Friday, December 2nd, 2022

Recreational marijuana sales open in RI

BY HALEY SANDLOW SENIOR STAFF WRITER

On Thursday morning, 96-year-old Joe Maraia became the first person to legally purchase marijuana for recreational use in Rhode Island at the Thomas C. Slater Compassion Center. The World War II Veteran had never tried cannabis before and walked away from the dispensary with marijuana-infused macaroons and chocolate chip cookies.

As of Dec. 1, licensed dispensaries in the Ocean State can legally sell rec reational marijuana to individuals 21 years and older. Rhode Island is now the 19th state to have legalized the sale and use of recreational cannabis.

Gov. Dan McKee signed the Cannabis Act in May, legalizing recreational use and possession alongside the existing sale of medical marijuana, The Herald previously reported. The act also cre ated a Cannabis Control Commission, which is composed of three members

who are appointed by the governor and oversee the regulation, licensing and control of use of marijuana.

Following the act, five compassion centers — licensed medical marijuana dispensaries — in Rhode Island were approved to sell recreational marijuana, including the Slater Center in Prov idence, according to a Nov. 22 press release. The other four dispensaries are located in Central Falls, Pawtucket, Portsmouth and Warwick. According to

the act, up to 33 total hybrid dispensa ries may be approved in the state.

The energy on Thursday was “great,” said Chris Reilly, spokesperson for the Slater Center. Upon walking into the dispensary, individuals are asked to ei ther show their ID or medical marijuana card. The facility inside is split for rec reational and medical use, with kiosks to order products and a separate line

RISD Project Open Door offers hands-on art education

METRO Program helps overcome barriers, fills gaps in public art education

BY ASHLEY CAI CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Lyza Baum, Rhode Island School of De sign textiles faculty, fondly remembers spending her Saturdays as a Cranston High School East student attending art workshops in the morning and sneak ing into nude figure-drawing sessions at RISD in the afternoon. Through RISD Project Open Door, Baum and other local high schoolers were able to access long-term, high-quality, free art programming to supplement their high school curriculums.

Founded in 2005, POD evolved out of what was intended to be a one-se mester art class for high schoolers that program founder Paul Sproll taught in a basement studio at RISD.

“Towards the end of the semes ter, a group of teenagers found me out and said, ‘Hey, mister, we hear

Linguistic scholars talk resistance, language preservation

Roundtable discussion hosted by CSREA, Cogut explores language in relation to race

BY NEIL MEHTA SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Four linguistic scholars discussed race, ethnicity, language and resistance at a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities Thursday

evening.

The event, titled “Liberatory Letters: Language as Resistance,” explored “the confluence of race, ethnicity, linguistics and culture in order to better under stand the acts of expression and resis tance that characterize the practice and preservation of language,” according to the event description. Invited speakers shared remarks regarding Haitian Creole, Indigenous languages, Asian American linguistic experiences and Black Amer ican Sign Language.

Jacques Pierre, lecturing fellow of

City Council postpones ProvPort deal extension

that would extend ProvPort’s lease and tax exemption program at the Port of Providence Thursday evening, citing plans to further engage the community in the decision-making process.

BY SAM LEVINE SENIOR STAFF WRITER

The Providence City Council decided to postpone a final vote on two resolutions

ProvPort is a non-profit organiza tion that manages a section of the Port of Providence sold to them by the city in 1994, according to WPRI. ProvPort’s tenants include chemical manufacturer and distributor Univar, propane storage and distribution company SEA-3 Provi dence and several cement and road salt

distributors, according to its website.

“We felt that it was necessary to talk about (the deal) and to give ourselves time” to listen to the community, Ward 10 Councilman Pedro Espinal said at a press conference before the council meeting. The council came to the de cision after engaging in meetings with representatives for ProvPort earlier in the day, Espinal added.

The proposed agreement would ex tend ProvPort’s lease and tax exemption program to 2052. Currently, ProvPort

pays around 5% of its revenue to the city instead of paying property taxes — the new deal would increase this figure to 9%, according to WPRI.

The resolutions extending ProvPort’s lease and tax exemption program were passed in a contentious meeting of the council’s Finance Com mittee Monday evening, in which com munity activists and residents objected to the deal during a public comment

there's an art club going on. Can we join?’ I turned to one of my graduate students, and I said, ‘Would you take this on?’ She took it on, and that really was the beginning of Project Open Door,” Sproll said.

The program has grown since its founding and has expanded to include Saturday workshops, after-school pro grams with four Rhode Island high schools and summer classes.

“We hope that by participating in POD programs, teens will learn valuable technical artistic skills and have the opportunity to strengthen their creative voice and confidence within an inclusive and supportive community,” POD Interim Director Lauren Allen wrote in an email to The Herald.

POD fills a vital gap in public arts education, which is becoming increas ingly undervalued, Allen wrote in an email to The Herald. High school stu dents lack access to “adequate visual arts learning opportunities, and many do not have the opportunity to receive art instruction during the school day,”

In this week’s episode of the Bru no Brief, the team looks at hook up culture on campus, concluding our series on sexual politics.

We speak with Elysee Barakett, senior staff writer and Bruno Brief producer, about her reporting on the sex lives of Brown students.

Subscribe to the podcast on Spo tify or Apple Podcasts or listen via the RSS feed. Hear the full report on this week's Bruno Brief.

Review: Netflix’s “The Noel Diary” is another forgettable holiday film

Professor of Computer Science Sorin Istrail

Riley Flores '22.5 wins best research presentation at engineering convention

METRO

Ocean State becomes 19th state to legalize sale, use of recreational marijuana

NEIL MEHTA / HERALD

SIMONE STRAUS / HERALD

The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities hosted the discussion Thursday.

CS Professor Sorin Istrail wins award recognizing algorithms research

Findings continue to influence field of computational biology 20 years later

BY JAKOBI HASKELL STAFF WRITER

The 30th Annual European Sym posium on Algorithms awarded its 2021 Test-of-Time Award to Sorin Istrail, professor of computation al and mathematical sciences and professor of computer science, and his collaborators for their paper “SNPs Problems, Complexity and Algorithms.” The award recogniz es “excellent papers in algorithms research” published 19 to 21 years ago that are “still influential and stimulating for the field today,” ac cording to ESA’s website.

The paper focused on compu tational problems and algorithm formulation of haplotype phasing — a process of reconstructing the maternal and paternal combinations of genetic variants found on chromo somes inherited from both parents, according to Istrail.

A single person has two haplo types — one from each parent — and understanding the interaction be tween these haplotypes can help scientists make predictions about a person’s susceptibility to diseases as well as the effectiveness of certain drugs, he added.

The researchers also proved that some problems in mining large amounts of data were NP-complete — a computer science classifier for problems that have an efficient algo rithm for validating a given solution but may or may not have an efficient algorithm for finding a solution. An

example of a NP-complete is a Su doku puzzle — while it would take a lot of time to complete the puzzle, it would be much faster to check it over once completed.

Through the paper and its sur rounding work, Istrail and colleagues made use of one of the pillars of computer science in genomics — recognizing that a genome can be modeled as a computational artifact and that, in doing so, one is able to access a powerful set of tools for analyzing it, according to Russell Schwartz, co-author of the paper and head of the computational biol ogy department at Carnegie Mellon University.

The technique for solving these problems is “finding abstractions — a simplification of the problem that you can reason with mathe matically,” Schwartz said. Besides computer science complexity class es — classifiers for computational problems that take similar time or memory to solve — other computer science concepts applied in the pa per include graph theory and linear programming.

Istrail and colleagues published the paper in 2001 while working at Celera Genomics, a private research company focused on genomic se quencing, Istrail. Istrail was serving as senior director of informatics re search at Celera at the time.

Leading up to the paper’s publi cation, Celera made large genomic datasets available for the first time as part of its effort to sequence the human genome, according to Istrail. The company hired a cohort of com putational scientists, including the authors of the paper, to develop algorithms for extracting useful information from these datasets, he added.

“remains the language of public admin istration, especially in written form.”

The paper developed at Celera continues to impact genomics re search 20 years after its publication. Shilpa Garg, an assistant profes sor at the University of Copenha gen who was not involved in the research, cited Istrail’s paper in a review article last year. Her article presented computational methods for known problems in genomics, such as a graph-based approach to efficiently integrating novel data types.

Garg’s research built on Istrail’s paper by examining new technol ogies for sequencing large strands of DNA. Most organisms have ge nomes that are too long to be read at once, so researchers instead read short segments of their genome and combine them.

In 2001, when Istrail and col leagues were working on the paper, the latest technology available for gathering large genomic sequenc ing data was short-read sequencing, but now long-read sequencing is be coming a viable option, according to Garg.

“The (2001) paper is actually one of the foundational papers in the computational haplotyping field,” Garg said. “Now, over two decades (later), there have been advance ments (such that) we can produce these chromosome-level genomes … with minimal gaps.”

Aside from Istrail’s work at Cel era and Brown, he is also a co-found er of RECOMB — an academic confer ence for the field of computational biology. The conference, which is approaching its 27th year, brings together leading researchers to discuss the latest advancements in genomics, according to Istrail.

