BPR Fall 2023 Issue 1

FALL 2023

ISSUE 01

SPECIAL FEATURE

GAMES

Issue 01, Fall 2023

The Games Issue

EDITORS’ NOTE What’s the move?

Whether we perform an unexpected checkmate or gleefully reveal a royal flush, the thrill of a win puts a pep in our step. A defeat can sting temporarily, but we move on, determined not to be sore losers. Some games, though, are designed to bleed into the way we think about and see the world. With a defined structure, small scale, and clearly delineated rules, games can enable us to better understand ourselves, our objectives, and our opponents. At the same time, the visions of the world created by games are necessarily incomplete—if not distorted.

In “Ctrl + Alt + Enlist,” David Pinto forces us to confront how video games shape our perception of war. By rewarding (pixelated) violence and obfuscating its toll on humans, first-person shooter games increase support for the US Army. Pinto illuminates how the military has contributed to game design, started an esports team, and even used video games to train Air Force recruits. In doing so, it has eroded the line between the screen and the battlefield, making us question where games end and the real world begins.

When competitions move out of the privacy of the living room into a sold-out arena, tens of thousands of eyes are trained on the players, anticipating their next moves. The gamemakers, however, study the fans. In “What Racial Undertones?”, Chiupong Huang reveals how the Ultimate Fighting Championship has incubated far-right bigotry within its fandom by refusing to condemn racist confrontations between fighters.

He contends that the company must rewrite the

rules of the game to penalize, not profit from, this behavior. Neve Diaz-Carr is similarly reformminded. In “Landing on Green,” she advocates for the elimination of the US diversity visa lottery. Instead, Diaz-Carr proposes a potential game-changer: a more holistic approach to reviewing green card applications.

Sometimes, altering the rules may not be enough to fix the game. In “Wheel of Misfortune,” Evan Tao examines how casinos have attracted Asian American immigrants by framing gambling as a source of community—and why a ban on exploitative marketing is not the solution.

By supporting immigrants as they acclimate to life in the United States and reinvesting in healthy entertainment offerings, Tao argues that local groups can make these harmful games less enticing.

In other cases, the culture of a game can change, even as the rules stay the same.

In “Ego Moves First,” Ariella Reynolds chronicles the transformation of chess from quasi-US-Soviet proxy war to YouTube virality. “What breaks down geopolitical barriers and binds us together is not the win or the loss, or even how we play the game, but the stories we tell as we play it,” Reynolds writes.

As the authors in this special feature illustrate, games shape everything from international relations to family dynamics. But we are not merely pieces on a board; oftentimes, we are also agents with the power to shape the way the game is played. As we do so, let’s bring our A game.

— Alex and Mathilda

Brown Political Review

Masthead

EXECUTIVE BOARD

INTERVIEWS BOARD

COPY EDIT BOARD

EDITORS IN CHIEF Alexandra Mork Mathilda Silbiger

INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS James Hardy Samuel Trachtenberg

CHIEFS OF STAFF Cole Powell William Lake

DEPUTY INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS Alexandra Lehman Alexandra Vitkin John Fullerton Mira Mehta Yuliya Velhan

CHIEF COPY EDITORS Isabel Greider Jonathan Zhang

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICERS Andrew Berzolla Ayla Kim MANAGING EDITORS Alexander Lee Bianca Rosen Henry Ding Joseph Safer-Bakal CHIEF COPY EDITORS Isabel Greider Jonathan Zhang INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS James Hardy Samuel Trachtenberg DATA DIRECTORS Asher Labovich Javier Niño-Sears CREATIVE DIRECTOR Christine Wang MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR Elijah Dahunsi WEB DIRECTOR Kevin Kim DIVERSITY OFFICER Jordan Lac

BOARD OF ADVISORS Alexander Samaha Alexandros Diplas Allison Meakem Hannah Severyns Isabel Tejera Tiffany Pai Zander Blitzer

INTERVIEWS ASSOCIATES Alexander Delaney Anik Willig Anushka Srivastava Ariella Reynolds Aubrie Miller Avital Strauss Benjamin Greenberg Benjamin Ringel Charlie Adams Cindy Li Connor Yew Declan Allio Elijah Dahunsi Ellia Sweeney Emma Blankstein Emma Stroupe Hayden Deffarges Haley Joyce Henry Robbins Hiram Valladares Castro-Lopez Jason Hwang John Kelley Karina Gostian Kate Javerbaum Lauren Muhs Lina Legesse Matteo Papadopoulos Matthew Kotcher Maya Rackoff Michael Citarella Michele Togbe Miles Munkacy Mira Echambadi Nash Riebe Sam Kolitch Sophie Jaeger Taleen Sample William Forys William Vogel

DATA BOARD DATA DIRECTORS Asher Labovich Javier Niño-Sears DATA DESIGN DIRECTOR Lucia Li DATA ASSOCIATES Aimee Zheng Alex Wick Amanda Sun Amy Qiao Angela Um Angelina Rios-Galindo Ariel Shifrin Arthi Ranganathan Ashley Kim Carson Bauer Cindy Li Dhruv Raghavan Edward Park Esther Krupp Irene Zhao Jed Morgan Jo Gasior-Kavishe Logan Rabe Ryan Doherty Shafiul Haque Titi Zhang Zoey Katzive

MANAGING COPY EDITORS Grace Leclerc Miguel Valdovinos COPY EDITORS Antara Singh-Ghai Anum Azhar Benjamin Levy Darisel Velez Ellie Brault Emily Colon Harshil Garg Jason Hwang Juan Fernandez Julia O’Neill Lilly Roth-Shapiro Logan Wojcik Sabina Topol Sara Santacruz Sofie Zeruto Tiffany Eddy Yael Wellish Yu-ning (Renee) Kuo

MULTIMEDIA BOARD MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR Elijah Dahunsi MULTIMEDIA ASSOCIATES Alex Lim Catharine Paik Daniel Ma Eden Lewis Fatima Rezaie Julia Kostin Leyad Zavriyev Maddelynn Brooks Mitsuki Jiang

BUSINESS BOARD BUSINESS DIRECTORS Andrew Berzolla Ayla Kim BUSINESS ASSOCIATES Benjamin Greenberg Bisola Folarin Chubbi Udemba Coraline Novatney Edward Park Ellyse Givens Eloise Robertson Hpone Thit Htoo John Lee Manav Musunuru Mariana Melzer Marilyn Abney Mehari Milton Serafyn Rybachkivsky Sofia Benedetti Stella Kleinman Tianran Cheng Yvonne Jia

EDITORIAL BOARD MANAGING EDITORS Alexander Lee Bianca Rosen Henry Ding Joseph Safer-Bakal SENIOR EDITORS Bryce Vist Francisca Saldivar Isabel Greider Natalia Ibarra Sarah McGrath EDITORS Antara Singh-Ghai Archer Zureich Ashton Higgins Ben Ackerman Elliot Smith Elsa Lehrer Grace Chaikin Harry Flores Hayden Deffarges Jack Tajmajer Kara McAndrew Lauren Griffiths Michael Farrell-Rosen Mira Rudensky Suzie Zhang SENIOR STAFF WRITERS Amina Fayaz Annabel Williams Ellie Silverman Ian Stettner Jodi Robinson Justin Meszler Morgan Dethlefsen Neve Diaz-Carr Rohan Leveille Rohan Pankaj William Loughridge

STAFF WRITERS Aman Vora Ananya Narayanan Andreas Rivera Young Annika Reff Ariella Reynolds Bruna Melo Chiupong Huang Daphne Dluzniewski Daria Dmitrieva Ela Snyder Evan Tao Gus LaFave Haotian Luo Hpone Thit Htoo (Ren) Ilektra Bampicha-Ninou Jeremy Gold Jimena Rascon Jordan Lac Kenneth Kalu Keyes Sumner Kritika Shrivastava McConnell Bristol Mitsuki Jiang Nathan Haronian Navya Sahay Nicolaas Schmid Noah Kim Oamiya Haque Ophir Berrin Phil Avilov Ross Rutherford Sonya Rashkovan Sophia Cheng Sophie Forstner Steve Robinson Tianran (Alice) Cheng

CREATIVE BOARD CREATIVE DIRECTOR Christine Wang

COVER ARTIST Peishan Yu

DESIGN DIRECTORS Andrew Liu Muhaddisa Ali Patrick Farrell

ILLUSTRATORS Alexandra Zeigler Ashley Nguyen Ayca Tuzer Cara Wang Daniel May Elizabeth Long Emmie Wu Hannah Rice Hye Won (Hayley) Kim Kaitlyn Stanton Kyla Dang Peishan Yu Rafael Mediodia Samantha Takeda Sophia Spagna Su Yun Song Xuan Chen Yan (Jessica) Jiang Yuan Jiang Yushan (Sabrina) Jiang Ziwei Chen

GRAPHIC DESIGNERS Alina Spatz Hannah Jeong Lindsay Ju Nadine Macapagal ART DIRECTORS Anahis Luna Haimeng Ge Jacob Gong Jason Aragon Lana Wang Lucia Li Maria Hahne Rosie Dinsmore Thomas Dimayuga

WEB BOARD WEB DIRECTOR Kevin Kim WEB DEVELOPERS Akshay Mehta Alexander Wick Hannah Jeong Hao Wen Robert Daly Shafiul Haque

Issue 01, Fall 2023

The Games Issue

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WORLD

London, Eyes Shut

The United Kingdom must wake up to Russian kleptocracy

by Nathan Haronian ’25, an Applied Math and International and Public Affairs concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Rafael Mediodia ’26, a Graphic Design major at RISD

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In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson pledged to embark on “a remorseless mission to squeeze Russia from the global economy.” The United Kingdom not only imposed sanctions on 1,500 Russian individuals and entities but also fast-tracked the long-promised Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill through Parliament. This new legislation increased investigations of suspicious assets and businesses, added new cryptocurrency regulations, and introduced the Register of Overseas Entities (ROE). The ROE requires that foreign organizations owning UK property identify a “beneficial owner”—an individual or entity with over 25 percent ownership of an overseas entity, trust, or firm. If the property was bought after 1999, the beneficial owner must register their personal information with Companies House, the executive body in charge of registering UK businesses.

