The College Hill Independent Vol. 37 Issue 6

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A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

26 OCT 2018 VOL 37 ISSUE 06

(Modified) imagery generated using Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks

FROM THE EDITORS Cover.Art.2.0 Jack Halten Fahnestock NEWS 02

Week in Subcultures Ben Bienstock, Sarah Clapp

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Tell Us What You MENA Ivy Scott METRO

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Slashing the Tires Paula Pacheco Soto FEATURES

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50 Years Later Jacob Alabab-Moser

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Coconut Lily Meyersohn SCIENCE & TECH

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Brain Jamming Kristen Whang

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Transhummusism Leo Stevenson BODY

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Glossier bb Annabelle Woodward LITERARY

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Becoming Inanimate Blake Planty EPHEMERA

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How To: Dress Eve O'Shea X

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Sacrifice the Settler Jorge Palacios

As my language becomes mired in loss, trading in expulsions of it starts to feel cheap.

Everything I write, sing, or say is cheapening myself to give you something. Saying there’s a way to get to ourselves, when there isn’t. I don’t know you. There is no way from me to me just like there is no way to you, collapsing somewhere in a sea of lost objects with your erased face like the backs of people’s hands.

Given how what's underlying is so often elusive / slips so easily, the false sense of permanence surrounding words starts to strike me. When my father, who continues to lose his father, can no longer remember details, my grandfather will become fleeted. And so my father starts to adorn his father’s garb, because some losses are forever and these are / were supposed to be the most important things.

A misplaced person, I often can’t remember anyone, home, or myself. I don’t know what will stick from what I saw / what I see now but I know that a first step is landing.

MISSION STATEMENT

—SA

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

WEEK IN REVIEW Sara Van Horn NEWS Mara Dolan Lucas Smolcic Larson Paula Pacheco Soto METRO Jacob Alabab-Moser Harry August Ella Comberg

ARTS Isabelle Rea Marianne Verrone SCIENCE & TECH Mia Pattillo Julia Rock Eve Zelickson LITERARY Shuchi Agrawal Emma Kofman

FEATURES Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

EPHEMERA Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer

BODY Pia Mileaf-Patel Cate Turner

X Maya Bjornson Maria Gerdyman

26 OCT 2018

VOL 37 ISSUE 06

LIST Alexis Gordon Signe Swanson Will Weatherly WRITERS Ben Bienstock Mica Chau Jessica Dai Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Liby Hays Jorge Palacios Giacomo Sartorelli Ivy Scott Marly Toledano Kayli Wren COPY EDITORS Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim

ILLUSTRATORS Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Julia Illana Jeff Katz Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt Miranda Villanueva Alex Westfall ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Alex Hanesworth Eve O'Shea

DESIGNERS Pablo Herraiz Garcia de Guadiana Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Katherine Sang Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong DESIGN EDITOR Jack Halten Fahnestock BUSINESS Maria Gonzalez

SENIOR EDITORS Eliza Chen Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson Will Weatherly MANAGING EDITORS Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Erin West MVP Paula Pacheco Soto & Ivy Scott

WEB Ashley Kim

The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK

IN SUBCULTURES

BY Ben Bienstock & Sarah Clapp DESIGN Katherine Sang

POW! WHAM! CHOMP? Let this serve as a lesson to all New England exotic pet owners and comic book lovers: you may indulge in your passions separately, but never dare combine the two. At last week’s Super Megafest Comic-Con in Framingham, Massachusetts, police arrested Michael Audette and seized his alligator, Burmese python, and two tarantulas. Audette, hoping to capitalize on the potential union of these fandoms, charged convention-goers to take photos with his creepy-crawly friends. Although tarantulas and pythons are legal to own in Massachusetts, alligators, tragically, are not.

Curiously, police arrested Audette on an unknown outstanding warrant unrelated to his zoological entrepreneurship and only subsequently charged him with possession and importation of the reptile.

Audette’s suppression sends a message that couldn’t be clearer: fans dressed in full Spider-Man garb are welcome at Super Megafest—according to its website, “New England’s Super-Fun Comic & Celebrity Pop Culture Fanfest celebrating Comics, TV, Movie, Sci-Fi, Wrestling and Rock & Roll!”—but authentic arachnids are forbidden.

Though it is tempting to view Audette as a snakescarfed folk hero suppressed by the comic book powers that be, the Independent has serious reservations with all parties in this sordid affair. Why did Audette, a Warwick resident, bring both legal and illegal animals (presumably under a large, khaki trench coat) across state lines when Rhode Island has both an upcoming comic book convention and no laws against alligator ownership?

Did he believe tarantulas and a five-foot python alone would not be enticing enough to costumed Massholes on their way to stand in the presence of secondary castmembers of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and WWE Hall of Famer “Mean” Gene Okerlund? Why bring wild animals to a comic convention at all? (For the thrill, of course.)

Despite Audette’s failings, we must consider what Massachusetts Environmental Police had to gain from shattering Audette’s dreams of bridging the divides between the animal kingdom and Marvel and DC Universes. Perhaps they conspiratorially invoked Audette’s undisclosed past warrant in order to maintain the tensions between these rival factions, lest law enforcement’s control of MetroWest be wrested from them by a porcupine in a replica Hulk mask. Surely the Framingham Police are threatened by the potential of

PERSONAL EFFECTS

an exotic pet owners–comic-con ticketholders alliance, and sought to perpetuate the hostility between these subcultures to preserve the status quo.

Though the Independent newsroom is divided on whether alligators, pythons, and tarantulas are gross and scary, we firmly believe in the right of Rhode Islanders to be weird in public. We are inspired by Audette’s audacious struggle against state-enforced conformity, and we will ourselves attempt to make change (literally and figuratively) this November by charging Rhode Island Comic Con attendees $15 a pop to pose with our beloved staff pet, Jonah the Komodo dragon.

–BB "LEGGO MY LEGO!"

a man’s life. After crying through several viewings of “Bye,” this writer has renewed her commitment to the ethics of Lego-journalism and discovered that Lego is more than a vehicle for movie-reboot merchandise, more than a vessel of apocalyptic anxiety, more than a cuboid that interlocks with other cuboids: Lego is community. For it is this community that has rallied around Louis over the past week; a fellow LegoTuber set up a GoFundMe campaign to rebuild the stolen collection, which far exceeded its initial $1000 goal with enough donations to replace the entire trove. In the campaign’s comment section, donors explained their sudden investment in Louis’ passion with memories of play––the formative, universal effect of clicking blocks together for the first time.

The politics of Lego may be as unwieldy as a 7,500 piece Millenium Falcon, but the heart and soul of Lego’s global network prove to be plainly noble.

While the Independent supports the pursuit of environmental justice, especially in the wake of the IPCC’s urgent report on global warming, we also can’t help but support Louis, even if it means that Lego must now manufacture thousands of dollars worth of brand new, oil laden, carbon spewing Lego bricks and Darth Vader miniatures. We will not stand in the way of this act of solidarity. We will not stand to see an oasis of technicolor joy swept from the Internet with Louis’ involuntary retirement. We will not back down from proclaiming: There is nothing so pure as a Lego!

After admiring pictures of table-sized Ewok Villages and scouring chat rooms till dawn, it is apparent to this member of the Lego-press that “Lego Life” isn’t just the Lego-specific social media app that she just signed up for: It is a lifestyle shared by a league of devotees, united through an unbreakable spirit of ingenuity and a dedication to uplifting the downtrodden among them. Tina Murphy, a GoFundMe commenter, speaks on behalf of this collective in comforting their comrade in construction: “One person ruined you, but watch as hundreds rebuild you.”

The Independent must issue a retraction of an article published in Volume 37, Issue 4, entitled “Block by Block.” The article, which reported on Lego’s pledge to eliminate petroleum-based plastic products by 2030, misrepresented Lego as an entity beholden to gross corporate excess, insinuating that its polluting practices would bring about a “primary-colored hellscape” if a sustainable solution was not instituted immediately.

The writer of that article would not have made so bold a claim if she had been attune to recent drama in the Lego universe surrounding YouTuber republicattak and his collection of Lego paraphernalia, accumulated over 14 years and valued at $18,000. In his video “Bye,” republicattak––real name Louis, a French vlogger known for documenting his Lego Star Wars constructions––fights back tears as describes the devastating robbery of his beloved bricks that befell him mere hours before. His voice quivers as he announces that –SC his channel must end. “It was really great to have you for eight years and to inspire other people,” he says, his eyes darting to the scene of the crime. “What an honor.”

It is hard to look into republicattak’s kind, tearful blue eyes and not feel horrible about his loss, especially if you recently wrote an article insinuating that society is doomed unless we reclaim and reassemble Legos for eco-friendly causes. You wonder if your call to arms incited a band of French climate activists to launch an anti-Lego guerilla revolution. You wonder if you ruined

BY Liby Hays

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

TAKING BACK THE WHEEL

BY Paula Pacheco Soto ILLUSTRATION Natasha Boyko DESIGN Amos Jackson Wafaa is eleven years old and attends Nathanael Greene Middle School. She and her younger brother were two of the almost 10,000 affected by the 11-day-long school bus driver strike. She missed almost a week and a half of school, including the breakfast and lunch that the school provides her every day. She told me her older brother tried to drive her to school, but couldn’t do it again in order to make it in time for work. “I have a lot of homework and tests to make up for,” she said, “I even missed the movie they do every week.”

On Monday night, Councilwoman Nirva LaFortune and Councilman Samuel Zurier organized a panel for parents to express their concerns regarding the recent bus strike and work-to-rule. Yet, many parents were left out of the conversation—a crucial one that better explained the role of the city in anticipating and responding to these issue. Wafaa’s mother, for example, does not speak English, and had a hard time accessing information regarding the strike as it went on. A few times, she prepared her children for school, waiting to see if the bus would come.

The Providence First Student drivers’ strike began on September 27 after an unsatisfactory response by the school bus contractor regarding retirement benefits for its employees. Teamsters Local 251—representing the 100 or so Providence bus drivers—and First Student initially met with a federal mediator on October 9, for the first time since the beginning of the strike, but the meeting reached no settlement. An agreement was finally made on Friday night after 11 days of striking.

Nick Williams, business agent for Teamsters 251, commented on the settlement as “a decent compromise,” but the negotiations were not free of obstacles.

The strike was the culmination of several months of dispute over pension protections for First Student workers. “We feel that medical and pensions are a human right and that’s what we’re out here fighting for” said Matthew Maini, the union’s business agentelect, at the beginning of the strike.

It is unclear whether the settlement has managed to respond to all the initial concerns of the strikers. While the central dispute was regarding retirement benefits for First Student employees, further concerns have

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METRO

been overlooked by journalists reporting on the dispute.

The strike broke out as “union officials want[ed] the company to begin providing a pension to bus drivers, while the company maintain[ed] it is only willing to increase its contribution to the members’ 401(k) plans,” WPRI reported. Under their current contract, striking drivers told the College Hill Independent, First Student will match some contributions that drivers make into their 401(k) plans. But because First Student limits the drivers to only around 30 hours a week, many drivers cannot afford to contribute any of their income into their plans, meaning that after decades of service to First Student, they retire with nothing. Teamsters Local did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the strike demands.

Workers involved in the strike articulated other concerns. A union steward who asked to be identified only by his first name, Gregory, told the Independent that, despite the company’s branding efforts, working for First Student “is not a part-time job.” Gregory pointed to a worn, blue sign displayed on the street next to the First Student lot: “Now Hiring: Earn Extra $$$ Working Part Time Hours.” But this promise doesn’t hold up to the reality of working for First Student: the company’s scheduling demands make it difficult for workers to access a secondary source of income.

Gregory, who has driven for First Student for 12 years, explained that drivers have to show up between 5:30 and 6:00 AM to check in and prepare the buses and are able leave the bus yard around 9:30 AM. They have to be back at the schools at 1:30 or 2:00 PM to pick up students, leaving little time to work a shift at another job, so unless drivers can get assigned to a rare daytime field trip, they’re unable to make any money during the midday hours.

history in Rhode Island, having negotiated a contract with the City of Warwick in 2009 and a $35 million contract with Providence through the Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in 2015. According to WPRI, the bus company—as the single provider for student transportation in Providence— has earned $35 million from the City of Providence between 2015 and 2017.

