The College Hill Independent Vol. 38 Issue 3

03 Fighting for civics education in Rhode Island

09 Dear Indy: a V-Day advice column

11 Queer cinema, then and now

Volume 38 • Issue 03

February 15, 2019

the College Hill

Independent

the Indy

a Brown * RISD Weekly

R n* A B row

D IS

ly Week

The Indy From The Editors

Contents Cover Craigslist Painting Zola Anderson

There are two kinds of people on the Independent: the ones who still believe in Valentine’s Day and those who have realized that love is a con(mag) and journalism is better than any monogamous relationship—even one between journalists. As we met with our sources at hole-in-the-wall coffee shops in the Upper West Side of Providence and waited by the phone for Mr. WET to call back, we couldn’t help but wonder: are we the new Hallmark? And is the newsroom a reflection of the dating pool––in dire need of copy editors?

News 02 Week in (Mis)conceptions Alina Kulman & Roxanne Barnes 05 Striking A Deal Kanha Prasad & Bilal Menon

They say that Cupid’s arrow never strikes twice, but we beg to differ. We’re on-again off-again with incoherent metaphors and cheating on our deadlines because we spent too much time wondering a second thing: Can an alt-weekly ever love us back? Or are we wasting our twenties chasing after a paper that’s too Independent to be tied down?

Metro 03 Civic Disobedience Sara Van Horn & Wen Zhuang

-BB & SC

Science & Tech 07 How Libraries Adapt Miles Guggenheim 13 Tourist Trap Liam Greenwell Features 09 Dear Indy...

SS & WW

Mission Statement

Arts 11 Do I Know You? Zach Barnes

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.

X 15 Thoughts for Food Jorge Palacios & Alex Westfall, Liana Chaplain, Miranda Villanueva, Pia Mileaf-Patel, Mariel Solomon, Sofie Jimenez, Marian Chudnovsky, Jennifer Katz

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.

Ephemera 16 Indy Tindy Claire Schlaikjer & Nicole Cochary

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.

Literary 17 Six Men Spotted at The Glen Park Roller Rink and Rec Center Will Weatherly

Week in Review Sarah Clapp Maria Gerdyman News Jacob Alabab-Moser Jessica Bram-Murphy Giacomo Sartorelli Metro Julia Rock Lucas Smolcic Larson Sara Van Horn Arts Ben Bienstock Alexis Gordon Liby Hays Features Tara Sharma Cate Turner

Shannon Kingsley Lily Meyersohn Literary Shuchi Agrawal Justin Han Isabelle Rea Ephemera Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Rosenblatt Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

Science & Tech Miles Guggenheim

Special Projects Harry August Lucas Smolcic Larson Eve Zelickson

15 FEB 2019

VOL 38 ISSUE 03

Staff Writers Jesse Barber Jessica Dai Brionne Frazier Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Mohannad Jabrah Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Alina Kulman Dana Kurniawan Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Star Su Marly Toledano Copy Editors Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim Yelena Nicolle Salvador Caroline Sprague

Design Editors Lulian Ahn Bethany Hung Designers Pablo Herraiz García de Guadiana Amos Jackson Cecile Kim Ella Rosenblatt Katherine Sang Christie Zhong Illustration Editors Pia Mileaf-Patel Eve O’Shea Ilustrators Sam Berenfield Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Bella Carlos Julia Illana Angie Kang Jeff Katz

Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Claribel Wu Stephanie Wu

Katrina Northrop Chris Packs Signe Swanson Will Weatherly Managing Editors Ella Comberg Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

Business Maria Gonzalez

MVP Will Weatherly

Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel Alumni+Fundraising Katrina Northrop

***

Senior Editors Olivia Kan-Sperling

The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

WEEK IN (MIS)COMMUNICATION

BY Roxanne Barnes and Alina Kulman ILLUSTRATION Rémy Poisson DESIGN Bethany Hung

LMS for Salvation Pope Francis wants you to know he’s not a regular pope, he’s a cool pope. With the recent 2019 World Youth Day festival in Panama, the Pope put his newfound fluency with internet culture on display when he announced the launch of his app and website Click To Pray, where users can click a button to show that they’ve said the prayer the Pope posts each day. People can also make accounts to post their own prayers, and anyone can click to say they’ve prayed for them.

The Pope also filled his speech at the festival with hip references—demonstrating that he has, in fact, used a computer before. Francis emphasized to the crowd of Catholic teens that life is not just “in the cloud and waiting to be downloaded,” nor is it simply “a new app to be discovered.”

The references didn’t stop there. The Virgin Mary, by choosing to give birth to Jesus, was the first influencer: “the ‘influencer’ of God.” Later in his speech, Francis proclaimed that “to be an ‘influencer’ in the twenty-first century is to be guardians of roots, guardians of all that prevents our life from dissipating and evaporating into nothingness.” Clearly, he is yet to see either Fyre Festival documentary (but preferably Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened, available on Netflix which, unlike the Hulu doc, did not allegedly pay Fyre Festival founder and actual sociopath Billy McFarland $250,000 for an interview), to learn how influencers successfully directed their millions of followers to go an island where there wasn’t food, water, or shelter for them. Or maybe Francis has seen the doc and was just reminded of Mark 6:7, where Jesus gives his 12 disciples some helpful travel advice to take “no bread, no bag, no money in your belts” on their journeys.

The Pope has previously admitted that the Catholic Church has a youth problem. At a speech in Estonia in September, he said that the myriad of sexual abuse scandals revealed over the last 30-odd years have “put off” young people, who see the Church as “bothersome and irritating.” Francis has continually positioned himself as one of the (if not the) most liberal popes in papal history; he has emphasized the need to respect gay people, to help refugees, and to aid the poor. One hopes, however, that in his attempts to reform the Church and reach out to young people, to create the ideal “communicative, accessible, joyful and interactive community” that he described in his Estonia speech, the Pope will do more than just tell teens that all that’s necessary for salvation is the click a button. (Although the Independent does admit to going

WORMHOLE

on ClickToPray.org and clicking for “the girl who was a decentralized currency is that one person can’t hide caught smoking at school”). transaction histories or restrict records. In Quadriga’s case, however, account information was regularly -AK moved into ‘cold storage,’ (meaning an offline bitcoin account, following in the crypto community’s tradition of naming things as if they were physical) and the only access key was the missing password. As this saga One Key to Bind Them All has unfolded, an internet theory has grown in popularit: it suspects that owing to his fishy financial operIn the latest development of a real-life financial heist ating system and Quadriga’s instability, Cotten is in conspiracy, this past week, a blow was dealt to users fact alive (and very rich) in India. of a Canadian cryptocurrency trading website called Supporting this theory is the fact that the area Quadriga. Back in December, Chief Operating Officer around Jaipur in India where Cotten went on his trip Gerald Cotten, founder and holder of the keys to the to found an orphanage has a reputation for its ‘Fake platform’s digital ledgers, was on a philanthropic Death’ mafia. Allegedly, westerners seeking to reap trip to Jaipur, India. While there, he died suddenly of insurance benefits frequent Rajasthan to obtain a fully complications related to Crohn’s disease. Since the legal death certificates from doctors for just an online website’s announcement of Cotten’s death in January, application and cash transfer. According to Quadriga’s account holders have been scrambling to figure out announcement, Cotten spent two weeks in a local how to get access to what amounts to over $190 million hospital, during which time he signed a will leaving all worth of bitcoin and other digital currency. British his assets to his wife Jennifer and their two Chihuahua Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) announced dogs. Though Cotten’s effects were put in order fairly on February 6 that users would not be offered recom- concretely, the much sought after password is nowhere pense from the state. Without that password, which to be found, adding fuel to the idea that Cotten may went to the grave with its caretaker, those accounts are be on the lam with two million dollars from the cold permanently frozen. accounts.

Quadriga’s website is understandably apologetic, Cotten’s colleagues have conflicting theories of outlining tentative next steps. “Gerry took sole respon- their own. While many consider his death strange sibility for the handling of funds for QuadrigaCX and in light of his financial circumstances, friend and as such no one other than him can access the coins Vancouver business associate Fredrick Heartline in the cold wallets," it explains. This is bad news for has a firm faith that Cotten’s passwords will come Quadriga’s 115,000 users because without that protec- to light posthumously. Faith appears a theme in the tion, their accounts are stuck in a system so heavily lives of cryptocurrency advocates—it would seem protected that authorized hackers employed in an that in the world of cryptocurrency, even something attempt to breach the platform had “little success.” as real as death itself relies on mutual belief. The Attempts to locate the password in Cotten’s scattered Independent sends its best to the floundering account notes and messages have also been unsuccessful. holders of Quadriga, and humbly submits that they try If this story sounds bizarre, the crypto commu- ‘password123.’ nity agrees. Trading with cryptocurrency is not supposed to hinge on one person’s access; the point of -RB

BY Theia Flynn

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

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CIVIC DISOBEDIENCE

A class-action lawsuit in Rhode Island advocates for civics education In 2015, only 23 percent of eighth graders in the United States demonstrated proficiency in civics, according to a national assessment by the federal government.

Since 1998, the average civics score for this group has only increased by four points. This lack of civics education—basic knowledge of government and the democratic process—not only signals a highly uninformed electorate, but is also indicative of the failure of the nation’s public education system. In the US, you are granted the right to vote when you turn 18, but not the right to know how or why.

Professor Michael Rebell of Columbia University believes the time has come to establish education as a constitutional right. In 2016, Rebell began researching a legally-enshrined pathway to American civics education. His study draws on a 1973 Supreme Court Case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, which declared that “the right to be educated” was not—as many of us may have assumed—“explicitly or implicitly” stated in the US Constitution. But in the same decision, the court acknowledged the importance of education in cultivating responsible citizens, raising an important question: does the Constitution guarantee the right to an education? After a sabbatical year spent researching this provocative and unanswered question, Rebell reached out to lawyers in Rhode Island last summer to find plaintiffs and file a lawsuit that would use securing the right to civics education as a means to codify education, broadly defined, as a constitutional right. The suit names six defendants: Governor Gina Raimondo, Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello, Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, Education Commissioner Ken Wagner, the Rhode Island Board of Education, and the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education.

The class-action lawsuit, A.C. vs. Raimondo, filed this past November, alleges that Rhode Island has failed to provide its public school students with the civics education necessary for full, democratic participation in American life. This formalized push for civics education appeals to supporters from across the political spectrum, in Rhode Island and around the country. The 14 student plaintiffs are fueled by what the suit alleges is inadequate civics preparation in the state. “We’re hoping we win this lawsuit and change it to where my younger brothers can have a really good education, and go into adulthood knowing how to vote, how to do taxes, and learning basic things that you should know going into the real world,” Aelita Cook, in her fourth year at the Providence Career & Technical Academy and one of the plaintiffs in the case, told the New York Times this past fall. These public school students span several age groups and hail from various school districts as well as different academic and cultural backgrounds.

