Thursday, September 21st, 2023

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

WHAT’S INSIDE

MUSIC REVIEW

Mitski’s new album wanders heaven, Earth

SEE PAGE 13

CRIME & JUSTICE

Community shows support after Jamie Marsicano ’16 arrested

SEE PAGE 5

ACADEMICS & ADVISING

Students reflect on Brown-Tougaloo exchange program

SEE PAGE 15

INSTITUTIONAL EQUITY

This year’s funding for BCA, allocated at $300,000 excluding supplemental funding, marks a $256,665 reduction from the 2022-23 school year — which totaled $556,665. This year’s funding is roughly equivalent to funding for BCA prior to the pandemic in 2019 and 2018, public UFB data shows.

Spring Weekend 2024 will be one-day festival

Brown Concert Agency cites significant budget cuts, rising production costs

BY KATHY WANG AND RYA VALLABHANENI UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR AND ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR

This year’s Spring Weekend will be a

ACADEMICS & ADVISING

one-day festival as a result of rising production costs and University-wide student group budget cuts, according to a Wednesday announcement from Brown Concert Agency. In keeping with recent Spring Weekends, entry to the festival will remain free for all undergraduate students.

Previously, Spring Weekend has taken place across two days, with three unique artists performing each

Engineering class reviewed following student reports

BY SOFIA BARNETT UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

The University’s Department of Engineering opened a review into the teaching of an introductory engineering course after 28 students signed a letter alleging inadequate instruction, an inaccessible environment for students without a strong subject matter background and inequitable treatment for women and students of color under the instruction of Professor of Engineering William Curtin ’81 last spring.

Sent in May before the course’s final exam, the letter, reviewed by The Herald, accused one of the professors of ENGN 0040: “Dynamics and Vibrations” of treating white students more leniently than students of color, citing two instances — one

during an exam and another during class presentations — where students of color allegedly received disproportionate treatment. The class had a total enrollment of 159 students, according to Courses@Brown.

This summer, Dean of Engineering Tejal Desai met individually with multiple students in the course to discuss its instruction, according to students who spoke with The Herald. Desai confirmed her receipt of a letter outlining complaints about an engineering course to The Herald. The Herald couldn’t determine if the course’s review was ongoing. Desai declined to provide an update on the investigation this month.

In a May email to the letter’s signatories reviewed by The Herald, Desai wrote that she had “escalated this to the appropriate campus leaders, including (the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity) and the Dean of the College who will follow up

day.

This year’s funding for BCA, allocated at $300,000 excluding supplemental funding, marks a $256,665 reduction from the 2022-23 academic year — which totaled $556,665. This year’s funding is roughly equivalent to funding for BCA prior to the pandemic in 2019 and 2018, public UFB data shows.

“This is by far the largest budget

UNIVERSITY HALL

NYT ranks Brown 230th of 286th for socioeconomic diversity

SEE PAGE 14

for any student organization, and BCA acknowledges the enormity of it,” BCA wrote in a statement sent to The Herald.

BCA was just one of the student groups affected by budget cuts made by the UFB, which faced over a $1.5 million gap between revenue and funding requested by student groups

U. trustee steps down ahead of term expiration

Orlando Bravo departs to focus on business and philanthropic commitments

BY CHARLIE CLYNES AND NEIL MEHTA UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITORS

Orlando Bravo ’92 stepped down from his post as a trustee on the Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — in May, two years before his term was set to expire. Bravo joined the Corporation in 2019. Bravo built a name and fortune for himself as a co-founder and managing partner at the private equity firm Thoma Bravo. He cited professional obligations as the reason for his departure from the Corporation when contacted by The Herald.

“Being elected to the Corporation four years ago was a sincere honor. However, my business and other philanthropic commitments have prevented me from engaging

at the level I had hoped,” Bravo wrote in an email to The Herald via a Thoma Bravo spokesperson. “As a result, I notified the Corporation that I (planned) to step aside before the end of my term to make room for someone else to serve.”

“I look forward to remaining a steadfast supporter of Brown in the years to come,” Bravo added.

“Orlando Bravo departed his role on the Brown Corporation given the challenge of balancing multiple priority commitments,” University Spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to the Herald. According to Clark, premature departures from the Corporation are not unprecedented.

Around the time of Bravo’s departure, Thoma Bravo faced several lawsuits — including a shareholder lawsuit over the firm’s 2021 takeover of a manufacturing software company and another alleging the firm’s involvement in FTX’s alleged fraud.

SEE PAGE 8

& CULTURE

KAIOLENA TACAZON / HERALD

Students alleged inequitable treatment, ‘lack of fundamental instruction’

WEEK IN HIGHER ED:

EXPLORE THE NEW DORMS:

1

U.S. News changes college ranking methodology, private universities fall

The publication’s evaluation formula no longer considers class size or alumni giving, but it has added a new factor that tracks the graduation rates of first-generation college students at national universities.

2 Acting Temple University president JoAnne A. Epps dies after falling ill on stage

While attending a memorial service, Temple University acting president JoAnne A. Epps died Tuesday shortly after becoming ill on stage.

3 Lincoln University reportedly underfunded by $361 million

Biden administration officials report that land-grant historically Black universities in Missouri and 15 other states, including Lincoln University in Jefferson City, have been deprived of $12.6 billion in funding over the past 30 years.

THIS WEEKEND

Political Economy and Health Impacts of Crop Burning in South Asia

Sept. 22, 2:00 p.m. Watson Institute

Heartwork: Food for the Activist Artist Soul

Sept. 23, 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. LitArts RI

Brown vs. Harvard Football Game

Sept. 22, 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Boston, MA

Yom Kippur Sound Bath

Sept. 24, 9:00 p.m. Sayles Hall

NEXT WEEK

The Feminist Fight to Bring Mumia Home

Sept. 27, 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. Salomon Center

Film Screening — “While We Watched”

Sept. 28, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. Sayles Hall

DEEPS Colloquium with Tripti Bhattacharya

Sept. 28, 12:00 p.m. MacMillan Hall

Brown Center for Students of Color Heritage Series Welcome Back Sept. 29, 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. Brown Center for Students of Color

CLAIRE DIEPENBROCK / HERALD

Construction began in January 2022, according to Michael Guglielmo Jr., vice president of facilities management. The dorms are “100% fossil free in support of the University’s 2040 net-zero commitment,” Guglielmo said.

CLAIRE DIEPENBROCK / HERALD

Natural light, operable windows, allergen kitchens and air conditioning are all features of the new residence halls that will “ensure a higher degree of user comfort,” Guglielmo said.

CLAIRE DIEPENBROCK / HERALD

The addition of the new Brook Street dorms aimed to address the needs of upperclassmen and “assist in Brown’s efforts to house an increasing share of its undergraduate students on campus,” Guglielmo said.

HERALD FILE PHOTO

Students support Moroccan earthquake relief efforts

co-president of the Arab Society.

BY ANNIKA SINGH CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Sunday’s student-organized fundraiser for the Morocco earthquake relief efforts raised thousands of dollars, which will be transferred to accredited charities Banque Alimentaire and El Baraka Angels through the Dwight Hall at Yale: Center for Public Service and Social Justice, according to Ghali Maata ’27, a Moroccan student who helped orchestrate the event.

The event was jointly organized by members of the Moroccan student community at Brown, who reached out to the Brown Muslim Students’ Association and the University’s Arab Society to coordinate the fundraiser, according to Jad Hamze ’25,

Students described a sense of urgency in planning and carrying out the event following the earthquake on Friday. The city of Marrakech was hit particularly hard, facing a “magnitude 6.8 tremor along with several aftershocks,” AP News reported.

“We wanted to — even if we’re far away — be able to be there for our country,” Sofia Tazi ’26, one of the event’s organizers, said.

“It all started by a common feeling in the Moroccan diaspora, which was kind of a feeling of being useless,” Maata said. “We were far from our families, far from what was happening on the ground. We all figured the best way to (contribute) would be through raising funds.”

According to Vice President of the BMSA Mahir Rahman ’26, “the MSA was able to pitch individual support from the E-Board in terms of … organization and bringing in

food, as well as other things.”

The fundraiser was conducted in coordination with other Ivy League university students — who made donation links available digitally — as part of a broader Moroccan student mobilization effort happening across North America, Europe and Asia, said Maata.

“Trying to coordinate the efforts to have a better impact, that was the idea,” Tazi said.

“The fundraiser isn’t done,” Maata said, explaining that fundraising efforts across the Ivy League will be active for “the next few weeks.”

Hamze stressed that the two organizations Yale is sending the money to were thoroughly researched.

Maata added that the charities are accredited “by the Moroccan government,” and that the decision to send donations to these organizations was made in connection with a broader Moroccan student diasporic group

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Head Opinions Editor

Alissa Simon

Opinions Editors

Juliet Fang

Yael Wellisch

Anika Bahl

MULTIMEDIA

Photo Chiefs

Elsa Choi-Hausman

Claire Diepenbrock

Photo Editors Mathieu Greco

Design Chief

Neil Mehta

Design Editors

Ashley Guo

Gray Martens

Designers

Joyce Gao

Menasha Leport

Tom Li

Nathaniel Scott

Tiffany Tran

Jane Zhou

BUSINESS

Kathy Wang

Aniyah Nelson

Katie Jain

DIGITAL NEWS Director of Technology

Swetabh Changkakoti

COMMENTARY

Editorial Page Editors

Kate Waisel

Devan Paul

Lilly Nguyen

Kaiolena Tacazon

Social Media Chief

Sahil Balani

Podcast Editors

Finn Kirkpatrick

Jacob Smollen

PRODUCTION

Copy Desk Chief

Brendan McMahon

General Managers

Joe Belfield

Andrew Willwerth

Sales Director

Alexander Zhou

Finance Director Eli Pullaro

globally.

The event’s tickets cost $5 and could be used for activities such as henna tattooing, a juggling competition, food and a raffle giving away a grand prize of JBL headphones. Flyers at the event explained the value of each contribution: A donation of $5 equaled 20 loaves of bread, $10 equaled 10 bottles of water and $20 equaled a tent shelter in Morocco.

“Everyone’s been eager, buying multiple tickets, and also just coming and using the space, bringing music and doing henna … it really felt like a lively space,” Rita Slaoui ’23.5 said.

According to Hamze, the organizers “got food for about 120 people, and it was all gone within thirty minutes.”

“We had students that had no affiliation to Morocco whatsoever, but heard about the event through social media,” Tazi said.

The Arab Society has previous experience quickly putting together a relief event after the group coordinated with the Brown Cultural Association of Turkey to fundraise for earthquake relief in Turkey and Syria.

Last year’s event “laid the foundation” for the fundraiser this year, Hamze said.

Students emphasized the importance of collaboration between the various student groups in organizing the event.

“I like to see the Arab world … as a place of shared community and solidarity,” said Aboud Ashhab ’25, a Heritage Series co-programmer at the Brown Center for Students of Color. “I am always proud of being an Arab, but I’m more prideful when it comes to events like this, where all of us — despite our different dialects, geographies, backgrounds — come together and support each other.”

Submissions: The Brown Daily Herald publishes submissions in the form of op-eds and letters to the Op-eds are typically between 600 and 900 words and advance a clear argument related to a topic of campus discourse. You can submit op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

Letters to the editor should be around 250 words and respond to an article or column that has appeared in The Herald, or critique or commend The Herald’s editorial decisions. You can submit letters to the editor to letters@browndailyherald.com.

Submissions undergo multiple rounds of editing. These rounds of editing generally take place over the course of one evening, and you may have to respond to edits late in the evening. If you know you will be unable to do so, please mention that in your email, and we will do our best to work with you.

Submissions can build on reporting from The Herald, reporting elsewhere, official statements from the University or other groups and other reputable sources, but they cannot break news or contain information that The Herald cannot verify. Because we cannot publish unsubstantiated information, failure to provide appropriate sources may mean we have to modify or remove unverified claims.

The Herald will not publish anonymous submissions or submissions authored by organizations. Leaders of student organizations can be identified as such but cannot write under the byline of their organization.

The Herald cannot publish all submissions it receives and reserves the right to edit all submissions.