First Student is currently seeking a two-year, $25 million contract extension to continue to transport the nearly 10,000 lower and middle school students in Providence (high schoolers in Providence use the RIPTA to get to school and are unaffected by the strike).

The contract extension has already been approved by the Providence School Board, according to what Frank McMahon, a spokesperson for First Student, told WPRI. The proposal has not yet been heard by the City Council’s School Department Oversight Committee.

Still, the settlement between the union and First Student, in which Mayor Elorza has played a key role, suggests that the city plans to continue working with First Student.

Earlier this year, First Student was involved in several labor disputes, in Seattle, Southern California, and Montreal, to name a few, over the benefits they provide—or don’t. The stories of Seattle employees— who striked for a week last winter demanding better pensions and healthcare benefits—strongly resonate with those of Providence workers. According to the Seattle Times, back in February, “bus drivers told stories of having to declare bankruptcy, pay for expensive medication out of pocket, or live paycheck to paycheck because their healthcare plan was unaffordable or they couldn’t get enough hours to be considered a full-time employee.”

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First Student, a multinational transportation company based in Scotland, operates 44,000 school busses for over a thousand school districts in North America, making it the largest provider of school bus services in the United States. The company has a long

Elected city officials characterized Providence public school students and parents as stuck in the crossfire between the Teamsters union and First Student.

“Think about the kids, think about the families, think about every single resident in the City of Providence

26 OCT 2018

Lessons from the First Student drivers' strike

that’s affected by this,” said Mayor Elorza in a press conference on October 2. Given the scale of transporting over 9,000 students, Elorza said, the city did not have the capacity to respond to the strike. Among those, around a thousand students with disabilities, who benefit from Individual Education Plans (IEPs), were affected. Laura Hart, a spokesperson for the district, told local news outlets that 165 students missed school every day of the strike. In fact, some schools that rely heavily on bus transport, especially lower and middle schools, saw attendance drop by as much as 15 percent.

Local media has also made families the focus of the labor dispute. In an article published September 27, the Providence Journal reported, “today, a 13-year-old girl suffered minor leg injuries after she was struck by a vehicle while riding to school on a Jump bike at 8:30 a.m.” Such rhetoric, rather than centering the complicated situation students and parents found themselves in, pits vulnerable students against the right of Union members to strike for better labor conditions.

In the context of several legal actions taken by the ACLU on behalf of students with IEPs—special education programs for students with disabilities attending public schools—ACLU attorney Christine Marinello said, “although the strike presents a challenge, it does not absolve the school district from meeting its obligations to students with disabilities.” Mayor Elorza established that, given their inability to find suitable transportations for students with disabilities, parents would be reimbursed for the cost of finding transportation themselves. As discussed in a press conference on October 2, UpriseRI reported, “accommodating [the disabled students’] transportation needs would require finding fifty busses and fifty drivers.”

In the context of the strike, the Providence public school community was pushed to rise to the occasion.

Maribeth Calabro, president of the the Providence Teacher’s Union and a special needs educator at Nathanael Greene Middle School, told the Independent that teachers implemented double coverage to make up for the loss of services students experienced due to the lack of transportation.

Without a suitable alternative to First Student,

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

students didn’t go to school and, in turn, couldn’t access crucial services, such as free and reduced lunch, counseling, and extracurricular activities, in addition to class time. In such a context, City Council President Salvatore responded by saying, “we need the stakeholders to come to the table and create a resolution that works for everybody.” This is not a question of whether the city has taken a side in the labor dispute, but rather the role of the city government in mediating corporate and community interests—which in this case has had direct effects on the lives of children and their access to crucial services.

It was the very same negotiations between First Student and the city government back in 2015 that brought the Providence community to this vulnerable position. Back then, the contractor company negotiated a “force majeure” clause that excused them from their duty to parents and student in the case of strikes, civil disturbances, or natural disasters. Nina Pande, Providence School Board Vice President, spoke to this process in a recent panel discussion. In 2015, when the call to contractors was made, two bidders came in. The central compromise at the time, Pande expressed, was that the force majeure clause would be kept in order to negotiate newer vehicles within a three-year period.

Ultimately, First Student was granted the contract as it was the cheapest option for the city. In the city’s eyes, budget seems to be the primary concern. In the recent panel to respond to parents' concerns regarding the strike, the School Board representative emphasized that “the 5-year projection is a 35 million dollar deficit for Providence schools,” she said. And, “while not everything is about money, everything is about money.”

night of Thursday October 10, when a fire damaged six to eight buses parked in the company’s compound in Silver Lake. The fire has been condemned by state officials, First Student, and the Local 251 union alike, remaining a mystery to all involved.

The agreement was facilitated by the fact that Elorza’s administration gave First Student the $600,000 the city would have paid First Student if the strike didn’t happen, drawing criticism from many local leaders. This is certainly a different approach to the one taken by other local governments. In November, as a contract dispute risked a strike, the affected school district in Seattle threatened First Student that it would, “seek damages of $1.2 million per day from the company if a strike occurred,” as reported by the Seattle Times.

According to a Teamsters press release, “driver retirement security was addressed in the contract by the establishment of a new pension for the drivers… all drivers will benefit from this enhanced retirement benefit regardless if they make any contributions with their own hard earned money.” According to WPRI the four-year deal also prohibits the drivers from staging another strike throughout the contract. Nicholas Hemond, president of the Providence School Board, confirmed in an interview to WPRI that the board plans to review how it can hold First Student accountable to its commitment to the workers. Yet, it is unclear what steps are being taken to make the company accountable to the greater Providence community—if any.

The question remains: will the local government stand up to predatory corporate conduct moving forward? Chris Maher, Superintendent of Providence Schools said on Monday’s panel that the solution is in a “more competitive bidding process” in the social +++ services contract process. Overall, the approach seems to be that more competition makes better companies, “I am glad that both sides are heeding the call to rather than reconsidering the role of profit-making in put the needs of students and families first by engaging the context of crucial services for Providence families. in constructive dialogue,” said Mayor Elorza following the announcement that a settlement between the PAULA PACHECO SOTO B’20 wishes money two parties had been reached. The Teamsters and mattered a little less.

First Student sat down following rising tension on the

METRO

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IMPOSSIBLE

BY Ivy Scott ILLUSTRATION Sandra Moore DESIGN Katherine Sang

content warning: war, murder, sexual violence Liz Sly is the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, a position she has held since 2011. Before that, Sly was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, and has been stationed intermittently in Beijing and throughout Africa and the Middle East for over 20 years. Originally from the United Kingdom, Sly is fluent in English with proficiency in French and Arabic, the three primary languages spoken in Lebanon.

The interview below, edited for length and clarity, is the product of a candid conversation with Sly on the importance of continuing to report from the Middle East, the role and responsibility of the West (in both politics and media), the ways in which a journalist might try to understand the complexities of MENA (Middle East North Africa), and—where appropriate— situate themselves within it.

It is important that this interview be considered in the context of the habitual complicity of Western media in US and European intervention. While the transition to critical reflection in the journalistic field is slowly taking place, for decades Anglophone media has perpetuated the myth that the West cannot be held responsible for instigating and exacerbating political instability in MENA. Even today, the presence of Western journalists in the Middle East, a region that has been systematically devastated by their governments, raises questions about the obligation of journalists not just to their readers, but to the subjects of their inquiry.

This interview is presented in the wake of the disappearance and murder of Jamal Khashoggi on October 2. The Saudi Arabian journalist openly criticized the Saudi Arabian government on platforms like the Washington Post, where he was employed as a columnist. After Khashoggi was reported missing, Sly wrote a profile about Khashoggi entitled “From travels with bin Laden to sparring with princes: Jamal Khashoggi’s provocative journey,” where she addressed some of the spotlights that journalists writing for Western publications often place themselves under, and the consequences of that scrutiny. As Sly’s interview suggests, however, these risks are taken willingly by journalists every day in an effort to place a spotlight on the politics of the Middle East, the impact of US intervention, and the concrete effects felt by residents and refugees across a region in flux.

He looks as though he is asleep—perhaps taking a nap before running off to play with his friends. But he’s not asleep. He’s dead. He died because of a war the world can’t or won’t solve and immigration policies that say: We don’t care.

The photograph of the drowned little Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach has gone viral on social media, turning him into a symbol of the suffering of Syrians and their desperate scramble to escape.

He had a name, Alan Kurdi; he was 3; and he came from the Syrian-Kurdish town of Kobane.* – “Why I tweeted the photo of the dead Syrian toddler”, September 2015

The Indy: You also wrote a story printed in the Chicago Tribune about the ruins of Kobane. Was your decision to foreground American involvement here a conscious one?

The College Hill Independent: I want to start by talking about an article for the Washington Post in 2015 regarding your tweet of a Syrian toddler’s body found washed up on a beach in Turkey. I'm wondering firstly why you found it necessary to write the article in response to the tweet?

LS: Well it’s quite hard, and I think you have to be careful not to overwrite as well, because people don’t want to be banged on the head with what they’re supposed to think or feel, or have too many words thrown at them at the same time. I’m not always successful but I think simplicity in writing is quite an important thing to keep in mind. Less is more––if you choose the right words you don’t need very many of them. And… you need to feel the story as well. Your compassion and empathy for the people you’re writing about [matters]. Even if they’re not very good people, they had a reason for doing what they were doing, or a reason for the situation they’re in.

LS: I thought it was really important to make a connection to the amount of damage and destruction that we’re inflicting on the Middle East, and the fact that refugees are showing up in the West. Because the West is saying that we’ve got to defeat ISIS, we’ve got to bomb everybody, but they're also saying we don’t want all these people coming… [Alan Kurdi’s] family could have gone home, but there’s no life there, and their house was destroyed, they’ve lost everything, and so of *Alan Kurdi was found washed up on the beach after he course they were trying to get to Europe. drowned while he, his father Abdullah Kurdi, and the rest of their family were trying to flee their hometown The Indy: How do you try to do justice to descriptions of Kobane for Turkey. of such sorrow and pain in people’s lives?

Liz Sly: Given the circumstances of the terrible war in Syria, and the huge number of people that have died, and the lack of interest in America about the war, I think I wanted to make the point that sometimes you have to post photographs of human suffering in order to make people aware of what’s going on, rather than cover[ing] it up.

The Indy: What do you do to try to reach that place of empathy?

The Indy: So then more generally, what do you think is journalists’ obligation to report the truth as opposed to LS: You have to move your head around a situation. If when they should leave things out? you stand in one corner and look at ISIS, they’re absolute evil. But you can move to a corner where awful LS: Well, I think you develop over time a certain judge- things have happened to the Sunnis of the Middle East ment for what’s necessary or pertinent to a story, what in recent history and you can see, not why the top guys is true and what is your opinion, and [how] to steer a are doing it, but why a community might welcome path between them. Sometimes you learn things that them in. [You have to consider their mindset] when you know if you publish them, they could have incred- they got involved––well, they’re up shit creek. Their ible consequences and cost human life, and sometimes houses are being bombed, they’re in the middle of a it’s better to leave those things out. But sometimes you warzone, their families are being lost––it’s a matter of have to make a judgement that people need to know standing at different angles, a bit like a photographer…

All italicized text below is taken from articles published by what’s going on and this is something that should be You have to explore different points of view.

Liz Sly in the Washington Post or the Chicago Tribune. put out there. +++ +++ +++ The Indy: As a journalist, you hold the interesting and “If you lived in Kobane, would you stay?” asked Alan rather unconventional position that journalism doesn’t Kurdi’s father, Abdullah, as he recounted the events that make any real difference at the policy level. Can you spurred his family's fateful departure for Europe in the talk a bit about that, and also explain why you keep patched-up wreck of his father-in-law’s home. The walls writing anyway? are cracked, half of the roof is missing, and the living room and bedroom are perforated by neatly rounded holes left LS: Well it is quite hard, actually, to continue to try by rocket fire. and tell people what’s going on when you know that His own house next door is entirely gone. It was they won’t take any notice. They will take notice if a destroyed in a U.S. airstrike, he said, and though that is story captures their imagination, or moves them, or impossible to confirm independently, much of the worst confronts them with some of the emotions that are damage in the town was inflicted by the U.S. warplanes going on in the region but it doesn’t actually change that were instrumental in driving the Islamic State away. very much… I try very hard to explain the politics, the -“What the ruins of Kobane tell us about the destruc- human context of stories, so that people realize that an tion of Syria,” November 2015 act maybe by their government or an act happening out here [where I’m stationed in Lebanon] is not happening in a vacuum.

