The College Hill Independent Vol. 39 Issue 3

INSIDE: THE PROJO’S PROSPECTS, BOLSONARO’S DESTRUCTION OF THE AMAZON, AND MS. MONOPOLY

A Brown/RISD Weekly / September 27, 2019 / Volume 39, Issue 03

the

Indy Contents

From the Editors

Cover sometimes I pee with my dog Ethan Shaw

I was just solicited to write this. It’s what I get for coming to Conmag at peak copy hour, I guess. Not that it isn’t a good thing. It’s a good thing!

News 02 Week in Veneers Loughlin Neuert & Nickolas Roblee-Strauss

Since getting to campus three and a half weeks ago, the mere thought of the Indy has stressed me out. What am I supposed to be doing? Where do people get ideas from?

How do I find sources? Why is everyone so smart? And cool? And good at picking apples?

03 Our House? Not Quite.

Auria Zhang

Last week, I wincingly looked back at my application, tempted to ask BCT why they accepted me. My most compelling hypothesis so far is that it’s a social experiment.

Science + Tech 05 A Common Cold War Mohannad Jabrah

It’s okay though. I’m making it work. Four hours ago, I sent in my first draft. Then I showed up here and copyedited a few pieces. And now I’m writing this. So you could say my budding relationship with the Indy is moving pretty fast. Or maybe the two of us are just a thing at this point. All I know is we’re involved.

Arts 07 The Year of Yeehaw Alisa Caira

Regardless, I definitely have a crush. When you’re starting something new, stress happens. But mostly it’s exciting. And for now that’s what matters.

-ER

13 On Desire & Being Desired Anabelle Johnston Metro 09 Treading Water Ricardo Gomez & Peder Schaefer Ephemera 11 Deep-Rooted Fears Sindura Sriram Literary 12 But No Let’s go Big dog Seth Israel

Mission Statement

17 Pink Slime Sindura Sriram

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.

Features 15 Bodytalk Parisa Thepmankorn X 18 Surfacing Tension Mariel Solomon

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

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

Week in Review Gemma Sack News Jacob Alabab-Moser Izzi Olive Metro Victoria Caruso Alina Kulman Sara Van Horn Arts Zach Barnes Seamus Hubbard Flynn Features Mara Dolan Mia Pattillo Science + Tech Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru

27 SEPTEMBER 2019

Literary Catherine Habgood Isabelle Rea Ephemera Eve O’Shea Sindura Sriram X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Comberg Ella Rosenblatt Tiara Sharma Staff Writers Alan Dean Muskaan Garg Ricardo Gomez Jennifer Katz Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Dana Kurniawan

VOL 39 ISSUE 03

Deb Marini Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Emily Rust Issra Said Peder Schaefer Star Su Kion You Copy Editors Grace Berg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Cherilyn Tan Design Editors Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong Designers Kathryn Li Katherine Sang

Illustration Editor Pia Mileaf-Patel

Web Ashley Kim

Ilustrators Alana Baer Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Fatou Diallo Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Owen Rival Charlotte Silverman Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Stephanie Wu

Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel

Art Director Claire Schlaikjer Business Somerset Gall Emily Teng

Alumni+Fundraising Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs

MVP Ricardo Gomez & Peder Schaefer *** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Senior Editors Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang Managing Editors Ben Bienstock Tara Sharma Cate Turner

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

BY Loughlin Neuert & Nickolas Roblee-Strauss ILLUSTRATION Georgianna Stoukides DESIGN Christie Zhong

WEEK IN VENEERS LOOKING PRESI-DENTAL The 2020 presidential race has opened with such an oversaturated field of candidates that sometimes distinguishing between them all is like pulling teeth.

During the September 12 Democratic presidential debate, former Vice President and frontrunner Joe Biden struggled to answer a tough question on the NRA. With Biden failing to ‘reach across the aisle’ and find a congressional majority post-Sandy Hook, journalist David Muir expressed doubts over the grinning ex-VP’s competency. But Biden’s response—relatively coherent compared to the rest of his performance that night—was quickly overshadowed. Viewers everywhere were overwhelmed by the strange mouthal calisthenics that accompanied his words. Was it gum?

Or were those winning pearly whites—just like the notoriously plagiarized 1987 Iowa State Fair speech that imploded his 1988 presidential run—flashy, but not of his own creation?

This probable denture mishap gave fodder to existing claims that the 76 year old may be too long in the tooth for the job he aspires to. Talk of his age, speculated senility, and failure to win a primary since 1973, not to mention the substance of his policies and voting record, play second fiddle as the New York Post, alongside others, shriek, “Joe Biden struggles to keep his teeth in his mouth,” placing the very gleamers that make him popular in jeopardy.

But American presidential history is no stranger to those who lie through their teeth. At its root are the ivory shiners (mythologized as wood) behind George Washington’s stony smile. Washington, insecure about the puffy appearance of his denture-laden jowl, posed most often with a stern frown. An existing complete set of his choppers—fashioned from a smorgasbord of human, animal, and ivory teeth—can be viewed at his estate in Virginia. Another such gem can be found at the National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore, where his lower jaw denture dated to 1795 grins in perpetuity.

Biden’s own smile, an icon of the Obama years, may find its home alongside Washington’s someday. Indeed, his embodiment of silver-haired manhood recalls the dignified aged appearance of our founding fathers.

That said, Biden would certainly flash his canines with more confidence were he crossing the Delaware.

Today’s televised debates are now criticized for their value as entertainment, and not as an opportunity to bite into ‘the issues.’ Commentators often recall the original televised presidential debates between a visibly anxious Nixon and infamously handsome Kennedy in 1960, an election theorized to have been won on visual charisma alone. Since the advent of televised debates, America has not elected a balding

president, although nearly every candidate has been male and of typical balding age. (A balding Gerald Ford won neither his VP nor Presidential position through national election.) Biden has ensured that his own hairline creeps forward with what the Independent can only assume are state-of-the-art hair plugs. Cory Booker, in unconventional style, naively awaits his own surge in popularity once he perfects the sheen on his hairless crown.

The ubiquity of the camera has certainly heightened the physical scrutiny of our public figures. Joe Biden himself has capitalized on this phenomenon, with resurfaced photos of his attractive youth and the nostalgic foundation of his campaign, Obama-Biden memes. But while the visual narratives of a campaign delight us, such frivolity only goes so far. As eighteenth century politicians presented themselves with vacant stares and decided frowns, today’s politicians don rolled up sleeves and phony smiles. A benign set of gnashers offset any failures in action, indulging the instinct to forgive that which is visually pleasing, a dental mask to the words that slip out from behind.

Biden’s orthodontic acropolis sparkles where his words fail to shine. What can I say, Joe, dentures or not, smile away.

-NRS THE LANDLADY'S GAME Everybody knows not to buy the utilities in Monopoly.

It’s just not worth sinking your hard earned cash into the electric company when you could be focusing on more lucrative properties. But what if you had a little more cash on hand? And what if the Electric Company was called ‘Wifi?’

In Hasbro’s newest edition of Monopoly, which aims to be “the first-ever game in the Monopoly franchise that celebrates women trailblazers” by flipping the pay gap, women receive 20% more money at the beginning of the game and when passing go. The streets and avenues of Atlantic City are replaced by products and technologies invented by women— Boardwalk and Park Place are now ‘chocolate chip cookies,’ and ‘stem-cell isolation.’ The railroads are rideshares, a significant loss for mass transit. A new array of tokens includes a wine glass, private jet, watch, dumbell, and notebook. Jail is still jail.

If Ms. Monopoly has served any social purpose thus far, it would be the antagonization and frustration of dozens of the angriest online trolls. Madeleine Kearns of the National Review calls its rule change “patronizingly pointless.” And the concerned and

angry citizens of the reviews pages of Target, Amazon, and Walmart seem to echo the negative sentiments of media pundits. Walmart.com’s MrEquality penned a one-star review entitled, “Our families deserve better.”

It seems that any recognition of the real world wage gap, and any embrace of a reparative process comes across as a transgression to the rabid sexists (and there are plenty!) of the board-gaming world. Feeding the trolls may not be a winning strategy, but it certainly is cathartic.

Still, questions abound. What makes this Monopoly ‘Ms.?’ What about the rigid and ungraceful gender binary that the rules enforce—does Hasbro really believe the human race is composed of exactly two genders? What is inherently more ‘Ms.’ about rideshares or wine glasses? What does an extra 40 dollars do in the game itself? That’s less than two nights of rent at Marvin Gardens (aka life raft)! More importantly, what does an extra 40 Monopoly dollars in a game do for actual women in the actual workplace? As Amazon user RZB sardonically commented, “I bought this in the hopes that the 12-year old girls in China who work the printing factory for this edition of Monopoly get a 5 cent raise.”

The switch from ‘collecting’ properties to ‘investing’ in inventions is a little clunky, and it remains to be seen how one would conceptualize building a little hotel on “retractable dog leash” or paying rent to the owner of "acupuncture tool." Still, it seems at least to be a way to shine a light on and celebrate the achievements and excellence of women whose labor often goes unrecognized.

In fact, the Hasbro corporation would do well to shine that light right back around on themselves.

Monopoly itself is a stolen, watered-down version of the Landlord's Game, the creation of Lizzie Magie, an outspoken feminist and anticapitalist who intended her creation not as glorification of rent-seeking capitalism, but as direct criticism. Hasbro has been lining its pockets with the fruits of her labor for almost a century while giving her nothing but lip service—500 dollars and a small note of recognition on the newest few editions of the game. Hasbro would have you believe, as the cover of their Ms. Monopoly edition suggests, that we can build a suburban, car-dependent (there is still free parking), Ayn Randian utopia where the chocolate chip cookie reigns supreme.

Ms. Monopoly presents the double-edged danger of profit-driven corporate politics: cheapening a social movement while empowering (and enriching) the executives.

The Independent is wondering whether the Hasbro executive management team (one woman and seven men) may have tried to ‘lean in’ so far that they’ve fallen on their faces.