All submissions to The Herald cannot have been previously published elsewhere (in print or online — including personal blogs and social media) and must be exclusive to The Herald. Once your submission is published in The Herald, The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. owns the copyright to the materials.

Commentary: The editorial is the majority opinion of the editorial page board of The Brown Daily Herald. The editorial viewpoint does not necessarily reflect the views of The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. Columns, letters and comics reflect the opinions of their authors only.

Corrections: The Brown Daily Herald is committed to providing the Brown University community with the most accurate information possible. Corrections may be submitted up to seven calendar days after publication. Periodicals postage paid at Providence, R.I. Postmaster: Please send corrections to P.O. Box 2538, Providence, RI 02906.

Advertising: The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. reserves the right to accept or decline any advertisement at its discretion.

reserved.

Thousands of dollars raised from student-organized fundraiser Sunday

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

City takes Comprehensive Plan outreach to Providence’s wards

Building quality, housing affordability remains top priority for Providence residents

BY JACOB SMOLLEN METRO EDITOR

On a rainy Monday night last week, nearly two dozen Providence residents filed into the Reservoir Avenue Elementary School gymnasium in the city’s eighth ward.

They sat down at cafeteria tables arranged underneath basketball hoops and covered with maps of the city and their neighborhood. Blank sheets of poster paper, colorful markers and sticky notes were placed on either end of each table.

The evening started with a discussion of traffic safety — people driving too fast down one street or the other. Someone’s going to get killed, residents told Ward 8 Councilman James Taylor. But soon, the conversation shifted to the evening’s main attraction: Providence’s Comprehensive Plan.

The Sept. 11 neighborhood meeting was one of fifteen listening sessions — one for each of Providence’s wards — to be held across the City this fall focused on the Comprehensive Plan. The meetings are part of a broader community engagement initiative that began last year involving citywide events, tabling across neighborhoods and online surveys.

“We’re taking feedback in lots of different ways, in lots of different places,” Deputy Director of the Department

PROVIDENCE

of Planning and Development Robert Azar told attendees.

The plan, which lays out a vision for the future of Providence’s urban development and policy, is updated once a decade, most recently in 2014. Every municipality in Rhode Island is required by the state to make such a plan.

According to Providence’s Department of Planning and Development, in addition to guiding development and land use regulations, the plan “must address community concerns such as housing, parks, transportation, community services” and more.

“It really is the foundation of all other planning efforts in the city,” Azar explained after the meeting. “It becomes (the) official land use policy for the city. … This is the time for people to weigh in.”

A 2022 survey — conducted as part

of the Department of Planning and Development’s “Listen and Learn” phase of community engagement around the plan — found that addressing building quality and affordable housing is the top priority for Providence over the next two decades.

That remains true in Ward 8, which Azar called a “microcosm” of the city.

“If you can’t afford to live in Providence, then nothing else really matters,” said one resident during the question and answer portion of the meeting. “Is that part of the plan?”

Azar said that improving housing affordability would be part of the plan and asked the crowd what they thought about changing some of the single-family zoning in the ward to multi-family zoning. Everything has trade-offs, he explained.

“We need to put housing units into the market and we need to figure out

where to do that,” he said. “I would argue we’re in a housing crisis.”

Dave Talan, president of the Reservoir Triangle Neighborhood Association, also highlighted the issue of housing availability.

“You can’t take a ‘not in my backyard’ attitude. I mean, they (have) got to build housing somewhere,” Talan said. “We just want to make sure it’s done right.”

For Talan, that means preserving green space in the neighborhood — not paving over it to make room for parking spaces. He added that he wants each neighborhood in the City to have at least one school that is within walking distance from the people who live there.

Aaron Hill, a public school teacher who said that he spends half of his take-home paycheck on rent, thought the meeting went well. Hill, who is a member of the Providence Urbanist Network, also said public transit, walkability and meeting climate goals were among his top priorities.

“The discussion here was incredibly civil,” he said. “We’ve got people coming with a wide diversity of ideas about where the city should head, but I’m really glad to hear (it) repeated that regardless of background, people understand the (housing) affordability crisis.”

Brenda McBride, another attendee, said that she did not realize that the discussion was more than the typical neighborhood meeting. She explained that she’s worried about litter

and noise pollution. “They need to be diligent and really do what they say,” McBride said.

Azar said that he continually hears concerns regarding housing affordability but noted that he also has heard from homeowners who are “concerned about issues that might come with growth and change.”

According to Azar, strategies to address the housing shortage might include “loosening zoning regulations” and helping “developers pay to create affordable housing” in addition to subsidies on the federal, state and local levels.

Azar added that there have also been concerns about how climate change will affect the city. Improving sustainability and climate resilience was the second highest priority of those surveyed by the city planning department last year.

Azar expects that the plan “will have a certain degree of fluidity” as it moves through the various stages of official approval. “Just as we’re gathering a diversity of opinions through this process, we’ll see that through the official process as well,” he said.

The plan will have to be reviewed and approved by the City Plan Commission, City Council and the state by January 2025, according to Azar. When the dust settles, Azar said the plan will likely include policy changes related to housing and land use, transportation, sustainability and climate resilience.

Park(ing) Day brings public art installations to downtown streets

Residents, organizations reserve, reimagine parking spots for community uses

BY TEVAH GEVELBER STAFF WRITER

Westminster and the surrounding streets were transformed into a walkable festival last Friday as local organizations and Providence residents filled parking spaces downtown to participate in Park(ing) Day, an annual event where curbside parking spaces are repurposed for public enjoyment.

Park(ing) Day was founded in 2005 by Rebar, a former San Francisco-based design studio, and has since expanded around the world, with 166 participating locations in 2022. The event first came to Providence in 2013.

According to the event’s website, Rebar’s founders first rented a parking space in San Francisco to show how streets can be used beyond vehicle movement and storage. The following year, in partnership with the Trust for Public Land, the group launched Park(ing) Day as an annual event “for people to reclaim urban space from cars, one parking space at a time.”

This year, The Avenue Concept — a public art nonprofit — took over a parking space on Westminster Street and set up a booth where they handed out stickers and pamphlets. A chalkboard next to the booth invited passersby to “draw or write with chalk what they believe public art is, in English and

Spanish,” said Jan Carlos, community participation manager at The Avenue Concept.

Carlos said he hoped that the event helped spread awareness about the ways in which parking spaces can be repurposed for public use and community engagement.

“It definitely makes people walk around a little bit more and sort of more open to talk to each other,” they said, “instead of everybody with their heads in their phones.”

“It is critically important to me that

through landscape architecture, people are given continuous opportunities to connect with each other … the spaces around them and … the natural environment,” wrote Kurt Van Dexter, the Providence event’s co-founder and president of the Rhode Island chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, in an email to The Herald.

Van Dexter originally organized the event with the then-president of RIASLA, Jenn Judge, and the then-president-elect of Rhode Island’s American Institute of Architects Vada Seccare-

ccia.

Park(ing) Day PVD is sponsored by the Rhode Island Street Transformation Project Mini Grant — through Providence Streets Coalition and Grow Smart R.I. — and is organized by the Rhode Island chapter of the American Planning Association and RIASLA.

This year’s participating organizations included local nonprofits, collectives, coalitions and individuals like Rhode Island School of Design students — all united by a desire to reimagine public space in Providence.

Liza Birkin, the lead organizer and founder of Providence Streets Coalition, said that she hopes attendees learn how “our public land and space can be used in different ways that support human creativity and vibrancy and just being, rather than a place to temporarily store our cars.”

Birkin has participated in the event for nearly a decade, adding that this is the biggest Park(ing) Day PVD she has seen. The project fizzled out about five years ago, Van Dexter wrote, but Birkin told The Herald that it has been brought back gradually since 2021.

One parking space, or “parklet,” designed by RISD Interior Architecture master’s students utilized reused fabrics and construction materials to create a vision of a “softer” city that is not dominated by heavy machinery like automobiles.

Shivani Pinapotu, one of the RISD students who set up the installation, said that the goal is to introduce an element of play into public space.

“Streets can be fun — cities can be fun and playful and whimsical,” Pinapotu said. “We forget that often.”

Birkin noted the symbolic nature of hosting Park(ing) Day on Westminster Street, which was closed off to traffic in the 1960s and transformed into a pedestrian mall, the first of its kind in New England. The street was reopened to vehicle traffic in 1986.

“All of this is about making change and building streets for people,” Birkin said.

JACOB SMOLLEN / HERALD

Improving sustainability and climate resilience was the second-highest priority of those surveyed by the city planning department last year.

TEVAH GEVELBER / HERALD

Park(ing) Day was founded in 2005 by Rebar, a San Francisco-based design studio, and has since expanded to include locations around the world, with 166 locations participating in 2022.

JUSTICE

Brown alum indicted on ‘Cop City’ charges in Georgia

BY MAHIN ASHFAQ SENIOR STAFF WRITER

On March 5, Brown alum and current law student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Jamie Marsicano

’16 was arrested on domestic terrorism charges while attending a music festival as part of protests against the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, nicknamed ‘Cop City.’

On Aug. 29, she was indicted under Georgia’s Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.

Cop City is a police campus being constructed in Atlanta for officers from the area and globally to train in. The project, which spans 85 acres, has faced opposition since its announcement in 2021, according to Xavier de Janon, one of Marsicano’s attorneys.

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s indictment, which names Marsicano along with 60 others, alleges that Marsicano aided and abetted arson and domestic terrorism by joining an organized mob and “overwhelming the police force” in an attempt to prevent the construction of the training center.

Tim Emry, another of Marsicano’s

SCIENCE & RESEARCH

attorneys, told The Herald that officers assumed that she was among other protestors who destroyed property near the construction site because they saw mud on Marsicano’s legs. Emry is also representing Marsicano in a new case alleging a Charlotte police officer made defamatory statements against her.

de Janon called the March 5 event, in which more than 20 people were detained by the police, “an indiscriminate mass arrest.”

“The RICO charges are yet another attempt by the state to silence and criminalize people who oppose Cop City,” Marsicano wrote. “But it’s clearer now more than ever that the Atlanta Police Foundation and their web of corporate donors are the real racketeering organization that’s conspiring to hurt communities, destroy forests and take lives.”

According to Rob Baskin, Atlanta Police Foundation’s vice president and director of public affairs, the foundation’s role in the city is “to develop new programs which can ultimately reduce crime,” CNN previously reported.

Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms described the project as “another step in our administration’s efforts to support our fire and

police officers, while also focusing on sensible reform,” in a September 2021 press release. “We will continue to work with the impacted communities on how to best thoughtfully develop and preserve the surrounding property.”

“This indictment is alarming for several reasons,” de Janon wrote in an email to The Herald. “The biggest one is that it criminalizes political dissent in an extremely worrisome way. It makes it a crime to act in solidarity with others and to support mutual aid.”

According to de Janon, the indictment was pushed forward based on the testimony of a single special agent.

“It is very unclear what the next step after this unprecedented indictment is,” de Janon wrote. “Usually, the next step would be for people to get arraignment dates, but it is a mystery how the attorney general intends to proceed.”

Following the initial arrest, Marsicano was released after three weeks in jail and spent three months on an ankle monitor, they said.

“I’ve been banned from (UNC’s) campus, (and) I can’t currently pass a background check — even though I’m factually and legally innocent — to get a lease,” Marsicano said. “You can really see how a charge, … and specifically

political repression can really destroy someone’s life.”

As part of Marsicano’s defense, her lawyers reached out to friends, family and supporters, including members of the University community who, in April, released a letter of support that currently has over 500 signatures.

Marsicano said that seeing the letter was “so powerful.”

“It made me cry, to see Brown University students, faculty, alumni, trying to lend their voice to support me and the other defendants,” they said.

“As Brown University community members, we are appalled at the absurd charges made against our fellow alumna and co-defendants,” the letter reads. “We will continue to apply pressure until the charges are dropped.”

“Jamie resonates with many Brown University students that I know, with that passion, that spirit and that lens for social justice,” said Dawn King, senior lecturer in environment and society. “I really know Jamie as a person. I know how kind they are.”

The charges of domestic terrorism “really upset me,” King said. “This is a scary reminder of speaking truth to power.”