This is an important step for a country that has been inundated with international money laundering and tax evasion. Banking secrecy laws, low tax rates, high interest rates, few strict regulations, and Britain’s network of secrecy havens in its territories and Crown Dependencies all attract international investment—some of it licit, some of it not. London in particular has gained a reputation for harboring the funds of Eurasian oligarchs in flashy assets ranging from yachts to mansions to soccer clubs, earning it

“London in particular has gained a reputation for harboring the funds of Eurasian oligarchs in flashy assets ranging from yachts to mansions to soccer clubs, earning it nicknames such as ‘Londongrad,’ ‘Moscow on the Thames,’ and, perhaps most damningly, ‘the London Laundromat.’”

nicknames such as “Londongrad,” “Moscow on the Thames,” and, perhaps most damningly, “the London Laundromat.”

So, how does the United Kingdom’s new legislation fare against this deeply ingrained system that props up money laundering?

Unfortunately, it has not been nearly as effective as hoped. Kleptocrats are still finding ways to dodge sanctions and launder money through London real estate, leaving many Russianowned assets unfrozen and unregistered.

To understand Britain’s complex relationship with Eurasian dirty money, one has to understand the history of British offshore banking. Post-Bretton Woods Conference, the United States emerged as the world’s dominant monetary power, as the US dollar became the global reserve currency. Realizing that there was an international market for the loosely regulated trade of USD, the United Kingdom set up its offshore banking system accordingly, finding a new financial niche in what is known as the Eurodollar market. Because of an informal agreement between British banks and the government, deals conducted in foreign currencies (usually USD) between non-residents can occur outside the United Kingdom’s jurisdiction. Since these economic activities take place outside of both US and UK regulatory environments, they are known as “offshore.”

Simultaneously, the United Kingdom encouraged its territories and Crown Dependencies to THE GAMES ISSUE

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“To effectively fight Russian financial crimes, the United Kingdom needs to strengthen the investigative and operational capacity of law enforcement to target Russian dirty money on a case-by-case basis.”

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become tax havens in order to give itself access to overseas banks. The City of London, complete with its own set of special exemptions and banking freedoms, became the epicenter of this new offshore banking network. Money from tax evasion, bribery, drug trafficking, and other unsavory sources was accepted into British tax havens and eventually funneled to London, where it could then be invested in legitimate assets.

In the 1950s, fearing that the United States would freeze dollar-denominated assets held in New York, many members of the Soviet bureaucracy moved their assets into the British offshore Eurodollar system. However, the real surge in Eurasian money flowing into the British offshore system came in 1991. When the Soviet Union dissolved, party elites and up-and-coming businessmen quickly bought up recently privatized and egregiously undervalued state assets. This created an elite class of politically powerful Eurasian businessmen scrambling to store their stolen wealth in British banks.

The United Kingdom welcomed these foreign oligarchs with open arms, and by the mid-2000s, an entire industry was built on attracting their investment. Fleets of lawyers, wealth managers, and real estate agents helped oligarchs set up trusts holding overseas shell companies to invest in London real estate. A ‘golden visa’ program even provided visas for foreigners who could prove they had two million pounds available for passive investment.

The government’s vetting of new businesses proved to be extremely weak—and remains so to this day. The United Kingdom is one of the easiest places to register a new business, and Companies House registers new companies practically automatically without verifying the applications’ legitimacy. Even now, obviously fake names like “Adolf Tooth Fairy Hitler” and “Truman Michael Miser-Lord SR00GESPYPRIEST” are labeled business owners on the official Companies House website.

When the Ukraine war began in February 2022 and the United Kingdom formally committed to countering Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine, flurries of British sanctions froze £48 billion in Russian assets by March 2023. Still, freezing assets is not seizing them.

Confiscating property requires authorities to first sift through trusts and shell companies to determine the true owner of an asset, then prove it was obtained with the proceeds of a crime. Considering that much of the kleptocratic wealth invested in the United Kingdom has been there for many years and that finding evidence of a crime would require the cooperation of the Kremlin, this may prove extremely difficult, if not impossible.

What about the Economic Crime and Transparency Bill? Unfortunately, there are

still multiple legal loopholes that allow overseas actors to avoid registering their business-owned properties. A would-be beneficial owner can dilute their ownership stake to below the critical threshold of 25 percent by sharing the company with family members and acquaintances, for instance. Legal property ownership can also be transferred through the use of partnerships and offshore trusts.

Although it is inherently difficult to measure money laundering, data suggests that these loopholes are being exploited. In February 2023, international corruption watchdog Transparency International identified 52,000 UK properties owned by unregistered offshore companies. A paper from the London School of Economics and the University of Warwick released in August 2023 found even more alarming numbers.

According to their data, of 109,000 properties owned by overseas entities, nearly 71 percent were not registered with Companies House due to registration errors, trusts, partnerships, or non-compliance. And according to a Reuters report, only four sanctioned Russian individuals were even registered with Companies House following the introduction of the ROE. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill is ineffective because it imposes new regulations on an industry that is based on exploiting loopholes and working around rules. To effectively fight Russian financial crimes, the United Kingdom needs to strengthen the investigative and operational capacity of law enforcement to target Russian dirty money on a case-by-case basis. Luckily, new, more powerful legislation is being introduced.

The proposed Seizure of Russian State Assets and Support for Ukraine Bill would enable the aggressive seizure of Russian state assets in order to fund Ukrainian reconstruction efforts.

Disentangling UK banking from dubious foreign investment is not an easy process, but it is a necessary one. As a country vocally opposed to the war in Ukraine, the United Kingdom has a responsibility to enact more aggressive legislation and confront its history as a hub for Russian dirty money.

INTERVIEW

MILITARY SPENDING IN THE ECONOMY AND PUBLIC IMAGINATION An Interview with Heidi Peltier

Interview by Mira Mehta ’25 Illustration by Alexandra Zeigler ’24

Mira Mehta: What do you think is the most important thing for people to know about the Costs of War Project?

Heidi Peltier: The main reason we got started and the main message that we want the public and policymakers to understand is that the costs of war go well beyond the cost that we hear about in the Department of Defense budget for any specific war. Budgetarily, the costs include the cost of veterans’ care, the cost of interest on the debt that we take out to pay for war, and the cost for Homeland Security, for example. Then there are all the non-budgetary costs: the effects on civilians, the families of people who are wounded and killed, the civilians who are impacted directly by war or indirectly by loss of access to healthcare. There are the environmental costs and the human rights abuses; the costs of war go well beyond what we hear about. One of the goals of the project is to help people understand those wide-ranging costs so that we’ll think more carefully before engaging in future wars.

MM: You’ve noted in the past that people think military spending is more important to the economy than it actually is. What do you mean by that?

HP: It’s a kind of public perception that war and the military are essential for jobs. That is in some ways a misperception because there are other ways to produce even more jobs by spending the same amount that we spend on the military.

Some of my research has looked at the question: If we shifted some military spending into alternative sectors including healthcare, education, clean energy, or infrastructure, what would that

Heidi Peltier is an economist who has researched and written extensively on military-related topics including public finance, contracting, and employment. She has been a part of Brown University’s Costs of War Project staff since its creation in 2010. She has also written about the clean-energy economy and is the author of Creating a Clean-Energy Economy: How Investments in Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Can Create Jobs in a Sustainable Economy. In addition to her research, she has been a consultant for the UN Industrial Development Organization, the International Labor Organization, and the US Department of Energy, among other organizations. do for jobs? It turns out that, for all of those sectors in particular, we’d actually create more jobs than we would lose. That is partly because some of those sectors, especially education, are more labor-intensive than the military.

MM: You’ve noted a connection between militarism and climate change. Can you explain how the two are intertwined?

HP: The US military is responsible for something like 80 percent of US government emissions. The emissions and fuel use of the US military are equivalent to those of some small countries, like Denmark, Sweden, and Portugal. Therefore, making any changes within the US military can have an effect on climate change. If the military made a big push for renewable energy, it could lower its cost and speed up its adoption. The military also has a significant role to play in reducing its fuel use, both by becoming more efficient and by reducing its operations—the Department of Defense admits that it has something like 20 percent extra capacity in bases and installations around the world. If we reduced that excess capacity, the United States could reduce its emissions with no change in readiness or operational capabilities.

MM: What would your ideal alternative world look like without this high military spending and militarization?

HP: The overall picture would be that the US military has a smaller presence in the world, that it reduces its global footprints, that it doesn’t so easily engage in overseas interventions, and that it uses other tactics—non-force tactics, like

economic sanctions and incentives, like diplomacy—to have an effect on other countries. The domestic economy would shift away from some of the arms production toward the production of things that we need to make us secure in other ways. Those are things like clean energy, infrastructure, healthcare facilities, education, and so on.

