels good?” he removes my white barber’s gown and smiles into his work in the mirror.

I do feel good, but it is more than about my short, fluffy hair. I feel good about myself. About my natural sense of connection to Mr. Chen, to the others in the room, and to this small street-side barbershop. * * * As consumers, we spend more than we expect on hair styling. While I have uncomplainingly paid 20 dollars at Mr. Chen’s for a 20-minute service that I can perform more or less on my own, on the other side of the globe, an average American woman in California, Texas, or Florida spends a total of 55,000

dollars on haircut during her lifetime, according to a survey by the DailyMail. The survey also found that the Californians came in first place with a 150-dollars average monthly budget spent on hairstyling.

Meanwhile, New York Times points out that hair styling is one of the few habit that consumers are reluctant to give up even during economic hardship--hair styling business witnessed a rare 8% growth during the financial crisis in 2008. Perhaps, at this special time period, a haircut not only served as a way to elevate one’s personal image for a confident booster but also as a way to treat oneself and alleviate the frustrations and self-doubts.

Not only is spending majorly on hairdressing a common phenomenon unlimited to a time span, this obsession also is not bound by geography.

“30 bucks!” exclaims my friend Kuzi Chinyaya, an international students from Zimbabwe, as she describes the rate of hair styling sessions at home. “Each time there were these crazy prices that they would give us, and here we are talking about a country that’s economically CONTINUED ON PAGE 14

Friday, March 30th, 2018

By Dylan Volman

As I’m driving down Centre Street, in Milton, MA, I pass by my school, Milton Academy, a K-12 private school with a small college-size campus containing a luscious quad and pristine, grand, over fifty-thousand in tuition, academic buildings.

This institution educates students from Milton, Europe, Asia, Africa and beyond, all receiving an education from one of the oldest and most highly reputed prep schools in the world. I take a right onto Randolph ave, drive another three miles or so, then hook a left across two lanes of heavy Massachusetts traffic onto Chickatawbut Road.

I keep driving another 30 seconds and reach a parking lot that divides into two parts, one part on each side of the street. On one side: there is an overlook with views into Boston and trailheads into woods. On the other side: is a set of concrete steps built into the side of leafy hill. These steps lead up to a wooden hut with no walls, just a roof and some poles, as well as a breathtaking stone tower. This is what is known colloquially as the "lookout", and it is one small region of the Blue Hills Reservation.

According to the Blue Hills official mass.gov webpage,

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

ingly, most of the appliances and furniture within the kitchen are donated. “The Harvard Business school was running a pilot program with the cabinet doors, and afterwards, they donated to us the doors.” “Even one of the industrial fridges came from one of the dining halls.”

These four walls enclose an open area filled with sofas for lounging and futuristic-looking tables and chairs stocked with Mac computers.

This space is anything but the dusty hole in the ground I first imagined.

After concluding the tour, Tamjid sits down at a table in the center of the room, explaining the beginnings of the Y2Y program.

“You can’t just kick people out,” he begins. “It just does’t make sense to fine people for being homeless. The community realized that there was a major issue regarding the amount of homeless lounging in the surrounding Harvard Square area, and as a result, many shelters were opened to provide a space for the homeless to spend the night and sleep. But there was very little support for the homeless youth and younger adults.”

the reservation includes over 7,000 acres of land, spanning over six towns. It holds 125 miles of trails through forests with tall towering trees, mucky wetlands, and rolling hills. Its rich history paints an even prettier picture of the importance of the land.

Bluehillsboston.com describes the rich history of the area. In 1614, John Smith was exploring what is now Boston Harbor, when he saw several large hills 10 miles to the south, one of which he named the largest “Massachusetts Mount.” In 1776, the 635 foothill was officially dubbed the “Great Blue Hill” and would later go on to have many, many, uses. During the revolutionary war, it served as a military "lookout" point to detect enemies, illuminated with beacons on special occasions. Today, the land acts as a stunning reservation filled with wonderful attractions for all, such as skiing, hiking, and running.

The "lookout" is specifically described as a “short hike with great views, this trail is lots of fun for children who like rock scrambling,” by friendsofbluehills.org, but the internet is a vast land of varying opinions about how to spend time here. Another site, cruisinggays.com, lists it as more than just a family-friendly nature destina-

Page 5

Cruising

tion. It advertises the "lookout" as a spot for homosxual men to meet up and have sex. *** Wikipedia defines “cruising” as “walking or driving about a locality in search of a sex partner, usually of the anonymous, casual, onetime variety” but Graham Gremore, a writer for the LGBTQ publication Queerty. com, defines “cruising” as, ”just another saturday night” for some men. Nationally, the gay cruising scene has been around for quite a while now, and has seen many different localities. Graham Gremore of Queerty.com writes that the first recorded police raid of a gay cruising spot was on February 21, 1903, when the NYPD entered the bathhouse in the basement of the Ariston Hotel in NYC. Bathhouses, which are like saunas or steam rooms, continued to be a popular cruising destination until the 1980’s and the AIDS epidemic hit, and men got scared of contracting the disease, so cruising died down a bit. In 1985, the New York City Health Department ordered a complete shutdown of all gay bathhouses, and there, the once beloved hookup hotspot died, but in its place, more locations emerged.

Technology gave birth to numerous means of cruis-

ing. Between, Tinder, Grindr, SCRUFF, Craigslist, and chat rooms, meeting an interested man has never been easier, and with sites like cruisinggays.com, these men can find out just exactly where and when the best places to get intimate are. As I’m sitting in my house, I look up cruisinggays.com, admittedly worried that my mom or dad will walk in. At the top of the site, there is a picture of an admittedly very attractive, shirtless man lying down. I must be in the right place. While the site looks a bit outdated, I am quite impressed with all it has to offer. For example: the site lists some of the best spots listed range from parks to public restrooms of hospitals, all very public places used for very private moments. With these spaces come codes too, and each space can have its own set of signals to indicate a man is seeking the company of another. I watched a youtube video by a youtuber named Strombo entitled “Gay Cruising” to find out more about these codes. When cruising in public restrooms, to signal to the man in the next stall that one is searching for sex, one man takes a wad of toilet paper and drops it on the floor within reach of the man in the next stall over. If the man in the other stall picks up the

Distant Worlds Feet Apart, Continued

With a quick google search, I discover the only other program that provides overnight shelter exclusively to homeless youth: Bridge Over Troubled Waters. As one of the original service providers to combat homeless youth, Bridge Over Troubled Waters was founded in the 1960’s initially “reaching out to disaffected, troubled, and often drug-involved youth” to provide them with “sandwiches, cold drinks, and non-judgmental conversations that turned into supportive counseling, referrals to health care, psychiatric services, a way back home if possible, and planning for alternatives when going home was not an option.” Over the years, Bridge over Troubled Waters developed from its roots in the 1960s — they now have a truck to provide on-site service to homeless youth while also offering overnight emergency youth shelter during the cold winter months — but the program still lacks the ability to consistently provide shelter during the regular seasons.

Tamjid explains that prior to the conception of Y2Y, there were, in fact, “only 12 beds dedicated to homeless youth,” many of which were in shelters that also catered

to older residents.

“There were many reports of youth not feeling safe in adult homeless shelter, especially when [homeless youth] were just aging out of foster care and entering this unstable world,” explains Tamjid.

In fact, a 2007 Boston census found that nearly 37% of the youth and young adults leaving state care agencies reported being homeless.

Tamjid continues, “Sam Greenberg and Sarah Rosenkrantz, who were the two founders of Y2Y, felt it important to create a space completely dedicated to youth.”

With twenty-two cubicle sleeping spaces to provide shelter to each resident for thirty days and five cots to provide one night stays for five residents, Y2Y has nearly tripled the amount of beds reserved with homeless youth, but even so, Tamjid regretfully admits that “ there are very few night where we are not at capacity. We are definitely seeing a demand that we are not able to meet.”

To get a highly coveted spot in the Y2Y program, prospective residents must enroll in a lottery, where they are each provided with a number. “We run one lottery in the morning and one

at night, and if your number is selected, you get to stay for thirty days.”

Accepted residents get more than just a simple hot meal and a place to sleep; They also get access to Y2Y’s networking program, where they bring in professionals to assist in legal and medical help — case management, mental health clinicians, drop-in service providers, workshops, resume help and job support, and referrals to other service providers.

But these services bring about their own issues. *** On Mondays, new residents may have to explain their story and their experiences on the streets, some of which may be personal and traumatic, to the case worker who comes in. On Tuesdays, new residents may have to explain the same story and experiences on the streets to the health care professional.

On Wednesdays, new residents may have to explain their story and their experiences on the streets to the mental health clinician. The point is, residents must constantly recount painful personal anecdotes time after time, possibly discouraging residents from reaching out to services that can rescue

paper, he is, too, looking to hookup. These signals can be tricky, however, as undercover police have been taught to recognize them. In 1998, famous British songwriter George Michael tried to cruise in a public restroom in Beverly Hills, only to find out it was a sting operation, and he was arrested for “engaging in a lewd act,” or “cottaging” (British terms for cruising according to wikipedia).

Why has gay hookup culture been forced into secrecy in public areas, and why has our law enforcement taken the matter with the utmost seriousness by setting up traps for these men? Homosexual high school drama teacher Peter Parisi says, “You keep it a secret because the lesson you learn is that it’s bad, it’s shameful, it’s sinful.” *** Peter Parisi and I are quite close. We’ve worked on several amazing productions together in the Milton Theatre Department, and I consider him to be a mentor and role model. This made my interview with him all the more easy and comfortable. We sit on the comfy, brown-leather couches in the faculty lounge in King Theatre. He is wearing a trademark Parisi outfit: a blue, checkered, CONTINUED ON PAGE 9

them from the cycle of seeking refuge on the streets and 30-day stay shelters.

Tamjid believes the next biggest improvement to Y2Y to be “connecting all the resources together to make our networking programing more effective. One problem that everybody knows about but doesn’t really know how to tackle is that when you reach out to new service providers, you have to retell your story each time, and that can be traumatizing.”

Much of this trauma stems from the experiences of the homeless LGBTQ youth community. According to True Colors Fund, a Homeless LGBTQ advocacy group, 40 percent of the nation’s youth identify as LGBTQ while homeless youth represent a mere 7 percent of the total homeless population.

Many are rejects of their families, abused and kicked out of households with parents who are unable to accept their child for who they are.

As a result, there is a huge emphasis on making sure residents at Y2Y feel completely comfortable during their stays. The facilities in the Y2Y space — showers, restrooms, and sleeping arCONTINUED ON PAGE 15

Friday, March 30th, 2018

Page 6

Delivering the Scoop On Ordering At Milton, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Twenty minutes pass and I call the driver again.

When she picks up, I hear the sounds of busy commotion in the background. She tells me that my food will be there soon. Another twenty minutes pass and I call her again.

This time I ask specifically when the drink will be here.

She responds with, “What drink? Your order didn’t have any drink on it.” Confused, I tell her that I’m asking about the bubble tea that was missing from my order. All I hear is, “Oh. Okay” before the call suddenly drops. I call her again. No answer. I try again.

No answer.

Now, I know that complaining about a single drink is very demanding. I don’t want to be that guy. After all, it’s just one cup. She didn’t forget some necessity; she missed one cup of bubble tea, a luxury item. However, after paying money for the drink, delivery fares, and tip, I would hope to be able at least receive all of my order.

Ordering delivery is not usually hard. Delivery is made to be convenient. In fact delivery services pride themselves on convenience.

Often when a restaurant offers delivery, they will provide a 30 minute guarantee or

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

an estimated time of arrival.

And when students choose to order, they often choose to prioritize the convenience of ordering over the cost of ordering.

Yet, ordering is not always convenient. Students need to contact the delivery location and direct the driver carefully through Milton’s campus to the doorstep of their dorm. Wouldn’t it just be easier to just walk over to Forbes to eat? ***

Peter Won and I sit in my dorm room, me at my desk and him across from me on my blue bean bag. A junior from Korea, he wears a plain light grey hoodie and blue shorts. Coming to Milton in his sophomore year, Peter tells me about his experience ordering delivery at Milton.

For him, ordering is a frequent occurrence. He orders three times a week on average, sometimes due to the lack of food options and sometimes due to the time of dinner. As with many Milton students, Peter feels that Flik does not always offer the most appetizing meals.

“I don’t like the quality,” Peter says, “However, Flik does serve good food occasionally.” Even though Flik does not always offer great options, Peter still eats at Forbes

on sit down days.

On sit down dinner days with not-so-appetizing food, he elects to eat a salad or something before ordering later in the night. But on non-sit down dinner nights, he typically will just order without checking what's served in Forbes. He “assumes Flik food is bad.” And that assumption isn’t unfair.

For most people, Flik is a staple of their Milton career. Especially for boarders, eating three meals a day served by Flik gets repetitive and, frankly, doesn’t taste great. Of course, being institutional food, Flik has to provide for hundreds of students, faculty, and children. With so many to take care of, Flik cannot create gourmet home cooked meals all the time.

However, Flik food is edible.

It fulfills every student’s nutritional requirements. But for many, nutritional value isn’t the only important part of food.

And with that inevitable truth, ordering delivery is no stranger to students. In fact, delivery is so expected that a webpage for menus of local delivery restaurants is available on every student’s MyMilton portal. The webpage lists options from Asian food to Pizza. The school expects every Milton student to

order at least once.

I remember back to freshmen year, before I knew how and what to order. Never before in my life had I ever ordered delivery. I had never heard of Grubhub or doordash, just two of numerous websites that connect you with thousands of restaurants for ordering delivery. Instinctively, I used the MyMilton portal to scout out different delivery options.

Milton’s expectation was correct.

And that expectation was correct for Peter Won too. Ordering is just part of his life as a Milton student.

When Flik food is not ideal, he’ll order Chinese food or pizza. Sometimes he’ll order with friends and sometimes he’ll order alone. And he knows about the financial impacts of ordering delivery.

“I don’t go to the point where it’s crazy. I always am aware,” he says. For him, ordering is a good investment. It offers him convenience and better food.

And Milton’s student community seems to follow his beliefs. Initially, when trying to write this piece, I could not find any data on ordering frequency of Milton students. Wanting to add more data to my analysis of ordering delivery, I created

and sent a ten question survey with topics ranging from ordering frequency to weekly spending amounts to all upper school students.

According to that survey sent to all Milton students, 164 responding, 81% of students ordered delivery at some point in their Milton lives. Of those who ordered, 31% said that they ordered once a week. Only 10% of respondents reported ordering multiple times a week. Other respondents said that they ordered less frequently than once a week. Perhaps ordering too frequently is out of the ordinary, but ordering in general is no abnormality. *** Flik Independent Schools provides breakfast, lunch, and dinner to all Milton students. Meals are already provided under Milton’s $50,000+ tuition. Yet, despite meals being provided for students, 58% of students spend $11-$20 on ordering food.

When asked why they order, students responded with a range of reasons.

Most of the responses focused on Flik with responses from “Flik is bad” to Flik is too “repetitive.” In general, despite Flik’s being available to all students, students will CONTINUED ON PAGE 8

AGGRESSION, DIGRESSION, Continued

dumpster. They stop dead in their tracks when they hear the evil laughter of neighborhood bully Scut Farkus, who has red hair and “yellow eyes.” As Scut laughs maniacally (like any good neighborhood bully), the three boys turn and stumble towards the dumpster at the end of the alley. From beneath the dumpster lid jumps out Scut’s sneaky “toady” sidekick, Grover Dill, and the two laugh evilly as they sandwich the three younger kids. Two manage to escape — one is pinned by Farkus, who twists his arm behind his back and forces him to call Scut “Uncle,” and shouts at him repeatedly to “cry, baby cry.”

After Scut finally pushes the poor kid away, the three scuttle home.

While exaggerated, this 1983 rendition of the neighborhood bully will seem outdated to most of us. Most middle school bullies nowadays probably don’t pin their victims and force them to admit inferiority in the form of “Uncle” or crying — at least not in American suburbs. If anything, bullying has become more serious than primitive name calling — and our beloved A Christmas Story only proves that this satire

of a bully is, well, a satire. As times and culture change, so must our perceptions of who bullies are: Just who is the new neighborhood bully?

Dr. Peter Raffalli, a professor of neurology at the Harvard Medical School and director of Bullying and Cyberbullying Prevention and Advocacy Collaborative (BACPAC) at Boston Children’s Hospital, speaks to me of the current status of aggression research and bullying prevention of schools in the US. “Yes, bullying is a public health issue. It’s been one since at least 2001.” A busy man, Dr. Raffalli is unfortunately unable to meet me in person; he calls me instead.

“I’ve worked specifically with kids with special needs, who can unfortunately be bullied more.” A neurology specialist with over twenty years of experience, Dr. Raffalli is wellversed in bullying’s roots, implications, and active areas of research.

As I sit in my dimly lit room, I listen to his slightly crackling voice over the phone as he identifies general trends of both bullies and victims. In general, Dr. Raffalli explains to me, victims tend to be outcasts — kids who are different or feel isolated. “Bullying is considered a form of abuse, and the vic-

tims of bullying act like other abuse victims: they don’t tend to come forward. They tend to be afraid to come forward, like it might make it worse, or it would be embarrassing if it comes out.” They instead tend to stay quiet, which unfortunately helps the bully to continue. Victims also aren’t sure if adults will handle their bullying situation well, “and that’s actually realistic,” he says, “because sometimes the adults don’t handle it well, unfortunately. That’s part of our goal: educating adults and teachers on how to handle these situations.”

Dr. Raffalli comments on the nature of bullies, too.

“They’re frequently the popular kids, actually. It’s not true that bullies are always the derelict kids. They’re just good at looking innocent.”

Confidence and a need for superiority, he says, finds itself among “the popular kids.” Dominance is nothing unique among this demographic. “Schools need to be aware of this. They have to look at things with a kind of discerning eye and say, you know, just because someone looks like a plain type kid, doesn’t mean he’s not bullying somebody.”

I ask about the psychological factors driving bullying.

He explains that most bul-

lies have a personal need for dominance, making sure they stay at the top of the heap, and that they can be fairly controlling people. “That’s another misconception, by the way, is that bullies are insecure. You know, parents will say, ‘He’s only doing this to you because he’s insecure,’ but it really turns out from the research that most bullies are not insecure, they know exactly what they’re doing, and if anything they’re very domineering people, and sometimes very confident people.”

As he explains, I begin to realize that a great deal of research has been done — and that understandings of the bully have progressed over the years. Dr. Raffalli pauses and lets out a deep breath. “I would say that those are the two big stereotypes that are myths: that they’re insecure, and that they’re the outcasts.

And they’re really not.”

At least as early as the 1990s, the traditional bullying stereotype has been evolving.

One 1999 study conducted by the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths College in London challenges the bully stereotype of an “oafish person” who “lacks social skills.”

The Goldsmiths study succinctly defines this “‘popular stereotype’ of a bully,” who “is usually a male, physically

powerful yet intellectually simple or backward, resorting to violence and aggression in their interactions almost because they know no other way (a familiar picture in children’s books and comics, for example ‘Tom Brown’s schooldays’, or The Beano).” The study goes on to break down this stereotype, arguing that a bully’s power to bully rests on the ability to understand and manipulate the minds of others — what previous studies have called, a “theory of mind.” This type of social cognition implies that bullies are not “oafish,” and as Dr. Raffalli pointed out, that they have social skills: they are, in fact, the “popular kids.”

And while traditional bullies still exist — Dr. Raffalli points out that “there are still kids who will bully for lunch money, or to do their homework” — bullying has mostly evolved in a time when access to media and information has become universal.

