The College Hill Independent Vol. 36 Issue 10

THE COLLEGE HILL A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY INDEPENDENT

36 • 10 20 APR 2018

THE

INDY COVER

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 36 / ISSUE 10 APR 20 2018

Eight Days a Week (Thursday) Ivan Rios-Fetchko

NEWS 02

Week in Review: Unrequited Love Sarah Van Horn, Mariella Pichardo, Emma Kofman

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YOUR DIGITAL LIFE Marly Toledano

SCIENCE 11 FEATURES 05

METRO 09

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Disarming Logic Lucas Smolcic Larson

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Allegory of The Cave Liby Hays

Homoludens Florence Li

Three Poems Will Weatherly & Sienna Giraldi

EPHEMERA

TECH 07

Free Direct Discourse D.A.M.A.J.

LITERARY

ARTS 13

Refocusing the Frame Soraya Ferdman

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Digital Knowledge Paige Parsons

Toe Tags The Indy Staff

X 18

FROM THE EDITORS:

Mug Shots Zak Ziebell

MISSION STATEMENT

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.

-JKS The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly

perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

Over already, and we barely got our footing. We had lofty goals—the abolition of alcohol, a cure for brainfog, the end of the conman. A little higher up the views will be better— but of course, views never really change. We made the mistake of thinking that this had anything to do with control, of thinking that every puzzle had a final piece. In the end, writing towards something isn’t the same as getting there. A bit cynical, we suppose, until we are reminded that we work here so that our readers can reach further.

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.

SPRING 2018

WEEK IN REVIEW Julia Rock NEWS Isabel DeBre Chris Packs METRO Harry August Erin West ARTS Nora Gosselin Cate Turner Isabelle Rea METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Eve Zelickson

FEATURES Ruby Aiyo Gerber Paula Pacheco Soto Wen Zhuang SCIENCE Liz Cory Tara Sharma TECH Paige Parsons Olivia Kan-Sperling OCCULT Gabriela Naigeborin EPHEMERA Maya Bjornson X Zak Ziebell

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

LITERARY Isabelle Doyle Fadwa Ahmed LIST Jane Argodale Alexis Gordon Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS Galadriel Brady Mica Chau Ella Comberg Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Liby Hays Anna Hundert Lillian Kirby Lucas Smolcic Larson Mariela Pichardo Ivy Scott

Marly Toledano Sara Van Horn Kayli Wren Kion You Emma Kofman COPY EDITORS Shuchi Agrawal Grace Berg Benjamin Bienstock Seamus Flynn Sasha Raman Caiya Sanchez-Strauss ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Eve O’Shea Claire Schlaikjer STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Julie Benbassat

Alexandra Hanesworth Kela Johnson Halle Krieger Sophia Meng Pia Mileaf-Patel Ivan Rios-Fetchko Ella Rosenblatt Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Katya Labowe-Stoll Rémy Poisson

SENIOR EDITORS Jane Argodale Kelton Ellis Robin Manley Gabriel Matesanz Will Weatherly BUSINESS MANAGER Maria Gonzalez

MANAGING EDITORS Jonah Max Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson MVP Maya Bjornson

WEB MANAGER Ashley Kim

DESIGNERS Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Laura Kenney Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt

SOCIAL MEDIA Fadwa Ahmed Pia Mileaf-Patel

DESIGN EDITOR Eliza Chen

ALUMNI RELATIONS Julia Tompkins

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN UNREQUITED LOVE

BY Sara Van Horn, Mariela Pichardo,

and Emma Kofman ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Say No to Marriage According to relationship guru magazine, Cosmopolitan, one in four women will turn down a marriage proposal in their lifetime. Citing a survey administered by travel research firm Superbreak, the magazine says that women have turned down the till death do us part offers in cases where they “didn’t feel right” about the prospect overall or felt their partner was a hot sack of trash waiting to be brought out to the curb.

Last week, Spring Creek, Nevada native Levi Bliss’ proposal to his girlfriend of two years, Allison Barron, went viral online due to their unorthodox proposal photographs. While Bliss bent down on one knee and asked, “Will you spend an extravagant amount of money for a single day with me to show our friends and family a grand gesture of our love?” his father-in-law stood just feet behind him holding a “Say No” sign over his head.

Barron’s response faltered for a few seconds because her attention was caught by her father, who stood beside the road waving a “Say No” sign over his head. Barron recalls, “I put my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing at Daddy’s sign. He has such a wild sense of humor. I think Bliss took that as me being speechless…

I wasn’t.”

According to Mr. Barron, the story went something like this: “Levi, I—,” Barron began, with her hand covering her mouth.

“Will you make a pledge before God and the law to take on my suffocating college debt?” he interrupted.

“I—” she continued.

“Will you go halfsies on my child support payments?” he asked earnestly as he knelt on one knee, gazing up at her through tear filled eyes.

Barron called the proposal “the worst day of her life.” Though she wanted to say yes despite her father’s sign, she says Bliss’ failure to “shut the hell up” changed her mind.

According to Barron, in his string of word-vomit, Bliss asked her to sign a prenuptial agreement “in case his Soundcloud career took off” and she, in the words of Kanye West, tried to “leave [his] ass and leave with half.”

From then on, she zoned out. “The ‘Say No’ sign just kept looking better and better once an hour passed by.”

Bliss has gone into hiding since the event. A source says he’s been spending his days and nights on Omegle, seeking out strangers to vent to using the username Barronurheartsucks69. According to NPR, his mother wasn’t too happy about the proposal, particularly Mr. Barron’s sign.

“The focus should’ve been on the couple,” she told National Public Radio. “Instead, a Dad joke killed [the proposal].”

Look What She Made Him Do T. Swift’s next love song, or next lawsuit, just might be about Bruce Rowley, the man who robbed a bank in Ansonia, Connecticut last week and threw the stolen cash onto Swift’s property. Rowley, a 26-year-old man from Derby, Connecticut, told Ansonia police that the bank robbery was inspired by his crush on the pop-star.

“It seemed he wanted to propose,” said Lt. Patrick Lynch. “But she wasn’t home when he went there. He said he threw some of the money over a fence to impress her.”

According to cops, Rowley walked into the Webster Bank in Ansonia, unarmed but bringing trouble, and demanded money from a teller who turned over a stack of cash. After committing the robbery, Rowley drove 60 miles up to the gated compound of Swift’s mansion in Westerly, Rhode Island and threw some of the $1,600 of stolen money over her fence. After his 2001 Jeep Cherokee was put on nationwide alert, he was spotted driving south on Interstate 95 by Rhode Island State Troopers who chased him back over the Connecticut border and ultimately arrested him, using spike strips to flatten the tires of his Jeep.

Rowley confessed his crush in the police cruiser on the ride back to Ansonia. He also confessed his plan to donate some of the stolen money to the Ansonia Police Department. This comes as a slight shock to the Independent, considering that Rowley was allegedly bitten on the arm by a police officer as he was taken into custody. Swift, for her part, hasn’t had any trouble shaking this one off and continues to claim no prior connection to Rowley.

While the tossed money still hasn’t been found, it has probably changed color. A dye pack, hidden in the stolen money for reasons unknown, exploded in the bank parking lot, explained Lynch, coloring both the money and Rowley a bright red. The Indy believes this to be a fateful accident, considering the title of Swift’s fourth studio album.

Rowley, meanwhile, remains in police custody and is due to appear in court on May 8. He was charged with second-degree robbery and fourth-degree larceny and continues to point out what Swift’s beauty made him do. Rowley was held on $100,000 bond after his arraignment last Friday. Perhaps, with her $17 million Watch Hill mansion littered with scarlet bills, Swift might find a way to help him out.

Racoons versus Coors Light The raccoons in Youngstown, Ohio are really putting themselves out there. Typically nocturnal, they’re coming out during the day and staggering about. They probably pre-gamed the occasion. No longer scared of humans, the raccoons are approaching people with teeth bared in grimaces. Sightings of what locals have termed “zombie raccoons” began in January of this year. We also watch too much of The Walking Dead and drunkenly compared ourselves to zombies on New Years, but unlike these racoons, our hangovers thankfully went away.

Many of the residents who call local police to report sightings of these deviant creatures believe the raccoons have rabies. However, animal experts are cautioning that these raccoons most likely have distemper, a viral disease that causes fevers, sneezing, labored breathing, stumbling, and more serious neurological symptoms such as seizures. The clues that tipped them off? The daytime expeditions, walking-on-two-legs, and newfound love for humans. We can buy this distemper argument, but are not convinced by sneezing zombies. But maybe the residents of Youngstown moonlight as hunters of the undead.

In one case, an affinity for humans caused a diseased raccoon to follow photographer Robert Coggeshall to his home. Coggeshall brought his dog inside, closed the door, and watched as the raccoon reared up on its hind legs, bared its teeth, then fell backwards onto its back and lay in a stupor before repeating the process.

Another clue: where rabies causes foaming at the mouth, distemper causes drooling. Though certainly alarming, we aren’t sure the raccoons are salivating over our brains rather than our dumpsters.

Luckily for the human residents of Youngstown, distemper, unlike rabies, is not transmissible to people.

(Plus, googling “zombie raccoons” now yields a lot of sunlit, up-close-and-personal portraits of grinning raccoons— big thanks to Coggeshall.) However, distemper is highly contagious among smaller mammals; the pathogens that cause distemper can be spread through the air, aided by the drooling and sneezing it causes. Probably trying to turn this kickback into a party, city raccoons, noticeably more social than country raccoons, tend to share food when they find it, making mealtime a possible source of contamination. We also imagine spin the bottle was played in the basement of some raccoon’s mother’s nest.

Residents in Youngstown are probably barricading their homes and googling things like “do silver bullets kill zombies????” Zombiepedia is probably teaching them that only decapitation can kill a zombie and that the proper term for “killing a zombie” is “making a dead body motionless again,” since they are already dead.

For the raccoons, distemper is fatal—either on its own or with the help of the Youngstown Police who have so far euthanized 19 raccoons and will continue to pick up their carcasses for testing. It appears that the raccoons are being shot, not decapitated, and we worry they might re-re-animate on the morgue slab. Hopefully, though, we will soon know just what these raccoons are taking to make themselves the life of the party.

Youngstown Clothing Co.’s newest t-shirt quickly became their most sold product: dark grey with “The Zombie Raccoons” in dripping red letters. The Indy suspects that these t-shirts will look good tucked into a pair of light wash jeans.

-EK

-SVH -MP

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

PRIVATE EYES

BY Marly Toledano ILLUSTRATION BY Rémy Poisson DESIGN BY Ella Rosenblatt

Cambridge Analytica and the new frontier of internet privacy

This past month, Cambridge Analytica has made its way into our consciousness and, for those of us unfortunate enough to be among their victims, their infiltration happened in more ways than one. Through an aptly named survey, “This is Your Digital Life,” Cambridge Analytica gathered information from roughly 87 million Facebook users, leading to public outcry and a global reassessment of how we have come to trust the social network. Personality quizzes may have their perks, but many have become less eager to identify as a Disney Princess after discovering what their digital life really looks like—or more exactly, after learning that others were perhaps more interested in their results than they were. While Facebook’s incessant targeted advertisements and keen interest in our political beliefs have raised eyebrows in the past, this most recent scandal has been widely publicized, sharply underscoring what privacy experts, and our parents, have been saying for years.

As troubling as these revelations are, they hardly even warrant being considered as such, as nothing discovered was really unknown. Even Congress is having trouble feigning surprise. As Senator Charles Grassley said in Mark Zuckerberg’s court hearings last Tuesday and Wednesday, “It is no secret that Facebook makes money off this data through advertising revenue, although many seem confused by or altogether unaware of this fact.”