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26 OCT 2018

JUSTICE t n o r e Interview with Liz Sly, Washington Post repor t

dl d i he M

The Indy: And how do you do that? What conscious *Raya Chidiac was the daughter of a wealthy Lebanese effort do you make to make sure that your writing businessman who was raped and murdered by a man comes across that way? identified in Lebanese police reports only as “B.H.” B.H. was the caretaker of Chidiac’s home, and a refugee LS: I think a story needs to work on two levels––it needs from Syria. to be about something interesting, but, on another level, it needs to show you another dimension to what’s The Indy: Do you find the humanizing element to be going on. So you need to find events, or people, or situ- very important in writing stories like these? ations, that illustrate some broader point, [that] open eyes or open doors to understanding something bigger LS: Yes… I would have liked to humanize the victim a about the situation, if that makes any sense. little bit more by putting in, for example, what was her job, what did she like doing, but I couldn’t get that from The Indy: If there’s a story that you remember writing the family, and I didn’t have the heart to push it. But I very clearly, can you walk us through what that process slipped in a nice thing the Syrian refugee who did her looked like? hair said. I thought it was important to remind people that this was a nice woman who didn’t deserve what LS: I think the story that stands out in my head most happened to her. recently is the one I wrote about a suicide bombing at a children’s soccer match. Its one of the saddest stories +++ I’ve ever written, probably the saddest story. Nobody had covered this bombing, nobody had gone to this Yasmina, 26, arrived in Miziara with her family in 2012 little town. Little was known about it, they just said after her brother was killed in the Syrian war. She got a there was a bomb at a soccer match and some children well-paying job at the local hairdressing s­ alon. Her sister were killed. [...] It was a tiny little village, and almost gave birth to two children. Her older nephew attended the all of the victims were children, and the boys who were local school. killed were the sons of the families living around the After her employer called to say she should leave soccer pitch which is at the center of the village, and Miziara for her own safety, she and her family piled their every house had lost a child and the whole village was possessions onto a pickup truck and left to stay with relain mourning. It was really a devastating scene and tives in a town about 40 miles away. nobody had come to tell their stories, they all wanted to One of her customers was Chidiac, the murdered burst out with their stories. I could barely speak, I felt woman. “She had a lovely personality, and she didn’t so humbled and awed by the awfulness of what they discriminate against people,” Yasmina recalled. “I am so were going through. sad about everything. I loved my job. I loved Miziara. The people there are so nice. But after what happened, they had The Indy: I imagine to write an article like that, you had enough of us.” have to ask all your questions differently because these -“‘All Lebanon is against them’: A rape-murder people are in such a state of grief. Can you talk a bit sours a country on its Syrian refugees,” October 2017 about how doing those interviews are different from other interviews that you might do?

The Indy: The last question I want to ask is about when you first started out as a journalist. I know that was over LS: As I said I could barely speak, and I didn’t have to 20 years ago, but what was the hardest part of reporting ask many questions. I just would ask “Tell me what and writing for you? happened” and they would tell you. And then sometimes they wouldn’t tell you very clearly, and you would LS: Writing and structuring a story. You can learn your have to be extremely patient and not push them. You subject, you can report very well, but then what’s the can’t say “Oh, please say whether this happened and lede? What’s the nut graph? How do you guide the then whether you came from there or there because reader fluidly from the top to the bottom of the story you’re not making it clear.” You just have to let them without losing the thread of their interest? Without talk, let them guide the conversation, and nudge every losing the story, making all the paragraphs follow on now and then, and [ask things such as] “Tell me about from each other? Structuring a story coherently is the your son” and of course they will talk nonstop. biggest challenge to learn for a young journalist.

st a eE

The Indy: Any other major challenges?

LS: In the big picture of it, the hardest part is dealing with this onslaught of suffering and trying to do it justice.

The Indy: I imagine that in those moments of frustration and with the pressure to get the job done and to do it well, it’s easy to overlook or neglect self-care as a component of journalistic practice. What is it that you do or say to get yourself through these moments?

LS: One of the good parts of getting older is you just kind of learn the lesson: it all works out in the end.

No matter how bad things look, it does all work out in the end. No story that didn’t quite work out how you wanted it to, nothing is ever actually a disaster—except for the key things of getting things right, not getting things wrong, and getting things out there. And in the end, it’ll probably be okay.

The Indy: Finally, circling back to the theme of doing justice to the stories that you tell, what is it that you tell yourself in those moments when you’re trying to ‘get things right’?

LS: Well, actually, the sad truth is you can’t do justice to it; there’s too much awfulness out there. I think the most depressing thing about it is knowing that you’re not telling the whole story. We tell the whole story of boring political events... but there are so many stories of misery out there, so many people with awful, awful things happening to them, so many twists and turns that are horrible and that are going to ruin people’s lives forever, and you can only tell a fraction of that. There aren’t enough minutes in a day or words on a page or newspapers to actually tell it all.

The Indy: So, one last time I have to ask: knowing that, why or how do you keep writing?

LS: It’s a compulsion, to tell people’s stories. I think it’s something that you can’t get rid of, either, you get a little bit addicted. It’s just a continuation of people’s interest in life and what’s going on around them, and it doesn’t stop, because every day brings new things.

IVY SCOTT B’21 still has faith that journalism matters.

The Indy: On a related note, could you also speak to The Indy: At what point––if ever––did that start to the way in which journalists are responsible to their become easy for you? sources in these kinds of situations?

LS: It’s always a challenge. You know, you’ve done LS: Well, I wrote a story last week about the murder all your work and you’ve got this great story and then [of Raya Chidiac] in a Christian village in Lebanon*... there’s the blank page in front of you: Where do you I didn’t want to put her family in the middle of a story begin? Which part do you pull out to start it with? You about a bigger issue when they are grieving themselves. have the challenge that you’ve got to grab the reader’s I did ask the family separately, could I get a comment attention in the first paragraph, and before that you’ve about their daughter? What kind of person she was, just got to grab the editor’s attention in the first paragraph. something nice to say about her, and they didn’t want So the challenge doesn’t quite go away, but the more to be interviewed. They were in a deep state of shock, you write, the better you get. and I’m not going to force them.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

06

FOLLOW ME ON SPOTIFY How music informs individual and social interactions

BY Kristen Whang ILLUSTRATION Peter Lees DESIGN Christie Zhong

Scrolling through the sidebar of my Spotify, I find myself intrigued by what my friends are listening to in real time. Kpop, indie ballads, rap, and Billboard Hot 100 titles flash by. I myself can be found listening to Lorde’s new album Melodrama on repeat for the moody lyrics and emotional indie pop feels. In the past, people would go to concerts to listen to music together. Today, we can also sit alone in our rooms and listen to music in a shared virtual space.

This social web of music-listening speaks to the powerful impact of musical tastes on human connection. So where does our taste in music come from?

According to neuroscience and psychology studies done on musical preferences, we are especially sensitive to music during our early teenage years due to the emotional development taking place during this time.

Areas of the brain are rapidly maturing and building new connections in order to process emotions, so these years are especially crucial to shaping mental schemas, or frameworks of patterns that allow us to organize our thoughts and musical tastes. Our brains associate these salient early experiences with the music we’re listening to, so the music we consume during this time is often instrumental in determining our future tastes.

The social dimension of music also begins to develop around this time—the desire to fit in with a social circle grows, so many people like to listen to what their friends are listening to. Music is a social signal. It becomes a marker not only of who you are to yourself, but who you want to be to others.

By your late teens, your musical tastes are mostly solidified, according to Dr. Daniel Levitin, a psychology researcher and professor at McGill University. Levitin attributes this milestone to changing neural plasticity, or the extent to which the brain continues to form new neural connections and reorganize itself. With this database of experiences, we build the aforementioned musical schemas that filter and shape the subsequent listening experiences we have. The music we hear once these schemas are in place is assimilated into the mental framework of neural connections, and we are no longer as open to different music. This phenomenon can be explained by Hebb’s law, which says that neurons that signal to one another consistently over time are more likely to make connections due to growth and metabolic processes. The converse is also true; neurons that do not send signals to each other will break their connections. The music you listen to early on forms certain connections and breaks others, hence your taste in music. +++ Processing music individually versus in a social setting brings up questions about how these two layers interact.

Musical tastes often have emotional roots and are therefore deeply important to people. In 1999, Schulkind et. al conducted a study on music and its role in autobiographical memory recall. The experimenters played popular songs for 36 adults, and then asked participants questions about emotions the songs evoked and whether the songs reminded them of life events. The strongest memory associations came with stronger emotional connections, and the general emotion described by the majority was nostalgia. Researchers found a strong correlation between positive emotion and recall of autobiographical memories, emphasizing the impact of emotional charge on memory. It’s also worth noting that the emotional valence associated with music tends to be positive rather than negative.

Positive life events with music tend to be in group settings, so much of the emotional charge of music may stem from positive social experiences.

07

SCIENCE & TECH

Emotional connection linked to important times in our lives creates stronger memory associations and cues, enhancing ability to recall past events. In 2009, Dr. Petr Janata, a professor of psychology at UC Davis, conducted an fMRI study on 13 UC Davis undergraduates. Participants listened to 30 songs while undergoing an MRI, which demonstrates brain activity by measuring blood flow, and then answered a survey about episodic memories recalled while listening to the music. The results showed increased activity in the prefrontal cortex upon listening to music, and an association of this region with both autobiographical memory and the processing of familiar music. This study indicates that listening to music is linked structurally to the processing of autobiographical memory, and so it shapes the way we view ourselves in memory.

Essentially, because musically-induced emotion is connected to memory recall, hearing a song associated with a memory might change how you reflect on that memory and on yourself.

Beyond individual experiences, music plays an important role in social environments as well. People process music differently based on how ‘empathic’ they are, a trait defined here as a person’s capacity to demonstrate empathy as a steady aspect of personality. This past April, Zachary Wallmark, a researcher at UCLA, conducted a study that quantified empathy and then performed MRI brain scans on participants listening to music. Empathy as a trait was measured using the IRI test, a questionnaire of statements to gauge self-reported empathy. The study found that people who tend to empathize more use different areas of their brains when processing music, specifically areas associated with socializing. In other words, strong empathizers process music as a pseudo-social interaction with another human being, which involves brain regions that deal with social rewards experienced in empathic social situations.

This scientific finding implies that music helps humans develop and sustain empathy by activating social circuitry of the brain. Experiencing the sensorium of music is like practicing social interaction. When a song resonates with you, it’s a similar experience to feeling a connection with another person­'s emotions, familiarity, and memories fill your headspace. In this way, music is a lens through which we process our social worlds. +++

together at concerts for a social experience. The overlapping neural networks for actual human interaction and simulated human interaction from music are both activated, enabling the strong bond felt between complete strangers who love the same music. Transferring music from a personal space to a shared space may enhance social connections, because the way in which the brain processes music and human contact is so similar structurally, as shown in the MRI studies. This increased activation of social areas of the brain may also be why apps like Spotify are so popular. Collaborative playlists, friend lists, and other social functions are compelling because we crave social connection, and music is a platform that enhances this.

The virtual spaces of platforms like Spotify present a different interaction of the internal and external effects of music. Instead of discovering other people’s musical tastes through conversation or concert, you can parse through that information from your phone or laptop ––alone. Yet listening to music alone can become social too, because other users can see what you’re listening to. Spotify could be another social space where people strive to curate a desirable image. On the other hand, the social sharing can also open up connections and conversations that are based on knowing what friends are listening to.