The term “cyberbullying” was coined sometime between 2000 and 2005, and refers to the act of harassing or bullying someone online, usually anonymously. The last bit there is especially important: anonymously. Students who CONTINUED ON PAGE 8

Friday, March 30th, 2018

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

boasted that, at one point, he handled $1.5 billion in transactions in the early stages. He and his companies ended up scamming numerous people, and he was fired from Paycom, which stood as one of the biggest middlemen between credit companies and porn sites. Now, the porn industry is a $97 billion business with billions of consumers, all through the creation of e-commerce — all for the enjoyment of sex.

Money may make the world go round, but everything comes down to sex. *** At Milton, a high school where we try to focus on discussing social issues around race, gender, and sexuality, students rarely discuss porn.

However, once someone brings up this taboo topic, others readily join in on the conversation. When I worked on Milton’s feminist magazine, The F-Word, during the hookup culture issue, the publication surprisingly never received an article on porn. Because all of the articles were student submissions, I expected one on how students watch porn, or why porn’s prevalence matters.

Then again, female students submitted the majority of the

Page 7

Let’s Get It On(line), Continued

articles. So how could I expect them to talk about porn?

As Robert demonstrated, it’s a male-dominated culture.

“I’d feel a bit uncomfortable if my girlfriend watches porn,” he later tells me.

Porn, like every sexual topic, is ignored in high school education. Milton teachers don’t talk about sexual education in affective-ed classes. In Massachusetts, schools receive federal funding for sex-ed only if the school teaches abstinence-only. Though Milton boasts the benefits of a private school and doesn’t receive federal funding, we still don’t teach students about healthy sex culture, or sex in general. Freshman health classes hardly touch on reproduction at all, leaving students to the grace of the senior-led Health, Sexuality, and Relationships (HS&R) courses, which are optional and for only sophomores and juniors. Only 48% of sophomores and juniors sign up, and really, how educated can theses seniors be on sex-ed if they haven’t had a proper class on it?

The lack of sexual education leads to poor consequences: students don’t understand contraception, sexually transmitted infections, or realistic sex culture.

While The F-Word and HS&R aim to close that gap, few students take these classes or read the magazine enough to bring it upon themselves to further their own education.

But Milton once disturbed the clear waters on sexual ignorance when the school invited the guest speaker: Cindy Pierce.

53 minutes after I sent an email with the subject “Sexploitation,” I receive an email back from Cindy Pierce, a sexpertise. The author of Sexploitation: Helping Kids Develop Healthy Sexuality in a Porn-Driven World, Pierce uses her comedic storytelling to speak with middle school, high school, and college students to educate them on sex. In 2017, she visited Milton and gave a humorous talk on sexual health and hookup culture. She’s middle-aged with a short haircut and a captivating, upbeat voice.

Her speech led to greater conversation among the student body with affective-education classes reflecting on how to improve Milton’s sex culture.

I requested to interview, and Pierce willingly accepted. We agree to talk the next day as she takes a break from her daughter’s college tour to discuss her views on teenage porn usage. “Porn is the num-

ber one sexuality educator,” Pierce explained, “but there’s no ‘how’ to sex.” She describes a somewhat new phenomena among porn-watchers: dissociation. People have started to dissociate — mentally separate oneself from the physical experience — during sex because they want to perform well, and the word “perform” leads to an unrealistic expectation that sex is a performance rather than a pleasurable, intimate experience. “Male participants get that porn isn’t accurate, but where can they get visual instruction?”

Pierce highlights another issue with porn: the need to know what you’re doing when you have sex. As society becomes more competitive, teenagers have a drive to need to know how to do everything correctly. Whether we’re learning how to graph a derivative or how to have sex, we rely on informational videos to do so — even in such different situations. In school, students are marked down for not doing something well, and this mentality leaks into their sex lives.

Therefore, when having sex, participants dissociate.

“They’re not in their bodies — they’re making sure they look like a pornstar and perform like a pornstar,” Pierce

says. *** I sit with Cooper, a virgin.

We’re in The Milton Paper office, sitting on the black couch pushed against the wall. Surrounding us are scattered posters and plaques — even a stolen Panera buzzer. Cooper reflects the stereotypical white boy at Milton: tall-ish and lanky, wearing a Patagonia. Yet he carries atypical views on watching porn. As a senior, our hypercompetitive environment and our sex culture is all he’s ever known or experienced.

I decide to start off with an easy question: How often do you watch porn? I realize that I catch him off-guard as he chokes on his school-provided parfait. “Once every two months?” He laughs while wiping his mouth. He recognizes his viewing habits are much different than most of his friends’, but he masturbates everyday. From my conversations with other guys, Cooper masturbates more frequently. Ironic, I guess. Though I think of him as stereotypical, I understand that he strays from the norm with his sexual habits. He claims that he chose, for a long time, to remain a virgin.

I don’t press as to why, but I CONTINUED ON PAGE 17

Driven Into Unfamiliar Territory: The Ethics of AI, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

works.” With the growing ubiquity of smartphones, more raw data exists than ever before: pictures, texts, music, et cetera. And all this data can now be processed faster and more efficiently than ever, as computing power has essentially doubled every two years for the past four decades. These two advances in computing made neural networks possible.

A neural network is a way for computers to process information first theorized in 1943 by neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts. It is a way to categorize information inspired by models of biological brains.

How neural networks work, simply put, is they are fed categorized information — pictures labelled cats and dogs — and the computers themselves attempt to find characteristics which distinguish the pre-categorized information. They operate as a baby learns: parents tell the baby the names of things, and the baby inductively (and subconsciously) categorizes them. But neural networks that process lots of data require significant computing power, afforded by the modern era.

Now that an aspect of a biological system is being replicated in a computer — how human beings inductively learn — we are much more justified in asking: could AI become conscious? ***

I pull into the parking lot of a fairly stark looking office building in Medford, Massachusetts. Because I’m a few minutes early, I decide to scope out the area.

Every breath of mine releases a kind of cloud as I notice that the street is split down the middle between office buildings and homes. With a Starbucks drink keeping my hands from numbing, I return to the front of the building after fifteen minutes. A gentleman, about forty years old, sporting a casual button down, meets me in the lobby and takes me to the second floor. He swipes a key card, opens a metallic door, and leads me into a room.

I’m initially blinded by the sight. The room is acutely white, the floor, the ceiling, some cloth curtains segmenting the room into quarters. He tells me this is where most of the experimentation takes place, and I have little time to inquire about the necessity of the room’s whiteness when he opens another door, one ini-

tially hidden by a white divider. I look around to find six or seven pairs of eyes staring at me, but their owners aren’t human. “This,” he tells me, “is where the robots are kept.” Ranging from what look like souped-up Roombas to cylinders with humanoid-like faces, the room’s robots number around ten. I see one particularly large robot, which looks like a white jukebox with arms. In front of it, a plastic chef’s knife sits on a table. He explains that this setup is part of their effort to teach safe knife handling to robots: things like, orienting the knife handle-first when handing it over to a person.

Thomas Arnold is a research assistant at the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts University. The laboratory’s primary purpose is to study how people behave around robots and how to program robots to behave around people. Their research is, in part, funded by the US Office of Naval Research and the US National Science Foundation. Beyond research, a number of undergraduate and graduate courses are also conducted in the lab, using its robots.

Thomas is one of sixteen people who work in the laboratory. His background, he tells me, is not in computer

science but in the philosophy of religion. And, for three years, he’s been working here, conducting experiments and producing research papers alongside the lab’s director, Professor Matthias Scheutz.

We slip into another side room and sit down.

He sits with one leg crossed over the other and a straightened back. He is methodical in everything he says, always taking time to thoroughly vet his words before releasing them. He seems to speak in paragraphs, with topic sentences and transitions.

When it comes to the question of computer consciousness, Thomas is fairly moderate. “There are some crusty philosophers,” he says, “who think [computer consciousness] is not coherent.”

Computer consciousness is something he thinks is possible, but he says freaking out about its moral implications now is premature: “No one is watching Westworld” — an HBO drama predicated on the exploitation of androids — ”and saying, ‘We’re really worried that the robots are actually suffering,’ that we’ve got to do something urgently.”

For thousands of years, consciousness — the exclusively human state of

self-awareness and subjective experience — has been explained as otherworldly.

There is the body, the physical, material self, and then there is the spiritual, god-given mind (or the soul). But modern philosophy has begun trying to explain the nature of a physicalist consciousness.

In the late 1990s, philosopher David Chalmers conceived of a division between the two kinds of problems of consciousness: “the easy problems of consciousness” and “the hard problem.”

The easy problems have to do with how science will explain the workings of the brain, like sensory information processing, pattern recognition, and information integration.

He dubs these “easy” because they seemingly have definite answers, though we may be unable to give them for decades. “The hard problem” is explaining how all these processes give rise to subjective experience, that feeling of self which we all experience.

However, some philosophers deny the existence of this problem altogether.

Dan Dennett, who also works at Tufts, believes that subjective experience really is just the collection of brain processes: the hard problem will be resolved by the easy prob-

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Delivering the Scoop On Ordering At Milton, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 6

still elect to order out once or more a week.

Joe Hines, the food service director at Milton of 6 years, oversees almost all the food that is served on Milton’s campus from the dining halls to the snack bar. We sit across from each other in Withington hall, a medium sized room connected to Forbes dining hall, alone. He is tall.

His body language makes him out to be in his forties, but his grey stubble ages him by another ten years. With a blue checkered shirt and a brown and purple vest, Mr. Hines places a clipboard with a few sheets of paper onto the long wooden dining table between us.

He unclips two sheets and places them side by side in front of me. Each one barely has any text, only a question and answer choices with percentages. I quickly skim the pages. Each is a question of a survey conducted by Flik in 2015. 84% of 82 respondents said they order takeout food primarily “instead of dining hall meals served.” Only 16% of respondents said they primarily ordered takeout “in addition to dining hall meals served” or “because [they] missed a meal time.”

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 6

Yet, ordering takeout is not always as simple as just being an alternative to Flik food. Do people order just because they despise Flik food or is there more to it? Are we just never content with what we have? ***

“I think the number of students that are ordering and the type of food that people are ordering and the volume that they are ordering is indicative of something wrong at Milton,” Joshua Emmott tells me. We sit inside his history classroom, the walls and whiteboards

like the Alex Trebek of Milton Academy. He always speaks slowly and precisely. Not new by any measure to Milton Academy, Mr. Emmott is currently on his 14th year at the Academy. From the start, he has lived in Wolcott House as a dorm parent, originally living on the top floor and now living on the ground floor.

About five years ago, he became the house head, taking on the responsibility of overseeing more than 40 boarding students.

Since joining Milton’s faculty, Mr. Emmott has seen a dramatic shift in the

and more.

That shift represents a cultural shift at Milton and in America. As Mr. Emmott puts it, “You can’t look at people and identify their level of wealth.” And with that economic shift also comes a social shift. When he started at Milton, Mr. Darling, now a faculty member of Hathaway, would bring speakers to talk about healthy eating.

Now, those speeches have disappeared.

The speeches did not end because they no longer serve a purpose. They disappeared because society is

“I don’t think about the fats, the sodium, the carbohydrates, and the other detrimental parts of the dish. And that’s exactly what Mr. Emmott worries about. We form these habits at a young age that will harm us as we grow older. And I completely agree that ordering on the daily without thinking about the health effects is a bad habit.” covered with maps. Just like the typical history class, we sit at the dark brown, wooden Harkness table. He looks around fifty years old, dressed in an olive grey suit with a dark purple bowtie to match his purple dress shirt.

The clean Harkness table we sit at seems bare in comparison to the overdressed walls of the classroom.

Always dressed well and fluent in almost every topic of study, Mr. Emmott is

Milton student population.

Initially, the word “diversity” only referred to how many African American students there were on campus. And at the time, financial aid was primarily for those in that “diversity category.” In the past few years, that mentality has shifted. “Now, one would be very careful to say that.” What he means is that diversity encompasses so much more than just race. It includes wealth, class status,

changing. Although healthy eating is still important, we no longer regard it with as much importance as before.

The social changes have only exacerbated the problem of ordering. And Mr. Emmott strongly sees ordering as a problem — an “almost completely negative thing.”

The food that students choose to order is his biggest concern of ordering delivery.

“In the boys dormitory, 100% of the food ordered is by any

measure unhealthy food.”

Blaming high cholesterol and fat, Mr. Emmott believes that ordering delivery leads to unhealthy eating habits. For high school age students, eating a lot and not so healthy food may not have strong short term effects. But as we grow older, those unhealthy eating habits can lead to health risks like diabetes and heart diseases.

I know, at least for me, I never prioritize a healthy choice over an unhealthy choice when I order. I just scroll through a restaurant’s menu and decide whether it sounds good or not. I don’t think about the fats, the sodium, the carbohydrates, and the other detrimental parts of the dish. And that’s exactly what Mr. Emmott worries about. We form these habits at a young age that will harm us as we grow older. And I completely agree that ordering on the daily without thinking about the health effects is a bad habit.

When I ask him about how he feels about Flik, he says that the same logic goes with Flik. According to Mr. Emmott, Flik’s serving sizes are often way too much. And while Flik may strive to offer healthier options and to edCONTINUED ON PAGE 10

AGGRESSION, DIGRESSION, Continued

cyberbully have the added edge of stealth and anonymity, granting less room for consequence and more freedom to express aggression.

According to the legal definition of cyberbullying, this aggression can include “rumors, threats, sexual remarks, a victims' personal information, or pejorative labels (i.e., hate speech).” Recent high-profile cases of cyberbullying in the 2010s have given awareness to the fact that cyberbullying can be just as harmful as traditional bullying — onsetting depression and other mental illnesses, and eventually, suicide.

For schools, cyberbullying presents a now well-known yet infinitely challenging problem. On a drizzling Wednesday afternoon, I walk into the roomy office of Mr. José Ruiz, Milton Academy’s Dean of Students and longtime school administrator. A man with a firm handshake, Mr. Ruiz greets me warmly as I sit down on one of his couches. When asked about the transition of physical to cyberbullying, he tells me Massachusetts law dictates that any kind of bullying, if manifested in the community or lives of students in school, falls under the

school’s jurisdiction. As I look around Mr. Ruiz’s school-administrator-like office, I notice his computer screen over-flooding with important-looking emails. “The online world is very difficult to patrol,” he tells me, “and the word ‘cyberbullying’ has become so charged that the stakes are higher.” According to him, the word “bullying” itself seems to capture a lot of behaviour that, when push comes to shove, may not really be considered bullying; the line is tough to draw. He also admits that in his eighteen years of working in education, he has seen only two physical fights, neither of them at Milton.

Both the school administrator and the neurologist mention the need for institutional vigilance. If people on the front lines — teachers, administrators, parents — don’t enforce strategies, Dr. Raffalli tells me, “then you can’t really do anything about solving it.” Dr. Raffalli outlines some of the do's and don'ts of bullying prevention and remediation: do reduce access of bully to victim; do provide strategies for kids to get help; don’t bring people together to talk about it — it only makes victims more anxious.

Past understandings of

the stereotype aren’t wrong, and social tension and hierarchy haven’t disappeared — they’ve simply evolved. Our Scut Farkus, push, shove, punch-kind of bully simply doesn’t exist anymore, or at

resolved? Will we always find this primal aggression between kids in school?

By the end of the phone call with the Director of BACPAC, only one question lingers on my mind: Where

couch sits the whole crew of old friends — all staring at the TV screen. Upon noticing us, they all stand to greet us warmly. Within minutes, though, I’m on the couch laughing with all the friends

“If people on the front lines — teachers, administrators, parents — don’t enforce strategies, Dr. Raffalli tells me, “then you can’t really do anything about solving it.” Dr. Raffalli outlines some of the do's and don'ts of bullying prevention and remediation: do reduce access of bully to victim; do provide strategies for kids to get help; don’t bring people together to talk about it — it only makes victims more anxious.” least he comes out less often.

A long term study conducted

by Child Trends, a nonprofit research organization, has found that “the share of students in grades 9 through 12 who had been in at least one physical fight in the past year declined from 43 percent in 1991 to 33 percent in 2001.

Between 2011 and 2015 the proportion decreased markedly, from 33 to 23 percent.”

In other words, on average, only one-fifth of children in the US found themselves in one physical fight in 2015.

Perhaps most interestingly, overall bullying rates have shifted insignificant amounts compared to this decline of physical bullying. Is it possible that this tension between students can never really be

does this need for aggression originate from? I can tell Dr. Raffalli lights up on the other side of the line: “Ah,” he says, “now that’s the billion-dollar question.” ***

A chilly Thanksgiving night, my family pulls into the driveway of a long time friend’s. Snatching up bottles of wine and two potluck dishes, my brother and I awkwardly rush ahead of our parents to the front door — we haven’t seen these friends in a couple years. Following the doorbell and the glass screen door, hugs, warm greetings, and laughter fill the air. My brother and I push into the large house, leaving the parents to their long catch up session. On the living room

of my childhood, eating chips, and watching one of us play video games on the TV. From a third person view, the character on the screen runs around on the street. We talk loudly and joke around as we take turns controlling the character, Michael, shooting guns on the streets of San Andreas and driving cars to shops for customized rims and paint jobs. Michael runs over a few pedestrians and receives a one-star wanted level by the police. Called for dinner, we pause the game and the title of the notorious game appears on screen: Grand Theft Auto V.

Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure video CONTINUED ON PAGE 10

Friday, March 30th, 2018

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 7

recognize his honesty and privacy around his sex life, which I don’t see from many others.

Cooper also says that porn isn’t realistic, but if he was about to have sex, “unfortunately, I’d probably get my information from porn,” he admits, stirring his yogurt and breaking eye contact. Compared to his typically outgoing personality, he answers my questions in short quips.

I blame this on my “easing” into the conversation. Our talk has a different attitude compared to the humorous and nonchalant one that I had with Robert. Yet, from Cooper, I get a voice that isn’t locker-room talk. “I just think we’re expected to know what to do, and that’s why a lot of guys get nervous.”

Cooper’ mentioning the fear that accompanies one’s first time reiterates Pierce’s concern. Now, erectile dysfunction (ED) is more common among young adults than it was before. In such situations, the male can’t maintain an erection in order to have sex, which may lead to embarrassment from both parties. Pierce explains that the pressure and anxiety around sex leads to ED,

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5

button-down shirt with jeans and a worn pair of timberlands. My first question to him is a personal one, about how old he was when he started sexually engaging in homosexual relationships, and how able he was to be open with these relationships. He tells me he was 17, and no, he was definitely not able to openly discuss these romances. “When straight people have crushes, they want to tell the world. For gay people, that doesn’t happen,” Mr. Parisi tells me in a very matter-of-fact tone.

When he says this, I start thinking about all the times I ran into the student center at Milton Academy to tell my friends about this girl I had just gotten with, and how cool I felt and how cool my friends made me feel. I feel awful that Mr. Parisi may have never been able to experience the thrill of talking about someone you like, but he reassures me that he was able to tell his friends about his love life. “With gay people, your friends become your family,” he tells me with a hint of nostalgia. I think that when he says this, he is reminiscing about his high school friends who cared for him and accepted him when

Page 9

Let’s Get It On(line), Continued especially because of their internalized views due to porn’s being so unrealistic.

But what could people be watching that affects them so much? *** And this is when I feel uncomfortable: when I use my personal hotspot to connect my computer to my phone data and type up “pornhub. com” into the Google search bar. I already told my roommate about what I was about to do, and she sat on the bed opposite mine, laughing at my face that shone red even through my makeup. I lean against the hard wall and set my laptop next to me.

I don’t want to react, and I feel like physical detachment from my computer will help with confirming the research purpose of this experience. I already feel the shame that 73% of girls feel after watching porn, and I haven’t even pressed the “return” key.

I’m greeted by a black website with the famous, or infamous, orange logo at the top: an orange box surrounding “porn” in white letters and “hub” in black letters. Right below the title are five tabs: Categories, Live Cams, Fuck Now, Phone Sex, and *Premium. I honestly thought the website would be more inter-

esting than this, but it looks like a shabby, amateur clickbait website.