While little comfort can be drawn from statements like Grassley’s, it serves as a reminder that Facebook has simply been doing what it was designed to do: harvest user data for profit. +++ Cambridge Analytica accessed Facebook user data through what looked like an academic research project. In exchange for a few dollars, users took a quick personality test that would supposedly help psychologists. Aleksandr Kogan, the mind behind the project, concedes that his app collected information on millions of people. In some cases, merely being friends with a test-taker compromised one’s personal data. Kogan then proceeded to give the information to Cambridge Analytica, a data mining company co-founded by Steve Bannon and funded by conservative hedge fund manager Robert Mercer. Christopher Wylie, a researcher-turned-whistleblower who brought this situation to the forefront of political discourse as a source for The Guardian calls Cambridge Analytica “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool.”

While Wylie was well aware of these programs during his tenure at the company, he claims that he did not come forward until after the election for fear of being “crushed”

by Bannon. “I didn’t fully appreciate the impact of what I helped create until 2016 happened,” he said. “Very soon after that, I started working for The Guardian, originally as an anonymous source,” he said. He told the Observer, “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

Cambridge Analytica then used the data to inform strategies for conservative campaigns—both that of Donald Trump in the United States and Brexit in the United Kingdom. Cambridge Analytica garnered information about user personalities through a process called “psychographic” profiling which essentially constructs

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NEWS

and predicts potential voters' personalities based on their likes, photos, and even, possibly, direct messages. In no indirect terms, Cambridge Analytica, according to its own website, “uses data to change audience behavior.”

It is important to note that Cambridge Analytica lacks a clean record—the company has been involved in scandals regarding bribery and other illegal activity in order to secure conservative political aims, according to the New York Times.

Though Cambridge Analytica hasn’t admitted that information gathered from their profile quiz was used in support of Trump’s campaign, the CEO of the company, Alexander Nix, also claims they played an essential role in deciding the 2016 elections, leaving it unclear what exactly they did with the information they collected. An anonymous source involved with the company offered up another possibility while speaking to NPR, arguing that the digital efficacy of Trump’s campaign was so underdeveloped that Cambridge Analytica never used psychographic profiling but instead used much simpler tactics on the campaign. While the situation does call into question the scale of the influence of social media in the 2016 election and the potent and uncharted territories for future voter manipulation, it is unclear whether Kogan’s work changed the outcomes of the election in the way that, for example, James Comey’s letter to Congress did.

According to Brad Parscale, a digital expert who worked for Trump’s campaign, the information did not help the Republicans in the election.

While it remains ambiguous what sway Cambridge Analytica held over the 2016 elections, Facebook’s policies, which allowed this sort of data harvesting in the first place is clear and troubling. When Cambridge Analytica did its data mining, Facebook provided external developers with access to the information of users and their friends. Facebook claims to have been deceived by Kogan, who stated that the data collection was intended for academic research. When he instead passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, he broke an agreement with Facebook. In 2015, the network required that Cambridge Analytica delete all the information that was collected, but it remains unclear whether Cambridge Analytica followed through. While Facebook has made some efforts to make privacy settings more accessible to users, the company continues to collect personal data and share it with external apps. As Zuckerberg told Senator Orrin Hatch when asked how the company makes money: “We run ads.” The commodification of user data remains the very essence of Facebook’s business model. +++ Like the countless applications that offer money or unlock new features in exchange for a download, there’s a higher cost to using Facebook apps than what we might choose to believe. In signing a user agreement we make a contract with a company that never promised to protect us. So why were we so shocked to find out that a cost came with publicizing our lives on social networks? At least in part, this surprise mirrors the public reaction to the Snowden leaks of the NSA’s surveillance activities in 2013. It reminds us that what we put out there is really out there—somebody’s watching. But the difference between the surveillance scandals lies in accountability.

The government, at least in theory, owes protection to the public and uses the data it collects towards this end.

Facebook, on the other hand, complied with a user agreement they made up themselves. Facebook is a for-profit enterprise: it has no obligation to even set up an illusion of checks and balances. While the NSA at least in word defers to the executive branch, the private sector continues to operate of its own accord. When a governmental agency uses our information they are accountable to themselves and their own ends and, hopefully, to the public. In this case, private parties, each with their own political and financial agenda, had access to our information. And Cambridge Analytica does not have the interests of the public in mind—rather, their use of the information has everything to do with who hired them and how they can make money.

The NSA and Facebook collect the personal data of individuals—for both agents, that information is essential to their success. It’s startling that we have accepted this practice from our government, but it’s even more shocking that we have given this power to any number of internet services. As Snowden tweeted last month, “Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as surveillance companies. Their rebranding as social media is the most successful deception since the Department of War became the Department of Defense.”

In the aftermath of Snowden’s leaks, the NSA has made various policy changes including a five-year limit on holding information and the Freedom Act which halted the mass collection of personal phone records. The question now becomes when Facebook will be held to the same standards following this recent data breach. +++ Zuckerberg has been in two days of court hearings this week because this method of gathering voter information is uncharted territory for legislators. Lawmakers have to grapple with how to take control of the free-for-all that still exists on the internet. But when asked whether he supported regulation, Zuckerberg further confused lawmakers by answering with a question, asking “What’s the right regulation?” At this point, lawmakers are struggling with whether they should treat Facebook as a media company or a tech company or even a financial institution—and whether the social network counts as a monopoly. Or they can take another approach, like the European Union, which has opted to take action on internet privacy by creating legislation that will impact Facebook alongside other media and tech companies that collect user data.

A lot of the blame for what happened with Cambridge Analytica has landed on Mark Zuckerberg, but that might just be because he’s a name we can all call to mind. In reality, because so few consequential regulations have any power over Facebook, it is hard to determine if they broke the law. Really, Zuckerberg never did anything that couldn’t have been predicted if users had been savvy about the way they used the internet: all he did was sit back and let third-parties make up their own rules in a still unregulated landscape. The public wants to morally reprehend Facebook, supporting a #deletefacebook movement endorsed by Whatsapp cofounder

APRIL 20, 2018

Brian Acton. The outcry has prompted Zuckerberg to address concerns with an apology—“It was my mistake.

And I’m sorry,” he said to lawmakers. However, the public condemnation of Facebook has little political or economic backing. Facebook has no one to answer to except itself. And its agenda does not leave any room for privacy—the very model for the business finds its success in collecting data and targeting individuals with specific advertisements.

In the end, Facebook is a corporation, and while it’s nice to hear Zuckerberg concede to lawmakers that “For most of [Facebook’s] existence, [we] focused on all the good that connecting people can do ... It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm, as well.” He could have predicted this kind of data harvesting and chose not to step in the way. People’s information is what his company banks on.

Zuckerberg can recount a litany of past breaches of trust that Facebook has engaged in: “Fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.” Still, as of yet, Facebook has failed to change its policies; third party apps can still access your friends’ data and it still does not do anything to prevent you from clicking the harmless-seeming terms of agreement on every online quiz you take from their platform.

The ideology that Zuckerberg, alongside other Silicon Valley tycoons including Travis Kalanick and Jeff Besos, takes advantage of is the still unregulated frontier.

They appear to have let go of the reins to allow profit to pour in, carrying their powerful machinery in any direction. To John Savage, a Computer Science professor at Brown University, this use of Facebook data came as no surprise. “I think that Facebook was so keen on finding a way to make money that they did not pay attention to the potential impact on their customers, and even after they were told that their technology had been misused… to have an influence on the elections of 2016, they still did not wish to acknowledge that there was a potential problem,” he said. “For me that represents a serious ethical lapse.” Critics have pointed to what resembles a Randian

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

philosophy of success at any price. As a result, Facebook can make no claim at having a nonpartisan influence. As we can see in the case of Cambridge Analytica, it has instead become a playground for high-paying agendas. +++ With Cambridge Analytica, the lack of internet privacy ceases to remain an abstraction, as it concretely influenced the 2016 election. But things did not necessarily have to go this far for us to become aware of the mind-boggling amount of information that Facebook keeps on every single one of its users and, sometimes, people who are not users at all—those are called “shadow profiles.” And it’s certainly not just Facebook, or Cambridge Analytica, doing this type of profile. It’s everything you download, charge, or log into—from Google to dating sites to AngryBirds.

Zuckerberg’s testimony on Tuesday and Wednesday made room for a reassessment of the future of internet privacy and how these networks will shape the political landscape in years to come. Zuckerberg admitted in the hearing that “I think we should have notified people, because it would have been the right thing to do.” Still, he maintains that the company never violated the 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission, which ordered that the network meet users expectations of privacy, because users agreed to give “This is Your Digital Life” access to friends’ data. Congress members urged Zuckerberg to take on the European Union’s model for maintaining internet privacy, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as an approach across the network. This new legislation, which will come into effect May 25, “is very strict,” said Savage.

“It stipulates that if you collect information on European citizens, then you have a serious duty to protect that.

You have to give evidence of that or you could be fined up to four percent of your gross revenues.” The GDPR will require users to explicitly give their consent before companies can obtain their personal data. Zuckerberg

confirmed that the protections offered by the European legislation will be extended worldwide—although his response to whether Americans would have the exact same control remained unclear. Regardless, the GDPR will have a major impact on the way all tech companies that serve Europe handle user privacy.

Hopefully, in light of Cambridge Analytica, we can base our actions on an awareness of the actual cost of accepting the terms of use. While maybe we can’t take back our data, we can understand the mechanics of these networks and scroll through our feeds a little more wearily. Over the course of the next year, we will see how lawmakers continue to grapple with regulating these internet giants. The reality of the digital age is that tech and media companies serve a larger population than many governments without even the pretense of regulation. They’re collecting and storing our data for profit and they’re doing it on the agenda of whoever pays.

Cambridge Analytica seems to have shaken up public understanding of the situation, pressing lawmakers to take a closer look at internet privacy. In Washington D.C., new bills have already been proposed in an effort to make an actionable response to Zuckerberg’s testimony. These include the CONSENT Act which would require that web services acquire permission from individuals to use their data and report data breaches. Another proposed bill, the MY DATA Act, would enable the Federal Trade Commission to create new rules to improve the security of internet service users. “I think [Facebook and other internet services] are going to be held to a higher standard,” said Savage. The commodification of user information might have been inevitable—but also inevitable is the regulation that follows. Cambridge Analytica has unwittingly initiated a conversation that might just make internet services more accountable in the future.

MARLY TOLEDANO B’20 gets her soy matcha from Shiru Cafe.

NEWS

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MEANS TO A BEGINNING The stakes of academic freedom in the context of the Palestine/Israel conflict

BY D.A.M.A.J. ILLUSTRATION BY Eve O'Shea DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

On Thursday, March 8, the Brown University Middle East Studies department hosted a panel discussion titled “Permission to Speak: Boycott and the Politics of Solidarity” as part of their Critical Conversations series. The goal of the event was to allow five contributors from the book Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production, Kareem Estefan, Ariella Azoulay, Laura Raicovich, Nasser Abourahme, and Sherene Seikaly, to speak freely before a public audience at Brown University about the politics of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) movement in the context of the Palestinian struggle for statehood. BDS is a Palestinian-led campaign that promotes various forms of boycott against the State of Israel in order to pressure the government to comply with international law standards.

The speakers invited to this panel represented a range of disparate backgrounds—from professions in academia to artistic production, and from identities that represent Israel, Palestine, and various Arab countries.

The content of the panelists’ discussion, specifically the breadth of issues, extended beyond the scope of the call for BDS and even the conflict with Israel. Rather, the panelists chose to speak on the greater contemporary issues regarding Palestine, of which the call for BDS only represents a small part. Abourahme, for instance, pushed back on Palestinian return to what is now Israeli land as it is presently conceived as a “restoration” of pre-1948 boundaries and suggested instead to think about return as the revival of the possibility of a Palestinian future.

Additionally, a significant amount of the panel’s first half was spent discussing boycotts in disparate contexts outside of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically regarding their efficacy in the contemporary art world in, for instance, declining to host art installations from Israeli artists complicit with their state’s crimes. Kareem Estefan and Laura Raicovich both addressed the implementation of boycotts as a means of decolonizing institutions, museums, and other spaces of expression. Estefan also referred to the cultural boycott against apartheid in South Africa directed at art or music that supported the regime.