Recounting the arrest, Marsicano described it “as if the police raided Spring Weekend and just indiscrimi -

nately grabbed whoever they could.”

“The only difference is that Spring Weekend is protected by the ivory tower and the music festival in Atlanta was to call attention to the murder of (Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán) and the destruction of the forest for Cop City,” they added, referencing an Indigenous queer environmental activist shot by Georgia state troopers in January.

Emry said that the protests have focused both on the “negative environmental impact” of the facility and “the expansion of public dollars being used to support police who perpetuate white supremacy and racial inequity in their systems.”

According to de Janon, the protests are particularly urgent since Cop City is still actively being built, resulting in the forest being cleaned “and more contractors … appearing.” He also noted that, though being constructed in Atlanta, the new facility has multiple sources of funding, as well as architects, contractors and lawyers from across the country — and it will be used by police from all over the world.

Rhode Islanders joined the protests against Cop City at a March demonstration.

“People in Rhode Island realized that Cop City is a national issue,” de Janon said.

Mosquito-borne disease EEE found in Rhode Island mammal

in which there were three confirmed human cases, according to Wendelken. Prior to that, no human had contracted the disease since 2010.

BY TOM LI CONTRIBUTING WRITER

On Sept. 7, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and the Department of Health announced the state’s first case of a mammal contracting the eastern equine encephalitis virus in 2023. Rhode Island’s risk for the disease is now classified as high.

EEE and West Nile virus are always in the environ ment but can only be con tracted via in fected mosquito bites, not mam mal-to-human con tact, according to Mike Healey, RIDEM chief public affairs officer. As a result, the diseases are primarily spread during mosquito breeding season, typically from June to September.

“Birds are the reservoirs of the disease,” Healey said. As mosquitoes bite birds, “they start to spread that disease to their own populations” and ultimately other mammals.

EEE cases in humans are rare, though the disease exhibits a high mortality rate — close to 30% — and can cause a multitude of ongoing neurological issues in surviving patients, said RIDOH Public Information Officer Joseph Wendelken.

The last human case of EEE in Rhode Island occurred in 2019 — a year

While human EEE cases are unlikely, RIDEM and RIDOH recommend several steps that can be taken to reduce the risk of transmission.

Among these are wearing bug spray, avoiding outdoor activities during sunrise or sunset and reducing possible mosquito breeding grounds.

“One small cup of water can produce thousands of mosquitoes,” Wendelken said. “Gutters, downspouts, old tires that you might have

in your yard, anything that collects water, you want to make sure to emp ty out.”

Symptoms of EEE in humans can include fe ver, chills, body aches and joint pain, Wendelken ex plained. The “illness tends to last for one to two weeks. … Fortunately, most people recover completely when there is no central nervous system involvement,” he said.

The preemptive positive was determined by a University of Connecticut lab and found in a donkey in Glocester, accord ing to RIDEM’s announcement. As of Sept. 13, RIDEM has

declared a total of five positive EEE mosquito samples, in addition to 11 West Nile virus ones.

The state’s current high-risk level has led RIDEM to take precau tionary measures, including tem porarily closing several recreational areas in Glocester. “We’ve been deal ing with EEE and (West Nile vi rus) for many many years,” Healey said.

“There’s no question that we’re having a very active year.”

“Because (EEE) is such a rare disease,

there are many unknowns about its ecology,” said Alan Gettman, RIDEM’s mosquito abatement coordinator. “But here comes cooler weather, and we’re nearing the end of mosquito season, so that spread is … going to fizzle out in a few weeks, depending on the weather.”

The Mosquito Abatement Coordination Office, established in 1987, works closely with RIDEM and RIDOH and is primarily tasked with trapping mosquitoes statewide throughout the summer and processing samples for EEE and West Nile virus, Gettman explained.

Gettman noted that recent increases in mosquito-borne diseases are tied to climate change. As climate temperatures rise, “we have a longer warm season (and) longer mosquito season,” he said. This gives viruses more time “to build up and magnify in the environment.”

Data from Climate Central, an independent group of scientists, researchers and communicators, also revealed that the length of Providence’s mosquito season has seen a general increase of 19 days since 1979.

Eastern equine encephalitis affects mammals, transmitted through mosquito bites

Charges against Jamie Marsicano ’16 pending following spring arrest

MEN’S ROWING

Jack DiGiovanni ’24, Men’s Crew leader, earns national accolades

DiGiovanni won silver medal this summer as part of U-23 men’s national team

BY DENNIS CAREY SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Two years ago, Jack DiGiovanni ’24 was cut from his first U.S. Men’s rowing camp, failing to make the roster. This summer, he won a silver medal as part of the U-23 men’s national team and was named the 2023 USRowing Under 23 National Team Male Athlete of the Year.

DiGiovanni began rowing in 2014 for Pittsford Crew as a coxswain, the leader of the boat. When he started at Brown in 2019, DiGiovanni was charged with helping lead an already successful team that had finished sixth in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships the year prior.

“As a freshman, he didn’t have a whole lot of experience,” said Men’s Crew Head Coach Paul Cooke. In 2020, when collegiate teams were not competing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, DiGiovanni “was wondering what he should do … and we suggested that he might actually just go out and basically shadow the Olympic team,” Cooke explained.

DiGiovanni always tries to “go the extra mile,” Cooke said.

Upon his return from a gap year shadowing the Olympic team during the 2020-21 academic year, DiGiovanni was selected as an Intercollegiate Rowing Coaches Association All-American second team coxswain and second team All-Ivy.

In 2022, DiGiovanni was able to put

WOMEN’S SOCCER

his team on the podium at the National Championship for the first time in eight years. “He’s really grown from somebody who was … very weary of his ability, to somebody who’s an indispensable leader on the team,” said teammate Ian Burnett ’24.

“He’s really a coach inside the boat,” said Burnett. “Not every coxswain is capable enough to play that role.”

DiGiovanni credits a lot of his growth to his teammates and coaches, who have worked to cultivate a positive “team-first” attitude.

DiGiovanni has become a strong leader in the boat for both Bruno and the US Men’s Under 23 team. While his teammates at Brown are his “best friends and family,” the national team is “a more professional environment,”

he said.

“It’s kind of cutthroat,” explained Burnett, who is also a member of the national team. “There’s a lot of tension because you don’t know who’s gonna get seat-raced with whom throughout the practice, and there’s always that (feeling of) not knowing where you stand.”

Burnett and DiGiovanni were both selected to go to Bulgaria to compete in an international competition this past summer, a race DiGiovanni would have watched from the sidelines while he shadowed the Olympic team three years prior.

The men’s team placed third in their heat qualifying round, missing a direct route to the finals earned by the top two placing boats. The early lack

of success for the team was a mental blow and proved their initial strategy was ineffective.

Despite the loss, DiGiovanni was determined to advance to the finals, leading him to develop a different tactic. The team spent a lot of time “discussing how (they) were going to get in front early,” Burnett said. “That seemed to be what we needed to do.”

DiGiovanni helped the boat make a collective decision “to go all out for the first half and try and hang on at the end,” and lead his team through the race plan, Burnett said.

This new strategy ultimately led to the U.S. men’s under 23 team winning a silver medal.

“You’re representing your country,” DiGiovanni said. “We went there, it was

really tough, the race was really close and we won a silver medal.”

DiGiovanni’s victory on the international stage led to his selection as the 2023 USRowing Under 23 National Team Male Athlete of the Year.

“I feel super blessed just to be a part of that group and then also to be recognized as one of the top people in that group is huge,” DiGiovanni said. “I have to say thank you to my teammates and all of the people that have gotten me there.”

Looking forward to the upcoming season, DiGiovanni hopes to continue Bruno’s success from 2022 using his experience from the international competition.

“That’s what I’ve tried to do last year and then this year: Bring the experience I had in the summer into the team and try to really raise the standard and … caliber that we perform at to an even higher level,” he said.

SCORES RECAP

WOMEN’S VS.MIAMI(OH) W 2-1

FIELD HOCKEY VS.LONGWOOD W 2-0

VOLLEYBALL VS.BINGHAMTON VS.MICHIGANSTATE VS.UCONN

W 3-2 L 3-1 W 3-0

SOCCER VS.RHODEISLAND W 1-0

MEN’S

FOOTBALL VS.BRYANT W 29-25

SOCCER VS.BRYANT L 1-0

Women’s soccer ekes out 1-0 win against URI

Bears struggle to score in final game before Ivy opener, find net in 81st minute

BY NICHOLAS MILLER STAFF WRITER

For 81 minutes during Sunday’s game against the University of Rhode Island (0-5-4), the Brown women’s soccer team (4-1-2) struggled to score. Despite dominating the run of play, missed breakaways from Bears attackers and saves from URI goalkeeper Faith Hutchins kept the Ocean State rivalry matchup — which the Bears have recently dominated — knotted at 0-0 for the majority of the game.

It was a late goal from midfielder Miya Grant-Clavijo ’25 that rescued Brown from a draw with URI, which has yet to win a game this season. Her 81st minute score also ended Bruno’s 197-minute scoring drought that included a 0-0 draw against the University of Portland on Thursday.

“I’m disappointed with how our team played,” said Head Coach Kia McNeill. “We were really sloppy with the ball, (made) a lot of unforced errors (and had) a lot of turnovers.”

The Bears attempted a staggering 21 shots on goal, 12 of which were on target, while the Rams tested Brown goalie Claire Gagne ’24 just once. But uncharacteristically poor finishing from Brown attackers — including multiple

breakaway chances for star forward Brittany Raphino ’24 that were saved by Hutchins — kept the Rams in the game until the final stretch.

“One thing that killed us this game and even last game is that we weren’t putting away those sitters,” said midfielder Sheyenne Allen ’24. “We’re getting the chances, we just need to put them away.”

With just nine minutes left to play, the Bears finally broke through. Receiving the ball at the top of the box, Raphino played a perfectly weighted through ball in behind for Grant-Clavijo, who sent a low shot past an onrushing Hutchins — but not past a URI

fired it into the side netting.

“We had a lot of opportunities during the game, it’s just a matter of finishing them,” Grant-Clavijo said.

Brown will kick off Ivy League play next weekend and will quickly face its toughest tests of the conference schedule with games against Harvard (5-2-1) on Saturday and Princeton (5-1-1) the week after.

The Crimson has been the Bears’ top competitor during Bruno’s three-peat as Ivy League champion, and the headto-head matchups between the two have often been decisive in the league’s final standings. Brown beat Harvard 4-2 in 2019 and 1-0 in 2021 before a

preseason as the nation’s fifth-best player by TopDrawer Soccer, scored in all three matchups against Harvard.

Brown will likely need to bring a more prolific attack to Cambridge than it showed against URI in order to keep up with the Crimson, who have averaged 2.88 goals per game and currently sit at 22nd in the country. Despite scoring a total of 10 goals in their opening two games, the Bears have scored just four goals in their last five games, bringing Bruno’s average to 2 goals per game.

“Our forwards need to be a little more aggressive heading into the final third,” McNeill said. “We’re looking to to

shoot the ball.”

“We can play better,” Allen said. “We’re not playing at our potential.”

WOMEN’S SOCCER

BYTHENUMBERS

9

Thenumberofminutesleft inthegamewhenmidfielder MiyaGrant-Clavijo’25rescued BrownfromadrawwithURI.

21

Thenumberof shotsBrown attemptedinSunday’sgame againstURI. 12oftheshots wereontarget,whiletheRams testedBrowngoalieClaire Gagne’24justonce.

2

Brown’saverage numberof goalspergamethisseason. Harvardhasaveraged2.88 goalspergameandcurrently sitat22ndinthecountry.

COURTESY OF BROWN ATHLETICS

Jack DiGiovanni ’24 is now focusing on using his experience on the international stage to “raise the standard and raise the caliber” of the team at Brown so “that we perform at to an even higher level,” he said.

MEN’S SOCCER

Men’s soccer drops third consecutive game with 2-1 loss

Missed

BY NICHOLAS MILLER SENIOR STAFF WRITER

For those who missed the result, a glance at the box score would likely leave little doubt about who won Wednesday’s game between the Brown men’s soccer team (1-3) and Sacred Heart University (3-3). The Bears outshot the Pioneers 17 to five, had seven shots on goal to the visitors’ three, and won eight corner kicks to SHU’s one.