MM: What do you see as the biggest barrier to creating that kind of world?

HP: I’d say that the two biggest barriers are the American public’s belief that our military needs to be not only the biggest military in the world but also 10 times bigger than any other military and that the idea of patriotism is equivalent to high spending on the military. I think both of those beliefs need to be challenged. Then we have this barrier that the Big Five and other consulting companies take in a huge chunk of military spending and can spend some of that on lobbying and affecting policy. As long as that continues happening, and as long as there’s a revolving door between defense industries and government, there’s going to be continued political support for military spending and high spending on contractors.

Edited for length and clarity.

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WORLD

Arms for Armenia How America can fill the power vacuum in the Caucasus

by Bryce Vist ’25, an Economics and International and Public Affairs concentrator and Senior Editor for BPR illustrations by Ziwei Chen ’25, an Illustration major at RISD

For much of its existence, Armenia has been tossed between its larger, stronger neighbors—first Rome and Parthia, then Byzantium and the Abbasids, and later the Safavids and Ottomans. This pattern shows no signs of stopping. On September 11, 2023, the United States began holding its first joint military exercises with Armenian forces. Eight short days later, Azerbaijan launched an offensive against the Republic of Artsakh, an unrecognized Armenian enclave in the historically contested NagornoKarabakh region. Within a day, the fighting was over, Artsakh ceased to exist, and tens of thousands of civilians from Nagorno-Karabakh began streaming into Armenia proper.

Azerbaijan’s most recent conquest capped a 30-year mission to recapture Nagorno-Karabakh, prompted by a successful Armenian incursion in 1994. For Armenia, the events of September represent a catastrophic institutional failure.

They lay bare not only the rot in an aging military obsessed with its past glories but also complacency in a diplomatic policy that relied on ancient allies (principally Russia) to the exclusion of all others. The fact that many observers believe Azerbaijan actually gained Russian permission for the invasion demonstrates just how badly Armenia erred. Russia’s reaction seems to confirm the speculation: An official government statement blithely called for a ceasefire, though former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev invited readers of his Telegram channel to 12

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“guess the fate” of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan for deciding to “play with NATO.” Russia’s sudden about-face has upended a Caucasian balance of power that, only a decade ago, seemed entrenched. With a humanitarian crisis brewing, the United States has a rare opportunity to exploit the vacuum by signaling its readiness to uphold lapsed Russian security obligations. In doing so, it could win an ally in Armenia and humiliate an adversary in Russia.

Some history may be in order. Since the Russo-Persian War of 1826–28, Armenia has been Russia’s natural southern ally against Muslim influence inside the Caucasus. Outside the Caucasus, however, common cultural heritage has stimulated robust ties between Armenia and Iran. Armenians are one of Iran’s largest recognized minorities, and Iran has served as a vital conduit for trade since Türkiye closed its border with Armenia in 1993.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has historically been under Türkiye’s patronage due to the countries’ common religious and ethnic identities. Israel has also forged strong bonds with Azerbaijan, which it perceives as a potential ally in an IranoIsraeli war. The two states’ arrangement allows Azerbaijan to import Israeli drones; in exchange, Israel receives tacit authority to use Azeri airfields in potential anti-Iran strikes.

These tripartite alliances—bet ween Russia, Armenia, and Iran on the one hand and Azerbaijan, Türkiye, and Israel on the

“Rather than crawl on all fours to beg Moscow for forgiveness, Armenia stood upright and shopped for allies elsewhere. Sure enough, it found a promising candidate.”

other—have remained largely stable since the fall of the USSR. Recently, however, one has begun to fracture. In 2018, Pashinyan swept to power in the so-called “Velvet Revolution,” which grew out of street protests against corruption and a perceived lack of economic opportunity. Yet underlying the movement’s explicit motives was a clear subtext: deep concern that Armenia was being ossified by Russian influence. This fear largely stemmed from former Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan’s 2013 rejection of an offer to develop closer ties to the European Union in favor of increasing Armenia’s economic reliance on Russia.

After the Velvet Revolution, Russian President Vladimir Putin began treating Armenia with considerable suspicion. When Azerbaijan marched on Artsakh in 2020, previewing its 2023 takeover, Russia saw an opportunity to cut its rebellious client down to size. It stepped aside, acting only to safeguard the Lachin Corridor, an extremely narrow lifeline from Armenia to Artsakh.

Armenia learned a lesson from its humiliating defeat in 2020—but not the one Russia intended. In early September of this year, Pashinyan claimed that relying on Russia as a sole security guarantor was “a strategic mistake.” Rather than crawl on all fours to beg Moscow for forgiveness, Armenia stood upright and shopped for allies elsewhere. Sure enough, it found a promising candidate—hence the fateful military exercises that likely provoked the Azeri invasion.

In making overtures to the United States, Armenia has taken a crucial first step out of Russia’s oppressive orbit, but in doing so, it has also made itself incredibly vulnerable to attack.

It is thus equally crucial that, for both geopolitical and humanitarian reasons, the United States meets Armenia halfway.

The United States should begin by exploiting the fact that Azerbaijan’s allies—and therefore Armenia’s foes—are also American allies.

Türkiye and Israel are core American partners: Türkiye is a NATO member, and Israel is a trusted friend. Both of these nations need America more than they need Azerbaijan. The United States could leverage its moral and material support for Israel’s anti-Hamas campaign to convince Jerusalem to go without Azeri airfields. Türkiye would be a tougher sell, but it could be induced to decrease financial support to Azerbaijan in return for an ebbing of US support for Syrian Kurds (whom Türkiye identifies as terrorists).

If US pressure works and both Türkiye and Israel halt shipments of offensive weapons to Azerbaijan, the Armenian position would already be far more secure. Should the Azeris nonetheless not stop at Artsakh, the United States should explore shipping weapons to Armenia, which still uses outdated Soviet arms that cannot meaningfully stand up to Azerbaijan’s modern imports.

Further Azeri aggression is not merely theoretical. Azerbaijan has been vocal regarding its desire to create the Zangezur Corridor, a narrow transport route between Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhichevan that would pass through the Armenian province of Syunik.

Azeri President Ilhan Aliyev has said that the corridor is a “historical necessity” that will be built “whether Armenia wants it or not.”

Armenia is likely to refuse to allow the corridor’s establishment during peace talks, reasoning that it amounts to ceding sovereign territory. If the countries are unable to compromise,

the war over Nagorno-Karabakh could lead to an even more brutal conflict on internationally recognized Armenian land. Moreover, even if the issue of the Zangezur Corridor is resolved, Aliyev has previously claimed that all of Armenia is truly Azerbaijan. Without clear mechanisms to prevent the Azeris from acting on such a claim, another severe humanitarian crisis is possibly imminent.

If concerns over a potential repetition of the Armenian genocide do not move American policymakers, then more pragmatic reasons should.

Armenia is still a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a post-Soviet security alliance composed of six nations firmly ensconced in the Russian sphere of influence. Flipping the allegiance of a CSTO signatory would be a considerable diplomatic coup and signal to the remaining five that the United States stands ready to fill Russia’s abandoned security guarantees. In the longer term, a firmly US-aligned Armenia could be a burr in Russia’s southern flank, tempering aggression of the sort that Georgia faced in 2008. An alliance could even hold benefits for US-Iran relations, which are historically poor, by providing a third-party mediator friendly to both countries.

With the Caucasus’ close proximity to global flashpoints, the United States cannot afford continued instability in the region. Opportunities to simultaneously win allies, embarrass foes, and make positive humanitarian impacts are rare.

For them to be relatively cheap is even rarer.

Yet in Armenia’s case, the United States can accomplish all three objectives by merely pressuring allies and, if necessary, sending a few caches of outdated arms.

It must not delay.

THE GAMES ISSUE

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WORLD

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A No-Brainer The case for recognizing neurorights

by Annabel Williams ’26, an International and Public Affairs concentrator and Senior Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Yushan Jiang ’25, an Illustration major at RISD

Within four years of State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power requiring its workers to wear electroencephalogram (EEG) neurodata headsets, the Chinese company’s profits jumped by $315 million. During this time, employees faced pressure to work more efficiently or risk being dismissed for the day. “When the system issues a warning, the manager asks the worker to take a day off or move to a less critical post,” Jin Jia, a professor of brain science at Ningbo University, told the South China Morning Post. “Some jobs require high concentration. There is no room for a mistake.”

Workplace surveillance has been on the rise in the past decade, especially with the recent push to monitor the activities of remote employees during the Covid-19 pandemic. Going beyond tracking mouse movements, keystrokes, and other indicators of productivity, nascent neurotech advances offer employers the ability to track brain activity itself. Some have already begun taking advantage of this opportunity.

For example, SmartCap technologies, which monitor fatigue in workers, are now required for many professional drivers. With the global market for neurotechnology growing at a compound annual rate of 12 percent, it is clear that the integration of this technology into everyday life, including places of work, will not slow down.

These advancements offer vast opportunities as well as significant costs. To balance competing interests, we need stronger regulations to protect human dignity and privacy in the digital age.

Current domestic and international laws have not caught up with the fast pace of technological developments that threaten to permeate every aspect of our lives. The past year saw the collective, frantic realization across the globe—after the launch of ChatGPT—that

futuristic technology is here, the competition is accelerating its production, and it is already changing many aspects of modern life. The subsequent recognition that existing legal frameworks and enforcement mechanisms worldwide lack protection of our neurological rights has made it more apparent than ever that there is a consequential (though not irrevocable) separation between policymakers and technological experts.