- LN

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

OUR HOUSE? NOT QUITE. On August 19, São Paulo, Brazil went dark at 4 PM. Drivers in Brazil’s most populous city were forced to turn on their headlights, creating a stream of white and red on the highway, and others took out their phones to record the phenomenon, triggering thousands of feeds around the world to light up with #PrayforAmazonia.

The murky, midnight-like darkness was due to smoke from about 10,000 forest fires in the Amazon Basin.

Low-lying clouds from a cold front combined with strong winds, blowing the smoke across a span of 2,000 miles. That day, locals found black water in containers used to collect rainwater. Soot, they realized, was what darkened the water.

After photos of the smoky eclipse in São Paulo were published, the burnings garnered international attention and condemnation, notably by the leaders of Germany and France. Germany previously suspended around $39 million in donations to projects under the Ministry of Environment due to concerns over increased deforestation, according to Deutsche Welle.

French president Emmanuel Macron called the fires an “international crisis” and took to Twitter to call for putting the issue on the agenda for the G7 Summit, which occurred on August 29. Macron also took a jab at Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, saying that he was lying about his commitment to climate change. “Our house is burning. Literally,” Macron stated on Twitter.

In response, Bolsonaro accused Macron of having a “colonialist mentality” and for utilizing a Brazilian issue for “personal political gain.” The crux of his argument is that the Amazon is Brazil’s sovereign territory.

And, regardless of whether or not the French president does have the mindset Bolsonaro accuses him of, France’s history with colonization is undeniable.

There have been more than 87,000 forest fires this year, the highest number since 2010, according to the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research.

Official figures show an 84 percent increase in forest fires compared to the same period last year with little over half originating from the Amazon rainforest.

Many of them are caused by escalation in human activity.

Due to the alarm over the Amazon fires, Bolsonaro has come under increased scrutiny. Despite only taking office this past January, the Brazilian president has overseen the increase of man-made fires by the thousands. Much of the burning has been linked to Brazil’s agriculture and agribusiness industry. The

03

NEWS

role of the Bolsonaro administration in this? Allowing production moved to the north of Brazil and “is now in free rein to illegal burning. the Amazon.” Specifically, production is occurring in the rainforest part of northern Mato Grosso and a diag+++ onal strip at the port of Santarèm, according to Philip Fearnside, research professor at the National Institute During his political campaign, Bolsonaro argued that for Amazonian Research, at the Pulitzer Center.

Brazil was underusing its natural resources, including the Amazon. In part, the president was referring to the +++ Constitution of 1988, which recognized Indigenous peoples’ right to their traditional ways of life and Bolsonaro’s actions have allowed a flippant disregard to lands they “traditionally occupied.” Bolsonaro for the law. His blaming indigenous people as obstacles wanted to overturn that. “He promised [there would to development and criticizing environmental protecbe] no more demarcation of indigenous lands and [he tions as too stringent “sends a clear signal to ranchers would] do everything possible to limit environmental and agribusiness that the federal government is not restraints to encourage more agricultural and live- serious about enforcing environmental regulations,” stock production,” said James Green, Carlos Manuel wrote Andre Pagliarini, a lecturer in Latin American, de Céspedes Professor of Latin American History at Latino, & Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College Brown University and director of the Brazil Initiative and a contributor to Jacobin, in an email to The College at the Watson Institute for Public and International Hill Independent. “He has created a climate of impunity Affairs, to the College Hill Independent. But recent for those who would profit most from deforestation.” history shows that economic growth and deforestaIn Brazil, legal reserve legislation requires a proption do not have to be synonymous. From 2004 to 2012, erty to leave 20 percent of its area for conservation if Brazil grew soy and cattle production while reducing it is in non-forest or cerrado areas of the Amazon, 35 deforestation by 80 percent by encouraging farmers to percent if in cerrado areas, and 80 percent if in forest improve efficiency and utilization of land they already areas of the Amazon. But since taking office, Bolsonaro own. has siphoned away funding from government agencies Bolsonaro’s call to exploit more resources is in charge of enforcing that law, according to Green. consistent with his political image. Bolsonaro himself IBAMA, the Brazilian Ministry for the Environment’s came to power through the influential political coali- administrative arm and the organization that oversees tion of the BBB—Boi, Bala e Bíblia, or Beef, Bullet, the protection of the rainforest, saw its budget cut 25 and Bible. The first B refers to the agribusiness sector, percent. which along with agriculture, constituted 23.5 percent In an episode of the podcast UN Dispatch, Rebecca of Brazil’s gross domestic product in 2017 according to Abers, professor of political science at the University Reuters. Brazil, after all, is the world’s largest exporter of Brazil, explained that one of the things Bolsonaro’s in beef and soybeans. The latter product, in particular, government did was “take the responsibility for deforis closely linked with Bolsonaro’s presidency. Take estation away from the ministry of the environment,” a look at any map depicting soybean production in which essentially reorganized Brazil’s government.

Brazil, then compare it to a map of Brazil’s 2018 presi- The employees in those divisions were left without dential election. Those who voted for Bolsonaro largely work. “They’re just sort of sitting around,” Abers said, inhabit states where soybean production is flourishing. “Basically the institution has stopped operating.”

Scientists in Brazil supported by the soy sector say This near purge of employees in institutions with the Amazon is not directly a victim of deforestation climate-related missions ranged from contractors to for the cultivation of soy because the majority of the the Director-General of the INPE. Around the time crop is planted in the Cerrado region, or the savannah, when the international community erupted over the which is located in the south of the Amazon, said fires, Bolsonaro fired the director of INPE, a governEstevão Fernandes, Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor ment research center internationally recognized for at Brown and adjunct professor in the Social Sciences its tropical forest remote-sensing applications. Its realDepartment at Universidade Federal de Rondônia in time Deforestation Detection System (DETER) is used Brazil. But the problem, in Fernandes’s eyes, is that soy to quickly identify areas where illegal deforestation

27 SEP 2019

A look into Bolsonaro's policies and the Amazon

BY Auria Zhang DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

is occurring and warn law enforcement. DETER has helped reduce “deforestation in the Amazon region when used in conjunction with law enforcement actions,” INPE said.

Earlier, the former director, Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão, released INPE’s annual report detailing an increase of 88 percent in deforestation this past June compared to the same month one year ago. In response, Bolsonaro claimed that the goal of the report was to malign Brazil’s reputation. “The numbers, as I understand it, were released with the objective of harming the name of Brazil and its government,” Bolsonaro said in a press conference. After defending the accuracy of the satellite’s data, Galvão was fired.

Ricardo Salles, Bolsonaro’s secretary of environment who was convicted of environmental fraud late last year, believes the solution to the wildfires is to “monetize” the forest, according to the Financial Times. Like Bolsonaro, Salles believed that the regulations were too restrictive in the development of areas in the Amazon, pushing people to break the law. The secretary is a proponent of zoning regulation, which would open up the Amazon for development, one of Bolsonaro’s goals.

“The problem is that Bolsonaro is bringing all the government institutions to the cattle side,” said Fernandes. By replacing government employees with people who agree with his policies, Bolsonaro effectively created an imbalance in the democratic system.

“It is not just [about] the soy, not just the forest, but also the politics behind all of this,” Fernandes added. +++ With increased international pressure from other countries regarding the Amazon forest, Bolsonaro has changed his rhetoric, instead accusing foreign governments of wanting to utilize the resources in the Amazon for their own countries’ gain. “Brazil is like a virgin that every pervert from the outside lusts for,” he said when discussing deforestation in the Amazon, according to The New York Times. In an address to the United Nations, Bolsonaro kept his disturbing portrait of the Amazon as a woman, saying that the forest “remains pristine and virtually untouched.” His public platform no longer mentions utilizing the Amazon’s natural resources. But privately, he continues to expand efforts in doing just that. Two months ago, Bolsonaro nominated his son to be the U.S.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

a hardscrabble existence,” he continued. Other countries are limited in what they can do. Rather, it is Bolsonaro’s policies and goals that are doing the most harm to the Amazon and those living in the forest. +++ The solution, as Green sees it, is to support efforts to put pressure on Brazil to return to previous environmental protection regulations. This would take a variety of forms ranging from protests to letters to Congress.

Green referenced a group of environmentalists, many of them youths, who went to the Brazilian embassy in Israel to voice their concern. Similar actions have been taken in other countries, from Colombia to South Africa. In contrast, Mat Jacobson, Senior Director of Forests at Mighty Earth, a global campaign organization, argued in an interview with the Independent that more attention should be given to agribusiness and corporate consumption as a whole.

“Just as [the Brazilian people] have the right to decide who their leaders are, we have the right to decide what we buy” as consumers of Brazil’s products, said Jacobson, who was also highly involved with other campaign organizations, including Greenpeace in Canada and the U.S. “I don’t think that’s an issue of sovereignty at all.” Jacobson’s reasoning was that if there was no market for the products, there would be no incentive to burn down the forests.

He added that this year is the fifth-year anniversary of the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), in which governments and companies agreed to halve the rate of deforestation by 2020 and end natural forest loss by 2030. The declaration was first endorsed by the United Nations Climate Summit in September 2014. However, it is voluntary and non-binding if an endorser is unable to or does not uphold their promise.

Jacobson pointed out that JBS and Cargill, two large food processing companies that agreed to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains by 2020, have yet to do so. With only three months left in the year, it “is likely impossible” that 2020 targets will be reached, according to a recent report released this month by NYDF. “This destruction in the Amazon is a direct result of [companies like Cargill] not following through on their commitment,” Jacobson said. “They need to be held accountable at a point where consumers have influence.” This method would attack the meat of Bolsonaro’s objective: opening up the Amazon for development.

ambassador because he believes his son can “get a deal with Trump to encourage U.S. companies to come in and take advantage of the Amazon,” Green explained.

Bolsonaro’s hypocrisy is evident in the same address he made to the U.N. “The Amazon is not being devastated nor is it being consumed by fire, as the media is falsely portrayed,” the president said. “Do not hesitate to visit Brazil.”