And yet, it was Sacred Heart that left Stevenson-Pincince Field victorious, relying upon a goal in each half to steal a 2-1 road win.

“Performance level was good but

we certainly didn’t do enough to win the game,” Brown Head Coach Chase Wileman said. “We had more possession, shots, set pieces and territory but none of that really matters. It’s about finding a way to get the result and we didn’t do that.”

“Overall the performance wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t up to the standard we know we can play at, which is disappointing to all of us,” said defender Taha Kina ’24.

Brown fell behind quickly thanks to a 21st minute goal from Sacred Heart forward Alex Almuzara, one of just two Pioneer shots in the half. In the second half, the Pioneers found the back of the net even faster, with a goal just four minutes in from forward Oliver Persson, who got on the end of a long free kick.

On the attacking end, the Bears,

despite prolifically creating chances, couldn’t capitalize. In the 79th minute, close-range attempts from midfielder Scott Gustafson ’24 and forward Lorenzo Amaral ’27 were fruitless.

The Bears’ scoreless streak, which had reached almost three full games, was finally broken by midfielder Cal Walsh ’25, whose 88th minute goal was the first of his Brown career.

The Bears have had an up-anddown beginning to the season. A strong 3-1 win in the season opener against University of Massachusetts was followed by a 6-0 beatdown at the hands of Fairfield University. On Saturday evening, Brown faced a tough test against No. 5 University of Central Florida, falling 2-0 in what was a hard-fought, even match.

Bruno will need to make its at-

tack more clinical, having scored just once in their last three games. “A part of it is believing that when you get that chance, you’re going to score,” Kina said. “We’re getting ourselves into good positions, we just need to do a better job being more ruthless and hungry to score.”

The loss to Sacred Heart is now the Bears’ third in a row with Ivy League play just two games away. Last season — which was Wileman’s first as head coach — the Bears went winless with three draws in the Ivy League despite going 8-2 in non-conference play.

The team is “not where we want to be results-wise but the margins are really small at this level,” Wileman said. “We need to clean some things up and continue to

get better so we are peaking later in the season.”

“We’ve shown progress in the last couple games, now we just need to minimize our mistakes and find that touch in the box and we can turn this thing around,” Kina said. “The Ivy League is so competitive and there’s only seven games, so we’ll go into each game with the confidence that we can take three points to achieve our goal of being in the Ivy League tournament.”

Brown will begin their conference schedule at home against Columbia on Sept. 23 after facing two in-state rivals — Bryant on Sept. 16 and Providence Sept. 19.

This article was originally published online Thursday, September 14, 2023.

‘We embrace chaos’: Football seizes dramatic victory on final drive of season-opener

“We knew we could come back,” Golden said. “We’ve been working our two-minute drill all week.”

BY LINUS LAWRENCE SPORTS EDITOR

The Bears had 56 seconds to cover 76 yards. By the time the clock ran out at Beirne Stadium Saturday night, the football team (1-0) had earned a hardfought season-opening victory over the Bryant Bulldogs (1-2) by a final score of 29-25 thanks to a thrilling final drive.

“When you get that win, it’s incredible,” said Head Coach James Perry ’00 following the game. “For us to have it on the first game of the season, (there is) a lot to improve upon … but I’m really proud of how the kids played.”

“We work really hard all winter, all spring, all summer — we do it for this right here,” said quarterback Jake Willcox ’24. “Getting the W is what we want.”

After a penalty and three completed passes — including a 30-yard reception by Graham Walker ’24 — the Bears found themselves at Bryant’s four-yard line. The drive was capped by Willcox firing a pass to his leaping tight end Dillon Golden ’26 in the back of the end zone.

The moment marked Golden’s first career touchdown. He had already made a big play in the game by recovering a fumble in the second quarter.

“When I saw that play call, I was like, ‘I might get the ball. It all worked out,’” Golden said, crediting Willcox for a “great throw.”

“Dillon is a great example of someone who just does his job. … He’s just a kid who never stops,” Perry said. “For him to find that ball when we needed it was just a terrific thing.”

Before the Bears and Bulldogs engaged in a wild back-and-forth battle in the second half, it was Bruno who commanded the early part of the game. Brown opened the scoring with a touchdown run from Stockton Owen ’25 off of a direct snap just before the end of the first quarter. After Bryant fumbled the return kickoff, the Bears quickly scored again on a pass from Willcox to Wes Rockett ’24.

Both teams hit field goals to make the score 16-3 in Brown’s favor. But with 0:08 left on the clock before halftime, Bryant recorded their first touchdown. In the third quarter, Bryant surged ahead after a 38-yard touch-

down pass from quarterback Zevi Eckhaus and successful extra point.

On the first play of the fourth quarter, the Bears recaptured the lead 2217 on another connection between Willcox and Rockett. With under two minutes left and Bryant driving, it appeared the Bears recovered a fumble behind the line of scrimmage. But the call was overturned to an incomplete pass after review, keeping the ball in Bryant’s possession.

Perry spoke to the team’s resilience while awaiting the ultimate call. “Before I even said it, the guys said ‘defense up,’” Perry said. “That call might get reversed, it might not get reversed, but regardless the defense had to be up and ready … so that was a good moment.”

With just over a minute on the clock, Bryant scored a touchdown and successfully converted a two-point attempt, going ahead 25-22 to set up Brown’s epic final possession.

“We like to make things interesting, but that’s just the way we play,” Rockett said. “We embrace chaos, we’ve been saying it since day one, so (when) we get in those situations, we just thrive. We always say there’s no such thing as clutch, you’re just yourself in the biggest moments.”

Rockett led the Bears with eight catches for 121 yards and a pair of scores, as well as 94 kickoff return yards. Willcox, meanwhile, went 36for-49 while totaling 355 passing yards and a trio of touchdown passes, falling just one yard short of matching a career-high set against Bryant on Sept. 17 the year prior.

“I’ve got the utmost confidence in the guys around me, and I really didn’t have to do much,” Willcox said. “I was just giving them opportunities to make plays and they did.”

Willcox and Wes Rockett are two of the Bears’ four captains this season along with linebacker Ethan Royer ’24 and defensive back Isaiah Reed ’25.

“I leaned on the senior group,” Perry said of the team’s offensive efficiency. “We have a very good group of kids (who have) stuck together for four years … for us to stick together means playing in really tough games and responding at the end, so I was happy to see that.”

Willcox, who ranked second in the Ivy League last season with 255.1 passing yards per game, had his stellar season cut short last fall by injury when he was removed from an Oct. 29 game against Penn.

“It means everything to me,”

Willcox said of his return to the field. “There’s nothing I enjoy more than playing football, so I’m happy to be back.”

“Jake is our captain and we needed him to play like one in a critical time,” Perry wrote in a message to The Herald via Brown Athletics. “I am proud of his leadership.”

Owen led the team on the ground with a career-high 54 yards and one touchdown, while Ian Franzoni ’24 racked up 31 yards on the ground and 62 yards through the air.

Brown’s defense also held their own against Bryant, forcing two interceptions and two fumbles. Last season, the Bears’ defense allowed 432 yards per game, by far the worst mark in the Ivy League.

The Bears will open Ivy play in Cambridge against Harvard Friday evening before what is expected to be a packed house.

“There’s a lot we can improve,” Willcox said. “You’ll see it next week and the week after that and the week after that.”

The win was “definitely a good way to start the season, but we’ve got Harvard Friday, so we (have) a quick turnaround,” Golden said. “We’re gonna be ready.”

chances loom large against Sacred Heart as Bears continue slow start

EMMA C. MARION / BROWN ATHLETICS

Jake Willcox ’24 named Ivy League Offensive Player of the Week

Malherbe ’26: AI is not inherently evil, but we should still regulate it

Most people are probably pretty familiar with artificial intelligence and the discourse around it by now. As much as it has been a subject of fear-mongering and misinformation, the fact that you have probably used ChatGPT before (even if just for fun) proves it has already been normalized. The more relevant conversation now is about whether AI can be ethically used. On one hand, you have those who argue it is needlessly stealing jobs from real people, particularly artists, just so that executives can get quicker and bigger profits. On the other hand, its supporters claim it is an innovation that will unlock new creative potential and which, like technological innovations preceding it, will create new jobs to replace the ones it takes. As a writer, the existence of something like ChatGPT puts me on edge, so it’s not surprising that I found myself in the first camp pretty quickly. However, even I have to admit that AI’s supporters are right about at least one thing: AI is not inherently evil. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t regulate it.

Supporters of AI usually ground their takes in history. They point to previous industrial revolutions, particularly the first, and compare AI’s critics to those of, for instance, factory machinery. Workers of the period were also scared their livelihoods would be replaced by machines, and yet more jobs were actually created by the implementation of machinery in factories. Just like those anxious workers, everyone scared of being replaced by AI will be proven incorrect once it actually creates new work for everyone while improving the standards and output of creative industries, right?

Well, not quite. History does repeat itself, but generalizations about how entire industries change do not accurately reflect what might happen on an individual level. The eventual creation of new jobs does not inherently mean

the people being replaced will be able to acquire (and be qualified for) these new positions. One might say certain jobs should be sacrificed for the overall enrichment of society and point to the exponential increase in profits and wealth following each technological revolution. But who is that wealth and profit really going to? Is it really helping those whose jobs are affected by AI?

In a world where the wealth gap grows wid-

er and wider every day, inflation continues to outpace livable salaries and rapidly growing industries bring us closer to the brink of environmental destruction, is the goal of more overall wealth really still the ideal? Especially when the money is mostly going to the top 1%? A movie written by AI, as opposed to actual writers, will not improve anyone’s life. It’s certainly not helping the writers who were not employed to produce it. And it’s not like those writers can suddenly go get one of the new jobs in AI development, either. Their only hope would be to join part of the lucky few kept on to manage and refine the AI output. This is even more true for visual artists, whose skills in practical art-making may not transfer at all to the way AI art is generated using keywords.

However, I don’t think the solution is eradicating AI. In fact, its supporters are correct when they describe AI’s potential benefits. Everything from cancer screening to environmental protection can be done with AI’s assistance more efficiently than humans alone ever could. Even in the creative world, AI can produce images and written passages quickly and cheaply with tools like MidJourney, allowing creatives, especially those without access to big studio resources, to experiment with ideas they might not otherwise explore. Storyboards, concept visuals and even idea generation are all uses of AI that would actually aid smaller creators. However, these potential benefits bank on AI being developed and utilized for the good of everyone, which is not our current reality.

With the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes, it is pertinent to point out that the fight for fairer compensation in these fields is linked to the discourse around AI in these industries. This is not because Hollywood’s unions are blind to the potential of innovation. It’s because the way AI has already started to pop up in these industries has been explicitly exploitative. Disney recently scanned the likenesses of dozens of underpaid background actors

so that they could use digital replicas of them in any future projects they wish. These actors were paid for only one day of work. It’s basic restrictions against practices like these that the unions are fighting for, and the studios seemingly don’t want to agree to any of it. Nothing exists to incentivize these big companies and executives to use AI ethically. The only possible incentive would be constraints, including government regulation.

I recognize the broad strokes of history: I know that these kinds of technological revolutions are an integral part of our society and have happened many times before with positive outcomes. I know that people have complained about losing their jobs to new technologies just as many do now. I would love to take refuge in the fact that my career will be fine in the future. However, the truth is that this technology can be made dangerously exploitative for creatives if not regulated at all. If executives don’t have to pay actual people to put out creative projects, more profits are generated — which is all that really matters to their balance sheets. It is more important than ever to support the efforts of artists to ensure this new technology isn’t used to undermine their ability to make a living. The incredible creative potential of AI can and should be accessed without needing to exploit artists for profit. This can only really be achieved by fighting for proper guardrails on the usage of this technology in the arts. After all, these revolutions and the profits they produce should benefit all of us, not just a handful of executives.