A divergence of science and government can be expected, as governments should not have decisive control over research on scientific, medical, and technological advancements, despite their integral role in providing funding. However, there needs to be better communication between the private and public sectors. Recent antitrust cases in Germany and the United States are attempting to affirm the right of governments to regulate Big Tech—rightfully so, as regulatory power is necessary to reduce harm that some technologies and developer monopolies can induce. Yet, conversely, technological expertise must also be valued and welcomed in policymaking processes.

Technology experts can provide insight into some of the innumerable benefits neurotechnology offers to society. In the health sector, cutting-edge products have the potential to help scientists better understand and treat neurodegenerative conditions and cognitive disabilities. Elon Musk’s brain implant company, Neuralink, just received FDA clearance to begin clinical trials on paraplegic patients. Other technologies can enable remote physiotherapy, aid those with epilepsy, and allow people unable to speak the ability to communicate their thoughts into words on a screen. Given neurotechnology’s promise for people with disabilities, it is essential that future conversations between decision makers and technical experts welcome the voices of disability rights advocates and center disabled populations.

However, the widespread use of neurotechnology in the workforce—monitoring and analyzing brain patterns and the inclusion of “hands-free” communication devices—also THE GAMES ISSUE

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WORLD

“However, the widespread use of neurotechnology in the workforce— monitoring and analyzing brain patterns and the inclusion of ‘handsfree’ communication devices—also comes with two primary ethical concerns: the capacity for discrimination and the collection of neural data.”

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comes with two primary ethical concerns: the capacity for discrimination and the collection of neural data.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which reports to the UK Parliament, recently published a report on neurotechnology warning of “neurodiscrimination” from both biased technological systems and overt unfair treatment by employers. Employers factoring neurodata into hiring processes can unintentionally discriminate by relying on technology biased against neurodivergent brain types—systems “trained on neuro-normative patterns.” The ICO report also raises concerns over the potential continuous collection of neurodata from consenting employees (which could include information estimating emotional states, productivity, and effectiveness of educational tools or information), all of which may increase the risk of employers discriminating against mental health conditions. Furthermore, because non-medical applications of neurodata are often not classified as “special category data,” which is regulated in the United Kingdom, neurodata lacks current protections against workplace discrimination—both in the United Kingdom and across the globe.

Then there is the question of who will have access to and ownership over the brain data—both of employees who are encouraged or required to use neuro-tracking devices as well as of individual consumers. Regardless

of the company—Meta, Neuralink, Blackrock Neurotech, or Precision Neuroscience—without any privacy protections or regulations in place, the legal and ethical risk of corporations commodifying brain data must be taken seriously.

Whether it be letting your employer have access to your brain data or releasing it in exchange for “hands-free” communications tools, bioethics expert Nita Farahany worries that people will make hasty decisions. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Farahany said, “I do worry people are unwittingly giving up [information] without realizing the full implications. That is true for privacy in general, but we ought to have a special place we think about when it comes to the brain. It is the last space where we truly have privacy.” Even more, the ICO report cautions that language decoding technology has the “potential to misrepresent what a person has said or to reveal thoughts that might otherwise have been private or meant to be edited before sharing. In both cases, highly sensitive information could be revealed with no way to recover it.”

Farahany considers solutions in her book, The Battle for Your Brain, writing, “When it comes to privacy protections in general, trying to restrict the flow of information is both impossible and potentially limits the insights we can gain… Instead, we should focus on securing rights and remedies against the misuse of information.” Establishing rights to mitigate the

“The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which reports to the UK Parliament, recently published a report on neurotechnology warning of ‘neurodiscrimination’ from both biased technological systems and overt unfair treatment by employers.”

use of new technology, she argues, should take precedence over prohibiting them. For state governments, expanding definitions is a good start.

Farahany recommends looking at current definitions of “privacy” and adding clauses on “mental privacy.” Additionally, she calls for establishing freedom from both “interference with our mental privacy” and punishment based on thoughts in definitions for “freedom of thought.”

At the international level, Farahany also strongly advocates for establishing “cognitive liberty” as a human right recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

However, Brown University professor and international law and human rights expert Nina Tannenwald cautions against tampering with the Universal Declaration. Reopening the document, she tells me, could open a door for countries who “might want to weaken its provisions rather than strengthen them.” Instead, she argues that we should expand our understanding of current rights articulated in the Declaration to include “cognitive liberty,” which could be addressed in an international treaty. To begin,

she proposes the creation of an international code of conduct or ethical standards that could then “progress to a binding treaty negotiated at the UN Human Rights Council.” While Farahany stands at the center of many neurorights discussions, perhaps Tannenwald is correct that establishing international norms while leaving the Declaration untouched is the best course of action to get states to consider “cognitive liberty” a human right. Regardless, both can agree immediate action is necessary.

As Farahany writes, “Neurotechnology has unprecedented power to either empower us or oppress us. The choice is ours.” However, the choice is really up to governments and international bodies, who must urgently establish which rights humans are entitled to in the age of digital surveillance and rapidly evolving technology.

The UN Human Rights Council should pass a treaty soon, and in the meantime, national and state governments must begin expanding definitions of mental privacy. Above all, policymakers across the world need to solicit advice from technological experts to inform their decisions.

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INTERVIEW

IN HER OWN WORDS An Interview with President Christina Paxson

Interview by Sam Trachtenberg ’24 Illustration by Alexandra Zeigler ’24

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Christina Paxson is the 19th president of Brown University.

President Paxson is an outspoken advocate for increasing access to higher education. Prior to her appointment at Brown in 2012, Paxson was dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Hughes Rogers Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

Sam Trachtenberg: A lot of students aren’t exactly sure what a university president does. Can you briefly explain what your role entails?

Christina Paxson: University presidents are charged by their governing boards with setting a direction and vision for the university. We do this in collaboration with faculty, students, staff, and corporation members. We are also responsible for hiring and building a team of talented academic and administrative leaders to execute this vision for the university. So that’s one part of the job. The other is to make sure that the university has the resources that it needs to thrive and fulfill its mission. That’s code for fundraising.

Presidents fundraise. I do a lot of that myself. And then

INTERVIEW finally, there’s the aspect of the job that is maybe the most visible to students—the ceremonial function, which I love.

I get to welcome students to campus. I get to graduate students. I also spend a lot of time speaking about higher education, representing Brown in the community and in the world.

ST: You made a pair of very important announcements at the beginning of this school year, the first of which is that Brown is increasing its “in lieu of taxes” donations to the city. Can you speak a little bit about what that means for Providence?

CP: Assuming the agreements are approved by the City Council, Brown will be putting in about $175 million over a 20-year period through two agreements. The first is a 20-year MOU, a memorandum of understanding, that we entered into with the other three institutions of higher education in the city. The second is a 10-year agreement that is Brown-only. I said at the press conference announcing these plans that Brown and Providence’s futures are intertwined.

If we’re successful, the city is more successful. If the city is more successful, we can recruit great students, faculty, and staff. I think it’s probably fair to say that 20 years ago, Providence was not a selling point for prospective students or employees. Now it is. People come to the city and say, “This is a great place.” Brown has had a lot to do with that.

I’m proud of that. The city needs resources to provide services and support education. It also has sustainability initiatives that we really believe in. So there are a number of things the city is doing that are very much consistent with Brown’s mission, and I think it’s important that we step up and support those things both through direct financial contributions and through a lot of the other things we do that are more indirect.

There are two things I really like about these agreements. One is that there’s an explicit recognition of the contributions that our institutions of higher education make to the city over and above these direct cash payments.

That’s great. The other part I really like is that the MOA has a number of really innovative provisions that give Brown strong incentives to invest in things that will make both Brown and the city stronger. We’ve never had anything like that before. Now, if our work sparks the development of new residential housing that’s on the tax rolls, some of that counts toward our payment to the city. We have an incentive to do work that’s good for us and that the city wants to see happen.

ST: Also as part of the agreement, the city is allowing Brown to acquire five new blocks: four in the Jewelry District and one here on College Hill. What’s planned for these new spaces?

CP: We have no immediate plans to make permanent changes to any of those blocks that we’ve acquired. There is one block, the Richmond Street block, that will have to be closed temporarily while we build the new Integrated Life Sciences Building. That would have happened whether we had acquired it or not. I have to say, none of this has been approved by the City Council yet, and even after it’s approved, there’s still another layer of approvals that have to go through. So there’s still a lot to work out. The way I

“We have an incentive to do good work that’s good for us and that the city wants to see happen.”

see it, we’re investing a lot in the Jewelry District. We’re working very collaboratively with communities that are involved in the Jewelry District, most notably the Jewelry District Association, which is a collection of homeowners and businesses in the area. My vision is that we will work collaboratively with those groups and with people in the city to say, “Hey, what would be great for this area?” If we decide with these other groups that it makes sense to close the street for pedestrian use and green space, that might be great, but we don’t know yet whether that’s going to happen, and we wouldn’t just dictate that outcome. The block on College Hill is a block that we also have no immediate plans to do anything with. It’s a block near the athletics complex just north of Sternlicht Commons. There may be some future use for that block, but I don’t know what it would be right now. All of these blocks are fully bounded

by Brown-owned buildings or property.