In general, we gravitate towards people with similar interests because we feel more comfortable disclosing personal information with them. Sharing intimate parts of ourselves, like what music we listen to, is a large basis of forming social relationships.

Music can be a source of finding commonalities, and is a strong shared interest because of its emotional and memory associations. Using social circuits of the brain, both literally and through music simultaneously, is a powerful effector in strong social relations. And while new ways of sharing music online may intuitively seem more disconnected than going to concerts because of its virtuality, overall, the ability to access information about what friends are listening to actually gives music a more prominent place in the sphere of social relations. It makes sense that so many people bond over listening to music together, and why Spotify playlists have taken on a social networking aspect of their own.

Regardless of time or place, physical or virtual, music gives us something to gather around, a shared space, a form of expression. Many people say they can’t live without music; the deep social connections that are sparked and developed by sharing music may be why.

Music as a pseudo-human experience deserves reflec- KRISTEN WHANG B’19 enjoys pretending to be a tion. The effects of combining social interaction with movie protagonist while walking down the street with music versus processing music individually are perva- her headphones in. sive in everyday life and have become more complex with the advent of social music apps like Spotify. As stated before, music can be an internalized factor that influences the way in which we view ourselves, past and present. But this concept also manifests externally—in the clothing style, slang, Spotify playlists, or music scenes we might choose to be a part of.

Shared music spaces, such as concerts, combine both the internal and external aspects of music taste.

People often listen to music on their own, but come

26 OCT 2018

FUCK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FUCK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FUCK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FUCK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FUCK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FUCK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FUCK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FUCK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FUCK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FUCK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

Do you believe in Space Colonization?

Indigenous peoples Have been alienated on their own land

Who is the real Alien?

I’m tired of all these existential space fantasies

CK FU

There is a paradox in a settler’s belief that Space Colonization will save humanity when the means in which he plans to carry these plans out are inherently unsustainable.

CH HE OP ST RI

SACRIFICE THE SETTLER

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CK

CH

S BU M LU CO

FU

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OL UM

CH

RC

CK FU

ST OP HE

FU

CH

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CK

HE OP ST RI

BU S

RC

S BU

ST OP HE

M LU CO

RI

PHER C HRISTO

FU

CK

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Kill the Indian Save the Man

FUCK C

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BU S

FU

OL UM

RI

ST OP

FU

CK

SACRIFICE THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY

HE OP ST

RI

CH

BURN THE SETTLER SAVE THE LAND

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Terraforming

Spacetime is not

Is

Violence

F

S BU

M LU CO

SACRIFICE THE URGE TO DESECRATE THE EARTH, THE PLANETS, THE STARS

a Playground to be owned

She is Land

a settler’s desire and She is our Mother

for immortality

and She is Sacred displaces Martians

from

Mars

my Ancestors

are watching

with their

Gods’ eyes

WALKING ON EGGSHELLS

BY Jacob Alabab-Moser ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Bethany Hung content warning: state violence, gore, gender violence

09

FEATURES

I am WhatsApping my friend Carolina on a Wednesday night in early October in the library. She is also a student; she studies English literature at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), the largest university in Mexico located in the southern reaches of Mexico City. She tells me her classes have just resumed that Monday after three weeks of closure.

I ask naively if she had a vacation.

As Carolina explains, on September 3, 2018, students held a peaceful protest in front of the Office of the University Rector. They urged for the administration to pay attention to various issues such as the understaffing of teachers, the presence of groups proliferating violence on their campuses, and continuing gender violence. The protest quickly devolved into chaos when members of armed paramilitary gangs called porros arrived, attacking students with rocks, sticks, knives, and homemade bombs. Porros are young men organized informally in groups called grupos porriles that university and state authorities have historically called on to disperse protests and maintain order on campuses. Photos circulating online of the attack at Ciudad Universitaria, the university’s main campus, show students being kicked, punched, and impaled by young men in plainclothes. The assailants’ faces are fully exposed in the broad daylight. Four students were injured, including a student from the same department as Carolina who lost part of his ear and almost his kidney from a knife wound in his chest.

In protest of the porros’ attack, students and faculty from 41 of UNAM’s university departments and high schools went on strike, suspending classes and administrative operations indefinitely. Students met in various types of assemblies, some arranged between students of specific departments and others university-wide, where they held discussions to organize a list of demands. On September 5, 30,000 students from UNAM and other universities converged on the Office of the Rector—a sea of people under umbrellas marching in the rain—to condemn the violence enacted two days earlier and ask the rector to accept the list of demands.

By the time of my conversation with Carolina, it was the first week of October and the UNAM administration claimed it had normalized university operations by finally reopening classes on most of the universities campuses. But to Carolina it feels like “walking on eggshells.” She says, “None of our demands have been met, but I don’t know. It’s too early to know.”

Like the concentric rings of a tree, the history of student activism in Mexico City is uneven from fits and starts of growth and ridden with scars. The precedent for hostile relations between progressive student activists and the repressive Mexican state was established 50 years ago, when a student movement was crushed in the violent 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. The student protests at UNAM last month and the resulting violent reprisals occured in the long trajectory of student activism amidst university-sanctioned violence. The issues burdening students have built up over the course of months, but more importantly, the current movement underway is the most recent incarnation of the decades-long fight by student activists for their ability to study, demonstrate, and live in an environment free from direct or indirect government repression.

While some conditions have improved since then,

students at UNAM still face violence by criminal groups on their campuses and an unwillingness by university administrators to meet their needs. Nonetheless, student activists at UNAM, like my friends, have proved resilient and undeterred by these threats, reinvigorating the once-vibrant student movement in the face of increasing danger. +++ I visited UNAM for the first time this past July to visit its Central Library. Driving south to Ciudad Universitaria, the university’s main campus, I watched Mexico City’s crowded skyline thin out and give way to patches of clear blue sky and views of distant mountain ranges.

Low modernist buildings in concrete began to appear along the road before I reached my destination: a tall, square building covered entirely by a mural constructed of hundreds of vibrantly colored stones. As I learned later, the Mexican artist Juan O’Gorman designed each panel of the mural to narrate a different period in Mexico’s rich history—one of a nation in constant flux that is very much reflected in the history of its largest public university.

UNAM occupies a unique place in Mexico’s national politics. Historically, it has been known as a battlefield between revolutionary leftist student activists and reactionary elements like porros whose actions have proliferated violence and repression. The origins of UNAM as a breeding ground for political action can be traced back in part to 1929, when the university became autonomous. Ideologically, this means the university “organizes itself as it deems best” to ensure academic freedom; in application, the university operates independently from Mexican government in administrative decisions—like choosing its authorities, exercising its budget, and, most importantly as of late, protecting and surveilling its campuses through law enforcement. This radical policy of autonomy, which was intended to prevent political control and censorship of the institution by the government, has ironically allowed for the uninhibited growth of porros that traffic drugs and employ violence against students. Since involvement by Mexico City authorities risks violating the university’s autonomy, protocol for government response is murky in dealing with cases of threats to campus safety, such as the attack on September 3.

The threat of porros continues to be among the student protesters’ top concerns. Many of the students present at the September 3 protest were high schoolers from UNAM-affiliated high schools CCH (College of Sciences and Humanities) Azcapotzalco who demonstrated because of the large presence of porros on their campus. Eleven of the 43 groups of porros said to operate on UNAM campuses at present are at CCH Azcapotzalco alone. What defines a porro remains up in the air. Besides crushing student demonstrations, they also are involved in drug trafficking. They do not have military training—they are not soldiers and belong to informally organized gangs—nor do they adhere to any particular ideology.

On one hand, the university administration has seemingly made an effort to accommodate requests to eliminate porros since the early September demonstrations. On September 13, the Rector of the University,

26 OCT 2018

Tlatelolco, UNAM, and Mexico's resurgent student movement Enrique Graue, accepted the list of demands by the students of CCH Azcapotzalco that included a request for “actions for the dismantling, dismissal, and expulsion of grupos porriles.” In addition, the university has already identified several porros from September 3 attack, in part through help from students, linked perpetrators’ clearly visible faces and numbers of jerseys in photos from the attack with social media accounts. At least 18 porros have since been expelled from UNAM—their names were published on UNAM’s website—and eight more were arrested by Mexican police and imprisoned. But the university administration is stalling further action: it has refused to satisfy the list of demands requested by students from the Inter-UNAM Assembly, as well as a more general document from the Inter-university Assembly that contains demands for truth, justice, and freedom of expression to be implemented in 35 universities across Mexico.

Many have doubts that the UNAM administration will actually seek to eliminate the porros when it ultimately relies on them to exercise its authority over students. Carolina stressed that the porros “know they’re protected” by the university administration, explaining why they attacked students without any disguises in plain daylight. Moreover, students at UNAM are increasingly threatened in the context of proliferating violence in Mexico City as a whole, which was relatively immune to the actions of drug cartels until recent years. +++ Vania is a 22-year-old Political Science and Public Administration student at UNAM and has attended protests since she was a child. The first contact I have with her is through voice memos that sound like she is riding the bus. As she records herself explaining the events unfolding at UNAM in real time, high-pitched beeps punctuate the cycle of stopping, boarding, and taking off of the metrobús as it runs through Mexico City.

Vania grew up in the midst of several major social movements in Mexico and the country’s burgeoning political democratization. Her first protest in 2005— against the attempt to impeach the then-mayor of Mexico City and current president elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)—was one of the largest in Mexican history with over one million people marching in the Zócalo, the city’s central plaza. When she entered high school, university students rallied around

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the #YoSoy132 (#IAm132) movement to demand transparent and unbiased coverage of the 2012 presidential elections from media conglomerates backed by the ruling political party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). As a teen, she also joined the movements for Ayotzinapa, regarding the 2014 disappearance of forty-three students of a teachers college in the state of Guerrero that was never solved. It goes without saying that she has been participating the assemblies at UNAM, particularly those that demand policies to eradicate gender violence on campus. When I ask Vania if she can remember when she realized she was an activist, she responds simply, “I can’t remember a precise moment that I became an activist because my whole life has been this way.”

An approximate starting point for the history of student movements in Mexico can be traced back 50 years exactly to the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968. Like their counterparts around the world launching movements to ignite radical change, Mexican students began to organize demonstrations in the months leading up to the 1968 Summer Olympics—the first Olympics ever to be held in Latin America—in part to demand an end to brutality and repression by the government under President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. After the organization of a National Strike Council (CNH) by students from various universities in August, the military became increasing violent in response, occupying Ciudad Universitaria in September and inflicting violent assaults on students. Ten days before the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, on October 2nd, 1968, around 5,000 students from various universities and other demonstrators met in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco area of Mexico City to peacefully protest.

It was a cloudy afternoon and it looked like it was about to rain. At around 6 PM, military helicopters flew over the plaza and flares were shot, prompting both snipers in surrounding buildings and columns of troops on the ground to shoot at the protesters. A dense crowd of figures in the plaza frantically dispersed upon the attack—the majority fled, sprinting out of the camera’s frame, but many were shot by the enclosing troops, resulting in dozens murdered, their bodies left lying in the plaza amidst the rubble. One survivor remembered seeing the corpses of swans and ducks that used to live in ponds in the square.

Carolina’s aunt, who was an anthropology student at the time, attended the protest at Tlatelolco. Upon seeing the arrival of tanks, she went home before the violence escalated. But from inside her house, which was located nearby, she could hear the gunshots and screams from people attempting to escape. She felt the urge to help them, but her mom refused, fearing the government would punish them for sympathizing with the protesters. The police began to search door to door in the neighborhood for survivors who had fled; those found were arrested and imprisoned. This show of unbridled government violence communicated not only an unwillingness to meet the demands of the students and allow them to peacefully protest, but also the insecurity felt by the PRI and the president when presented with any form of unrest, especially with worldwide attention directed towards the country ahead of the Olympics.

Government repression continued into the massacre’s aftermath. The official death count released by the government was a drastic underestimation at 25 dead; most estimates by activists soar to 300 or 400.