More broadly, the suit reflects the momentum of the current political moment, where public urgency for civics education reverberates nationwide. While the legal road ahead is long and certainly challenging,

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METRO

the groundbreaking potential of a favorable ruling has many education advocates excited. There are plenty of powerful quotes in Supreme Court cases about the fundamental importance of education, said Jennifer Wood, a lawyer in the case and the Executive Director of RI Center for Justice. “We believe that we just haven’t asked the question the right way.” +++ The lawyers behind the case have set their sights high, aiming for no less than a judicial decision declaring education a constitutional right. The case is professionally spearheaded by a group of lawyers initially contacted by Professor Rebell: Jennifer Wood from Rhode Island Center for Justice, Samuel Zurier from Zurier Law, and Stephen Robinson from Robinson & Clapham Law Firm, all of whom have experience challenging educational practices in court.

In conversation with the Independent, Rebell noted the bleak reality of civics education across the country.

“We could've brought this case in any of the 50 states because none of them are doing an adequate job,” he said. However, as Wood explained to the Independent, the choice of Rhode Island as Rebell’s “test case” was not an arbitrary one: “We have very difficult facts about some of the inequalities in some of the more economically distressed neighborhoods in PVD,” she said, pointing to a civics elective course that was eliminated in the Woonsocket school district following the 2008 recession.

Statistics published this past November also confirm this claim: recent Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System (RICAS) exam results reveal some sobering statistics: 34 percent of Rhode Island’s students in grades three to eight were considered just barely proficient in English Language Arts compared to 51 percent in neighboring Massachusetts, where an identical standardized test is administered. Rhode Island also has a disappointing record in civics education: it is one of the few states that has no civics requirement in state-mandated curricula.

This disillusionment with state education policy reverberates across the working coalition behind the case. Robinson has worked on the subject for nearly 20 years, heading both Pawtucket v. Sundlun in 1995 and Woonsocket School Committee v. Chafee in 2014, the last two cases on state-level education reform. Although the former, which was directly linked to issues presented in the 1973 Rodriguez case around equitable funding in school districts, was reversed and lost in the Rhode Island Supreme Court, Robinson, recalling the case to the Independent, emphasized its subsequent impact: “As a result, for about 10 years, it was simply a recognition that we had to give more money to the poor districts.” Armed with the hopeful consequences from Pawtucket, Robinson along with Samuel D. Zurier (another lawyer in the current civics suit) tried again in Woonsocket School Committee 19 years later, this

time arguing for equal funding with a larger focus constitutional rights and liberties, pointing directly to the education clause in the Rhode Island constitution.

While unsuccessful a second time, it introduced the potentials of using a civics focus in legal arguments for equitable education.

“I’m hopeful that people will see [A.C. v. Raimondo] as something that isn’t a class thing,” said Robinson, “My past two cases were unpopular even in Rhode Island—you’re trying to take money from well-to-do wealthy people—but this is different. I think most people want fellow citizens to be engaged voters. Like back to Greek times.”

A.C. v. Raimondo is unique in its bipartisan support.

While the case is heralded by some as a progressive effort to address educational inequities, Wood reminds us that the biggest Supreme Court champions of civics education have been Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Neil Gorsuch, appointed by Republican presidents.

Republicans and Democrats find common ground in the struggle for civic participation, she argues, particularly when thinking about who is excluded from the democratic process. The lack of access to elite institutions, and the civic preparation they provide, is a topic where, Wood reminded us, “I could quote from both teams.” Public civics education is also something that particularly animates people attentive to the statements of the Founding Fathers, a style of reading first used in 1980’s by Scalia and other conservative judges, and to the notion of democratic participation: “You can’t parse that along electoral political lines,” Wood said. +++ These lawyers believe that specifically emphasizing civic participation as the goal of US public education will allow the courts to move beyond the aforementioned ruling in San Antonio v. Rodriguez, a case which failed to dismantle the unequal funding of public schools through property taxes—the underlying source of public educational inequality more broadly.

“What the Supreme Court said in Rodriguez,” Wood explained to the Indy, “was that students don’t have a right to equivalent funding. That case was actually a funding equity case which is critically important to what our case is not.” A.C. v. Raimondo, in contrast, is a civics one, arguing that the question —whether or not education is protected under the constitution—is an open one.

Instead of fighting for the financial reform of public schools, this coalition of lawyers seeks to guarantee the right to an education by arguing that civic education is crucial to the full participation in American democracy. Their theory, according to Wood, is that “There are certain enumerated constitutional rights— the right to vote, the right to be judged by a jury of one’s peers, the right to exercise free speech—and that all of these enumerated constitutional rights are rendered

15 FEB 2019

BY Sara Van Horn and Wen Zhuang ILLUSTRATION James Gately DESIGN Christie Zhong

inaccessible if you do not have the adequate education.” This legal strategy incorporates judicial precedent from hundreds of years ago and harkens back to the importance that the Founders themselves placed on civics education. As Wood explained, “You actually have to be a good student of civics to bring a civics case.”

Yet the emphasis on civics is not a universal strategy among lawyers fighting for American educational rights. In Detroit, for example, a court case is seeking a similar declaration of educational rights on the basis of literacy. This different standard is especially alarming to Rebell, who told the Indy, “We're very concerned that if we're going to get one shot at the Supreme Court, the outcome shouldn't be that all you need to be a capable citizen is to be able to read and write at a sixth grade level.” Emphasizing civics, he argues, allows for a much more robust definition of education, one that is tailored to the political realities of the 21st century: increased internet use, for example, as well as a heightened stress on widespread voter participation.

Additionally, newly available data on US public education can provide key supporting evidence that previous lawsuits lacked. Attributing this “literal mountain of data” to changes in data collection under President George W. Bush, Wood highlighted the new authority this data lends to claims of educational inequities. Instead of asking a judge to make a subjective assessment about educational standards, lawyers can use statistics to point to learning gaps between different groups of students based on race, gender, and income and to compare Rhode Island’s performance to national standards.

and technology of changing times. In an age of deceptive news coverage, he believes students are required to have not only basic civics literacy, but a critical understanding of media.

Both Robinson and Wood were quick to stress the overwhelming public support for an approach focusing on civics education. “This case causes and commands public conversation about the core purpose of public education,” said Wood. “Why do we even do this thing?

We educate the public so they can participate in democracy in a knowing and informed way.” By aiming for a constitutional declaration instead of specific funding or curriculum reform, A.C. v. Raimondo doesn’t necessarily address the root causes of Rhode Island’s failing education systems such as shrinking property tax bases or structural racism in public schools. Yet these concerns are not necessarily ignored by the lawyers pushing a case in many ways intended to spark a conversation and establish a basis from which to argue subsequent legislation. “I think this will ultimately end up in the US Supreme Court,” said Robinson. “I just hope I live long enough to see it.”

WEN ZHUANG RISD’19 AND SARA VAN HORN B’21 wonder whether Schoolhouse Rock! will testify against Gina.

+++ The rightward shift in the political and social climate after the 2016 presidential election is at the center of Rebell’s push for a renewed focus and emphasis on civics education. The repercussions of the election also preface his book published last year, Flunking Democracy: Schools, Courts, and Civic Participation, in which he situates the root of our current polarized society in the decline of what was once a robust era of civic engagement. He starts by recalling the civic ethos of the Founding Fathers: “teach good political judgement, allow learning from prior generations’ mistakes and successes, and inculcate honesty, integrity, and compassion.” He then traces the decline of this ethos to the second half of the 20th century, arguing that civics curricula failed to address the new values, rights,

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

04

STRIKING A DEAL

BY Bilal Memon and Kanha Prasad ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel and Eve O'Shea DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Standing on the front steps of LA City Hall, Alex “economic hardship.”

Caputo-Pearl, president of the United Teachers Los The UTLA reached similar victories with regards Angeles (UTLA), shouted into a crowd of teachers and to support staff and pay increases. Under pressure parents, “You just taught the best lesson of your lives.” to increase standardized test scores, public schools A sea of hand-painted signs and raised fists roared in across the country have directed their limited budgets affirmation. to additional reading and math instruction, instead of hiring other essential school staff. Los Angeles +++

has suffered particularly badly, with more than 500 students per counselor and nearly 2,000 students for Teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District every nurse. The deal ensures a full-time nurse in every (LAUSD) began striking on January 14 after months school, a librarian for every middle and high school, of failed negotiations with the city over pay, bloated and allocates more school funds to hire counselors. classroom size, lack of support staff, and the increasing Salary also played an important, if secondary, privatization of public education. Over 30,000 role for teachers in a city with skyrocketing real estate teachers marched, picketed, and rallied in a powerful prices and growing economic inequality. For schools in show of labor solidarity that garnered national political wealthy areas, teachers are priced out of the neighborand media attention. The six-day strike halted activity hood, forced to live elsewhere and face long commutes. in the second largest school district in the country, Before the strike began, the city promised a raise affecting over 600,000 students in more than 1,000 of 6 percent—not far from the union’s demand of 6.5 schools. The final agreement between the teachers’ percent. Largely satisfied by the city’s offer, the union union and the City included a six percent pay increase; eventually conceded the change. smaller class sizes; more funding for nurses, librarians, and guidance counselors; and a moratorium on new +++ charter schools.

Class size was a top priority for the UTLA. Beyond the common educational issues of class size, According to the LAUSD superintendent's final budget budgets, and salary, the recent proliferation of charter for 2017-2018, class averages exceeded 40 children schools in the city greatly affected the trajectory, tone, for middle and high schools, while numbers hovered and goals of the UTLA strike. There are currently 277 around 30 for elementary schools. In comparison, charter schools in Los Angeles, serving more than national class size averages in urban areas range from 138,000 students. Charter advocates maintain that 16 to 28 students. The class size explosion in LA poses charter schools provide parents and children with a direct threat to children’s well-being because, as a more choice and the opportunity to escape undergrowing body of research suggests, there is a causal performing local schools. However, critics argue that relationship between class size and academic perfor- charter schools, which operate autonomously but mance. Smaller classrooms put less strain on teachers receive public funding, lack accountability and sap and allow for more individualized attention. A study resources from district schools, further aggravating sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers the LAUSD’s financial troubles. found that primary school children in smaller classThe controversy is further complicated by the rooms scored better on tests and were more likely to go influx of big money. Wealthy philanthropists influence to college than similar children in larger classrooms. education in Los Angeles by bankrolling and sitting After negotiations, the city agreed to reduce class size on the boards of individual charter schools, while by four students over the next three years in grades also financing pro-charter politics at the district level. four through twelve, nullifying a previous provision Prominent donors include the Walton family, founders that allowed class sizes to balloon during times of of Walmart; Doris Fischer, co-founder of Gap; and

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NEWS

Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix. These billionaires claim to provide opportunity and choice to children across their city. However, critics—most notably the UTLA—call their intentions and methods into question. Charter schools prevent democratic processes from shaping education policy. Instead, they leave many crucial decisions to philanthropists and corporate executives who have little to no background in education or public policy. In a interview with the Indy, Jordan Henry, assistant principal at Santee Education Complex, a public high school, remarked, “My colleagues and I, we are all firm members of a shrinking middle class, and our clientele are a growing underclass. And it’s apparent that the uber-rich are … buying more of a voice in the [education system.]”