ST: I’m curious about this decision to buy more land. Is Brown’s footprint in Providence currently too small to accommodate the needs of the University?

CP: Does Brown have land to expand? Well, yes and no. If you look at the capacity of Brown to expand on College Hill, it’s very, very tight. We’ve built three new dorms in the last five years, which is fantastic. Can we keep fitting more onto campus? It would be really hard to do that. We don’t want to take down historic districts. We want to respect the neighbors. We want to do things the right way. What’s great about the Jewelry District is that it was land that used to have a highway running through it. It has a bunch of buildings that used to be jewelry factories that all closed when business moved overseas. It’s an area where we can expand and bring in both commercial and residential development. I don’t want that area to be all Brown, but it’s very unusual for a university to have an area that close to its historic campus where it has room to grow, and we’re going to need it.

Edited for length and clarity.

THE GAMES ISSUE

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WORLD

Nationalist Nomenclature The BJP is playing the name game

by Ela Snyder ’26, an International and Public Affairs concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Yan Jiang ’25, an Illustration major at RISD

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During the Monsoon Session of Parliament in late July 2023, Naresh Bansal of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called for India to be renamed Bharat, which is the state’s Hindi name. He argued that the change would erase the remnants of “colonial slavery” represented by the name “India.” Only a few months later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi (BJP) sparked immense domestic debate for sitting behind a placard titled Bharat at the G20 summit. For the BJP, India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist party, this renaming initiative is representative of its ambitious attempt to reframe the nation’s postcolonial identity. However, it also reflects the party’s well-known commitment to Hindutva, a nationalist ideology that stipulates the active opposition of the Indic people to religions and cultures not “native” to India.

Historically, the state’s nomenclature has been fraught with the legacy of exonyms— names given by outsiders, often through phonetic transliteration. The name Hind is derived from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, used

by Arabs and Iranians to describe the Sindhu River that divided the Indian subcontinent from the Iranian plateau. However, the river was renamed the Indus by the Ancient Greeks, a name that was later adopted by the British during colonial rule, giving India its modern name. On the other hand, Bharat is the Hindi name given to the region by its native inhabitants and used in most local vernaculars. Formally, Bharat is one of the state’s two names. In fact, Article I of the Indian Constitution declares “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.”

Now, the BJP is fighting to abandon the name India altogether, and anticolonial rhetoric has become a convenient weapon in its arsenal. This September, BJP MP Harnath Singh Yadav criticised the name India as “an abuse given to us by the British” and called for the country to be renamed Bharat. However, this demand followed swiftly after the opposition bloc named itself INDIA (Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance), suggesting that it was nothing more than hollow rhetoric designed to consolidate the BJP’s support among the Hindu-majority electorate. Ironically, the BJP has been criticized for continuing to capitalize on the sociopolitical currency of the name India, advancing schemes entitled Make it India, Start-Up India, and New India.

Over the past 75 years, post-independence Indian governments have replaced the Anglicized exonyms of multiple cities with names in Hindi. As early as 1950, several states were rechristened in an explicitly anticolonial manner. The United Provinces, for example, were renamed Uttar Pradesh (“North Province” in Hindi) after legislators decided a British name could not foster patriotism. More recently, in 2001, Calcutta was officially respelled Kolkata in correspondence with the native Bengali pronunciation.

However, while the renaming of states and cities was once justified to shed the legacy of British occupation, it is now assuming an

anti-Muslim tenor that strays from post-independence secularism. Cities with Muslim names that were in use centuries before British occupation are being renamed by the BJP. The city of Allahabad, for example, named by the Mughal Emperor Akbar in the 16th century, was retitled Prayagraj in 2018 after the Hindu pilgrimage site. Similarly, the city of Faizabad, historically the seat of Mughal power in India, was renamed Ayodhya in 2018 in homage to a fictional city from the Ramayana, one of the two most important epics in Hindu literature. The BJP has thus equated Hindu cultural pride with the marginalization of the non-Hindu peoples of India.

The BJP’s renaming initiatives have been challenged not only by academics and the opposition party but also by India’s Supreme Court.

In March, the Court struck down a petition by Ashwini Udadhyay, a BJP leader, to give every historic site and city of India a Hindu name.

The Court rejected the proposal as an attempt to burden the present with the past and “create more disharmony.”

The BJP is framing name changes as a defiant assertion of Indian sovereignty in response to a legacy of foreign occupation. However, the act of renaming must be understood in the context of the BJP’s broader goal of erasing India’s Muslim history in pursuit of Hindutva. Its recent moves to rewrite the past violate the Indian constitution’s clear separation between state and religion and thus call into question how secular India truly is.

“While the renaming of states and cities was once justified to shed the legacy of British occupation, it is now assuming an anti-Muslim tenor that strays from post-independence secularism.”

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WORLD

Bricks, Not Bullets African countries are footing the bill for private military corporations

by Kenneth Kalu ’27, an International and Public Affairs and Public Health concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Ayca Tuzer ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

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In the 1990s, egged on by foreign investors, Western governments, and international development banks, several sub-Saharan African nations chose to welcome the 21st century by privatizing a host of basic state services. The African states with the lowest social unity— Mali, the Central African Republic (CAR), South Africa, and Sudan—were paralyzed by corruption, devoured by sectarian conflict, and plagued by the stench of weak governance. This toxic combination created fundamentally poisonous institutions. As a result, transferring of crucial services like utilities and healthcare away from failed governments toward the private sector became extremely alluring.

Many politicians listened to the siren song of privatization, and their states have paid the price: Corporations’ hunger for profit dashed fraying nations against the rocks. Private interests have distributed bribes, assassinated activists, and participated in discrimination against already marginalized groups, exacerbating the fracture of disunited African nations along existing fault lines. However, perhaps the most damaging trend of all has been the privatization of military and security forces. Private military companies (PMCs) have contributed to economic exploitation, human rights abuses, and societal disintegration in Africa’s most vulnerable nations.

PMCs are battle-tested organizations that are often able to operate independently as military units—gathering their own intelligence, recruiting their own troops, and supplying their own arms. While dozens of separate PMCs from the

United States, Russia, South Africa, and Europe have already saturated Africa, they are not the only private organizations selling security on the continent. Instead of full-fledged military units, African governments and foreign nations operating on the continent have increasingly turned to private security companies (PSCs) to protect what they define as “high-value” individuals, infrastructure projects, and, above all, mining operations. Together, the rapidly growing networks of private armed groups in Africa are known as private military and security companies (PMSCs).

In Malian, Central African, and Sudanese mines, PMSCs have built a generation of shell companies armed with pickaxes and preferential mining contracts. They sport names like Lobaye Invest and Meroe Group, and they extract billions of tax-free dollars worth of minerals, petroleum products, and other assets. Postcolonial African countries are increasingly surrendering their resources for security guarantees—an exchange with both a dollar cost and a death toll.

Whether they are funneling cartloads of Sudanese gold to Khartoum’s most repugnant war criminals or converting expanses of Central African soil into toxic open pit mines, PMCs like the Wagner Group have become agents of environmental destruction and conflict expansion.

Even worse, military privatization threatens the very foundation of governmental authority.

In functioning states, a monopoly on legitimate violence is realized through government-run police and military forces. In disunited, weakly governed states (like the aforementioned Mali and CAR), however, the growing reliance

“Egged on by foreign investors, Western governments, and international development banks, several sub-Saharan African nations chose to welcome the 21st century by privatizing a host of basic state services.”

on PMSCs to enforce the law, prevent terrorism, and quell riots has degraded that monopoly. As a consequence, uniformed entities must compete with a menagerie of foreign, private armed groups for popular legitimacy. Unlike cohesive nations whose governments deploy violence to protect those whom they are bound to serve, states with high PMSC concentrations suffer from the fragmentation and conflict that comes with the prioritization of revenue over residents.

PMSCs usually operate in states with weak or nonexistent judicial and law enforcement institutions. These states, which are already ill-equipped to prosecute crime, must face the implicit threat of antistate violence from a powerful foreign organization within their borders.

Consequently, they often turn a blind eye to PMSC human rights violations. Even in cases of flagrant lawbreaking by PMSCs, states resort to fanciful explanations rather than genuine scrutiny or investigation. For example, when Russian journalists investigating the Wagner Group were killed in CAR, law enforcement blamed the crime on nameless highway robbers and refused to investigate Wagner.

The lawlessness of PMSC behavior has encouraged private interests to openly circumvent laws that protect the public. When Zimbabwean miners protested poor conditions at the Chinese-owned Odzi Mine, mine owners threatened to open fire—in direct contravention of Zimbabwean labor laws that guarantee a right to strike. These bullets would have come from the firearms of a hired PSC. In South Africa, where PMSCs outnumber the state police

nearly four to one, affluent white residents of a Cape Town suburb attempted to privatize the beach by hiring PMSCs to eject a group of Black beachgoers.

Private forces are not only impairing the ability of the law to protect the population but are also being used to enact private visions of who should have what. As climate change exacerbates resource scarcity in Africa, this is increasingly concerning. In the CAR, farmers have used private armed forces to tip the scale in their conflicts with herders who are attempting to use traditional grazing routes. Hoping to secure their livestock and communities, both lower-income nomadic herdsmen and wealthier urban absentee pastoralists have responded by hiring and, in extreme cases, joining a variety of PMSCs of their own. These conflicts have further destabilized a deteriorating state, taking over 800 lives in the first half of 2023 alone. While desertification and decreasing land fertility are bound to lead to increased conflict, the presence of PMSCs has turned cross-community animosity into outbursts of communal violence that resemble episodes of ethnic cleansing.