In his defense of Brazilian sovereignty, Bolsonaro accused other governments of wanting to interna+++ tionalize the Amazon, which, Green notes, plays well to Brazilians of all political stripes. By making that What the international community can do to effect allegation, the Brazilian president was able to weave change while respecting Brazil’s national sovereignty, a story that the extensive flora and fauna, the green however, remains ambiguous. Engage embassies and in the national flag—and by extension, Brazil itself— opening discussion on the issue? Or create change is under threat. “Bolsonaro is changing the whole by impacting one of the most important sectors of environmental problem into a nationalist problem,” Brazilian economy? Then, as Bolsonaro likes to harp Fernandes added. on, there is also the hypocrisy of developed countries However, Green cautioned that the issue should denouncing what Brazil, a developing country, does be raised in a way that does not disrespect Brazil’s with its natural resources when the former historically sovereignty. “The way you raise the issue should be profited from their own and other countries’ resources. appropriate. In other words, not in any way indicating By appealing to all Brazilians, Bolsonaro effectively you have any desire to internationalize the Amazon,” created an 'us vs. them' mindset, turning the focus of Green said. Green drew a parallel between the domestic critics away from his own destructive policies.

Amazon and natural lands internationally, asserting “If the international community sounds interventionist, that the Amazon is as much the world’s as “the Great chances are that Bolsonaro will be more successful Plains [and] the Rocky Mountains… The Black Forest in rallying [Brazilians] around the flag,” said Matias in Germany is the world’s also. So, I think we have to Spektor, associate professor of international relations respect national borders.” at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, in an interview with The Brazil, Green continued, has a right to decide what Washington Post. happens within its own borders. Talks about internaAt the 74th Session of the United Nations, tionalizing the Amazon, which constitutes 60 percent Bolsonaro stated that Brazil had “suffered in the hands of Brazilian territory and is an integral piece to the of international media because the fires in the Amazon country’s identity, would only alienate Brazil’s citizens, awoke in us a feeling of patriotism.” Olavo de Carvalho, further stoking Bolsonaro’s inflammatory accusa- an ultra-right wing political pundit who was, according tions of a modern “colonialist mentality.” A headline to Bolsonaro’s son, instrumental in helping Bolsonaro published in early August by Foreign Policy—“Who will win the election, said the Amazon “must be occupied invade Brazil to save the Amazon”—caught the eye militarily. Amazonia is ours and we have to assert of Bolsonaro supporters, who then utilized it to raise national power there. End of story.” Occupar para não alarm over the possibility of foreign intervention. entregar indeed.

It is an age-old concern, and one Brazil has Fires in the Amazon tend to peak in the September historically been troubled by. In the 1960s and ’70s, dry season. It remains to be seen how serious our Brazilian generals overseeing the Amazon operated prayers for Amazonia will need to be. under the phrase occupar para não entregar, “occupy it to avoid surrendering it.” But they did so without AURIA ZHANG ’22 urges people to keep the pressure acknowledging the millions of people already living on Bolsonaro. in the Amazon, many of which are “desperately poor,” wrote Pagliarini. “They need jobs, incomes, sustainable ways to live that do not depend on perpetuating

NEWS

04

BY Mohannad Jabrah ILLUSTRATION Indy Staff DESIGN Christie Zhong

A COMMON

COLD WAR The political history of phage therapy Mount Sinai Hospital in Brooklyn has a fungus problem.

In May of 2018, a patient was admitted for abdominal surgery. He was found to have an uncommon fungal infection that was resistant to standard antifungal drugs. The fungus in question was Candida auris. First discovered in 2009 in Japan, it has spread to hospitals all over the world—Spain, South Africa, Pakistan, India. 29 countries in total have seen C. auris infections in hospitals. In New York state alone there have been over 300 reported cases, most of them in Brooklyn and Queens.

What makes C. auris such a lethal threat is its persistence. C. auris cannot be killed by standard antifungal treatment, leading to a mortality rate of nearly 60 percent. C. auris also spreads very easily. Patients infected with the fungus shed C. auris from their skin, enabling it to easily stick to surfaces and medical instruments.

C. auris is an example of a new class of pathogens known as “superbugs.” Superbugs are bacteria and fungi that are resistant to commonly available antibiotic and antifungal drugs. These diseases are an especially concerning issue for the current healthcare system because of our heavy reliance on antibiotics.

However, antibiotic drugs are not the only method of treating infections. Another form of treatment— known as phage therapy—has recently come into the spotlight as a potential substitute for antibiotics. But phage therapy is not a recent discovery. While it was originally pioneered by Soviet scientists in the early 1940s, due to Cold War tensions this lifesaving treatment was suppressed in the West and rejected as a legitimate medicine. +++ In his 1945 Nobel Prize speech, Alexander Fleming— the Scottish scientist behind the discovery of penicillin and antibiotics—gave a stern warning regarding the overuse of antibiotics. Fleming cautioned against rampant, unnecessary use of the drugs. Such reckless action, he predicted, would give rise to more hardy bacteria resistant to antibiotics. “[The] thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment,” he said in Oslo, “is morally responsible for the death of the man who succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism.”

05

SCIENCE + TECH

Fleming’s warning, however, was futile.

Antibiotics have since been recklessly maldistributed and unnecessarily prescribed. Patients regularly receive a course of antibiotics even for minor acute respiratory infections when the drugs are in fact unnecessary. The US Centers for Disease Prevention & Control (CDC) estimates that over half of antibiotic prescriptions are made hastily and without consideration of other options. In many cases their overuse exposes bacteria to antibiotics without killing them, allowing the bacteria to develop resistance against antibiotics. The emergence of these drug-resistant superbugs has significantly diminished the rate at which we are producing new medicine. This can be explained by superbugs’ evolutionary mechanism, which allows for the consistent adaptation and change.

Antibiotic overuse is also an issue in farming and meat production. Livestock farms that overuse these types of drugs are essentially breeding grounds for these superbugs, as it is an environment that allows a quickened onset of resistance towards antibiotics. In one case, Merck, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, published a direct statement to the FDA urging them to implement greater restrictions on the use and distribution of antibiotics.

Such practices threaten the utility of antibiotics, which are no longer thought of as the ‘last line of defense’ against disease. Instead they are used to quickly eliminate infections, giving bacteria the exposure they need to adapt their own defences and to evolve to eventually become superbugs. Bacteria that used to be easily eliminated, such as gonorrhea, have now evolved around these antibiotics.

As terrifying as this antibiotic crisis may appear, a solution does exist. Many medical experts have recently considered using a specific kind of diseasecausing organisms to kill bacteria. Known as bacteriophages, or “bacteria eaters,” these alien-shaped viruses are known for their ability to infect bacterial populations with deadly diseases. Because of this, some medical institutions believe bacteriophages may play a role in the crisis of antibiotic resistance.

The potential of bacteriophages lies in their evolutionary superiority. Bacteriophages depend on the presence of a bacterial ‘host’ cell to replicate. The bacteriophage injects its DNA into the host cell, triggering one of two responses. The phage DNA either

stays in a latent phase where it continues to get passed on to future bacterial generation or its proteins are activated, leading to the creation of new bacteriophages.

These copies burst from the bacterium, killing it.

Bacteriophages are strong candidates for solving the antibiotic resistance crisis because they are able to reproduce regardless of whether the infected host bacterium is resistant to antibiotics. In other words, phages present themselves as a deadly killing machine capable of wiping all sorts of bacteria that evolved to resist the drugs that contemporary medicine churns out.

Known as ‘phage therapy,’ the concept and technology of using these natural bacteria killers to fight antibiotic resistant pathogens has recently been of much interest to the global scientific community and several renowned medical institutions—such as the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, San Diego—due to a desire to incorporate it as a modern panacea to drug resistant bacterial infections. +++ From a historical viewpoint, ‘fighting disease with disease’ through phage therapy is not new—it first emerged in the 1920s as an unexpected byproduct of the medical arms race of the Cold War. As a result of the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time, the withholding of medical advancements was used as one of many militant tools and political instruments that served to further amplify the gap between the two countries. Distribution of antibiotics— wonder medicine at the time and produced mainly in the West—was restricted with the aim of denying access to the Soviet Union. As a result, Soviet medical professionals were left to develop their own alternative to antibiotics. The result was phage therapy.

Initially proposed in the 1940s as a substitute to the Soviets’ limited supply of antibiotics, phage therapy was implemented in the clinical setting and was used as the primary basis for treating patients. The results of a large number of these clinical trials that supported the effectiveness of phage therapy were published in Russian-language academic journals from Russia, Georgia and Poland. Patients with bacterial infections came from all over the Soviet Union to the Eliava

27 SEP 2019

Institute of Bacteriophages in Tbilisi, Georgia to receive treatment with phage therapy.

Decades later, in the 1980s, the antibiotic blockade ceased, and subsequently the medical research surrounding phage therapy technologies halted as penicillin began to dominate the medical field in the Soviet Union. In the West, a culture of mistrust towards Soviet technologies also served to increase criticism of phage therapy and other medical technologies used by the Soviets. It is important to note, however, that the declining interest in manipulating phages to treat infections was not because method was ineffective. Rather, focus shifted towards the development of other medical technologies because of the scientific barriers posed by the Cold War, and because of the lack of extensive knowledge of bacteriophages in the West.

Nevertheless, some former Soviet countries continued to utilize this form of treatment. In addition, longstanding phage therapy medical institutes such Eliava, which was founded in 1923, are living testaments to the proven effectiveness of phage therapy.

advancement of medicine. In an effort to delegitimize Soviet science, the American medical community inadvertently rejected a real breakthrough. The long legacy of this politically-motivated blindspot asks us to think critically about how the progression of the antibiotic resistance crisis could have been different had the U.S. accepted phage therapy as a viable medical tool.

What’s more, it forces us to ask ourselves about the possibility of other similar ‘miracle’ discoveries that were stifled or ignored. The history of medicine is not sterile. It is interwoven with the history of nations and global conflict.

MOHANNAD JABRAH B‘22 has a head cold.