I don’t want to explore that much, so I click on “Porn Videos,” which leads to innumerable categories. The first ones are: Top Rated, Hottest, Most Viewed, and Recommended. The site contains an impressive amount of oth-

imize the screen and close the pop-up that advertises “Real sex now!” and bring the page back. “That’s just not normal,” she comments as she climbs back onto her bed.

But is this how we’re taught to think about sex?

“This is literally a buffet,” I joke. But it really is. Those who enjoy watching porn

“I shouldn’t be as flustered by watching porn as I am. Yet I never wanted to actually search up porn and see what it looks like. When I had a Tumblr account, a blog website, soft porn came up on my feed, but it wasn’t aggressive, and the GIFs were often from movies, so I didn’t care. Pornhub, however, requires a different mentality altogether to go on the website.” er topics, such as Stepmom, Creampie, and Fetish. “Ugh, dude,” I wince. My roommate jumps off her bed and runs to mine.

“What’s on it?” She leans over to see the screen. We’re fascinated, confused, and uncomfortable. I already clicked on Top Rated, and the first thing I see is a video, or a GIF, of an enormous penis just going in and out of a girl’s vagina who looks as if she’s in a lot of pain. No. Really, I see a huge dick pounding a girl with a huge ass and big tits.

That’s my first thought — it’s hard to use mature language when describing porn. I min-

would gleam at scrolling down and seeing thousands more pages to tap on just in case the first page of options didn’t contain what they’re in the mood for. That I’m so surprised and have no clue what I’m doing reveals a lot about women in porn culture. As a vocal advocate for sexual health and as someone who parallels Robert’s openness about taboo topics, I shouldn’t be as flustered by watching porn as I am. Yet I never wanted to actually search up porn and see what it looks like. When I had a Tumblr account, a blog website, soft porn came up on my

Cruising, Continued

many others wouldn’t.

He details to me the ways he would meet guys at gay bars or LGBTQ college dances. “Straight people are hooking up parties and wherever,” he says to me very directly, as his assumption is that I am some douchey, white, teenage male who flirts with girls and only thinks about sex.

I can’t say he’s completely wrong. “You see some girl, you put the moves on her.

Guys aren’t gonna do that,” he says, referring to the risk of getting beat up or publically shamed that every gay male takes when trying to pick up another guy who may or may not be gay as well. Even Mr. Parisi, a man I consider to be quite brave and confident, tells me he is cautious about what he says and does in certain environments. “Still in 2017, you guys can say what you want...but we know homophobia still exists.” “You guys,” doesn’t feel accusatory, but it does feel like he’s reminding me that it is the responsibility of those in the societal norm (white, male, straight, cisgender, etc…) to fix the prejudice against those who are LGBTQ. We dive into the more general perception about gay hookup culture. He discusses all the components that contributed to the stereotyp-

feed, but it wasn’t aggressive, and the GIFs were often from movies, so I didn’t care. Pornhub, however, requires a different mentality altogether to go on the website.

I’m not a squeamish person. But after I chose the second video (the first one was “MILF takes a big load on her face,” and that seemed

ing and fear surrounding gay men. Growing up, he tells me there were no gay role models on TV or in the movies, and gays were always portrayed in the media as offensive stereotypes, such as the very effeminate gay best friend, or the sexually deviant villian, like in the 1980 movie “Cruising” with Al Pacino where to Mr. Parisi, the humble moral of the story is “Gay people are killers.” He details to me how Rock Hudson’s diagnosis and the AIDS epidemic fueled the flames of homophobia with religious extremists calling AIDS a curse from G-d, and the notion that ”having sex with another man...the implication was you were going to die.” He says that the TV show, “Will and Grace,” helped change the perception of gays, as it was the first time a gay person was portrayed as “normal” on TV. What does he mean by “normal”? He means not a villain or stereotypical flouncing friend. He meant like me, like any other person. *** I have seen homophobia first hand. The word “fag” is heavily used amongst Milton Academy students, and assemblies and talks regarding LGBTQ issues are often met with apathy or snide jokes.

I’ve always thought high

school homophobia was the product of a hypermasculine culture where banging chicks and treating them like shit was what you did if you craved peer approval.

To be quite honest, I have been guilty of perpetuating this social stigma, but I take pride in the fact that I am at least aware of when I am a dick, and always try to better myself to prevent future douchery on my part. While students, like me, may be the forefront of the shameful homophobia happening at Milton, I’ve always wondered if Milton as an institution is at fault too. My suspicions only grew, when I went on Tinder on school grounds.

As I was researching various aspects of the cruising scene, I was trying to observe the website Grindr, a dating and hookup app exclusively for gay men. I hit enter, and instead of Grindr’s homepage, a message informing me that Grindr had been blocked

by Milton’s wifi appeared. I wasn’t shocked. Being a stereotypical-my school censors everything and is so lame-kid, I figured all dating apps were blocked. Just to make sure my teen angst was not serving me wrong, I went to Tinder’s website. No blocked message this time. “This is bullshit!” I yell, not realizing the entirety

just too bland!), I immediately grimace as if reacting to seeing someone else in pain. To describe the porno as sex would be incorrect.

Realistically, sex isn’t initiated because someone’s shirt slipped, people don’t scream such vulgar things, and enjoyable sex isn’t absurdly aggressive. Moreover, we don’t naturally have such extreme body types. Like Cindy Piece says, porn is far from accurate in every sense.

I don’t finish the video.

I feel somewhat disgusted with myself and Pornhub. I CONTINUED ON PAGE 11

of my english class, including my teacher, could hear me. I couldn't wrap my head around how one dating app could be acceptable, but another, exclusively for homosexuals, could be inaccessible.

Could it be that my seemingly hyper liberal school could actually be slightly homophobic? I had to know why, and this is how, after four years at Milton, I had my first conversation with Brian Price, the head of Milton’s IT department.

Tech stuff was never my forte, so I had never been to the IT department offices, nor did I have any idea where the offices were. I got directions and went off on my journey. I pass the bookstore, duck down a white painted brick hallway, and arrive at a standard wooden door. I open the door, and walk into an ordinary set of offices with long rectangular desks and blue swivel chairs, nothing like the crazy Star Trek, gadget-filled room I had been expecting. I’m greeted by the receptionist, who then calls Mr. Price to come out and greet me. He approaches me wearing a classic male Milton teacher’s outfit: a blue button down shirt, tan khakis, and brown loafers. His most noticeable physical quality is his bald head, which I actu-

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Delivering the Scoop On Ordering At Milton, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8

ucate the Milton community about healthy eating, the sheer size of its portion sizes promote an unhealthy eating habit.

As the discussion progresses, Mr. Emmott begins to discuss the economic aspect of ordering delivery.

To him, only those students with a surplus of wealth will order delivery since tuition includes food costs. And there are some who will consistently elect to skip eating in the dining halls for eating delivery in the dorm. This gap between those who always eat in the dining halls and those who always order highlights those who have wealth and those who don’t, according to Mr. Emmott.

Each year, that gap gets worse and worse. In the dorm, students are exposed more to inequalities among the other boarders. And to Mr. Emmott, that exposure is due to a change in society.

The old philosophy of “don’t flaunt your wealth” is slowly fading from our current society.

When he talks about the gap between who does and does not order, I start to think about myself. I don’t order everyday, but I do order once a week. I don’t think

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8

there is anything intrinsically bad about ordering; however, I can definitely see a gap between who orders and who does not, especially in the dorm. I don’t try to flaunt my wealth. Yet, as a victim of society norms, I definitely have flaunted it at some point, through my dorm room or my frequency of ordering.

Class divide is getting stronger. What is important is how we deal with this class divide.

During our conversation, Mr. Emmott brings up an interesting point, besides the economic side of ordering, that most people may not recognize. Mr. Emmott compares ordering delivery to smoking cigarettes. In the past, Milton used to allow students to smoke cigarettes on campus. However, rules were put in place to stop the smoking of cigarettes. Mr. Emmott sees that act as Milton’s “paternalistic attitude”: since smoking is bad for one’s health, why would Milton educate students if they were going to die of lung cancer anyways. And just like how Milton changed the rules of smoking, Mr. Emmott sees validity in Milton changing rules around ordering delivery. Since ordering delivery generally promotes unhealthy eating habits, he sees no point in educating stu-

dents whose unhealthy eating habits will cause future health problems. He says, “I am continually frustrated that [Milton does] a really good job of creating this group of smart people and that we still promote very unhealthy living habits.” *** I’m back with Mr. Hines, Milton’s food service director, in Withington hall, a quiet alternative to the bustling main Forbes dining hall. He says that Flik has worked to provide greater and healthier options over the past six years. For example, Flik always offers a healthy alternative to a less healthy option.

In Hines’ mind, Flik has taken actions to make ordering delivery unnecessary.

According to Mr. Hines, student ordering is “not on [his] radar at all.” He says, “as far as I’m concerned, no one orders out.” He doesn’t know whether boarding students order, how frequently they order, or what they order. In fact, ordering delivery does not affect Flik’s cooking process. Although he doesn’t see any issues with ordering out, he also sees no need to order out. “If you told me no one ordered, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mr. Hines tells me.

Mr. Hines’ job is to provide everything a student

would need food and nutrition wise. For him and Flik, ordering delivery is not part of the needs of a student. Flik provides everything a student needs. The dining halls provide options and choices, nutritious and healthy.

However, he does understand why people may want to order. “It’s human nature to want to try something different.” Ordering delivery changes things up, from the food to the atmosphere. Although Flik may provide all the necessities, in terms of nutritional value, the dining hall environment or food options get boring.

And as Mr. Hines believes, human nature inclines us students to try something new like ordering pizza with a group of friends. *** Zac Mustin, a senior in Wolcott House, agrees with Mr. Hines that there really is no necessity for ordering.

Back in my room in Wolcott, I sit at my desk while he sits on the blue bean bag just a couple feet away from me, just like Peter Won. Dressed in blue sweatpants and a plain grey shirt, Zac hails from England. He came to Milton as a Freshman and adjusted to the change in culture between England and America.

Not a frequent order-

er, Zac works at the school’s gym on the weekends to make some extra cash. To him, ordering food is not a good “investment.” He compares the benefits of spending money on food or a room decoration, like a beanbag or lights. If he orders, he’ll typically spend $15 on food. And all that money will be gone in less than an hour. However, if he chooses not to order three times, he saves around $50, enough to better his room for a whole year with some decoration or tech item.

This concept that Zac brings up focuses on the difference between short term pleasure and long term pleasure. Ordering food is short term pleasure. Although it may taste better than the options provided

by Flik, that pleasure disappears once the food is gone.

Instead of investing in short term pleasure, Zac believes in investing in long term pleasure. “Ordering food is not a good investment, especially when you already have food on campus.”

Although he does say that Flik food is not always great, or even sometimes “dire,” he still tries to eat something. Zac prefers to “get by” on what food that CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

AGGRESSION, DIGRESSION, Continued

game published by Rockstar Games, first released in 2013.

Set within the fictional state of San Andreas, South California, the game’s story is centered around heist missions and organized crime around the city, involving vehicles and shooting. A large component includes fighting against police and government agencies, with a five-star point system indicating how “wanted” the player is. The game is openworld, meaning players can freely roam virtual San Andreas and the fictional city of Los Santos, the latter of which based on Los Angeles.

The game’s franchise name, “Grand Theft Auto,” refers to the common player action of stealing cars on the streets of the city.

Extensively marketed and widely anticipated, the game broke sales records and “became the fastest-selling entertainment product in history, earning $800 million in its first day and $1 billion in its first three days.” But the game didn’t come without its critics — the Grand Theft Auto franchise had long been criticized as overly violent, and the fifth in the franchise was no different. Upon release, the game quickly gen-

erated controversy regarding violence and its depiction of women. One famous review

by Todd Martens in Hero Complex of the Los Angeles Times looks down at its “carjacking, prostitutes and murder scenarios,” citing the game as an example of “violent and misogynistic video game culture.” In specific, one mission uses waterboarding as a torture method. An ingame radio talk show, which runs while the player drives a car, advises listeners to crush a woman’s sternum during sex, reasoning that “most women love that.” Besides its “strip clubs, robberies and murders that come as easy as blowing bubbles,” Martens largely condemns the “rampant misogyny and violence against women.” A game about gangsters, thugs, prostitutes, and street life, GTA V has undoubtedly made thousands of parents ask the dire question: Will this game make my child more violent?

In modern American culture, video games have long been one of the factors associated with aggressive tendencies in children and teenagers. According to Statista’s breakdown of video game sales in the United States in 2016, fifty percent of video games sold fell under the genre of “action” and

“shooter.” Game franchises like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counter-Strike, and Far Cry all satisfy the stereotyped male desire of shooting, killing, and violence. In one 2015 study conducted by the American Psychological Association Task Force on Violent Media — one of the most comprehensive reviews to date — findings “demonstrate a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behaviour, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in pro-social behaviour, empathy and sensitivity to aggression.”

While the review claims that controversial games make players less kind and sensitive, it also acknowledges the “insufficient evidence about whether they lead to criminal violence or delinquency.”

From a broader view, American culture provides a wide palette of violent media that may be cause for aggression among teenagers. Violent Movies, TV shows, and certain genres of rap have been associated with aggressive behaviour among media consumers. In an age where this kind of media has become easy to access, children may find themselves more submerged in worlds and subcultures of violence and

aggressive behaviour. American Horror Story, Hannibal, and Game of Thrones are examples of shows that can promote a certain strain of vulgarity or violence that leads to aggression among viewers.

In a digitized world where we pick and choose our media, we become shaped by what we see and hear, and certain

social media, simultaneously allowing each other to post mean and degrading comments while assigning social value to posts and photos — “likes” and “comments.” This online rush and its social implications has sparked its own commentary of modern culture, one that forces the physical into the virtual. Our

“Like any social phenomenon, aggression is a growing and changing creature, evolving with trends that are both shaped by and help to shape society.” social and political commentaries — like Black Mirror, a philosophical and sometimes violent television series — may bring out the worst in us. Once again, however, violent media is only one spark for the sizzling fire of aggression.

Like any social phenomenon, aggression is a growing and changing creature, evolving with trends that are both shaped by and help to shape society. Much less often do kids express aggression manifested in the physical violence we see in media — and yet, our culture still pushes the need for this kind of violence across all sorts of screens.

More often than ever, we harass others and enforce hierarchies of power through

exposure to a culture and environment of toxic aggression may just be cause for our own aggressions.

On a late Sunday night, I enter the messy dorm room of George Luo, a senior at Milton Academy. George, a strong-built international student from Shanghai with distinctly spiky hair, wears a wife beater and loose gray sweatpants. “More than ever, people want to be successful.

And when you’re successful, all you want to be is even more successful.” George suggests that the increasingly competitive world, spurred by an increasingly violent world — with terrorism, mass shootings, suicides — gives CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

Friday, March 30th, 2018

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9

still don’t care if others watch porn, but now I wonder what type my friends watch. What does the type of porn you choose show about your personality? So many of the popular videos were about incest, and I know I would judge someone for watching that.

Perhaps parents don’t worry about their children watching porn because it’s about sex, but rather because the content can be legitimately disturbing. *** Contrary to Cooper, Bella openly talks about her watching porn. She leans back in a swivel chair, legs spread apart while smacking pink bubblegum. Bella is a senior who is known for her openness with everything taboo, and she opens up about personal instances in which her partner has experienced ED. “Almost every time, the guys who get erectile dysfunction are virgins. It’s not that they’re not turned on, but they’re really nervous.”

Bella tells me that some of her partners whom she feels closer with have asked her about the adequacy of their penis size. “They compare themselves to pornstars, and I wonder if I have to, too.” She goes further to explain that

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

ally feel suits him quite well.

His handshake is firm but not overly aggressive, and his face looks content. I could tell this was not going to be some crazy gotcha interview, as I immediately sensed by his voice and mannerisms he was a calm man.

We sit across from each other at a table in his office.

I ask him how the school decides which sites to block.

He explains to me the school uses a Cisco created software tool called “Umbrella”, which filters sites by categories such as gambling, hate, violence, and pornography. The software then blocks the sites that fall into those categories that the school does not want the students to have access to. Mr. Price notes that some sites may not produce content that falls into negatively deemed categories, but a pop up ad or small component of the site might cause the website to fall into a certain category.

He adds that if there is a website in question, he and Mr. Ruiz collaborate on whether to block it or not.

This collaboration can happen when students make an unblock request of a censored site. He gives me an example of how last year, a

Page 11

Let’s Get It On(line), Continued

she has felt self-conscious about her appearance during sex, and she wondered if her partners compare her to pornstars.

After watching porn, I understand the notions that it may cause. Are women supposed to look like that when orgasming? Are all guys that aggressive? A study from Wheelock College revealed that 88% of porn contains physical aggression — the polar opposite of intimacy.

The pornos demonstrate a sex culture that is wholly unnatural, and yet we still go back to it for pleasure. “I watch porn if I’m bored and wanna get off. I can’t use my imagination,” Bella says. But these videos fill our imagination with choking, screaming, and pain — I wish those three words weren’t so common in porn videos.

“I definitely separate who I am as a person versus who I am when I’m having sex. I sometimes feel gross afterwards even though I’ll enjoy it during it.” I understand how she would feel gross after my experience. Pornos are degrading towards women, and maybe the business makes up for this by paying the women $600 to $1500 per video, whereas men are paid around $150. Bella explains that she thinks people try to

“emulate what [they] see in porn, even though that’s not what sex is.”

How much do we let what we see in porn influence our sex lives? **** When Pierce talked to men about gay hookup culture, they told her that they don’t enjoy anal sex — the content of 45% of porn. “They think they need to be having anal

2016, Pornhub retains a clear increase of consumers each year. The parallel between porn increase and teenage sex decrease also remains clear.

Though teenage sex may not be a dependent variable of porn’s increase because official data on porn usage is limited for those under 18 years, teenagers have had a sharp decline in sexual activ-

“Though teenage sex may not be a dependent variable of porn’s increase because official data on porn usage is limited for those under 18 years, teenagers have had a sharp decline in sexual activity.” sex and it’s not something they need to be doing. I’m more interested in actual pleasure, and too many people start with what they see in porn.” With all the concerns about how porn negatively affects sexual health, why is it so prevalent?

When I looked at Pornhub’s year in review, which was extremely detailed and full of exciting language with its boasting the amount of revenue and viewers the site gains each year, the website shows that it won’t suffer from any decline soon. Given the increase from 18.35 billion visitors in 2014, 21.2 billion in 2015, and 23 billion in

ity. Time Magazine published an article in 2017 which speaks lowly of teenagers, saying that “18-year-olds act more like 15-year-olds from previous decades” because teenagers are less likely to do “adult activities like drinking alcohol, dating, having sex, going out without parents, driving a car, and working a job.”

This article explains that because underage teenagers are not engaging in risky behavior, like drinking alcohol and having unprotected sex, they’re less mature. Moreover, their grouping drinking and going out with parents seems odd because the two

Cruising, Continued

student was researching pole dancing for a senior project, but found many sites on the subject were blocked due to the affiliation pole dancing has with strip clubs. Some sites were unblocked so the student could do their research.

I then dive into the question I most desired to ask: why Tinder is unblocked but Grindr is blocked. “Don’t know,” he responds. Not exactly what I had been hoping to hear. “There’s certainly no overt intent to say this site is off limits,” he adds. I question this, as I feel they should both follow under the same category of “dating” or “sex” on the Umbrella tool but I am met with a similar response as before when Mr. Price says “If there was any discussion about it, I wasn’t a part of it.” Before I left, I submitted an official unblock request for Grindr. Six days later, I received an email from Mr. Price denying my unblock request, citing that Umbrella finds “adult themes” within Grindr, but not Tinder.