Paulie Malherbe ’26 can be reached at paulie_malherbe@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

Aizenberg ’26: Don’t follow the news — it does more harm than good

Statistician Nassim Taleb often points to an allegory of a fragile bridge. Regardless of what car drives over it, it will eventually break. The Swiss author Rolf Dobelli adds on to that: When the bridge collapses, what does the news focus on? It reports on the driver, on his life and on his family. These facts are attention-grabbing, but they are not necessarily relevant. The news should instead primarily report on the bridge because its collapse raises important questions (e.g., what types of bridges should local drivers avoid? Are there civil engineering flaws that are shared amongst other nearby constructions?). But news outlets do not center stories about bridges because fewer people will watch.

This scenario illustrates the two main problems with modern news. First, it increasingly focuses on rare and fear-inducing events. This approach makes consumers overly fearful and stressed about what’s happening around them. Second, modern news often functions as entertainment, reporting on events with little to no practical relevance to viewers’ lives. Because of these downsides, I believe that a significant portion of news is neither constructive nor important; in many cases, you might even be better off not consuming it.

Journalism and the news have value at their most critical moments: They hold the powerful accountable and provide vital information quickly during emergencies and natural disasters. And there are moments when we genuinely need to watch the news. But consistent news consumption for its own sake causes stress and is detrimental to health. According to a survey from the American Psychological Association,

more than half of those who follow the news say that it causes them stress. Negative news consumption is also correlated with depression. Upsetting news events may even cause learned helplessness, a pathological feeling of powerlessness and a lack of control.

This is because regularly following the news makes people afraid and gives them a more negative view of the world over time.

lic safety, it certainly doesn’t qualify as an “existential threat.” However, because of fear-mongering news coverage, studies have shown that people who watch local news overestimate crime rates and their likelihood of being the victim of a crime. Because negative events have a bigger impact on the human mind than positive events, it creates a feedback loop where consumers crave negativity and news outlets feed it to them.

News outlets are often incentivized to report on sensational events such as violent crimes because they garner more attention. As such, frightening crimes such as murder receive a disproportionate amount of coverage (hence the slogan “if it bleeds, it leads”), causing these crimes to seem more common than they actually are.

For example, media outlets are more than happy to run many stories about the threat of violence on the New York City subway. Yet recent analysis from the New York Times shows that roughly 1.2 violent crimes occur for every million rides. While it is worth focusing further on pub -

Even when news is factual and not overly sensationalized toward extreme crimes, it still may not offer practical benefits.

A lot of news that appears in major outlets primarily informs you about far-away events over which you have no control.

Local tragedies can become national headlines, but a limited number of readers will live within a 50-mile radius of where the crime occurred, and fewer still will attend a public hearing or donate money to the victims. The headline’s main effect is to desensitize readers to the gravity of tragic situations.

Some remain committed to following the news because, even recognizing its downsides, they feel that it is important to stay informed. But following the news is a very inefficient way to do so. More than a fourth of the time in nightly news programs, on average, are ads. Furthermore, a significant portion of many news programs is “fluff” — light human interest stories. Social media news may even be worse. Viral news stories on social media often are “fake news” like the widely-viewed documentary “Plandemic,” which falsely alleged that the COVID-19 pandemic was a global conspiracy. Furthermore, the snippets of news on social media are often not long enough to give nuance to news stories or provide viewers with balanced perspectives. If you do follow the news, it is probably best to follow wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters that only exist to report the facts in a plain context.

Following the news is often perceived as a good habit, but doing so has an overwhelming net negative impact. News leverages our desire to stay connected to the world to achieve the exact opposite — we become more scared of our surrounding environments and desensitized to the graphic and extreme. Our news entertainment makes us stressed, fatigued and even depressed. As writer Neil Postman said in 1985, by watching the news, we are amusing ourselves to death.

Benjamin Aizenberg ’26 can be reached at benjamin_aizenberg@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald. com

The incredible creative potential of AI can and should be accessed without needing to exploit these artists for profit.

Following the news is often perceived as a good habit, but doing so has an overwhelming net negative impact.

“

Angelino GS: We’re in the midst of a fitness misinformation epidemic. The government needs to step in.

I have worked in the fitness industry for nearly a decade at this point. I have worked in and consulted for many different companies and individuals in many different corners of the fitness industry including gyms of various types, the nonprofit sector, social media influencers, apps, websites, certification agencies, test prep companies, school systems, bodybuilders and more. My diverse experiences have enabled me to better understand why fitness seems to be so much harder than it should be for so many people. The problem? Most people do not know how to improve their health and fitness effectively due to wide-reaching misinformation, both online and in real-world professional practices.

We are in the midst of a fitness misinformation epidemic. Underqualified social media fitness influencers and fitness practitioners regularly advocate for unsubstantiated training practices, incorrectly explain fitness phenomena and make poor, uninformed dietary recommendations. The pervasiveness of misinformation leads to less effective training methods and less progress toward fitness goals. When the prevalence of misinformation is compounded with uncertainty about which information to trust, people might lose faith in their own ability to exercise and adherence is reduced. Regular exercise is critical purely from a health perspective, as it decreases morbidity and mortality rates.

The harm of not exercising isn’t always apparent. It can manifest years or decades down the line when someone experiences a preventable heart attack or another health outcome. Many diseases that can lead to death or severely impact quality of life can be managed or avoided through regular exercise.

The fitness misinformation contributing to these outcomes partially stems from a lack of government regulation of both who can prac-

tice as a personal trainer and the minimum level of practitioner competency in the fitness industry.

Personal training certifications vary greatly across the organizations that grant them, meaning there is no minimum standard of practice for U.S. fitness professionals. Anyone can be a personal trainer. Anyone can disseminate fitness information with false authority. Certifications are created by independent or-

on the information contained in one required textbook, and the default means of preparing for the exam is self-study. Some organizations offer optional supplementary materials that can be completed concurrently while reading the required textbook, such as videos, but both required and supplemental materials cumulatively do not offer as comprehensive a learning experience as a typical college class. Even the most stringent certifications I would consider

the right direction, the National Strength and Conditioning Association has acknowledged the importance of instructor education by moving to require all new Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist candidates to hold a field-relevant bachelor’s degree by 2030. Still, this is just one private organization, and more changes are needed. Unlicensed individuals should not be allowed to act in the capacity of a fitness practitioner. This will help protect against social media fitness influencers without a formal education in the fitness industry from misleading large groups of people at once — and potentially turning them away from fitness.

ganizations and convey only that the holder meets the standards of that specific certifying body. This means that standards and information quality vary across organizations. Only a few organizations have truly high-quality standards and are managed by PhDs, such as the American College of Sports Medicine and the National Strength and Conditioning Association.

Even in some of the better cases, the amount of information required to earn a personal trainer certification is comparatively limited — similar to that of one college course.

The only set-in-stone requirements for certification for most organizations are that candidates 1) pay to sit for an exam and 2) pass that exam. Some organizations base their exams

about as dense as one graduate-level course, such as the ACSM Certified Clinical Exercise Physiologist or the NSCA Certified Strength And Conditioning Specialist certifications.

But while knowledgeable and skilled practitioners do exist, their messaging gets buried under all the underinformed professionals and pseudo-professionals out there. This isn’t the fault of any individual certified practitioner or any well-meaning certifying body. The onus lies with the government’s lack of regulation. The industry must have legally enforced standards through mandatory licensure. Those standards need to be high. Licensed individuals must have significant advanced education, such as a field-relevant bachelor’s degree before being granted licensure. In one step in

If a policy solution is not enacted, social media companies have the means to provide a solution. Previously, YouTube released a feature that allows licensed medical professionals to apply to receive a label on their channel indicating that they are a licensed provider. Despite the problems with the current personal trainer certification system, it may be impactful to allow certified fitness professionals to differentiate themselves from those with no educational background in fitness at all.

Tolerating low standards of education and practice within any health-related industry is a disservice to the population these industries serve. Health and fitness don’t have to be as hard as they are. Government regulation demanding more from the industry and its professionals — or self-proclaimed professionals — will better meet the public’s needs. The status quo has let everyone down. Everyone deserves better.

Domenic Angelino GS can be reached at domenic_angelino@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

Editorial: Students should have a say on legacy admission

Brown recently announced the formation of an ad hoc committee to investigate the University’s admission policies, including the use of standardized testing, early decision and — perhaps most notably — legacy preference. The committee’s role is to review data related to admission and to make recommendations on how to alter admission practices in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to end race-conscious college admissions. Composed of five members of the Corporation, four Brown faculty members, and Provost Francis J. Doyle III, the committee is poised to play a central role in one of the most pressing areas of University policy.

President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 acknowledged the gravity of this task in the official charge to the committee, which outlines the importance of this moment in which the University must assess whether it “is fully realizing its educational mission and upholding its commitments to academic excellence, equity, access and diversity.” We commend the University for taking these issues seriously and are glad to see potential action on admission. But the lack of a channel for current student voices is worrying.

Current students should play a role in guiding conversations about how future classes of Brown students are admitted. Their omission from this committee is not just a matter of nominal representation — it could dramatically alter conversations happening behind closed doors. The inclusion of a recent graduate, a former Undergraduate Council of

Students president, is an encouraging but insufficient step. But what the committee must do, in order to best represent a range of attitudes on admission practices, is actively solicit input from current students and use their perspectives to inform policy recommendations — especially on widely discussed topics such as legacy admission.

Recently, an argument presenting legacy admission as a potential boon for institutional diversity has emerged. In the 21st century, as Brown alumni become more diverse, such practices might actually privilege children of alumni of color in the application process. A number of influential members of the Brown community have entertained the continued use of legacy admission as either a partial substitute for the now-defunct policy of race-conscious admission or at least as a matter of racial equity. Among them is Africana Studies Department Chair and Professor Noliwe Rooks, who holds a seat on the committee, as well as Associate Provost for Enrollment and Dean of Admission Logan Powell and Corporation trustee Xochitl Gonzalez ’99, who aren’t on the committee. As the ad hoc committee assembles, these perspectives will surely be given due consideration.

But there is another view no less important to admission discourse at Brown, one that aims not to reclaim legacy preference as a tool of racial equity, but to eliminate it altogether. Those who advocate for the end of legacy admission see the practice as a class-based form of affirmative action that, rather than opening

doors for the historically disadvantaged, has functioned to consolidate opportunities for wealthy and well-connected students. We’ve called for the end of legacy admission a number of times for those reasons. Nationally, Generation Lab has found that 75% of current university students don’t consider legacy admission “fair.”

This is the view held by most of Brown’s current undergraduate student body. On campus, The Herald’s spring 2022 poll reported that nearly two-thirds of undergraduates believed Brown should not consider legacy status in its admission process. The results are similar when cross-tabulating by legacy, non-legacy and first-generation students. The past year has also seen groups like Students for Educational Equity and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee of UCS organize a rally of over 100 students to challenge the University’s use of legacy preference and standardized testing in admission. Without providing a formal channel for student voices in its ad hoc committee, Brown is denying a body that has largely and consistently held an anti-legacy viewpoint the ability to shape discussions that will define admission policies for decades to come. This is deeply troubling.

One might explain the committee’s hesitation to engage undergraduates in their deliberations by pointing to the fact that their position at Brown is temporary. After all, students pass through the University for only a few years; therefore, their concerns might be relatively short-sighted with minimal stakes

in the University’s long-term health. But this could not be farther from the truth. Despite the transient nature of any one student’s time here, Brown is its student body. Fair consideration should be given to the voices of students — particularly when it comes to an issue like undergraduate admission. Shouldn’t the student body have a say in its own composition — and the admission fates of its children?

Even as a group that works in mainly administrative contexts, it would only benefit the ad hoc committee to develop formal avenues to solicit input from students as it proceeds to review admission data and policies. Established groups like SEE are a great place to start — such organizations are well-versed on topics of admission policy and have a clear point of view to share with the administration. But regardless of specifics, the committee should keep one thing in mind: We, the students, represent Brown — and we care about how the University represents us in turn.

Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board and aim to contribute informed opinions to campus debates while remaining mindful of the group’s past stances. The editorial page board and its views are separate from The Herald’s newsroom and the 133rd Editorial Board, which leads the paper. This editorial was written by the editorial page board’s editors Kate Waisel ’24 and Devan Paul ’24, as well as its members Alissa Simon ’25, Rachel Thomas ’25 and Yael Wellisch ’26.