Whether utilized by farmers in the Sahel or apartheid revivalists in South Africa, the privatization of security has made one thing clear: When African states’ monopolies on legitimate force are broken, the fragments do not scatter among the population equally. Instead, they accrue to the wealthiest members of society, creating a dual system in which those who can afford to purchase security victimize those who cannot. This process then invites the poor and

marginalized to respond with bursts of rifle fire.

To silence hired guns, weakened African nations must reclaim their monopolies on legitimate force. This means investigating army enlistment rolls to identify and eliminate fake soldiers and expanding training and incentives for native police forces. Efforts must also include corruption reduction initiatives aimed at all levels of military readiness—from expanded recruiting to troop retention and increased oversight of troop salaries. When national militaries and law enforcement have the strength to ward off external invaders and internal malcontents, citizens will be able to feel secure without private militaries.

While these solutions would shift the balance of force in a public direction, they would not disincentivize African governments from obtaining the services of PMSCs. Here, wealthier states have a role to play. African governments that mortgage their mines to PMSCs do so because there are no other viable options that allow them to address internal threats. Instead of conditioning foreign aid or development assistance on the immediate dissolution of solidified autocracies, wealthy governments interested in curtailing the rise of PMSCs should collaborate with African governments as they currently exist to build public economic capacity.

Strong societies do not tear themselves apart. For Africa to rid itself of the PMSC plague, communities need concrete—not a mixture of cement, sand, and rock, but a fortified combination of empowered government, functioning security, and national unity.

THE GAMES ISSUE

23

SPECIAL Wheel of Misfortune

by Evan Tao

Ego Moves First

by Ariella Reynolds

What Racial Undertones?

by Chiupong Huang

GAM

FEATURE

MES

Landing on Green

by Neve Diaz-Carr

Ctrl + Alt + Enlist

by David Pinto

THE GAMES ISSUE

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BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

WHEEL OF MISFORTUNE How gambling has become a losing game for the Asian immigrant community

BY EVAN TAO (淘敬仁) ’27, AN INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS CONCENTRATOR AND STAFF WRITER FOR BPR ILLUSTRATIONS BY CARA WANG ’24, AN ILLUSTRATION MAJOR AT RISD

ISSUE 01

Walking into a casino in the United States, you might feel like you have entered Macau rather than Las Vegas. Around the floor are games like Baccarat, Sic Bo, and Pai Gow poker. Hong Kong pop stars perform concerts. Dim sum is served at restaurants with names such as “Red 8” and “Mystique.” And, accordingly, a sizable proportion of patrons are Asian. These are not high-rollers from abroad but rather immigrants largely living on poverty wages. They are often attracted by advertisements in Chinese newspapers and posters in majority-Asian neighborhoods—communities where casinos strategically send free shuttle buses to pick up customers who do not own cars and hand out free vouchers with the ride.

These are intentional marketing choices by casinos to court Asian immigrant customers—a demographic already at high risk for developing a gambling addiction. Selective advertising, easy access, and other social characteristics constitute a slew of risk factors for Asian Americans. While there are no comprehensive statistics on gambling addiction by ethnicity, studies show Asian immigrants experience gambling disorders at rates ranging from 6 to 60 percent, depending on their nationality. Comparatively, the national average is 1 to 2 percent. The evidence shows that Asian American gambling addiction is an intergenerational public health crisis driven by the casinos that profit from it. Regulating the gambling industry’s marketing practices and investing in immigrant communities is necessary to ameliorate the issue.

While many East and Southeast Asian cultures have long traditions of wagering on games, addiction issues cannot be fully attributed to culture. Studies show that rates of participation in gambling and rates of addiction are higher among Asian immigrants in

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Western countries than in Asia and that “moving to an environment with more gambling opportunities seems to increase disordered gambling in the Asian population.” Moreover, some researchers argue that pointing to cultural stereotypes to explain addiction is racist and downplays the root causes of the problem.

So, why is gambling addiction so prevalent among Asian immigrants? Some advocates say that addicts gamble to pursue dreams of escaping poverty. Others add that the casino can act as a social refuge in an unfamiliar world. Interviewees in Boston, for example, shared that their neighborhoods lack many familiar or linguistically accessible entertainment options. When Asian workers want to decompress after long shifts, casinos offer both—as well as a sense of community. Understanding this helps explain why online gambling is less popular among Asian Americans than casino gambling. The desire for belonging can only be satisfied by an in-person venue, which casinos are more than happy to provide.

Another consideration is casinos’ targeted marketing tactics, which they have hardly tried to hide. Ernie Wu, the director of Asian marketing at Foxwoods Casino, explained that he views marketing to Asians as a positive way of satisfying culturally specific cravings:

“THE DESIRE FOR BELONGING CAN ONLY BE SATISFIED

BY AN IN-PERSON VENUE, WHICH CASINOS ARE MORE THAN HAPPY TO PROVIDE.”

“Our Asian blood loves to feel the luck,” Wu said. “We call it entertainment; we don’t say it’s ‘gambling.’” Anthony Patrone, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun Casino, shared in a 2007 interview that 25 percent of the casino’s table game revenue came from Asian Americans—a customer base that had

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BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

grown 45 percent in the two years prior. At the time, 48 buses brought customers from majority-Asian neighborhoods to the Mohegan Sun every day. As Patrone put it, “It is easy to spend capital on a fastgrowing market.”

However, this spending has difficult consequences for gamblers and their families. One study found that young Chinese Americans were twice as likely as white students to report concern about their parents’ gambling. In interviews, Asian immigrants described experiencing marital and family strife, domestic violence, poverty, debt, homelessness, and depression as a result of gambling addiction.

Unfortunately, Asian Americans are also nationally the ethnic group least likely to use mental health services.

Immigrants who suffer from gambling addiction may also pass it on to their children. Studies show that young, educated Asian Americans suffer disproportionately from gambling disorders.

Although Asian American college students are equally or less likely than white students to participate in gambling, among those who do, Asian students are more likely to become addicted to gambling.

To find solutions to this public health crisis, we can look to history. Today’s casinos are drawing from another harmful industry’s playbook—that of Big Tobacco. Companies like Phillip Morris also used targeted advertising, easy access, and free samples to sell an addictive product to a vulnerable market: children. In 1998, the largest civil litigation settlement in US history placed broad limits on cigarette advertising. Lawyers and government advocates should similarly leverage public health concerns against casinos.

Legislation is another potential route to addressing exploitative marketing. The Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, introduced in 2022 by congressional Democrats, would prevent advertisers from targeting ads to customers based on their membership in a protected class, like race or gender. If this bill passes, it may provide an opportunity for litigants to argue that casino advertisements unlawfully target Asian customers based on their race. The posters written in Mandarin and plastered over Chinatown advertising free bus rides and casino vouchers could ride alongside the Marlboro cowboys into the sunset.

As beneficial as this policy could be, curbing exploitative industries’ marketing tactics will not solve the cultural alienation, language barriers, and lack of communal entertainment options with which many Asian Americans struggle. Fortunately, many community and nonprofit initiatives are working to address these problems.

In Boston, there is the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center and VietAid; in San Francisco, the NICOS Chinese Health Coalition; and in Ohio, the Asian Gambling Prevention Project. Groups such as these are on the front lines of providing education and intervention on gambling addiction, helping immigrants acclimate to life in America, and advocating for government agencies to reinvest in immigrant neighborhoods. As these organizations know, so long as Asian American neighborhoods remain bereft of healthy and accessible amenities, the American Dream will remain as elusive to at-risk immigrants as the million-dollar jackpot.

ISSUE 01

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THE GAMES ISSUE

How the game of chess has shifted from geopolitics to egopolitics

BY ARIELLA REYNOLDS ’27, A BEHAVIORAL DECISION SCIENCES CONCENTRATOR AND STAFF WRITER FOR BPR

EGO MOV

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRISTINE WANG ’24, A GRAPHIC DESIGN MAJOR AT RISD AND CREATIVE DIRECTOR FOR BPR

Fifty-five decibels. That is as loud as the room got when American chess wunderkind Bobby Fischer took on the Soviet chess machine Boris Spassky on July 11, 1972 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Officials began monitoring the hall’s sound levels when Fischer threatened to walk out of the “match of the century” if they did not remove all cameras— with a match this important, there was no room for error. Fischer argued that the cameras were noisy and contained mind-controlling devices aimed at disrupting his play. As ludicrous as this claim may seem now, it was not an unreasonable accusation given the backdrop of high-stakes US-Soviet geopolitical tensions. As the Cold War thawed toward détente, chess became an outlet for competition between the Soviet Union and United States.

Fischer’s claims made clear that these games were not so much about the individual players but about the flags they bore: Spassky and Fischer were nothing more than pawns in a geopolitical battle, and they were acutely aware of it. Fischer took the championship.

Though he refused a ticker-tape parade and the key to his native New York City, he was rewarded with a City Hall reception. He also earned the admiration of millions of Americans who swept into hobby shops in droves to buy up chessboards.

Fast-forward 50 years, the geopolitical chessboard has shifted seismically—along with the game itself. While players still pore over Sicilian Defenses and Queen’s Gambits, a new crop of masters has taken center stage, and they do not operate like Spassky and Fischer.