The government purportedly seized all photographic evidence of the massacre and it did not appear in many of the Mexico’s major newspapers, whose owners are known to align their interests with those of the ruling party. Those that did cover it maintained that armed provocateurs in the crowd or the students themselves provoked the massacre, keeping with the official government explanation. Film footage of the massacre was only released after over 20 years had passed; in 1968, there were no cell phones to capture and livestream the events to share them with the rest of the

world. Rather, the Mexico City Olympics continued as planned and PRI’s authoritarian hold over the Mexican state remained for over three more decades. But the violence that was inflicted that night had inscribed the memories of the survivors and all future generations of students. It was no coincidence that the 43 students of Ayotzinapa were en route to Mexico City to commemorate the annual October 2 march when they were intercepted and disappeared in 2014. +++ Vania and Carolina both tell me that much has changed since 1968, namely that the government, ruled for the past six years by President Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI, no longer blatantly exercises military violence against student protesters at UNAM. But students are still killed, “by people who the government does not pay attention to and (whose actions it) even foments,” Carolina reminds me. “Still, Mexico is filled with violence.”

This past July, I was in Mexico City during the landslide election of leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) as Mexico’s next president. Enthusiastic crowds flocked to the Angel of Independence, one of the city’s most iconic monuments, to ring in what his supporters have heralded as the fourth transformation in Mexico’s history in terms of political democratization and his administration’s potential for radical reform, including an end to the political and social hegemony that AMLO calls the “power mafia.” For student activists, he could be a potential ally in their struggle. He has already spoke out against porros and in praise of the students’ demands in a video uploaded to social media (which curiously shows Graue, the Rector of UNAM, beside him).

But as the history of student activism in Mexico has shown in its repeating cycles, only the students themselves can guarantee improvements in their conditions.

While Carolina voted for AMLO, she is skeptical of how much he can accomplish in his term of six years.

“He himself is not the change.” Carolina tells me. The students know very well that they are.

JACOB ALABAB-MOSER B’20 interviews his subjects solely through Instagram DMs.

FEATURES

10

PICTURE PICTURE PICTURE SHOWS SHOWS SHOWS FOR FOR FOR ROADKILL ROADKILL ROADKILL content warning: animal death, non-consensual intimacy Martin is smoking on the bed with his elbow buried into his thigh and head turned away from me. I wonder if the stiffness in my body reminds him of the raccoon he ran over yesterday. Rigid. Cold. Attractive, manly qualities. I feel visceral nausea about the incident seeping out from his body, leaking from his pores like steam from a pipe. I try to make myself smaller, but the consequence is that he becomes larger than life.

I get up to leave. Martin doesn’t say goodbye. I grab my bike and disappear.

Walking my bike home, I spot one of the neighborhood strays with its nose buried into the ground. I cross the street to give it space, gravitating towards the sidewalk. A round, dark body squirms free from its jaw, darting away under a building. I feel my chest tighten once I realize what the dog was preoccupied with. A rat the size of a football somehow manages to squeeze between a closed gate and into safety. Finally realizing its prey was lost, the stray miserably scratched the ground in defeat. I turn the corner and ignore the rest of the scene, feeling my gut fume with something vile, and my throat burn as I reach for the keys in my pocket. +++ The two of us, Martin and I, are taking the train to Boston visit friends. It’s a lousy excuse to escape the grey of our college town, but I accept the invitation like a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. Pathetic as it sounds, I barely know anything about Martin’s friend group. As someone with almost no social life, I feel honored, if not morbidly entertained, by the thought that Martin would introduce me to his strangers.

By the time we arrive it’s almost sunset. We call a ride to his friend’s place while I fidget with my coat’s strings, wondering how local wildlife keeps in the mayhem of densely populated cities. The sad corner of town we’re dropped off in feels too familiar. You can spot Christmas lights draping off the roof like ornamental rat tails. I wonder how many pests each year are attracted to the colorful artificial lights, either to end up wrangled in some festive deathtrap or to succumb to frostbite.

Minutes later we’re inside, warmer than we were outside, but not by much. The walls are plastered with a sickly yellow. A single wreath welcomes us into the living room, where Martin’s friends are getting their fill of generic brew for men in their early-twenties.

When I excuse myself, Martin follows me into the bathroom. It’s roughly the size of a walk-in closet, and I don’t hesitate telling him to piss off before he puts his arm around me. I know it’s meant as a loving gesture, but it makes me feel worse than the boozy stink floating wild in the air.

“It’ll be good,” he tells me. “You’re such a stuck-up, you know that? Letting loose is what it’s all about. You don’t need to drink.”

“No,” I repeat, “I don’t.”

He slides his hand up my shirt. I close my eyes as his fingers ghost over my chest scars. They’re faded but still sensitive when pressed down on—it feels like reliving a long-lost memory of what used to be there.

Behind my eyelids, I see bright colors, Christmas lights reflected on windows. It was Christmas when I had top-surgery, but no matter how hard I try to remember it, it’s all a blur of northeastern snow and arid blue mornings.

Martin’s breath is thick on my throat. I’m not sure if I like it. I think about the giant rat I saw in the park yesterday. I think about how possums play dead when

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they’re frightened. I wonder about all the different ways I’ve learned to play dead, and whether or not this shield of testosterone injected into my body really repels any of that fear off.

“You’re like a real guy, y’know,” Martin teases me.

“It’s really a shame that –” “Don’t finish that sentence,” I warn him. “You’ll regret it.”

“Okay, but it’s true,” he insists. “You came here to have a good time. And they don’t know about you, so why even care?”

“I don’t care. I just hate crowds.” Not only that, I hate hot bodies lingering over my own, hate having Martin get all up in my personal space. Not that I mind.

I don't mind, I tell myself, knowing that I’m lying. But I don’t enjoy having to worry about not hearing my own voice in my head, either. It’s like someone constantly ringing a cowbell in your ears despite telling them to stop a dozen times. That’s what it’s like sleeping with a boy like Martin.

I let him kiss me. It’s quick and unloving. When we’re done, I open the door again, and we slide out into the party. The room is red with a hardwood floor—a thin veil of lighting tints everything a wasted pink.

For a moment, I’m wary of the entire party. One of Martin’s friends whisks him away. He says he’ll just be a moment. It seems as if his entire life is made up of these little moments.

It’ll be a moment.

Just a minute.

I’ll be back soon.

But in my case, the moment is perpetually on hold, like my life is a video game, and someone is holding down the pause button. I awkwardly fix myself by the staircase like a lamp and dully watch the party unfold.

Bodies bump and bounce against each other without dancing. They want to speak but have no one way of hearing a stranger’s words.

When threatened, possums stiffen their bodies and stop their breathing momentarily. They are not the only animal with this behavior, yet it has become one of their most easily identifiable traits. With pointed, enlarged snouts and black beady eyes, there’s little to appreciate about what most people consider pests. My mind spoons as I watch the party in front of me un-nest like a never-ending series of matryoshka dolls. My stomach squeaks. I am very bad at playing dead in a tireless crowd. +++ There’s this misconception that when a person transitions, their transition magically skips them to the next chapter of life without any of the messy in-betweens. I call this the über-trans myth. When I started injecting hormones, Martin constantly made jokes about how strong I’d be, how manly my face would be, how much hair I’d grow. That I’d be just like a real guy, but better.

Only about a fraction of those things actually occurred.

But I can’t blame him for wanting to encourage me. It’s hard not to look at a broken thing and not imagine how you can fix it, become its savior.

In this scenario being über-trans means epitomizing the gender you’re aspiring to become. It doesn’t assume that, actually, you’ve always been born that gender and nothing other than surface-level changes are happening. When you become a man’s man, according to Martin when he’s smoking pot in his one-bedroom apartment, you actually become better than a plain man.

26 OCT 2018

BY Blake Planty ILLUSTRATION Natasha Brennan DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

“It’s even manlier that you only fuck guys,” he told me. A huge ring of smoke slithers out his mouth. He passes the mouthpiece to me. I inhale, close my eyes, and pretend I’m on a big shiny dragon and not here. I cannot comprehend the logic that brought him to that conclusion, but I can try if I smoke.

“You’re like, the übermensch,” he laughed.

“You do know Nietzsche thinks I’m an abomination, right?”

Martin’s mouth goes slack—he’s tired of talking.

He rolls his neck and turns towards me.

“You’re one of a kind,” he tells me. “You really aren’t like any other dude I’ve met. You’re so special in your own way.”

“Like?” I feel as if I’m an arrow darting all over a roadmap, not exactly sure where this is going. But I already know this route. I know this script like the back of my own hand.

“You have a pussy. It’s the best of both worlds.”

I cringe. I know he doesn’t mean it. But it’s also the verbal equivalent of a burning steel spike through my chest. I take a deep breath and consider leaving for the night. I could crash on a friend’s couch.

“That’s a shitty thing to say,” I admit. “I hope you know that.”

Martin waved his hand. “You know what I mean.” +++ We found a dead rat under the sink today. I got on my knees and reached through the filthy cupboard doors and winced as I touched its soft wet body. When I finally grabbed its tail, I slid it quickly into a paper bag.

It had enough weight to make a small noise as it hit the bottom, which made my stomach churn. It was a fat rat. The fur was a dirty brown, with small scrawny pink fingers that vaguely resembled my own. I tried not to open the bag again, but I couldn’t resist. Squinting, I re-examined every part of the vermin before I finally sent it to its resting place: the trash. I had no idea where it came from, but I began imagining an infinite spiral of rodents secretly collaborating with each other in our walls. Every knotted tail, every pair of beady black eyes, completely silent and stiff as if they had never lived before. +++ In the rat-dreams, at first, the rat is happily eating. The frost bites my little pink nose and my chapped pink hands. I use them to shove the food in my maw like a raccoon. Under all this fur I'm ready to break out, like a butterfly from its cocoon, all skin and meat curling away like an orange peel. It doesn't occur to me until later that the rat is me, a furry pest scraping for garbage in a harsh winter. My twitching feet gather the strength to lift myself up on my hind legs, walk away, find somewhere warmer and drier to sleep. The winter is long, and the night is short and sweet. +++ I unlock my bicycle at three in the morning, making sure not to wake Martin as I roll it down the hallway back home. My body itches with the thin shaking of a thousand little hairs on my limbs. Waiting for something to come roaring down the street to devour me whole, I’m perpetually becoming a piece of roadkill in Martin’s eyes. I don’t think it’s fair. As I lock the door behind me and set my bike on the sidewalk, I look over at the green

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square dumpster everyone in the apartment complex uses. Trash doesn’t get picked up until Sunday, so the wet rat carcass will continue sitting there for a while.

When I roll myself over to it, the stench sucker-punches me—torn-open black trash bags, soiled pieces of food, broken glass and beer bottles. I don’t question the impulse I’m about to act on. I use a flashlight to spot the paper bag out from the other piles of trash, glad that I’m able to snatch it up so easily. If this was a dream, I would’ve fallen and been eaten whole.

It’s too easy to fall in. I’d be a filthy as the rest of them, the dozen or so other rats coming in the night to mourn their dead.

The bag is heavier in my hands. I open it knowing what to expect: the fuzzy blanket of maggots, bulging eyes, limp wrists, and sodden tail. The body has already begun to decompose, not even having been out for a day. I hold my breath, clench the bag in my fist, squeezing the body, gently, and toss it back into the black mouth.

I have no clue where to ride. My handlebars feel sweaty and disgusting after touching the rat’s dead body, but I clench them anyways hoping to focus on the street ahead. As I start pedaling, I catch a shiny glimpse from the corner of my eye. A scrawny possum is hobbling through the open parking lot, dragging its fat leathery tail behind like a rolling carpet. Goosebumps attack my skin. The knot in my throat chokes me, and I’m massively disappointed in myself—I was going to escape, run away, disappear into the night. But this strange animal gives pause to stare me down, and I realize I’ll never be like them, never be naturally nocturnal. I’d never be roadkill-bound. My hands and

feet are not clawing. My skin is not clumps of grey fur I kiss to lick my wounds. My eyes aren’t void black things that shrivel up in the sunlight. I wipe the sweat on my jeans, and feel my pulse, realize that I’m only meat and bones, torn-open and sewn back together to make a new person. Acknowledging my fakeness is my first step to living it, living through this body. +++ “Where did you go?” Martin asks me, rolling over my way. I finish washing my hands and flip the bathroom light off. I shake my head, tell him nowhere in particular. That I just needed fresh air.