+++ Nowadays, medical professionals continue to hold opposing viewpoints regarding phages. While some attest to its potential, others are more skeptical. Many scientists take issue with the fact that Western science has yet to fully recognize and comprehend many of the intricate details of bacteriophage biology. Our limited understanding of phage-bacterial interactions is especially concerning in the context of injecting these bacteriophages into patients’ bodies. Additional criticism against the technology stems from the fact that phage infections are incredibly specific, meaning that a specific phage can only interact with a very limited number of bacterial strains. This piece of criticism gives rise to questions about the practicality of the technology. It gives phage therapy the image of something that is not quite compatible with the current pharmaceutical industry. Perhaps most worrisome of all is the fact that, similarly to how bacteria evolve to withstand antibiotic medicine, this technology may also mutate through means that we do not fully understand.

Nevertheless, phage therapy showcased itself as a dependable medical technique after scientists and physicians at the University of California San Diego hospital treated a man named Tom Patterson.

Patterson’s infection—caused by a multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii—could not be treated by antibiotics. Comatose and in a near-death state, Patterson’s health deteriorated until UCSD receiving FDA approval to use unconventional phage therapy approach. Over the course of many months involving intravenous administration of ‘phage cocktails’ directly into Patterson’s body, doctors discovered that the infection was slowly fading, and that Patterson was able to recover from his coma.

Phage therapy’s success in Patterson’s experimental trial gives us much hope with regards to combating antibiotic resistant superbugs. The revitalization of phage therapy, however, reveals much more than merely an antibiotic drug problem. It is a crystal clear confession of how politically-driven censorship and suppression can act as a barrier to the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SCIENCE + TECH

06

THE YEAR OF YEEHAW John Wayne movies may obscure the history, but the cowboy began from a Spanish imperialist practice: Spanish colonialists forced Indigenous Latin Americans into cattle herding. Though the American cowboys who emerged out of this culture were Black, white, brown, and Indigenous, the mythical American cowboy developed primarily from white settlers’ violent visions of the frontier and laws made at their discretion.

Now cowboys and the culture surrounding them can be observed in cowboy-boot filled stadiums across the United States, but also in a dizzying array of collaborations, remixes, fashion senses, and new genre-bending styles of music. Insertions of American country music have become increasingly international and significant, one example being the release of “Seoul Town Road,” a BTS remix of Lil Nas X’s iconic “Old Town Road.” Though the original song was not the first trap-country crossover, it swept the nation and the world in an unexpected mix of genre, internet, and sociocultural positioning, stemming from the song’s unique rise to fame and the character of Lil Nas X himself. The genre-bending didn’t stop there either.

Cupcakke’s “Old Town Hoe” also took a try at the crossover along with many remixes, fueling the song’s extended hype.

Lil Nas X wasn’t the first hip hop artist to take on a country sound. Predating the Yeehawpocalyspe, Kol Moe Dee released “Wild, Wild West” in 1987 and Mo Thugs Family released “Ghetto Cowboy” in 1998. On both of these tracks, depictions of cowboys are used to make the songs stand out as narratives of their performers as cowboys. More recently, Lil Tracy and Lil Uzi Vert released their track “Like a Farmer” on May 17, 2018. Solange’s When I Get Home gave recognition to her Southern home of Houston. Beyonce recorded her song “Daddy Lessons” with the Dixie Chicks in 2016. Megan Thee Stallion has consistently embraced country iconography in her work and fashion. Even “Big Green Tractor” became a successful trap remix.

At first the crossover might not make sense; it didn’t to me until I found myself in a conversation with Suzi Wu, a musician who blurs the lines of genre in her own work. She classifies her sound as something between early hip-hop and 80s indie rock with her London background shining through everything. She views herself as both a cowboy and a witch, using the imagery of both eagerly in her music. During her set at the Governors Ball, a music festival in New York City, she joked about how she started “the Year of Yeehaw.”

After her set, I got the chance to ask her if she meant it, to which she replied that she obviously didn’t, instead crediting trap and hip-hop for the year’s extended Yeehaw theme. She explained that the transition of country into trap was obvious, since trap musicians “are the law of the land and, if they were cowboys, they would be the law of the land.”

Suzi's statement is complicated. The grammar of her phrase draws a clear line between being and being recognized as being. Rather than having these musicans be recognized as “the law of the land,” they simply are it. Their position as creators and foundational characters of “the land” is swept to the side as the cowboys that America makes ample room for continue to dominate.

Historically, cowboys were cattle herders and, more significantly, perpetrators of a frontier mentality that assisted in the decimation of Indigenous American populations. These characters have since expanded far outside of their initial histories, becoming an iconic American symbol and, through that, leaving remnants of their violent pasts in popular culture up until the present. Additionally, these cowboys have become increasingly fictitious, filled with societal constructs that grant a vision of a cowboy with little basis in history and instead filled with a dominant American imagery of power, lawlessness, and a certain bravado. When Suzi Wu said hip-hop and trap musicians are the law of the land, she was saying that trap

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and hip-hop musicians have, in theory, the modern characteristics we associate with the cowboy that are being praised anew. These musicians are the creators of their own path, following rules unique to them in a genre that is inherently innovative. They blaze trails where before these paths simply didn’t exist. However, these musicians, due to their lack of connection to White America, are placed outside of its narrative.

Their music is taken out of the land and considered as something new instead of something stemming from a longer American tradition. The most popular music of the present day is left out of a larger American history which prioritizes fictitious reimaginings of the cowboy over full understandings of the histories of erasure, violence, and exclusion.

That’s where the difference between country and other genres becomes apparent. The “cowboys” of country have historically been listened to. That is, their narrative of white men galloping across the South and the West on horses and, nowadays, in trucks has been prioritized in visions of the United States and its history. Meanwhile, the plural histories of the United States have been ignored. Black cowboys have essentially been erased by an exclusionary American culture that maintains itself by erasing evidence of difference. Additionally, people who were never given the chance to be cowboys in the first place are never given a chance in these visions at all. Today, I believe the word cowboy is taking on new meaning while maintaining its historical roots. Cowboys, as always, are “the law of the land.” They demand power, and they receive it through their avoidance of the traditional mechanisms of acquiring power. However, today’s cowboys cover much more ground than the cowboys of the past who were entrenched in a violent, oppressing history. These new cowboys of the present are appearing across cultures and, in this case, across genre.

Trap and hip-hop artists have, in many ways, gained more and more recognition in the popular music scene over the past few decades. There are innumerable ways in which these artists have been able to place themselves into different listening spheres. I want to focus on the intentional use of cowboy-infused country and virality across genres, examining how the cowboy became a tool to generate space for under recognized artists. Case in point: Lil Nas X. “Old Town Road” is a trap song that, as much as it can, draws on cowboy iconography. It began on Soundcloud before becoming a sensation on the short-form video app TikTok. On TikTok, virality can easily emerge as users are quick to perform their own versions of the app’s most watched videos. One of these viral videos (cowboy themed, obviously) features Lil Nas X’s song in the background, the performer transforming to the lyric “I got my horses in the back.” As TikTok itself was blowing up, the funny, catchy song rose with it, climbing quickly (and controversially) up Billboard’s charts and landing Lil Nas X the record for the longest running number-one single ever.

Lil Nas X is considered by many to be a meme gone too far, but his rise is much more complicated. When he first released his song on Soundcloud and Spotify, the ‘country’ tag placed on it brought him a wave of unprepared listeners and let him trend in a less competitive category than hip-hop. This same move would spark the Billboard chart controversy that got him removed from the country chart in a spurt of media coverage. As a media torrent surrounded Billboard’s racist decision (and the deliberation that followed), Lil Nas X signed with Columbia Records, started recording remixes, and quickly rose to his current success.

These movements, far from being accidental, were a strategic utilization of country as a genre to help Lil Nas X carve out the space in the music industry he desired. Lil Nas X, partly from his prior experience running a popular Twitter account, knew the potential of taking the strongly associative image of a cowboy and applying it to a genre of music that relies on none of the same traditional imagery. This movement works

due to the potentially similar demands for recognition and space made by country and hip-hop artists despite their drastically different positions and imageries.

Additionally, coming out of an internet era of abundant cowboy imagery (look no further than the Wal-Mart yodeling kid, the “Howdy, I’m the Sheriff” meme, the “wot in tarnation” meme, and the new wave of fashionable cowboy attire), the furthering of the movement to the next stage was exactly what the public didn’t know they wanted. Lil Nas X was able to see the potential of this moment and, in pairing it with country’s attributes, cast himself as 'the cowboy' who insisted he was the law and, accordingly, became it. By the time anyone stepped back from the meme, Lil Nas X had claimed his space and position, becoming a black, queer man in country before mainstream America had even considered the possibility.

Lil Nas X was able to gain such a position by, in his own words, going down an “old town road” and “ridin’ ‘til [he] can’t no more.” While this old road of the cowboy is paved with a horrific history that must remain considered, here, Lil Nas X is using that road to take what was taken. His use of the cowboy becomes a reclamation, telling a violent history that it no longer can hold all of its former power.

Now, as a viral video of him shows, he struts into elementary schools in full country attire to masses of screaming, six-year-old fans singing his songs back to him line for line. As a modern day cowboy, this space, and an increasing number of others, are wide open for him as the world looks on. Wearing a cowboy hat, Lil Nas X enters without question, in part by playing on the imagery and persona that students like these would be used to dressing up for as Halloween, learning about in classes, and seeing across the rest of their media culture. The space reserved for the “law of the land” cowboy is taken back and used in an entirely new direction.

While Lil Nas X may be the most visible example, this isn’t the first or only time 'the cowboy' has been used to vault an 'un-country' artist into a place of mainstream recognition. Early in this new wave of public cowboy fascination, Mitski released her album Be the Cowboy, furthering the same country themes found in her music video for “Your Best American Girl.”

That video featured Mitski performing and professing her desire and inability to be “Your Best American Girl” because, as the video shows, she’s not the white, skinny, boho-chic girl wrapped in an American flag that the “all-American boy” highlighted in the video wants her to be. In the video and on the album, Mitski makes sense of and reclaims her place as someone outside of the “all-American” narrative the video constructs. While the white Americans in the video beside her aggressively make out, she makes out with her own hand before changing into a golden dress and walking off of the video’s set entirely, exposing the viewer to the backside of the entire operation. Mitski opts out of all-Americaness and exposes the complications behind it, fully realizing and making the audience aware of the fact that she has other things ahead of her. With her album, Mitski demonstrates what exactly that might be; she decides to play a different character in the story.