Unlicensed individuals should not be allowed to act in the capacity of a fitness practitioner.

‘A Haunting in Venice’ drowns in tired tropes, weak jokes

BY KATIE JAIN UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

A good murder mystery may never grow old, but when the same themes are repeated from one story to the next, it’s certainly possible to inundate the genre with predictable tropes. Released in theaters Friday, “A Haunting in Venice,” the third of Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot series, falls victim to several overused motifs.

Loosely based on Christie’s “Hallowe’en Party,” “Haunting” takes place in post-World War II Venice, set around 10 years after Branagh’s first two Poirot movies, “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) and “Death on the Nile” (2022). This latest portrayal depicts the Belgian detective as older, disillusioned and, of course, more flawed.

Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) is your classic grizzled detective, drawn out of retirement by mystery writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) when she asks him to discredit a seance performed by

a psychic in a haunted house on the eve of Halloween. When the psychic, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), is murdered at the seance, Poirot puts himself on the case, solving not only Reynold’s murder but also a mysterious death from a year prior.

Poirot’s usual charm, characterized by an overconfident dedication to facts and philosophical thoughtfulness, is dulled by the movie’s attempt to make him seem aged. While he still has an occasional quip reminiscent of Christie’s Poirot, Branagh’s adaptation lacks much of what makes the character unique and is, as a result, less fun to watch. He is more human in “Haunting,” but his fundamental flaw only scratches the surface of human emotion. He has seen — and perhaps brought about — far too much death. In other words, he is like every other fictional detective. That said, Poirot’s internal conflict is reflected well in the film’s cinematography and emphasized in some drastic departures from Christie’s version. Primarily, “Hallowe’en Party” takes place in a small town in England, while in “Haunting” the cast is trapped in a haunted house in an exotic location — recreating the same environment as

the boat in “Death on the Nile” and the train in “Murder on the Orient Express” with a similarly small ensemble cast. This change certainly makes the film more intriguing and thrilling, but it also misses some of the charm provided by Christie’s depictions of the British countryside.

Of course, Venice is not a random choice. The city is renowned for its canals and the fact that it’s slowly sinking into the ocean, encapsulating a main theme of the film: drowning. The viewer learns early on that the first of the victims was drowned, and an attempt on Poirot’s life at the beginning of the movie almost leaves him drowning as well. But beyond that, the film’s emphasis on drowning, strengthened by numerous scenes of characters sinking through water and into oblivion, symbolizes a more common struggle: drowning in one’s own past. An obsession with what has happened and has been lost is not only the source of Poirot’s internal conflict but also the motivation for most characters, including the murderer.

But the film’s expected themes are not helped by the larger whodunit, which becomes fairly predictable about

halfway through the movie. This ultimately leads to a rather disappointing conclusion that feels borrowed from a number of other mysteries. While the “suspects trapped in a mansion” plot seems to be an everlasting fan favorite in whodunit films — such as “Clue,” “Gosford Park” and “Knives Out” — the genre has become so saturated that original plotlines are hard to come by.

While “Knives Out” twisted the narrative and poked fun at the standard murder mystery tropes, Branagh’s attempts at comedy, mostly through

Tina Fey’s quips, fell short. Fey’s snarky inserts disrupt the solemn, historic atmosphere created by the rest of the cast, and her comments feel better suited for her role in the mystery comedy show “Only Murders in the Building” than for this period drama.

As a result, “Haunting” doesn’t distinguish itself as anything special among countless similar films. But its dedication to the genre, multilayered plot and impressive cast all guarantee an interesting watch for fans of murder mysteries.

FILM REVIEW

‘Poor Things’ offers a world full of riches

Victorian science fiction film boasts dashing visuals, provocative themes

BY FINN KIRKPATRICK ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR

Yorgos Lanthimos, the idiosyncratic Greek director behind films such as “The Favourite” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” has never been afraid to push an audience outside of their comfort zone. His films, marked by stilted dialogue delivered by deadpan actors, avant-garde cinematography and a deeply pessimistic sense of humor, can be most easily identified by one simple human act — sex.

In the press conference at the Venice Film Festival for his newest film “Poor Things” — the eventual winner of the festival’s prestigious Golden Lion — Lanthimos jokingly remarked, “It’s weird, isn’t it? Why is there no sex in movies?”

In Lanthimos’s cinematic language, sex is far more than an erotic expression

of passion purely put on screen for aesthetic purposes. Of the many ways sex has appeared in his films, the scenes generally hover around three major exploratory questions: how sex can be used to liberate a body, how it can be used to enact control over another and how it can so easily be commodified. Never have these questions been more crucial in his work than in “Poor Things,” a Victorian-era science fiction film, and never have they been so interesting.

“Poor Things” follows the rapid and curious coming of age of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), the revived creation of the Victor Frankenstein-esque Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). In her quest to understand free will and personhood, she leaves the confines of the Doctor’s home to go on a continental journey with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a lawyer whose initial rejection of all things appropriate in society attracts the ever-curious Baxter.

Baxter’s initial coming to consciousness in the world is one marked by excessive hedonism eventually leading to cynical nihilism. From a sexual awakening at the

hands of an apple and a whole lot of sex with Wedderburn, to excessively eating sweets, binge drinking and dancing, Baxter looks to experience the world in as many sensory ways as possible.

But upon meeting Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) on a luxury ship to Greece, Baxter gets exposed to a more pessimistic view of the world. She learns that behind the opulence of her own new life is a world of suffering and inequity, and is left to reckon with the helplessness of not being able to fix it.

The film is most impressive in how it tracks the mental growth of Baxter’s character. She begins hardly being able to string together a coherent sentence of more than three words and ends up capable of citing philosophy and understanding human anatomy. But never does the film feel like it is making an illogical leap in her capabilities from scene to scene.

Tony McNamara’s screenplay does a very clever job of slowly introducing new vocabulary for Baxter: Her gradual development into a fully formed individual truly

feels like that of a real human, albeit accelerated. And it is fully sold by the best performance of Stone’s career, which perfectly matches the progression of her dialogue with her development of new, more “civil” mannerisms. She begins walking like an action figure, with stiff limbs and a limited range of motion, but as she finds her way in the world, she learns how to physically move through it as well.

She learns to read into the intricacies of human mannerisms and finds her worth as a unique individual, not propped up by the men in her life. And, of course, much of this is learned through sex. Not just the pure act of it, but also the withholding of it and the philosophical discussion of it. This progression from something of pure experience to the contemplation of that very thing’s meaning is a thematic arc that exists in every aspect of the film. It is this development that never makes the film feel stale and always provides something to ponder.

But what makes the film most impressive is its aesthetics. Lanthimos pulls out

his full pantheon of camera techniques ranging from harsh fisheye lenses to extreme closeups to peephole framing which bring the viewer into the uncanny worlds only Lanthimos can successfully create. The setpieces of London, Lisbon, the ship, Alexandria and Paris are all styled like intricate dollhouses finished off with a rich color palette which ranges from deep purple and orange skies to steampunk vehicles populating all of the locales.

“Poor Things” is not the most easily approachable film out there. Its scenes are littered with full-frontal nudity and sex and its shots are funky and unsettling — with a fair share of blood and guts, as well. But beyond these potential roadblocks is a touching story about learning to understand humanity in all its cruel complexities. On top of that, it is one of the most daringly successful aesthetic achievements in recent cinema. Lanthimos’s voice can not be mistaken for anyone else’s, juggling all of these elements to create something that is nothing short of art in its highest form.

Kenneth Branagh’s third film adaptation featuring Hercule Poirot falls short

COURTESY OF DISNEY

Tina Fey’s snark feels better suited for her role in “Only Murders in the Building” than for this period drama.

COURTESY OF SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

‘You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah’: humorous coming of age

Sunny

BY ISABEL HAHN SENIOR STAFF WRITER

When you’re thirteen years old, there are few things in the world that matter more than being thirteen. Netflix’s recent coming-of-age comedy “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” released Aug. 25, captures the chaos and emotional turmoil of teenage girlhood, camouflaging a surprisingly mature core message in the midst of a compilation of silly antics and creative choices. Based on Fiona Rosenbloom’s 2005 book of the same name, the film notably stars all four members of actor Adam Sandler’s family, with a debut performance from his daughter Sunny Sandler as protagonist Stacy Friedman.

Staying true to its catty, eye-catching title, “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” follows Stacy, a soon-tobe teenager, as she prepares for her upcoming bat mitzvah and navigates the dramatic obstacles of seventh grade. The film is primarily centered around Stacy’s friendship with her best friend, Lydia (Samantha Lorraine), and how it is tested by the social pressures of middle school, from messy crushes on cute boys to trying to fit in with the cool girls. Stacy’s close relationship with her parents (Adam Sandler and Idina Menzel) and older sister (Sadie Sandler) also plays a significant narrative role in the film. Though it is likely relatable to all in its portrayal of junior high troubles, the film tells Stacy’s story

MUSIC REVIEW

through the lens of a Jewish teenager, putting a spotlight on the experience of growing up with the culture and practices of Jewish communities.

“You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” is aware of the simplicity of its premise, wasting no time in throwing the audience into Stacy’s tweenage problems and playing out scenarios that, though cringeworthy, hit the nail on the head in their replication of adolescent frivolity. Stacy and Lydia, whose entire lives have revolved around each other since early childhood, find themselves torn apart by a mutual crush: Hebrew school heartthrob Andy Goldfarb (Dylan Hoffman).

In the midst of this drama, Stacy finds herself grappling with pressure to

impress her judgemental peers, appear more grown up than her parents will allow her to be and make preparations for her upcoming bat mitzvah ceremony. With her entrance into adulthood fastly approaching, she faces the challenge of learning what it really means to reach emotional maturity and stay true to herself. This is partially reflected in the film’s depiction of Stacy’s dilemma over what to do for her mitzvah project, an opportunity for Jewish youth to uplift their religious values of compassion and generosity by giving back to their community. Despite how trivial the decisions Stacy makes may appear to us as older viewers, the film excels at presenting how she approaches them as life-or-death situations, successfully

eliciting our sympathy for a protagonist whose actions are almost too embarrassing to witness.

This is not to say that the movie is always easy to sit through. Painfully filled with Gen-Z lingo and questionable pop songs that often begin to play out of nowhere, the film’s stylistic choices make it glaringly obvious that it is not immune from devolving into a stereotypical campy Netflix teen flick. But unlike many of the other movies on the streaming service, “You Are So Not Invited to my Bat Mitzvah” acknowledges and even flaunts its ridiculousness, sending a message to younger viewers that it is okay to be unapologetically yourself and that it is natural for early adolescence to be

a time of awkward mistakes and overdramatic meltdowns.

Friendship breakups and middle school romances aside, the standout aspect of “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” is the dynamic between Stacy and her loving, yet often unserious, father Danny. Their connection feels undeniably authentic — which is unsurprising, given that the two actors share a real-life father-daughter bond. Their scenes feel more like witnessing an actual father giving advice and spending genuine time with his daughter than the stiff, non-believable parent-child relationships suffered by other teenage-marketed movies. The same goes for Stacy’s bond with her sarcastic yet supportive sister Ronnie, played by Sunny Sandler’s actual older sister Sadie. The stars of the film bring an unexpected but charming surprise by showcasing that their family relations do not overshadow the genuine talent and chemistry they display on screen.

In an interview with Variety, director Sammi Cohen said, “Adam plays dad to his daughters, but they’re able to detach. When we enter the Friedman house and we’re making a movie, it’s its own thing. … Everyone (has) space to do what they do best, but there’s also support when you need it.”

With the enjoyable success of “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” it feels safe to anticipate future acting endeavors by the Sandler sisters. Taking family comedies to a literal level, the film reminds viewers that growing up is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that should be embraced — sparkles and mascara-stained tears and all.