The book Assuming Boycott discusses boycotts from around the world, from South Africa to Cuba, not just BDS singularly. The conversation, both in the richness of its scope and the diversity of the panelists’ perspectives, offered value for all members of the University community, regardless of their ideological orientation or their individual stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Effectively, it served as a crash course on cultural boycotts––Estefan memorably proclaimed them as beginnings, not ends to

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activism––and as the conversation moved toward the intricacies of BDS and the Palestinian case, the panel remained candid and open as an educational space.

Although the panelists held personal views on the BDS movement—which is commonplace, expected, and perhaps even necessary for rigorous university settings— the panel did not come to a political consensus on the efficacy and implications of BDS, much less the greater Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The agenda of the panel was unquestionably an academic one.

+++ Jared Samilow, a member of Brown Students for Israel, a student group that encourages conversation about the right of a Jewish state to exist, took great issue with the panel and wrote a recent op-ed in the Brown Daily Herald entitled “Academic Boycotts are Bad for the Academy.”

Samilow’s arguments revolve around multiple flawed assumptions. To begin, he equates academic discussion on boycott of Israeli academic institutions to university-sponsored pro-boycott propaganda, assuming that simply because Beshara Doumani, the Director of Middle East Studies at Brown, and the five panelists exhibit personal support for the academic boycott of Israel that aims to boycott Israeli universities complicit with the crimes of the state, the discussion was a university-approved sponsorship of such an action. Samilow argues, from the very beginning of the article, that academic freedom should be prioritized at the cost of PalestinianIsraeli politics. What Samilow misses, however, is that this conflict is less a political issue than a humanitarian one. There are no two equal sides but an oppressor and an oppressed; Samilow advances the inviolability of freedom of expression even at the cost of human lives, a position that finds its roots in Western political thought.

While boycotting Israeli institutions may seem the most apparent way in which academic freedom is deliberately restricted, limiting campus conversation on the academic boycott of Israel and BDS is just the same. One of Samilow’s critiques of the panel was that the conversation lacked ideological diversity, demonstrated most evidently through the lack of Israeli voices. Professor Ariella Azoulay, however, spoke from her background as an Israeli citizen. She explained to the Independent, “I am not counted by the author as an Israeli scholar.” By openly discrediting Azoulay’s voice as unworthy of representing an Israeli perspective, Samilow exemplifies dangerous,

anti-democratic ideology that seeks to diminish dissenting voices within the Israeli nation. Azoulay experiences this ignorance often as a result of the Hasbara propaganda regime of fear, which “decides who is Israeli and who is not, in a way that Israeli scholars are only those who act as spokespeople of the state,” according to Azoulay.

Hasbara is a public diplomacy tool used by the State of Israel to spread a positive image of itself abroad. This silencing of specific Israeli and Jewish voices is not an isolated occurrence; another Jewish professor at DePaul University, Norman Finkelstein, whose parents survived concentration camps during the Holocaust, was denied tenure and later denied entry into Israel due to his work condemning the Israeli state.

It should be noted, too, that Critical Conversations actually does work towards expanding “diversity of thought” or “ideological diversity” to otherwise marginalized Palestinian and Israeli voices—just not the hegemonic sort envisioned by Samilow and his ideological counterparts. The production of knowledge about Palestine and Israel is fundamentally skewed—arguing that a panel like Critical Conversations must present a balanced conversation or equal representation of the two sides ignores the disparity between Palestinian academia and Israeli. For Palestine, the sole source of academia exists within the diaspora, which is significantly less powerful than the plethora of Israeli academic institutions that wield immense knowledge power in Israel and the United States. The Institute for Palestinian Studies, the oldest leading source of scholarship about Palestinian affairs and National Archive for Palestine, has its main offices and library in Beirut, while other central hubs for Palestinian studies are located at Columbia University and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Academic activity within the occupied Palestinian territories is largely inhibited by the Israeli state, whose total control over the everyday functions of Palestinian universities, such as the mobility of faculty and students, hampers any productivity. The problem for Palestinians goes beyond just one regarding the production of knowledge to that of access to education, since residents of the occupied territories are also often barred from Israeli universities.

This imbalance in knowledge production translates to an imbalance in power as well; events such as Critical Conversations present the opportunity of elevating voices otherwise marginalized. To criticize the dominance of viewpoints sympathetic to the Palestinian cause at a single event demonstrates ignorance and a failure to

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understand the need for marginalized voices to receive representation and space. And to say that Doumani, a tenured professor who specializes in the social history of Palestinians, cannot host academic events that analyze Palestinian political identity has problematic implications for academic freedom at Brown and other college campuses.

Last March, a similar condemnation of academic discussion occurred when the University of Manchester censored a talk by a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust about the mistreatment of Palestinians at the University of Manchester. Univeristy administrators then labelled the talk as anti-Semitic, after being lobbied to do so by the Israeli ambassador. In another instance, following supposed lobbying by pro-Israel organization StandWithUs, University of Cambridge threatened to cancel an event about BDS altogether last November due to concerns over neutrality that arose from the event chair being Palestinian. Finally, a talk scheduled for next month at Arizona State University by Hatem Bazian, a chair of American Muslims for Palestine, about BDS almost faced cancellation when he refused to sign a contract from the university stating that his talk would not engage in boycott of Israel.

Despite claiming to be a bastion of acceptance and left-leaning thought, Brown also harbors funding and representation imbalance between Israel and the rest of the Middle East. One need look no further than the disparity between the sprawling, well-endowed Hillel House, which receives funding from Hillel International, and the Brown Muslim Students’ Center, housed in a dark basement room of an aging freshman dorm, to realize this problematic dynamic. Though all students are entitled to a place of community worship for their respective faith, Hillel has become increasingly politicized in recent years due to large amounts of funding from Israel that

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tie it directly to Zionism and, in the process, undermine the communal space for Jews of all orientations vis-à-vis Zionism. Brown also established the Israel Fund in 2016, which it hopes will soon reach its $10 million endowment goal, in conjunction with the Watson Institute for International Affairs and with the purpose of promoting research and opportunities in Israel and the Middle East.

Recent revelations about the creation of the Israel Fund without any involvement or input from the Middle East Studies department, as well as the fund’s role in financing a 2017 Wintersession course to travel to and study in Israel/Palestine, have underscored the blatantly political—rather than academic—nature of this endeavor in addition to its history of deceiving students. One cannot help but wonder the reasons for the discernible absence of a Brown Palestinian Studies Department, a Brown Palestine Fund, and tenured professors from Palestinian institutions.

While lobbying by foreign governments or contracts banning boycott have yet to surface at Brown, organizations like CAMERA and Canary Mission are present among student and professor affiliates; these groups are known to blacklist students and professors who utter anything remotely critical of the state of Israel or Zionist settler-colonialism as anti-Semites. They have the capacity to wrongfully erase perspectives critical of the Israeli state and remove individuals from their careers through networks that engage in undeniable academic censorship, leaving students and professors who harbor any empathy for the Palestinian struggle afraid that their careers could end if they so much as speak freely and openly express their sentiments. When Raicovich, one of the five speakers on the panel and previous Director of the Queens Museum, declined to host the Israeli mission to the UN’s re-enactment of the 1947 Palestine partition vote at the museum due to the trauma experienced by

Palestinians by this event, she later faced accusations of anti-Semitism and eventually resigned from her role.

Estefan, another speaker on the panel, told the Indy, “Several of my friends and colleagues, whether of Arab, Jewish, or other backgrounds, have been subject to these bogus ad hominem attacks. But what we are calling for, when we advocate BDS, is in fact co-resistance: the coming together of people of conscience against the ethno-nationalist divisions imposed by Israel and the political bodies that legitimate its colonial policies, to envision an egalitarian, peaceful co-existence with Palestinian self-determination.” +++ It goes without saying that the March 8 Critical Conversations panel was crucial in efforts to level the playing field for University discussions regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict that persistently biases the Israeli perspective. When engaging with frameworks of settler-colonial oppression designed to value only certain voices, one cannot overstate the importance of providing a space for discussing the promises of academic boycott.

The BDS movement constitutes First Amendmentprotected free speech in the United States—as argued by the ACLU—but has nonetheless been declared illegal in 24 states and many additional localities. The privileges afforded by a liberal education include the active practice of processing different views to form individual opinions—a privilege that, one must remember, is absent from larger discussions about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

D.A.M.A.J. wants equity, not equality.

FEATURES

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SOCIAL FABRICS Connecting and crafting online

One long string of yarn, when arranged correctly, can become any number of shapes a person could want to wear on their body: a scarf, a sweater, a bodysuit. With a pull, the whole thing can unravel. The constraints comfort the mind, as with a pattern to follow and an understanding of the basic motions, one can settle into a rhythm for hours.

These qualities oppose our conception of the things we create online: the “content” that streams onto our media platforms daily seems immaterial, detached from our bodies, and seamless, as though it can never be undone. It is constantly spreading, hyperlinking, to widen our scope of focus. Knitting, with its tedious, monotonous movements, can act as a break in the information flood of daily internet use, from the barrage of images and words— importantly, it allows a break from the verbal. But digital technologies and craft converge; in recent years knitters and crafters more broadly have carved out a space for a renewed dissemination of craft knowledge, made possible by platforms like Youtube, Reddit, Ravelry (an online knitting community) and personal blogs.

There is comedy in the intersection of handicrafts and internet culture, or at least this is what I think, as special effects transitions appear between different shots of a woman’s hands, teaching me how to cast-on my first row of stitching. But this is only because the face of knitting has always been older, feminine, and domestic, the demographic of those often presumed to be digitally illiterate. It is exciting and strange to see these women in their own online communities, in which discussion of making creative projects is often interspersed with hints to the forms of care these women foster beyond crafting (the nod to a granddaughter that will receive this childsized sweater, to the cake that needs to be baked for the family party), creating a different ecology from the trending discourse of more masculine or youth-centric corners of Reddit or Twitter.

Historically, older women taught skills like sewing, knitting, and crocheting within the home, as domestic production of clothing was a necessity in most American households. Craft knowledge was transmitted intergenerationally, while trends circulated among women through periodicals and craft books. Victorian classics like the Godey’s Lady’s Book circulated knitting patterns as well as poetry and opinion pieces to tens of thousands of women.

Although crafting was a chore, it was also a mode of engaging with deeper aesthetic traditions, often bound to place and family. As a 1895 issue of Art Needlework describes: Would it not be a pleasant occupation for many of our girls to fashion something, the best of its kind, in the style of the days they live in, so well and so prettily that it would be worth keeping as a reminder of these days when they are past, and we ourselves are among the old-fashioned things; and would also be

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worth sending down the time as our grandmothers' things have come to us?

My grandmother, in fact, left me a beautifully knitted blanket that sits on my bed. It is something I have always marveled at; its construction incomprehensible to me.

She was gone before I became interested in learning, and my mother was never taught, so I learned from YouTube.

From the phone in my lap beneath my knitting needles, a Scottish woman instructed me on how to tie my first slipknot, and precisely how to manipulate the yarn into the first row of stitches—loop, slide in, wrap around, pull through.

Youtube has presented astonishing new possibilities for the world of hobby crafters: just typing in “how to knit” on Youtube yields 4.8 billion videos, exhaustively covering everything from basic stitches and fixes to more complicated pattern construction. You can pause and replay the motion of a stranger’s hands at your own pace.

You can get bored of their voice or dislike their lighting and move onto another teacher immediately. These efficient instructional videos unfold into the much lengthier process of making: someone can teach you a new technique in three minutes that you spend the next ten hours repeating.

In many ways, activities like knitting allow you to readjust to a slower pace than that of digital communications. Most knitters I know knit in the background of other activities in their life: watching TV, chatting, waiting, listening. When done in public, such as during a faculty meeting or the waiting room in the doctor’s office, knitting occasionally elicits discomfort from others, as if a bit of private domestic life has walked too far out the front door, becoming unprofessional or too precious for others to see.