“Well, that’s interesting,” he says. “I’ve been thinking it’s starting to smell like wet dog in here.”

I laugh awkwardly and silently feel like shedding my skin, becoming the rat, feverishly crawling into a hole to die.

“Did you plan on going somewhere?”

“Nowhere, I’m going nowhere,” I tell him, in a manner of forfeit, because it is the truth. But the punchline hurts, winds the breath out of my chest, a stab in the back.

My skin crawls as I sit beside Martin. I let him wrap his arm around me. He’s clueless as to where I’ve been, where I’m going, who I’m set to be. His body isn’t mine, and never will be, but I close my eyes and imagine myself crawling away and disappearing forever into the very bottom of the earth.

LITERARY

12

MATERIAL GIRLS Gendered consumerism and the allure of ‘natural’ beauty

The ‘real girl’ lives on commercial breaks, subway cars, and the glossy broad sides of commuter buses. She is beautiful, but unlike any Barbie doll that toy manufacturers could hope to imagine—a large forehead, maybe, or a nose splattered with freckles. We see her embracing each new day as it comes: meditating, reading, wearing comfy-looking socks, and wholesomely applying X brand lipstick for a natural, glossy finish. Picking a juicy-looking raspberry from a bush, she is at peace.

She doesn’t fear stock market downturns or the scrutiny of her peers. Seeing her apply that lipstick, her kind eyes backlit with optimism, I experience a sensation— first of reverence, then of envy, then of desire.

If you’ve ever heard of HBO’s hit comedy-drama series Sex and the City, you’re probably familiar with its curly-haired, Manolo Blahnik-coveting protagonist Carrie Bradshaw, the fashion & love-life blogger epitomized by her infamous line: “I have this little substance abuse problem: expensive footwear.”

While most women’s relationships with shopping aren’t as intense as Bradshaw’s, we still talk about the practice like a vice or an addiction. Though some consider it a craft, a competition, or a therapeutic pastime, the language used to describe shopping is more often penitent—think, “I shouldn’t have” or “I had to” or “I couldn’t help myself.” While part of this attitude stems from a Judeo-Christian anxiety about materialism and excess that dates back to biblical times—think ‘Thou shall not covet’—the fact that the stigma around shopping persists despite the championing of mass consumption suggests that darker forces might be at play.

The ‘sin’ of shopping has several dimensions. First, there’s the fear of inefficiency—that choosing to spend $20 on a non-essential item of clothing is a poor allocation of resources that could otherwise be saved, or invested in cryptocurrency, or used to feed ourselves or others. Then there’s the political dimension: when shopping for mass-produced goods, we feel complicit in perpetuating manufacturing practices that pollute water sources, damage ecosystems, and perpetuate (potentially) exploitative labor practices around the globe. Lastly, there’s the fact that shopping has historically been gendered as a feminine and therefore a trivial activity. In shows like Sex and the City and Arrested Development we see shopping portrayed as a fussy, un-intellectual pastime reserved for characters like Lindsay Fünke and Carrie Bradshaw, self-absorbed, materialistic women who aren’t accountable to the ‘real’ world.

This leads us to an interesting nexus of hypocrisy: Why is it ‘artificial’ when a woman buys a pair

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of expensive shoes, but amusing (and thoroughly All-American) when a man buys a sports car he can’t afford for his 45th birthday? The man isn’t any less real for splurging; in fact, he’s self-realized. But in order for a woman to be considered ‘real’ or ‘unlike other girls,’ she is expected to abstain from shopping and wearing makeup—activities that might make her seem duplicitous. The ‘real girl’ might be used to promote beauty and skincare products, but the 15-second advertisement she stars in implies that she is not the type to shop needlessly or ‘for fun.’ She is the kind of girl who summits mountaintops; all she needs is sunshine and all-natural lipstick. +++ Of course, women’s choices are also governed by their financial means, and consuming for fun is a privilege reserved for the middle and upper classes. But harmful stereotypes about women who shop ‘for fun’ or ‘irresponsibly’ overshadow the valuable contributions made by the countless women who shop ‘responsibly’ or use the power of the purse to further an ethical agenda. American women from all socioeconomic strata have a long history of using consumer activism as a means of spearheading social and political change. In a lot of cases, it has been what women have collectively chosen not to buy that has instigated changes. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, was largely planned and executed by African-American women who were members of the anti-segregation Political Women’s Council. In 1902, Jewish housewives on the Lower East Side protested a six cent hike in the price of kosher meat by rioting in the streets and distributing fliers that said, “Eat no meat while they take meat from the bones of your women and children!” to great success. And just last year, angry (wealthier) women customers boycotted Neiman Marcus for selling Ivanka Trump’s shoes.

One increasingly popular means of women’s consumer resistance is seen in the consumption of organic products. Organic buying is widely considered a mark of privilege—a form of quasi-resistance exclusively reserved for white elites—but surveys taken as early as the 2000s show that this has never really been the case. One 2006 study by the Hartmann Group found that Asians and Hispanics were the most likely (out of Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, and Caucasians) to have purchased organic produce in the last three months, and that organic “core consumers,” or those most committed to the organic lifestyle, were found to be Hispanic or African American. While cost

is often a barrier for organic consumption, a Canadian survey found that 64 percent of households in Canada with an income of less than $40,000 still buy organic, compared to to 70 percent of households with an income of over $100,000. The common association of organic buying with the high-end retailer Whole Foods prevents people from factoring in the organic buying that takes place in specialty ethnic food stores, farmers markets, or at street vendors.

Kim M., Creative Director at VSA Partners, a branding agency in New York City, told the Independent that she believes buying natural and organic products has become a means of civic involvement for many Americans: “It’s pretty obvious that we’re not getting anywhere on a governmental level in terms of protecting the environment or protecting our water and food supplies. Purchasing natural things seems to be a way of exercising control amidst all this chaos that’s going on.”

When I buy earth-friendly beauty products from an outlet like Sephora, I know in the back of my head that I’m succumbing to packaging that was expertly designed to capitalize on the guilt that I feel as a knowing participant in ecosystem-damaging market capitalism. There’s something eerily algorithmic about the soothing shades of green and the labels promising to refresh, renew, and heal me from the sins of modernity. I know I’m being played, but I still walk out of the store feeling like I’ve saved myself, saved the earth, and said screw you to the political and corporate powers that be.

Buying organic has become a redemptive exercise, and a large number of cosmetic and skincare companies have rebranded or expanded their natural product lines to satisfy women’s desire for resistance and redemption through identification with nature.

This trend is exemplified by the “I Am Not Synthetic” campaign that Burt’s Bees used to launch their first full cosmetics line in 2017. The campaign featured commercials that showed ‘real’ women of all colors being empowered by real ingredients. “Burt’s Bees is taking a stand against synthetic chemicals,” says the narrator as the screen jumps from a girl doing a pirouette in an empty but expensive-looking apartment to a picture of fresh-looking raspberries. The words “take a stand” coupled by the fast paced, urgent tone of the advertisement suggests that a ‘call to arms’ is being issued; it’s framed as resistance propaganda. +++ This is a really compelling advertising campaign.

Visually stunning, topical, camaraderie-generating.

Like many effective advertisements, it successfully capitalizes on several shifts in cultural attitudes, namely the naturalization of cultural chemophobia, or the irrational fear of chemicals, and the rejection of traditional beauty standards. But this advertisement is most effective because it reclaims of the words “real” and “natural,” words which have historically been used to signify places and people associated with men.

When FOX newscasters talk about the “real America” they mean the manly America, the gritty, industrious, bootstrap-pulling white working class. When they discuss “the real problem,” they are referring to the economy, and they emphasize the word “real” so that other issues (a woman’s right to choose, for example) seem marginal in comparison. When someone refers to a “real man,” I imagine a man who has rejected the

26 OCT 2018

BY Annabelle Woodward ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

modern world and its trivialities, who drinks Natty and lives off the land.

It’s no great secret that this manly “real American” was dreamed up by mid-century advertising agencies to sell cigarettes and elect Nixon. But despite Mad Men’s valiant effort to shine a light on it all, these fictions continue to influence predominant cultural attitudes about women and reality. Burt’s Bees is setting a good example by encouraging women to reclaim the word “real” and incorporate ethical consumption into their identities, and it’s hard to find fault in their “be true, be you” message. But their campaign exemplifies a potentially problematic trend in activism: that women should resist the political and corporate powers that be by somehow returning to nature and rejecting all things modern and messy.

When watching the Burt’s Bees commercial, I am compelled to purchase the all-natural product not because it is pretty or user-friendly or non-carcinogenic, but because I feel like it will cleanse me of myself.

It will somehow wash away all the weird, contradictory caveats that confuse my identity as a woman, and I will be reborn as a wholesome, nurturing femme forest creature, totally ignorant of stock markets and shopping centers, just living and loving and spreading good cheer.

I know this idea of return is totally fictive and illusory, just like I know that I’m probably not really saving the earth or saying ‘screw you’ to anyone when I buy organic beauty products, but I still sometimes go online and put beauty products in my cart. Maybe I don’t buy them but I think about them for a while, you know?

Companies will continue to use this “Be real! Be simple! Be natural!” messaging because nature is hip right now (for good reason, the earth is dying!), but a woman’s identity (or human identity, for that matter) is never natural or pure, and all attempts to distill it into an essence have proved futile or damaging. Depending on your perspective, we’ve been corrupted/enriched/ constituted by so many chemicals and conflicting stories about ourselves and others that there’s no easy return to a singular ‘reality’ in sight. We’re all real. Or maybe none of us are real. And if young girls grow up believing that being ‘real’ is synonymous with being ‘all-natural’ and ‘pure,’ they’ll internalize an essentialist, reductive understanding of identity.

If women working in television, advertising, and other creative fields fight to promote more realistic (and therefore, proudly impure) portrayals of what women look like, perhaps our idea of what’s real will no longer be reserved for stock markets, lumberjacks, and forest nymphs. Perhaps it will include real, real women, too.

ANNABELLE WOODWARD B’20 has two plants.

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BODY

14

THINKING IN BIG HISTORY

BY Leo Stevenson ILLUSTRATION Alex Hanesworth

now everything is happening faster than you can think at the speed of genius at the speed of a thousand geniuses competing at the speed of a civilization-powered light beam this special time, maybe to be revisited later but not really experienced as it unfolds we can see what should be done the vase falling slo-mo to the ground but we cannot help it the signals take too long from brain to muscle

-Nick Bostrom, from “Göttingen”

Transhumanism is hard to define. Humanity+, founded

by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 1998 under the name “World Transhumanist Organization,” introduces its long definition of the term by describing transhumanism as, “a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.”

Transhumanist thinking is often fantastical, dreaming up futures of a later, better phase of humanity that veer into sci-fi. There are many shades of transhumanism— ones with political currents like libertarian “extropianism,” democratic “technoprogressivism,” and environmentalist “technogaianism;” strands that focus on reversing aging, bodily augmentation, or cognitive enhancement; critical-theory driven “cyborg feminism” and “postgenderism.” While they vary in their priorities, obsessions, and assumptions, these currents are united by the ideal of moving beyond what we currently know as the human condition. They all see through the lens of what Bostrom calls “big history”— zooming out to place humanity in a longer timeline, and trying to plan ahead.

Bostrom, who runs the Future of Humanity Institute (which he founded at Oxford in 2005), is arguably the most prominent face of transhumanism, but most of the attention he gets is about the apocalypse.

Bostrom became famous outside of the transhumanist community for his thinking on what he calls “existential risks to humanity,” and specifically for his 2015 New York Times Bestseller, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Superintelligence argued that an “intelligence explosion,” an event in which AI (artificial intelligence) learns to improve itself and starts growing exponentially, has the single highest potential—over and above candidates like climate change and nuclear war—to make humanity go extinct. Bostrom has explained that possibility with the simple thought experiment of a “Paperclip Maximizer”: Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. If humans did so, there would be fewer paper clips. It would realize as well, that human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.