Mitski wanders heaven and Earth in ‘The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We’

BY DAPHNE DLUZNIEWSKI SENIOR STAFF WRITER

The individual tracks of Mitski’s new album, released Sept. 15, are relatively simple: Many contain only two verses separated by the occasional one-line chorus. But as a whole, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” is anything but simple. Drawing on the imagery of nature and celestial bodies, Mitski has created a piece of art that is chilling, soulful and stunningly cohesive.

The album opens with “Bug Like an Angel,” in which stripped-down verses contrast with a triumphant chorus featuring Mitski singing alongside a choir. The song also introduces listeners to Mitski’s unique lyricism, the most striking of which closes out the song: “I try to remember the wrath of the devil / Was also given him by God.” Whether an indication that she takes comfort in remembering that her shortcomings are still derived from God or a suggestion that even God has made devastating mistakes, this nod to a higher power kicks off the album with a sense of surrender that persists throughout the rest of the tracks.

The mood remains gloomy with “Buffalo Replaced,” the album’s second track Mitski paints a picture of deserted

plains disrupted by freight trains and highway cars. The oddity of her lyrics, from the seemingly nonsensical concept of a “buffalo replaced” to describing a personified hope that “sh*ts where she’s supposed to, feeds herself while I’m away,” adds to the general sense of unease that the music generates. Yet, it is this embracing of the unusual that makes Mitski’s music stand out amidst other alternative artists.

Listeners are brought to a more uplifting locale in “Heaven.” Mitski’s poeticism adds an extra dimension of charm to the classic-sounding country love song. The song offers a space for reprieve: Listeners can use “Heaven” as a recess from the more somber emotions Mitski elicits in her other tracks.

The album takes an unsettling shift with the track “When Memories Snow.”

The brief song starts off jarringly with Mitski’s powerful voice and eerie background vocals. The addition of sweeping instrumentals in the second half of the song improves the track, but the abruptness of the beginning throws off the album’s otherwise placid nature.

Luckily, the most beautiful song of the album follows this chaotic interlude. In “My Love Mine All Mine,” Mitski offers up her heart to the moon and asks it to shine her love down on her partner. With its soothing melody and tender lyrics, the slow track serves as a lullaby that ushers listeners into a state of pure contentment.

This calm persists with “The Frost.” Mitski’s use of the steel guitar and her description of a frost that “looks like dust settled on the world” evokes the image of an abandoned ghost town, alone and forgotten by society, just as she feels. But Mitski lifts up spirits again in the immersively ethereal “Star,” which is about a love whose light persists long after the relationship ends.

The next track, “I’m Your Man,” disrupts the dreamy atmosphere and establishes itself as one of the album’s most captivating songs. Mitski subverts the title’s traditional meaning as a pledge of loyalty, turning it into an admission of mistreatment. The song closes with incessant dog barking, playing on lines earlier in the song: “You’re an angel, I’m a dog / Or you’re a dog, and I’m your man.”

The album ends with a grand farewell in “I Love Me After You.” On the track, Mitski lists all of the luxuries she will enjoy now that she is no longer tethered to a previous relationship. The song offers an interesting twist after the preceding tracks in which isolation was the enemy and companionship was the only salvation.

Even in her love songs, Mitski seems to be pleading for release throughout “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We.” The ascension in the finale, with its hypnotic vocals and expansive instrumentals, suggests that she has finally been granted her freedom.

Sandler, father Adam Sandler star in Jewish teen comedy on Netflix

COURTESY OF NETFLIX

‘You

Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah’ follows soon-to-be teenager Stacy Friedman as she prepares for her bat mitzvah and navigates the dramatic obstacles of seventh grade.

Newest album captivates with unsettling melodies, poetic lyricism

COURTESY OF DAVID LEE

Mitski’s embrace of the odd and unusual makes her music stand out amidst other alternative artists.

INSTITUTIONAL EQUITY

Report ranks Brown lowest among Ivies for socioeconomic diversity

U. also ranks below URI, Providence College according to New York Times analysis

BY NEIL MEHTA UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

Brown ranks 230th among 286 of the most selective colleges in the country for socioeconomic diversity, according to a Sept. 7 New York Times analysis.

The report measured socioeconomic diversity using the proportion of first-years receiving federal Pell Grants — which are awarded to low-income students to pay for college — in the 202021 academic year. The report ranked Brown below all other Ivy League schools and two other Rhode Island colleges in the report, Providence College and the University of Rhode Island.

For TK Monford ’25, a Pell Grant recipient who applied to the University through QuestBridge, the report proved “surprising.”

Among low-income students, “the community we have (at Brown) is really strong,” he said. “I never thought of it as being smaller than other schools.”

ACADEMICS & ADVISING

Still, he noted that low-income students at the University are only a small portion of students.

“The number of kids who are low-income is really small, and I can be the only low-income person in the room,” he said. “It’s been a big cultural shock coming to Brown.”

“When you are looking at where Brown ranks, it is not surprising to me as a student,” wrote Niyanta Nepal ’25 co-president of Students for Educational Equity, in a message to The Herald.

“We have one of the wealthiest student bodies across the Ivy League.”

A 2017 database by the New York Times on research from Opportunity Insights, a Harvard research and policy organization co-directed by Professor of Economics John Friedman, reported that Brown ranked highest among Ivy League schools and similar elite colleges for student median household income.

University Spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to The Herald that the University “continues to make significant progress in enrolling talented students from a wide range of

backgrounds.” He cited the University’s coverage of all costs for students whose families make less than $60,000 and noted that the University meets all demonstrated need for financial assistance.

Clark added that Pell Grant eligibility is “one indicator of progress” in enrolling a diverse student body, The Herald previously reported. He additionally cited the University’s efforts to increase the representation of

Pell-eligible and other first-generation and low-income students, like offering automatic fee waivers and expanding partnerships with “community organizations that support low-income students.”

Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies concentration finds footing

Concentration’s launch follows series of U. commitments to NAISI

BY SAMANTHA CHAMBERS SENIOR STAFF WRITER

New course offerings for the Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies concentration are underway for the fall semester, following the program’s launch earlier this year.

The concentration — which emerged from years of student activism — will see its first graduating class in spring 2024. Its courses will focus on historical and contemporary aspects of Indigeneity, including languages, politics and belief systems, The Herald previously reported.

Rae Gould, executive director of the University’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, called the launch of the program “a long-awaited triumph.”

“Native American and Indigenous Studies has been something students and faculty have expressed interest in and worked to develop for a number of years,” Gould wrote in an email to The Herald. “Being able to offer an official concentration, and not only courses with NAIS focus or content, has elevated the work of many past students and faculty who have waited to see this development.”

Ma’iingan Wolf Garvin ’25, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and Bad River Ojibwe, knew she wanted to concentrate in Critical NAIS before it was even officially launched.

“I truly could not emphasize enough how much it means to be in an Indigenous

studies class as a Native student and how much I learn from the community it creates,” she wrote in an email to The Herald. “It brings me so much joy and meaning to learn from Indigenous professors surrounded by Indigenous students.”

Kalikoonāmaukūpuna Kalāhiki ’24 decided to concentrate in Critical NAIS given the personal importance of the study to their Native Hawaiian identity.

“As a radical Hawaiian fighting against the settler-state back home through food sovereignty, I find great value in this

education because it provides me the vocabulary to understand imperialism and (its) legacies in my home and across the world,” they wrote in a message to The Herald.

The concentration was part of five commitments adopted by the University in May 2022 alongside its official land acknowledgement statement. The University originally planned to offer the Critical NAIS concentration in fall 2022, according to those commitments.

But even before the University’s

pledge, student activism was a driving force in creating the concentration, Kalāhiki and Wolf Garvin said.

“I don’t think that people outside NAIS or (Natives at Brown) really understand how much work and fighting it took to get to where we are today,” wrote Wolf Garvin, who is a NAB co-coordinator.

“It’s been over a decade of work from students and staff and faculty, and it has been an extreme uphill climb.”

Kalāhiki added that NAB’s activism “laid the groundwork” and “built the mo-

mentum” for the concentration.

Visiting NAISI Faculty Joseph Dupris — who is teaching one of the program’s mandatory courses, ETHN 1200K: “Introduction to American Indian Studies,” this fall — also attributed the program’s launch to student advocacy on campus.

“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for students saying that they want to have an opportunity for their own language learning, or for years of student activism,” Dupris said.

CHART: NEIL MEHTA / HERALD, SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES

While the University’s commitments alongside its land acknowledgement statement included the concentration, students and faculty cited the importance of activism in bringing the concentration to life.

Sunrise Brown members join New York climate demonstration

Group joined 75,000 in march calling for climate action from global leaders

BY SAM LEVINE UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

Over the weekend, around two dozen members of Sunrise Brown traveled to New York City to join an estimated 75,000 protesters in a demonstration calling for global leaders — especially President Joe Biden — to take more aggressive action against climate change.

The protest, which took place on the eve of the annual United Nations General Assembly meetings, was focused on “bringing the momentum back” to in-person climate organizing after a slowdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Marlena Brown ’25, a Sunrise member who attended the demonstration.

Sunrise members attended the protest in order to join in “re-igniting something in the movement and building more collaboration across groups” involved in climate activism, Marlena Brown said. “It was really rewarding to be in a space where people from all different aspects of the climate movement came together.”

The demonstration in New York also allowed climate activist organizations across Northeast college campuses to connect. According to Marlena Brown, 10 members traveled to New York the night before the protest to attend a panel engaging the Yale Endowment Justice

ACADEMICS & ADVISING

Coalition, members of the Fossil Free Research coalition and Sunrise hubs from Columbia, American University and New York University.

“The point was (to get) specifically college hubs together to talk about their experiences with activism on their campus” and the “challenges they run into,” Marlena Brown said.

Sunrise Hub Coordinator Isaac Slevin ’25 spoke on the panel, after which attendees split into small groups to discuss best practices for climate organizing on college campuses, said Ava Ward ’25, a Sunrise Brown member who attended the panel. “They really crafted a very powerful narrative of why we need to work together,” she said.

Ward added that she attended the protest in New York hoping to connect with other college climate activists.

“I wanted to be a part of the growing movement that is a cross-university coalition of students committed to the climate fight,” she said.

According to Marlena Brown, Sunrise Brown leaders focused on bringing a “strong variety” of group members representing different identities and levels of involvement to the demonstration. They were also eager to provide members who had never attended a major climate protest before with a chance to do so, she added.

Virginia He ’27 was involved with the Sunrise hub in her hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Before arriving on campus, she contacted Sunrise Brown organizers to get involved with the or-

ganization and jumped at the opportunity to attend the protest in New York.

She said that it was “crazy” seeing so many people on the streets of New York, adding that it was her first time attending a demonstration that big. She began her work with Sunrise during the pandemic, when nearly all activism occurred virtually.

“When I was marching down the streets of New York, there was a really big sense of solidarity and togetherness … that I hadn’t really felt before I came to the East Coast,” she said.

Marlena Brown emphasized the demonstration’s intergenerational

and energetic nature, with activists of all ages joining forces in New York to demand action addressing the threat of climate change.

“I would say that the biggest thing I got out of it was this … greater sense of unity” in the climate movement, Marlena Brown said of the demonstration.

Ward also highlighted a speech by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), noting that it was “really incredible to be able to see firsthand one of our political leaders really taking the climate threat seriously.”

Back on College Hill, the Sunrise members who attended the protest are

eager to incorporate the solidarity and energy they experienced into their work at the University.

The demonstration “showed us that our next steps forward should be finding a way to marshal in our power and (the) passion we have amongst college students towards an effective end,” Ward said.

The demonstrators at the protest were “all very much in the fight together,” He said. “That was really empowering to see, and I’m really excited to continue to build that community as I do some more work here at Brown.”

Students reflect on Tougaloo-Brown exchange semester

Program recently restructured to include ‘streamlined’ application

BY SOFIA BARNETT UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

The Brown-Tougaloo Partnership has offered experiential learning opportunities both on College Hill and at Tougaloo College’s campus in Jackson, Mississippi, since the program’s official establishment in 1964, according to the partnership’s website. One of the partnership’s largest opportunities — the Brown-Tougaloo exchange semester — allows interested students from both schools to spend a semester away at the other institution.