A knitter’s defense is usually that the monotonous manual work often helps them focus their thoughts or listen more intently. In this way, the rhythm of the hands grounds the outside activities in something material, processing whatever stimuli is coming in through the singular motion of a stitch. In contrast, in surfing the internet, your multitasking can become untethered.

Messages can flow in at a rate faster than you can read, the website you are on can open up countless potential pathways to click and wander while music streams in the background. You have to chart your way through the simultaneous activities, making active decisions about what the foreground of your focus is.

Knitting today is deeply embedded in the internet: its popularity as both a leisurely hobby and remunerated labor is due to the accessibility of craft knowledge online as well as the ability to monetize either that knowledge or its products through the internet. Popular bloggers and YouTubers can make money through advertisements, from commissions off of purchased products

they recommend to their audiences, or through selling the instructions to their patterns as online documents.

Further, websites like Etsy create a marketplace to link small-scale craft producers to customers who want luxury, handmade items without the labor of making.

However, digital communications also enable the rapid machine of fast-fashion, of which cheap and accessible clothing makes the cost and time-commitment of knitting seem like an extreme way to arrive at a similar product: a pair of socks, for example, can take 24 hours total to make maybe spread out over days or weeks or months, a timescale in which Amazon could deliver you a five-pack of socks for a price comparable to that of the yarn. While both the producers and the socks of these two different kinds of production have qualitatively different existences, both products ultimately end up serving the same purpose.

To knit, then, is clearly not to pursue efficiency or utility, but something else. The kind of multitasking that knitting enables is crucial to its appeal, and part of why it continues to draw primarily women, despite the fact that both women and clothing production are now less bound to the home. Whether for money or for the satisfaction of creating things, the work of knitting fits neatly and flexibly into the work of childcare, into the background of a social life, and into the hours outside of the traditional workday. +++ I wanted to know why someone who knits as a hobby would teach knitting online. After all, the composition of a knitting pattern and of a video tutorial are creations of disparate skill-sets. One popular Youtuber I talked to, Donna Wolfe of Naztazia, began teaching knitting and crocheting online unintentionally, two decades after her grandmother taught her how to crochet. As a technology business consultant, Wolfe created her website and YouTube channel as models for her portfolio to demonstrate to clients how social media can be used to market a business. “Little did I know it would take on a life of its own!” Wolfe explains.

Wolfe’s online crafting tutorials are a commitment wedged into a busy life: “Videos take me three-tofour hours to complete from start to finish. I try to get one video out per week, so I have plenty of time for my consulting business as well as time for being a mom to my 12-year old daughter and seven-year old son.”

In addition to being a supplemental income to her work as a consultant, Wolfe sees the two careers and two distinct skill sets as being linked creatively. She describes similarities between website-building and textile pattern design work: coding and writing knit or crochet patterns both require adherence to certain standards and abbreviations, as well as making aesthetic choices about color

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BY Paige Parsons ILLUSTRATION BY Lillian Xie DESIGN BY Mariel Solomon

and appearance in general. Wolfe tells me that she has certain practices she follows every time she makes a tutorial, including even how she does her nails—which is important when your hands take up most of the screen.

Two of the first videos that come up under a YouTube search for “how to crochet” are Donna Wolfe’s. She speaks clearly, enumerating the process step by step in coordination with every hand motion. Across the bottom of the screen, important words appear, and her pink crochet needle can be easily followed against the white background and bright green yarn. She repeats techniques for clarity, the video transitioning with slow fades.

At moments, the video shifts to Donna herself, standing outside wearing a pink crocheted sweater, explaining to the beginner that mistakes are common. The six-minute video, with its ten million views, has certainly helped form the basis of thousands of crocheting projects, little iterations of Donna’s example happening in hands all over the world.

Another popular craft blogger, Jessica Potasz of the channel Mama in a Stitch, tells me that she began putting her crafts online as a way of organizing the patterns she was making. She thought she could just upload them to a blog as a sort of archive, and if someone stumbled on them while looking for a particular pattern, she would be happy that her work could be of use.

She didn’t begin the work intending it to become a career, but as a way of organizing the pastime she had taken up while taking care of her young child. Crafting had multiple purposes, as she explains: “I could foster my love of art and design while making practical pieces for myself and loved ones.” As she gained tens of thousands of followers, Potasz began to take the blog more seriously, and ultimately found ways to monetize it through affiliated links and sponsorships. Most of her original designs are free, but there is also a separate link to her Etsy shop,

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where instructional materials for recreating her designs go for three dollars. This website and YouTube channel have now become full-time work, done flexibly around her schedule as a mother: “the great thing is that I can take a day away from the blog to take my daughter to the zoo and then work late at night to make up for it. However, it means a lot of long days and long nights!”

On her website, Potasz writes that she was previously a certified Special Education teacher, and still spends some of her evenings tutoring kids. Now, she spends most of her time teaching to an international audience—largely Canadian and American women, but also a sizeable portion of viewers from outside of North America, ranging from teens to grandmothers. There is a certain fondness between Potasz and her audience, as she watches them produce their own personal versions of her designs, often for their own family members or loved ones. +++ Within the wide open possibilities offered by the rapid dissemination and access to information on the internet, craft production has not only been changed by the internet as a platform, but also as a source for the structures a knitted or woven fabric can encode. Earlier this year, electrical engineering researcher Janelle Shane trained a neural network to learn a set of 500 knitting instructions sourced from various websites. New instructions were then generated by the network, creating idiosyncratic designs, many of which have been knitted by members of the online knitting community, Ravelry. As a wide variety of differently-shaped knit projects were inputted, many of the patterns which resulted create novel shapes, sometimes incompatible with functional knitting. The people testing out the patterns often had

to alter the instructions as they went along, combining human ingenuity with the computer-generated designs.

In this space between handmade construction and computer-generated design, knowledge is translated across disciplines that seem distinct, yet in practice can be put in generative conversation. In designer Francesca Rodriguez Sawaya’s handwoven work entitled “texere,” patterns are translated between verbal language, to a digital language, and then into a woven structure.

Rodriguez Sawaya analyzed auditory patterns from oral history recordings as the basis of the project, writing on her website that “texere is not about replacing the way we do things today, but the realization that technological design is reactive and sometimes overlooks the unwritten context that adds meaning to our stories.” In this instance, the physically crafted object retains something of traditional knowledge that cannot be subsumed into either language or digital culture. In a similar vein, certain craft techniques, such as Victorian laces, are being preserved on craft websites, ready to be reconstructed by contemporary craftspeople. In this way, online craft communities are both places to push craft into new directions as well as to revive and renew long-standing traditions.

An intertwining of textile and computing technologies is nothing new. In one telling of the story, computing originates in textile manufacturing; some consider the jacquard loom, invented in France in 1804, to be the first computer because of its ability to hold information systematically through punch-cards which translate into yarn selection. Charles Babbage, a 19th century British polymath, took the structure of the jacquard loom as the basis for his theoretical Analytical Engine, a general-use programmable computing engine proposed in 1837. He even used the metaphor of the textile mill to explain its organization: the “store” compartment held numbers inputted via punch-cards, while a separate “mill” compartment processed the numbers arithmetically.

More than a century before the first actual construction of a general-use computer, Babbage anticipated the basic logical structure that would come to dominate electronic computer design. Notes on the Analytical Engine by Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician and writer who worked with Babbage, ultimately became formative for the design of IBM’s first digital compiler, a program that transforms code between languages, in 1957.

Lovelace wrote, “We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” As digital technologies allow craft communities to reprocess their ways of making and create new networks through which to transmit technical knowledge, the slow process of crafting returns one knot of the tangible to the vastness of the web.

PAIGE PARSONS B’18 is much too impatient to knit her own socks.

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08

MISSING THE MARK The reality of the gun control debate in Rhode Island

BY Lucas Smolcic Larson ILLUSTRATION BY Halle Krieger DESIGN BY Ella Rosenblatt

On April 10, hundreds of people packed the galleries of the RI State House. As the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance two new firearm regulations, some of these onlookers chanted “our votes count!”—a threat to representatives up for reelection in November. The protestors objected to a proposed ban on ‘bump stocks,’ the mechanical attachment that enabled the semi-automatic rifles used in October’s massacre in Las Vegas to fire faster. They also denounced the so-called red flag law, which would permit state judges to confiscate legally-possessed guns if their owners were flagged as threats by law enforcement. Red flags could include a history of mental illness or acts of violence, but also the “unlawful, threatening, or reckless brandishing of a firearm” displayed on social media.

April 10 had all the hallmarks of today’s fight over gun control. An overwhelmingly white and conservative faction of gun owners, claiming shooting as their cultural heritage, loudly defended their Second Amendment right to bear arms. Meanwhile, liberal lawmakers and advocacy groups work to pass sweeping gun restrictions, spurred on by the latest mass tragedy. Bridging this chasm is one striking commonality: both misunderstand the very issue at hand.

Kinds of mass violence The political debate, amplified by the media, portrays mass shootings as the tragedy of US gun violence, but these events obscure the bigger picture. In 2015, after a gunman killed nine worshippers at a church in South Carolina, President Obama told the nation, “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries…with this kind of frequency.”

Politifact labelled his claim “mostly false,” citing a database by researchers Jaclyn Schildkraut and H. Jaymi Elsass that puts the US at a lower per-capita mass shooting fatality rate than Norway, Finland, and Switzerland (although isolated events have boosted these countries’ rates). Difficulties in defining mass shootings complicate cross-national comparison, resulting in some studies which conclude that they are a uniquely American problem and others whichcast doubt on this hypothesis.

Everyday US gun violence presents a more clear-cut issue. In 2016, the CDC reported the firearm death rate in the US was about 12 per 100,000, or just over 38,000 victims that year. Sixty percent of these were suicides, which while concerning, contributes to a suicide rate comparable to that of Germany and other EU countries.

This leaves about 15,000 homicides. This rate of interpersonal gun violence, eight times higher than the rate in Canada and 27 times higher than Denmark’s, sets the US apart from all nations with similar socioeconomic status.

But mass shootings figure into only a tiny portion of this violence. Mother Jones’ mass shooting database recorded 71 victims in 2016, representing only .005 percent of total gun deaths. These catastrophic events are a serious problem but, broadly speaking, they are not the problem of gun violence in the US. Everyday gun violence is an issue of urban racial injustice. The CDC reports about 80 percent of gun homicides in 2016 took place in cities. Despite making up only 13 percent of the population, Black Americans are gun victims at rates that exceed those of whites in all 50 states. In Providence, data presented by Mayor Elorza’s Advisory Council to Reduce Gun Violence in

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2017 showed shooting victims treated at city hospitals over the past 10 years have been 32 percent Hispanic and 43 percent Black. Overall, Rhode Island has one of the lowest gun death rates in the US, but gun violence disproportionately harms urban communities of color in the state.

Classical High School student Wilfred Chirinos addressed the neglect of urban gun violence in communities of color at the March 14 Providence Walkout to End Gun Violence. Speaking about the national reaction to the Parkland shooting, he said, “My problem was that the message was focused on gun violence in schools, but little do we speak about the gun violence in communities, in our communities.” What would a broader movement to curb gun violence look like? It would acknowledge the intertwining dynamics of poverty and racism as the real targets of meaningful anti-gun violence efforts, framing the issue as one of social and racial justice instead of political partisanship.

The color of gun control The gun control movement’s failure to protect urban communities of color from violence is nothing new.

UCLA law professor Adam Winkler wrote in the Atlantic, “indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like any other laws, were used to oppress African Americans.” After the Civil War, Southern states adopted Black Codes that barred Black gun ownership and prompted the confiscation of firearms by bands of white men, the most famous being the Ku Klux Klan.

After the Black Panther Party’s armed members followed law enforcement to observe and guard against police brutality in 1967, gun control attitudes suddenly mirrored those of the post-Civil War South—this time in California. Then-Governor Ronald Reagan responded by signing the Mulford Act, prohibiting the open carry of guns in public places. The next year, President Nixon oversaw the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which banned “Saturday Night Specials,” or cheaply made handguns associated with minority communities.