While Be the Cowboy’s cowboy imagery is less distinctive than that in Lil Nas X’s work, Mitski’s work prioritizes the channeling of the persona of the cowboy.

As she says in an interview with the Outline, “whenever I was in a situation where maybe I was acting too much like my identity, which is wanting everyone to be happy, not thinking I’m worthy, being submissive, and not asking for more. Every time I would find myself doing exactly what the world expects of me as an Asian woman, I would turn around and tell myself 'Well, what would a cowboy do?'” Accordingly, her songs work as a counter-narrative to the stereotypes of a Japanese-American woman a listener might force onto her. Her songs praise her intentional isolation, like the cowboy leaving his world behind for the lonesome,

27 SEP 2019

BY Alisa Caira ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Cowboys making space in music

open terrain. She makes use of the cowboy’s boldness, stubbornness, and recklessness with songs that refuse to apologize. On “Remember My Name” specifically, she sings, “'Cause I need somebody to remember my name/After all that I can do for them is done/I need someone to remember me.” While, as mentioned, there is nothing in the imagery of this statement that calls to the cowboy, the sentiment of desperate remembrance feels tied to the cowboy: a larger wish to remain relevant even after an ending point. In addition, her refusal to show guilt for a self-centered confession also calls to the cowboy as she asserts to the world how she wishes it could be.

Mitski’s release, like Lil Nas X’s, quickly became sensational, albeit in distinctly different circles. Be The Cowboy helped Mitski rise to an iconic place within the indie realm, becoming Pitchfork’s best album of 2018 (beating out the pop-country album Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves); an intangible buzz began to swirl around her, making itself known in casual references to “becoming the cowboy” and a social media current that still follows her.

Being the cowboy was and is evocative of becoming something more powerful and more rooted in the fabric of this place. This place—the United States—that is perhaps unready for genre-bending and honest performers such as Mitski, as shown in Billboard’s charts. When Mitski became the cowboy

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

and told everyone around her to become the cowboy, she showed people how to co-opt the dominant for their own means. Mitski’s cowboy tinge was more emotional than sonic, but it was still able to grant her the space she had come to it for. By the time people noticed the cowboy was a Japanese-American woman who wasn’t afraid to subvert stereotypes and expectations regularly and elegantly, she was already at the top of indie pop. The system had no way to reverse that process. Just as the system had no way to subvert Lil Nas X once he beat it.

The work of Lil Nas X and Mitski are prime examples of the ways the cowboy, country, and their iconography can be used across genres to capitalize on the space-taking infused into the cowboy motif. By associating with the cowboy and its adjacent position to country, artists of other genres can acquire some of the power held with the style and fuel their own popularity with it. By making this entire process feel somewhat meme-y, artists who might have been disadvantaged in their work can rush to the top through virality before second-guesses have the time to catch up with them.

As we know, all parts of the cowboy are not and never will be good. Complicated histories of violence, racism, and erasure are entangled with this persona.

However, the current usage of cowboy by these artists and artists like them, I believe, is a proper reclamation of the word. Rather than taking further, these

people are making for themselves what was taken. The “yeehaw” spirit infused in all of this is more of a movement than a trend. Memes and humor, increasingly, are becoming viable ways to claim space instead of mere stylings. While, in all of this, there is an element of humor and aestheticization, that doesn’t undermine the careful work that is being done to make this imagery into something useful, something powerful and fundamentally new for a new group of people.

Mitski, Lil Nas X, and adjacent artists are able to take history into their hands to create a power previously not meant for them. As every listener continues to fall into the cowboy craze, these performers ride into the sunset after acquiring the space and respect they first turned to the cowboy for.

ALISA CAIRA B’22 is particularly pleased the word “yeehawapocalypse” made it into this piece.

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TREADING WATER

Before ad revenue dried up, and before the financial crisis, and Facebook, and the smartphone, and Craigslist, the Providence Journal was a giant of Rhode Island. Its news empire extended far beyond the three floors of offices they owned in Downtown Providence: The paper laid claim to twelve news bureaus scattered across Rhode Island and Southern Massachusetts, with another bureau in Washington, DC. The Journal of the 1990s was committed to covering anything that moved, from the Bristol Fourth of July parade to corrupt mayors. It provided a key civic service to Rhode Islanders, informing them of national and local news of import with original reporting.

But as the twentieth century turned to the twenty-first, the bureaus began to shutter. Now, the Journal has no office in Washington DC. The newspaper only occupies half a floor of their old building Downtown.

From a high of 140 reporters and editors in the paper's heyday, the Journal now has only about 15 reporters on staff. The paper has been bought and sold multiple times and is now in the hands of a media conglomerate controlled by a hedge fund, Gannett Media. One needs only to compare the heft of a Journal copy of yesteryear, when the paper had far more reporters, with one of today, to realize how the business has been gutted.

“It’s sad, because when I got to New England, the Journal was a destination newspaper for journalists, 30 years ago,” John Saltzman, a Boston Globe reporter who worked at the Journal, told the College Hill Independent.

“For a mid-sized market, it was one of the best papers in the country.”

Of course, the Journal is not alone. Newspapers across the country have also struggled to adapt as the media industry has changed: When the internet broke

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the financial model supporting newspapers, media conglomerates cut staff and increased the pressure to generate profit, and newspapers were caught off guard.

“We probably were late to the party, because we were the titan,” said a newsroom employee at the Journal. “We were the steamrolling ocean liner of Rhode Island for a hundred-plus years. We were the news. And we were going along on a very straight course, and when things started to shift and technology started to come into play, we were not as fast off the mark as some other more innovative newspapers at the time.” +++ There is no easy answer to why newspapers have struggled to remain financially viable in the past decade.

Even journalists themselves are not entirely in agreement about what happened to their industry. While most journalists the Independent talked with said the rise of the internet and the process of digitization have changed the way people receive information, others pointed to the growing desire for partisan news and changing structures of ad revenue as causes of financial strain.

“Over the past 20 years, newspapers have struggled mightily, and in many respects the bottom has fallen out,” said Saltzman. “The internet has, in so many ways, crushed the business model for newspapers. It’s curious, because stories now are read by many more people than when there was no internet, but the source of revenue for newspapers has changed.”

Newspapers used to have some of the largest profit margins in any industry. Much of this was tied to their

centrality in advertising—if you wanted your ad to be seen, it had to be in the newspaper. Classified ads and advertising used to make up the majority of newspaper profits, but as classified ads shifted to Craigslist, and advertisers turned to online forums such as Google and Facebook for their targeted ad campaigns, this revenue stream collapsed. From a high of almost 50 billion dollars in advertising revenue in 2005, newspapers are now only projected to earn 14 billion in ad revenue annually, as estimated by the Pew Research Center. More and more newspapers are turning towards subscriber-based revenue streams, instituting paywalls on their content.

This drop in revenue has been used as a justification for ownership to cut newsroom staff, leading to the shrinking of newspapers throughout the country..

According to Pew, since 2004, the US has seen a drop in newsroom employment by 47 percent. That trend was certainly felt at the Journal, where a series of layoff shrank staff size.

The financial crisis of 2008 made it difficult for newspapers to take the risks necessary to innovate and adapt, because no one wanted to pay for the news. This triggered a vicious cycle, limiting papers’ ability to digitally transition, which then made their news less engaging to read, which only cut revenues more.

Elaborating on the roots of the crisis in the journalism industry, Dan McGowan, a longtime Rhode Island journalist currently working for the Boston Globe, said, “Newspaper companies didn’t adjust to the internet very well. Craigslist and things like that took away classified ads which was a huge revenue source, and you didn’t charge right away on the internet… You had this situation where this new thing, the internet, really crushed you on a bunch of different fronts.”

McGowan claimed that the Journal could have been more entrepreneurial in introducing new multimedia content sooner.“I hate to say they got complacent, but they kind of did,” he said, adding that the Journal’s reliance on print revenue made it more difficult for the paper to transition to the digital age. To some extent, the paper’s seemingly unchallengeable success in Rhode Island gave them a false sense of security, impeding their ability to adapt. +++ As the newspaper industry’s business model began to struggle, papers across the country found themselves vulnerable to changes in ownership. Papers, which have traditionally been privately owned and not subject to shareholder concerns, are now, in some cases, liable to the pressures of the public market.

Papers with private owners are typically owned by families or individuals who are more invested in the

27 SEP 2019

BY Ricardo Gomez & Peder Schaefer ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Ella Rpsenblatt

Can the ProJo stay afloat in the Ocean State?

paper itself. This stands in contrast to public ownership, where the corporate leadership is responsible for and interested in generating profit for shareholders.

A dearth of antitrust regulation has allowed large media companies to merge and absorb small papers across the country. The Journal is now owned by Gannett Media, a media conglomerate that resulted from the August merger between two of the largest newspaper chains in the country, Gatehouse and Gannett. Both companies operate under the New Media Investment Group, which is publicly traded on Wall Street and responsible to shareholders.

In a press release announcing the merger, shareholder benefits and “synergies” were stressed as possible benefits: “The majority of synergies is expected to be realized within 24 months of closing and result from the increased scale of the new organization, sharing of best practices, leveraging existing infrastructure, facility rationalization and other judicious cost reductions.”

All of this corporate jargon is supposed to explain the benefits of merging, but if the historical contractions in newsroom staff are any indication, these “synergies” and “judicious cost reductions” translate into layoffs and reduced news coverage.

Expense reduction is the primary incentive of consolidation. For example, as a means of increasing efficiency, the Journal is now designed in Austin, Texas where many other Gatehouse papers are designed.

After the merger, New Media Investment Group now controls 263 daily newspapers across the country, with a presence in 612 media markets across 47 states and Guam, according to a press release.

“We’re owned by a hedge fund, and consequently their stakeholders, people who own stock in Gatehouse, demand profit,” said a Journal newsroom employee.

“And with profit has come cuts in newsrooms, at the Journal and other places around the country.” Given the choice between profit and more community news coverage, the corporate, publicly traded, mindset chooses profit. While newspapers have always been businesses, the change in ownership from private to public has placed new demands on some newspapers to perform for Wall Street; papers have become incentivized not by what will most help their communities, but instead by what will make the most money.