Charter advocates spent millions of dollars on the 2017 LA school board election, packing the board with friends and allies. In 2018 the board selected Austin Beutner, a wealthy businessman and board member of Granada Hills Charter High school, as district superintendent. Progressives also fear that privatization could open the floodgates for future profit-making. In a 1999 report for potential investors, Merrill-Lynch claimed, “a new mindset is necessary, one that views families as customers, schools as ‘retail outlets’ where educational services are received, and the school board as a customer service department that hears and addresses parental concerns.” In recent years, this market-driven mindset has become mainstream as business executives, technology CEOs, and corporate-friendly public officials increasingly dominate educational discourse.

On Superintendent Beutner’s watch, the proliferation of charter schools has continued: LA is now home to more charter schools than anywhere else in country.

In many ways, the teachers’ strike is a reaction against the steady march of privatization. +++ Funding for the union’s demands played a central role in the debates leading up to and during the strike.

Teachers criticized the city for withholding funds and practicing a policy of austerity without just cause. To their point, a report by the LA Board of Education

15 FEB 2019

LA teachers push for a more equitable public school system

found the district has almost two billion dollars in reserves. The coffers have been growing rapidly over the past five years, up from 500 million dollars in 2014. However, Superintendent Beutner maintains that much of that money has already been earmarked for burgeoning pensions and retiree benefits. In an interview with the New York Times, Beutner argues: “The union’s desires are the same as mine. In concept we could agree with everything. But there’s limits on resources. The regulator on behalf of the state has told us we’re in dire financial straits. We cannot spend more than what we have.” For the time being, the district’s bloated piggy bank can accommodate the increase in funding; however, long-term, sustainable budgetary policies remain to be seen.

California’s peculiar tax structure has contributed to the financial strain experienced by public schools in LA and across the state, including in Oakland and Sacramento. In most American school districts, the vast majority of public school funding comes from local property taxes. Since Proposition 13 of 1978 gutted property taxes in California, districts have been forced to supplement their budgets with limited state funding. Some scholars hold Proposition 13 responsible for the tragic decline in the quality of public education. In the 1960s, California public schools ranked nationally among the best in America; now they rank in the bottom decile in terms of educational achievement and per-pupil spending. The teachers’ strike has renewed interest in repealing Proposition 13; however, if previous attempts are any indication, it is near impossible to reimpose the far-reaching tax. The proposition remains immensely popular among large swaths of the electorate, especially the middle class.

The future of California schools rests, in part, in innovative and electable tax policy. +++ In a school district spanning more than 960 square miles, that 98 percent of UTLA teachers voted to strike is a testament to the success of efforts to rebuild solidarity within the union and the broader community.

These rebuilding efforts go back eleven years to the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

2008 financial crisis, when hundreds of teachers— most between the ages of 27 and 32—were given the pink slip. In the face of these mass layoffs, teachers at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Community Charter School organized a one hour work stoppage and civil disobedience to protest the spending cuts. Among these teachers were longtime UTLA activists Alex CaputoPearl and Cecily Myart-Cruz. They started the Union Power caucus after realizing that the union needed drastic internal reform if it was to effectively respond to the various crises facing LA schools. In an interview with the Nation, Emerson Middle School teacher Noriko Nakada noted that “They were already huge union activists, but the union wasn’t doing what they wanted the union to do.”

Campaigning on a platform to work with the broader community for better schools and against privatization, the caucus was elected to UTLA leadership in the summer of 2014, with Caputo-Pearl as president and Myart-Cruz as vice-president. Swiftly after coming to power, they set to work obtaining the funds that would be required to realize their campaign promises. First, they held a vote on a dues increase, and 80 percent of the members voted to increase their own dues by 30 percent. Using these funds, three new departments within the union were created: an organizing department, a political department, and a research department. The creation of these departments pushed back against the inefficient small-room negotiation tactics pursued by previous president Warren Fletcher, whose bargaining approach consisted of signing off on contract issues piece by piece. After being elected in 2010, Fletcher hired professional negotiators to do the bulk of the bargaining, instead of sourcing popular teachers from within the rankand-file. The union contract remained expired for two years of his tenure and many union members were left deeply unsatisfied with the leadership's failure to articulate its own vision for how schools should run. In contrast, Caputo-Pearl and Myart-Cruz articulated a platform that represented a commitment to long-term political organizing, and sourcing negotiators from within the base of the union. They also established the parent-community department, which committed itself to deepening ties with and giving voice to the parents and the community living in the neighborhoods surrounding each school. The department trained staff and members in reaching out to parents and listening to their concerns. Many union members were also parents embedded in their own communities (70 percent of women members identified themselves as mothers or grandmothers), and were able to leverage their personal connections towards creating deeper ties.

In an interview with 94.1 KPFA, Caputo-Pearl referred to these efforts as part of a broader strategy well known in union circles as “bargaining for the common good”—bringing to the bargaining table issues that affect not just the school but the community as a whole. The five years spent by the union leadership building these grassroots structures and relationships proved instrumental, as both rank-and-file teachers and community members felt directly invested in the daily governance of the schools. This marked shift in strategy meant that, when the possibility of a strike was floated after negotiations with the administration stalled, the prevailing atmosphere amongst members was not one of surprise and vulnerability, but of coherence and resolve. In the same interview with the Indy, assistant principal Henry commented, “Without circling a date on the calendar, the union [under Caputo-Pearl] was always upfront that they need to remain cognizant of and build towards the possibility of a strike.” When the strike commenced, picket-lines and mass rallies filled with demonstrating

teachers took over the city like a well-oiled machine and effectively shut down the public education system for six days. Additionally, thousands of parents in the community lent not only nominal support to the effort, but took multiple days off from work to stand with their children’s educators in the pouring rain. +++ If long-term political organizing allowed the union to build reliable teams and tactics, then the momentum of other teacher strikes in the nation inspired it to confront, rather than simply negotiate with, the school board. In early 2018, a wave of teachers’ movements, revolts, and strikes roiled the nation in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky. Years of stagnant wages and cuts to essential student services such as librarians, counselors, and nurses were justified by local politicians as unfortunate externalities of the tax decreases that would ultimately serve the general good by creating jobs. The animating force of these movements to resist the status quo was a growing realization that the architecture of their respective states’ fiscal systems had been engineered to starve public services while fattening the paychecks of school-board superintendents. According to the monthly magazine Labor Notes, the number of striking teachers collectively represented 5 percent of the total K-12 education workforce in the country. This was the biggest spike in teacher strikes in more than half a century, breathing life back into a long-dormant activist tradition. Harkening to this spirit, the UTLA convinced their members to strike when the LAUSD presented a woefully unsatisfactory last-ditch deal on January 11.

The success of the LA strike has only intensified a nationwide wave of teacher protests. There are now stirrings of teacher union activity and unease in Virginia and Colorado; 95 percent of Oakland teachers recently voted to strike; and West Virginia teachers may walk out again, due to efforts by Republican legislators to renege on previous agreements. While last year’s teacher revolts took place prominently in red states, the movement has now taken root in purple and even solidly blue states. In fact, that teachers in the second largest school district in ostensibly the most progressive state in the nation had to strike to remedy the direness of their situation demonstrated the extent to which pro-charter interests—represented by figures like Austin Beutner and Eric Garcetti, Mayor of LA— are deeply entrenched in the Democratic Party. An issue like this may very well threaten to deepen the growing gulf between the establishment and progressive wings of the party, and could be a contentious point of debate amongst Democratic presidential nominees for the 2020 election.

Regardless of electoral outcomes, the teachers’ movements across the country aren’t showing any signs of slowing. Amidst all of their differences, these movements have a unifying mission: resist efforts by corporate executives to redirect funds away from teacher’s salaries and crucial student services and towards charter schools. The LA teachers’ strike is the most powerful current in this recent wave of teacher strikes. By regaining ownership over the terms of their work, these teachers have empowered not only themselves but the community of students and parents surrounding their schools. Arlene Inouye, UTLA’s chief negotiator, sums it up perfectly, “Of course, it’s hard to go on strike —but once you get there, it’s exhilarating. I honestly had no idea how much power it would give our members. It changed the whole face of everything in this city.”

BILAL MEMON B‘22 AND KANHA PRASAD B‘21 peaked in high school.

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HOW LIBRARIES ADAPT In its 2018 and 2019 budget proposals, the Trump administration attempted to cut government funding for the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Although it is easy to rationalize this gesture to financially hinder the only federal program supporting our public library system as another ignorant, Trumpian assault on the humanities, the reckless logic of this maneuver is more fundamentally dangerous to the conception of what libraries actually are. In a four sentence-long justification that reads with the rhythm and elequancy of a high-school lab report, the White House concluded, “given that IMLS primarily supports discrete, short-term projects as opposed to operation-sustaining funds, it is unlikely the elimination of IMLS would result in the closure of a significant number of libraries and museum [sic].”

To understand contemporary public libraries as stagnant databases of information that simply require bare “operation-sustaining funds” to stay open is to project a false image onto their nature as dynamic, adaptable institutions. While libraries certainly provide and offer information, they are not Google search engines or stagnant hard drives. Stripping the funding that allows them to do anything but simply exist—the flexible budgets that allow them to conduct special projects and community services—reveals a major misconception of what, in reality, libraries do today and what they have done for our country in the past. Although it is easy to perceive libraries as obsolete in the context of computers and virtual databases, history shows that their more tangible social interface is adaptable and perhaps more vital to the American commons. +++ By 1900 libraries in the United States were overwhelmingly staffed by women. Faced with a cultural hegemony that whittled career opportunities down to a select few pathways, women filed into the ranks of the American library system. Beyond the desire for self-sufficiency, the rapid democratization of text and page imbued the librarian’s role with newfound social

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significance. Melvil Dewey, a principal founder of the American public library, specifically targeted middle class women to form the ranks of his vision. Selling his newly established School of Library Economy in New York, he linked the modern librarian to an agent of cultural enlightenment, a gatekeeper to untapped constellations of knowledge and information.