He reiterated to me there is no intention to block solely Grindr, but he added, “I tend to agree with you that we should endeavor to apply consistent treatment to comparable sites/services.” ***

Rumors are not to be trusted, but, if everyone’s saying the same thing, there might be some truth in it. One rumor about the "lookout" is that the sign in the parking lot of the "lookout", banning pulling in backwards to parking spots, was made because pulling in backwards was code for cruising. Among students and some faculty, this rumor has become fairly common knowledge, but still, just a rumor. I hate not knowing for sure, so I decide to call the Milton Police Department for information on people caught cruising at the "lookout", and if they could confirm the famed pullin backwards rumor. “That’s the state department's jurisdiction,” says the officer whose name I never caught. After calling the State Police Department branch in Milton four times over a twelve hour span with no set interview, I drive to the department.

I wait for some time in an attempt to interview Lieutenant Mccarthy, who I was told during one of my four calls would be the best person to ask on the subject. I wait sitting in the station’s lobby, staring at all the different posters warning about the dangers and consequences that come with living a life of crime. I feel as though I’m at

one of those D.A.R.E lectures where some guy is shouting at me to not do drugs. After about half an hour, an officer comes out and tells me Lieutenant Mccarthy will not be coming in today. Fantastic.

I keep calling, which probably landed my name on some list titled “teens to pullover.” Eventually, I reach a women working in the files office, who I was told would be able to give me information. Technically, she did give me information, which is that I couldn’t have any of the statistics or arrest records and that police never patrol nor make arrests at the "lookout".

An unnamed commenter on cruisinggays.com would disagree, as he wrote back in 2009 “place is full of cops, under video surveillance, I've seen uniformed cops pop out of woods, trail near telescope, they patrol the parking lot.”

I’m going to side with the unknown internet man here, as I have first hand seen cop cars in the parking lot there.

Coincidentally, about two days after striking out with the police, Ethan Berman, a classmate of mine saw cops snooping around another car right on the road to the "lookout". Why would the police lie to me when there is blatant proof they are patrolling the area? No, I do not think

actions are extremely different parts of being an adult; this sentence asserts that we should we drinking, and we shouldn’t be going out with parents. The decline in teenage pregnancies and drug abuse appear as problematic because those behaviors apparently make the teenagers less mature, but this generation is also more sexually intelligent, politically-minded, and education-seeking.

Exposure to the internet allows teenagers to educate themselves much more than past generations, yet they’re accused of worse sexual habits and culture. This Time article didn’t argue against porn for, in my opinion, the right reasons. The article insists that we should stop watching porn because it halts our adult development. Wouldn’t we rather have teenagers watching porn over higher rates of drug use, teenage pregnancy, and alcohol addiction?

Sexperts, like Cindy Pierce, don’t support porn because they care about pleasure and intimacy, which porn lacks.

“Boys are craving intimacy, and they don’t want to be abusive towards girls,” she says. But their only reference of what sex “should be” is CONTINUED ON PAGE 13

the police are homophobic, but it is very interesting how sex, gay sex, is a topic even the cops are uncomfortable talking about. *** Even seeing cop cars and anonymous internet cruisers wasn’t enough for me.

The rumor was still not confirmed; I had to keep digging.

In stepped Maggie Brown, a middle aged woman who has been working for the Blue Hills Reservation since 1992.

The Blue Hills Reservation office put me into contact with her as someone who was described as very knowledgeable about the land and its history. For the interview, I found it appropriate that we meet at none other than the "lookout". I pulled in, forwards, to the left side of the parking lot. She was already out of her car waiting for me, so I did one of those “sorry I’m later than you because I’m the interviewer and I really should get here first” kind of fast-walks to her. She was average height, and wore a green fleece jacket and khakis. We walked a quarter way up the beautiful stone stairs and sat at a picnic table to the right of the stairs.

I ask her about the history of the reservation. She knows it like the back of her hand.

She tells me how the Blue

Friday, March 30th, 2018

Page 12

Delivering the Scoop On Ordering At Milton, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 10

may be not enjoyable instead of ordering. Often when the food is not enjoyable, he’ll ask for food from others who did choose to order. And usually, people are willing to share some. So, getting by on Flik food is usually not a problem.

However, sometimes ordering food can be a “better investment.” When you order in a group, ordering delivery is no longer “just for eating food, or to sustain yourself.”

Just like going out to dinner, ordering in a group is not just to eat food, it is to do something with your friends.

Ordering becomes a “social activity.” Similar to what one survey response mentioned about ordering being a tradition among friends, ordering in a group becomes “more

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 10

worth it” since you are enjoying an experience with friends. However, despite the social aspect, Zac would still choose to save that money for going to the movies or buy a videogame instead of using ordering food as a “social activity.”

In the survey I sent out to

food. It’s about the experience.

However for Zac, ordering in a group only provides a temporary experience for friends. Many better investments exist where the enjoyment will “hold.” He states, “You won’t remember the days you order with friends,

ly don’t typically order because the food served by Flik is bad. They choose to order just because they’d rather eat something else. And in some extremes, Zac mentions that some people will order without even looking at what Flik is offering. To him, ordering without checking out the

“However for Zac, ordering in a group only provides a temporary experience for friends. Many better investments exist where the enjoyment will ‘hold.’ He states, ‘You won’t remember the days you order with friends, but you might remember the days where you go watch a movie with friends.’” the student body, one respondent of the first survey said that ordering was “a ritual that my friends and I share.”

Another said that they ordered because they “just want food with friends.” Ordering is about more than just the

but you might remember the days where you go watch a movie with friends.”

I asked Zac why people still choose to order, despite it being a poor investment.

He says that the people who tend to order more frequent-

meal is “a waste.” Ordering, even though one could get by on what’s offered by Flik, “doesn’t make sense” to Zac. I end our interview with one question: should the school ban ordering? He freezes for a second. He puts

his hand to his chin, signalling a clear moment of conflicting emotions. After a few seconds of silence, he replies by rejecting a “delivery ban.”

Banning delivery would only perpetuate the notion that “the school is a prison.” Instead of the school banning delivery, he suggests educating students. One method he suggests was having seniors in each dorm explain the health and economic impacts ordering delivery can have.

While a direct ban may send a clear message to students that ordering has negative impacts, it would have a poor response. So therefore educating is the best way, according to Zac. *** Ordering delivery used to be banned (at least on CONTINUED ON PAGE 20

AGGRESSION, DIGRESSION, Continued

way to psychological tendencies to be “evil” or violent.

“Schadenfreude,” he says — it’s the first time I’ve heard this word. Schadenfreude, George explains, is the human desire to watch others suffer, pleasure gained by another’s misfortune.

But more importantly, George touches on a chord deeper than the social and cultural causes for aggression — he reaches into its human roots. I shift around in the chair covered with clothes as I lean in to listen to him. “I’m not a pessimist, but I believe that alongside everything else, there is something inherently evil in people. It’s natural to want to be be better than others. It’s human.” He’s talking about innate tendencies — and he believes that though physical aggression has declined, aggression itself will never go away. George’s thoughts on the subject spark new, dire questions in my mind: What has changed with the decline of the physical manifestation of aggression? Have we lost something from the transition of physical to virtual? Is there a primal need for physical aggression? *** From the 900s to 192 BC, an ancient Greek city-state flourished on the banks of the Eurotas River in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. A nation with strong militaristic values, this state grew to be the strongest military power by around 650 BC, dominating as the overall leader of the combined Greek forces during the Greco-Persian Wars. This city-state remained unique in ancient Greece and all of history due to its core social and political value of maximizing

military prowess and power, both through its military standards and ways of life. It is said in this city that babies born small or deformed in any way were left on mountains to die; that all young boys, from the age of seven, would began an intense military training regime known as agoge. This legendary citystate — one that has inspired modern-day movies and redefined understandings of war and military life — is Sparta.

History dictates that humans have aggressive tendencies, like many other animals in natural ecosystems. Wars, battles, rebellions, domestic conflicts, individual fights — all have appeared countless times in the books of history. The aggressive tendencies have pushed mod-

territory, and fight for scarce resources like food and water. In some cases, male aggression is a key factor in the mating process, acting against fierce competition. In these ways, many ethologists believe aggression in animals has primal purposes and confers biological advantages — a method by which natural selection can take place. Aggression has from the start been a natural and essential mode of behaviour that encourages life to evolve and survive.

Regarded as one of the greatest films of the 90’s and ranking tenth on IMDb’s list of 250 Top Rated Films, David Fincher’s Fight Club directly tackles the idea of “blood spilt.” The synopsis speaks for itself: “An insomniac office worker, looking

fact is, Tyler doesn’t exist. He just represents someone who the narrator wants to be — I think deep down we all want to be someone.” In the case of this film, it’s someone who’s free enough from society to release his anger in a physical way. As cited on Fight Club’s Wiki page, “Richard Schickel of Time described the director's mise en scène as dark and damp: ‘It enforces the contrast between the sterilities of his characters' aboveground life and their underground one. Water, even when it's polluted, is the source of life; blood, even when it's carelessly spilled, is the symbol of life being fully lived. To put his point simply: it's better to be wet than dry.’” Tyler Durden’s character perfectly lives this mantra through his pithy dialogue:

“History dictates that humans have aggressive tendencies, like many other animals in natural ecosystems... Among evolutionists and biologists, aggression in animals serves deeper, innate causes and is founded on a need for survivorship.” ern researchers to the brink of human core social values, mental cognition, and primal need. Aggression, it seems, is in our blood.

Among evolutionists and biologists, aggression in animals serves deeper, innate causes and is founded on a need for survivorship.

Whether its biting, scratching, hitting, or pushing, animals are aggressive to secure higher chances of surviving and producing offspring.

Ethology, “the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour,” studies aggression as it relates to the interaction and evolution of animals in natural settings. Animals may display signs of aggression to fend for their young, catch prey, escape from predators (fight-or-flight), secure

for a way to change his life, crosses paths with a devilmay-care soapmaker, forming an underground fight club that evolves into something much, much more.” It’s revealed that Tyler Durden, the unrestrained, iconoclast soapmaker, is a split personality of the narrator, who is the “average everyman of society.” A story with one of the greatest cultural impacts of the 1990s, Fight Club follows the story of a man who uses an underground channel of aggression to find meaning in an otherwise droning, boring life.

George Luo believes that the most amazing part about Fincher’s direction in this film is the fact that by the end of the film, “you still believe that Tyler Durden exists. The

“It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything,” or “I don't wanna die without any scars.”

In a world where physical fighting has nearly disappeared, it might not be surprising to find that people want to rediscover life through pain or aggression.

From early on, adults teach children to be kind and not to fight — but with the suppression of fighting in this sensitive and kind modern culture, fighting has gone not just online but underground. Cage-fighting, more popularly known as MMA (Mixed Martial Arts), is a highly visible version of this underground effort. Dog fighting, robot combat, even the NFL have become arenas for a physical clash that fight

against the suppression of physicality. Perhaps, in some deep-rooted way, fighting simply needs to be a part of us. *** Mark’s Daily Apple, an internet blog, strives to “rediscover primal living in the modern world.” The author, Mark Sisson, is a 63 year-old Malibu resident who writes on health and wellness.

Among the troves of articles that advise on diet and nutrition, fitness plans, and weight loss techniques, one particular piece catches my eye: “The Role of Fighting in a Primal Life.” The articles begins with a history of violence and fighting in the human race, stating that “hominids have been fighting for millions of years, and every culture of humans has a fighting tradition.“ But then Sisson takes a turn: “What if fighting is a way to ‘tame the beast’ within?” Reasoning that “human aggression is probably an adaptive trait, a deep-seated holdover from the days when surviving and thriving meant killing things (and sometimes people) for food or territory,” the author asks, what if fighting has health or mental benefits?

Enter the world of martial arts. Kicking, punching, jabbing, slapping, grappling — all in a controlled manner. I sit down at a desk in the dim second-floor hallway of Wolcott House, a dorm at Milton Academy.

Mr. McGuirk, a short but sturdy history and economics teacher, sit across from me. Adjusting his glasses, he provides me some insight on the benefits of martial arts.

“I started when I was four: kenpo karate, jiu jitsu, kickboxing, boxing. My family CONTINUED ON PAGE 22

Friday, March 30th, 2018

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

abusive porn. *** With the development and spread of the HPV vaccination, children receive more education on STIs from a younger age, according to The Boston Globe. Even though porn portrays unprotected sex, there has been a rise in protected sex as well as in the usage of the “Morning After” pill. Therefore, teenagers understand how unrealistic porn is, just as those that I spoke with previously confirmed. Porn’s correlation with the decline in sex remains, but is that bad?

I asked my English teacher how she expected teenagers to learn how to have sex and how her generation learned: “By doing it!”

We’ve created two ex-

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5

Hills Reservation was one of the first five parks part of the first regional park system in the country. The park was set aside in 1893 by former Harvard president Charles Eliot, who believed Boston was becoming too urbanized and desired an outdoor space for citizens to relax. The reservation had also been used as a camp for unemployed men to come to and work for money to send home to their families. I felt my research had covered most of the historical info I needed, so I jump into the sign question early on. She says the sign was put up around 10 years ago, and was made for traffic safety reasons-no mention of cruising at all, leaving the rumor of the sign, with several believers and a whole lot of witnesses, still unconfirmed. *** Whether or not the sign was put up to stop cruising, it is undeniable that cruising does happen at Blue Hills Reservation, so what do the people who use Blue Hills for its family-friendly, recreational side think of the not-so-PG activities that are also taking place? One day as I was diligently working in English class, as always, Ms. Baker tells me about a running buddy of hers, who’s seen cruisers in action at Blue Hills, and is not a fan of what goes down. I could hear the social justice warriors crying homophobia, but I like to think I’m a bit more open than the SJWs, so Ms. Baker puts us in contact.

David Litvak lives in a very nice home on a culdesac in Milton. I pull up and park on the street, eager to listen and dissect what Mr. Litvak has to offer. We were

Page 13

Let’s Get It On(line), Continued

tremes of sex-ed: either you get it on, or you watch porn.

Sure, experience beats watching a video, but given that teenage pregnancies have lowered by 57% since the 80’s may reveal that just “doing it” was not the best approach.

Teenagers now get more satisfaction from watching porn rather than having sex, and this self-induced climax does

in sex culture. We slut-shame women for having sex, and we tell them not to masturbate. Pierce explained that the insecurity women feel by thinking they must look like a pornstar affects their willingness to accept pleasure. “Girls aren’t willing to receive oral.

The clitoris has 8000 nerves, but men expect them to climax off of penetration. So

ton is definitely influenced by porn, and porn usage at Milton is no different than at public or private schools across the country. The majority of teenage boys watch porn, even the boarders. As students mature, conversations around porn become less prevalent because its excitement passes, as Cooper said. Therefore, though the

“The sex culture at Milton is definitely influenced by porn, and porn usage at Milton is no different than at public or private schools across the country.” cause a shift in one’s libido and in the ability to orgasm from another person. Society asserts that we need to be able to climax from someone else — masturbation isn’t okay forever.

Given these standards, women might have no space

girls fake [an orgasm].” Men have erectile dysfunction and women don’t orgasm: right now, hookup culture seemingly benefits no one.

“There’s a lack of communication, and it leads to bad sex,” Pierce says.

The sex culture at Mil-

media and adults depict us as immature, that immaturity passes with age.

As students grow throughout high school and reach the maturity of senior year, the conversation and stigma around porn decreases.

Through my conversations

Cruising, Continued

originally supposed to meet around five, but our time was moved to seven, as an emergency came up for Mr. Litvak in his place of work: the emergency room. I knock on the door and am greeted by Mrs. Litvak, a blonde haired, very kind, taller women. Of course, being 5’6, most women look tall to me. She invites me in for some food in the kitchen. I graciously agreed, so as to be polite, but I am legitimately starving as well.

Waiting for me in the kitchen is the man of the hour. David Litvak is a tall, dark haired man with glasses. Very scholarly looking. We greet each other, then move to the living room to begin the discussion, but before we sit down, Mrs. Litvak warns me her husband has a lot to say on the subject.

This only gets me more giddy. Before I start the formal interview, I engage in small talk, but when I ask him how his day went, he looks at me somberly. The life of an emergency room doctor comes with as many sad days as heroic, I imagine.

Enough with the chatter. I ask Mr. Litvak about his background. His parents were both immigrants: Father, Chilean, his mother, Hungarian. They moved to New York to start their family. Growing up, the house was one big melting pot of Chileans, and Hungarians, and El Salvadorans. The family did not stay in New York for long, as Mr. Litvak spent his middle school years in Mexico, and his high school years in Bethesda, Maryland, where he would graduate and go on to row at Williams College. He then achieved his highest educational accolade when he received his MD from Yale, and his highest life accolage when he met his

wife at Yale. Since Mrs. Litwak's family is from the Boston area, the family decided to move to Massachusetts to be close. Milton was chosen as the final destination when his son was admitted to Milton Academy as a kindergartener.

“I love to stay in shape. It keeps me sane,” he says. With all the craziness in the life of a doctor, I can understand why having a hobby is a necessity.

When I ask him what draws him to hiking, he details how he loves the peace and quiet, the lack of cars, and the beautiful wildlife. He says he loves pushing himself on the uphills and “feeling like I’m flying on the downhills.” He claims to me he’s been to every section of the Blue Hills reservation, and I don’t doubt him for a second, because I don’t think he’s the type of guy who needs to lie to bolster his status. He’s quite impressive without bragging.

To this point, the interview had been nice and easy with an almost nostalgic feeling, but he knows I didn’t come over to eat cookies and talk sweet. When I finally get around to asking him what he thinks about the cruising, he laughs like that kind of “oh boy, here we go” laugh.

“Being aware that this is happening in this space is something I don’t want to have on my mind.” Since running is his escape, sex might not be what he wants on his mind.

He details times when he was running, very early in the morning and some activity. “You see rustling in the woods, and it’s clearly there.”

I push further, and ask if he’s seen anything more. He answers, “I’ve seen more than just rustling”-code for, “I’ve seen dudes banging.” He then goes on talk about the beauty

of the park, and his desire for the park’s reputation to stay pristine. We talk about how illicit activities can change an area from nice to seedy.

I begin to understand Mr. Litvak’s view. Blue Hills reservation is his heaven, his pleasure, his world. Being a Massachusetts citizen, he has every right to take full advantage of all Blue Hills has to offer, and has every right to use the park for what it is intended for, running and hiking. When he sees cruising, his world loses the peace and safety he loves. My final question to him is if it makes a difference that it’s gay people hooking and not straight people. “I hope it doesn’t” he responds. *** During my time with Mr. Parisi, I ask him what he knows about the cruising scene in general. “In England they call it cottaging,” he says to me. George Michael would be proud of his knowledge of British terminology. He told me he knows somewhat about it, and while he doesn’t partake in it, he understands how some men have been forced into this part of the gay hookup scene. “Forced.”

That’s a powerful word. The implication to “forced” is someone doing something they do not wish to do, against their will. Do cruisers have no desire to cruise? Between the countless apps and websites and detailed codes, is there no enjoyment at all?

And what about gay women? Why have I found no evidence of any sort of lesbian cruising scene? Could it be because of the old stereotype that guys just want “it” more than girls, and are willing to do anything and go anywhere to get “it”?

The more important issue,

with Cooper, Bella, Cindy Pierce, and Robert, I’ve seen the different viewpoints around porn, but also a strong similarity. Teenagers and adults alike recognize the unrealistic and unhealthy aspects of porn, yet we still depend on it for ‘education’ on how to experience sex.

Porn has affected our ability to use sex as a form of intimacy, and the social guidelines make it a physical chore rather than a pleasurable experience. “[Teenagers] wish it was different — they want something that feels real,” Pierce says.