Many historians attribute this sudden energy around gun control to an intent to keep guns out of the hands of Black radicals.

Gun control policies played a role in the rise of mass incarceration of Black and Brown people in the 1980s.

Yale law professor James Forman Jr. explains in his book Locking Up Our Own how, surprisingly, Black politicians worked to criminalize gun possession in their communities with tough-on-crime policy. Responding to high levels of crime threatening African American communities, Black Washington DC city councilman John Wilson pushed a sweeping ban on handguns and shotguns, along with mandatory minimum sentences for criminals who used guns. His proposal passed, but concurrent calls for addressing crime through social programs from other Black leaders met their end with the political conservatism of the 80s. Forman explains that Black politicians did not realize that their punitive policies, such as mandatory minimums, would go on to drive the disproportionate incarceration of their own communities. Although they fully intended the criminalization of gun possession to help protect their neighborhoods, in the long run these policies again worked against the people gun violence affected the most.

Low-hanging fruit Today in Rhode Island, attempts to curb gun violence are also accused of discrimination. Take the red-flag law, which passed in the House on April 12th and now awaits a Senate vote. After its introduction, the RI ACLU published a 14-page criticism of the bill stating that “extreme risk protection orders”—the means by which judges authorize the confiscation of guns—allow police to use coercive measures against individuals not alleged to have committed any crime. The bill’s critics cite the vocal support it garnered from the Police Chiefs of Rhode Island and its potential to disproportionally impact communities of color already targeted by law enforcement—effectively making unrestricted gun ownership a white, upper-class privilege.

The bill also faces opposition from guns rights organizations. Brenda Jacobs with the Rhode Island Revolver and Rifle Association told the Independent that red flag orders “circumvent due process” and set a “dangerous precedent.” On the other side of the debate, the Communications Director for the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence (RICAGV), Kat Kerwin, declined to comment on the bill to the Independent.

Beyond the red-flag law, the liberal gun control agenda in Rhode Island is consistent with the national debate’s focus on mass shootings. Her organization endorses three policies: a ban on assault weapons; a ban on high capacity magazines; and the Safe Schools Act, which prohibits firearms on school grounds with exceptions for police, Reserve Officers Training Corps, and sport shooting programs. Kerwin called these efforts the “low-hanging fruit approach” of gun violence prevention, describing the kinds of firearms the RICAGV hopes to ban as “weapons of war.” The assault rifle ban’s national supporters have included President Obama, Everytown for Gun Safety, and more recently the #NeverAgain activists from Parkland.

In 1994, Congress passed a federal assault weapons ban. However, loopholes in the legislation, like the difficulty of defining “assault weapon,” and the 1.5 million assault rifles already in circulation, resulted in studies finding unclear evidence about its life-saving potential when it expired in 2004. Rifles are also responsible for only a fraction of US gun deaths, with handguns accounting for about 70 percent of fatalities overall and making up a similar percentage of mass shooting weapons, according to Mother Jones. Assault-rifle bans might be “common sense” policy for many liberals, but they also play a role in legislative logjams around gun control. Jacobs, a member of the RI Revolver and Rifle Association, explains why her group opposes an assault rifle ban in RI. “We feel that our gun laws are pretty well-balanced in Rhode Island right now,” she told the Independent, describing stringent background check laws, as well as mandatory safety courses required for gun club memberships, concealed carry permits, and a hunting licenses.

“They feel that banning and restricting guns from law-abiding citizens is going to stop crime. It’s not,” says Jacobs. She has a point. There are more than 300 million guns in civilian possession in the US. Comparing this number against 38,000 gun deaths, or even 500,000 gun victimizations, makes it clear: the vast majority of gun owners are not committing crimes. What is more, strict state-level gun regulations suffer when neighboring states adopt more lax measures and illegal guns remain available.

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According to Jacobs, it is “the gangs and the people with mental illness that are the problem.” But research

by Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, finds that curing all cases of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression overnight would only reduce gun violence by 4 percent. "Most mentally ill people are not violent," he says. Jacobs’ gesturing towards gangs acknowledges the impact of urban gun violence. But “gang” is often code for an overarching image of Black and Latinx people as criminals and a justification for punitive policy, which is problematic given the overpolicing and risk of police shootings these communities already face.

Beyond a selective focus Kerwin, with the Coalition Against Gun Violence, separated gun violence into two categories: “episodic,” or periodic mass shootings; and “non-episodic,” smaller scale violence that accounts for the majority of gun deaths. When asked why the RICAGV’s policies address primarily episodic violence, Kerwin responded, “I think non-episodic gun violence isn't something that you can legislate,” portraying her organization’s policies, like the assault rifle ban, as only the first step to a more expansive anti-gun violence agenda. The RICAGV does fund groups addressing urban gun violence in a more holistic way, helping the Providence Student Union put on the March 14th Student Walkout. It is also considering a future measure to increase the numbers of social workers in schools to support communities where gun violence is prevalent.

“The organizing communities that exist now in gun violence prevention … have been focusing on the episodic side because that’s the gun violence that impacts white communities,” Kerwin acknowledged. She cited evidence of changing norms in the demands of some Parkland student-activists of color during the March For Our Lives. They demand politicians move beyond a selective focus on white victimhood to address racially disproportionate everyday violence. These activists agree that non-episodic gun violence is something that needs to be legislated, urgently so, while also calling for a nuanced approach that does not write-off their communities as criminal.

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So what works?

An equitable answer to the racialized impacts of everyday gun violence means moving beyond gun control’s mass shooting paradigm. Gun regulation is one of many policies that could address gun violence—not the only solution.

The city of Boston acknowledged this while facing high levels of youth gun-homicide in the 1990s. Its response was an anti-gang violence policy designed by criminologist David Kennedy called “Operation Ceasefire.”

Kennedy believes the racialized image of gang members as murderous super-predators masks the fear and social pressure these young men feel. In Boston, he discovered that less than 5 percent of community members in gang-dominated neighborhoods participated: a tiny circle of people was driving the majority of violence in the city, a finding replicated nationally.

His program troublingly began with a strategy of over-policing gun violence, including long sentences for repeat offenders. Then, the city conducted “call-ins,” meetings between gangs, law enforcement, clergy, and local service groups in a safe environment to explain a new “zero-tolerance” policy for gun violence. Officials spoke directly to those at risk for gun violence about the consequences of the crime while connecting them to social services they might need, like housing or employment. Addressing the underlying causes of violence, like chronic poverty, residential segregation, and other forms of structural disadvantage, was meant to decrease shootings.

Operation Ceasefire was enormously successful—at least in the short term. It accounted for a rapid 63 percent reduction in youth homicides, in what was dubbed the “Boston Miracle.” The model was exported to other cities, and a 2012 review of the policy found that seven of the eight cities that had fully implemented Ceasefire saw similar reductions in violence. Ceasefire is known as the “pulling levers” approach because it involves simultaneously pulling all relevant levers of violence: coordinating social services and the relationship between police and communities. Because of this, it falls apart easily when any of the actors involved become less committed.

Boston saw a 67 percent rise in homicides in 2001, which Kennedy credits to failures in the continued implementation his plan.

Punitiveness has shown itself to the lowest common denominator policy in US criminal justice when politicians disagree about the role of social supports in addressing crime. Ceasefire falls apart if officials lose commitment to the program in favor of harsher measures. Kennedy’s program walks a razor’s edge between supporting the over-policing of communities of color and recognizing the humanity of those engaged in urban violence. It is not easy to pull off, but the implementation of any effective program against gun violence won't be, either.

Raise the wage In Rhode Island, certain lawmakers are taking similarly broad-based approaches to gun violence. Last year, Representative Marcia Ranglin-Vassell formed the Community Response to Joblessness and Gun Violence, a coalition of legislators and community organizations. “I strongly believe that the root cause of gun violence lies in generational poverty and lack of proper representation at all levels of government,” she said in a press release.

Ranglin-Vassell listened to Providence residents’ needs and solutions—many of which came down to employment. Her coalition hopes to establish a city-wide job fair, and she also plans to reintroduce a bill for a $15 minimum wage. Ranglin-Vassell believes these policies are a necessary addition to gun control measures targeting mass shootings.

Kat Kerwin indicated the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence is taking part in Ranglin-Vassell’s efforts. While Brenda Jacobs and the Revolver and Rifle Association did not mention any such endorsements, her organization supports a bill requiring the RI attorney general to prepare an annual report on rates of gun crime and prosecution. These are small steps—beginnings—to reframing the gun debate in terms of the real problems of violence, their racial inequities, and the multi-faceted policies that will be needed to address them.

LUCAS SMOLCIC LARSON B’19 believes gun rights and gun violence prevention aren’t opposites.

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THE HUMAN GAZE Photography, objectivity, and the National Geographic Twins

BY Soraya Ferdman ILLUSTRATION BY Rémy Poisson DESIGN BY Mariel Solomon This April, National Geographic published an issue dedicated entirely to the subject of race. On the cover was a photograph of Marcia and Millie Biggs, who first went viral in 2007 when NatGeo called them “million to one” biological anomalies. Below their portrait is the line: “Black and White. These twin sisters make us rethink everything we know about race.” Together, the image and text present Marcia and Millie as a symbol for a post-racial future without taking into account the fetishization that can follow this kind of representation.

National Geographic’s decision to publish an issue that tackles the subject of race is peculiar for a magazine that for so long published both explicitly and implicitly racist content. The magazine editors are aware of this contradiction. So much so that an apology from the current editor-and-chief, Susan Goldberg, is included in the issue. The apology outlines the ways in which National Geographic has historically turned a blind eye to racial injustice in America, all the while exoticizing countless communities abroad. The apology is far from thorough.

Even Goldberg admits that it represents a first step, as it fails to adequately address the magazine’s legacy of racist image production.

National Geographic presents itself as a popular science and educational organization, but its most powerful tool is arguably the magazine’s artistic reputation: it is a publication that seeks, first and foremost, to dazzle its readers with beautiful images. In an interview at Brown’s Watson Institute, Professor of Anthropology Catherine Lutz commented, “In the past, [the magazine] represented many white middle class readers’ wish to see themselves as open to the world, first through colonialism, then through tourism and cosmopolitanism. I think it still serves that role of implicitly telling Americans who they are in relation to the rest of the world.” Lutz co-authored the 1993 book Reading National Geographic with Jane Collins. +++ Though science is a discipline rooted in empiricism, it interacts substantially with the subjective realm of art.

Our contemporary world is filled with various examples of this overlap—Planet Earth documentary series, Natural History Museums, and the MIT Visual Arts Center. Equally, early developments in modern science were deeply tied to visual culture.

Visual information, more so than numerical data, has been used throughout history to make arguments both about humans’ relationships to other humans and to the non-human world. The Renaissance brought about an increased interest in the documentation of the natural world and the creation of thousands of images— geographical maps, botanical sketches, and anatomical illustrations, among others. Early scientists relied heavily on visual tools to explicate their findings and to increase the value of their books—illustrated books could be sold for higher prices. Illustrations of plants and animals were also included to demonstrate greater intellectual authority, as the viewer would assume the illustration was done ad vivo (from life), and therefore was more accurate even than a textual description.

11

SCIENCE

In this period, wonder and exploitation operated hand in hand. Nature, widely considered to be the extension of God, was seen as perfect, designed to bewilder its witnesses. But as the Renaissance overlapped with the colonization of the Americas and Africa, God’s world was also stratified: creation existed in a hierarchy that visual artists then replicated. These images reflected their authors’ European biases. Colonized people were often depicted as closer to nature while Europeans were likened to celestial figures. Artifacts from this period are visible to this day, such as the painting “Discovery of the Mississipi by de Soto,” by William H. Powell, which still hangs in the United States Capital building. In it, De Soto is perched high on his white horse and painted in the brightest colors. The Native Americans, in contrast, are cowering close to the ground without clothing or protection.