Point being, a superintelligent AI, given one specific goal, would pursue that goal to the exclusion of everything else, which could have apocalyptic consequences. Bostrom’s logic is that since human extinction would be infinitely worse than even the worst non-extinction catastrophe, avoiding extinction

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should be our highest strategic priority. This means that addressing the risk of runaway AI is currently far more important than any other ethical cause. Bostrom calls planning about humanity’s long-term outcomes “macrostrategy.” A profile in the New Yorker called him “The Philosopher of Doomsday.”

In his writing on transhumanism, Bostrom envisions potential futures where humanity evolves past our current physical and intellectual limitations, conquers aging and death, colonizes the universe (invoking the violent imagination of an ‘open frontier’), and merges with computer intelligence to create forms of life both quantitatively and qualitatively so far beyond what we are now that we literally cannot imagine it. That unimaginable scope of wellbeing is the central message of Bostrom’s “Letter From Utopia,” a 2010 essay in which he, speaking as a hypothetical future-dweller, points to the flourishing that a transhuman future could reach: “what you had in your best moment [i.e. the current heights of human happiness] is not close to what I have now—a beckoning scintilla at most. If the distance between base and apex for you is eight kilometers, then to reach my dwellings would take a million light-year ascent. The altitude is outside moon and planets and all the stars your eyes can see.

Beyond dreams. Beyond imagination.” Bostrom thinks it’s terribly short-sighted to be attached to the kind of “human condition” that we’ve been used to for this long first act of human history—he calls that “status quo bias.” His hope, as expressed in “Letter From Utopia,” is that we overcome the evils we take as inevitable (from war and oppression to sickness and age) and into a “life that is truly humane.”

But the first step to that future is to secure life.

That’s how Bostrom’s positive vision got him concerned that humans might not live long enough to get there, and how macrostrategy became his priority. In his view of big history, we stand at a turning point much like the agricultural or industrial revolution, where a technological leap (the development of computers) has upped the rate of our technological change. Everything is moving faster, which presents both special opportunities and special threats. That bonfire of blinding wellbeing is only possible if humanity’s small flame of consciousness doesn’t get snuffed out, by AI or some other threat. +++ People are listening to Bostrom. Especially a lot of developers, researchers, and academics who see themselves as actively designing the AI future, with all the possibility for human good (or at least massive wealth creation, in the short term) that that entails. As the feeling has mounted that “move fast and break things” might break too many things, a voice in the room warning that the entirety of human existence is at stake has perked up a lot of ears.

Bostrom isn’t the only voice currently warning of the dangers of AI, but he’s certainly the loudest. Just about all discussions on the topic include or at least allude to his arguments, so his thinking can basically be taken as representative of the rest of the intellectual current. He’s the one who gets called before the UK parliament or the UN to speak about the dangers and governance of AI (both of which he did in 2017).

Since the publication of Superintelligence, funding has poured into organizations and research focused on AI safety, AI governance, and ethical AI. These

organizations’ research can range from developing international policy on controlling AI to developing AI architecture that could build in values and control functions. Organizations that already focus on existential threats, like the Future of Life Institute and Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk, have moved AI to the center of their programs. Open Philanthropy, a tech-world-driven organization which tries to maximize the decision-theoretical “expected value” of the good it can do with its money, lists “Potential Risk from Advanced Artificial Intelligence” among its priority causes. Open Philanthropy has given about $71.5 million in that category of grants since 2015, including a pledge this fall to Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute of about $17.5 million.

The grant is striking. It is a massive vote of confidence to the reality of Bostrom’s vision: it means that, at least in the tech world, the possibility of thinking in “big history” (and of planning for it) is being taken seriously. The worldview that sees macrostrategy, far-future thinking, and existential threats from AI as a reality, rather than a mere extension of transhumanist sci-fi thinking, is gaining a serious measure of legitimacy.

And though Bostrom’s current work on AI and Macrostrategy may be bringing in his funding, they’re not his only ideas that have crept towards the mainstream. Remember that moment in 2016 when Elon Musk publicly declared that he believes it’s nearly certain that we’re living in a simulation? That was a direct reference to a Bostrom essay. Musk also donated $10 million in 2015 to the above-mentioned Future of Life Institute’s program on existential risk from AI. Macrostrategy isn’t fringe—it’s getting the tech world to talk about ethics. +++ Bostrom’s discourse sets him apart from other strands of transhumanist and speculative futurist thinking.

Body-focused transhumanism, for instance, is excitable to the point of pure sci-fi speculation, thinking far ahead to full-body prostheses and mind-uploading.

Critical theory transhumanism, like the work of Donna Haraway, is written in dense academic language that’s deeply meaningful to scholars, but tends not to reach too far outside such circles. Hardly any futuristic thinking provides suggestions that are actionable enough to be anything past “interesting.” Bostrom, on the other hand, uses a language that the powers that be (whether deep-pocketed tech donors or members of parliament) can understand, and that they respect.

Bostrom uses the rigor of analytic philosophical logic, statistical risk assessment, and Bayesian decision theory to back up his points. His texts are full of quantitative justifications, thought experiments (such as parables in which humanity is pictured as sparrows trying to breed an owl—the AI—to do their work for them), and symbolic logic, using ‘ethical frames of aggregative utility’ (roughly, the position that good can be quantified and tallied) to estimate comparative expected values. He speaks in terms of optimizations, maximizations, and rational agents. This is the language of capital-R Rationalism, and it’s very good at setting up arguments in a way that, with the arguer controlling the terms, makes them seem unobjectionable. Even the parables make the argument’s terms especially invulnerable; how to formally object that you don’t think AI is much like an owl at all (or a paper clip)?

26 OCT 2018

Nick Bostrom, transhumanist visions, and the rise of macrostrategy

That’s not to say that that difficulty isn’t simply a side-effect of Bostrom’s deeply rigorous thinking; I don’t mean to mount an epistemological critique, or to say that he’s wrong. But Bostrom’s Rationalist thinking is a highly effective way to get people (especially people in power) to listen, and to take the ideas born out of his transhumanism seriously. His Rationality builds a hard, convincing shell around his visionary core, and it's compelling enough to justify anything from his position that AI strategy should be the world’s top ethical priority to his view that we’re almost certainly living in a simulation. Bostrom is brilliant enough to communicate why everyone else should think his vision is reality, and real enough to be a priority. None of those other transhumanists are getting $17.5 million grants.

I don’t mean to imply that Bostrom is insincere, either: a recurring strand in Bostrom’s thinking is a concern with human bias and shortsightedness, the worry that left to our own devices we’re liable not to plan ahead. His faith in Rationality lies in its ability to break through those biases and get us to see what’s too distant or counterintuitive to notice. But his Rationalist methods, whether they’re for convincing others or for thinking more clearly, aren’t where his ideas come from—they come from the sci-fi transhumanist discussions that he came to intellectual maturity with. +++ I want to understand Bostrom’s vision because I want to know what worldviews are slipping in at the core of his well-reasoned macrostrategy. Bostrom doesn’t hide that core. It’s clearer in his more literary writings, like “Letter From Utopia,” where he expresses himself without the shell of technically legitimizing language.

It’s clearest in his poetry, which is nestled at the bottom of his website, a short selected stanza and a link to a subsection of NickBostrom.com. Bostrom describes his recent poetic endeavors as “relapses” from a previous stage of his life—presumably the part where he was expressing his vision raw, before he started packaging it to convince the world to prioritize macrostrategy.

Some of it is personal, like his musings on settling into his career. But others show the clearest glimpses of his cosmology, his view of where we stand in the scope of long history. For example, one poem from 2002 shows his vision of human history at a precipice: the promise of crossing triumphantly to the other side, the abyss of the eternal night.

On the Bank

On the bank at the end Of what was there before us

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Gazing over to the other side On what we can become Veiled in the mist of naïve speculation We are busy here preparing Rafts to carry us across Before the light goes out leaving us In the eternal night of could-have-been There’s so much hope for what humanity could be in Bostrom’s poetic view, and fear, and precarity. You can see his attempts at strategic planning hanging in uncertainty, as small as the old “blue speck” photo of earth hanging in the void. But that precipice also comes with serious urgency: given where humanity stands at present, there’s no time to waste. Another of his poems (titled “Göttingen”) articulates that, opening: the rush the rush the rush the fuse that’s burning down information glitters rain of idea sparks the thing is sprinting sipping, taking off to the waiting black powder That poem is his most recent, from 2017, and it carries the rush of his current work: it’s serious now, there’s more at stake, the risk of apocalypse in a potentially impending “intelligence explosion” so neatly symbolized by actual explosives. And out of that comes the sense of moral urgency: you’d better run to deal with the problems this precipice presents if you have any kind of resources to do so. If our historical moment is so precarious, at this place where our acceleration could take us to utopia or the abyss, it’s no time to be sitting around. A trace of that outrage shows in an excerpt from “Juicy Exceptions”: the young ones glimmer briefly like fourth of july firework [sic] then fall to dust […] strut on you arrogant pricks shine on you daughters of ivy occupy your privilege like a desert garden fig-nude amongst almonds and apricots let us feast our eyes on your impudence as you slurp that rough-shelled coconut with a pastel straw

two; this is no time to be lounging around. If you’ve been granted the power, the privilege, of that kind of education, given the precipice we stand on, how could you use it for yourself, even for a moment? When our species might be at stake?

At the end of the bio on his website, Bostrom writes, “I am in a very fortunate position—having no teaching duties, being supported by a staff of brilliant research colleagues and assistants, and facing no restrictions on what I can work on. Must try hard to be worthy of such privilege!” It’s “Juicy Exceptions” that shows how deeply Bostrom means that. He’s not just humbly saying he’s lucky—he’s saying that privilege gives him a duty to pull his weight for the greater good, hurrying to keep up with the urgency of this strange historical moment. Which makes sense of how Bostrom is leading his life, basically locked in a room coming up with the best arguments he can for why people should listen to his apocalyptic/utopian message, publishing and running between speaking circuits and parliamentary panels, doing his best to right the course of history before it’s too late.

Bostrom’s worldview, as you dive into the visionary corners of his mind, is compelling: it draws you in, makes you think in big history, makes you and your concerns start to look very, very small. I trust Bostrom’s intentions more after reading his poetry; his vision of the long future seems like a genuine hope for what he calls (in the last line of Superintelligence) “a compassionate and jubilant use of humanity’s cosmic endowment.”

I’m also worried by the implications of his ideas.

If you follow his logic completely, then putting our energies towards the highest-priority issue of our age (AI strategy) should mean dropping our other, immediate projects of world-fixing and world-making, as any suffering we might alleviate now is secondary to the possibility of extinction. I have too many reservations about Bostrom’s strategic ideas, his thoughts on how change gets made, and his ability to consistently distinguish sci-fi from reality, to buy that fully.

Big-history thinking raises questions, though, that go beyond Bostrom’s exclusive focus on AI scenarios.

What if, to have any hope of building the world we want, the first step is to prioritize catastrophic threats, even others like climate change or biosecurity? Maybe the state of tech does place us at a unique moment in history, with the unique urgency Bostrom feels. Which would mean we ought to think more strategically about where to apply that urgency. Terrifying as it is, Bostrom might have a point.

After meditating on the finitude of youthful pleasure, this poem breaks into pure moral outrage at the very LEO STEVENSON B’20 wishes more theorists wrote thought of elite students enjoying their vacations. It poetry. only makes full sense in the context of the previous

SCIENCE & TECH

16

ITEMS I LOST FORGOT MOVING

OR ELSE WHILE THROUGH

BY Lily Meyersohn ILLUSTRATION Remy Poisson DESIGN Christie Zhong

“Think of a word, any word. Let’s try coconut.”

My old friend whose parents named her after a citrus gives me her instructions. She’s teaching me sense memory, like diving for pearls.

“Coconut will take you to a memory. Follow the memory as if it were a river; branch when it does, lie in the delta once you get there. And don’t think about what actually happened—that doesn’t matter.