The pleasure of the illicit — this fantasy that we’ve come to expect — how will we know what’s real when we have it?

though, is if cruising truly is some men’s only option.

Massachusetts claims to be a progressive state. You can feel the political smugness the second you enter the state. Can Massachusetts really claim to be so forward thinking, when there are men who feel they have no choice but to have anonymous sex in public areas, and when there are schools who censor websites allowing gay men to meet other men?

The big question for me is, why is nobody talking about this? I hear daily rumbles and murmurs and rumors regarding the "lookout", but no one actually has the balls to openly discuss it, moreover, noone has the balls to talk about it like an issue we can solve as opposed to some funny secret. Maybe some gay men who cruise do enjoy it, but I have a hard time believing every gay guy’s first choice for intimacy is the woods. As a school, a state, and a country, we need to address the role society plays in the gay cruising scene, and what we can do to make gay hookup culture more openly accepted. Do it for the greater good of your fellow man. I’m doing it for my friend, Peter Parisi, who deserves the same level of respect as everyone else.

Friday, March 30th, 2018

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4

ities, and that three out of every five African Americans and Hispanics live in a community housing toxic waste sites.

Before meeting with Dave Jenkins, former educator at Alternatives for Community & Environment, I didn’t know any of this. It was a dry, cold Monday morning early in December when the Milton alumnus arrived to Flat Black Coffee in Ashmont, carrying two reusable-looking bags and donning a REI-type fleece jacket, flat cap, largelensed glasses, and a slightly-misshapen beard. Christmas music poured from the speaker just catty-cornered above our table, an unfortunate choice for a discussion, on my part, but Mariah Carey quickly lost traction in my mind as he unravelled an elaborate history and definition of environmental justice in Boston.

“From very very local, like, the air you breathe in your house, spreading all the way out to global environmental systems,” Jenkins explained, “you’re combining that with an understanding of how this world works, which is specifically that systemic op-

Page 14

Boston’s Urban Farming, Continued

pression — racism or white supremacy, capitalism, and poverty.” His claim, that these systems impact humans in environments physical, social, and political, struck me, so I asked about his thoughts on urban farming: that must be the solution!

But, with a subtle and familiar-feeling exhale, he cautioned my blindly-hopeful attitude by asking, “In cities, who’s gonna be the owners of the food production?” Ownership of the land and destination of the product are two variables steeped in complexity; the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service shows that two neighborhoods in Boston, West Roxbury and East Boston, are still officially “food deserts” — urban areas where access to affordable and/or healthy food is very limited — despite former Mayor Thomas Menino’s effort to bring sufficient grocery stores to all neighborhoods of the city.

“Is the food being grown put into a food system that provides equity in terms of what people can buy and eat and give to their kids?”

Jenkins brought up an example from Detroit, where a big company bought a great area

of city land, planning to build a massive urban farm, and “people were like, ‘hell no, this doesn’t reverse hundreds of years of excluding people of color, it doesn’t put food back into our food system, it’s just gonna get sold in the market like regular produce.’”

His energy from frustration and hope alike described how complicated the striking balance between environmental and civil rights really is.

Establishing urban farms is similar to real estate development: if the new housing is only benefitting “white companies from the suburbs who are buying and flipping it, and wealthy upper-middle class people who can afford to buy it,” then it isn’t actually benefiting the neighborhood. A community is comprised of its people; beautifying an area without empowering its people, and in fact, pushing them out, is the definition of gentrification, according to Jenkins.

The EPA website has a timeline that favorably portrays the federal government’s progress against environmental injustice, but there still exists increasing and persistent inequality in the Boston area: “State of Equity in Metro Boston,” a

report released by Metropolitan Area Planning Council last February, found that white residents live in neighborhoods that are, on average, 83% white and only 4% black and 6% Latinx; black residents, by contrast, live in neighborhoods that average 43% white and 31% black/African-American and Latinx residents live in neighborhoods that are about 31% Latinx. In addition, Boston has the greatest income inequality of all American cities, according to a Brookings Institute study from early 2016.

“How’s it done?

Who’s in control of it? Who’s doing it? Is it from people from this neighborhood, people of color that are leading this process? Who’s getting the jobs?” These are just a few of the questions necessary to ask, Jenkins convinced me, before blindly praising environmental development, whether community garden, urban farm, or hydroponic garden container. *** I departed the cafe, ten minutes behind schedule, and hurriedly jimmied open my bike lock. The air already electrified my chapped, cracking hands, and for a second, I wonder how some-

one could spend the winter on the street here. I cruised down the hilly street from Ashmont Station, where my wallet had been pickpocketed not a month before, where the tangy smell of smoldering joints is always lingering.

Passing dismal commuters, Catholic school students, and, fittingly enough, what looked like an abandoned, fenced lot, strewn with concrete rubble, I made my way down into historic, quaint Lower Mills, as the “urban” setting melted into “cakepop” stores, family pizzerias, three-star restaurants. Brick buildings lined the wharf, and I could imagine so clearly a version of this townplace two hundred years ago. Residential Milton is, quite literally, a “city on a hill,” and during the seventy-foot altitude climb, somehow, I began to understand how unattainable it could be.

I’ve frequented the couch and cool coffeehouse vibes of Coffee Break Cafe in Milton with friends, dorm mates, my advisory, and now, with Judy Lieberman, co-founder, former farmer manager, and board member at Brookwood Community Farm in CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

What Are We Doing When We Cut Our Hair?, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4

dead,” she reminds me. Later, when I confirmed the statistics and found that the average wages for Zimbabwean domestic workers were set between 80-100 dollars per month, my math informs me that some people regularly spend almost 30 percent of their monthly wages on hair.

To this point, Kuzi draws an accurate conclusion, “People spend more than they have on their hair.” With African hair being much more fragile, people who want to have a protective style that allows their hair to grow need to visit hairdressers much more frequently to maintain the short-lived protectors.

The need to fit into western beauty standard portrayed on the media that features long, straight hair unnatural to people of African descents, is one of the cause for major spending on hair. Chemically treated, straightened hair needs to be maintained about every two months, and therefore, a constantly straight hair even becomes a status symbol in Zimbabwe. “Only the rich kids can keep straight hair all the time,” says Kuzi. Moreover, white Americans are similarly insecure about their hair color: while the majority is naturally brunette, 40% of those who choose to dye hair

turn to blonde. Advocates for natural hair have been fighting battle with straight hair both because of the costliness of hair treatment and the discriminatory beauty standards. The “Natural Hair Movement” which origins in the U.S. during 2000s, urges African Americans to allow the hair grow freely and develop hairstyling based on the afro-hair texture.

But the reason for our frequent visits to barbershops and hairdressers is more than the obvious effect of a fresh hairstyle. * * * A clean, white plaque reads “The Milton Barbershop,” accompanied by a familiar blue-and-red-striped barber pole and a glass window exhibiting three smiling, colorfully-dressed straw dolls and a small room with three busy barbers. Drawn by the coziness of the scene, I rushed into the shop, tripped over the doorstep, and spilled my coffee. A woman with a short, straight, neat, and professional-looking haircut immediately put down her clips and rescued me with a deck of tissues, asking in a warmly-rough, motherly voice if I were okay. It was Jen, the owner of the barbershop.

As I waited for her to finish the line of customers, I noticed how loud the barbershop was--a slow, swinging

50s tune playing in the background, the ringing of a telephone on the counter, and incessant conversations between each of the three barbers and their customers--all at 9 am on a chilly Friday morning of November. Bits of the conversations pop up to me: mashed potatoes, a favorite thanksgiving dish, sleeping at two the night before, and Trump’s tax policy.

As soon as a customer would sink into the comfortable chair and gazed at their own reflections in the mirror, they jumped into conversations that flowed unbelievably naturally.

When Jen finally had a ten-minute break before her next appointment, I began asking her how she got into the career. “My aunt Nancy was a barber,” Jen answered in her Bostonian accent, ending in [ə] instead of [r], “ and I just loved people and loved talking to them.” She has been working in the store for 12 years and now works with friends whom she has kept since 6th grade.

Through Jen’s description, I feel as if the barbershop is a homey church, where one comes in for casual confession and leaves feeling relieved and satisfied. “Some people tell me things that they would say ‘Don’t ever tell anybody else this,’” she said, and I wonder why. Af-

ter all, the barbershop is a public space and no one is responsible for guaranteeing the confidentiality of the conversation, yet somehow a tacit agreement between the customers and the barbers makes this space sacred. It acts almost as a parallel universe where what’s said is synced to one’s daily life but does not create an impact on that life.

I found myself envying Jen, familiar with the rules of this other universe, as she responded, “you are just part of their world. Even people you don’t know very well will confide in you,” when I asked her to describe her relationship with clients. I recalled my own sense of helplessness and loneliness when I found myself a distant bystander of everyone’s life in the Milton Academy, and I imagined the very people whom I have lived with for three years in the dorm yet whose life I barely knew of telling Jen more during their first conversation than they told me over all these years.

To an acquaintance, we may feel obligated to convey positive information and refrain from disclosing our frustrations, but barbers, on the other hand, can more conveniently become the listeners for our confessions because of their detachment from our daily life: they are

not your parents who would judge you by your performance on the math test today, or your friends who would spread rumors about your being emotionally volatile.

I think Jen knows the delicate balance between revealing herself enough so that her customers feels that the trust is mutual and revealing too much that she crosses the line and seems to be too involved in her customers’ lives that they cease to feel secure in front of her. The photos featuring Jen’s two dogs that crowd the styling station, or the story about her wearing a basketball hat to go to the market with her daughter, promptly discloses details about her life and creates a personal and specific environment; on the other hand, her “carefulness on political topics,” commented by one of her customers, Mr.Chung, shows that she holds proper reservation to create an inclusive environment that differs from the traditional barber shops where people would ramble on with strong opinions.

Jen’s incredible memory perhaps makes major contribution to her relationship with the customers.

With the high turnover rate and each cut lasting only CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

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Distant Worlds Feet Apart, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5

eas — are all gender neutral to make sure all are included.

Staff and volunteers make it a point to refer to all residents by their preferred pronouns.

But this is not enough. *** Some may argue that as a society, we have accomplished a lot in accepting the LGBTQ community; we have passed laws that legalize gay marriage, a big milestone that not many other countries can claim to implement, but there still remains a large community of conservatives who views the “LGBTQ Condition” as an epidemic. With 50% of the LGBTQ youth coming out receiving a negative reaction from their parents and another 25% getting kicked out of their homes, as reported by True Colors Fund, the youth homelessness problem may stem back to society’s alientation of the LGBTQ community.

I ask Tamjid about the return rate of previous residents at Y2Y, an indicator of the success of the program, and the news is not great.

Tamjid claims that “there usually is a high return rate.”

He acknowledges that “there is only so much that can hap-

pen in 30 days. The most common short term plan we hear about is re-lottering or finding another place to stay.

Many are unable to find a stable job and living space in such a short amount of time.”

With 60% of homeless youth identifying outside the LGBTQ community, the problem of the high return rate may lie even deeper than just an alienation of the LGBT community. Perhaps society’s adamance to cling onto the negative connotations associated with the homeless prevents them from leaving the streets.

When stopped at red lights, my parents adamantly refuse to roll down the window to spare a dollar or two to the homeless man toting a cardboard sign begging for change. Their reasoning: the homeless will not use the money to buy food or clothes, but rather splurge it on alcohol and drugs, even when my parents have never seen homeless men wander into liquor stores and reappear with alcohol.

Unfortunately, this is one of few stereotypes that holds true. According to the National Institute of Drug CONTINUED ON PAGE 17

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The Ethics of AI, Continued

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lems. All this strikes some uncertainty into the question of computer consciousness.

There are other objections to computer consciousness, though. One such objection, perhaps the most prominent, was thought up by UC Berkeley Professor John Searle. To explain his objection, he developed the Chinese Room thought experiment. Imagine this:

Google has succeeded in creating a computer program that can speak Chinese fluently without help from a human operator. A fluent Chinese speaker can interact with the computer without distinguishing it from a fellow person: it passes Alan Turing’s test of intelligent behavior.

Now, imagine a room with an English speaker and a copy of the code of that program (in English). If you slipped questions in Chinese under the door and the person executed the code eliciting a sensible response, would we say she understands Chinese? Searle says no. The role of the person and that of the computer are interchangeable. Basically, he says, computers can never truly understand a language or, consequently, be conscious

because all they do is follow instructions.

This thought experiment, while interesting, has proven controversial. Some have accused Searle of oversimplification — for a human to follow a program of that complexity and length would literally take billions of years.

And others say that, while the human operator doesn’t understand Chinese, the system as a whole (the room, the code, the person) does. It’s like asking if your prefrontal cortex can speak English.

While a section of your brain may not understand language, the system as a whole, the entirety of the brain, does. But so what? What’s so concerning about computer consciousness?

A recent episode of Black Mirror, the acclaimed British science fiction series, depicts the moral complications of conscious AI. In the episode, in an effort to mimic his favorite television show, a computer scientist creates a video game replicating the show and conscious players within the game to be his crew. In the game, he is all-powerful, and his crew members are consciously aware of their inability to escape. Computer consciousness could lead to this: a kind of AI slavery.

Thomas does see a world where computers could be given some kind of moral status. “There is a sense, as with animals,” he says, “that just as we don’t have animals given full rights, but we do recognize that there is some type of intermediate category.”

Recently, much of HRILAB’s research explores how and why human beings assign moral status to robots.

He says that recently they’ve been exploring what it is that makes humans “attribute personhood to a humanoid robot.” While you would think that having a face might prompt more human treatment, Thomas tells me that language and voice are the most significant factors: “If you give a voice to that souped-up Roomba...people will attribute a lot to it.”

Whether or not it is deserved, people are often unable to resist “attributing some kind of agency or cognition to a system if it gives the right language and moves in a certain way.” *** We, as consumers, are obsessed with man-vs-machine narratives. Movies like The Matrix and The Terminator depict a world where artifiCONTINUED ON PAGE 22

Student Pictures From March For Our Lives

Friday, March 30th, 2018 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 14

nearby Canton. After a week of emailing through mutual connections and last-minute rescheduling, she finally burst through the door, with long hair and boots, but more than crunchy-functional attire, her caring crow’s feet and smokey, warm voice speak most towards her adoration for the work.

In her work with ReVision House Urban Farm in Dorchester, Lieberman became “frustrated about not having as big an impact [because] it was hard to grow a lot of food on such a small lot,” and discovered a seventy-acre farm not far away, about five miles from the edge of Boston,” within the Blue Hills reservation. After she and co-founder Mark Smith got permission from the Department of Conservation and Recreation originally for an acre of the land.

They started the nonprofit corporation in 2006; Brookwood now has eight acres between the Blue Hills land and two other sites.

From the beginning, the mission of Brookwood was to “make food accessible to low-income communities [and] really, to all surrounding communities,” through

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Boston’s Urban Farming, Continued

a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, where farm members purchase a share of the coming harvest and pick up their share of produce each week from May through November. Families that can afford their own farm share are encouraged to donate to a CSA fund to help finance a share for a low-income family.

Though Milton is a “pretty wealthy community, it’s pretty mixed economically because it’s so close to Mattapan,” as observed in the more affordable, sometimes two-family housing on the Boston side of the town.

“There are a lot of people working hard to move to Milton for the schools for their kids, but are struggling to live here,” Lieberman said.

Brookwood works with the Milton Community Food Pantry, used by two hundred families, to give free shares to financially-qualifying families. But, she pointed out, “as a nonprofit, we do depend on donations and grants to be able to give away food or sell it for below costs. We’re trying to be sustainable and it’s a balancing act to generate income and also to do the mission work of the food security and accessibility.”

Besides the CSA program, Brookwood also reaches out directly to neighboring communities through organizations like the Roslindale Village Main Street Summer Farmers Market, held weekly at Adams Park, minutes away from my uncle John’s house. “We used to be the smallest vendor in Rosy,” but now, Brookwood claims a few tents to sell produce exclusively from its own farms, aside from fruit from Sunshine Farm in Sherborn and corn from The Big Apple Farm in Wrentham. *** Biking from Milton to the Rosy Farmers Market is just marginally faster than walking to the T stop, taking the trolley to Mattapan, and taking the 30 to Roslindale Square, but I’ve made the commute through Mattapan Square a few thrilling times.

The street-side bike lane dipped in and out without much warning, coupled with blind and furious Boston drivers, lofty MBTA busses, and parked car doors suddenly swinging open. Over this span of less than five miles, segregation in Boston speaks for itself: in the 2010 census, the ethnic makeup of Milton was 77.4% white, 14.3% black,

and 3.3% Hispanic/Latino of any race, while Roslindale’s was 49% non-Hispanic white, 18% non-Hispanic black, and 25% Hispanic/Latino.

Where the Farmers Market once was, I passed the now-empty delta of grass amid a strangulation of nonsensical streets, tents and display tables retreated from December’s chill; last August, a sunny hike up the nearby Peters Hill in Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum for a picnic of baby okra and pita from a local Egyptian vendor wasn’t too shabby, in a city no less.

But this time, I was en route to my uncle’s house, and five minutes down the adjacent residential road, I reached Brown Avenue.

John Murphy, former coordinator for the Southwest Boston Community Garden and “Uncle John John” for many years, opened the back door to my knock, and it was like I never left: a handful of dishes in the sink, the thermostat set just a tad too cold for my comfort, the kibble cat food barely touched, my cousin Jacob upstairs playing some first-person shooter game. I grabbed a salty licorice from the cabinet — nobody else eats them — and John offered to make a sin-

gle-origin dark roast coffee from a local business with family roots in South America.

When the coffee reached optimal strength and sweetness, we settled down on the couch with the mugs and recalled his beginnings with the garden, just a walk away, nearly ten harvest seasons ago. Information passed down the grapevine from a parent of Jacob’s friend, and after a few years on the waitlist, John’s assigned plot was growing tomato plants with “mild success.” His preference soon moved towards experimenting with “plants like potatoes, garlic, onions, some berry bushes, longer-term crops like asparagus,” and all kinds of flowers, gradually controlling the acidity of the soil, seeds, “typical things like watering, weeding, mulching.”

With fifty plots, including raised plots for those with limited disability, the Southwest Community Garden is among the larger in Boston, in a garden system falling under the Boston Parks Department. Like other community gardens in the city, Southwest is an organic garden, he exCONTINUED ON PAGE 18

What Are We Doing When We Cut Our Hair?, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 14

about fifteen minutes, as soon as the next customer in line positions himself in front of the station, she could pick up immediately where they left off the conversation last time by asking “What’s new” or “Last time you told me that...” while giving them the exact haircut they want (which they themselves couldn’t even describe). Doing this, she doesn’t take notes. “I have just been doing this for so long that I can remember,” she says.

Imagine how our feeling of significance soar when we perform these four actions simultaneously--gazing at our own face for fifteen minutes straight, meeting the barber or hairdresser’s eyes in the mirror, experiencing a process that betters our physical image, and having a one-onone conversation in which we receive the other party’s undistracted attention; Yet, we feel an even more heightened sense of self knowing someone who does not participate in our lives remembers all about us. The barbers endow our personal lives with almost undeserved significance.

Mr.Chung, having taught at Milton Academy for 17 years, has been Jen’s customer since she obtained the ownership of the store.

One of his reasons for going to Jen is that, “she always asks, ‘How are the girls?’ and she remembers their names.”

Having lived in the town for seventeen years, he still feels like an outsider to the community, and “Jen and Al (Mr. Chung’s barber prior to Jen) are the ones that gives hope,” he says. This hope, I suppose, encompasses a sense of genuine acceptance by the longstanding members of the community, a slight sense of relevance to the townspeople’s life, and his own sense of belonging to the town.

can be the buoys that stop them from drowning in a sea of anonymity, and even the regularity of the sessions would be as comforting as having evenly-spaced buoys that consistently provide security. Perhaps this explains the phenomenon which Mr.Chung recalls, that “people become personally offended sometimes when Jen closes for holidays.”