“At the end of the day, you have to make the numbers,” Alan Rosenberg, executive editor of the Journal, told the Independent. “When you’re a publicly owned company, you’ve provided Wall Street with an estimate of what the numbers will look like, and it’s incumbent upon you to reach that.”

When asked about layoffs at the Journal, Rosenberg again mentioned the necessity of meeting profit targets, saying that while he’s tried to protect jobs by

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

advocating for cuts in newspaper length, among other strategies, the financial realities mean that that’s not always possible.

On the other hand, Rosenberg stressed that Gatehouse has tried to stay innovative while working with the Journal, and said that there had never been any directives issued from Gatehouse to affect editorial coverage. He mentioned a new watchdog investigative team the Journal had recently launched, as well as a set of new newsletters, and gave the Independent a quick tour of the Journal's in-house podcasting studio, a marker of their attempt to stay relevant.

A number of papers across the country have spoken out against ownership structures they deem to be harming their journalism. For example, last year the editorial board of the Denver Post publicly called out the hedge fund owners of their newspaper, saying that if Alden Global Capital didn’t want to support good journalism in Colorado, they should sell the paper to someone who would. The editorial board rebellion at the Post came after ownership instituted a series of layoffs, reducing staff from a peak of over 300 to less than 100, a similar situation to what’s happened at the Journal.

An examination of newspaper ownership can provide insight into the varied trajectories of different papers. Papers that are not owned by media conglomerates have not seen the same level of staff cuts as papers that are. For example, papers like the Boston Globe—owned by John Henry, also the owner of the Boston Red Sox—have been able to take risks such as the recent opening of an office in Rhode Island. The Washington Post was struggling before billionaire Jeff Bezos bought the paper. While these philanthropic owners are good for the short-term production of resource-intensive investigative journalism, their statuses as owners raise questions about conflicts of interest between owners and the news their reporters are supposed to cover. Papers owned privately by billionaires have been able to innovate and are reaching economic stability because they are not as intensely pressured to produce profit as papers owned by a conglomerate, but this is not a healthy or viable model for the entire journalism industry. +++

take a conservative stance. Ahlquist looked to the debate over the Burrillville power plant as an example of the Journal holding back criticism to placate an ad-buyer, the energy company Invenergy.

“I don't think the ProJo serves the needs of the people of Rhode Island,” Ahlquist said. “They want to claim that they are delivering the news, and they have this theory that the news is this neutral thing to be delivered without slant and without politics," he told the Independent. "They have long been uninterested in covering the actions of small neighborhood and community advocacy groups.” Ahlquist labeled the Journal with the term “false neutrality,” claiming that they would be doing better financially were they to take stronger stances on issues and cut past the notion that the news is always neutral.

Ahlquist’s brand of independent, progressive journalism engages with the new environment of media consumption that demands that news serves the tailored needs of readers. Independent publications like Uprise RI serve the community by reporting in underserved areas that financially-strained traditional papers fail to cover. While the Journal may be restricted financially, it still has a responsibility to cover issues and stories that matter.

With the shrinking number of Journal bureaus, there exists a growing threat that local town councils and communities will go without quality news coverage. Ahlquist is part of a group of independent journalists and smaller local papers that are helping to fill this gap. Rosenberg mentioned some of these papers, such as the Warwick Beacon, the Valley Breeze, and the Cranston Herald, that are doing the kind of local reporting that is key for the civic health of communities.

The Boston Globe has also perceived the growing need for quality media in Rhode Island. Late this summer, the Globe opened an office in Providence with three reporters, some former employees of the Journal.

While the team has only dipped their toe into the state, with a newsletter and limited coverage, their presence is perhaps the biggest reminder that there is space for more coverage in Rhode Island news than what the Journal and other independent journalists can provide alone. +++ The Journal has long acted as a check on power. The paper was key in investigating and covering the corruption and assault trials of former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci. If no organization like the Journal existed to tell those stories, how might the course of that mayor's career—and the city's history more broadly—have changed? If there are no journalists at the council meetings, at the courts, and in the schools, our society and communities will suffer.

Most of the desks at the Journal offices are covered with paper: old press releases, taped=up pictures of favorite stories, and dozens and dozens of newspapers, from fresh copies of the Journal to yellowing, fading newsprint buried, like geologic sediment, under pages of a newer age.

Rosenberg at the Journal has no sentimentality about print. He knows that the future of the industry is digital, far from the giant presses that once resided in the basement of the Journal building.

Now, the Journal is guided by a monitor hanging over a lonely conference table in a corner of their offices. The monitor looks like a window into the future, offering up-to-date stats on page views, social media attention, and website readership. Armed with these tools, the Journal may yet find a place in the future to tell the stories that matter.

Traditional newspapers are not the only way journalism exists, nor will exist, in Rhode Island. Steve Ahlquist is an independent journalist who publishes through his website, Uprise RI, a progressive news source. In discussion with the Independent, Ahlquist maintained that the Journal editorial pages are influ- RICARDO GOMEZ B’22 and PEDER SCHAEFER enced by the need to satisfy advertisers, and frequently B’22 are trying to recruit Marty Granoff to buy the ProJo.

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EPHEMERA

27 SEP 2019

BY Seth Israel DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis

You seem so happy Based on the data uncovered I was like you must need insurance ASAP Anybody have any questions?

Also side-note Synapse

I’ve never tried an Impossible Burger That is so sorry I’m gonna go home Alright Bye-bye In terms of like, improving everything, The fuck does that mean?

No, no So Ricky Ricky! That’s so funny And then one morning I said Have fun

We are Ready to go out How long are we envisioning Being conscious

You’re looking at me Oh my god, yes It was uncomfortable I would go, I think I would go, can you let go?

Come and get There Basically To that point They’re doing it from scratch

That’s a little short Two-ten Each one A thousand words Everyone puts in so much work I have a friend I don’t really know how it works Me too You don’t see anything He wants to know what happened to your hair What happened to my hair?

I’m sorry, I’m sorry

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Going to the hospital in Providence Die? I would do insurance, yeah I would do insurance Because I have so many issues I was talking to my mom and I Nerd alert My professor He said We’re all people as electronics go Everyone has an equal amount of hours

But No Let’s go Big dog My professor He said Ivy League Logistically Exactly Roughly about Oh my god You’re not answering my question Zach Or Bob He deserves to feel some Seven Seven?

Yes Where am I getting it from?

Is it in Cuba?

No It’s a wig JC sent me She said we should really sit down and see Where were you sitting?

Were you sitting on the floor?

I just got into drawing this summer Sketching I need more Salvador You have to realize It’s binging Wait, wait should I text my Dog Did he die?

No but What Let’s go

LITERARY

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ON DESIRE & BEING DESIRED King Princess, Hayley Kiyoko, and queer representation in pop music I easily lose myself listening to Mikaela Straus’s (a.k.a. King Princess) “Pussy is God.” Beyond its lyrics (which I know by heart), I’m carried away by the song’s swelling bass and, more acutely, the sound of her smile. It’s only when my phone unexpectedly broadcasts the song over speakers—when my listening has an audience—that I feel self-conscious about the absurd, almost unintelligible loop of Straus's voice in the hook and the claim that “Your pussy is God.”An openly queer anthem about Straus’s desire for physical

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and emotional intimacy with another woman, the piece celebrates her partner’s sexuality and revels in her lust. The song is intensely personal: in speaking to her own experiences, the song speaks to me. Even so, for the longest time, sharing her song felt wrong, as if the words themselves became shameful in the presence of others.

Eventually, I came to recognize this fear as some internalized rejection of my own sexuality, a result of being implicitly told that queer desire is predatory and

wrong. Despite the groundbreaking work to diversify the music industry undertaken by artists like lesbian duo Tegan and Sara, the current heteronormative narrative of mainstream media leaves very little wiggle room for women's overt expressions of unadulterated desire, especially for queer women who do not perform to or for men. Even girl-power anthems like “God is a Woman” define women’s eroticism within the scope of male sexuality. Her value is determined by how she makes him feel. Ariana Grande serenades

27 SEP 2019

BY Anabelle Johnston ILLUSTRATION Sandra Moore DESIGN Daniel Navratil

an unnamed male figure, “You love it how I move you/ You love it how I touch you,” placing herself in relation to a man early in the song. While she goes on to allude to her sexual prowess and flip the narrative of the body as a temple, she continues to propagate the idea that it is designed for others to worship in. Conversely, many queer artists actively oppose this self-imposed objectification, instead intertwining romantic interests with sexuality, as Straus does in “Pussy is God.” Her reaffirmation that the subject of her affection is “special” and someone worth caring about represents a far more tender affection than Grande’s praise of her own sexual prowess and is the crux of what makes the song so raw and meaningful.

We often turn to social media to call women queens and (selectively) applaud their empowerment, yet, in everyday life, still normalize slut-shaming and fetishize women’s eroticism. I see it everywhere: my women friends are comparatively less comfortable discussing masturbation than my friends who are men, and for better or worse, find it more difficult to express sexual desire for potential romatic partners of any gender. Despite the popularity of Grande’s song, the ways we discuss women’s desire have not fundamentally changed. “God is a Woman” is acceptable because it exists within established confines of sensuality and aesthetic beauty; Grande herself is the object of desire and presents in a way that is conventionally attractive without being too heavy-handed.

But as songs like “Pussy is God” blow past social mores that cast queerness and women’s sexuality as ‘other,’ artists like King Princess and Hayley Kiyoko, another queer pop artist, are reclaiming bodily autonomy. They are both the objects of desire and the desirers, a role that queer women often take on outside the public eye. Straus and Kiyoko are now selling this dichotomy for mass consumption as they enter the world of mainstream popular media, taking pride in their ability to represent LGTBQ+ voices in the commercialized music industry. And their work does make a meaningful difference in the lives of their audiences; it is gratifying to recognize myself in Straus’s mourning of a lost lover in “Talia,” and understand Kiyoko’s difficulty navigating relationships with others who are uncertain in their sexuality, as described by her song “Curious.” Both women present queerness to the masses as nebulous and at times painful, an honest depiction that at times makes me feel vulnerable in sharing.