Applications for the Brown-Tougaloo exchange semester are now open until Oct. 1, according to Brown’s Assistant Director of Experiential Learning Programs Kelly Watts. The program is seeking out students who hope to “expand intellectual and cultural curiosity, enhance academic and personal growth, develop new skills and self-awareness and cultivate community and long-lasting relationships,” Watts wrote in an email to The Herald.

The exchange program has recently been restructured based on feedback from previous program participants, including a new “streamlined” application process that involves individual meetings with program applicants, according to Watts.

Exchange students can now also participate in a “pre-departure” and “follow-up orientation” prior to the

start of classes, as well as receive more detailed guidance about the academic and extracurricular resources available to them during their semester away.

The Herald spoke to three Tougaloo students who completed their exchange semester at Brown to learn more about the available opportunities, resources and experiences associated with the program.

Vivienne Diaz said that she chose to attend Tougaloo to combat the feelings of isolation she experienced after receiving a “whitewashed” education in her hometown.

Diaz, who came to Brown in fall 2022, described her acceptance to the partnership program as “the stars aligning,” since the COVID-19 pandemic halted her original plans to study abroad as an undergraduate.

“I was the first student since the start of COVID” to participate in the exchange program, Diaz said. “So I

was all by my lonesome. I feel like my experience is pretty unique because I had to be a social butterfly and was just everywhere.”

During her time at Brown, Diaz found a home in several student organizations, including Hillel, Queer People and Allies for the Advancement of Medicine, Rural Students at Brown and Cuba at Brown.

Diaz credited much of her ability to successfully navigate the different institutional channels at Brown to her Tougaloo advisor, Melissa McCoy, and Nirva LaFortune MA ’19, former assistant director of the Curricular Resource Center for Peer Advising at Brown.

“I really felt like I put down some valuable roots and made great connections,” she said.

Matthew McKee came to Brown from Tougaloo this summer as a research assistant for Professor of Physics and Engineering Jay Tang in search of an

opportunity to “research something new, somewhere new,” he said.

McKee expressed feeling supported by both Brown and Tougaloo during his exchange summer, noting that he received a housing stipend from Tougaloo, as well as a $6,000 stipend from the University. He also received extensive counseling from his Tougaloo mentor, Wendy White of the Jackson Heart Study Undergraduate Training and Education Center.

McKee noted that his summer experience allowed him to learn just as much about personal values as bacteria: “I learned both in the lab and outside of the lab.”

According to She’Kyra Paige, who did her exchange semester at Brown last spring, the most significant benefit of the program is that it “forces you to grow beyond what you’re used to.” She explained that before coming to Brown, she had never spent much time away from Mississippi.

Paige’s experience was not without its challenges. “I believe as far as staff supporting me, my cohort and I were mostly by ourselves,” she explained. “A lot of Brown students and teachers were not aware of who we were, and our Tougaloo staff really didn’t reach out as much.”

“I navigated the University with friends I made at the Brown campus,” Paige added.

According to Tougaloo College’s BTP Program Director Daphne Chamberlain, the BTP program staff at Tougaloo checks in with students “from time to time during (their) time on exchange.”

“There have been long-standing concerns voiced by Tougaloo College students about the acknowledgment of their presence on Brown’s campus,” Chamberlain wrote in a message to The Herald. “This is an opportunity to bring more awareness to the matter between both institutions so … our students can feel more welcome in that community while they are there.”

Sylvia Carey-Butler, vice president for the University’s Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, wrote in a message to The Herald that “students participating in the Semester Exchange Program have access to all of the campus resources available to Brown students,” including Campus Life programs and student organizations.

Watts shared that “staff in the College welcome student feedback and are always seeking to improve the student experience in programs that we help to administer and manage.”

Paige, McKee and Diaz each noted that their best piece of advice to students hoping to participate in the Brown-Tougaloo exchange semester would be to connect with other exchange students on campus and seek out former program participants.

“Do the exchange semester,” Paige said. “Just communicate with others who have been in your shoes before.”

Despite a lull in exchange following the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Watts wrote that “we anticipate there will be 1-2 Brown students enrolled at Tougaloo College and 2-3 Tougaloo students enrolled at Brown” in Spring 2024.

COURTESY OF ERIN MACKEY

Ten Sunrise Brown members traveled to New York the night before the protest to attend a panel with other climate activist organizations from Northeast college campuses.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

For She’Kyra Paige, the most significant benefit of the program is that it “forces you to grow beyond what you’re used to.”

accordingly with Professor Curtin.”

Desai also wrote that “separately, if you are open to it, I would like to meet with members of this group to better understand your experiences and get additional feedback. We are in the process of examining our curriculum and inclusive practices.”

In response to The Herald’s request for comment, Curtin and his colleagues who co-taught the class denied any racial and gender bias and said Curtin has a history of “equitable” instruction.

The letter had 16 named student signatories and an additional 12 student supporters who took the class but chose not to disclose their names out of “fear of retribution.” As Desai wrote in an email to the signatories, the University has a policy protecting students, faculty, staff and other community members from retaliation after they make “Good Faith Reports” of the violation of a law, regulation or University policy.

“Writing a letter like this is not a step that we take lightly,” the students wrote to Desai in May. “But none of us ever envisioned we would endure this type of experience when we accepted admission to Brown University.”

The letter alleged that Curtin’s lectures provided little “fundamental instruction that would allow students to grasp” much of the course’s “advanced instruction,” and students were often “unable to do the necessary self-directed backtracking to fill the gaps in their instruction” on exams.

While the class was designed and taught with two additional instructors, Professor of Engineering Yue Qi and Associate Professor of Engineering Miguel Bessa, Curtin led 18 of the course’s 23 lectures and was the only instructor named in the students’ complaints.

In the letter, students claimed that those who lacked prior knowledge about the course’s content area were “left to fend for themselves” despite the course’s introductory nature.

“It definitely felt like (Curtin) assumed everyone had taken AP Physics before,” Mina Bahadori ’26, one of the letter’s signatories, said. “Some of my classmates had even said things like ‘Oh, yeah, the midterm was hard but it’s … basically just like what you learned in AP Physics,’ which was really hard because I had just used my class notes to study for the test, not any previous background.”

Bahadori primarily took physics online during her junior year of high school and felt she “didn’t really learn physics so well.” As a result,

she felt that she was falling behind her ENGN 0040 classmates from the onset.

“If you come from a school with fewer resources, you’re already put at a huge disadvantage. And on top of that disadvantage, there’s a way bigger chance that you’ll fail the class,” said Chloe Chow ’26, referring to students who may not have had a chance to take AP Physics in high school.

The course was a “nightmare” for students without a strong subject background, Bahadori said.

Jules Silva ’26, another signatory of the letter, noted that ENGN 0040 caused them emotional and academic stress — and was discouraged by their experience in the course, especially given that engineering “wasn’t much of a welcoming space in the past.”

“But I figured it would be different at Brown,” they said.

Regarding opportunities for student support, Curtin, Qi and Bessa, in their joint response to The Herald’s request for comment, said that “Prof. Curtin also made a concentrated effort to provide extra help for all students who struggled to master key concepts needed for success in ENGN0040.”

The teaching team was “very distressed that some students have interpreted our best efforts and intentions in any way that has detracted from their learning experience,” the professors wrote in an email to The Herald, noting that “although ENGN0040 is a challenging class, the classroom environment is meant to be engaging, positive, and fun.”

Among the two incidents of alleged discrimination described in the letter was one in which Professor Curtin left the testing room unsupervised during an exam to knock on the bathroom door of a student who had asked permission during the exam to use the restroom. “You’re taking a while,” the professor said, according to Silva, who viewed the comment as an insinuation of cheating.

Curtin reportedly walked past several white students in the bathroom who were on their phones and made no comments to them. The student in the stall, to whom Curtin allegedly directed his attention, was a person of color, according to the letter.

The letter also described an incident wherein a presentation group composed “primarily of women of color” adjusted a project during testing, a permissible activity according to the project brief. Curtin yelled at the group and told them they were “unprepared” and “were doing something that wasn’t permitted in the project,” the letter claimed.

In an earlier presentation, an all-male group allegedly made the

same adjustment to no response from Curtin. The project brief, reviewed by The Herald, noted that project designs were “adaptable” so long as groups could make changes within three minutes.

Curtin did not directly respond to a request for comment regarding these incidents, instead asserting in the joint response that he has a “30year record of equitable treatment of students” and “has a personal history of support for women and people of color throughout academia, as Prof. Qi can attest, and for disadvantaged children in Rhode Island.”

Silva said that Desai also encouraged students who failed the class to “reach out,” as the school would need to look into every student who contacted the dean after failing and “see what the basis was.”

In a statement to The Herald, Desai wrote that the School of Engineering has several procedures in place to advance its commitment “to providing an educational environment that supports inclusive excellence.”

Desai said that generally, reports to appropriate campus leaders — including the dean of the department of engineering — trigger a review process that includes staff from the School of Engineering, the College and OIED meeting with all individuals affected, including students and faculty members.

“I can confirm that as dean, I received an email in the spring semester from students sharing their concerns about their experience in an engineering course, and we have acted following our policies and procedures,” Desai wrote to The Herald.

Desai also noted that students also have the opportunity to appeal their grade in a course if they felt as though the grading process was unfair.

“Any specific actions taken following a careful evaluation depend upon the findings, with an overall goal of developing a proposed solution to mitigate any issues or concerns,” Desai wrote. “Ultimately, our priority is offering an exceptional educational experience for all students that positions them for success, which includes preparing faculty to do their very best work.”

According to Silva, who is currently a TA for an introductory engineering class this semester, their experience in ENGN 0040 is evidence of one of their fears: that introductory engineering courses will continue to be inaccessible for many students.

“I don’t want another class to ever have to go through what we went through,” they said.

for this academic year, The Herald previously reported. In allocating limited funds, UFB has worked to ensure events that have occurred historically can still happen.

According to BCA’s statement, before the COVID-19 pandemic, attending both days of Spring Weekend used to cost $50, which accounted for “roughly 40% of an annual (Spring Weekend) budget” for the next academic year.

After Spring Weekend was made a free event in 2021 — a decision “proposed by” the Undergraduate Finance Board and the Student Activities Office — lost ticket revenue was supplemented by UFB’s “budget surplus” for the past two years, with the group being “under the impression that things would continue this way” until they were noticed otherwise after last year’s Spring Weekend, according to the statement.

Coming into the previous academic year, UFB had about $3.2 million to spend — including a $1.2 million surplus — and planned to spend nearly the entirety of the funds in their account, The Herald previously reported. While it intended to have a $150,000 surplus into this school year, spending exceeded projections, leaving them with almost no surplus this year.

“Now that the surplus has run out, we’re in a position where we have no ticket revenue from previous years,

TRUSTEE from PAGE 1

Clark emphasized that these lawsuits had no relation to his departure. Neither Bravo nor his spokesperson addressed requests for comment about the lawsuits.

The Corporation now includes 37 trustees. In May 2023 — before some members ended or began their tenures — it had 39.

effectively leaving us with 40% less funds for the foreseeable future,” the BCA statement wrote.

The cut in funding is accompanied by rising production costs.

According to the statement, BCA has historically dedicated “roughly 60%” of total budget to artists and 40% to production costs — but that number has changed due to “inflation as well as the advent of new costs like (Event Operations),” which had “previously been covered by Brown for all student groups.”

On Sept. 11, UFB announced that back-end support for events not strictly related to safety — such as Event Operations — will be limited due to their budgetary constraints, The Herald previously reported.

This year, 60% of BCA’s budget will go to a single day’s production costs, reducing the group’s artist budget. That budget “would have been reduced by more had we decided to maintain the 2-day model,” the statement shared. “Furthermore, inflation has increased the price that artists charge and the percentage of their fee that agents demand, leaving BCA with even less buying power.”

“Despite the change to a oneday festival, we’re really excited to explore new possibilities for Spring Weekend in the coming years, and hoping to get in dialogue with the student body over what the event should look like,” BCA wrote in their statement.

The Herald previously reported that, among Corporation members, Bravo was a top donor to Republican-affiliated political causes, making two $500,000 donations to conservative super PAC America for Everyone in 2022. Bravo did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the two donations.