Thinking of how many others Jen has given hope to and how many times the haircut has brightened people’s days, I realize that I un-

and the white base for bandages while the pole was for patients to grip to ease the pain. In the other version, the stripes were the color of French national flag to commemorate a wise, eloquent barber who tricked the enemies to protect a revolutioner hiding in the barbershop.

Either way, the pole is a symbol that barber shops used to be more than a space simply for trimming hair. The artful handling of sharp tools enabled the barbers to cure diseases as surgeons, and the conversational skills allowed

“The haircut sessions used to provide not only mental therapy but also physical therapy, and the familiar red-and-blue-striped barber pole that constantly spins in front of every barbershop is a representation of the latter.”

He also mentions that Jen has old customers who “come like clockwork.” What prompts their biweekly visit to Jen’s is probably not that the half an inch of newly-grown hair needs trimming but that they are lonely.

The one-to-one conversation and the intimacy of the physical interaction, where one’s head is touched and massaged by the barber’s hands.

We can all probably count in one hand the people who have touched our head, and for many who miss this trust and intimacy and naturally crave it, the haircut sessions

derestimated the role of haircutting.

The haircut sessions used to provide not only mental therapy but also physical therapy, and the familiar redand-blue-striped barber pole that constantly spins in front of every barbershop is a representation of the latter.

One version of the story says that barber’s pole originated from medieval times, when barber shop not only for haircutting but also bloodletting and other surgerys that cure maladies.

The red stripes represented blood, blue for the veins,

them to save the lives of their customers. Certainly, barber shops today were banned from performing physical cure of diseases, but they not remain as a shelter for people to seek mental comfort. * * * The therapeutic effect of haircut sessions diminishes in chain stores. When I walk into Supercuts, a chain store that emerges in the 1970s and has 2,400 locations across U.S., I notice the immediate, stifling silence. From the allblack dress code to the sole, impersonal decoration in the room--a poster of a model’s

thick blue bangs-- the store conveys a sense of solemness and professionalism that resembles that of a dental office. My instinct tells me that I have to spend money here to talk to one of the staff, so I quickly skim through the price on the blackboard and find the cheapest option— tea-tree oil message for ten dollars.

I lay down on a grey, padded bench in the back of the room, as Jasmine, my assigned hair stylist walks over in her black bodycon dress.

Jasmine describes the color of her hair as a “turquoise-ish, greenish blue,” which looks harmonious with her dazzlin indigo nose rings. In a soft voice, she tells me that, as an introvert, she is comfortable with the quietness, and most of the time her colleagues are also too anxious or stressed to talk because of the intensity of the job: standing all day long and meeting one new face after another.

Jasmine is not planning on continuing her hairdresser career for too long.

She has worked in several salons and starts in the Supercuts a month ago, but she would perhaps “move to another salon soon” or “become a chef.” Jasmine’s words reminds me of the transient character of hairstyling caCONTINUED ON PAGE 18

Friday, March 30th, 2018

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15

Abuse, one study found that 71% of homeless youth abused some form of drugs or alcohol. Those unable to seek shelter abused harder drugs, turning to “heroin and other injection drugs, methamphetamines, and crack cocaine.”

Known for their ability to aid consumers in escaping the miseries of reality, these substances appear to be having an opposite effect. The National Institute of Drug Abuse reported that 52.1% of homeless youth drug users attempted suicide, more than twice as much as their sober counterparts at 25.6%.

Drug and alcohol abuse has become such a big issue that some youth shelters require residents to pass a breathalyzer test before entering.

Y2Y follows a more lenient approach, specifically noting on their website that no drugs or alcohol are allowed in the space while residents only need to appear sober to enter the space.

But there are also many other stereotypes that exist that deviate far from the truth. I will admit, like many who see homelessness from the outside, I am not immune to these stereotypes either.

While around in Harvard Square, I feel uncomfortable walking by streets occupied by one or two homeless people sitting on the corner asking for money. There is

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Distant Worlds Feet Apart, Continued

one street that I particularly remembered — Massachusetts Avenue. Along the street front, a Bank of America and a Santander filled with stacks of money sit in stark juxtaposition to the homeless camping out in front on the floors, benches, crates, and 5-gallon cement mixing buckets.

What makes this street so special is the never ending aisle of homeless individuals and couples claiming a piece of concrete for themselves.

I pass by the first man dressed in dirt-covered khaki pants and a splotchy khaki jacket squatting on his crate, holding a sign half covered by a grizzly beard asking passerbys to spare some change during the holiday season.

After dishonestly explaining to him that I had no loose bills to spare him, I notice a ragged couple dressed in cheap, torn leather staring me down from a bench.

Their act to produce money — karaoke. They blare music from a speaker and sing along while asking passing pedestrians to spare some change.

For the next 400 feet, three other homeless parties ask for money, perhaps waiting for those who had just with drawn cash from the ATMs within the banks to donate a few crisp bills away.

As it gets dark, my throat tightens with unease traveling down Massachusetts Ave. My mom had warned me prior to my trip to be careful; perhaps the homeless

might get frisky and steal my wallet and computer. Being young and alone, I am not in good shape in defending myself. And with the only people around me being other homeless people, if I were to come under attack by one, I am worried they would all gang up on me. But these are all merely speculation. There is no hard evidence that any one of the homeless lining the streets would gang up on me. I eventually muster the courage to talk to the first man squatting on his crate holding a sign, and although he declines to allow me to interview him, he didn’t grouchily tell me to “fuck off” as many would think, but explains that he doesn’t do school projects and wishes me luck on my paper. But my own speculations about the homeless still kept me from walking down Massachusetts Ave, choosing instead to walk down a dark alleyway that night to reach Y2Y. And I am not alone in entertaining these thoughts about homeless people. *** While in Harvard Square, I decided to talk to managers and employees at local businesses, trying to get a sense of the perceived disturbances caused by the presence of the Y2Y shelter and the homeless people loitering in store fronts. I started with LF, a small women’s clothing boutique located next to the alleyway directly across from

the main entrance of the Y2Y shelter.

A security guard posted at the main entrance of the store gives an immediate impression that homeless disturbance is a major issue. I walk through the maze of racks filled with generic clothing, finally locating the blonde dome of the manager above the piles of unfolded clothes.

The college-student-age manager wearing the latest styles whose name I don’t catch is quick and cheery to answer the question, almost as though homeless disturbance is on her mind constantly. She soon tells me that “business isn’t affected very much from the shelter,” but acknowledges that “[she] notices them sitting around, even though they don’t bother [the store] much.”

I push her a bit, asking her if any homeless ever barge into the store seeking shelter from the cold outside, even for a few seconds. She explains again that there is little direct interaction between the store and its employees and the homeless, but she does mention that “[the homeless] goes through our trash to find the cardboard and it’s kinda like ‘oh whoops, there’s your trash everywhere.”’

As I turn to leave, she quickly slips in, “I think it’s more a personal thing rather than a professional thing.

The homeless make me feel uncomfortable but they don’t

affect business, even when the shelter is right across from us.”

A similar thought process exists at the other end of the alleyway in Origins, a high end beauty boutique.

I heave open the heavy glass door spanning from floor to ceiling. The lights bouncing off the polished white marble blinds me as my nose becomes overwhelmed with the scent of high end lotions, creams, and hair products bottled in pristine white bottles.

Miranda, a sales lady in her mid-50’s dressed in the tight black top and pants uniform wears a thin line of vibrant red lipstick — a final attempt to fit in with her co-workers 30 years younger than she. Miranda seems eager to give me a piece of her mind about Y2Y and the homeless community it attracts. “The opening of the homeless shelter drove a long standing juice bar out of business,” she begins. “They had been open for about a year or so before the homeless shelter had opened and as soon as the shelter opened its doors, the homeless started lingering around the juice bar.” She nods her head and continues, “I suspect it was all those homeless people lingering around that drove them out of business.”

I look around, noticing the empty store lacking cusCONTINUED ON PAGE 19

Driven Into Unfamiliar Territory: The Ethics of AI, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 7

cially intelligent machines rebel against and enslave the human race. Could this science fiction ever become a scary reality?

I am walking in the basement of the bleak concrete building which houses Milton Academy’s visual arts and computer science departments. I’ve been reading up on the dangers of artificial intelligence in preparation for my meeting with two of Milton Academy’s computer science teachers, and what I’ve read concerns me a great deal. Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, the tech entrepreneur and theoretical physicist, respectively, have both been vocal about the dangers of AI, saying that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. Whether they are excessively bashing alarm bells to spur conversation or are truly terrified remains a mystery. I step into the computer science department’s primary classroom to see Mr. Hales give the ten-or-so students in his artificial intelligence course brief directions before we duck into an adjacent of-

fice with Ms. Pries.

Chris Hales is a veteran of Milton Academy, nearing two decades of teaching computer science at the institution. Ms. Pries, on the other hand, was hired just this past year specifically to teach both sections of Milton’s AI class. The three of us sit around a small, circular wooden table, in a room scattered with wires and chords.

The picture the two initially paint seems to me pretty stark. Mr. Hales doesn’t see any sort of limitations to AI. The kind of superintelligence that could exceed the thinking capacities of human beings — not just in simpler technical tasks like arithmetic but in general thinking capacities — is not only possible but likely.

Mr. Hales says that, once we release a program capable of advanced machine learning, we will be unable to “put the genie back into the bottle.”

There are a lot of unknowns here because of the unpredictable nature of machines that can reprogram themselves. “You could easily make something that can teach itself,” Mr. Hales notes, “and it

could very easily morph into something you had no intention of it morphing into.”

They seem to be justifying all the fear my research has injected into me. Then, our discussion evolves into an examination of placing limits on artificial intelligence.

Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher, has proposed that the goal-oriented nature of computers could lead to disaster. To illustrate why, he often will outline the following hypothetical.

Imagine a superintelligent program designed by 3M to maximize the output of paper clips at one of their factories. Maximizing paper-clip output would entail, at first, boosting productivity at the assembly line, say, or optimizing shipping routes. But, because the machine cares only about its goal and lacks the kind of moral intuition human beings have, this hypothetical superintelligence could soon see the end of humankind — the world’s biggest resource hogs — as the key to maximizing paper-clip production. What’s stopping the program from destroying infrastructure to harvest the

raw metals for use in the factory? Bostrom proposes that we use machine learning for superintelligence to inductively learn about the things we value: human life, freedom and autonomy, pleasure and the lack of pain.

Mr. Hales sees programming values as potentially counterproductive. First, we could program the wrong goal: “minimize death” could mean, to a computer, prevent reproduction (since no one can die who hasn’t been born). Second, even more concerning, Hales believes programming moral values could counterproductively encourage immoral behavior, since a superintelligent program may not “waver in the conviction of the moral cause you’ve given it,” like a kind of Crusades 2.0.

“Couldn’t some kind of physical limitations prevent harm?” I pose — my Macbook has only a screen and keyboard, how could it harm anyone? Ms. Pries quickly shoots down my proposition. “There are programs that run medical machinery which would absolutely kill,” she says. When we’re talking

about the dangers of AI, the concern is not a robotic Arnold Schwarzenegger; the concern is our power grids and commerce, our communications and water supply.

Pries and Hales agree that AI should probably not be unnecessarily connected to these kinds of infrastructure.

Isolating different structural systems is key to ensuring that a particular virus or rogue superintelligence cannot spread.

AI-caused disasters, they see, as probable, but anything like humanity-ending catastrophes as unlikely. Terrible things could happen, but they will prompt regulations and fixes before anything worse could occur. “When you have a self-driving car run a red light,” Mr. Hales explains, “people are all of a sudden like, ‘Self-driving cars are the end of the world,’ so we will become more focused on the issue.” Systems will err, but the consequent public outcries will lead to improvements that will prevent further harm.

Human beings, they both CONTINUED ON PAGE 19

Friday, March 30th, 2018

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 16

plained, so members are forbidden from using inorganic or chemical soil amendments like certain weed-killers and fertilizers. Other rules are set by a garden’s self-governance structure; at Southwest, a treasurer transfers annual dues to the garden bank account used for water, wood chips, green manure, leaf molds, maintenance, some equipment, occasionally project costs like for a shed, and the coordinators decide the start of the season, other big-picture agenda. The city contracts compost by the cubic yard from a city producer at no cost to the garden, and runs a program to distribute free packets of seeds for garden use.

“The city and the state do put priority on community gardens and are willing to consider that a community garden is the highest use for a piece of land.” (“Highest,” I took from his didactic tone, meaning morally, even nobly, for bringing the community together to better the earth.)

John noticed this intent evident at recent community meetings about the “disposi-

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Boston’s Urban Farming, Continued

tion of various small parcels of land that the city owns, odd lots here and there.”

However, if land is designated for a garden over, say, housing units, “financing to get it constructed is another issue.” The Parks Department was willing to “allocate a portion of a park for a new garden” just a mile away, near Mattapan Square, and lots of volunteers came forward to be part of an “official governance structure”; the final obstacle now is the several thousand more dollars needed to finance construction, including irrigation systems.

That money won’t grow on trees, or any plants for that matter. Even if another community garden were interested in helping fund the formation or upkeep of another, Boston Natural Areas Network, a sub-organization of the Parks Department, prohibits the sale of produce grown in Boston community gardens in Article 89 Urban Agriculture Rezoning.

And while a farm might “focus maximize production, in the community gardens, gardeners like making the most of the land we have, but the motivation is growing

for enjoyment and our own individual achievements.”

Though, John admitted that Southwest comes off as “kind of intense, high-strung” relative to the other gardens, the activity is fundamentally a hobby for people with other primary sources of income with which to buy food. Production efficiency “depends on the economy you’re trying to achieve.” *** In his preparation for the holiday season, John was planning to buy a wreath and the season’s last ruddy apples that weekend, and suggested I come along for the ten-minute drive to Allandale Farm. I figured that Boston’s oldest working farm, equidistant

business. What looked like a quaint farm building was surrounded by an assembly line. Men in traffic suits directed cars into the parking lot beside stacks of tied up Christmas trees marked “shipped from Canada,” and herded families towards the displayed trees and rolls of garlands of all varieties. More men were throwing trees through monstrous wrapping contraptions — trees that had already been tied on their route from up North — and the child in me couldn’t help but feel betrayed, knowing the truth. A white tentlike building had been erected to house the hundreds of wreaths and shorter branches, the ceiling festooned with

“My naivety in thinking urban farming, really, any farming, could exist independent from the expectations and demands of capitalism sunk like a rock.” from the Square and the Arboretum, might yield some granola small business, but as we pulled in, I saw workers adhering to a very different motivation: commercial.

The frost was setting in for the season, and so was

kitschy lights. The great old Christmas market set up in the back displayed more ornaments and paperwhites and tree care accessories than I’d ever seen, and I wondered how the space could look so much smaller from the out-

side.

Business is business: such profit-oriented practice is key to survival for an organization relying heavily on customers’ goodwill and support for locally-sourced food.

And still I felt shame for partaking in this cash cow of a holiday as I waited in line at one of two registers, holding a paperwhite in a tin can that costed me a hundredfold of what I imagined Allandale obtained it for. But even after all this, the business is still a nonprofit. My naivety in thinking urban farming, really, any farming, could exist independent from the expectations and demands of capitalism sunk like a rock.

Growing food in urban spaces is not without the challenges of agriculture across the country; somehow, I began to understand that urban farming only has more obstacles, and that I needed more answers.

As we left, with paperwhite and five yards of garland perfuming the car, I noticed two yaks roaming the fenced woods next to the roadside, one with a broken horn.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 20

What Are We Doing When We Cut Our Hair?, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 16

reer that Mr.Chung concludes from his encounter with hairdressers except for Jen. Many reasons can explain for such transiency. First, one does not have to invest much to become a barber or a hairdresser. Like David, the hairdresser at Eclipse Salon in Milton, jokes in his interview, “Where else can you find a school that charges one dollar per hour for lesson other than beauty schools?”

The low cost for tuition allows hairstyling to be a quick career change that people turn to; for instance, according to the New York Times, salons employed many refugees from the 2008 economic recession. However, the same reason means that people may not be completely commit to the career and would quit if better options are available. On the other hand, barber’s innate character as craftsmen gives them mobility. The agility of the fingers and the skillful handling of scissors arm the barbers with a consistent level of employability wherever they move.

This employability across the board is further guaranteed by the very transiency of the barber’s craft: unlike a watchmaker’s watch that easily lasts for a decade, a perfectly fluffy haircut only last until the minute one walks out of the store; therefore, there ex-

ists constant demand for the craftsmen. Another, blunter reason is that, with an average hourly wages of 8.5 dollars plus tip, hair stylists in Supercuts and other chain salons cannot sustain a living in the city. Although, “nothing you do would sustain a living in the city,” Jasmine adds. As I ask her how much tips people usually leave, she responds, “it depends on luck. Sometimes they can be grumpy and just refuse to tip.” Then I recall talking to Jen, whose connection to the town of Milton helps establish her customer base and likely guarantees reasonable tips, and I begin to understand that having a family vibe to maintain a regular customer base in an affluent town like Milton gives advantages to those working in independent barber shops.

In 2016, U.S.News listed 11.66 dollars as the medium average hourly wages for barbers, similar to the wages of a restaurant employee who receive tips. The stats surprised me that the unique skill set of barbers does not give them advantages in terms of the salary, although it does provide more potential for salary increase, as the top of the career earns 10,000 dollars more annually than the top restaurant employees. Consumers are hinted of the wide range of salary by the wide range of price at the stores. Out of the stores

where I conduct interviews, the Milton Barbershop and Supercuts both provide men’s haircut for 16 dollars, while Eclipse Salon almost triple the price-- 45 dollars or more for men’s haircut and 60 dollars for women; the Shag Salon fifteen minutes down the road from Eclipse offer women’s cut at an average price of 95 dollars. I understand that those who treat haircut as a mere necessity would consider the prices at salons outrageous while those who enjoy the service and luxuriousness of the experience may disagree. In terms of the other branches of hairstyling business, the further they stray from emphasizing the necessity, the more expensive the service gets. Alli Webb, a

the U.S. in the end of 2016, according to Forbes. * * * But to both barbers and customers, the listed price is not all that the business offers.

The Goodfella’s Traditional Barber Shop labels itself as “traditional” right in the title, and the following introduction on its website states, “We strive to offer men a place of privacy and relaxation, where they can indulge in men’s grooming.” Goodfella is an exception in creating a socializing space for only male customers, for most of the barbershops don’t explicitly reject females and instead would offer women's haircut at a higher cost than men’s so that less female customers

versation goes away.

In Mr.Parisi’s description, the ambience and furniture of this Italian barbershop feels “stereotypically masculine” with the “dark leather couches,” “dark, wooden color finishes,” and two tv screens constantly streaming sports games. As one of the few hair styling places in town that hire only male staff, the store does create a social occasion for “manly” conversations to take place and may cater to many who may feel restricted from expressing freely otherwise.

The author of the article “Why Every Man Should Go To The Barbershop” claims that one of its benefits is that each visit makes one “manlier.” The conversations cen-

“I have never had my hair cut in the U.S. for the three years I have been here. I would rather cut my hair on my own with my Swiss army knife, despite having to tolerate some undesirable choppy ends. Even when I have to visit a variety of barbershops and hair salons for the interviews, wearing my long, unruly hair that cries for trimming, the idea of getting a haircut there never occurs to me.” mom of two kids from Los Angeles, began a career by offering a simple blow-drying session at a cost of 40 dollars, and when she realized that the demand was far higher than what she could supplied, she turned this idea into a seventy million dollar business with seventy chain stores called “Drybar” across

tend to visit.