As a researcher, Istrail contin ues to formulate ideas that advance

bolster Indigenous language education in Alaska, where he currently teaches.

the field while ensuring that his ap proaches are sound mathematically and biologically, according to Bjarni Halldorsson, associate professor in the department of biomedical engi neering at Reykjavík University and head of sequence analysis at deCODE Genetics, a biopharmaceutical re search company. Halldorsson com pleted his postdoctoral fellowship at Celera, where he reported to Istrail, and the two have collaborated on several papers since.

In addition to continuing his

similar protections for BASL.

work in haplotype phasing, Istrail is also working on regulatory genom ics, an area focused on the region at the beginning of every genome that controls gene expression. He is also working on algorithms to predict protein folding.

In his current research, Istrail continues to build on findings from the 2001 paper. “Genomics today is a world of … haplotypes, and the active research themes are all about understanding the role of (them) in health and disease,” he said.

romance studies at Duke University, kicked off the panel by discussing the development and future of Haitian Cre ole as a language of resistance.

Pierre began with a history of Haitian Creole, explaining that the language came about from enslaved people’s need for common language and solidarity.

“A multitude of … African languag es were spoken by enslaved people,” Pierre said. “Because enslaved people did not share a common language, it was impossible for them to communi cate and join forces quickly and cast off the shackles of slavery.”

Solidarity among enslaved people in Haiti, Pierre said, relied on “the lan guage they created, which is Creole.” For enslaved people, this language became “the sole vector of communi cation to resist, plan, strategize … and fight for their freedom.”

“As the saying goes, communication is power,” Pierre added.

He noted that Creole “has come so far” since its creation but has “a long way to go.” For example, while virtu ally all Haitians speak Creole, French

But Pierre said he is confident in Creole’s expansion because it “is the only language that unites all Haitians and … captures the heartbeat of the country.”

Creole “can be seen as a model of resistance, creation and freedom,” built to create a “new life where skin color should not be seen as a symbol of su periority,” Pierre concluded.

X’unei Lance Twitchell, professor of Alaska Native Languages at the Univer sity of Alaska Southeast, continued the panel with a discussion of preserving Indigenous languages.

The erasure of Indigeneous lan guages “has been intentional,” Twitch ell said. “If you live in North America and you are an Indigenous person, the various survival of your language is an act of resistance.”

Today, many Indigenous languag es only have a few speakers, many of whom are older speakers, he explained. Learning these languages is import ant — it provides an “understanding of cultural values” and connections to past generations.

Twitchell shared his proposal to

“If you graduate from high school in Alaska, you need to take one semester of one of our 23 Indigenous languages,” he said.

Discussions such as the panel are important because they can build “awareness of what Indigenous peo ples are doing and what they need,” Twitchell added.

The panel continued with Joseph Hill, associate professor of American Sign Language and Interpreting Educa tion at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology. Hill discussed the past, present and future of Black American Sign Language.

BASL, which has been around for 150 years, originated in southern schools in the United States. “In the South, (schools for deaf students) didn’t sign in the same style” as schools in other regions “because of region alisms.”

The language has faced erasure, Hill explained. For example, ASL documen tation has intentionally excluded signs used in BASL. Additionally, while laws protect ASL as a language, there are no

Hill explained that his research on BASL should be understood using a lens of intersectionality.

“Often, people are aware of dif ferent layers and levels of systemic oppression that influence this work,” Hill said. “But also oftentimes, peo ple don’t think about ableism, being oppressed based on disability, and audism, the oppression of deaf people or the people who have an inability to hear.”

Today, online spaces are useful tools to preserve and share BASL. Hill said that internet spaces can allow people to document, communicate and publish material related to BASL.

Adrienne Lo, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wa terloo, concluded the panel discussion with a discussion of Asian American identity and experiences related to language.

She discussed the ways in which Asian American people must navigate expectations surrounding the languag es they speak.

“They want us to learn standard English but then say that we always fall short,” Lo said. “They tell us that

we need to maintain our heritage lan guages, but mastering both is framed as compromising our ability to speak the standard.”

Contradictory linguistic expecta tions for Asian American people create social pressures to “signal our ability in all of these (language) varieties, but not too much and not in the wrong ways,” Lo said. For example, speaking English “is both seen as necessary economi cally but also as an emblem of being whitewashed.”

In opposition to these pressures, Lo cited measures that scholars have proposed to exercise their agency.

“We can refuse settler logics of language and identity,” Lo said. “We can refuse labels like ‘semi-speaker’ or even ‘heritage language speaker’ be cause such labels measure us in terms of distance from some truly authentic monolingual speaker.”

Lo discussed these measures as a path forward regarding language and resistance to oppression.

“Thinking with these scholars about more productive ways to mobilize con cepts like agency, resistance and liber ation can move us toward a more just and equitable future,” Lo said.

Professor of Computer Science Sorin Istrail researches computational problems and the algorithm formulation of haplotype phasing.

COURTESY OF JESSE POLHEMUS

Allen wrote. Some of the obstacles to arts education include socioeconomic inequality, transportation, family or school obligations, she wrote.

POD “was probably the first time I ever had people critically look at my work and offer really valuable insight,” Baum said. “I really had people ques tion, ‘What are you doing, and why are you doing it?’ No one really ever asked me that before.”

The program provides a depth of artistic education that is often not available to high school students. For Isaiah Aladejobi, a POD teaching artist, this means getting students to create a dialogue between their own stories and the objects they create.

“I really talk about identity and how to communicate your own iden tity on certain objects,” Aladejobi said. “Sometimes the simplest thing could really communicate the whole story.”

Aladejobi said he hopes this will show students another aspect of art that he was not given in high school.

“When I'm looking back, I lacked this type of exposure in high school,” Aladejobi said. “It gets me more in trigued when I’m able to find students that remind me of how I used to be and then try to help them out with experimenting with new styles (and) pushing them forward.”

In addition to providing a high

FROM PAGE 1

section.

“We want to build, but we want to build healthy, good things that are go ing to be sustainable for the commu nity,” said Monica Huertas, executive director of the People’s Port Authority, an organization that fights for commu nity oversight of the Port of Providence. Huertas believes that the decision to extend the deal requires “much more extensive community engagement” with residents who live near the port.

“I am asking you to trust the com munity process,” Huertas said to the committee.

The tax exemption agreement with ProvPort expires in 2024, and ProvPort’s lease extends until 2036, according to the Providence Journal. The People’s Port Authority believes that there is “no justification for urgency in rushing this important decision right now,” instead requesting that the council engages the community in negotiations, according to the group’s Facebook page.

Despite opposition to the deal, the Finance Committee passed the resolutions with a vote of four to one

school arts curriculum, POD also helps guide students through college appli cations. Baum mentioned that POD helped her with portfolio reviews, essay writing and art photography when she was a high schooler.

“The early days of Project Open Door (were) more about working with

and scheduled a final vote before the entire council during Thursday’s meeting.

At the press conference Thursday evening, Huertas emphasized the role of community opposition in convincing the council to postpone the final vote.

“We didn’t come to this point because the polluters or City Hall decided to have a good heart, (but) because we've been organizing and involving ourselves and speaking to them,” Huertas said.

“We are partners with the city of Providence (and) we want to have a healthy, good relationship,” Bill Fischer, a representative for ProvPort, said at the press conference. Fischer said that ProvPort acknowledges the “frustra tion” expressed at the Finance Com mittee meeting and added that “it is good to continue the dialogue” about the deal.

At the Thursday council meeting, the motion to table the two resolutions passed by a voiced vote and did not receive any opposition from the council members present.

“I'm so grateful for the communi ty advocates who came out and raised their opposition,” Ward 1 Councilman

young people to develop portfolios for college,” Sproll said. “The visual arts can be a massive hook.”

The program also strives to build connections between creative peers and supportive faculty. Sproll attributed POD’s success to its ability to create a sense of community that was “there for

the long term, not just for a moment.”

Baum echoed the importance of the creative community that POD has built.

“I'm really interested in working col laboratively with people in community and place, and that's what they're also doing,” Baum said. “It has definitely impacted all aspects of my art and pro

fessional life.”

“There needs to be a radical shift in the perception of the value of art and design education in schools,” Sproll said. “It's not just about training artists and designers. It's really an opportunity to develop … the creative capacity that is inherent in all of us.”

John Goncalves ’13 MA’15 told The Her ald after the meeting. Goncalves be lieves that the approval process was too rushed and added that moving forward the council will focus on “bringing all the stakeholders to the table” in order

to reach a fair deal with ProvPort. Huertas was pleased with the coun cil’s decision to table the vote on the resolutions. “We are super, super, super happy that finally the community was listened to,” she told The Herald after

the meeting.

According to Huertas, the next steps will be “talking and engaging with ProvPort, engaging with (the) City Council and getting the community work done.”

PORT

COURTESY OF LAUREN ALLEN

Throughout the local community, Project Open Door fills a vital gap in public arts education, which is becoming increasingly undervalued, said Lauren Allen, interim director of the program. The program provides arts education for high schools.

SAM LEVINE / HERALD

ProvPort is a non-profit organization that manages a section of the Port of Providence sold to them by the city in 1994. Following community advocacy, extension of its contract has been postponed.