Starting in 1881, library schools like The School of Library Economy began turning out the first professional workforce of American librarians. Trained to operationalize the Dewey Decimal System—what was then a groundbreaking interface for accessing a vast reservoir of text, media, and image—graduates learned to revolutionize the various collections and databases in the already established libraries up and down the American East Coast. Over the turn of the century, as Dewey’s model succeeded, more and more women enrolled in library school. By 1924, they would make up 94 percent of library school graduates.

But at the turn of the 20th century, the climate of this movement was changing. As the profession grew more and more popular, library establishments on the East Coast filled up. Suddenly hundreds of the women graduating from library school could not find the work they had been trained to do. In response to the problem, women graduates turned to the western half of the United States. Aside from a few cities like San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Los Angeles, settlements and towns situated in the more rugged and rural areas of the West were dramatically underdeveloped. This was especially the case in terms of educational resource and literacy. A census taken in 1871 found only 6 percent of America’s entire libraries existed on in the Western part of the country.

New universities and small “reading clubs” had built a foundation to access, but the work of organizing, connecting, and solidifying these fledgling institutions required professionals from the East.

When women librarians first arrived at these destinations, however, they found a situation alien to what they had been trained to handle. Collections were small, random, and disorganized, while the populations they expected to provide for were separated by poor infrastructure and harsh geographical climates.

With small underfunded libraries, sometimes a single room tacked onto a university classroom or government building, it was hard to provide a welcoming comfortable environment for new readers. Under such environmental and financial restrains many incoming professional librarians had to adapt their practice and ideals.

At a long established university on the East Coast, or an in an urban setting like New York, merely maintaining accessible and up-to-date nexuses of information provided a public service. Out west, however, where communities were decentralized and the actual facilities themselves poor and uninviting, simply optimizing the old interface to access these books did nothing to help the community. In a culture that valued individuality over cultural education, homestead over community space, the public service provided by libraries was not apparent. Women working as pioneers in the West would thus have to emphasize the service a library could provide. Staying true to the service of making information accessible, they stepped outside the procedures and methods they had been taught.

In many cases, librarians either organized or participated in traveling libraries. At their grandest scale, traveling libraries were a sequence of horse drawn carts carrying a variety of reading material.

In somes cases, a mule or packhorse with a single rider was the “traveling library.” Librarians who had spent their education walking up and down the halls

BY Miles Guggenheim ILLUSTRATION Eve O'Shea DESIGN Bethany Hung

of a single building now found themselves adventuring through the outdoors as they loaned books to far-flung rural settlements and worked to establish new branches. Concluding her history of these literary pioneers in her book Cultural Crusaders, Joeanne E. Passat writes, “Contrary to the pervasive twentieth-century stereotype of the librarian as an introverted, bookish spinster, western women librarians had to be socially adept in order to secure widespread support for a library movement in its infancy. They also needed to be articulate, comfortable with diverse audiences, and prepared to mount a horse, as well as a public podium, with confidence.”

In this way, just as their expectation of how a librarian worked shifted, the goals of the institution itself changed. In the case of traveling libraries providing a substantial database of information fell second to spreading and teaching literacy. Adapting to the needs of their community, they ignored the precedent to establish the traditionally quiet, introverted environment more concerned with its information than the social background of its clientele. Touring on horseback or asserting themselves outside the university or building they had established, librarians acted like politicians. They gave guest lectures at churches, taught literacy at schools, and lobbied their cause to local governments as beacons of social mobility and cultural heritage. As the American West developed, losing the charming American ideology once tethered to its seemingly infinite horizon, librarians were building the next frontier of the American dream. A space where accessibility to knowledge and information sought to level the social playing field for communities, urban and rural. +++ With wealth inequality and homelessness on the rise in urban areas across the United States, libraries in more desperate cases have once again begun the process of adapting to their environment. As free, comfortable, heated spaces with access to internet and computers, public libraries have learned to adaptively confront the realities other American institutions have failed to address. In Los Angeles, where approximately 50,000 people live on the street, public libraries often provide the shelter and basic social services the city has failed provide. Joining a nationwide trend, many branches have since hired social workers to be on staff. As physical book loaning has decreased over the years, library staff have found themselves more and more occupied helping people find jobs or filling out government forms online. Although the age of computers has in some ways challenged the tangible database of information libraries supposedly offer, it has also asserted the need for a free space which bridges the digital gap between private and public access to opportunity.

Many homeless people seeking shelter in libraries actually use the internet and computers to work their way out of the situation they’ve found themselves in.

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American public libraries and the aura of collective interface But in spite of the potential to uplift and reinvigorate many underserved populations, you can “Yelp” any branch in the city of Los Angeles and find a host of complaints accusing the building for deteriorating into a homeless shelter. “Such a crying shame,” writes Gavin E., who apparently has 157 other reviews we can read, “An important Frank Gehry building housing very important Hollywood and entertainment collections….The homeless/mentally ill people who practically live here, have made this space a place you just don’t want to visit. Patrons have warned me about bed bugs and lice being present, and transmittable here.”

There is something pathetic and disturbing about an online enclave of self-proclaimed critics condemning one of the last community spaces for opening their doors to homeless. In some ways, these critics gets to the heart of the problem. Public libraries are not Facebook groups or coffee shops. They do not exist in tandem with the web of cavernous, introverted spaces of our virtual world. While libraries and computers are both platforms to access knowledge, their respective interfaces differ on a wide scale.

Researching or simply perusing information on a computer is a deeply reflective and introverted experience. With hyperlinks and search bars that channel our specific and impulsive needs and profiles that curate and filter or interests, we interact with reality which is shaped according to our self-image and thoughts. With total control over our perception of the world, we are rarely surprised. Disturbances and disruptions of the continuities and connection we form to design-specific ideas of the world are almost always tethered to our whim to switch from the New York Times to Youtube, or our shared within the gated communities of our friends and family.

Although we perceive the space of library as a silent, impersonal world, the way we interact with its database is far more worldly, random, and community based. Normally we engage the library with a specific book or desire in mind. Still, it does not reach us instantly the way a hyperlink delivers information. In

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libraries we wander through architecture. We confuse one row of books and numbers for the other, we are exposed to new and sometimes distantly connected information. The book next to the one you need may involuntarily offer a new perspective. The book ten paces away may offer an connection between two ideas previously unmade. In the same way this physical interface exposes us to the randomness of perspectives and ideas, it also subjects us to randomness of a community space. In the public sphere our identities are challenged, placed in question, and sometimes forced realize the world in new ways. This collision of realities is rare and often resisted by the interface of the computer. Outside the digital world, the pursuit of knowledge conflicts and intersects with the feeling of something more tangible and immediate. Although the quiet atmosphere of a library restricts arguments or fist fights from breaking out, simply the presence of a diverse population of physical people can changes the affective quality of a silent room. +++

through which the information we access is understood. Inside the public sphere libraries foster, an auratic tone shapes the very foundation of how knowledge is conceptualized and provided.

Whether they like it or not, public libraries and the resources they offer are bound to this unstable, shifting feeling of collective existence. As the aura of a particular social climate shifts, the relative quality and nature of knowledge libraries provide moves in tandem. For early libraries in the American West, both social and interfacial norms shifted according to the physical and cultural topography of the regions they faced. The means and ends through which knowledge was conceptualized and brought to serve the community changed. Today, libraries once again face a new new social geography. With a growing force of social workers and a new generation of librarians working to support patrons negatively affected by the digital divide, they have once again proved their adaptability.

While the old American library aimed to spread a basic literacy, the new American library is providing a much needed social literacy. A nuanced, human interface of community knowledge and support even the most sophisticated computer would fail to render. American public libraries should not be fighting to keep the little government funding they have, they should be demanding more.

In his “Short History of Photography,” the German theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin defines aura as “a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance of semblance or distance, no matter how close it may be.” For Benjamin, the word aura invokes the feeling of an external reality intersecting with our MILES GUGGENHEIM B’20 did, however, at one internal reality—the fluid, amorphous moments of point, search “the history of libraries” on Google. orientation and alienation that occur as we perceive things and objects outside our conscious. A city square full of people, for example, has a stronger aura then a private room. Although Benjamin stresses the importance of this idea in terms of perceiving art, perhaps we can frame his idea of the aura in how we perceive information as we collect it. Opposed to the digital world, in libraries this auratic quality is immanent. The unstable randomness, the air of liminal uncertainty we experience navigating through public architecture, amongst other identities and bodies, marks every moments

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DEAR INDY...

BY WW and SS ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

I want love but not sex. Help. I know it's a thing, If your concern is with finding someone who will but I don't know how to deal with it! care for you outside of a narrow sense of physical intimacy, then I would assure you that with a lot of commuWW: Forgive me for overreading, but the crux of your nication and a little time, you will find someone who question, I think, is not actually within your question wants to discover the parts of you that have nothing to at all. On top of your question, then, I’ll add my own: do with sex. I suspect, however, that you will first have why is wanting love, but not sex, something to “deal to start discovering those parts yourself. There are so with” at all? A recent story on the cover of the Atlantic many stories that love can help you tell about coming was titled “Young People Are Having Less Sex,” a into contact with the complexity of another person’s decree which was only a hair’s breadth away from the worldview. These stories might lead to sex later on kind of scaremongering articles about how millennials down the line, or they might not. They might instead are killing Applebee’s. Cited among the reasons for be stories about experiences you never knew you cherthis decline was masturbation, Tinder, and helicopter ished, wisdom you never knew you had. In any case, parents (not to mention, say, the larger part of a genera- believing that these stories can take you places you tion getting thrust into economic precarity). To be sure, haven’t been might actually make it easier to hope for some of these might be true for some people, but the the relationships you want, and easier to communicate sheer number of potential causes revealed the fact that versions of being together that don’t have sex as an framing the issue as a problem for sociology to diag- overly pat ending. nose—and, perhaps, solve—might be a little beside the point. Do we have to treat young people’s different view I have been seeing somebody who doesn’t share of sex like a generation gone awry? Why is our sense of my interests and it feels strange, maybe because normalcy clocked to our libido anyways? many of my previous partners have. Part of me Our ideas of sex go largely unspoken in our actual thinks this might be a great way to start to be open lives, yet they’re all but central in cultural fantasies to new experiences, but part of me thinks that I’m about what our lives should look like, making you feel a abandoning a slower process of finding someone little like you’re in a XXX version of the Truman Show: I can really get along with. Is this growth or a everyone but you is horny, and in on the joke. You don’t compromise? have to believe this literally—no one actually does—in order for this silent expectation to exert a powerful SS: I’ll start this off by raising the polemic that, maybe, influence on what you take for granted. Following we never want novelty out of our love lives. I’m tempted the sexual revolution and all of its feminist and queer to suggest that, more often that not, our desires remain descendants, we’ve only just begun to expand our fairly stable over time—even when we try to broaden vocabulary for the sex we do have, let alone the sex we our romantic horizons, the heart wants what the heart don’t. On the side of sex there are such vibrant, capa- wants. I cite this adage because it also gets at the fact cious verbs (a matter of taste, but I find ‘rimming’ to be that desire exists precisely because we can’t rationalize strangely poetic). But on the side of the sexless there it away. It’s exactly because we can’t predict or force a seems to be a dead-end, a lack of the same rich ways to crush that crushes are fun. describe what we do and who we want to be.