Many marginalized musicians who become mainstream choose to take on the role of an unelected advocate for their community, which entails presenting one perspective as the voice of a diverse group. While well-intentioned, this position is impossible to uphold, and at times can alienate queer people who do not conform to the binary model of desire that both Straus and Kiyoko present. They continue to represent women’s sexuality in the same ways that male artists do: overtly, with sweeping statements about physicality and erotic imagery in music videos. Neither artist disrupts the current heteronormative configuration of sexuality; instead, both employ language and images that are commonly utilized by men to depict women.

This mode of expression can be unsettling, partially because it challenges the way we think about women who love other women, and partially because they love in a way that can seem similar to the way straight men do. As these artists are hailed as our unequivocal representatives, I find myself wondering: Who are they to speak for me? +++ “I hate it when dudes try to chase me,” Straus croons in her breakout hit “1950,” immediately rejecting male attention in her first message to the world. In an industry dominated by big-name producers and multiple songwriters, “1950” stands out not only for its message but because the message comes directly from Straus. She began her career independently releasing music on Soundcloud before signing with Mark Ronson’s record label Zelig Records. She then re-recorded her first hit “1950” in early 2018, a tribute to The

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Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. With the success of this song, Straus, as King Princess, was immediately thrust into the world of pop music and Billboard Top 100 hits. Although none of her singles since “1950” have achieved the same fame, she remains firmly planted in mainstream music, exactly where she wants to be. In many interviews, Straus has stated that she hopes to be the representation she never had growing up, the queer girl who has made a name for herself in a predominantly straight industry.

Straus hopes her music will normalize public representation of women’s sexuality, stating in a 2018 interview with them., “I think I wanted to emulate these male music figures that I had that were able to just talk about the women that they wanted to be with.”

But by modeling herself after overtly sexual male musicians, Straus continues to view women through the male gaze, attempting to subvert but not necessarily dismantle the system. This reduction of a woman to an object of desire­— even by another woman—can be dehumanizing even if that is not the intent.

King Princess is not alone in her self-proclaimed empowered expression of sexuality. Hayley Kiyoko has also taken control of her own narrative in her lyricism, online presence, and music videos, explicitly owning her body and gender expression while diving headfirst into the world of mass-distributed pop music. Kiyoko was first recognized as a prominent queer artist after the release of “Girls Like Girls” in 2015, a matter-of-fact affirmation of her sexuality that was accompanied by a music video depicting the trials of navigating one’s first lesbian relationship in the face of homophobia and the judgement of others. It was one of the first music videos that had ever resonated with me on a personal level, not necessarily for plot but for the emotional vulnerability Kiyoko depicted. It was intimate and honest, and it was reassuring to see young teenage girls fall in love the way that I do. When the protagonist physically fought for her relationship, it almost felt like she was protecting me.

As a part of Kiyoko’s target demographic, I understand her appeal; she is well-spoken and entertaining, as well as a natural storyteller. Her self-directed music videos incorporate intensive dance routines and unadulterated queer love, balancing empowerment with vulnerability, as exemplified by her “I Wish” music video, released in 2019. “I Wish” flips the narrative of the school-girl fantasy, instead depicting Kiyoko and her friends participating in an elaborate sorceress-inspired ritual before breaking out into dance that incorporates traditionally masculine thrusts and body language. The choreography is jarring and she appears almost possessed, utilizing symbols of fists and pounding that are typically associated with men.

The surprising nature of this performance lies not in the actions but the actor, as Kiyoko still presents within the binary confines of sexuality despite undertaking an unexpected role. Like Straus's, Kiyoko’s representation rests on the male conception of power and physical representation of it, reclaiming queer sexuality while still depending on previous constructions of what it means to be empowered. +++

empowering way that is a performance in and of itself.

It is only when others’ experiences are unreflective of her own that she chooses to critique how queer women present themselves. As a voice in mainstream media, Kiyoko promotes only one version of women’s sexual empowerment sexuality, one that is limited in scope and functionality. She actively participates in the pitting of lesbian expression against bisexual expression, and directs media coverage to all that is wrong with a version of queer sexuality that does not mirror her own.

Kiyoko also participated in Taylor Swift’s infamous “You Need to Calm Down” music video, starring as one of the many LGBTQ+ faces in the “ally anthem.”

The video was widely criticized as a star-studded publicity stunt, an example of another straight celebrity profiting from Pride month, and Kiyoko’s presence continues to undermine her argument that sexuality is not a performance to profit from. This hypocrisy is common among artist-activists who make broad statements about representation in popular media by selecting certain voices to speak for others.

Straus too sees herself as a means of representation, intertwining her public image and the music she creates to promote one persona that supposedly speaks for many. She was fortunate to grow up surrounded by prominent musicians who worked in her father’s studio, helping her form a strong sense of self that is evident in the public sphere. Her privileged upbringing, arguably, has given her the opportunity to be unabashedly herself and create music that celebrates her identity. But as she leaves behind the bedroom-and-microphone setup for a professional studio, her unique voice may be lost in the charts. Queer desire sells, but the capacity in which Straus expresses it isn’t necessarily what people want to hear. “1950,” her most commercially successful song to date, is the least overtly queer song she has produced.

However, her other music is still relatively well-known, and the release of her upcoming album in October may sway public opinion to allow for more mainstream expression of women actively desiring other women— not simply the state of being desired. +++ For many women—myself included—the idea that sexuality can be owned and constructed in a positive manner is still relatively new and is partially a result of seeing it represented in the media we consume. For all their faults, King Princess and Hayley Kiyoko are two prominent woman artists who have developed their own expression of sexuality and queerness in their art, a goal many aspire to but never reach. Most of us are still trying to determine the intended audience of our own sexual performance, how we look at others, and how we want to be looked at. As I formulate my own framework of desire, it helps to hear the defeated sigh of Straus as she admits that “We say ‘I love you’ but we ain’t together,” and see the raw depiction of both the sensual and painful parts of sapphic relationships in Kiyoko’s “Cliff’s Edge.” Although their proud pronouncements of queer love and desire are what garner public attention, the vulnerable moments of intimacy they sing about are what make me feel heard.

As they gain more recognition, these queer artists have ANABELLE JOHNSTON B’23 was never allowed the potential to use their platforms to make substantial to write about this kind of thing in her high school changes in a heteronormative system, but they may do newspaper. harm to their audience even as they claim to overthrow the establishment. Both King Princess and Hayley Kiyoko have been hailed as voices of their generation and queer icons, but neither woman has contributed to long-term, substantial activism beyond the confines of Pride month and representation advocacy.

Kiyoko spoke out against Rita Ora’s 2018 hit “Girls,” arguing that the song perpetuates the idea of (bi)sexuality as a performance for men. Ora released an apology for the lyrics, which link sexual exploration with inebriation, stating that the experiences depicted were reflective of her own and were not intended to offend anyone. The song focuses on desire of women by women, a theme that is prevalent in much of Kiyoko’s music as well. Like “Curious,” the “Girls” music video features many half-clad women, lying suggestively while the artist sings. Theoretically, “Girls” continues to perpetuate the same stereotypes as Kiyoko’s songs, and yet Kiyoko is critical of Ora’s expression of eroticism. For Kiyoko—and many others—the issue does not lie in the act of sexual performance but in who is actually performing. Kiyoko features eroticism in her music videos and lyrics, exposing bodies in an

ARTS

14

On wounds and the loneliest form of memory

BODY TALK When faced with a missing

BY Parisa Thepmankorn the surface, we carry faces person or examining an ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng and limbs we have known unnamed or unclaimed body, DESIGN Daniel Navratil our entire lives. But there are the police will always ask about places we carry inside us that physical features. Any birthmarks, we have never touched, will never moles? Any scars? Anything we can use touch. They are ugly and viscous and to identify the body? To tell it apart from fleshy and muscular. We do not know the others? them well, yet cannot live without these parts.

I hear about an instance of this on the TV in my dentist’s office. It is June. I am working at a hospital, surrounded by people with hands wrinkled and worn, studying the ways the mind can unravel with time. By July I am feeling reckless with the idea that my body is merely a record of the things I have held and lost, a promise of the things to come. I am straddling the line between thinking of my body as a vessel and thinking of it as a being. Regardless, it is intimate and it is mine.

I open my journal to a blank page and begin to catalog my body.

During my middle school years, my father suffered a subdural hematoma. It is a head injury that causes blood to collect in a space between protective layers that cover the brain, in the tissue found just underneath the skull. He had been building a small garden in our backyard for my mother, whose vegetation and plastic pots had crept from the kitchen counters to the corners of the dining room and across the entirety of our deck.

He cannot pinpoint exactly when it happened, what caused it. Likely: a tool smacked against his head at the wrong angle. Afterwards: a vessel, ruptured. A pool of blood. Red, an old dark red, accumulating slowly. A Here: an oval birthmark with jagged edges on the growing pressure, slow and insidious between layers of left side of my face, right in front of my ear. Called a his body he has never seen, never will see. café au lait spot, it is a harmless identifier, an area of light brown pigment that I have never known my face After the injury and the surgery and the recovery my without. father was never the same. Surgery is powerful and it is intimate. It changes the body, sanctions someone—a Here: A knotted scar protruding from the top of my stranger, usually—to reach inside, to touch a body in right foot, a result of when I was seven and aggressive, places that might never otherwise be touched. How zipping around neighborhood streets on my Razor surgery changes a person often depends on the kind of scooter like I owned the sidewalks. Until I tripped and injury, the kind of surgery. Sometimes we can bounce found my foot gashed and red and embedded with back, sometimes we grow stronger and hardier. Other gravel. Screeching, I found my father and thrust my times we are bent over, broken. Held hostage. sandal-strapped foot into his hands. An extraction of several rocks, a smear of Neosporin, and a band-aid The way this one would swing was unclear at first, the later, I was back, gripping the green sponge handles, signs subtle. My father stopped working on the garden, biting down hard, flying into the wind. understandably. Then he abandoned most of his home improvement projects altogether. Soon he began to Here: my ugly ankles. Blemished with circles an complain about his struggle to fall asleep, the anxiety unseemly shade of purple-brown, the result of old of another brain emergency keeping him awake. So prolonged wounds. I am the one who makes them ugly, he asked and then begged for tranquilizers from his who stops them from healing. For example, I buy new unrelenting doctor, and trashed him behind his back shoes and break them in. I blister and then I pick at after his request was refused repeatedly. And then I them and I bleed and I sop up the red with tissues and I started to notice how our once-frequent conversations wait for them to scab over and then I pick at them again. dwindled, disappeared; how his temper kept flaring in For example, buzzy little mosquitoes drink my blood increasing increments until his shouts were rocking and I let them and later I scratch my ankles and don’t the doors of our house every other day. How I started to stop until I spill more of my own. dread our conversations, our interactions.