'25: Sustainable RFPs ensure sustainable future

the nation, a deluge of public works projects are preparing to take advantage of the plentiful infrastructure dollars recently unleashed by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. While cities, counties or states may take the lead in authorizing these projects, it is exceedingly rare to find local governments capable of executing these projects in their entirety. As a result, respon sibility for delivery of these projects often falls to private companies, which in theory compete with each other to obtain contracts to study, plan and build public infrastructure. These consultants wield enormous influence, having considerable discretion when it comes to the planning pro cess, design standards and construction practices. Thus, consultants could push the entire country forward if they built sustainability into every step of their practice. However, they will not do so unprompted — like most private companies, consulting firms need financial incentive or they will stick with cheaper, easier methods. It must fall to governments to amend how they issue contracts and put pressure on these consultants to change their practices.

The arcane nature of the contract and de sign process for government projects obscures the incredible importance that this process has in developing sustainable infrastructure. Selling public projects to private companies normal ly begins with a Request for Proposal, or RFP, which is a public notice that a government is soliciting bids for a service. RFPs typically in clude a statement of work, which describes the scope of the project, and a statement of goals and commitments the issuer would like the project to meet. These RFPs are the chief docu ments guiding the design process for any proj ect and can have a huge impact on what actual ly ends up in the community. Consultants gen erally adhere to these RFPs closely to provide the most competitive cost possible, potentially ignoring social or environmental implications of their work. Even when consultants are bound by minority contracting requirements and de

sign standards, they still strive to meet the bare minimum and avoid anything which may com plicate a bid. Thus, if governments do not in tentionally craft RFPs with strict environmental guidelines included, the projects that dominate the built environment in communities across the country will not move toward sustainability.

Unfortunately, these RFPs are not written with much community input — in fact, they are

bake environmental protection into every proj ect from the start.

There are two ways to achieve this. The first is to mandate community engagement in the crafting of the RFP, possibly leading to the in clusion of requirements which reflect commu nity concerns like environmental sustainability. That said, doing this could run the risk of banal processes being co-opted by neighborhood as

made sustainability a central part of their work. So, many of these firms lack the robust institu tional knowledge to incorporate sustainability practices into the full scope of their work. By requiring firms to incorporate environmen tal best practices into their deliverables, they will have no choice but build out the capacity of their sustainability expertise, ensuring that these firms will retain this knowledge and build on sustainability successes over time.

Additionally, such requirements would breed innovation and make sustainability more cost effective. As the demand for sustainable alternatives to typical materials increases, firms would be incentivized to increase their avail ability and accessibility, thus lowering the price.

By mandating that consultants apply sustain ability, then, governments can make sustain ability cheaper in the long run. Such a process emerged in the past decade with the price of solar panels while demand for them surged. There is no reason not to expect the same trend should cities push for a pivot to green concrete or another similar sustainable building mate rial.

generally written without any feedback at all. RFPs may be written by bureaucrats doing so at the behest of a superior, an aging planning document or a local elected official who con ceives of the project. It is possible that the en tire process could take place behind the scenes until the project has already been designed and is ready for its final, ceremonial approval. It is only at this point that the average person may receive notice of a project in their community, forcing them to fight an uphill battle against a planning consultant, bureaucratic momen tum and a shovel-ready, cheap project. All this leaves little room for the community to demand more sustainable practices if governments do not do so ahead of time.

While certain RFPs do have language that requires consultants to design with sustainabil ity in mind, this is not the rule everywhere. It is critical that governments recognize the need to

sociations or bogged down by endless debate, especially for large projects like new bridges or highway redesigns.

Alternatively, governments could take the second path: Mandating all RFPs include cer tain language addressing sustainability. For example, if an RFP explicitly stated that a new bridge would need to be designed sustainably, there would be a number of different paths the consultants could follow. One would be to use green concrete in the construction of the bridge, reducing the carbon impact of the con struction significantly. Or, the consultants could add a bike lane to the bridge, thus promoting multi-modal travel.

An equally important effect of changing how RFPs are issued is the impact it would have on the long-term trajectory of the private consul tancy firms. These firms are built to meet the unsustainable status quo, and thus have not

As a city, Providence has made excellent progress toward a sustainable future, as has the state of Rhode Island. Now, with Rhode Island poised to make historic investment in its crum bling infrastructure, it is critical this investment goes towards sustainability initiatives. The city or state should serve as an early pioneer in this new method of project development and demonstrate to the rest of the country that the government can bring the private sector along and ensure sustainable development in all proj ects.

Gabe Sender ’25 can be reached at gabriel_ sender@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald. com and other op-eds to opinions@brown dailyherald.com.

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“It is critical that governments recognize the need to bake environmental protection into every project from the start.”

Riley Flores '22.5 wins best research presentation at national convention

undergraduate

BY ANNA KIM SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Riley Flores ’22.5 received the best re search presentation award at the 2022 National Convention of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, held in Charlotte, N.C. Her presentation, titled “A Device for Multiplexed Processing of Glioblastoma Spheroids,” is part of a research project in the University’s Tripathi Laboratory for Microfluidic Diagnostics and Biomedical Engineer ing, supervised by engineering PhD candidate Cel Welch GS.

“I have no words,” Flores said. “It’s not just me, it’s the lab, it’s my mentor, Cel, they’re the ones who have also won the award … I’m incredibly proud of it, I think it’s going to make an impact,” she added.

Flores was one of a few undergrad uates who participated in this com petition. The judges “told me that we were impressed that an undergraduate presented this work,” she said.

When Flores joined her lab in sum mer 2021, she had limited device knowl edge and no prior research experience; she joined with the goal of learning how to make low-cost, accessible devices.

Her project is part of Welch’s gradu

ate student project, which uses electric fields to optimize tissue dissociation methods that are used to break down tissues into single cells. This is import ant for single-cell sequencing, a tech nique used to “understand the genetic complexity in tissue,” which is import ant for cancer research, Flores added.

Current approaches to tissue dis sociation include chemical and me chanical methods like trituration, which involves pipetting a solution up and down, Flores said. However, these tech niques are not the most reliable and sometimes lead to low cell survival.

Welch’s research team found the optimal conditions to separate samples of bovine liver tissue and glioblastomas — tumors of the spinal cord or brain, Flores said. Using these parameters, Flores created a device called Single Plex that can be used to process the samples, she said.

From there, she and Welch were able to create a Multiplex device with multiple electric outputs, designed to be portable, low-cost and capable of increasing the number of samples they could process, she added. Though the hardware is complete, the researchers are still working on the device’s inter face “because we want to make this something that hopefully can be used in the clinical setting or the research setting,” Flores said.

Now, Flores is leading her own project to create a diagnostic device to identify chlamydia. “It's very excep tional for an undergraduate student

to grow marijana plants, he said it is time to give his away.

to not only contribute so much to a PhD-led research project, but then to also have the ability to design their own research projects and to take that level of initiative that's required to actually execute your own research project from the ground up,” Welch said.

Flores is a former president of the Brown chapter of SHPE and founder of a SHPE chapter at her high school in a predominantly Hispanic community. The SHPE is the “nation's largest asso ciation dedicated to fostering Hispanic leadership in the STEM field,” according to their website.

The Brown chapter of SHPE holds events for “professional development, things like resume workshops and in terview workshops,” Ulysses Chevez ’23, current president of the Brown chapter of SHPE, said.

During the annual national con vention in November, “SHPE members from all across the country will come to one location,” Chevez said, along with about a hundred different companies and graduate schools.

The national convention “was so incredible, seeing so many other His panic engineers striving for greatness the same way that you are,” Chevez said. It is also an opportunity to network and attend workshops, he added.

“The companies are there to hire people, so you can get an offer right on the spot,” Chevez said. SHPE “makes sure we train whoever goes and we make sure that they’re prepared to go,” Flores added.

One of SHPE’s main goals is “provid ing a sense of familia, which is family in Spanish,” Chevez said. “Being Latino or Hispanic coming to Brown, especially in engineering, there's not as many who look like you, have the same background as you. So finding a group of people who do have that is very comforting and gives me a home, especially because I think a lot of us come from places that are predominantly Hispanic,” he added.

“I feel like SHPE here at Brown is

not known well enough and it's such a shame because I feel like we're such a good research resource,” Flores said. Flores emphasized that despite the misconceptions its name might evoke, SHPE supports Hispanic students across all STEM fields, not just engineering.

Flores is currently applying to graduate schools, where she hopes to continue investigating diagnostic de vices among other interests she hopes to explore.

for picking up online orders.

“It's like a Mecca — it's a beau tiful place,” said Mike Reginakaba lu, a resident of Rhode Island who came to the Slater Center Thursday to purchase marijuana. Reginakaba lu was unable to renew his medical marijuana card about two years ago because his hospital no longer al lowed its doctors to issue them, he explained. Until yesterday, he drove to Massachusetts dispensaries and kept his own marijuana plants, which were legalized in May’s Cannabis Act.

“Now, I don’t have to grow my own,” Reginakabalu said. With the large amount of electricity necessary

“I’d rather support a place like this,” he added.

The Slater Center is anticipating an increase in business, according to Reilly. Greenleaf Compassionate Care Center in Portsmouth also hopes to see an uptick in sales, although its main focus will continue to be serv ing those with medical marijuana cards, said Ted Newcomer Jr., the dispensary’s chief of staff and com pliance officer.

“I think it’s good for the industry, and it's good for employment,” New comer said. “We’re gonna see new industry grow out of this.”

Reilly also spoke about the

“evolving” industry, noting the historic arrest and imprisonment of individuals — especially people of color — found in possession of small quantities of marijuana. Now, there are “safe and regulated places” where people can purchase marijuana products.