My interview with Mr.Parisi, a regular customer of Goodfellas’, begins with him giving me a caveat—“I know absolutely nothing about hair and probably can’t give you any information.” Yet, when I begin asking him about Goodfella’s, my initial worries of an awkward con-

tering around traditionally masculine topics such as cars and sports allow him to comfortably participate and feel “at ease to say what’s on his mind.” I ask if Mr.Parisi feels that the conversations in Goodfella’s have particular dynamics, and he agrees CONTINUED ON PAGE 21

Friday, March 30th, 2018 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17

tomers, and ask Miranda if she sees the homeless shelter having a similar effect on Origins. She pauses and rolls her head back before responding, “now that is difficult to quantify you know?

Obviously we have seen customer attendance drop considerably in recent years, but most of our sales are now done online with the internet and everything, so I wouldn’t be exactly sure if they do have an effect on our sales.”

However, she acknowledges that the homeless might have an effect on customer experience. She explains that she has seen customers who “seemed uncomfortable and who probably would have stayed longer browsing the products had there been no homeless standing outside.”

But that is the extent of the damage done by the homeless regarding business.

“I see them more as a personal problem,” claims Miranda.

“Sometimes they block the doorway and we are scared to tell them to leave because they are sassy.”

It’s not just Miranda. She recalls a time when one of her coworkers “was working the cashier on day, and she a homeless man with his dog outside, and she is a huge sucker for a dog. She cannot resist petting them, so she goes outside the store and asks the man if she can pet the dog. He says sure, and after she is done touching the dog, he says ‘that will be one dollar.’ Golly,” she remarks, “the nerve of this guy. And he

Page 19

Distant Worlds Feet Apart, Continued

would not leave until he got his money! Scared that poor girl.”

Miranda admits that she “parks around the corner,” and like me, “when I am closing late some nights, I’m scared to go down a certain way. I will refuse to walk to my car down the alleyway, and will opt to take the longer route.”

And the negative connotations around the homeless community do not seem to be disappearing soon.

Youth on Fire, “a dropin center for homeless and street-involved youth,” according to their website, preceded Y2Y in providing services to the homeless youth community, but has recently had its funding cut. In 2017, Youth on Fire partnered with Y2Y to secure funding for the next five years, merging into the same location under the church.

I reached out to two employees on two separate occasions, asking if I could come into the space and ask a few questions. Unfortunately, they declined me entrance into their space, hoping to protect the privacy of their clients, but offered to answer the questions I had. They eventually also turned down my questions, citing protection of privacy again. But could their silence be more than just trying to hide the identities of their clients? After all, some of my questions had simply asked what Youth on Fire did.

In transitioning between topics with my Dartmouth interviewer, Ms. Hughes, I

bring up my youth homelessness piece and my frustrations in dealing with the representatives at Youth on Fire. With experience as a lawyer in the health care sector, Ms. Hughes believes that their actions were somewhat outrageous. Perhaps their intentions are to protect their clients, but she claims they could have answered the logistical questions while asking clients if they would be comfortable in answering some of the more personal

would be appropriate for us to give a statement regarding this issue,” she finishes. Her harsh, short-cropped hair looks as though it yells “leave the store now!”

How can we expect our society to progress when homeless youth support groups and children’s stores teach us that it is a taboo to talk about homeless people? How can we end youth homelessness when we can’t even talk about it?

Even with the apparent si-

to be a staple of the streets, blending in with the benches, trees, and street lights lining the streets, but their growing younger presence is a reality check of the progress made by society. We claim that our society has shifted to the left with the liberals in passing milestone legislature for the LGBT community, but 40% of homeless youth do not agree. Nor do the thousands of homeless in Boston alienated by society who still hold preconceived notions of who

“We claim that our society has shifted to the left with the liberals in passing milestone legislature for the LGBT community, but 40% of homeless youth do not agree.” questions. She agrees that Youth on Fire’s silence creates a stigma surrounding youth homelessness, suggesting that there should be no discussion of youth homelessness whatsoever.

Local businesses at Harvard Square seem to have the same mentality. I wander through the colorful aisles of the Curious George store, looking for a business associate who could answer my question about the disturbances to business caused by the homeless. After dodging shelves loaded to the brim with backpacks and figurines of the man in the yellow hat, I finally find a sales lady stocking the latest Curious George puzzles. She appears happy to answer any questions I have in locating a product, but shoots me a stern glare at the mention of homeless people. “We are a children’s store, and I do not think it

lence of businesses and programs around Y2Y, the issue of youth homelessness does not remain stagnant. Before leaving Y2Y, Tamjid quickly chimes in that though there exists a high return rate, “there is still a lot going on in the background in terms of getting homeless youth off the streets.” As recent as the fall of 2017, the mayor of Boston shattered the silence on youth homelessness, declaring his intentions to end it altogether. According to boston.gov, the city of Boston has already committed millions to Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ development of 28 units of supportive housing. Like Tamjid, the city is working to unite all service providers to design a plan to end youth homelessness. *** The homeless man sitting on the corner surrounded by all his belongings appears

the homeless are.

Later I return to Y2Y during the busy hours of the night. Hidden away from the laughing customers strolling out of the well-lit urban outfitters and specialty chocolate and meat stores onto the bustling streets lined with festive christmas lights, there lies another bustling community a few feet below. The streets of Harvard Square are not immune to the poverty of the homeless, and the homeless youth shelter is no stranger to the buzz of Harvard Square. Swiveling my head, I see groups of homeless youth my own age rushing off in different directions though the center square stocked with couches and Macs towards the different attractions — warm showers at the gender neutral bathrooms and hot food at the donated kitchen.

Driven Into Unfamiliar Territory: The Ethics of AI, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17

point out, are incredibly flawed, and so much of people's fears surrounding AI are often unfounded. A couple of Elon Musk’s self-driving cars may have gotten into accidents in the past year but, Ms. Pries points out, “Humans are terrible at driving…[and we] place a huge amount of trust in other people that is, relative to a computer’s performance, undeserved.” Mr. Hales continues the thought: “We inherently trust flawed systems and don't trust systems which are clearly less flawed because they are human, which logically doesn't make sense.”

Ms. Pries and Mr. Hales break the often dichotomous view of AI. It isn’t going to spell the end of mankind or be totally flawless. It’s just more complicated than that. ***

Walking out of that interview, I found that some of my apprehension about an AI-filled future abated, but it wasn’t gone. Artificial intel-

ligence ending humanity is still surely a possibility but maybe not a likelihood, and the alarmed words of Musk and Hawking may be more carefully employed hyperbole to spur conversation and regulation than anything else. I still have my concerns, though.

Days after our conversation, one word, which Hales mentioned, lingers in my mind: Stuxnet. Stuxnet is a computer worm developed jointly by US and Israeli intelligence and was responsible for causing significant damage to the Iranian nuclear program. One of the primary obstacles to hacking the computers running Iran’s nuclear centrifuges was that they aren’t networked — that is, they aren’t connected to any broader computer system (like the internet). Stuxnet worked by indiscriminately sneaking, undetected, into hundreds of thousands of computers and USB drives.

The thinking was that eventually someone within the Iranian program would plug

an infected USB into one of these network-isolated computers. The worm was designed to recognize when it was connected to one of these centrifuge computers and would work to destroy it.

What if someone released a kind of Stuxnet virus designed to attack America’s power grid, or financial system, or security apparatus?

What if that virus was capable of advanced machine learning, such that it could outsmart any programmer’s attempt to remove it? An artificially intelligent virus put in the wrong hands could wreak irreparable harm.

While AI may have the same destructive capacity as a nuclear weapon, the danger it poses is somehow qualitatively different than that of a bomb. The Manhattan Project was a highly classified government endeavor, worked on by the best scientists in the United States. But the creation of superintelligent AI is different. Private companies across the world are working to create a poten-

tially humanity-ending set of code. And yet the US government has been sluggish at enacting any kind of regulation.

Unlike the creation of the nuclear bomb, the creation of superintelligence is scattered and unregulated, but

When I ask him about its risks, he seems concerned and sees the need for important safeguards. “The important thing,” he tells me, “is that whoever is developing [AI] is also developing safety protocols, failsafes.” In his

“‘No one’s gonna teach you ethics,” he says.

“You’re not gonna get that kind of stuff from Googling.’” the stark consequences could be just the same.

It’s a Friday, and Milton Academy’s student center is animated with teenagers preparing to go home or to their various sports games.

I am sitting with Ben Stewart, a long-haired senior for whom computer science is his primary interest. On tall bar-style chairs, our arms resting on a tall bar-style table, we hover over my iPhone, so its microphone can pick up the conversation over all the commotion.

Ben is enrolled in two computer science courses, one of which is concerned with artificial intelligence.

Milton AI course, he says the first thing they did was “discuss the ethics of AI… [and] think about the choices [they] could be making with the stuff [they’re] creating.” He is unsure, however, as to whether high schools and universities teaching computer science adequately address AI’s ethical issues.

And the fact that so much of computer science relies on self-discovery means if you’re not looking at ethics in the classroom, you may not be looking at ethics at all. “No one’s gonna teach you ethics,” he says. “You’re not gonCONTINUED ON PAGE 21

Friday, March 30th, 2018 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 18

*** What better way to learn more about all I didn’t know than to delve right into the center of urban farming in Boston?

After several emails back and forth and a rescheduling or two, I was finally sitting down in Cox Library with the incredibly busy and yet, relaxed and welcoming Patricia Spence, Milton alumna and executive director at the Urban Farming Institute of Boston. While I had been at class, she’d already touched on three different projects, and had a quick phone call with the Department of Agricultural Resources to take in an hour before attending some city meeting with Boston lawmakers about the continuously-evolving policy… I became overwhelmed just by the summary her ToDo list for the day. But, sensing my distress for her, she warmly recalled her time in a French play and the fashion shows she held in Straus, and suddenly a sort of camaraderie settled in.

The Urban Farming Institute, a nonprofit organization determined to “develop and promote urban farming as a Commercial sector that creates green collar jobs for residents; and to engage urban communities in building a healthier and more locally

Page 20

Boston’s Urban Farming, , Continued

based food system,” has been instrumental throughout the urban farming movement in Boston, which might attribute to Spence’s hussle-and-bussle. I’ve been familiar with the Institute since last spring, when Milton’s Community Engagement program established a weekly volunteer opportunity to an Institute worksite in Dorchester. On Sundays, we’d be tasked with anything from pulling out unwanted growth, juicing rotten cherry tomatoes to ferment their seeds, extracting and sifting hot compost, wheelbarrowing around dirt, any of the many tasks necessary to keep up a farm. Spence’s job is, I’d say, even more intense and important: “The nonprofit corporation forming for the Institute was looking for a ‘jack of all trades’ to dive into something completely new, without a lot of rules: the industry of urban farming,” and she assumed the position in March, 2014.

The Urban Farming Institute is most recognized for its nine-week, two hours per week training program, an overview of farming in the city; as many as ten graduates are then selected to work for twenty weeks over the summer at one of the four productive farms across Boston.

By the beginning of next year, Pat shared, the Institute will

have amassed several more plots of land, including the Fowler Clark Epstein Farm, described in the Boston Globe as a 30,000-squarefoot historic property in Mattapan requiring a $3.2 million restoration. The Institute will send out an application to UFI graduates and other credentialed farmers to lease the new land and sell commercially a certain portion of the food. (The Institute is a nonprofit with a for-profit sale operation falling under the training facility, which is fine because it “doesn’t make a ton of money.”)

Working independently, an urban farmer would need hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to buy land, bring the farm up to code, obtain soil, tools, and seeds, and that’s without the continued cost of a crew, irrigation, food lost to theft and weather and bugs, and not to mention, time; the Institute promises to alleviate many of these impossible hurdles and help farmers finding customers.

Besides the full farm operation, the Institute also manages a program of over six hundred volunteers per year (with a summer youth leadership development program in development right now) and holds an annual Massachusetts Urban Farming Conference in the spring,

which all adds up to a budget of over half a million dollars.

But the Institute is still about people. Spence described the leadership of UFI as “diverse, folks of color, that actually come from the neighborhoods that we’re in.” She shared childhood memories of riding bikes past the Fowler Clark land, and described the Institute’s motive to “bring in folks in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan that are trying new careers or even aren’t gainfully employed, maybe have some health problems, maybe aren’t eating right.”

The Institute has played an active role in the urban farming movement, not only with the physical land but also with the pioneering policy.

Many of the forerunners in pushing the aforementioned Urban Farming Rezoning Article 89, established just a few years ago, were on the board of UFI from formation in late 2011. The city of Boston gave them land to “see if this urban farming thing could make sense,” and in December 2013, the article passed.

Once the legislation gave the green light, where did the Institute amass their land? Spence used the word “reclaim” to describe their recovery of vacant and disregarded bits of land across Boston, ten or thirteen-thousand feet, too small for de-

velopment. “We’re trying to make vacant land, sometimes dumping grounds, into farmland again: productive, looking good, helping people feed people,” she explained, with a sense of urgency, gentle but present. “It is not a quick process, and you have to have funding,” Spence mentioned, addressing that, though eight properties are currently in some phase of becoming urban farms, “it could take a while for all eight.”

But maybe the coolest thing in the works is the “community land trust” the Institute recently partnered in creating, “possibly the first in the country just for farmland in the city.” The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), a community-based organization formed in the eighties to enhance the industrial dumping grounds in the village to an economically- and environmentally-vibrant place. With the Institute, DSNI created the Dudley Neighbors Inc. Land Trust, “a really special and effective model everyone in the whole country is talking about,” remarked Lily Pollans, professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College and another Milton alumna.

By the time I finally secured a conference room in CONTINUED ON PAGE 22

Delivering the Scoop On Ordering At Milton, Continued CONTINUED FROM PAGE 12

some days). I spoke with Mr. Heard, the Associate Dean of Students, about the history of ordering delivery at Milton. We sit in his messy office, him on a wooden chair across from me on a firm sofa. He is wearing a blue shirt with a grey Patagonia vest and blue jeans. We start the conversation with his time at Milton as a student.

Mr. Heard, a class of 1993 day student, remembers times of a pizza truck that would offer food to students.

After evening study hall, a Spukies Pizza truck would pull up outside the dorms and sell slices of pizza. He and other students would go over to grab a quick snack before check in. He says, “The number of restaurants that deliver in the area has heavily increased since that time.

Delivery didn’t even exist back then.” For him, the pizza truck was the closest thing to delivery. And at the time, there was no obvious division between who was buying it and who wasn’t. It was cheap and convenient at the time.

Since then, ordering delivery has increased very fast.

This rise is due to “a level of access and availability that just didn’t exist then.” With the increase in delivery services, local restaurants, and online ordering mediums, ordering delivery has become a staple of the Milton community. “The amount of ordering is in line with the increase in amount of access,” Mr. Heard says, “As stuff has become more accessible, more people have ordered.”

But accessibility is not the only reason for the increase in ordering. Mr. Heard blames a shift in culture as another factor in the rise of delivery. He says, “We’re in a

time, students have begun to care less about whether they are making the right decision. They just choose to do it. In terms of ordering, students are not considering the effects that it can cause. Of course, Mr. Heard acknowledges that some people order more “depending on their disposable income”; but in general, ordering food simply wastes food that is already on campus and food fees that are already on one’s tuition bill.

Moreover, ordering delivery creates a bad habit of unhealthy eating and mismanagement of money.

With this rise of ordering,

“Mr. Heard blames a shift in culture as another factor in the rise of delivery. He says, ‘We’re in a culture of because I can, I do. Too often I feel like ‘because I can’ is the reason, and not a lot of thought is being put into, ‘Should I be doing it? Is it good for me?’’” culture of because I can, I do.

Too often I feel like ‘because I can’ is the reason, and not a lot of thought is being put into, ‘Should I be doing it? Is it good for me?’”

Just like Mr. Emmott, Mr. Heard sees a cultural shift around ordering food. Over

Milton Academy’s administration has shifted the rules on when ordering is allowed.

Originally, ordering was only allowed on days without sit down dinner (Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays). In the past couple of years, the rules have changed to allow

ordering on sitdown nights as long as the food is delivered during “non-disruptive” times. The reasoning behind the shift? It was in response to “constantly spending so much effort trying to enforce the rules that just didn’t feel like energy well spent,” says Mr. Heard.

He says, ordering food is a “cultural norming trap.” Food has become an icon of Milton culture. “Food is a social thing. Sometimes I think that we are blind to the impacts of our consumption, our choices around it,” says Mr. Heard.

My generation is unique.

We grow up during a time in which information is readily available. If we want to know who was president in 1938, we can google it instantly. If we want to see the weather forecast for next week, we can check the weather app on our phones instantly. If we want to ordering a book, we can go onto amazon and get it in less than 24 hours. We can get what we want when we want it.

We live in a unique world.

We are the children of the internet. We can access anything whenever we want. We are disoriented when we lose that power.

Ordering delivery gives our generation power. At our fingertips is food of all cuisines and types. We like being able to choose what to eat. We enjoy that independence, an independence that has evolved with the rise of accessibility and the shift in social norms. *** “Email and password don't match, please try again.” I retype my email address and password. “Email and password don't match, please try again.” I close Google Chrome and try logging in on Safari. “Email and password don't match, please try again.” I click on “forget password” and reset my password. I try to login with my new password. Once again, “Email and password don't match, please try again.”

Instead of continuing trying to order through the restaurant’s website, I decide to just use my phone’s Grubhub app. I add my food to my “bag” and continue to checkout. I confirm my order. I get an email from Grubhub. The title reads “Your Order Is Being Prepared.”

Friday, March 30th, 2018

Page 21

What Are We Doing When We Cut Our Hair?, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 18

that sometimes some of the guys would say things that they would not necessarily say with women around with languages that are sometimes “a little bit colorful or crude.”

Perhaps, although the barbershop is still a space for public conversation, it does fulfill the mission of providing a sense of “privacy” with its intimacy.

However, each barber shop also has its own ways and standards to control these conversation. Vito, the owner of Goodfella’s, does not tolerate his customers to swear, especially with female presence, and gets “very angry” when this happens. Similarly, in Milton Barbershop, Jen manages the “level of conversations” varies depending on the customers in the house: the “adult-mode conversation” ends when children come in, and the conversations quiet down even more when the elders walk in. On the other hand, the public

and commercial nature of the space allows customers to advocate for their opinions or simply choose not to patronize the store, which Mr.Parisi did when a barber at Rocco&Sons made a racist comment.

Although neutral towards the vibe and conversation topics in Goodfella’s, he feels that “there is something familiar” about the Italian cultural elements of the place, from the Italian American singers’ voice in the background to the Italian family that owns the barbershop.

His words strike a chord with me. I have never had my hair cut in the U.S. for the three years I have been here.

I would rather cut my hair on my own with my Swiss army knife, despite having to tolerate some undesirable choppy ends. Even when I have to visit a variety of barbershops and hair salons for the interviews, wearing my long, unruly hair that cries for trimming, the idea of getting a haircut there never occurs to

me. I used to think that it is an issue of habit or of cost, but now I wonder if, deep inside me, I am not willing to trust a stranger who does not speak my native tongue with my head. I am not the only one. Many boarding students share a similar sentiment: international students only get haircuts over summers and domestic students wait until they go home for Christmas.

As the type of hair can be a visible and essential representation of one’s ethnicity, the barber shops can easily target to cater a specific ethnic group, and those that do so may provide a rare opportunity for socializing among the community. For instance, black-owned barber shops are portrayed as being at the “center of African American public life” and a space that “encourages both confidentiality and camaraderie” among African American communities, according to University of Pennsylvania press.