Don’t come up for air.” +++ I am flying towards the Sonoran again. This is the seventeenth flight and although all the planes before this one shuddered, none of them went down. Laughing at turbulence is just like crying at ascent: gleeful destabilization, seeing the horizon start to curve and remembering we don’t live on flat ground, never have.

I haven’t been back since 2015, when I lived here with a girl with snaggled teeth and golden hair. The city was a four-month, scorching renaissance. We weren’t making much money and were eating from the pantry, so after we roasted a frozen turkey, I boiled its carcass, stripped bones to make her a month’s worth of broth, fed it to her through flu. We fell in love with the desert, or I did with her. Then we left for college. It was only there, in a small wet place, that I first felt relief as my edges stopped erasing, stopped collapsing into hers.

When I land this time, the desert smells the same: creosote, wood varnish. I teach my brother about the ocotillo which blooms a vivid, fleeting orange after monsoon and which was the favorite of the girl with snaggled teeth. We were never there for monsoon, and I never remember it raining at all. But even in the desert, it must have rained.

I know I am older now because when I think of her teaching me to push my boot into the clutch, how she always did it better, less clumsily, than I did, danced less clumsily, too, dove straighter in chlorine pools, I don’t call her hair golden, just strawberry blonde.

This marks the end of the girl I was at nineteen, but it is also a sign of mourning, rather than persistent melancholy: accepting loss, passing on. +++ Coconut. I woke early to it in a sweaty apartment in an almost-mega city with the smog filtering in. It was finely shredded in cups of rice and I ate it while bumping elbows with the girl I slept alongside on a hard pallet, our backs touching. Sometimes in the morning, I drank coffee with heavy condensed milk. Those were the nights I could not sleep.

They took good care of me in Hanoi, my teachers and the woman who let us call her mother, who cooked rich food, batter-fried pork, beef tossed with pineapples. She plied us with durian. And still, my hands trembled, incapable of stillness while my mind flitted towards home, towards someone I met in a red house while I thought I still might love that girl with snaggled teeth. There should have been many ends to this, after months seven hours ahead, or one back.

She once traced the maps of our lives with her index fingers, slender birds in the air between us. They came together all of a sudden, never meeting, perhaps parallel – then they whipped away again. Seventeen flights and still never converging.

Now, seven thousand miles away, she was perfectly silent. A bus west to a mountain village where I slept under nets, rain on a tin roof, and I texted unfair you’re unfair and she texted yes this is unfair, though neither of us texted it like that at all. +++ The real end didn’t come for a year. Down the street from the beginning, in a beige house rather than a red one. By then, I did not think it was living, just a kind of 17

FEATURES

Mourning and melancholia in their transit unwritten, just a thick thing suspended between breath.

My citrus friend, her name is Clementine, says sometimes my rationality comes across soulless. Tonight, Clementine texts me from Paris (come! you can be my dumb american friend, and I’ll be yours) and tonight, I protest.

Have you heard yourself talk about her?

But I never knew how much I loved her.

Have you heard yourself talk about any of them?

But maybe I never loved any of them, as I insisted I did. Certainly I was not kind enough to them, and unkind to myself by letting them be unkind to me, and thus I must not have loved them, or myself, or loved myself too much.

Midnight, sitting on Lola Loening’s porch down Power with the moon blood and huge and hanging off lead-ridden rooftops. After dinner, Lola pressed a child’s blue tattoo of a dragon onto my left arm. That was tender.

And with three hours left, Clementine is cranky and telling strange men to meet her at the cafe before she leaves for Charles de Gaulle. While she waits, she texts: Not over him. Don’t really think about him. But definitely in love with him.

Clementine mistook the tattoo on the man she loved, a dragon on his bicep, for red. Turns out it’s blue, and I wonder what that means, to mistake blue for red.

Blue: out of, or a moon. But tonight’s blood moon? Blue or red?

I have wanted to keep things like that, namely, nameable.

Her flight must be taking off now, into a grey atmosphere. Lightless, she once called the absence over Paris, over its shingled roofs, its toits. This week autumn arrived and our own toit gently sank from the accompanying rains.

So the hollow walls of this house swell. When we put our fingers to them, they come away chill and damp.

Perhaps all the ceilings will cave, but I don’t know, I only dreamt they were crumbling after falling asleep in the afternoon on another bad-news-day. Outside rain was flashing down in white. +++ Flooded, I test that sense memory meditation. Dive The American left but left his Oxfords behind. He apol- in, struggle in our mud. Surface with nothing smooth or ogized since they were the ones he wore to the beach lustrous in my palms. the day we biked there and he stepped in ripe dog shit, +++ so they were a rude gift to leave on my doorstep, but I forgave him. He’d get them next trip. At the beach we arranged shells in neat rows around the exoskeleton of There are some things, however, I am trying hard to a dappled crab, husks of June which I took home to dry remember clearly. Only the light streaming soft and clean, how the sky’s the bluest it’s been in months. I out on the sill.

Silly, how he called it luggage—those objects we must remember that. How there was a singing cricket carry, ruinous souvenirs—since English is his second or on our toit. I closed the window, but not before rain ran down my hands into the bath, where the fecal debris third language.

The American read me the letter his mother sent from a boy’s shoes lingered.

Tonight I also went out in a rush to meet him in German about a woman named my name and whether she is his girlfriend and if so, his mother is so Clementine, who is home now, and I left the doors pleased for him and hopes the couple is happy together. unlocked. But Rae left blood in the toilet and Paloma, I liked how what he wrote to me in this language, my whose name means dove, left rotting cauliflower in the grandfather’s, came out scrambled like this on trans- fruit basket. The whole apartment stinks again.

Some rain and some shit, like turbulence, I must lator apps, overly formal with phrases like bear fruit.

But he said he disliked being called The German, so laugh about, for they remind me how alive, how waterproof my skin. Some parts are still raw, they’re a hot here goes.

A day too late and the stairwell stinking, I sat to pick wire inside that you cannot touch. If you held your the shit out of the cracks of his Oxfords. Did this mean finger to the wire, it would burn—I know that. That is anything? Besides this, we have still done nothing for also called tender, and that’s alright, we can’t always one another. I suppose I washed my sheets before he blame ourselves for tender.

But anyway, this particular story is one you can came; I suppose he took an endless bus to come. But I never thought this qualified as proof when showing touch. It’s just a laughing story on a school-night, so someone—a stranger in a separate city—you loved her. take it like that. I’m giving tonight so please baby take it, and why don’t you hold it so I don’t have to hold it When you’ve never even said you do. any longer. +++ LILY MEYERSOHN B’19 is still hunting for pearls.

That’s a brutally calculated study. There is no proof, and even when there could be, it would be entirely waiting, this habit of lying around in dirty sheets that would never be shared the way I asked them to be.

Waiting, and rising to tidy again, dust every inch in a city where dust gathers while we sleep. I knew that in the end none of the dustlessness would matter, and none of the gifts either, hidden in drawers since my return from warmer climes.

Perhaps it just needed to happen and be done with.

That it was another experience I must live through, but once lived, I could pass on. But she read Anaïs Nin in Paris and Nin wrote no—that this experience would lead to a second, the second to the third.

I knew my stomach would churn once she came, especially while eating side by side since that’s when one realizes the hunger, the gnawing, has nothing to do with one’s stomach and everything to do with an empty more chronic. That I’d sob when it was done with, especially nights, biking home alone except for the fuzz of cigarettes on my skin.

Surely some of the time had been sweet. Brown beauty marks by bay’s edge, long letters written, whatever. But I might have been projecting, something I’d read about lesbian relationships always being described as having a “superior tenderness,” the sex having a “gentleness” to it. As if we were wounded birds. I wondered who wounded who more, and whether it mattered.

For instance, in one letter from an island, she ate a grapefruit and remembered my tenderness, and this made me angry since I was not a bird. But even then I wouldn’t have known whether she liked to add sugar to sour fruit. She was not a bird either, but what did I know of her, outside silhouette?

Submerged in delusion, torpid in cars crossing Rhode Island islands when the bridges in the background were fogged out so I could only see in strips.

Before she came, I unfortunately dreamt of a misty bridge every night for a week. After she came, I did not dream anymore. I wept, for the pain I was not yet used to losing.

26 OCT 2018

1.

At school I cut out shapes. I take the glue stick and paste them above words, which are their names. The shapes on the page describe objects, and the words attached to them have soundsww which I can pronounce.

On Power street Monday

In my dream Tuesday

2.

3.

Velvet Polyester Linen Knit

To school Wednesday

In my room Thursday

Combing through the collection

soft scratchy stiff thick

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

18

THE DUSTY OLE LIST FRIDAY 10.26

Scary Acres RI // 2150 Scituate Road, Cranston // 7-10PM // $20

Did you read our article on Monsanto last week? Still fiending for some agricultural fiends? Go run around and scream amidst this year’s seasonal harvest. Don’t take any stalks though—they might be patented!

SATURDAY 10.27

Boycott Wendy’s Protest // Wendy’s (391 Charles Street) // 1:30-3PM

Behind Wendy’s contrived quirkiness and rectangular food lies a long history of human rights abuses and sexual harassment in its supply chain. Join this action, part of a national effort coordinated by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers the Student/Farmworkers Alliance, to demand Wendy’s protect its workers, as well as call for others to join a boycott.

Arcade Asylum Author Series — Hallowe’en Edition // The Arcade (65 Weybosset Street) // 6-9PM

This reading is being put on by the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council, and while surely they’re a great bunch, it’s high time for RI to move its creepy canon beyond an archaic/arcane racist. Some of the writers of “weird and dark” fiction on show here would make a great start!

Bounce House: Halloween // The Bounce House (121 Washington Street) // 10PM-2AM // 21+ // $15

Judging from a quick glance at Facebook, actual bounce house rentals are currently going for a full $100!

This dance party is way less, but there likely won’t be anything inflatable. Time to be an adult and party on solid ground, where all the people dressed as sexy ghosts are.

SUNDAY 10.28

15th Annual Great Pumpkin Road Race & Dog Walk // Pete Sepe Pavilion (50 Asylum Road, Warren) // 8:30AM-11:30AM Initially read this and thought the pumpkins and the dogs were competing somehow. Maybe if Monsanto gets its act together (see Friday) this will be true very soon. Dog owners—come with a poop bag.

MONDAY 10.29

6th Annual Courtyard Jack O’ Lantern Extravaganza //Scalabrini Villa Nursing & Rehabilitation Center, 860 N Quidnessett Road, N Kingstown RI // 6PM-8PM Pumpkin carving at a nursing home! Reminds this LW of some of her earliest memories of fall, spent painting pumpkins at her financially unstable Lutheran church in the company of many geriatric Norwegian women. Costumes welcome, light refreshments to follow. (LW hopes they serve apple juice and crumb cake—these are her petite madeleines…)

TUESDAY 10.30

Factory of Terror 2018 // 120 Pearl Street, Fall River MA // 12AM-11:59PM // $18

Join Southern New England’s favorite cat-themed country music station for a family-friendly terror sesh!

Word on the street is that Cat Country 98.1 FM’s 20th consecutive Factory of Terror performance will feature a haunted indoor swamp. If The Indy were tasked with writing a country song about this event, it would follow the tragic fate of a local Kid Rock fan attempting to drain the swamp irl, but, upon failing, disappearing into the mire.

WEDNESDAY 10.31

KiNK presents Halloween! // The Dark Lady, 19 Snow Street // 9PM-12:30AM // $7 Human sacrifices accepted in the dungeon. :-) THURSDAY 11.1

2018 Providence Symposium // Providence Preservation Society 24 Meeting Street // 12PM-1:30 PM

Join the Providence Preservation Society on day one of its three-day annual PVD Symposium. This year’s event, entitled “Preservation and Place: The Cultural Landscape of Providence,” seeks to ‘investigate the layers of (sometimes invisible) cultural landscapes present in this city.’ There are plenty of reasons to be critical of historical preservationism—however, the event’s self-proclaimed interest in ‘invisible’ cultural landscapes seems like a promising chance for the PPS to address histories which haven’t been enshrined.