“We’re creating an environment where people are no longer going to be subject to arrest or prosecution for possession,” Reilly said. “For us, it’s kind of an exciting thing to do.”

“I hope that the … taxes collect ed will be used for some positive things,” said one Brown student who spoke to The Herald on the condition of anonymity. “Hopefully some of the money goes towards aiding those

who have been previously negatively affected by legislation.”

Another student who spoke on the condition of anonymity said they thought the legalization was “a good thing” because it is safer to buy can nabis products from a dispensary rather than from a dealer. The stu dent, who uses marijuana products regularly, plans to go to the Slater Center instead of a Massachusetts dispensary that they and other stu dents occasionally drive to.

While anyone 21 and older can purchase marijuana, the Slater Cen ter cannot advertise to the general public, Reilly said. Currently, dispen saries may only advertise to a “direct patient audience,” but he hopes the

Cannabis Control Commission will address issues like this.

“Right now, … we’re very limited in what we can do in advertising, and we hope that changes fairly soon,” Reilly said. The center has signs within the facility, along its building and on the outside gate that indicates that the center now sells to individuals aged 21 years and older. But it has not been able to advertise in other ways.

For Reginakabalu, marijuana use is more than just “an old hippie thing.” With the new legalization, he wishes everyone will “give it a shot.”

“I think it's a really good situation for everyone,” Reginakabalu added.

TODAY’S EVENTS

Midday Music at Martinos Audi torium

12 p.m. Granoff Center, Martinos Aud.

Brown Jazz Band: Mingus 100 8 p.m.

Grant Recital Hall

TOMORROW’S EVENTS

Women's Basketball vs. Universi ty of Hartford 12 p.m. Pizzitola Sports Center

Replacing Ableist Language Forum 2 p.m. Friedman Hall, Room 101

Portuguese and Brazilian Studies DUG World Cup Watch Party 2 p.m.

159 George Street, Room 102

Cuban Brunonians Association's Funk Nite 10 p.m.

Alumnae Hall, Crystal Room

Applied Music Program Fall 2022 Piano Recital 12 p.m.

Grant Recital Hall

CCB '23 Winter Farmer's Market 3 p.m.

Kasper Multipurpose Room

U.

develops tissue dissociation device, wins award for project

COURTESY OF THE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING Riley Flores ’22.5 joined the Tripathi Laboratory with the goal of learning how to make low-cost and accessible devices.

MARIJUANA

Knock on Wood

superstitions and their infallibility

By Samira Lakhiani Illustrated by Hannah Zhang

Tears well up in my eyes the instant the plate hits the ground. It shatters on the kitchen floor beneath me, its pearly ceramic fragments blending in almost seamlessly with the tile. I’m six years old, and my dinner plate has slipped out of my small hands en route to the dishwasher. My dad picks me up, moves me to the living room, and checks to make sure my skin is free from any of the shards. He and my mom sweep up the formerly intact plate, then reassure me that accidents happen; I just have to be very careful when I am holding something fragile. Being the overly sensitive child I am, I continue to sob over this inconsequential incident. My parents are used to this. My mom lovingly takes my hand and says, “Darling, did you know that breaking a plate is actually good luck?”

My tears come to a sharp halt. I look at her, befuddled by the association of something so arbitrary with good luck. But the conviction in my mom’s voice makes me believe her without asking for an explanation. I feel better, hopeful. Eagerly anticipating something good coming my way.

Superstitions are curious. Some seem sensible, like abstaining from walking under ladders; the potential precarity of the ladder falling provides a logical association with bad luck. Others, like throwing salt over your shoulder

Letter from the Editor

Dear Readers,

I really do love writing that. Dear Readers . I usu ally eschew “dear” as a term of address, finding it oddly intimate yet simultaneously stilted in the con text of, say, an email or letter. But in cases such as this, there’s just no other word for it. Because you are so dear to me. Every part of this magazine is dear to me, from the writers to the illustrators to the editors to the copy editors to the layout designers to you, the readers. I’m thinking awfully hard about all the things this magazine has meant to me—laughing over Top 10 list contributions and staying up until the wee hours of the night and workshopping sentences in sprawling Google Doc comment chains and saying endless thank-yous over the course of a night. Thank you for your edits. Thank you for coming. Thank you

or wishing on a wishbone, have less obvious or well-known explanations. People may not actually believe in these superstitions or take them seriously, but they are hardly ever sincerely challenged. I like that we have a blind faith in them. We are constantly questioning ideas in realms like in politics and science, yet without batting an eye, the entire world has welcomed knocking on wood to avoid a jinx.

A poll conducted by Research for Good in 2019 indicates that the superstitions regarding good luck are widely observed among Americans. Roughly half believe in good luck resulting from picking up a penny or a four leaf clover, and 40 percent believe in the sanctity of a lucky number. Yet superstitions involving bad luck, such as seeing a black cat or breaking a mirror, are not followed nearly as rigorously. Only 20 percent of responders expressed belief in these more inauspicious occurrences. It’s hard to believe that this discrepancy is coincidental. There is a romantic element to this—perhaps as a society we have a tendency to hold onto hope, by any means possible.

In elementary school, I was introduced to a more meticulous way of walking: without stepping on the cracks of the sidewalk. This habit emerged from an absurd rhyme, “don’t step on the crack, or you’ll break your mama’s back.”

for everything. Sometimes I think the biggest part of my job is being grateful.

It is such a difficult beast, saying goodbye. In Narrative this week, one of our graduating post- edi tors also writes about goodbyes, approaching the concept as she does all things: with poetry and love liness. Our second Narrative writer imagines what her older brother would have been like, if she had one. The Feature looks towards superstitions, both personal and cultural. In A&C, one of our writers con siders Drake as a figure in the media and discusses his recent album. The other contemplates a possi ble interview with a Grimm fairytale archetype as a means of processing the Club Q tragedy. Lastly, our Lifestyle writers think about fashion, friendship, and colors.

Well, here we are. Here I am, at the end of three

Even as a kid, I knew the expression was nonsense. Yet I adhered to it almost religiously until high school. It was like a game, where knowing that the consequence was not legitimate made it feel like I could win every time.

Most superstitions’ foundations lie in culture or religion. I grew up with plenty of those. Some I had no problem with: If I was ever gifted money from a relative for a birthday or holiday, there would always be an extra dollar included, apparently for auspicious reasons. The checks I would deposit read “fifty-one dollars,” never 50. The origins of the superstition stem from the fact that round numbers, like 50 or 100, have a finality associated with them. The extra dollar, called shagun (from Sanskrit), signifies prosperity by offering the money room to continue to grow after receiving the gift.

Other superstitions in my household were slightly more ludicrous. Growing up, I was told to never cut my nails past sundown. Both my parents were raised to abide by this, so I complied without ever asking for its rationale. Recently, I discovered that this superstition, common in Indian culture, dates back centuries. Long before nail clippers existed, people trimmed their nails with makeshift blades, so it was best to do it in sunlight to increase precision and avoid injury. It’s incredible that even though this practice belongs to the past, it has sustained itself for

years editing at this magazine, at the conclusion of a long string of weeks spent waiting for Thursday night. Our lovely prods, our little jokes, our scavenged pizza and spontaneous icebreakers and collabora tive playlist a thousand miles long. I love post- for the people who were here when I began, curled on the Copy Couch in 195 Angell. I love post- for the era of Zoom prod nights, each lovely face rendered a pixelated postage stamp. I love post- for its future: I am so happy to be leaving it in Kimberly’s capable hands. All there is left to do now is say goodbye as I do at the end of every prod night: with the deepest, deepest appreciation.

ages. And this is certainly not the only one.

I was also raised to lay shoes flat next to each other (never stacked), to face all beds in the house to point north, and to never wear henna in the month of August. All of these superstitions are intended to prevent bad luck. My grandparents and their grandparents regarded these as valid truths to adhere to, not just obscure superstitions. Growing up continents away from my grandparents has always made me feel detached from my culture, so I hold on dearly to anything passed down through the generations. While I may not believe in the validity of these superstitions, I believe that upholding these practices tightens the knot that connects me to my family. Logic and practicality aside, I can’t see myself ever abandoning these practices.

It is a rarity to find things that are agreed upon in just one place, let alone multiple parts of the world. While superstitions vary considerably across nations, some have a certain near-universality. Several airlines, hotels, and hospitals all over the world lack a 13th aisle, floor, or room to keep misfortune from befalling their occupants. And, around the world, it is common in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, China, India, and Turkey to knock on or touch wood as a good luck ritual. Many ancient cultures believed trees to be the homes of spirits and gods, so this was a way of communicating with higher powers and petitioning good fortune. In Italy, however, the lucky material is not wood. Rather, they say “tocca ferro”, meaning “touch iron”. This practice comes from the notion that evil can be repelled by horseshoes. Regardless of the material, it is clear that the longing to govern our own luck is universal.

The ubiquity of superstitions is a product of our human desire to seek control over our lives and our fates. They allow us to create our own certainty, albeit a false one. Within control exists comfort, and psychology researcher Jane Risen proposes that this universal blind faith “can help us manage the uncertainty, and the stress and tension that comes from not knowing what’s going to happen.” Avoiding sidewalk cracks to spare our mothers’ spinal cords is a wonderfully altruistic sentiment, but also one motivated by an underlying desperation to claim control where we have none. The happenings in our lives are unpredictable, and if there is an opportunity to control even a morsel of our destiny, we will seize it, no matter how irrational it may be.