National Geographic hired the historian of photography John Edwin Mason to analyze and critique the magazine’s own archives for its Race Issue. A professor from University of Virginia specializing in African history and the history of photography, Mason’s commentary is firm and unforgiving, “Until the 1970s, National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers. Meanwhile, it pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.” Though technically impressive, much of the photography encouraged a colonial gaze. For example, National Geographic’s coverage of the apartheid in South Africa is almost entirely void of Black South African perspectives. “The only black people are doing exotic dances…[or are] servants or workers,” Mason writes. “It’s bizarre, actually, to consider what the editors, writers, and photographers had to consciously not see.”

As Mason’s analysis makes clear, photography exists in more of a liminal space between objective and subjective practice than science does. The audience that consumes photographs at once thinks of them as irrefutable evidence, a captured moment of reality, and as artwork, more closely linked to emotion than to fixed meaning. Photography is interesting precisely because it so effectively captures what links science and art to each other. A photograph is at once objective and subjective, fixed and curated, timeless and contextual. Because of this, photographers often are not held responsible in the same way writers are for the content they produce.

Perhaps the technology of the camera places its user at a greater distance—it is the camera that captured the image, the lens that bent the light, not the hand of the photographer.

The extensive writings by photographer-writers, such as Susan Sontag and more recently by Teju Cole, have helped problematize the relationship between photography and objectivity. Both Sontag and Cole regard photography as a series of choices that tell the viewer more about the photographer than their photographed subjects. These choices—composition, color, angle of vision—come together into a kind of argument the photographer is fashioning around their muse.

Take, for example, the cover photo of Marcia and

Millie Biggs, which neatly captures the April issue’s overarching argument, mainly that race has no genetic basis.

What else could explain these twins, whose coordinated outfits, yet contrasting skin and hair highlight the paradox between their audience’s understanding of siblings and race? Siblings, after all, are intimately connected and share private spaces whereas Black and white people are thought to have different ancestries and inhabit separate private and public spaces. The photograph fails in its false optimism: American society has not transcended race, it remains a problem in its history and in the fabric of its present. Though the rest of the magazine addresses these issues, the cover suggests a raceless future, exploiting the twins for shock value.

In her article for the New Yorker, “The National Geographic Twins and the Falsehood of our Post-Racial Future,” Doreen St. Félix argues that the cover at once debunks and reinforces scientific racism: “The issue’s abstract says that ‘race is a human invention,’ and that skin color has misguidedly been used as a ‘proxy’ for race. And yet the magazine cover undermines all of these correctives. ‘Black and white,’ it reads, under the portrait of the twins.” There are plenty of people in the United States who continue to believe races bear meaningful genetic differences.

Of primary concern for St. Félix is the fetishization of interracial children: “Multiraciality ought not to be the vessel for social hope.” And so even in an issue that attempts so carefully to address its racist history, even though it includes several articles analyzing the political and social repercussions of American racial injustice, the start to this conversation is a photograph of interracial twins. So much of empiricism is rooted in the act of observing, of eyeing a subject closely. The photograph of the twins not only makes them a vessel for social hope, but of scientific inquiry. That is another thing about the photograph: most of the discourse takes place between the photographer and the audience.

Take a photograph and place it in a scientific magazine, and it immediately becomes difficult to separate fact from fiction. Since the sciences are still commonly perceived as objective disciplines, a photograph labeled as scientific could be seen as even more objective—just showing the world ‘as it is’—thus making embedded racism more insidious, and potentially harder to delineate. Knowing this, how can we, as consumers of science media, train ourselves to separate fact from fiction? The kind of analysis Cole and Sontag practice, which Mason also applies in his work with National Geographic archives, calls on one to acquire a more nuanced visual literacy—to find the human hand lingering at the edge of the frame.

SORAYA FERDMAN, B’18 read National Geographic Kids throughout elementary school.

APRIL 20, 2018

THREE POEMS SIGN AND SEAL

ILLUSTRATION BY Isabelle Rea DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

into its own fixless

Three years later, the question of remains: can my body be the sign that I survived?

Asking after the distance between how and why men split lives, between means and ends, a life thrown toward their convergence.

dew-thighed-today i set out to find my missing vowels with me i have only the things you bring to picket fences, to human scenes and some movements not yet tender and some ridges each too frayed and some cupped hair all too harsh

One hopes that pain makes nothing, that history does not deign to produce us. And yet we seek that which endures, and in doing so, speaks its listening.

and only one conjoining feature and flowers and grasses and the little-hooped-man who raised his head to swallow me whole, look at me like a charming motif until i rose full size as a wall decoration

This desire is the imperative to make an incomplete world.

We cannot take each other as the seal of what we have failed to know.

for him i am figure-of-eight for him i am of a bull’s hide for him i am a signet

I would like my presence to say: “Though the two of us have lost both origin and destination, there is no parallel, no recurrence, there is space outside of living.”

and yes, i am presumably made of matter presumably a signet presumably just a warning that before the dismal disaster i set out, swollen and waiting for the worst to happen, for the sound of sliding boxes. for knowing

Denegation of: “It is happening again,” marking the time I have spent waiting for my brother’s child, traveling forward and sideways with the movement of the night.

BY Sienna Giraldi and Will Weatherly

that grey is synecdoche for age shrinking for hurt and smiling for end-state yet still asking if this is it. if this is where i shout into the open mouth of the sea’s lapping hurrah and yell thank you thank you thank you thank you

WW

on the day i accept love’s tepid tide, i still shudder and watch wood stretching in summer, sucking power from its mold, waging indistinct and still it’s the most innocent gesture keeping the body upside down feeling blood flood the throat hearing the body rev its engines saying, im right beside you and alone is some sensation so im all around you

A TEST “This is only a test. If this was an actual emergency, you would be supplied with additional information.”

I watch the birds rise with the noise. For them it is a total sound, air waves landing on their bodies without conversing. If I put my head to their chests in flight, the test might speak to me with this sound. This proximal speech is not my knowledge, but my claim.

SG

I inherited a lithograph of an open plain from my grandmother, printed by a man named Oren Johnson. It is hung in my room. I am waiting to ascribe some scrap of language to it, but somehow I have never found the right. Two shapes enframed: almost ground, almost sky.

Oren on the plain and spinning, watching a continuous line. When he stops, the line changes. One could say this place has two horizons, the stretch of the land and the limit of his view, and in my room, one hangs without the other. The frame is the part that speaks Oren’s claim.

Somewhere I am speaking, and my words are immanent. This is my loneliness: this ripple of air, this emergency unclaimed.

WW

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

12

THE THE NEW NEW SCHOOL SCHOOL Expressionistic recollections of a night in virtual reality

TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY Liby Hays DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

The worst part about virtual reality is how flagrantly interesting it is. You bring it up and everyone within earshot turns their heads, echoing—coincidentally? ironically?—the rotational and positional control schema of a VR headset itself. And without much insight, or imagination even, you and the interested parties can launch into a series of bold speculations: all hopes actualized, all promises fulfilled, flesh but a vestige, in the wake of VR’s technological developments. Man’s triumph over metaphor at long last, and a jolt of phantom pain from a simulated knife as the final nail in the coffin of the mind-body dualism…

But such speculation only bogs us down, situates us.

No, we must move on—from the realm of pure hypotheticals to their uncanny realization, within the circumstantial bounds of a snowy January night and a closet space in Co-Works fabrication lab and from the perspective of a peevish, genotypically-XX college student—trappings of identity cast in lower or higher relief, depending, as vicarious worlds opened onto me.

13

ARTS

+++ 1. Rec Room (Developer: Against Gravity) Now, in media res, it was C, Zak and I: C being a professor and Zak being a close friend and C, Zak and I going into VR respectively because only one headset would work at a time, and the screen going gray because I had glitched it? Jamming on the triggers in my damp palms, it’s grey and I’m yelping and scared I pressed the wrong button but soon I realize that someone in the game has just placed a garbage bin over my head. Sorry sorry, he says and takes it off, How could you, How dare you etc. and, not listening, he dashes off.

(I mean dashing less in the sense of running than in the sense of a dashed line, as local movement here operates as a discontinuous teleportation mechanism. C says that panning straight forward though a scene would cause significant nausea, so they’ve developed a system where you move shorter or longer distances by aiming a dottedline parabola that projects outward like pissing into the distance.)

The controls have taken some adjusting to... Along

with the headset that holds rapidly refreshing OLED panels up to either eye, I’m given two handgrips, each with a joystick, pushbuttons, a roundabout slider and two triggers. The headset and grips are also apparently studded with infared LEDs tracked in space by a peripheral sensor to grant greater positional accuracy. Before Rec Room, C had dropped me in a proprioceptive primer app where I held still for a low-poly butterfly to land on my outstretched finger. Now in the Rec Room commons— a gym-type area strewn with corporate promotional kitsch like Frisbees and water bottles—I’m honing fine motor skills by using a tennis racket to lift the corner of a magazine off of a table. Manipulating these objects becomes the source of immense pleasure, thanks to the physics engine that so convincingly simulates their relations.

Now I exit the commons and enter a door marked "Charades." The way charades works here, we gather on a stage at podiums and a person in the center picks up a card and tries to express the word on it. They do so either through gesticulation or 3-D drawing extruded at the angle of one’s wrist and hanging in the air a few seconds like shaving cream on a mirror before solidifying

APRIL 20, 2018

and clattering to the floor. The drawings rock back and forth at points of contact, then dematerialize when the turn’s elapsed.

In between turns we talk amongst ourselves or to unseen companions. The man next to me says he needs a cigarette, and I anticipate his avatar’s rapturous collapse as he removes his gear to go smoke it. (His need for oral gratification recalls the incessant cries for pizza rolls that echo about the rec center. And the fact that, given the nondescript Rec Room avatars resembling nothing more than dot-eyed boxing dummies, and the ability to modulate vocal pitch from tenor to chipmunk, you can never guess someone’s age or nationality until they give accidental cues My ball, mine because the interesting thing about half of the people you meet here is that they’re actually small children and I say I don’t want that ball it’s of no interest to me And how C once was talking to a young woman and then a child approached and started calling him Daddy, and the woman Mommy and it was an awkward but interesting foundling scenario, for a bit).

At the end of charades, the game gives us all loot boxes containing a special item as incentive to keep playing. Great satisfaction in ripping the cardboard seal from the top of the package. The spoils of war… Today it’s a beret. +++ 2. VR Chat (Developer: VRChat Inc.) I am finding out one of the main risks you run in VR Chat is the risk of love at first sight. And if not a lasting love—still jarring and fatefully impelled. Unlike Rec Room’s clean, brightly-lit public location, VR Chat ‘gives us a taste of the nightlife,’ in a series of clubs, dive bars and house parties. You arrive at these spaces, through a portal or else a hologram navigation menu that projects from your wrist like a spy-watch, and you’re quickly taken up in the fracas. You’re accosted from all angles by this group of Caveman Spongebobs, Ugandan Knuckles in a ‘Looking for GF’ shirt and Fourth-of-July hat carting around more of their brood in a mini wagon, or else crucified DeadMau5 throwing off laughcrying emoji particles electrostatically, and then the floor clears a bit and you meet her gaze: the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen in your entire life, hovering breathlessly at the far wall.

Timidly you try and approach her, maneuvering around the Knuckleses (those scamps) but as you get closer you realize that what seemed like varicolored streaks in her hair is actually the Cool Ranch Doritos logo layered

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

on top of itself, and—overwhelmed by her grace, her quietude, the sheer ultimacy of the encounter—you flee the premises before things can progress any further. (Due to the popularity of anime-style avatars, you can repeat this love/loss cycle ad nauseum in any server of your choosing.)

I should add, I arrived at this club as a wraith but now I’ve taken the form of a bald white cismale in a Hawaiian shirt. One hand is permanently clamped around a beer, but he’d probably call it a ‘brewski.’ I found the body frozen against a wall with a placard next to it reading: As the digital social world grows, Eric wondered what will happen to us as these digital identities are stolen, and taken control of. As an experiment, he has released this model of his body to the wild. So for a couple of weeks, Eric is here as a clickable avatar for everyone!