They are 20-something-year-old YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and TikTokers—who also happen to be 2,000+ rated chess experts. Their social media virality, and thus their success, is predicated as much on their personalities as it is on their chess proficiency. These players, and the media they publish, have democratized chess, throwing off its yoke of nationalism. Playing everyone from relative newbies in Kiruna, Sweden to the infamous hustlers in New York City’s Union Square, Gen Z chess masters have literally changed the game. By taking chess out of stuffy hotel halls and meeting people where they are—in public parks, on the streets, or in digital arenas—this generation is creating new openings for anyone, anywhere to play.

When Anna Cramling sits down on the grass just outside the Eiffel Tower, mounts a chessboard on a cardboard box, and holds up a sign offering 20 euros to anyone who can beat her, she is not

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ES FIRST

staging the match of the century. But she will get views—a million of them on YouTube alone. Three opponents take her up on her offer. One is a local fan of her videos, another is a novice tourist from Iowa. Although all three face a swift defeat, they know that the opportunity to play a top-ranked player is itself a coup. But the fact that a million viewers clicked on a thumbnail to find out how Cramling checkmated them all—that is a cultural phenomenon. And a game open to anyone, anywhere—watched potentially by everyone, everywhere—has no need for national champions.

This new world order of chess may seem like game-over for traditional, in-person competition. Shedding their national hero capes, even old-school grandmasters such as Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, and Anish Giri are building a social media presence.

They now Twitch stream and post YouTube videos of in-person and digital matches against the likes of Cramling. If state affiliation is losing significance for players and fans at the center of institutional competitive chess, then perhaps what appears to be a radical break from old-school chess is not radical at all. Could it be more evolutionary than revolutionary? The rules remain unchanged from their origins in the 16th century: a zero-sum game between two people, moving with the intention to win, where sacrifices often serve the greater good. Black versus white. And this lends itself to the theater of heroism: Any pawn can become a powerful queen, and any king can fall.

This novel stage is just as suited to content creators angling for a monetizable, girl-beats-world narrative arc as it is to nation-states looking to strut their superiority. One of Cramling’s most-viewed videos features the young, blonde Swede taking on trash-talking men who call her “darling” and tell her she’s “too easy” and that they “have to let [her] win.” Of course, most do not even stand a

“THIS NOVEL STAGE IS

JUST AS SUITED TO CONTENT CREATORS ANGLING FOR A MONETIZABLE, GIRLBEATS-WORLD NARRATIVE ARC AS IT IS TO NATION-STATES LOOKING TO STRUT THEIR SUPERIORITY.”

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chance: She is too good. With two grandmaster parents and a 2,100+ Elo rating herself, she gives her audience something to celebrate: a young woman with no nationalist ax to grind, checkmating her way to triumphs of girlboss good over evil. Even when Cramling plays Magnus Carlsen, she holds her own for six minutes, getting the typically reserved current World Chess Champion to sacrifice a compliment: “You’re doing a little too well for my liking.” With over 10 million views and 9,100 comments (on the Carlsen video alone), audience members have a clear message for Cramling: She is their hero.

Chess is consummately mythopoetic, providing the game board on which heroic geopolitical and sociocultural battles alike could be structured and played out within their respective spaces and times.

But as much as these narratives may share a common lineage, something is different. In the domain of the digital native where anyone can play, anyone can win, anyone can get a rating (via Chess.com), and any game can be broadcast to millions of people who can watch it anywhere, the center cannot hold. For this reason alone, content displaces country as country decouples from competition.

The geopolitical becomes the egopolitical as content becomes the new king. The era of patriots gathering around the flagpole to support their country and national chess hero may be eroding fast in favor of a new era of fans, followers, and subscribers from around the world, all eager to know what their favorite content creator is up to next. Whereas chess as geopolitical sport relied on a fan base grounded in national identity, chess as egopolitical sport is unrestricted: Fans can be found anywhere and can find cultural affinity in their love both of the game and the content creator telling a story about it.

The evolution of chess is certainly not the first cultural phenomenon to test the permeability of national borders, and it will not be the last. Widely considered the “great equalizer,” technology is accelerating globalization and paving the way for people everywhere—regardless of country of origin—to contribute to the global culture and economy. But if the evolution of chess has anything new to say about globalization, it might be this: What breaks down geopolitical barriers and binds us together is neither the win nor the loss, or even how we play the game, but the stories we tell as we play. Chess may well be teaching us that, as citizens of a globalizing world, we have more in common than we know; and while that might mean a checkmate for Fischer-Spassky-style rivalry, chess is now a better game for all of us.

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“WHEREAS CHESS AS

GEOPOLITICAL SPORT RELIED ON A FAN BASE GROUNDED IN NATIONAL IDENTITY, CHESS AS EGOPOLITICAL SPORT IS UNRESTRICTED: FANS CAN BE FOUND ANYWHERE AND CAN FIND CULTURAL AFFINITY IN THEIR LOVE BOTH OF THE GAME AND THE CONTENT CREATOR TELLING A STORY ABOUT IT.”

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WHAT RACIAL UNDERTONES?

The UFC should pull no punches to defeat prejudice in the sport

BY CHIUPONG HUANG ’27, A STAFF WRITER FOR BPR

ILLUSTRATION BY KYLA DANG ’24, AN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN MAJOR AT RISD

Before Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) competitor Driscus Du Plessis, a white Afrikaner, knocked out former Champion Robert Whittaker, he declared that he would be the “first real African champion, born, bred, and raised in Africa.” Immediately following the fight, then-reigning Middleweight Champion Israel Adesanya, a Black Nigerian, was ushered into the cage. In front of a sold-out stadium of 19,204 fans, Adesanya confronted Du Plessis, shouting, “Yeah my African brother, let’s go n—, let’s go n—.”

This grandstanded racial quarrel was not an unprecedented shock for the UFC. The company implicitly encourages such moments by repackaging them into clippable promotional materials. When a reporter asked about the potential “racial undertones” of the Du Plessis-Adesanya spat, UFC President and CEO Dana White shut down the question, saying, “What were the racial undertones? … Who gives a shit … this is the fight business.”

Presenting this episode between Adesanya and Du Plessis as standard UFC fare to a vast international audience exemplifies the sport’s culture of not only tolerating but also profiting from expressions of racial conflict, homophobia, misogyny, and bigotry. A clip of the interaction between Adesanya and Du Plessis has garnered over two million views on YouTube; had the fight been made, the exchange would have been effortlessly turned into the UFC’s promotional storyline. Being a bubble for fringe, manosphere-esque intolerance has become the UFC’s cultural signature—even as the company becomes increasingly mainstream and globalized.

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The UFC is unique as a $12 billion sporting franchise that allows for occurrences like a fighter calling crowd members homophobic slurs to go without official reprimand. In another incident, a fighter asked his upcoming Nigerian opponent if he had gotten “smoke signals” from “his tribe.” When Dana White was asked about the exchange, he proclaimed that he would not “muzzle anybody.” In contrast, the NBA abides by a “zero-tolerance” policy for hateful fan behavior, and four Ligue 1 soccer players were recently given suspensions after participating in homophobic stadium chants.

The UFC, with its informal “no muzzle” policy and intentionally inflammatory promotional tactics, presents itself as an anti-woke haven from the mores of cancel culture.

These patterns of platforming hate are allowing mixed martial arts (MMA) to become a vehicle for bigotry outside of the fighting cage. Across Europe, neo-Nazi groups have taken advantage of the MMA community to extend their reach from the cultural margins into the mainstream. Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov is known for being photographed with UFC fighters and hosting them at his gym as part of his upbeat public image, which obscures human rights offenses like his persecution of LGBTQ+ Chechens.

The meteoric growth of the UFC is taking these harmful ideologies along for the ride, exposing a growing constituency of younger male fans to sentiments like Middleweight Champion Sean Strickland proclaiming, “We need to go back to taking women out of the workforce.” For young men, sports and sanctioned violence often provide a sense of recognition, community, and a destructive brand of masculinity closely connected to violence and physicality. When newer audiences are drawn into the UFC fandom, they are inevitably exposed to a space where far-right, misogynistic ideas freely circulate. For instance, many UFC fans openly cheered at fighter Dillon Danis’ relentless harassment of Logan Paul’s fiancée Nina Agdal, including his posting of explicit photos of Agdal.

Formal written policy cannot void toxic social norms. For MMA to thrive as a sport, the UFC must progress to a consistent standard where the most explicit examples of hatred or injustice are met with both the informal punishment of community outrage and formal reprimand from the organization—whether that be in the form of fines, suspension, or expulsion.

Although the UFC is far from having laid the needed cultural groundwork, the company ought to imitate other sporting bodies that are at least progressing toward standards of accountability and cultures of recognizing injustice. One can look to the case of former Royal Spanish Football Federation President Luis Rubiales, who was barred by FIFA and drowned in international condemnation after forcibly kissing a female player. Rubiales ultimately stepped down.

Such lines of unacceptability are desperately needed in the UFC. The appeal of the sport ought to be the chance to see world-class striking, grappling, and wrestling, not displays of unpunished vitriol repackaged as entertainment.

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LANDING ON GREEN Navigating the immigration visa roulette

BY NEVE DIAZ-CARR ’26, A POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCENTRATOR AND SENIOR STAFF WRITER FOR BPR ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMMIE WU ’24, AN ILLUSTRATION MAJOR AT RISD

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This year, 54,000 immigrant visa recipients in the United States got here by winning a game. They took a seat at the table, placed their bets, and got the luck of the draw. They won the diversity visa lottery.