Haircut being a social phenomenon is not ex-

clusive for human beings, and, instead, the reason why barber shops have become a social center can trace back to our animal instincts. Social grooming, defined as “the behavior of cleaning and maintaining one another’s body or appearance,” serve as a major factor in establishing friendships and social structures among primates. The same nature also allows us to trust and appreciate the relationship with the ones who handles our hair. Would this instinct for social grooming save the barbershops for us as the last stronghold for neighborhood socializing? Would the trust, the intimacy, and the shared sense of community sustain through the modern trend of social isolation?

That I don’t know.

But I know that, many, like Mr.Parisi, who cherishes the existing relationship with his barber, Sal, would not let go of these bonds. During our interview, he repetitively characterizes as a “good

guy” and states that Sal is one who he can leave his back to.

Mr.Parisi offers a generous lists to explain why Sal is a nice person, and, from his description, I can see Sal, a stranger I have never met: a medium height, stocky man in his early twenties, with one arm covered in a barber pole tattoo among other patterns; he is driving down Randolph Ave now, in a vintage car that is part of his car collections to cut Mr.Millet’s hair, on his days off, as he had always been doing for the past five years.

Driven Into Unfamiliar Territory: The Ethics of AI, Continued CONTINUED FROM PAGE 19

na get that kind of stuff from Googling.”

A quick Google search confirms what he’s been saying. Harvard’s undergraduate computer science department has a mere one course devoted to the ethical challenges of intelligent systems, and it is neither mandatory nor prominent on their website’s course catalog. I couldn’t find a course devoted to the subject at all in MIT’s undergraduate computer science program either.

While there isn’t much data on the subject, a 2006 survey did find that only half of undergraduate computer science programs in the United States require their students to take an ethics course.

Thanks, in large part, to the lobbying of prominent philosophers (like Nick Bostrom), scientists (like Stephen Hawking), and tech giants (like Elon Musk), universities

and ensuring that AI share our ethical and moral values.

But there are problems here. Research on the ethics of AI is dangerously isolated from the government, which is the only institution that could enact regulations based on this research. There’s not much indication that AI companies, aside from Google’s DeepMind, are taking any of this research seriously. And, if you look at who’s participating in conversations about the ethics of AI, you’ll see almost exclusively wealthy, white, male faces.

Any progress in regulating AI at the federal level seems hopeless at the moment.

Under the Obama administration, some progress was made: Obama created a task force to assess the benefits and risks of AI, which made twenty-three recommendations for how our government should interact with the private sector to ensure public safety. Though this was only

“Research on the ethics of AI is dangerously isolated from the government, which is the only institution that could enact regulations based on this research.” have begun to take these issues seriously. MIT’s Media Lab has recently established a new ethics division, and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center has recently taken on the ethics and governance of AI as a core mission. Google’s DeepMind has, just this past year, launched a new research group dedicated to understanding the economic impact of automation, assessing potential AI biases,

slight progress, the Trump administration has decided to abandon it anyways. And after Trump’s Charlottesville debacle, the American Manufacturing Council, an advisory group which included many prominent tech CEOs, disbanded, further distancing the research in Silicon Valley from the regulatory agencies in Washington. While shows like Black Mirror are trying to spark national conversation

with dark satire about future technologies, the problems within the American political realm seem to outweigh any national conversations about AI. Fake news, polarization, and bureaucratic incompetence are outshining AI’s dark shadow.

Whether any of these initiatives or research groups will be enough to obviate catastrophe, I am unsure, and, I’ll admit, a little uneasy. But it does seem like Ms. Pries and Mr. Hales are right: it may take a disaster for the public to start taking this stuff seriously. *** Unlike Tufts’ HRILAB, Forge AI has no sign, or really any public evidence of its existence aside from a website. I spent ten minutes wandering Cambridge’s Massachusetts Avenue before I located a small door to the left of a Walgreens, with the address 625 displayed in frustratingly small font. I pressed the keypad to reach security and told him I was there to speak to Forge AI — I declared it with the kind of confidence that says, “I am expected,” but I wasn’t. I drew open the door, exchanged some greetings with the security guard whose face was hid by two computer displays, and got into an elevator.

When the elevator doors opened, directly in front of me I saw a meeting room. I walked up to a white, bearded receptionist who pointed towards an iPad and told me to sign-in. The iPad scanned my driver’s license, photographed my face, pre-

sumably for confirmation, and asked me which company I was visiting.

You see, Forge AI’s headquarters is in a “communal workspace,” which is run by a third party who rents out the space to various companies. The workspace, in fact, looks more like a Starbucks girded by a ring of small meeting spaces than an office. Fifty or so programmers are scattered on the room’s contemporary, ergonomic

The advent of new technologies has always provoked fear mongering. In the 18th century, some feared that reliance on newspapers would lead to social isolation.

In the early 19th century, some condemned the use of trains because they thought man wasn’t meant to travel at thirty MPH. In the early 20th century, radio was thought to harm children’s reading abilities.

This all seems ridic-

“That’s the thing about AI, too: there’s so much uncertainty. The only certainties I can think of now are: the necessity of regulation and inevitability of disaster.” couches and tables.

I went to Forge AI, in part, to figure out what exactly they do. On their website, they claim to be “transforming the world's ocean of unstructured data into streams of structured information immediately usable by intelligent machines” — whatever that means. But after waiting forty minutes, I realized two things: my parking meter was about to expire, and I was probably never going to find out what they do.

I was back on the highway, headed home, curious as to why I didn’t get an interview. I wasn’t too disappointed, though, because my initial hopes weren’t too high, anyway. Cold-calling inherently involves uncertainty. That’s the thing about AI, too: there’s so much uncertainty. The only certainties I can think of now are: the necessity of regulation and inevitability of disaster.

ulous now, but only because we possess the clarity of hindsight. If we truly weren’t meant to travel at thirty miles per hour, we would be now justifying that fear mongering. But there is something different about this new technology, about something that can mimic human thought, that could exceed human intelligence, which seems to warrant fear mongering.

When two cars collide, we normally have someone to blame. Some kid was texting and driving. Someone daydreamed their way into the car ahead of them. With AI, we seem to be removing this agency, but are we really removing responsibility?

If something goes seriously wrong, humanity-ending-ly wrong, with AI in fifty years, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. Sure, it was a computer that caused the crash, but we first took our hands off the wheel.

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AGGRESSION, DIGRESSION, Continued

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 12

owned a couple martial arts studios, and it was just something my dad did, and so I got involved.” Quite simply, Mr. McGuirk tells me that in an athletic sense, “it’s just like any other sport.” Different types of martial arts involve different styles of movement: some allow kicking, others emphasize use of the body’s joints, etc. As a sport that has become heavily established in organized competition, martial arts have taken on their own finely tuned sets of rules.

According to Mr. McGuirk, martial arts can also have health benefits. “There’s something about being able to release steam in some way that’s healthy, regulated, managed,” Mr. McGuirk tells me. “That’s not just about breaking bricks or wood, or punching a punching bag.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 20

the library and managed to log into my Skype, Pollans popped up onto my screen wearing a lavender scarf and donning bangs of the perfect length, sitting in some classroom or office.

Even with some auditory distortion over the call, I could feel her passion in explaining the sophisticated loophole of the land trust contract: “the trust prevents land from being bought and sold on an open market and it’s not privately owned, so it’s collective and very radical, economically and politically.”

The strategy effectively controls the gentrification that so often occurs when land development and increasing real estate costs push out entire socioeconomic groups. DSNI saw the “old, toxic sites that nobody was using but owners wouldn’t sell, with back taxes and no value” and promised, if given the land, they would fix it all; DSNI was granted “eminent domain,” the power to take “private property into public ownership to do something for the public good,” and has since cleaned up the land and built housing.

The grassroots origins of these urban farming organizations grew from former “gorilla gardens” in the seventies as a “political action to take these spaces in places where the city government, developers, and investors weren’t really paying attention: people claiming a right to that space and making something beautiful in their own neighborhoods.” But as the urban farming idea has quickly gained traction in recent years, the focus of

That’s also breathing techniques, stretching, taking a half hour to just stretch your body out.” Mr. McGuirk continued into college and ran his own studios for a while, more because he enjoyed teaching his friends and students self-defense, as opposed to simply getting aggression out (“That’s never really been my forte”).

George also testifies to the aspects of exercise and self-defense. “You feel more confident from formal training,” he tells me.

George started training with Taekwondo at the age of six, later picking up Wing Chun, Judo, boxing, and nunchucks.

Posters of Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee, and other great fighters of history decorate the walls of his dorm room.

“You gain a sort of awareness.

On the streets, if you have to protect yourself, you instinctively have a feeling of what

to do. It’s also not just about yourself — it can be about helping those around you.”

In light of the recent sexual harassment allegations, this conversation of self-defense is increasingly relevant.

“If you are a girl,” George tells me, whose social role has traditionally been the submissive, weaker gender, “martial arts can prepare you for dangerous situations in life where without training, you might just freeze up not knowing what to do.” This idea is portrayed in a poem by Malia Chung, a sophomore at Milton Academy who trains at Hard Knocks Muay Thai, in which she juxtaposes her godmother’s experiences of sexual harassment with her own self-defense training (which occurs alongside mostly men). George continues: “Having exposure to training gives you the courage to simply move, which

might simply make the aggressor back down. Sometimes, this mentality is something that can save your life.”

That night, George stays up late to teach me how to throw a punch. For someone who’s mostly an amateur athlete of soccer and tennis, this motion is brand-new. “Move your hip with your shoulder — that way, you get the most power. Don’t twist your hand.” That night, as I slowly master the punch, a new kind of confidence breathes life into my body.

Boston’s Urban Farming, Continued

policymakers is turning towards developing food security, like a “strategic urban intervention”; “people in the city government are saying ‘if we’re growing food more locally, we’ll be less dependent on these very insecure global networks of production, and maybe food safety and public health could be improved.’” And yet, urban farm proposals still get blocked for a variety of reasons, including a “lack of bureaucratic channels for zoning and permitting,” the public health concerns of generally-uninformed city dwellers about, say, rats, and the potentially-distasteful appearance of a farm in the winter without its lush bloom.

Pollans’ educational background has helped her consider “how built space contributes to the health and wellbeing of residents, to the economy, how impacts the environment, and how you can adapt the built environment to meet other goals — environmental, social, economic, political.”

When introducing the urban farm into this equation, the planner must recognize the threat of gentrification and “use public subsidy to buy and develop places that are affordable” for the current residents, and of course, have “culturally-appropriate and useful” facilities, including public schools, grocery stores, and transportation access.

Urban planning is a jigsaw puzzle to attract new residents and optimize overall satisfaction while also establishing a priority to protect communities that have long suffered the drawbacks of the city. If playing the SimCity

BuildIt game in eighth grade taught me anything, it’s that everything — every road, every park, every house, every sewage line — has a local and distant impact. If you want to build another house, you need to make sure the power plant is producing enough energy to supply for that family; so too are the complexities of integrating this newfangled concept of natural food production right in the heart of concrete jungles.

But unlike artificial scarcity in a 2014 phone app, food deserts can’t be solved by dropping a healthy food store into the neighborhood.

The “Whole Foods Effect,” or, the direct correlation between presence of Whole Foods (and similar chains) and increase of nearby property value, was proven in a 2017 Zillow Research study: the values of homes near a Whole Foods appreciated 140 percent between 1997 and 2014, compared to the median U.S. home appreciating just 71 percent.

A corporation can’t possibly save a community. Growing the food, moving the food closer to the city, and making the food accessible, physically and economically, is a careful ground-up enterprise of many moving parts, and unfortunately, won’t happen overnight. But if the collaboration between city officials and urban farming advocates, community farmers, civilian gardeners, urban planners, ag-tech developers, restaurant food-sourcers, even philanthropists of any kind, continues, the ball will start rolling faster and faster. After all, bringing the food back to the city is about as grassroots, personal, and vital to the sur-

vival and preservation of a whole community as about any initiative can get.

“My whole work in life is about environmental sustainability so that’s obviously the thing that I care about the most,” Pollans admitted, with maybe a self-aware readjustment of her hair. But, adamant, she reaffirmed the same sentiments as nearly Jenkins, Spence, Lieberman, a concept as clear as day to anyone who gives it even a moment’s thought, that “oppression of people and exploitation of the environment always happen at the same time, through the same processes.” She encapsulated the core of this conflict succinctly, with the wordsmithing of the academic and the passion of activist: “You can’t make a place sustainable if all you do is invest in making a clean environment, there’s no point in making the world livable for just a few people.” *** As I biked to the Fruit Center in Milton the next day to pick up some Brussels sprouts and mangoes, on wheel I now know are cracked from cold and a chain that once popped in the middle of a four-way intersection — I haven’t quite trusted it since — I realized that, in the small ways, I’ve already been contributing to bettering the whole community. Yes, the Fruit Center targets a certain gourmet-purchasing character, and it’s certainly only financially-available to the people of Milton, in stark contrast to the Star Market in Mattapan two miles away. But if I can support what good the Fruit Center does for the physical environment at least, what with using energy-efficient

temperature and lighting control, implementing recycling and biodegradable shopping bags, and purchasing local produce… well, that might not be too shabby either.

For the laymen of the city, those who are about as involved as buying groceries once a week and eating out occasionally, I think it’s about intention. Whatever little influence you have, in the form of a dollar or a volunteering hand or a garden plot, if it’s angled just slightly more towards progress instead of regress, maybe that collective shift will make the difference, if even just on a Boston-level. Maybe a visit to locally-sourced eating establishments, maybe joining a CSA, there are so many little things we everymen can do to support those who dedicate their lives towards equality and environmental sustainability, who show up at town hall and propose policy, who reclaim land and build sustainable places.

Maybe one day, we’ll see a Boston where communities that had been disenfranchised and excluded are empowered by policymakers and their fellow Bostonians — black, white, rich, poor — with legal and financial resources to make beautiful, food-giving spaces in their own neighborhoods. Maybe then, the impossible radish from a garden box, daughter of technology and intention, will represent the against-allodds, city-grown equity so many people are fighting so hard to achieve.

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Why You Should Take “The Craft Of Non-Fiction” “Nonfictions isn’t like any other course at Milton. It’s the most fun English course (in my opinion). Every class feels real. Everything we discuss and write about is relevant about our lives. Instead of reading books that feel like they are distant and unnecessary, we read articles and essays that discuss real parts of life. I honestly cannot stress enough how relevant this course feels.

Every class period is different. It’s never just regurgitating prepared notes about last night's reading. It never feels like a chore. It’s always fun and interesting, entertaining and captivating. You learn about your classmates and you learn about yourself. And the course is tough for sure, writing two 4000 word essays and sharing your deepest, darkest secrets isn’t exactly that enticing. But trust me — it’s all worth it. Just take it.”

- Alexander Chen “Milton students accumulate a lot of knowledge about a lot of subjects. We know the Pythagorean Theorem, the steps to designing a scientific experiment, the formula for writing a critical essay. And yet, between Megablunders and in-class essays, we seldom get a chance to think about why and how we write. (Which, I’ll add, is a damn shame: pretty much all professions require some level of writing.)

I personally — and I think I’m speaking for rest of Nonfictions students — have enjoyed every single moment of my time in the classroom with Ms. Baker, workshopping peers’ writing (because nonfiction writing should look and sound as clean as creative writing), and bearing witness to our continual improvement as a class. I can honestly say it’s been my favorite course in three years at Milton.

Sure, you’ll have to turn off your English comprehension autopilot, you’ll even have to say good-bye to reading literature out of obligation, and you might just have to crack down on those dangling modifiers you always miss. But trust me, take this course, because you’ll seriously love it.” - Emma James “Taking nonfictions was probably the best decision I ever made at Milton. Here are some reasons why: The freedom. Whether doing profiles or interviews or feature pieces or memoirs, you get to choose what to write about and what to say and how to say it.

You learn to be much more observant of the world. You learn to look at something like a shirt and see not just its fabric and buttons but its cultural significance and potential ethical consequences.

Instead of just cranking out papers about literature, you learn to appreciate the essay as a kind of literature itself.

You constantly discuss current events and politics in a nuanced, judgement free way.

You learn to read with the intent of improving your own writing.

No more critical essays.

It’s fun!” - Jonah Garnick “In the past seven-ish months in the Nonfictions course, I’ve arguably developed more as a writer than I have since Class IV English. This course focuses solely on writing—though we do read memoirs and articles— so as to enhance the student’s ability to write on, well, nonfiction. I’ve written an essay of ideas (basically a rant) on signing desks, a polemic arguing against Free the Nipple, a major article on porn, and many other fun and serious pieces. As you hopefully saw in this issue, students in this course research and write on a variety of topics and issues that we’re actually interested in. I’m sure everyone can think of an English class in which you had to read a book that you found boring or perhaps despised, but in Nonfictions, you choose how you shape this course—which is really rare and something to take advantage of during your senior year. Because we’re personally invested in our essays and readings, we work hard to give justice to what we report on; the passion that drove this feature article surpassed every expectation that I had for my interest in porn. For some of the class, this was our first journalistic piece, but after months of training and writing, we’ve blossomed into adequate journalists who can take on a 4,000 word article. No matter what level you believe you are when you enter into the course, we all leave as significantly better writers, and I hope that you take advantage of this opportunity if you can.” - Navpreet Sekhon “I took Nonfictions because I love hearing people’s stories. Everyone got to where they are through a unique set of events. Sometimes bad people start out good, sometimes your taxi driver was this close to making it big, and other times people’s lives are exactly how you expected them to be. When it all boils down to it, we as humans are all so connected. We all have very real dreams and fear, things that make us tick, and favorite snacks.

These conversations and connections that non fictions assignment forces you to partake in help you realize the similarity in humans, which in turn allows you to tear down walls you had built to shut certain kinds of people out. Nonfictions is a loving, provocative, groundbreaking course, and I recommend that anyone who has a passion for taking great classes takes this course.” - Dylan Volman

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Student Perspectives on Gun Control and the March for Our Lives “The march was an eye opening experience as to the change young people can make and feel. It was also astounding to see the kindness complete strangers displayed one another.

Whether this kindness included simply telling someone you liked their sign, or telling them how proud you are of their involvement in the movement, the humaneness displayed gave me hope in such an unsure and dangerous America.”

“Though the march was incredibly empowering and positive, it also held its saddening, emotional moments as well. It showed that the marches were also like a memorial for those who lost their lives to gun violence and mass shootings, which drives me even more to want to invoke a positive change in America, and push for gun control.”

“This CANNOT be happening. It is OUTRAGEOUS that along with preparing for fire drills, kids as young as elementary school students must be prepared in case there is a school shooting in the future. Students should NOT be going to school with fear. Students should not be walking into the building thinking that it is possibly their last day nor should they be thinking about where they would go or what should they do in case there is a school shooting…To be honest, this is no longer a matter of politics…this is common sense. This is why WE CALL BS.” “Although [gun control] is a great idea, I don't believe that it will help with school shootings. The government can not simply take away all the guns in the US. People who want to do these awful crimes, will always find a way to get a gun.”

“I think that teachers should absolutely not be armed and that we need to make the age higher for being able to buy guns. No child should have to go to school in fear for their lives.

Shootings and especially school shootings are happening more frequently everyday and we need congress to take initiative and make a stronger gun policy. Enough is enough.”

“We are ones actually dealing with the first hand effects of school shootings, not politicians...I personally know many people who are very proud of the second amendment, and I as well believe is must be recognized and respected...the right to bear arms should have a place in our Constitution. However, in the end, guns are not a right, they are a privilege. Life is a right, and when people infringe upon that right of life by using guns in a harmful way, then that privilege must be taken away. ” “The Parkland shooting of white kids was the turning point for all this, people have been protesting guns for a long time now, especially police brutality.”

“I truly believe that school shootings and gun violence stem from issues surrounding mental health and wellbeing. I was so happy the march happened, but I didn't see many posters or hear speeches that agree with my beliefs...I believe the greater change begins with educating those who need help-those who are more prone to become school shooters.”