There’s a reading of your question that’s more I am drawing your attention specifically to verbs generous to your partner: that you can’t really tell because, just like the rom-coms and pornography whether or not you’re compatible with them, and that which claim to reflect our desires (and which, in this uneasiness is making you intermittently doubt actuality, work to shape them), I think this is partly a your long-term chemistry. Everyone’s been with question of narrative. Consciously or not, many of us someone like that—the sex one night is great, and the enter relationships not for what they are, but for what next day you suddenly realize that you can’t stand they might become, often with ‘sex’ as the thing we’re the way they talk about some lame hobby (tie-dying, moving towards (i.e. a greater intimacy and capacity to playing with Tech Decks, analytic philosophy). I want be vulnerable) or away from (i.e. developing relation- to suggest that it’s nearly impossible to feel completely ships beyond the purely physical). Again, this doesn’t and unconditionally attracted to anyone, let alone have to be true in order to have real effects, and its someone you’ve only been dating for a short while. I’ve status as always a little bit fictional is another valence never started a relationship without considering all of why I’m calling it a “narrative.” Even if you don’t the ways things could be better. The truth is that it’s see yourself stuck within the confines of this all-too- impossible to compare any single relationship to an simple pattern, you might be finding it difficult to find amalgamated recollection of the best parts of your old words to communicate outside of these stories we tell relationships without feeling disappointed. There’s no ourselves, to tell stories that don’t start with sex or to gold standard for compatibility, only different ways of ask someone you already love, “Well, where do we go feeling closeness. It’s up to you to figure out whether or from here?” not you actually feel such a closeness with your current

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partner.

My question to you is this: does the time you spend with this person matter to you as much as your interests do? If they’re bored by your interests, or you’re bored by theirs, then the answer to this question is probably “no.” All things considered, I don’t think you have to tell yourself that openness to new experiences matters enough to determine whether you go on more than one or two dates with someone you aren’t especially into. It may be hard to admit to yourself that you regard this person, who represents a form of romantic stability that’s easy to dismiss as satisfying, as a distraction from your will to live a life pervaded and defined by the pastimes and shibboleths you cherish. The choice at hand isn’t between dating people who share your interests and dating people who don’t. Instead, decide whether or not you want to spend your valuable time taking a chance on someone you find underwhelming.

From my own experience, the process of cultivating happiness alone with yourself is way more challenging—but always leads to the kind of growth that you’re doubting this relationship can provide.

How do you deal with patronizing partners? I want to stand up for myself, but I don't want to fuel an already-imbalanced power dynamic.

SS: First, I want to address a key point you’re suggesting here: that this “patronizing partner” of yours is part of an already-imbalanced power dynamic. I get it, getting close to a condescending person can be super toxic; still, the term “patronizing partner” here feels too undefined to help me figure out what’s making it so hard for you to feel comfortable with this person. Is this patronizing partner someone whose dismissive condescension discourages you from feeling vulnerable enough to vocalize your needs? Do they only tell you they care about you when they want something from you? You might be dating something like a fake friend. For the sake of this reply, I’ll raise a working definition of “patronizing partner” that stresses the way in which your partner’s insincerity allows them to keep you around even as they impose rhetorical sanctions on emotionally honest communication. By imposing this distance within the confines of a serious and perhaps committed relationship, I’m sure that your partner leaves you feeling powerless, even when you aren’t. I want to draw a parallel between the words “patronize” and “pander” because both terms reference faux-sincere speech so unwilling to overcome the task of building closeness that its value becomes transactional, a proverbial carrot on a stick. I seriously hope that their economization of love is unintentional; I hope that they’re not pulling tricks just to enjoy relative dom-status over you. Unfortunately, you might think that your patronizing partner is a great person, despite the fact that they’ve constructed this state of

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unavailability.

It sounds like there’s an imbalanced power dynamic preceding and conditioning your entire relationship with this person, such that standing up for yourself (or just voicing your emotional needs) feels like it’s part of a bargaining process. If this is true, I’d encourage you to reconsider why you’re even attracted to them. But if your problem is just that your partner is primarily relating to you by being patronizing, and you have never started a dialogue with them about how invisible that I imagine this makes you feel, I’d also encourage you to go ahead and stand up for yourself. Except, by standing up for yourself, I mean that you should open up to your partner about how their behavior makes you feel and try to work it out. In fact, try not to imagine the task of communicating your emotional needs as identical to “standing up for yourself.” This person has—I sincerely hope—no actual control over you. They’re being a jerk to you and you’re understandably frustrated. This doesn’t mean you have to ditch them forever (unless you want to)! There’s no way to know for sure whether or not your partner is purposefully being toxic to you until you talk to them.

It’s not unlikely that their patronizing behavior is a poor guise for some deeper insecurity that haunts all their other relationships, too.

At the same time, don’t hesitate to admit to yourself that you’re feeling distrustful of your partner. There’s good reason for this—when they’re being patronizing to you, they fail to acknowledge the fact that you’re a complex individual whose desire for intimacy can’t just be swept under the rug. It’s difficult to trust someone who can’t recognize you as you. Unfortunately, you’re still gonna need to talk. Not because it’s your fault that you’ve ended up with someone who makes you feel so empty, but because you owe honest communication to every single person you know, especially yourself.

You’ll feel a lot better once you know for sure how this person reacts to the simple truth that you feel alone in

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your togetherness with them.

I'm trying to get over someone who I had feelings for, but never expressed. I'd like to move on from something that ultimately never amounted to much, and I'm not sure how to. I feel like this might be a different process than getting over a breakup. Help!

WW: You say that this unexpressed connection never amounted to much, but I want to put out the possibility that it actually amounted to much more than the raw details of your life could possibly describe. For example, there are some days when I feel like I’ve dreamed up a whole soap opera before I get out of the shower in the morning. I can’t tell you the number of men I’ve mentally proposed to on my walk to work. And, perhaps like you, I have had connections with people which have grown not less, but more intense because our intimacy went undefined. These were relationships whose possibilities were allowed to silently multiply until the people I loved left my life, leaving me adrift in visions of a world all the more compelling for having never come into being. Our lives are poor containers for the lives we live in our heads.

Actually, I take part of that back. These worlds aren’t more compelling, or even hospitable; they only feel that way. If these relationships never really started, they also never really have to end. Fantasies are all too easy to sustain, and all too hard to grieve. But this is exactly what I’m suggesting: not a process of forgetting—how can your mind wipe out what it created in the first place?—but a process of mourning.

I have to admit that when I first encountered your question, I had doubts that I ever found a path through this grief myself. There are still songs, tchotchkes, and places in my hometown which send me reeling back to a spot in my life I worry I never really left. And so, with a queasy feeling in my stomach, I consulted with others

about how they fashioned a sense of closure for themselves. For one confidante, this fashioning was material. “Write a letter expressing exactly what you once felt you never could,” they instructed me. “Then burn it, or bury it.” As a fan of the 1996 witchy teen romp The Craft, the notion of hexing yourself into moving on carried a certain amount of romance, like gathering your pals together and chanting “Light as a feather!” to see if you can levitate.

But it was this romance which, ultimately, gave me pause. Though this ritual might be soothing in the short term, it also feels like trying to replace one fantasy with another. This problem is deep at the heart of what makes these thoughts hard to get rid of: lacking what you might consider material proof, they demand to be proven, and whether it’s burning a letter or convincing yourself they loved you back after all, your attempts to furnish evidence that your love was real and that it mattered will always be tenuous, temporary, falling short.

This is why, on top of the material steps I might usually suggest here (focusing on other areas that boost your confidence chief among them!) I am recommending the difficult imaginative task of dealing with this unrequited connection on its own terms. What this means, essentially, is knowing that there are no more questions to ask of this time in your life, nothing more to know, and nothing left to prove. It means living with a question that doesn’t have an answer. It also means recognizing the very thing that I started this response with: sometimes the most important experiences we have can only be our own. You loved this person—that, at least, was real.

If this still seems vague, it is likely because I don’t know what shape it would take in my own life either.

I suspect it would feel like forgiveness, for both the person you loved and, most importantly, for yourself.

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The most erotic film I’ve ever seen was made in 1950.

It’s a silent French film that lasts all of twenty-six minutes. It’s very gay.

Does any of that surprise you? It shouldn’t, but it might, and understandably so. That we live in an age of widely and instantly accessible information doesn’t mean we’ve escaped the trap of cultural amnesia.

The film in question—Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour (A Song of Love)—was nowhere to be seen on Out Magazine’s recent list of the “15 Greatest Queer Sex Scenes in Film History,” whose oldest entry, Gia, came out in 1998.

I was born in 1998. Read Out and you’d think queer cinema was too. But the problem here isn’t just a general cultural illiteracy; it’s the formulation of a history in which queer representation is endlessly novel, even though nothing could be further from the truth. Look at Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts, Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied.

Hell, there were gay hieroglyphs.

This false history is perilous. Being here and being queer remains an essential political act, and letting touchstones of queer representation slip into the ether of the forgotten past is one step towards queerness itself getting ground to dust and scattered to the winds.

If we’re not represented, the thinking might go, then we must not exist.

I don’t mean to overstate the case. Queerness will survive Out leaving Jean Genet off their listicle. But I’m touchy about such negligence because, in denying queerness a past, Out’s list feels like an infant form (or, more hopefully, a vestige) of driving the queer into the dark and stubbornly insisting it’s just a phase. How could something with no history be anything but? The consequences of this kind of denialism have lately been on my mind, thanks mainly to two recent cultural events that crawled under my skin and stayed there, insistent in their ugliness. First was the recent article in the Atlantic about Bryan Singer’s history of sexual abuse; the director of films such as The Usual Suspects, X-Men, and, most recently, Bohemian Rhapsody, Singer has allegedly been abusing teen boys for decades. And second: the based-on-fact FX miniseries American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Ryan Murphy’s hypnotic, disturbing exploration of the linked lives of Andrew Cunanan, a gay serial killer who went on a murderous spree in the late 1990s, and Gianni Versace, the gay Italian fashion designer who would eventually become one of Cunanan’s victims.