In a world where practically everything is dictated by logic, I view superstitions as a way to keep the magic in our everyday lives. Whether that might be crossing my fingers as I open Canvas to see a test score, letting myself get rained on for a brief second so I don’t have an open umbrella inside, or smiling instead of crying after accidentally breaking a plate, I’ve found that superstitions offer glimmers of hope and excitement in the most arbitrary of circumstances.

Bottoms

Older Brothers

as imagined by an only child

by Luci Jones Illustrated by Josephine Hostin

People think I have an older brother.

Maybe, they are picking up on my tomboyishness, an unexpected fluidity. The way that, during elementary school recess, I played football with the boys instead of dress-up with the girls. The way that I wore oversized, masculine clothes that looked pre-worn by someone larger. A new friend said she could picture him—tall, fluffy brown hair, a little lanky. “He definitely majors in something like film or media at Brown or somewhere.”

My cool-but-approachable, Tarantino-loving older brother. When he comes home to North Carolina from college for winter break, his tufts of hair tickle my cheek as we hug. We open Christmas presents with our parents and our dog, Oreo, around the Hanukkah bush, inside jokes abounding. We take long walks on the Eno River trail, pine trees and monkey grass lining the paths. Set a backyard fire, eat gooey marshmallows and semi-burnt Eggo waffles that have been sitting in the freezer for a little too long. He is my family, but also a friend. We shoot each other conspiratorial looks when our parents say something embarrassing in front of the neighbors. He plays soccer, like me, and we sneak into our old elementary school playground to take some warm-up shots on the miniature goals. He always teases me about girl problems when we first reunite but offers gentle advice as we warm back up to one another. We are thick as thieves.

I am an only child, but I like the idea of a sibling, of being part of a family sub-unit. One of two. A part, a piece, of the bigger family puzzle.

My dad has a brother who lives in Southern California, where they grew up. As the younger brother, my dad was a nuisance. He would fart into the bathroom while my uncle was peeing and then pull the door shut so that the smell got caught inside. One time, he short-sheeted my uncle’s bed— folded up

the top sheet so that my uncle wouldn’t be able to stretch his legs out beyond the middle—and replaced the legs with pencils, which collapsed as soon as he tried to get in bed. The best story of all is when my dad dared my uncle to eat a live sand crab off the beach. He actually did it. He shoved the writhing mass of crab into his mouth, at which point my dad immediately clamped my uncle’s jaw shut to keep him from backing out of the bet. I imagine a sandy esophagus and potential organ damage, but mostly it just sounds gross. All I know is that my uncle’s payback was just as devilish. Easily affected by motion sickness, my dad had to get on one of those hellish theme park rides that strings you up like a Vitruvian Man and spins you upside down. Four times. My uncle then forced him to drive home while answering math questions. Needless to say, my dad threw up. Multiple times.

My mom does not have a brother. She is an only child like me. She did have a poodle that she cleverly named Poochie. She painted Poochie’s nails bright colors and attached clip-on earrings to her ears, redubbing her Princess Poocheskela. I think of her chosen stoop siblings in Park Slope; the adopted family of kids on the block who she gathered with late into her high school years, smoking, drinking, getting up to all of the typical things high schoolers do.

In my mind, my brother and I go to the Eno trail and cloister ourselves in a thicket of trees off the main path. I’m nervous about stepping in poison ivy, but he doesn’t really care how I feel, excited by the knowledge that he has and I do not. I’m tripping over my shoes, trying to keep up with his long strides. We settle into the forest as the sunlight fades and the air cools. He passes me a handmade joint with a crooked smile. I choke nervously on the smoke and am not really sure if I’m high or not. But I am so glad to be there with him, eating animal crackers and Gushers in the middle of the woods, that for once, I don’t mind the ambivalence.

I lived in New York this summer. My grandparents and I got dinner one night in Harlem. Somehow, the topic of family genealogy came up and we got to talking about my grandfather’s mother, Janet, and his older sister. I didn’t know

“I thought, ‘Hotttt!’ And then I was like no, that doesn’t make sense for you.”

“Happy Spotify wrapped week to all that celebrate.”

“Can’t you just let me enjoy a nice double standard?”

my grandpa had a sister. My grandma weighed in on their tense relationship: “He was always the favorite. As soon as you came along, your parents forgot about her,” she said quietly. “I don’t think she ever stopped resenting you for that.” He smashed his face between his palms, stuck in a past he’d like to forget. I was struck by how deeply ingrained this resentment is, between my grandfather and his sister, his sister and his mother, his mother and his sister and him. A complex spider web of bitter threads, spun with love and hate. I asked my grandpa how long it has been since he talked to his sister, whose name I still don’t know. Nearly 20 years, he told me. When Janet died, he reached out to his sister about the funeral arrangements, but she had no interest in mourning their mother.

I’ve always thought my imaginary brother would be the favorite because he would have had an extra few years to make a good impression on my parents. “Not fair, but that’s my lot,” I’d think.

But now, suddenly, I think about how I’d feel once he left for college years before I graduated high school. I am alone. I have become Oreo’s favorite sibling. We don’t eat at the dining room table anymore, because there’s enough room for our small huddle of four—three humans and one dog—at the island in the kitchen. My brother doesn’t check in much, perhaps because he is busy learning guitar to try out for an indie band in college that is inspired by the Velvet Underground and has a spunky one-word name. Secretly, he is afraid of being forgotten. I don’t check in because I am “busy with school,” and similarly afraid that he has forgotten me.

Over the past few years, I have gone out with two people with older brothers. One’s brother was infamously kicked out of summer camp for breaking into the girls’ cabin and stealing all their underwear. The other’s used to fling ping pong balls at her in the basement of their house for fun. Another time he made her eat flour, which made her choke so badly that he had to pull the wet clump out of her throat with his hand.

What would it be like to talk to my older brother on the phone? Everyone I know seems to talk to their older brothers on the phone. By now, he would have graduated college and moved to Brooklyn to make a documentary film about the dangers of gentrification in urban areas, or something else socially impactful. His hair would still be floppy, but he would probably cover it with one of those hipster snapbacks that all the people in Brooklyn wear now. He would go to the neighborhood pickup soccer games and have advice on the local food scene. We would call to talk about the pitfalls of online dating and that thing mom said yesterday on the group FaceTime and I would ask about his job at the new studio. In a few months, we would both be home for summer vacation. It’s been too long since we’ve seen each other, we’d agree.

On a roadtrip to Lake Lure in North Carolina one summer, my family decided to take a pontoon boat out onto the water. In the boat was my mom, my dad, Oreo, and me. Oreo is scared of moving vehicles, but she was trying her best to be brave and my mom was cooing at her in that special, indecipherable way that dog owners do. A sudden thought hit me.

There are only four of us, and someday, I will be the last one left.

This is my family unit. I am one of four, but I am also one of one. An only child, and eventually, the only one left.

It is strange to feel the loss of something before it has gone away. It is more strange to me than feeling the presence of a brother who does not exist.

I see the details on his face so clearly. The dimples that curve on the sides of his mouth are just like mine. The dimple on the right side is always just a bit deeper than the left. I see the patch on his eyebrow that matches my own, the place where we both rub too hard when deep in thought. The toenail that mom always tells us to stop picking is finally growing back.

He’s right next to me. Back for the summer.

He dips his toes into the muddy lake water off the side of the boat and tells me if it’s warm enough to wade in. He smiles at me as my mom mutters softly in Oreo’s furry ears, flicking some water at my dad to distract him from his seasickness. I feel his rough palm before it lands on my skin.

He taps my arm lightly to say, “Hey, let’s jump together.”

Anyway, Don't Be a Stranger

a farewell

by Siena Capone Illustrated by Talia Mermin

The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.

— “For M” by Mikko Harvey

Of all the parting phrases, “see you around” has always been my least favorite. It’s bereft of intention, leaving things up to fate; “see you around” suggests that if or when you see someone again, it’ll be by accident. It’s a maybe. And from people I like, I’ve always wanted certainly. There doesn’t need to be a false promise of soon. Just eventually

This is why I’ve always said “see you later” instead— there’s that promise nested in the middle of it, that singing note of certainty. Maybe soon, maybe not. But definitely, and eventually.

But graduation feels like running out of see you laters, watching what was once a bountiful reserve of years dwindle down to months, then weeks, then days. See you later, see you later, see you later, and then, suddenly—

For as long as I can remember, I’ve said goodbye to my bedroom at home before I leave it. It’s a silly ritual, formed some time before I left for a family vacation, but it feels necessary, like an act of respect. The kinships we have with places—be it bedrooms, kitchen tables, cities, lakes, yards, fire escapes—can be as dynamic and formative as the ones we have with people. I believe it’s important to honor that.

My childhood bedroom has housed sleepover dramatics, middle school sulks set to the soundtrack of Marina and the Diamonds, sluggish high school early mornings where I would literally groan out loud upon waking. I spent endless evenings as a teenager watching the sun lower into the sparse Michigan winter trees, hoping everything would turn out alright. My room watched me turn seven, turn sixteen, turn eighteen—like a family member. Thus, saying bye, room, before I head off back

to school after yet another break just feels polite.