In terms of avatars, I’m wary of the ‘flocking behaviors’ they can encourage, having briefly visited the tropical indoctrination island of the Ugandan Knuckles.

When I become Eric, I worry I’ll be absorbed into a morass of Erics, but so far there are no other Erics in sight.

I bum around different worlds for awhile. I go to restaurants, cabarets, parties, a horror attraction with a user-instituted paywall. I see a lot of acid trance Mr. Meeseeks from Rick and Morty, clone troopers sunken half into the floor, and Minions with aurora borealis panning over their bodies like a cosmic rash. (Everyone makes fun of me for my Hawaiian shirt and Lakais, but I pay them no heed.) Some of the residual angst from the Doritos girl I channel into dancing in the club with a large penguin hottie. Then I go to Time Square, which is just a hot dog cart surrounded by empty facades (not unrealistic). When you try to enter Sbarro or American Eagle, you’re teleported to the top of a tall building, with no recourse but to jump. +++ Now it’s C’s turn and he’s running through the halls of the abandoned anime high school. Zak and I watch secondhand on a computer monitor. He finds a rose bouquet—how quaint—now he’s running, leaping from the desks of the abandoned anime high school. C has a secret dream to be a VR Professor, and this could be the perfect context.

C was one of the first people to pique my interest in VR when I had his class over a year ago. One of his favorite metaphors is that VR ‘fell out’ of the

high-resolution retina displays developed for smartphone screens—the headset just a box holding a high-res screen with two views slightly offset from one another, after all.

It’s a tangential, almost accidental, development. But the question, as with its also inadvertently-developed cousin, LSD is: what can we learn from our experiences in another world?

As C roams the high school—dashing past lockers, basketball court, My Hero Academia posters—he speaks of the potential he sees in the medium. That one of his dreams is to create an emotionally-affecting VR experience that moves beyond the indie game trope of ‘an interactive journey through my depression’ in order to directly confront players with their own hypocrisy. Because there is something in VR he sees which abrogates, cuts sharp across players’ devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, lending it a political efficacy heretofore unrealized in gaming.

I learn a lesson myself, this night in VR, albeit at the last possible moment. Zak and I are getting ready to trudge back in the snow, and C has teleported to a chapel where he once witnessed one franchise character wed another 100-foot-tall franchise character (the details evade me...).

But standing in as a de facto groomsman at the present wedding is this magnificent figure. Not magnificent in his appearance, but in the way he moves: flitting gyroscopically between every possible X, Y, and Z orientation. He gives the impression of a human asterisk or an agitated molecule or a cartoon fight where arms and legs jut out for just an instant from a cloud of dust, and what I come to realize is that: this man is my new teacher.

Think, he riddles me, What is the greatest gift you could give to another? You don’t get riddled often these days, so this is a special treat. The human asterisk psychically confronts me with this line of thought. He keeps on riddling. He won’t stop riddling. What is the greatest gift you could give to another? What is the greatest gift? What is the greatest gift?

Answer: Your own center of mass.

But is that even true? Is it even so great a gift if it’s something I don’t actually want? What I really want is to throw mine away, or give one to every member of a live studio audience, Oprah-style.

LIBY HAYS B/RISD ’19 asks that you not put a garbage bin over her head until she’s properly adjusted to an environment.

ARTS

14

KE

JA

What is there not-to-say regarding Kelton, dearest of his name, jovial presence gracing our undeserving asses trundling along the day-to-day earth?

Talented chef, devoted lover, regular at Fortnight Anarchist Wine Bar. Did you know that JA has the world’s only birthmark that spells out the word “DEPOP”? They also have a tattoo of the word “Findy”—the secular commune in which they live. Jane tucks their chestnut hair into an iron-grey headscarf: they look hot and very Slavic.

You are reminded of a hot day in Eastern Europe when you stand with Jane at a chapel on a high hill looking down at all the ATMs and row-garages that, from this height, appear to you only as colorful squares. “Jane,” you ask, “wanna go into that Catholic gift shop? I’d like to buy my mother a Catholic souvenir.” Jane goes to the store with you, even though they already have an icon of the Virgin Mary next to the Twin Peaks poster in their turquoise bedroom in PVD. You don’t buy anything. You daydream about lying supine at the top of the hill and rolling down into a grassy knoll in the conceptual city you’re dreaming of. That’s what it feels like to be with Jane. The landscape in your head is uneven, but when you’re with them, you’re not overthinking the implications of this topography. With Jane, you’re feeling fine—quite possibly, you’re feeling perfect.

Kelton! Dearest Kelton!

Children swear by Christmas but over here in the godless terrain of our mutual, endless toil we swear by the hour, 10 PM, the turning point of all working resolutions, and truly there has never been a figure so suited and suitable for the hour as Kelton, Kelton Ellis, who projects the image of living his best life, who rips off one-liners in person and on Twitter, who choreographs life in its most daring arrangement, finishing his work, writing his essays, and having the take that is perennially spiciest and the one that makes life easier to live.

FA ID my first introduction to ID was in email form—in a parenthetical, no less—under a year ago: “(isabel is really rad if you haven’t met her— she’s really great at political reporting with in-depth personal interviews).” since then, i can’t help but think that our friendship was one long interview, and each desperate article conceived of and written at Tea in Sahara was that question about ‘your greatest weakness.’ there is a special joy and absurdity in running into ID in public, with that sheepish, bursting smile on her face as if she was caught in the act of pretending to be an adult. don’t be fooled by ID’s apparent normalness or business-casual attire—she is as frantic, nonsensical, and outlandish as it gets. there is harmony in the world when the campus gossips edit the newz section, and i am afraid for the future. newz will nvr b the same. in one month, ID will march meekly across the qg and into the halls of journalistic infamy. but there is hope. i can see it now: “New York Times changes name to New York Timz, editor-in-chief Isabel DeBre declares!” balance is restored, the world is at peace, and we can finally have some fun again~~ SF

Oh Fadwa, what would we do without you? Life is just a cold hard metal pole, and we keep sticking out our tongues at this pole to watch them stick to it as though the pole is made of glue. You have a different methodology. Life is a cold hard metal pole and some people use this pole to whack others in the head. You don’t do that at all—you just dance. You have a pole in your living room and you’re dancing on it, you acrobat! It is Thursday night. Your pet cats are watching and they’re all impressed. So is everyone you know, and everyone you’ll ever meet.

CRS

What is that muttering voice you hear... repeating back to you your words, but historicizing them, putting them into new argumentative frameworks….oh, there’s a head, poking out from bundles of colorful fabric (and why is there smoke coming out of the blankets?)...is that Soraya?

Why yes, it is. It also looks like she is sketching your face right now, drawing the scene vibrantly, you didn’t know your face was shaped that way, but now...is she human, or is she something more?

BY Indy Staff ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Eliza Chen & Maya Bjornson

“Solo espera un momeeeeentooooo, solo dime no es cieeeeeerto” —RBD As our beloved Camila steps into the world, we only hope we could keep her here for one last perreo (como Laika).

CRS came to Brown as a young idealist. Many of us, initially deterred by her determination and confidence, found in her an unapologetic woman, kind soul and loyal friend. Through her four years at Brown, Camila has remained committed to the liberation and empowerment of marginalized communities through her work (and crushing the ego of innumerable cis white men in the process). She never let us forget about what the real world is like, never let us forget that there are people (like her) fighting relentlessly against its injustices.

Camila, I will miss you deeply and can’t wait to see where life takes you (and those you will take down as you go along).

From your friends and frenemies here at the Indy, we just want to say: stay ReBelDe, wey.

DP Rhymes with BP, multinational energy company responsible for 2010’s disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Unlike the corporate ghouls at BP, DP is highly ethical.

She is the Robin Hood of her BUDS shift, never failing to allow her broke friends a free snack at the Rock cafe. She’s the caretaker of manifold Shih Tzus—which is important, because these are miserable, slow dogs who are genetically encoded with a longing for comatose. Dom will tell you you need to start using retinol for your fucked-up skin and then remind you your fucked-up skin will get better.

She owns a t-shirt that says “Linguini & Clams” and it looks really good on her. Armchair film critic and jaded Italian, Dom once told a boy at a party that she “doesn’t like music” and he choked on his spit. That’s not a problem: she’s way too good for him anyway.

TK I’ve spent many hours wandering through TK’s illustrations—happily, of course, but confused. Confused not just because of their labyrinthine structure, nor their hazy atmosphere, nor even the by the depths of their pools of ink, but by the contradiction presented by her bright demeanor when she comes in to scan them. I can remember maybe three times I have seen Teri not smiling. Pleasant to an extreme, open and kind, one can’t picture her with the trimmers requisite to fashion a dark hedge maze. But then maybe I’m all wrong about her drawings–maybe every twisting curve is a grin.

TOE

TAGS TAGS TAGS TAGS TAGS TAGS TAGS TAGS TAGS TAGS TAGS TAGS TAGS

15

EPHEMERA

APRIL 20, 2018

LC

JM

I admittedly took a course solely because LC was enrolled. It was 100 percent worth it.

Who else could call BS on a professor without looking like: A) a jerk B) a dunce C) a twisted teacher’s pet.

LC did it with a wide smile, a short laugh, and a swig of her Nalgene.

I command+F LC’s Canvas posts every week. Before class, I read them at least twice, maybe three times.

I wish I could compare French realism and cognitive neuroscience studies without sounding like I was up to my ears in bullshit.

Love letters are cheesy. Insta DMs are creepy.

I tried to send a Candygram, but couldn’t find the words.

I tried to write a Canvas post, but my browser timed out.

So here I am, with my toe tag and a ticking clock, To tell you, LC, U a real one <3

Stopgaps, fail-safes. Ionic strippings and gluttings. Flapping nostrils, vestibules, preformationist, post-facialist antifinalism. Discursive gasses.

Fresh haircut with the matching toe tag. A glass of wine, raised in toast, with limpid and opaque facets. And add to that list, absolute candor.

Which is to say: A bear jumps out of a bush and starts chasing two hikers. They both start running for their lives, but then one of them stops to put on his running shoes.

His friends says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear!”

His friend replies, “I don’t have to outrun the bear; I only have to outrun you!”

IRF my best friend and worst enemy: it won’t be the same without you at every corner i turn. will i ever return to the john d rockefeller if i know there is no chance of you being in my spot? will i ever have a crush again if i know there is no chance you are already dating them? maybe not!

JT “All aboard,” the pockmarked conductor beckons. Steam rustles through the metal beast. “Bon voyage, mon ami!” “mon frère,” “ma Julia.” Kisses, hugs, a few poignant tears. The platform is crowded but each person a world onto themselves, each dress more beautiful than the last. The bellboy mulls over some well-appointed luggage: “Alumni relations, qu’est-ce que c’est?” Later he’ll be beaten for his inquiries.

The machine gives out a sudden lurch, then from the engine room, uproarious laughter.

GM

A figurehead of ample wit, Mad scribbling pen his left paw grip’t, And in his bearing, held an air Both Uncle-goof and debonair.

He toiled nonstop in as if impelled by some sacred decree, To imbue Piggies, Blobs, and Butts With Spatiality.

But our minds drift now to a time, Whereunto our youth’s budding green Has faded dun, uncannily unfolds a scene, All roads of fate converg’d to one.

Our faces now inscribed with lines, By mirth and sadness in due part, We see his Grandspawn warm their hooves about the holographic hearth.

“Children you must keep busy hands…”

Their wizened Poppa grunts.

“Which is a kinder way to say: please pass that fucking blunt.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

PP You see our floating heads through the crowded reception area. “A two hour wait?

This is a place for families, that drive Camrys,” you hear someone say. Inch your way towards us. Try not to trip on that special Quebecois “sacred sacrament.” Drizzy guides you to the bar—the Charon of the Cheesecake. Already at the bar, you know we’ve had a few. You sit down, “This ain’t no Birch,” you mutter. —What did you expect, this is the graveyard shift, baby. And we been down here for a while now.