Together, the stories of Singer and The Assassination of Gianni Versace point us to a question: what are the dangers of disinterest, disaffiliation, even disgust, toward queer people and their culture? +++ “Nobody is going to believe you.” Cesar SanchezGuzman remembers Bryan Singer saying the line to him during a yacht party, just after the then seventeen-year-old Sanchez-Guzman tried to tell the yacht’s owner, Seattle tech millionaire Lester Waters, that Singer had raped him. The phrase is hardly unique; it’s the theme upon which many an abuser spins

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a variation to cow his victims into silence. But in this circumstance, in this instance of awful trauma inflicted by one man on a teenage boy, the phrase takes on a new register of meaning. To be believed is to be known—to be revealed to the world—and that’s always a scary thing. But it can be especially so in the realm of the queer. Sanchez-Guzman didn’t immediately tell his parents that he had been raped, because he hadn’t yet told them that he was gay. The anxieties here run parallel—who wants to be known as something that the world isn’t prepared to reckon with? Two years after the assault, Sanchez-Guzman married a woman—a childhood friend—and kept up the false front of a relationship for eight years, suffering from anxiety and depression all the while. And a lawsuit he filed against Singer in December 2017 is still churning its way through the system, as Sanchez-Guzman waits for a positive recognition of his experience that may never come. The world remains loath to acknowledge him.

The same might have been said of Andrew Cunanan. Cunanan, the serial killer played by Darren Criss in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, is something of an enigma. He lies pathologically. He assumes many different names and tells many different stories.

He wants to be known, but as what? Criss plays him with a Norma Desmond-like desperation for the spotlight that’s churned into something even more chilling by the vigor of youth and relentlessness of sociopathy.

“If being a fag means being different, sign me up!” he says at one point. Cunanan delights in his own specialness, but he isn’t special in a way that the culture is eager to reward. He wants to be a star and he wants to be gay, and he wants to be those things at the same time. The show is set in the ‘90s, when the avenues to such an existence are few. Cunanan finds one—he has, after all, been immortalized in a television show—but it’s streaked with the blood of six men, five of them gay. +++ Watching Gianni Versace in the wake of the Singer allegations, it occurred to me that Singer and Cunanan both operated with a sociopathic expertise attuned to the distinct vulnerabilities of many gay men, leveraging a culture of shame and repression to sate their own monstrosity. One of Cunanan’s victims was Jeff Trail, a gay naval officer who was discharged in 1996.

The show devotes an episode—perhaps its most explicitly political—to Trail’s experience in the Navy during the time of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 1994 policy that barred openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual people from serving in the United States military while also prohibiting discrimination against closeted service members.

You can be gay, it decreed, as long as we never catch you being gay. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” remains one of the most astonishingly weird federal policies in American history—not only because its name bore the awkward tonal seriousness of 11-year-old blood brothers, but also because of the obviousness of its artifice, the way it proudly legislated a nation’s military into sticking its head in the sand. It was a sign of a country refusing to know its people.

In the episode, itself titled “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,”

Trail (Finn Wittrock) meets Cunanan at a gay bar in San Diego. Trail has never been to such a place; he’s still in the Navy, and being gay in public is a dangerous game.

Trail, alone at the bar, feels out of place, and soon gets up to leave. Cunanan stops him with two words: “First time?” Criss plays the scene with a finely tuned physicality. His elbow resting on the bar, his head resting on his hand, he looks at Trail intently, his lips drawn into a sly smile as his eyebrows jump up just a bit. Trail stops, his body tight. “That obvious, huh?” “There were a few clues,” Cunanan responds in a queeny drawl. He’s saying to Trail, with every part of his body, “I know you.”

In that knowledge lies power. The thrill and the danger of recognition collide. Tonight, it’s just thrills— Trail tastes freedom, Cunanan his charming steward.

But Cunanan knows how to wield that knowledge as a weapon, too. Months after they’ve met, he sends Trail a postcard, bearing a romantic message and signed “Love, Drew,” but he addresses it to Trail’s father, who doesn’t know his son is gay. It’s an implicit threat that only works in the world of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and the attitudes it represents, where self-knowledge is a secret to be kept and a burden to be borne. Cunanan signals to Trail that by knowing him, he can destroy him. After their first meeting, their relationship gradually becomes more prickly and unsettled, thanks mainly to Cunanan’s increasingly erratic behavior. He eventually spins out of control, and, two years after their initial meeting in San Diego, bludgeons Trail to death in a Minneapolis apartment. But it all started— the potential for that violence opened up—when Cunanan saw him for who he was.

The moment between Cunanan and Trail in the bar echoes an earlier encounter in the episode. Trail finds a closeted gay sailor in his command sitting in the locker room, tending to his wounds after being beaten by his mates. The sailor begs Trail to get him reassigned; he can’t stand the torment any longer. Trail, standing in front of him, moves close, and caresses the sailor’s cheek. It’s a bristlingly erotic gesture of solidarity, a gateway to a desperate hug and a tacit understanding. But it’s also a vision of the safe and sincere compassion Trail himself deserves to find, and that Cunanan will later only appear to offer. That’s the risk you run looking for connection in a world that doesn’t want to know you. +++

Almost concurrent with the institution of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was the development of a new term: the “glass closet.” It refers to the state of being quietly understood as queer without having ever publicly come out, and over the years, the likes of Jodie Foster, George Michael, and Anderson Cooper have occupied the weird, liminal position it represents. Like “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” it’s evidence of straight fragility gone wild, where any explicit acknowledgement of queerness sends hoards of heterosexuals into a pearl-clutching, sometimes violent frenzy. The Assassination of Gianni Versace smartly connects the two; in the course of a single episode, it features Jeff Trail’s reckoning with

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BY Zachary Barnes ILLUSTRATION Miranda Villanueva DESIGN Christie Zhong

Bryan Singer, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and brushing up on your history

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” and Gianni Versace’s decision reasons unrelated to the sexual abuse allegations, is to publicly come out as gay after spending years in nominated for five Oscars. There’s a bitter irony to the the glass closet. “I’ve never said it,” Versace (Edgar fact that Singer directed one of the highest-grossing Ramirez) plainly states. “I’m gay.” Despite his sister’s films ever made about a real-life queer person (in this concerns about how it will affect the famed fashion case, Freddie Mercury), but the film has also been house they run together, he resolves to come out in an widely criticized as being fundamentally uncomfortinterview with the Advocate. Versace recognizes that able with its protagonist’s sexuality. Plenty of people the glass closet is still a closet, and that he has both the still thought it worth the price of admission, though— privilege and the responsibility to step out of it. it has cleared more than $200 million domestic—and Jeff Trail also feels the pull of political respon- that’s usually what matters most in Hollywood. When sibility. His experience with the gay sailor in his the Atlantic first released its exposé, Singer was slated command drives Trail to do a TV news interview (with to direct the comic-book adaptation Red Sonja, and his face in shadow) about his experience as a gay man producer Avi Lerner rejected calls to remove him from in the military. Cunanan urges him not to do it. “You’re the film for weeks afterward. The whole project was not famous,” he says. “Nothing’s gonna change.” But quietly shelved in mid-February.

Trail won’t be dissuaded: “It’s something I need to Meanwhile, Singer himself responded to the do. I can’t explain it any better than that.” He feels article in the Atlantic by calling it a “homophobic compelled to resist “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and, more smear piece.” It’s a nifty trick that activates the anxibroadly, to participate in the political project of making eties of straight people for whom queer culture remains queerness known. a complete unknown. It seems likely that somewhere Cunanan is a sociopath; making the world a better in that morass of ignorance, gay sex remains inextriplace doesn’t move him much. But he does care about cably linked to pederasty, and that people are reluctant the politics of celebrity and what they might offer him, to act in condemnation of the latter for fear of slipping and it’s for that reason that he has Gianni Versace’s in a judgement of the former. Singer benefits from that Advocate interview taped to the wall of his closet. As a anxiety, but it pervades the culture beyond him. Just character explains late in the season, Cunanan’s fasci- look at the recent news about a wealthy white gay man, nation with Versace stems from the tantalizing pros- Ed Buck, in whose Los Angeles apartment two black pect of what the designer represents: being “so rich men recently died of drug overdoses under mysterious and so powerful that it doesn’t matter that you’re gay.” and under-reported circumstances. A West Hollywood That’s what Cunanan wants—to be an exception to the councilman told the Los Angeles Times that the story world’s rules. He has no interest, as Trail does, in doing “says a lot about the dark underbelly of gay culture.” But the hard work of changing them. the more acute problem may be the lingering perception of all gay culture as a “dark underbelly,” where +++ the behavior of people like Andrew Cunanan, Bryan Singer, and Ed Buck shocks and surprises less than it The necessity of that work persists today; the case of does confirm lingering suspicions, the tragedies they Bryan Singer makes this clear enough. The article in create maelstroms of deranged and violent fuckery the Atlantic was published online on January 23, 2019, that’s only to be expected from those goddamn though it was a long time coming. Rumors and lawsuits disgusting queers. have dogged his career for years. For now, though, it Of course, “queer” as a category expands far remains basically intact—Bohemian Rhapsody, for beyond cisgender gay men; deflating its definition to which he is the credited director despite being fired just that one population is antithetical to what the word three-quarters of the way through production for represents. Those at the margins, like queers of color

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

and trans and nonbinary folx, are most vulnerable to the malevolent ignorance here described, and any queer political project that doesn’t highlight them can be summarily tossed into the trash. And while I’m in the business of late-in-the-game stipulations, here’s another: visibility isn’t power. Being “known” will not by itself relieve queerness from the weight of deeply entrenched oppression, and carries with it its own perils. But I’ve harped on “knowing the queer” because the stories of Singer and Cunanan seem to point to the particular dangers of keeping the queer unknown and at a distance. I want these stories to point us to a practice of bringing queerness, in all of its forms, out of the shadows.

Which brings me back to Jean Genet. Though complete knowledge of other people is, in truth, impossible to ascertain, knowing the queer can still be a meaningful political horizon. It’s something to strive for, and Genet can help. In Un chant d’amour, two prisoners occupy adjacent cells, separated by a thick concrete wall. They are gay, bored, and horny, and devise a delicate but powerful method of connection: after feeding a straw through a hole in the wall between them, one of them blows cigarette smoke through it as the other sits open-mouthed on the other side, drinking in the smoky kisses. It’s an erotic connection between two men as breathtaking as I’ve ever seen on screen.

The film was banned for years after its production; now, it’s streaming on Kanopy. Fail to watch it, and it might as well still be censored. So go give it a look. Know thyself—or begin to know what queer can be. Some of us are counting on it.

ZACH BARNES B‘20 is busy watching old gay movies.

ARTS

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T URIST TRAP Geosure tries to build a safer world—but for whom?

BY Liam Greenwell ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Lulian Ahn

I open Geosure and the map populates with nearby scores. There’s a lot of green, implying “low risk.” One of the nearest yellow icons sits in Boston’s South End, a 41. Worldwide, the map is scattered with numbers, ranging from 1 to 100, and colors, green to red. There are more than 35,000 location-based “security” scores on the app. Often broken down to the neighborhood level, Geosure claims to seek a “safer, more predictable world” through this data. Brought to market in 2017, the company’s app has been recommended by NBC News and Travel & Leisure and sits at 4.8 stars on the App Store.