Walking through my neighborhood in Providence lately, I’ve begun to feel the impending goodbye like a shadow falling over me. Its cold shade is visceral: I remember taking turns down Transit Street as a first-year and thinking it was some great detour. The area was like a brand new pair of boots, and I laced them up four years ago and set out to break them in. Now, they’re familiar and worn, wrinkled with Four Seasons Market visits with my roommates and walks over the bridge, the gray cityscape to my right watching me grow older and happier. The blisters of first heartbreak, impending loss, and crushing disappointment have all become tough calluses, keeping me safe amid the coldest winter winds and the rockiest ground.

+

This week, my roommates and I started making a list of Providence favorites to hit for the last time before we leave.

“This is going to make me depressed,” Sylvia said as we started. She was right. The thought of leaving Providence is usually a flame too hot to touch—I’ve tried to become practiced at hovering my hand just above it, feeling the abstract warmth of the idea without burning myself.

Talia threw out suggestions, and we picked and chose the crucial ones, as if every single one didn’t feel precious, as if we’re not a little terrified of the nameless territory stretched out in front of us. That’s what scares me the most about what comes next: how unlabeled it is. It’s become a point of pride to know all the street signs in my neighborhood, what turns to take, what spots are worth going to for good books or good coffee. I wasn’t ready for my world to become amorphous and encrypted by unfamiliarity again.

Seaweed’s, Xaco Taco, Hot Club, Ellie’s, Louis Family Restaurant. Each potential future visit summoned all the past ones in my head—celebrating Jane’s 22nd birthday on the back patio of Seaweed’s, a heart-shaped sparkler illuminating her laugh; sitting at Xaco Taco with Addie and her parents sophomore year, pleased to find that her parents are just as warm and fun as she is; eating fried pickles at Hot Club with Nat and my roommates, watching the city lights on the water.

On nights I’m feeling particularly sentimental, it feels cruel that the conventional life path is set up this way: carefully knitting ourselves into the fabric of a place, only to be asked after a set amount of time to extricate ourselves and start again. +

The first time I ever wrote for this magazine, I was a firstyear. I wrote a Narrative piece about feeling completely and utterly lost. This was in the geographical sense (I couldn’t get anywhere without Google Maps), the emotional sense, the intellectual sense, the fashion sense—you name it, I probably didn’t know what was going on.

This Thursday, I will squeeze into the little upstairs conference room at 88 Benevolent Street for the last time. I love the people who make this magazine, who were here before and who are here now and who will be here after I leave. I love our hodge-podge playlist of everyone’s combined music taste, the Rina Sawayama and the Hungarian songs. I love that postused to be called Fresh Fruit and had a sex advice column. I love seeing what funky earrings Kyoko will wear each week. I love

chatting with her and Alice and Joe and Aditi and Kimberly and the collection of people who gather to read and chat and sigh and scroll throughout the night. I love reading writers’ stories about Minnesota loons and ghosts and country music. It’s an uncomplicated, simple love.

How fitting, all those years after writing about feeling lost, to bring in a piece on feeling found. And I won’t even need Google Maps to get to the office.

+

This is the part of the piece where I start lingering uncomfortably near the door, resisting the bye, room

In a way, that’s what taking this last extra semester was— my friends and I forgetting our proverbial scarves and coming back later for them. Laughing sheepishly as we found ourselves back here, in our beloved yellow house, like kids asking for one more bedtime story before sleep. And Providence is generous, so we got one.

When we retrace all our past steps these next few weeks, we’ll be telling it and retelling it to ourselves—here I was, here I was. Here I am.

I realize now that it took running low on see you laters for me to finally understand the value of see you around. It took meeting these people that I love, and then learning what it is to miss them, be it over an indefinite pandemic or a summer break.

The later is important, but turns out the around is just as crucial. Because I’ve been spoiled with it—the around. The domestic, the daily, the constant companionship. Being able to watch Sylvia sit on the floor with her growing pile of crochet, to sit with Mary on Wriston underneath our favorite tree, to listen to Maya and Talia’s singing voices weave into one another in the kitchen, to eat challah that Hannah just took out of the oven, to lose terribly to Peter at Wingspan. When the around we’ve always known is taken away, we’ll have to make it ourselves. +

The night that first post- piece was published, I was told I could come to prod for 9-spot. At the time, the BDH office was on Angell Street (but the post- room was still just as cramped). It was hot inside, rolling office chairs jousting for space, greasy boxes of pizza laid open, the room full of chatter and joy. I was nervous, because there was nothing I did my first year with a resting heart rate. But everyone was kind and welcoming, telling me their name and asking for mine even though we knew we’d both forget. I instantly wanted to be a part of it, this easy rapport, this space of fluorescent light and clattering keyboards carved out in the middle of Thursday nights. I left a few hours later with a small smile on my face, excited for my very first piece to come out the next day.

An hour later, I got an email from my editor at the time. I had left my scarf at the office.

Transcript: Interview with a Grimm Archetype Club

Q, 11.19.22

by AJ Wu Illustrated by Jasmin Lin Insta: @sasha_art_0201

CW: Homophobia, Violence, Club Q Shooting

“The End of the World was a nightclub... The End of the World was loud. The End of the World leaked music like radiation, and we loved the neon echo, even though it taunted us or maybe because it taunted us…”

Saeed Jones, Alive at the End of the World

“‘I would get up at one or two a.m. and I would call every gay bar I had the number to from the 1940s. I wouldn’t say anything. I would just stay on the phone and listen to the sounds in the background. I would stay on until they hung up, and then I would call another one of my numbers, until I had called all the numbers I had… That phone. Those numbers. That was my lifeline… It meant there was a place somewhere—even if I couldn’t go there— that place was out there. I could hear it. Freedom.’ She called the bars two to three times a week like this—for fourteen years.”

An interview with Myrna Kurland in Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall by Marie Cartier.

Where are you?

I’m inside a box on a grassy hill.

You’re literally inside a box on a hill?

Yeah, I’m literally inside a glass box, resting on a hill.

Wow. Tell me about that.

A woodpecker pecks at my coffin like a persistent boy pulling on his mother’s sleeves. Sometimes the light dances along the edges of the glass. I feel like dancing with it. Most of the time it is so quiet and the only sound is weeping that comes in faint droves. They say someone is coming for me soon. I’m dubious.

I’ve never interviewed a person in a glass coffin.

It’s transparent as all display cases are. When the stranger I’m waiting for comes, he’ll stoop and brush the hair out of my face. “I’m finally here, have you waited long enough? Have you had enough of resentment yet?” He will be decorated in his

number of previous kills (stars across a sash). He’ll permit me to rejoin the rest of them (I’ve learned my lesson this time) and take me away to his high-walled palace.

How does the remainder of the story go?

We settle down, have the right number of kids. Baseball practice. A porch to sit on. Sunday service, picnics in July, church plays at Christmas and Easter. Mulch sales. A terrible beast is buried beneath our green lawn. Suntan lotion slathered on heavily for days at the community pool. Barbeques for every occasion. A wooden rocking horse and a freshly painted mint green saddle. A weighted silence after it rains. Goldfish you can buy with pennies, fried dough in copious sums. Our children still can’t imagine what it’s like to grow old.

Who or what are you afraid of?

The light on the floor, seeping in. Nowadays I’m afraid of sleep. I didn’t use to be an insomniac, but being cursed to sleep for one hundred years can do that to a person. I try different remedies—counting sheep, counting blessings, warm milk, cold showers, mixtures of pills, calisthenics—but none of them help. I read the news and my chest hurts. I can’t stop reading the news even though getting closer makes it worse; they want to make ghosts out of people I love.

Who or what do you love?

Moonlight carried home in hats. Crumbling church spires as they fall into the sea. Numbers that end in three and seven. The hunter, sent on an interminable mission, sees something she wants for the first time, so she spares my life. A tundra sprawls before us and covers us. Instead of just me, we are both entrapped. We walk for days in the snow, rendered speechless by the wonderful world. We burrow in a hiding place together, loving one another oddly. We die by the sword and live out of sorts. My head keeps drumming.

What do you do in your spare time? I’m assuming you currently have a lot of it.

Spinning fear into gold. Switching out hot and cold packs for the ache. Guessing the names of short and ill-humored baby snatchers. Fantasizing about a world in which we’re more than a cautionary tale.

Ever run away?

Once, I took a train on a cold night. Studied my face in the window as the stars fell into the water below. I stood at the bank of a fast river and listened to it for hours while entertaining the idea of falling in and staying for a while. Every story is a souvenir of survival. Raizan wrote, I must be crazy not to be crazy in this crazy spring nightmare. This house spins and I spin within it to create the impression of stillness. As long as the music is playing, no one is allowed to die

Last thing you ate?

Day-old potato salad. Humpty Dumpty, made omelet. A legion of soldiers decorated in their harms, one by one, spitting out their red and gold jackets and stupid fur caps. A biscuit that shrunk me down and allowed me access to another world, with only the price of never being able to look back and be content. As a child I ate communion wafers and prayed to God to look out for all of us, listing the names of everyone I loved; and then, after I’d exhausted that list, everyone I knew or had run into at one point or another. Now I’m older and know better.

Who is responsible?

Who isn’t?