Now all that is left are small mounds and discolored flesh. Scar tissue. I trace them sometimes. I think about girls with long beautiful legs. I want long beautiful legs too but I want a lot of things. I am trying to stop picking at my skin but these small acts of violence are too easy.

My fingers love to linger, remember, hurt, heal, and then do it all over again. I think that maybe it is a way for me to embody my own body: I rub my scars over and over and over. Eventually, the skin feels almost heavy.

Grounding.

The last time I visited my father’s childhood home I was struck by its lushness. Ang Thong is an hour and a half outside Bangkok. Its name translates to gold basin, a reference to its basin-like geography and its fields swaying with golden rice. It is full of open-air markets and cramped alleyways and is always teeming with neighbors milling around stalls emitting the smells of hearty soups and meat, hot oil and Sriracha. It is a labyrinth of colorful woven straw mats and garish plastic chairs.

content warning: depictions of blood and wounds

Perhaps because in the few pictures he has shown me from his teenage years, his back is a steel rod, his mouth curved in a smile already unyielding. Last month in New Jersey, I saw him old and weathered. A stranger I knew but could not recognize. An alien mowing the lawn in a suburban wasteland. My teeth hurt and I think that I love him. I must. I think about it some more and think maybe I just want to love him. See, I want a lot of things. All of them scare me.

My father has started going to the local church on Sundays. My family is Buddhist but my dad is the only religious one. Before bed he prays to Buddha, as he has his entire life, but also to God in case He is listening too. I am wondering now if suffering itself is a kind of religion. If it is, no wonder I am no good at it.

My mother and I are selfish. We look to pleasure first, prayer last. Faith only when we need it most. My last weekend home, my father tries to coax us into going to church with him. Instead my mother leaves to harvest vegetables from the backyard garden. At the kitchen table I sit alone, legs pulled up against my chest. I want to tell him that I am so tired of being lonely in a kitchen full of people I want to love but instead I shake my head and bite into my mother’s tomatoes raw. The insides leak like old wounds. +++

When skin is punctured, it begins to ooze a vivid red, darkening as it begins to clot and dry. Eventually, it forms a scab. The body’s immune system kicks into action, turning the area swollen and tender as cleanses the tissue and fights infection and repairs the wound.

Eventually, new tissue begins to grow.

On Friday the 13th there is a full moon, a harvest moon.

A friend’s mother warns her to stay safe and we laugh and I am only a little scared. The moon’s light streams, tender on the streets of Providence, but it cannot change the fact that the night is already too bitter for mid-September. Later, I am all limbs, sprawled on the rug of my room, reading the same lines of poetry until they bite. There is nothing here / that I want to remember as fact. It is a fact / that every person believes they are more than a god. / That is the part of me you harpooned.

Cut your name into.

And then you are back, haunting me. I think of you and cannot stop thinking about you. You, the person who cut into me, marked me, who I cannot seem to erase from my body. You, from the writing class, who wrote me long letters and told me funny stories about elaborate dinner parties and the three chickens you raised with your Turkish roommates. You, whom I loved and whom I thought might love me back.

Last summer, we found ourselves on the roof of a friend’s apartment building, the party inside nearly over. We were together and by ourselves. You told me +++ I am trying to reconcile the image of my father and the about your dysfunctional family and I told you about image of a child scampering through alleyways in prac- mine. We made self-deprecating jokes and later, you The human body is both familiar and foreign. On tical Velcro-strapped rubber sandals and I am failing. told me that you think this is special, maybe. Probably.

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FEATURES

27 SEP 2019

You gave me a cheeky smile that is supposed to commu- could not commit to me after all. Did not want to. It’s nicate that you care about me but can’t quite say it out been so long. It feels different now. Did you mean it when loud yet. you said you loved me, I asked, more statement than question. You paused. That is answer enough. I did not In the months that followed, I waited for you even tell you how, in that moment, a sharpness I cannot quite though I knew I shouldn’t. Even though you lived describe ran through my stomach. Instead I nodded, far from me. Even though you were not good for pretended that it was something I could understand. me. I stayed despite the lies you fed me to patch up the unseemly holes in your life, despite the way you A scar forms because new tissue tends to grow back called me hours after your bus should have arrived in differently than the original, with a different texture, a Providence just to tell me you couldn’t make it after different quality. Over time, this flawed area may fade all. You were so good at apologizing. And I was good at or disappear entirely. forgiving. That is to say: I always wanted to forgive.

Now, your stream of lo-fi hip-hop appears on my music Once in class you wrote that your best quality was feed yet again and if I could bring myself to I would talking, and it’s true. You could charm a horse or have erased your name from my screen months ago. a groundhog or a ghost. You made me fall for you, My mother is convinced I will be alone forever and I because of course I did. You’re obsessed with making tell her I am still so young we are always so young even if I other people fall for you. You’re good at it. I think about am forgetting what her fingers French braiding my hair what you said to me when you called things off. It was feels like. Governor Street stretches out underneath me after a year of longing. I found myself in the same city and the night is thick with something ghostly. Before I as you for a summer, and we decided to date, officially, fall asleep I am thinking about you, a habit I can’t seem finally. Decided that we would do things for real. Four to shake. My stomach is empty but still aches with a dull days in, you told me you changed your mind, that you tenderness I only associate with you. I am afraid you

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will haunt me forever and I am just as afraid that you will not. See, I still think about you almost every day.

You touched me somewhere soft and vulnerable inside and left a void, a small dark cavern that throbs when I am lonely or alone. See, only now do I understand that there are parts of me that cannot be untouched.

So lately, I have been trying to hold onto the idea that it is not a sign of weakness to remember. There is your old attic room on Williams Street, your Dazai and Kerouac on my bookshelf. Our ribbing banter still a shadow on my tongue. There is my desire to save everyone including you. It’s okay. It’s okay.

This is what I know to be true: When wounded, a body will seek to mend itself. Sometimes it is red and painful but we are built to withstand so much turbulence. For example: I am here and alone and alone and alone and alive and remembering.

PARISA THEPMANKORN B’20 is only sometimes scared of ghosts.

FEATURES

16

PINK SLIME

BY Sindura Sriram ILLUSTRATION Sindura Sriram

17

LITERARY

27 SEP 2019

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the list Friday 9.27 The Providence Athenaeum presents Colson Whitehead - First Unitarian Church - 6-8PM

Wed 10.2 Alternative Rosh Hashanah - 159 Sutton St - 6:30-9:30PM Celebrate the Jewish New Year with Shalem, a Jewish affinity group based in PVD that seeks to “integrate spiritual practice with radical politics.” The space will be accessible, and all are welcome—non-Jews and Jews, practicing or otherwise.

Mon 9.30 Debut of Little Sister by Rebelle Artisan Bagels Stock Culinary Goods - 9:30-11:30AM Rebelle Artisan Bagels—known for its lox and fair labor practices—is expanding! Starting on Sunday, head to Stock on North Hope to meet Little Sister, Rebelle’s pastry venture. Says Chef Milena, Little Sister’s menu will nod to her childhood in Puerto Rico.

Sun 9.29

the list

If you’re tryna live out your Beyonce “Blow” moment, this is legiterally the night for you. So swipe on some sapphire eyeshadow, be careful with your lash glue, and wear your trustiest glossy red lip for a night you won’t forget—unless you fall, get a concussion, and oblige your crush to walk you home ;) As the event title suggests, this is an imagined community of skaters, bladers, and spectators. Come as you are—or as you want to be.

JoJo Siwa: D.R.E.A.M. *The Tour* - Dunkin Donuts Center - 7PM While Siwa’s first EP, D.R.E.A.M. The Music, tackled the precarity of pre-teenage fantasy, her latest record, Celebrate, delves into the ecstasy of excess. In spite of her critics, Siwa proposes a daring political project: “We all speak one language / When we burn it down, down, down on the floor.” Whether you’re a Siwanator or not, this List writer urges you to buy a ticket, smoke a J, and witness this late-modern technicolor vulgarity.

ADULT SKATE NIGHT AT UNITED SKATES OF AMERICA - 75 New Rd, Rumford, Rhode Island (https://www.facebook.com/ events/495234111226546/)

Thurs 10.3

Doors Open RI - Pawtucket and Central Falls All day Remember urban exploring? Head to Providence’s northern neighbors in Pawtucket and Central Falls this weekend to revive your youthful sojourns in abandoned factories and subway tunnels for the recurring Doors Open festival, which allows the public to access usually-inaccessible urban spaces in RI. Highlights include the old Industrial Trust Building on Pawtucket Main St. (it has a stunning stained glass dome) and a defunct National Grid power station (#NationalizeGrid).

Puerto Rico: The Unknown U.S. Colony Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute

Sat 9.28

The Center for Latin American and Carribean Studies at Brown welcomes Ángel Collado Schwarz, a historian, radio moderator, writer, and professor at Yale. He will be giving a talk on the contemporary history of Puerto Rico, as well as its future—and the effects of US invasion and Hurricane Maria. The talk will be at the Joukowsky Forum and will go from 7-8:30PM.

Colson Whitehead, whose book The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award, will visit Providence this Friday for a reading and Q&A. Whitehead’s work relays historical loss and resilience that even the archive is unfit to hold. “Who built it?” one of Whitehead’s characters asks in the novel, upon arriving at a station on the Underground Railroad and looking into a long, disappearing tunnel. “Who builds anything in this country?” another answers. Don’t miss this.