Oh yeah, we’ve been waiting for you to join us. C’mon girl, share this penne alfredo.

Have you ever seen something so creamy.... What’s that? You wanna go to the Old Canteen? Please. That place is too pink for you; there ain’t no cheerleader left in those Dutch cheeks. Besides, this is what hell looks like ‘Saige Sarsons.’ You say hell is UPenn—typical AlphaPhi, haven’t had to say au revoir to the old Indy quite yet. You ever think the afterlife would be a Cheesecake bar full of sad boys? Yeah, you always knew this moment was coming. Welcome.

Fondly we recall the day He strode abreast the College Haunch A sprightly man, GM by name, Of moral fiber bristly, staunch.

We picture him in common-space, Engaged in conversations rich, In the mess halls, lounges, dorms, And charcoal-smirched workrooms in which,

truth be told, i will be cold because my heart will be broken. and you will be cold because you’ll be in alaska with your stupid fucking van (for the record, this does not make me feel better. alaska is a bad, bad idea and i hate it [but, truth be told, if your stupid van breaks down there, i’d drive to you, longways or up-and-down ways]). i’m glad to know you, to have been in love polygons with you, to have seen you without your giant boots on. i hope you never read this and if you do i hope you work on your fucking mask resonance (it’s more intimate to make people vibrate with your voice than to force them to lean in to hear it). yelling across the pool table: love you, and you still owe me a motorcycle ride or three.

RM Someone fucked up. Sure, we’re all trapped on a server in some metaphysical Valley, but even (especially?) tech bros have off days. Who knows what happened; perhaps some code-writing crank went too deep down a subreddit rabbit hole and forgot he was programming joy out of existence. Whatever the glitch in the mainframe was, we’re lucky, because Robbie Manley appeared. And what a world a glitch can make! A world of audacious earrings and random Canadian accents, of Lacanian (ex-)rugby players and debates about pirates. Don’t let anyone convince you Robbie is rational; the fact such a smart person emerged from such a dumb world is such wonderful nonsense (or dialectical synthesis!

Take your pick). Before Thiel pulls the plug on this whole simulated enterprise, know this: the ferocity with which Robbie clings to what is right, and to the necessity of care, was as rare as it was real, the singularity be damned.

TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE TOE

TAGS EPHEMERA

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PLAYING IN MANY FORMS Tag, the club, and fake personas

BY Florence Li ILLUSTRATION BY Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

On a recent February day, I checked the weather and saw that it was going to be unseasonably warm. In celebration, I typed the words “WARM WEATHER TAG” into a Facebook event page, invited some friends along, and hoped for the best. The day came and I sped off to India Point Park, hoping that the friends I had invited would show up. I waited for 30 minutes but, lo and behold, no one appeared. Just as I was about to give up hope, a friend I used to fancy—but had invited nonetheless—showed up. For about an hour and a half, we pretended to throw an imaginary ball around while having a conversation.

It was definitely very awkward. Yet there was something endearing and earnest about how, throughout our conversation, we ignored the fact that we were literally throwing air at each other, continuing to toss this ‘ball’ around. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about how none of my friends and I regularly play anymore—at least not in the same way that we used to as children. +++ One of the most popular games at my primary school was something the students made up called ‘Opposite.’ The game took root at the large, pastel-green, metal shed on the left side of our school field. The premise of Opposite involved running from the right side of the field to the left and back without getting caught by IT. The shed acted as our home base, but we were not deemed safe unless we touched (read: slapped) the shed and yelled “OPPOSITE!” Many a lunch break was spent playing this game—come rain, shine, or Hong Kong’s infamous 92 percent humidity. We would sprint from side to side of the school field, panting, yelling and screaming before shuffling back to our classrooms, sporting black, mud-ridden school shoes, once the bell rang at the end of lunch.

Another game a friend and I invented drew inspiration from our shared disinterest in athleticism. Finding ourselves more fascinated by characters we came across in books, we created our own intricate universe inspired by children’s fiction. Complete with code names, rituals and a box full of trinkets, we named this world ‘Tribania.’ We would walk around the school field, tending to Tribania’s inhabitants and the various responsibilities that come with building a universe. A classic storyline in the game involved saving a Tribanian citizen from some arbitrary evil force. We would spend most of lunch trying to hatch a plan to break through the various traps the evil force had lain before us—evil lizards, black holes, a sudden fire.

Eventually, we would make our way to the secret cave (read: green shotput net), defeat the evil force, rescue the imaginary citizen and return to our seats in time for our weekly maths quiz. Partaking in the world of Tribania felt intimate. It was our own little universe that no one else had any access to. It was a hallmark of our friendship, our intimacy, and was a tool in building one of the relationships in my life I hold most dear to my heart.

When I went back home over winter break, my

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FEATURES

friend and I opened our Tribania box together for the first time in about four years. We smelled the old paint adorning our handmade bandanas, flicking through our old notebook wherein we codified a made-up language.

Encountering this game again for the first time in years felt bittersweet. What is it about our quasi-adult lifestyles that makes it more difficult to engage with these games?

How can I try to cultivate the sense of carefreeness that I remember and keep physical proof of? What do we do now, as quasi-adults, that occupies the same niche that playing as a child does?

There is a nightclub in Hong Kong called PLAY. Its logo is comprised of a gold bear and the word PLAY written in sans serif font underneath. PLAY has earned a reputation among me and my friends for being a regular haunt on our nights out. Funny enough, my friends and I don’t even know whether or not we like going to PLAY. I don’t particularly enjoy it there—usually, the club is chock full of underage teens and horrendously drunk dancers.

The music choice is repetitive—if “Problem” by Chance the Rapper isn’t played at least three times throughout the evening, it means that something immobilising has happened to the DJ. And, worst of all, the club attracts a very homogenous crowd, thereby enforcing the value of seeing and being seen. However, I do enjoy dancing and being with my friends. As much as I complain, I go anyway.

And, of course, then come our late-night meals.

Typically, my friends and I eat in fluorescent noodle shops that are either open 24 hours or until 4 AM. The noodle-slurping usually either takes place under the hum of fans and lights, and accompanied by lots of spaced-out staring, or with much chatter, heavy debriefing and vigour. In both situations, my order rotates between beef brisket noodle soup, a noodle stir fry or seared rice cakes. As we chat, we wolf down the meal, the noodle ends flick up, and droplets of soup or sauce land on our just-cooled-off faces. We get up and head back out into the dark, where sentiments and affections are not always explicitly expressed, but heavily implied through the inevitable trailings off of “text me when you get home,” once we all part ways. +++ Sometimes, at the club, we would make up fake personas with specific backstories and distinct personalities, and then attempt to mingle. Explaining the intricate and well-crafted backstories doesn’t work especially well in the loud club, but this scheme works well in quieter scenarios. In fact, a friend and I forge this at university every now and again. We don’t have a particular rhyme or reason as to why we do this, other than for the hell of it. We have different personas for different scenarios.

For times that we feel more mellow, we become our 65-year-old couple selves—Deborah and Gilbert. They watch Jeopardy reruns every night, while drinking red wine and smoking weed. We imagine them to be living

somewhere in Vermont, with their 30-year-old hacker son who lives in the basement, and without their incredibly successful daughter who lives in the city. For the times that we like to mock and be parodies of ourselves and our generation, we pretend that we are a hip, influencer couple whose primary occupation is living in New York, and see their university educations as a side-gig. We came up with this couple whilst frantically changing in a bathroom of a salad bar chain before attending a friend’s mom’s Christmas party for work, which we were running late for. Excited to debut our new personas in front of a room full of strangers, we tried our best at smizing and looking intriguing and mysterious through the mulled wine and snacks, but I reckon we just looked stupid.

After all, nobody really interacted with us, but it didn’t really matter. Under our fake personas, we spent the night hanging around the open bar, dancing and scoffing down all the snacks. A night well spent, indeed. +++ In many ways, the magic and wonder of play has not disappeared as I have gotten older. Despite it not being something as fixed and regimented as it felt in childhood, I find that I make time for it—whether consciously or not.

I try to swim at least once a week. There is something about being in the water that causes my anxieties at large to diffuse. Typically, I swim in the morning and always wear my swimming costume under whatever clothes I have picked out for the day. Sometimes, this makes me feel like a superhero when I step into the changing room—like I have to rip off all my outerwear to dramatically reveal my real identity as someone who bought a Nike swimming costume on sale.

I sit by the ledge, and my feet dangle in the pool. I kick about for a bit before pushing myself off and plunging into the water. It feels cool and smells like chlorine, which I find endearing. Depending on how I feel, I swim some laps and a wave of nostalgia for when I used to take swimming lessons washes over me. This time, however, swimming feels very different—I feel calm and collected, even though my heart begins racing after a just few laps. But this is the only noise I can really hear, except for the faint rustle of my feet kicking. Sometimes, I take a noodle or a kickboard to use as my floatation device of choice. I lie atop the kickboard, or sit on the noodle, and slowly paddle and sail down my lane. I stare at the ceiling as I drift down on my back, breathing deeply.

Before I get out of the pool and head back into the changing room, I always attempt to touch the pool floor.

I come up for a big gulp of air, propel myself down, and stretch my fingertips out to reach for the nearest tile. I lean my chest forward and my arms instinctually push back. For a few seconds, I forget that I am in a pool full of swimmers, and the world feels still. The water swirls around me. Eventually, I come up to breathe.

FLORENCE LI B’20 wants to play tag with you.

APRIL 20, 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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CupcakKe : Friday 4.20 ;-) 8PM, THE MET (1005 Main Street, Pawtucket) Postponed due to last month’s snow, the esteemed rapper CupcakKe now graces Rhode Island on the most prestigious of days. $20 advance, $25 at door~ Ice Cream Pop UP at Riffraff : Saturday 4.21 3–6PM, Riffraff bookstore and bar (60 Valley Street) LW has been meaning to check this place out for a while, so maybe you’ll see them at this event, tipsy off a fancy cocktail and/or perusing the shelves and/or stuffing themselves with ice cream.

Menu TBA

the list ASTROLOGICAL W E A T H E R Hello from the other side! Mercury’s out of retrograde; we’re out of Aries season; the Sun is now in Taurus with Venus ( Taurus’ baby!). With Venus opposite Jupiter, it’s time to party and indulge (if you still have the $$ after tax day [i don’t]).

Find a new hobby.

Maybe even make new friends (especially now that I, your Scorpio-stellium best pal and worst enemy, am graduating). You can find me crying at the Bagel Gourmet in the medical school for the next four years, regardless of the astrological weather.

High Tea with Farmacy Herbs : Sunday 4.22 12–2PM, Roger Williams Park Historical Center (1000 Elmwood Avenue) Sample various herbal teas and learn about their benefits.

Seems like a good opportunity for unintentional ASMR. $20 Choose Your Fighter : Monday 4.23 6–8PM, ISB Gallery (55 Canal Walk) See the illustration work of RISD seniors, including some beloved Indy staff members. Free <3 Fighting Pharaohs Egyptian Battle : Tuesday 4.24 1–2PM, Brown University Quiet Green (Brown Street b/w Waterman & George) See a Brown class recreate an Egyptian battle??? This sounds bizarre and also like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Please go.

Free Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida (1999–2007) :Wednesday 4.25 Salomon Center ( 79 Waterman Street) Come see a bunch of tattered college students deliriously cackle at Jeb Bush, a true meme in human form. Normally I wouldn’t encourage you to mock a man whose mom just died but come on, his brother did 9/11. Tickets are out, but there will be a standby line and I’m sure lots of people who ironically reserved seats are gonna flake.

Free Synthwave Night 5 - Presented By NEON : Thursday 4.26 7PM, Freeplay Bar & Arcade (182 Pine Street) Hoping there’s Simpsonwave too. $5 cover Alas, I, the List Writer, am now stepping away from my role forever! Bye List! Bye Indy! Bye School! Don’t have too much fun without me! <3