How will you get revenge? If you’re comfortable sharing

Chopping off their hands, like how the vengeful kings used to do it. Proofed and baked in an oven inside my gingerbread home. By way of bird, dropping a heavy stone. At last, their ends will correspond to their deeds (2 Corinthians 11:15). We yell get up get up and our dead friends do get up and reclaim their seats at the table, their places already set. There are no more vigils in parks. We stop all this nonsense of losing, and the stories

are true; the dragons can be killed. I hold my own close to me, carefully, tightly, and somehow that is enough.

How long is August anyway?

It’s late summer. We fly kites all afternoon. You row us out to the middle of the lake, and we listen to the mix of loons and coyote calls from every shore as the sky gets dark. We fish out from the bottom of the lake an old amulet, arrowheads, and a few gold coins from previous adventures. I tell you a story about us and—because this is still fiction—we make it and stay in love forever.

What would you say, if you could?

I’m sorry I forgot to water your plants that time you were away and they died. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten how to kill dragons; I wouldn’t recognize one if it showed up and laid down at my door now, how useless. Our favorite band came to town, and I went alone but not really because I was thinking of you the whole time. I miss eating breakfast with you. Not too long ago, I threw a gold coin in a well and then was embarrassed I thought anything would happen. Here’s how everything has changed.

What’s your idea of a perfect ending?

Every one of us comes home. The day bends towards us and we are alive! Swimming on a hot day, we imitate the swans for a while, then paddle to shore. We give each other haircuts at home and sleep through the whole night, a song drifting out with the box fan perched near the open window. We get ice cream and squeeze onto the carousel like kids again even though we’re too big, having grown beyond our expiration dates. We hug one another and it only means goodbye for now.

Gaslight, Gatekeep, Her Loss

As he approaches his 40s, Drake has sat atop pop culture’s highest throne for over a decade, and he has become increasingly self-aware of his positionality. Age has brought the pop star a perspective that is at once retrospective and introspective. This insight, however, is a double-edged sword: as Atlantic staff writer Spencer Kornhaber writes, “More than ever, Drake’s superpower and limitation are his con man’s senses of empathy and self-awareness.”

While Kornhaber wrote this as a description of Drake’s 2021 album Certified Lover Boy, it rings even more true in his most recent project, Her Loss, a collaboration with Atlanta rapper 21 Savage. In promoting the album, Drake’s self-awareness became a PR superpower. Drake and 21 Savage appeared on all of the typical promotional tour programs—except they were all fake. They did a fake NPR Tiny Desk Concert, a fake Vogue appearance, and even a fake Saturday Night Live performance airing on Drake’s YouTube channel at the same time as the real SNL musical guest’s performance. Drake’s performative promotion is sheer marketing genius—most people consume these shows in chopped up clips scattered across social media, making it harder to identify their lack of authenticity. Therefore, Drake and 21 Savage received all of the PR benefit without actually having to benefit the programs themselves.

shooting for clout.”

While cancel culture has been tossed around in political contexts as a buzzword, its true arena is pop culture: in today’s discourse around celebrity accountability, canceling or boycotting has become synonymous with moral condemnation. The main moral question I apply to public figures who have morally transgressed is as follows: “Can one separate the art from the artist?” If the answer is no, the artist is condemned to cancellation; if yes, however, they emerge without consequence or blame.

by Evan Gardner Illustrated by Connie Liu

“Draaaaake?...Aubrey Graham in a wheelchair?”

This quote from rapper Soulja Boy on the morning radio show the Breakfast Club lives forever in the rap industry. In the infamous interview, Soulja Boy objects to Charlamagne’s claim that Drake is more successful than Soulja—an objection so loud and off base that it inspired endless social media memes. Clearly, Soulja Boy is wrong about Drake’s success; he is the star of our generation. What Soulja Boy was correct about, however, was that Drake’s riches, fame, and celebrity all began with acting. Drake first came into the public consciousness by playing a boy in a wheelchair on the coming of age teen drama Degrassi. And ever since his first role, Drake has been playing a character: on diss tracks, he is a gangster rapper; on Certified Lover Boy, he is a lover; on Scorpion, he is a father and a son; on Honestly, Nevermind, he acts as a DJ in a club; through all of these ventures, he varies his language and accents to fit each persona.

It is fitting however, that his music and public interactions are filtered through acting because he requires the audience to generate meaning. Although characters may feel like real people living, breathing, and feeling on the screen, in reality, they are merely personas. In the absence of a true human subject, meaning comes from the audience’s interpretation. While the actor may portray emotion, the audience member is the one who identifies it and feels it, making acting fundamentally dependent on the consumer’s gaze.

Drake’s success is rooted in the actor’s masterful command of this gaze. Through acting, Drake learned how to cultivate a specific response from his audience. He ascended the ladder of pop culture not with artistic genius, but with his spectacular ability to hold the public gaze hostage. Drake went from icon to iconic: he is, as he tells us in a song with DJ Khaled, a POPSTAR.

Only Drake is capable of pulling off a stunt like this: not only does he have the capital to ward off Vogue’s subsequent lawsuit, but more importantly, he has the cultural capital to make this move successful, and he knows it. He knows that we will believe his performance, for not only have we seen him appear on these platforms before, but his celebrity status is such that there is no stage he could not walk across with ease. With these videos, Drake is laughing at us from his perch on top of popular culture: not only has he conned the media, but he has also conned his fans, and his knowledge of his own celebrity fuels his deceit. The song he and 21 performed on fake SNL was even titled “On B.S.,” a sly pun on his conscious embrace of falsity.

Similarly, Her Loss flies off the shelf not because of any authentic lyrical genius, but because of Drake's cultural standing. Drunk on its own consumer value, the tracks on Her Loss are comically lacking in terms of substance—the album features lyrics like “crusty, musty, dusty, rusty/fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” or “wham bam thank you ma’am,” and, my personal favorite, “if you a dog, then roof n***a, I’m a dog.” Drake’s lyrics begin to make clear the simultaneous superpower and limitation Kornhaber speaks of: while it may allow for bold moves without fear, self-awareness “can make you complacent.”

However, Her Loss’s self-awareness does not just limit Drake’s creativity; its most profound constraint is the one it places on the listener. In Circo Loco, Drake’s con man approach to music goes awry. He raps, “This bitch lie about getting shots, but she still a stallion/She don’t even get the joke but she still smiling.” Many listeners received this line as a diss to Megan Thee Stallion, who was allegedly shot by fellow rapper Tory Lanez; in true Drake fashion, it does so behind the cover of performed meaning. Lil Yachty, a collaborator on the album, claimed that Drake was referring to cosmetic injections and using stallion as a general slang term for tall women. Nonetheless, Twitter users and music critics alike immediately pounced on Drake; Megan Thee Stallion herself even tweeted in response,“Stop using my

Drake holds a unique position in this dichotomy: he has never been a part of his art, so we don’t even know who he is. He hides behind characters, accents, and layers of meaning, making it impossible to assign him any moral blame within our current framework. While his recurrent sexism is clearly a shortcoming of his own, Drake’s escape from meaningful scrutiny despite his transgressions reveals the holes in our moral analysis of the modern celebrity. As Kornhaber writes, “Lyrics can have layered meanings, but it’s laughable to say that Drake, who’s as calculating as a computer, didn’t intend for the words shots, lie, and stallion to trigger exactly this kind of controversy.” In the supposed Meg diss, Drake appears in costume once more: just as the actor hides their person behind their expression, Drake hides behind layered meaning. Pop culture’s lexicon simply cannot ascribe blame to a figure as flimsy and transient as a Drake character—the man himself has never been present. While we may not have the language to pinpoint the nature of his wrongdoings, Drake himself does, cementing his role as pop music’s con man. Her Loss is teeming with—to return to Kornhaber’s analysis of Certified Lover Boy—“the language to talk about your own awfulness.” On More M’s, Drake boasts, “Thought I was a popstar, I’m Slaughter Gang, I baited ‘em.” Here, he explicitly says that his movement between personas is often intentionally deceptive. Her Loss is one large baiting of popular culture: Drake elicits controversy while evading accountability by returning to his acting roots: he presents cues that he knows will invoke a response, but he lets the listener assign the particular meaning. As he tells us in the latter half of the bar dissing Meg,“She don’t even get the joke but she still smiling,” Drake is giving us language whose true meaning we will never understand. Nonetheless, he gets his intended reaction out of us, and escapes unscathed.

Thus in an era dominated by cancel culture, Drake’s selfawareness has impeccably guarded him against cancellation; it is his superpower, and a glaring limitation of our moral cognition. As the album’s title suggests, canceling Drake truly would only be her loss: killing the character we see, hear, and watch leaves the man himself unscathed and falls short of addressing the suffering of the women who fall victim to his backhanded blows. To address the sexist harm of albums like Her Loss, what needs to grow is our critical assessment of pop culture accountability; this does not entail a stripping down of lyrical layers, but instead an understanding of what exactly builds them. If we understand how Drake functions and the gaze that created him, then we can begin to dismantle the harm of his sly, evasive violence, of our own societal notions, and of producing an unreachable yet dominant figure.

how celebrity and the sneak diss escape popular morality and endanger women

Color Me [x]

The Pantone Personality Palette

by sarah kim Illustrated by harshini venkatachalam

Synesthesia: the ability to hear shapes, taste colors, or see music. For some, there is an involuntary reaction that happens between senses where one sensory trigger will consistently and predictably cause an interaction with another.