Geosure uses 75 main data points from hundreds of different agencies to inform the primary facet of its score. These include local and regional crime stats; data from the United Nations, Center for Disease Control, FBI, Interpol, and more; macroeconomic factors (such as the rate of inflation versus GDP, which correlates to social unrest); the number of medical facilities; and the number of police employed per square mile. In addition, Geosure’s scores are informed by unstructured data analysis powered by machine learning, which includes local language news processing and crowdsourced “experience reports.”

The company’s website asks, “Travelers know where the water is safe. But what about the streets?”

Aggregating vast quantities of data to create a supposedly-objective number, Geosure says it gives users that answer, hoping that consumers and companies will treat it as fact. Similar aggregations, based on crime data, have recently come under scrutiny for the inherent bias, racial and otherwise, that infect these systems that many proponents nonetheless tout as infallible. Geosure wants to set itself apart from these systems but, skeptical that a truly objective number was at all possible, I tested a few cities in the app.

Delhi, India is a 74, implying “high risk” according to the app. Providence, meanwhile, is a 29; Atlanta is a 58; Damascus is at “highest risk” at a 98. This means Providence is 45 points away from Delhi, whereas Delhi is, in turn, only 24 points away from Damascus.

I wasn’t sure how to read this: Damascus is still in the middle of a war, while Dehli is experincing no open conflict and is home to some of the best healthcare in the world. Without a written explanation as to what these scores mean in practical terms, I was confused about what they meant.

Seeking clarification, I reached out to Daniel Madden, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer of Geosure Global. In a phone interview, he told the College Hill Independent that the lack of explanation accompanying the scores is an attempt to work against “information overload” in other travel safety datasets, such as the U.S. Department of State’s travel advisory

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system. “Ambiguity creates anxiety for travelers and paints entire countries or regions as unsafe,” he told me. Geosure wants to create a timely, granular system that “anyone can understand.”

Still, I told Madden that I didn’t quite understand this easy-to-understand system. He was surprised, at first, that I had once felt safer walking around Delhi than the 74 score would suggest. But then he clarified that the scale is not linear in terms of discomfort, equating it to a temperature scale. A location above 80 would have more of an “acute risk to your person” than somewhere like Delhi.

It nonetheless seemed faulty to claim that one safety score can be applicable to everyone. We know that, on a basic level, different governments advise their citizens differently on travel: in 2017, Canada warned its travelers that “the frequency of violent crime [is] generally more prevalent in the U.S. than in Canada”; the same year, the government of the Bahamas warned its traveling citizens to “exercise appropriate caution” around American police because of the prevalence of shootings of young black men in the US. Geosure attempts to tailor its scores to individuals, with separate scores for female and LGBTQidentifying travelers. These scores are informed by local laws and specialized statistics. Geosure is the first to publish scores like these, and this has garnered the app positive press attention.

But if the scores are based on flawed or incomplete data, as the crime prediction systems often are, then the scores could be informed by those biases. And even if the data were perfect, the practical meaning of a score for a given traveler would change wildly. It would have to confront race, class, and more, as well as whether the chosen data would be applicable to a specific traveler’s feeling of safety. For example, the number of police in an area might make some feel safer­­—but it might make others, for instance men of color from the Bahamas, feel that the area is less secure. The effectiveness of the score relies on the assumption that people experience feelings of safety in broadly the same ways, based on the mutual intelligibility of the “importance” of certain statistics. But this assumption is flawed, and suggests the company’s audience is smaller than it would like to admit. +++ One year ago, the U.S. Department of State revamped its travel advisory system. It now has four levels corresponding to the degree of threat: from “exercise normal precautions” to “do not travel.” A spokesman from the Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs told the Indy in an email exchange that its

advisory system “makes it easy for U.S. citizens to access clear, timely, and reliable safety and security information about every country in the world.” Each country has its own report, with descriptions about the reasons for each score.

Geosure’s other competition includes location-based crime “heat maps,” mostly developed to aid homebuyers or realtors in selecting a neighborhood.

These companies, which include NeighborhoodScout and AreaVibes, conglomerate data from law enforcement agencies and run models to predict the frequency of crimes compared to other neighborhoods.

On NeighborhoodScout, Providence has a score of 10, which means it is more dangerous than 90 percent of US cities. But, Kate DeVagno, a marketer at NeighborhoodScout pointed out, different neighborhoods have different scores—the area around Brown University is a 66, meaning it’s less crimeprone. She called the data an “objective assessment” of a community’s risks when I asked about inherent bias in the product. “We stand behind the accuracy of our data.” But these prediction models confront the same problems as the ones used in law enforcement: as the American Civil Liberties Union has claimed, the models are only as good as the data fed in. Crime data is emblematic of the “historically biased criminal justice system,” not exempt from it.

Daniel Madden from Geosure is convinced by neither the State Department nor the heat map approach. Geosure is betting that individuals and companies want something different from either a government-produced, human-written analysis or localized predictions based on a few data points. Part of that bet involves the belief that consumers will trust Geosure’s claim of universality. Whereas the State Department operates on a federal level with a specific focus on American travelers and NeighborhoodScout is limited to US cities, Geosure wants you to believe that its score is applicable everywhere, and to everyone—and that it is not susceptible to the same biases to which it admits crime data is susceptible.

“We utilize a big data predictive analytics approach in order to eliminate any inherent bias,” Madden said, citing the 75 major data points and the two “unstructured” sources of data (AI-informed language processing and crowdsourced reports) that go into the score. But there are two major problems with this approach. First, Geosure dismisses crime data as susceptible to bias, but still bases the weightiest part of its score on other data potentially susceptible to the same biases. Moreover, Geosure takes no responsibility for the actual collection of data, and the company does not regularly audit its collection methods or the data’s accuracy. Madden said that Geosure counters

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this by aggregating its data to minimize the effect of outliers. “We’re not reinventing the statistics wheel here. We’re minimizing errors in our regression by using a very, very large sample,” he said.

Though Madden’s point may be true for a dataset with all 75 points, it’s unclear how much (and which) kinds of data go into any given score. All scores look the same on the app, and there’s no indication that some might be more reliable than others. This is especially pertinent for those ratings in parts of the world that are both stigmatized internationally and subject to more uncertainty about day-to-day security—a place where Geosure’s scores could be legitimately helpful for a risk-management firm, for example.

That’s the second problem: there are many places in the world where those 75 data points are hard to come by, and so the Geosure score might by necessity be based more and more on the kinds of data that Madden criticizes as being insufficient on their own. Just last year, the UN pointed to “alarming gaps” in its own data on migrant children because of the “extremely challenging” nature of gathering data on vulnerable classes, especially in war-torn regions or places with little government oversight. Geosure is not trying to track migrant children, but the UN’s statement reveals that the progenitors of much of this data are aware of issues that surround it. The scores remain untrustworthy, then, as long as the details of their creation are shrouded in generalities rather than specific disclosures about the method of building each score.

it that way. Recently, they have embedded their score within other apps, such as TripIt, a travel organizer. On their website, they target their services to risk-management, insurance, and study abroad companies.

Geosure plans to add 6,000 data points for additional North American neighborhoods soon (as of this month, Providence only has a city-wide score). The company sees itself as part of a virtuous cycle, whereby a good score can lead to “greater trust in government institutions...increased tourism, more jobs, better performing economies,” and “a higher quality of life,” according to its website.

But Geosure also must reckon with the question of whether it is only reporting a public service or if it is also creating new, unfounded trepidation—or overconfidence—about the security of certain locations.

Its process rests entirely on the validity of both its data and its process for manufacturing that data into an “easy-to-understand” number. That is, the process does not take into account which data are used in a given location, let alone any metric to measure the trustworthiness of that data or when or how AI-based or crowdsourced tools are implemented or not.

But so far, there seems to be little self-reflection about the power of Geosure’s claim of objectivity, with these concerns in tow. The score remains an artificial system that gives consumers little hint as to how the sausage gets made, or how to change their behavior based on a given score to make their travel more secure.

There is also the serious concern, despite the company’s catering to women and LGBTQ-identifying travelers, that the company has not seriously probed +++ its assumptions of who the service is, and could be, for.

The app’s relative rankings reveal a tension between a Geosure’s app is free, and the company intends to keep focus on an objective, data-based system and one that

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

relies on an intuitive understanding of what relative rankings mean. Geosure does not confront the possibility that one's reasons for feeling “secure” are tied their identity and, notably, does not currently have plans to add a ranking that accounts for race in meaningful ways.

There is clearly a power structure involved in the act of scoring the security of a place on the other side of the world (supposedly objectively) without having members of those communities take part in the system’s creation. And a similar dynamic of power is inherent to tourism itself. A visitor gazes at the supposed “authenticity” of a foreign place, evaluating and interacting (or not interacting) with locals in prescribed ways, locals who sometimes don’t have the financial means to engage in the same ritual elsewhere.

Behind the utopian claims that Geosure is working for a “safer world” is the implicit assumption that there are those in the world who can choose whether to engage in less-secure areas—and those who have no choice.

Despite its overtures about inclusive scoring, Geosure must still prove that its scores are not only applicable to people who are implicated in neocolonial assumptions about the act of travel, assumptions which are irresponsible if not confronted. Until then, Geosure remains a service that claims universal application but whose scores—the creation and rigor of which are still suspect—only apply to a small subset of the global audience it claims to reach.

LIAM GREENWELL B’20 is currently browsing the App Store.

SCIENCE + TECH

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15 FEB 2019

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

16

SIX MEN SPOTTED PARK ROLLER RINK ROB

It is hard to avoid looking at one another on the rink because you’re in a circle: somebody’s always following you, you’re always following somebody. That being said, men like Rob try to mind their own business as much as they can. If they could just ask Keith to turn off the lights, they would more than happily skate around in pitch darkness, the sound of their wheels gliding smoothly over lacquered wood as the only evidence they were in the room. Or better yet, if they could build miniature rinks in their homes, so they could flip their own light switches, and roll around in their own total darkness. I am glad none of them do, though. It means I can watch them. If they don’t want to look at me while I do it, so much the better.

This is Rob’s routine: he spends the first few minutes at Glen Park in his car in the parking lot. This is what the kids my age usually do, taking last swigs from disposable water bottles before stumbling in. I thought Rob fell into this camp for the first few weeks until I started listening closer on my smoke breaks and heard the arias. Only the highest notes from his speakers could pierce through the plastic and metal of the sedan, and when the parking lot was quiet enough it sounded like someone was sending morse code signals from a long distance. After about fifteen minutes of sitting in the driver’s seat with his eyes closed, Rob would turn off the radio and step out onto the asphalt, the laces of his skates already tightened. He had been wearing them in the car.

After such a ritual, you’d think he’d be a better skater than he actually is. Perhaps if we played any opera he’d be able to skate like he does when his eyes are closed in the driver’s seat, with class, with grace.

Perhaps it’s just because he’s always looking down at his feet.

AL

Al runs the snack bar. Sometimes he wants it to be like a chaste, off-brand Cheers, and sometimes he just wants to go home. Near the end of my shift, when nobody new is renting skates, he gestures me over to do some tandem reconnaissance.

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When is Jazzercise Guy gonna topple, he asked me one night.

He doesn’t have his skates tight enough, I said.

Nobody ever has their skates tight enough. All that work is going to his ankles.

You’d think they’d learn, Al said. Or that they’d feel it.

They’ll feel it in the morning, I said, reaching over and taking a stale chip from the corner of his nachos.

Al took one too. No, he said, you’d think they’d know they’re not rolling smoothly enough. When my dad taught me how to skate as a kid, he told me that I wouldn’t be doing it right until I felt like I was flying. It took me until after I was a kid, and all that time I knew I was fucking up, because it felt like I was on a pair of stilts with wheels. My dad would try and correct me whenever he came with me; he never said practice is perfect because he wasn’t perfect and I wasn’t perfect, so why bother. I always wanted to skate behind him to follow his technique, but he stayed behind me and shouted commands instead. I guess that’s why I can’t really picture my dad skating, Al said, ‘cause I never got to watch him.

Al scraped the last remnants of the Cheez Whiz with the edge of a tortilla chip while I tried to remember if I’d ever seen him skate, even once.

CAS

Glen Park’s self-appointed star, Cas, emerged from the disco era highly enriched, and he wants everybody to know it. Most of his tricks are variations on a pelvic thrust, but he has a new title for them each time he comes in, which is at least weekly. The pattern for this is an adjective or a verb plus a ’70s film starlet’s last name. The Freaky Fonda. Struttin’ Streisand. He shouts these to Al, who consistently flashes a peace sign despite being a little pissed that this is going on year three for this particular ritual. As with most of the cheesiest things about Glen Park, you kind of have to be a good sport.

Cas’s friendship with Keith Fortune, the rink’s DJ, is a constant point of discussion between Al and I, mostly for its obscure origin.

Cas needs his alliance, Al once conjectured, otherwise how’s he going to keep at least one Commodores song on the playlist every Thursday? I see Al’s point; there are always a few songs that sneak in close to Thursday’s closing time, and when they come on, Cas looks up at Keith, does the Kickin’ Keaton, and winks.

Glen Park, Connecticut, was far from the jive even forty years ago, so it’s hard to imagine their sense of sharing a history as anything more than being similarly groovy people in a decidedly less groovy world.

Still, when they’re alone together, it’s easy to imagine them enacting memories from the same life.

When I take out the trash on Thursdays I like to hover near the dumpster at the back of the lot and watch them smoke the joints Cas stashes in his oversized shirt cuffs. In the cast of the spotlight over the parking lot it’s hard to tell their silhouettes apart, their only distinguishing feature being who’s holding the flame at any one time. The quiet of that hour is so profound that after three years of listening to it, it’s all I can hear of their friendship, so that when Cas waves at Keith blasting some Supremes record over the loudspeaker, he does it with the sound of a decade long silence.

BRUCE

I should say that these men’s names are entirely my own invention, unless they pay by credit card, when I can keep their receipts and record them in my log.

It took a minute to attach Bruce’s face to his receipt when I found him vomiting in the bathroom. Nausea isn’t uncommon at Glen Park, simply because we strap disorienting footgear on people and tell them to go in a circle for five hours. Bruce underestimated the effect of this, and like most other college kids, took the retro charm of the activity as a call to get ironically soused beforehand.

The puke was unironic, his tears even less so.

When I took his hand after I had mopped around the toilet, it felt genuine, even though his eyes couldn’t stay fixed on mine, and kept rolling backwards in his head.

The moment would remain unchanged by his remembering, I decided, because he wouldn’t remember it at

15 FEB 2019

AT THE GLEN AND REC CENTER all. So I stayed there to hold him up from falling into the The doorman! Matt shouted, and grinned up at me. toilet until one of his friends came in and I pretended That’s right, Dave said. That’s right, I echoed, and to be management, screaming How the hell did you wanted to cry. Dave skated over to the snack bar and let this happen, I’m not here to take care of your sloppy hunched on the plastic bench across from Al’s counter, friend, what the fuck is wrong with you? his back to the rink. I could hear some of what he was saying every time Matt and I passed. No, you can’t have DAVE him on Saturday, the Cougars game is that morning Dave comes in with his son Matt every Sunday after- and I told the school I’d volunteer to coach. We made noon, when we offer our less-popular Matinee Skate a lap. I know weekdays was the agreement Mandy, but for half-price. I’m pretty sure Dave makes sure he has can’t a guy just go and teach his son how to do a manly exact change, because he always makes a big show of thing for goddamn once. Another lap, I was skating passing off a $5 bill to Matt so he can pay his own dues. backwards but I wasn’t as good as Dave so I kept sliding One time Dave spent the last of his cash in the lobby across the rink, and Matt’s eyes kept swimming. I don’t vending machine, and as he was swiping his credit know why he likes it here so much, it smells like some card Matt gave me a look of supreme guilt, like he was queer’s jockstrap. I kept getting more and more ahead stealing something very precious. I didn’t have the of Matt, but I wanted to look closer into his eyes to see if heart to tell him that I was glad that I could finally learn he knew that word, knew what it meant. I tried to slow his dad’s name from a receipt. down, forgetting that you can’t use the back brakes Unlike Al’s dad, Dave is a great teacher. He learned when the back of your skates are traveling forwards. how to skate backwards pretty early on so that he could Matt tumbled into my arms as I was falling. It was skate and talk to Matt. Just relax, Dave says. Keep unclear whether I was catching him or he was catching your eyes on me. His smiling face, when it’s facing me, me. keeps floating further away as Matt chases it. Then I didn’t see this at the time, but Dave twisted his they round the corner and I watch Matt bite his lip in ankle as he leapt over the partition between the snack determination as his dad rolls closer. Face, turn, face. bar and the rink, after the crash. I only saw him once They never take their eyes off each other, but it seems he had crawled over to where Matt and I lay, our limbs to work, because they never fall either. entwined and splayed out together. For a minute he lay That is, except for one day about three months ago, down next to us, and we were three forms huddled on when with every lap Dave seemed to look a little more the parquet floor. He shook with laughter. Well, aren’t through Matt to the bland sheen of the floorboards. we pathetic? Dave said, and continued to chuckle The skin under his eyes was heavy, and maybe purple, as skaters stopped to help him and Matt up from my although the light at Glen Park is always low and it was tangled form. hard to tell. On lap twenty, he looked up and met my gaze. Usually when men notice I’m watching them, I MAN #6 try to look extra bored, but this time Dave regained his Sometimes I dream that they know I’m watching. What smile, and I smiled back. tricks would they do for me, if they did? What grace Dave waved me over. Would you mind skating would they find? The men who come alone usually with my son for just a minute? he asked. I have to take a circle listlessly, like their own vultures. As opposed to call. He smiled again, apologetically, like he was saying Jazzercise Guy, who skates like he’s charging a battlesomething he silently knew I would understand. front, they don’t seem to care whether they’re finishing Of course, I said, I love kids. any laps, even when they’re on their three hundredth.

He turned to Matt. Do you know who this is? he Don’t they know going nowhere is what rollerskating asked. is about, that it’s beautiful, that we’re doing it all

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BY Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION Julia Illana DESIGN Christie Zhong

the time? I dream of them slowing, starting to spin, turning, turning, pirouetting in place.

On certain nights, when the flask under the counter is nearly empty and the fumes from the skates’ leather turns sweet, I forget to name the men. Maybe it’s me not wanting to—without names their rotating shadows seem all of a piece. Who’s to say they aren’t in orbit around each other, that the thing pulling them around and around is the strange attraction of being a moving body surrounded by space.

Man #6 lifts one of his legs, and my eyes train on him. All eyes train on him. He is the center; all the skaters are speeding towards him now, or drifting away.

He keeps his arms and leg suspended as he rounds the corner towards the snack bar, and it seems like he will keep them up forever, or that his last leg will lift up too and he’ll float up to the ceiling.

Al sees this, gives a loud hoot, and flashes me a thumbs up. I know he watches, too, but doesn’t watch himself watching. After however many years, it’s hard not to feel for these men as they lift themselves from the weight of their bodies, as they let their skates carry them out of their skin. Few do it, but the ones who keep returning here find their way. It is what will keep Man #6 coming back, and it is what will keep me watching him: the repeated realization that your body can feel something new again, after all this time.

On the day that I quit this place, I’ll go out and join them. I’ll tell Keith to fire up the rink’s 4-manual Wurlitzer pipe organ, which hangs from the center of the rink, nearly forgotten until Organ Night every year when the elderly come meander across the rink, remembering ballrooms. He’ll play some old classics for me, too: Til We Meet Again, Let Me Call You Sweetheart, You Belong to Me. I’ll tell him to turn down the lights, and the men and I will float out onto the rink in total darkness, all of us in an eddy of what we can’t see.

LITERARY

18

it's the (grocery)

list

A secret location!

SAT 2.16 Adult Mom, Bad Moves, Strawberry Generation, The True Jacqueline

AS220 (115 Empire Street) 9PM-12AM // $10 Let’s play a game: is it an indie rock band or a lesson in vocabulary on a kindergarten-level? 1. Snail Mail 2.

Hop Along 3. Soccer Mommy 4. Told Slant 5. Girlpool. Obviously this is a trick question, and this List Writer (LW) is bitter about the state of band names in 2019. I’m sure, however, you don’t have to regress as a person in order for this to be a fun night.

SUN 2.17 Macrame Plant Hanging Workshop

Bolt Coffee (96 Calvery Street) 12PM-2PM // $35 As far as I know, John Waters’ Polyester features the only scene ever to grace the silver screen which depicts macrame as a murder weapon. Should you want to shoot a sequel, however, you’re going to need to do some crafting first. Complimentary mimosas are included in the ticket price, potted plants are not.

MON 2.18 KIDZ BOP Live

Mohegan Sun (Uncasville, CT) 4PM // $49-$69 Nothing but respect for MY tiny singing presidents!!! Seriously, Presidents’ Day is (appropriately) dead this year, so it’s either sitting at home and wishing that our country was run by a worker’s council or driving to Mohegan Sun to watch children do a rendition of Pretty Boy Swag. I think we both know which is the right call.