I think everyone has their own form of synesthesia. I have a friend who sees a number whenever they think of or interact with a person—odd numbers mean different things from even, and a person who is a four is entirely different from a person who is a forty. For me, months of the year follow the outline of a rectangle in my brain (starting with January in the upper left corner) so dates are physically placed in a specific spot along the perimeter.

While I think it would be cool to taste the color of every wall I see, I don’t have synesthesia. What I tend to do though (and I guess will settle for) is see a color and immediately think of a person in my life who embodies that color. Perhaps the discrepancy between shades can be argued according to personal relationships with the individual, but I believe there is still a general agreement of color association. A guide to color-match your friends, a Pantone list of my dearly beloved:

Forest green (emerging from a dark turquoise), Pantone #3308

Different shades of green are entirely different people. Forest green people are well-balanced. It makes sense why I see you the least in our suite. You are far more balanced than I am, and now that I’m

thinking about it, I haven’t seen you since Monday. Perhaps I could’ve seen you yesterday had I not gone to the 10:05 p.m. movie showing and woken up at 9:30 a.m. this morning. Let’s snuggle in your bed and watch The Parent Trap (Lindsay Lohan version only) soon, okay? I’ll roll the joint for us.

Forest green people settle into their specific shade and lean into it. For you, everything in your life has begun to be painted by those broad strokes. Forest green people probably run outdoors to exercise (maybe with a fanny pack strapped to the waist), do puzzles on Thanksgiving Day, and eat granola and non-dairy yogurt for breakfast (which, of course, they never skip).

Deep fuchsia, Pantone #0807

Deep fuchsia people will probably wear pants that are also deep fuschia. Maybe with pearls, too, and drive a dented car. Deep fuchsia is bright and loud and entertaining, and indeed, deep fuchsia people are all those things. They have strong personalities, but everyone could use a bit of deep fuschia in their life. Once you do, you might climb up fire escapes with them or jump out of planes from 14,000 feet together. They’ll have the dented car bouncing to the heaviest beat when picking you up from the station at 3 a.m., and maybe you’ll roam around the rainforest with them too. You pick, it’ll be a good time regardless.

Blue is blue the way white is white, at least for Pantone #0293

Classic, true, honest. It’s like when people have 18 pairs of blue jeans in their closet, there is still a single one that is the classic, love-worn staple, and the perfect shade of blue. You are my favorite pair of blue jeans. I would sacrifice all my other pairs in a heartbeat if it meant I could keep you.

Some days blues are a Pantone #2955 and other

days, a Pantone #0298. If there was a set of ten markers and one of them was blue, the shade might be different between each brand of markers. But there will always be a blue marker—blue is blue the way you are you.

Yellow, Pantone #3935

“Yellow is capable of charming God.”

There is a physical effect with yellows. Seeing you has the same effect as sunlight when you’re seasonally depressed. You just make the world brighter in a literal way. You are just cavalierly happy and it’s infectious. Hues of yellow will of course differ, but there is an undeniable radiance of yellows. So let’s crochet together and cook dinner together with the rosemary from your impressively healthy dorm plant. Or we can put on goggles and go for a dip in the sound, but it’s colder now so maybe we can just go climbing together. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what we do—as long as it’s with you, I know I’ll be okay.

Orange, Pantone #0804

Orange is for people who grow persimmons in their backyard, who re-wild their lawn to allow nature to reclaim its ground. Orange is for people who get emotional at cookbooks and unashamedly read romance novels while also reading Moby Dick. Orange is for people who are brilliant and are the exception to orange-color-haters. You are the exception and there is nothing quite like my love for you.

Moss green (in the context of a medallion yellow, Pantone #0130), Pantone #5767

Now, moss green is important because the context of the color will change its meaning entirely. Moss green has individualized relationships with its adjacent color, whatever it might be. Moss green people can never be generalized; their conversations with one person are like moss cultivated in a Japanese garden, and their conversations with another like moss as Christmas decoration.

Let’s consider a moss green next to a medallion yellow, Pantone #5767 to Pantone #0130, respectively. In this context, moss green people send postcards on roadtrips, will have a personal connection to the word “cabin”, and exclusively shopped at REI and Patagonia on Cyber Monday.

But that’s not to say moss greens can’t survive on their own. Moss, absent of roots and stems and leaves, can grow anywhere. In fact, moss comes alive in the rain.

How much more sweet, tasty, and brilliant the world around us becomes when colors come alive in this way.

“Perhaps building a home means, instead, freely giving pieces of ourselves away, leaving them in the unexpected corners of the world.”

—Kaitlan Bui, “In The Places We Once Called Home” 12.03.2021

“I think that any reflection upon this time will inevitably unfold as a stubbornly linear narrative, defining itself through the recognition and repetition of salient events.”

—Anneliese Mair, “A Decade Undone” 12.06.2019

'The Noel Diary' rejects holiday rom-com absurdity but fails to stand out

BY ALEX NADIRASHVILI UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

Amidst the arrival of the holiday season, Netflix has been filling its roster of new releases with more and more cliché Christmas titles — including “The Noel Diary,” a film starring Justin Hartley and Barrett Doss of “This is Us” and “Station 19” fame, respectively. Based on a quasi-autobiographical, romantic novella of the same name, “The Noel Diary” fails to stand out from Netflix’s growing list of holiday movies, despite the film’s rejection of typical rom-com tropes.

“The Noel Diary” starts with Jacob Turner (Justin Hartley), a successful novelist who is preparing to spend yet another holiday season alone. The movie takes quite an unfortunate turn early on when Turner receives a call in forming him that his mother has passed away, prompting him to return to his small hometown to take care of her estate. While at home, Turner meets Rachel Campbell (Barrett Doss), who is searching for her birth mother — a

woman she believes once worked as a nanny for the Turners. Together, Turner and Campbell go on a multi-day road trip that slowly builds their relation ship. As Turner is forced to confront his absent father, Campbell searches for any semblance of a connection to her own lineage.

For audiences looking for a typical holiday rom-com, “The Noel Diary” will certainly disappoint. The movie fails to welcome the absurdity of many other romantic comedies. Instead, “The Noel Diary” often attempts to distance itself from the genre, such as when Turner pokes fun at the two-people-singlebed rom-com trope. But the film feels stale because it refuses to embrace the absurdity of this style of film, which audiences often love watching because of how bad the movies are. “The Noel Diary” ultimately ends up being unen joyable and simply bad.

The movie’s creative decisions also make little sense. There are enough dramatic montages throughout the film — of Jacob’s childhood bedroom, a solemn graveyard, the cluttered mess of the Turner home — that are overlaid by slap-you-in-the-face sad music to fill an entire movie on its own. These scenes are overused and lose the little emotional impact that they are sup posed to evoke in viewers.

Turner and Campbell’s relation

ship also makes little sense. There is no accidental circumstance that brings the two characters together and forces them to stay with one another — unlike the unrealistic but enjoyable plot of Netflix’s “Falling for Christmas,” where Lindsay Lohan’s Sierra Belmont is left in the care of Chord Overstreet’s Jack Russell after suffering from memo ry loss post-skiing accident. In “The Noel Diary,” audience members are left to question what supposedly realis tic characters would decide to go on a days-long road trip with someone they have only known for a single day. The film thus becomes more absurd than those like “Falling for Christmas” because it attempts to avoid these sto rylines.

Perhaps Turner and Campbell’s journey would be more tolerable if their characters were likable. Turner’s persona seems to be based entirely on how exaggeratedly sad his life is. The movie goes from revealing one unfortunate incident in his life to the other — from his lack of current fulfill ing relationships to his absent father to his deceased mother and brother. The real holiday miracle in the film seems to be Turner’s ability to find a happy ending with his father — when the two are somehow able to rebuild 35 years of no relationship within a single night.

Campbell, on the other hand, is far too perfect for her own good. She is somehow fluent in French, German, Italian and Mandarin and has several scenes throughout the movie where she starts singing perfectly, entirely unprovoked. Campbell’s character gets especially old when she continuously goes on rambling monologues about needing to find security and fill a void in her heart.

It is also hard to forget that, as Turn er and Campbell fall in love on their journey, Campbell is both emotionally and physically cheating on her fiance Alan (Mike Donovan), who is waiting to plan their engagement party when Campbell returns. The film pushes Alan

further and further into the background as the movie progresses, but it's difficult for audiences to look past the fact that Turner and Campbell’s relationship rests on an uneasy foundation.

The acting in the movie similarly suffers from the script’s refusal to em brace traditional rom-com absurdity. The dialogue in “The Noel Diary” is bland and uninteresting. Oftentimes, interactions between the characters feel awkward and uncomfortable — as if the actors weren’t even given a script to go off of. By the film’s end, audiences cannot help but wonder how Hartley and Doss, talented actors who have previously proven their abilities, fell so far from grace.

AT A CROSSWALK ON COLLEGE HILL

forget to enjoy it while you can.

Film starring Justin Hartley, Barrett Doss lacks joy of standard Netflix fluff-pieces

COURTESY OF NETFLIX TUDUM

In the Netflix film, Rachel Campbell cheats on her fiancé with Jacob Turner, a plotline that audiences can’t overlook.

JACK WALKER / HERALD