Every year, more than 11 million people send in an application to the Department of State’s visa lottery, all of them from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. The no-cost application is open to all persons from eligible countries with a high school diploma or two years of trained work experience. Fifty thousand of the millions of applicants are then allotted a permanent residency card at random. The intention of this game is admirable: It aims to ensure that 5 percent of the green cards offered annually by the US government go to immigrants otherwise lacking a pathway to the United States. However, its results are far less impressive, revealing many of the systemic issues within the broader US immigration system and leaving much to be desired from our immigration processes.

Irish Americans in Congress first introduced the diversity lottery in 1990 to create a pathway for Irish and Italian families to immigrate to the United States without restrictions. Forty percent of visas in the diversity lottery’s first three years went to Irish nationals. Now, most applicants are from Africa and Eastern Europe. Since the lottery’s creation, the organizational problems of the US immigration bureaucracy, which were exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, have become increasingly hard to ignore. The application process— fraught with issues that prevent applicants from obtaining green cards—highlights the backlogged and confusing nature of the US immigration system at large.

The first obstacle faced by applicants is the existence of websites impersonating the Department of State, hoping to swindle people out of their money by getting them to apply to a fake diversity lottery. These scams are more prevalent for the visa lottery than any other pathway to US immigration, complicating the unfair and often mystifying nature of the process. Meanwhile, the lucky few who do happen to win the lottery are asked to navigate through bureaucratic red tape before receiving their green cards. They must pass a background check by scheduling an interview at their local US embassy, but the severe shortage of available appointments makes it so that many applicants are unable to schedule an appointment before the fiscal year expires and they lose their green card. For the applicants with the most at stake, this process is often harder; embassies are more likely to be backlogged in conflict-prone, under-resourced countries—if they are open at all. In effect, even applicants who beat the next-to-impossible odds and win the roulette often don't get their prize.

The game-like nature of the diversity lottery makes immigration to the United States seem like a randomized and juvenile event rather than a sophisticated process dedicated to providing opportunities to immigrants from countries with low immigration rates. By randomizing acceptees without accounting for their humanitarian or economic conditions, this pathway to US residency eerily resembles a game of chance with nearly impossible odds. But this is no simple $5 buy-in: Human lives are at stake, threatened by political and economic stagnation. The resources and time spent to conduct the

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lottery would be better allocated toward immigration programs that take into account the harsh humanitarian and economic realities of today’s world and function in an efficient and comprehensible way.

In the past few years, many people have called for the dissolution of the diversity lottery, with some using arguments similar to mine. Others, including former President Donald Trump, employ very different rhetoric. Following a 2017 terror attack perpetrated by a diversity visa recipient, Trump openly condemned the lottery system. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he temporarily halted the diversity visa lottery along with other immigration services. Trump justified this move with baseless xenophobia, calling for a decrease in the volume of non-European immigration to the United States.

Many take a more pragmatic approach, arguing that the diversity lottery has a negligible effect on total immigration numbers and that, with the United States issuing and renewing up to one million visas a year, its resources should be used to make improvements to more common US immigration processes. Overall, the consensus across the political spectrum is that the current model is a waste of resources and must be overhauled.

Policymakers should look toward our northern neighbor, known around the world for its advantageous and incredibly efficient immigration services. The Canadian model employs a merit-based points system for its express entry applicants. Potential migrants are given points based on numerous qualifying criteria, including language skills, education, work experience, age, and the more nuanced category of “adaptability.”

Applicants who score higher than 67 out of 100 points become eligible to submit an application. Forty-five thousand of those who meet this threshold are offered immediate permanent residency based on their likelihood of financial success. The overwhelming majority of them are already temporary residents of Canada, with the others primarily coming from Nigeria and Cameroon. The processing time for this application is, on average, 60 days—just one example of the Canadian immigration bureaucracy’s efficiency.

While the express entry pathway is primarily concerned with economic immigration to stimulate growth, Canada has a host of

“BY RANDOMIZING ACCEPTEES

WITHOUT ACCOUNTING FOR THEIR HUMANITARIAN OR ECONOMIC CONDITIONS, THIS PATHWAY TO US RESIDENCY EERILY RESEMBLES A GAME OF CHANCE WITH NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE ODDS.”

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other programs resettling humanitarian refugees that repeatedly land it high up on the list of nations letting in the most refugees each year. The total volume of immigration to Canada is tremendous; immigrants comprise almost half of the population in many Canadian cities, and a huge share of the country’s elected members of Parliament are born in other countries. It is predicted that by 2041, Canada will be an “ethnocultural mosaic,” with one-third of the country’s population being immigrants.

The point is not for US policymakers to replicate the specific criteria of the Canadian express entry program, but rather to learn from Canada’s ability to efficiently evaluate and consider the respective backgrounds of individuals applying for residency. To do this, the diversity visa lottery must be eliminated. To better prioritize diverse visa applicants, permanent residency cards must be adjudicated not only to high-skilled “meritorious” workers, like in the Canadian model, but also to low-skilled workers. In order to thoughtfully build a diverse immigrant population, the Department of State bureaucracy should develop clear quotas for the skill levels and origin countries of its green card recipients and adjudicate accordingly.

Congress needs to increase funding to the Department of State to resolve the incredible backlog caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and reduce processing times, as it did for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act. Yes, to “increase efficiency and shorten wait times,” but really to humanize the experiences of those seeking refuge in our state, especially asylees. Efforts to streamline low-skill economic migration would facilitate legal immigration, achieve the lottery’s original goal of creating opportunity for otherwise unlikely immigrants, and stimulate the US economy.

American politicians and bureaucrats should not reduce the word “diversity” to a helpful push for specific policy priorities. Diversity should be a guiding light for immigration processes that prioritize the cultural, ethnic, religious, and economic variables of people around the globe. With a more comprehensive and human-centered pathway to permanent residency that processes immigrants intentionally, efficiently, and respectfully, we may begin to reshape how immigration is understood in this country.

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THE GAMES ISSUE

How video games became the Pentagon’s secret weapon

BY DAVID PINTO ’24, A HISTORY AND MODERN CULTURE & MEDIA CONCENTRATOR ILLUSTRATIONS BY SU YUN SONG ’24, AN ILLUSTRATION MAJOR AT RISD

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For the US military, recruitment starts in the living room. Video game franchises like Call of Duty and Halo introduce a fun, romanticized, and low-stakes version of warfare to millions of American teens—mostly young men and boys. Gameplay focuses almost exclusively on the tactics and tools of war, brushing aside the less entertaining ethical dilemmas and psychological costs. This distortion has palpable effects; a 2008 MIT study revealed that 30 percent of Americans aged 16 to 24 held a more favorable view of the military because of the state-sponsored game America’s Army (2002). This was no accident—the Pentagon has a strong hand in contemporary video game development.

From chess to Call of Duty, games have long been a safe outlet for our most bellicose instincts: hoarding resources, conquering territory, and competing with enemies. In recent decades, video games have found new ways of scratching that primal itch. Today’s young gamers are immersed in an interactive, multisensory virtual world.

At a tender age, their minds are flooded by complex and addictive

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algorithms with the power to influence emotions, behaviors, and ideas. If, as studies suggest, first-person shooter (FPS) games can make players more militaristic in outlook, then it’s no wonder they have become a major tool in the arsenal of the US military.

Since World War II, the US military has cultivated a close relationship with the entertainment industry in an arrangement dubbed the “military-entertainment complex.” In 1942, the Office of War Information began purging scripts of “anti-war” material while collaborating with studios like Disney to produce educational, often propagandistic content. Over the next few decades, the Department of Defense (DoD) began to provide “production assistance” on a number of entertainment titles each year. For film and TV studios, ceding some narrative control to the military can accord major advantages, such as access to extremely advanced equipment.

From lending F-35 fighter jets to major film studios to reviewing and revising scripts, the Pentagon has thus ensured authentic (read: flattering) portrayals of the armed forces in numerous Hollywood blockbusters. With the original Top Gun (1986), for instance, the DoD saw an opportunity to rehabilitate the US Navy’s image post-Vietnam.

Death-defying stunts, awe-inspiring fighter jets, and action stars like Tom Cruise contributed to an 8 percent boost in Navy recruitment. Thirty-six years later, the DoD repeated the trick with Top Gun: Maverick, co-scripting the second highest grossing film of 2022.

The story is much the same in the gaming world, where the military-entertainment complex has found new form. The aforementioned America’s Army was an early and successful government attempt at game development, designed to recruit soldiers for the nascent War on Terror and influence popular perceptions of the Army. The military has since collaborated with AAA production companies in an advisory role, consulting on popular FPS games like Black Ops II (2012) and Six Days in Fallujah (2023). On such games, military personnel advised designers on how to make combat gameplay more realistic.

Surprisingly, this advisory relationship goes both ways; in 2014, Pentagon officials approached Dave Anthony, a former writer and producer for the Call of Duty franchise. Impressed by the “realism and authenticity” of his game, they invited him to Washington to join a panel of experts on modern warfare. Anthony was later named a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, advising the government on how to predict and conceive of future national security threats.

Today, games don’t merely mimic war, they shape our perception of it—even at the highest levels of government.

Even though the military has had a strong hand in crafting the way Americans view war, the US Army is now facing a grave recruitment problem. In the last two years, America’s primary land force has shrunk by around 7 percent, as the pool of recruits reaches “crisis levels.” Dwindling enlistment numbers have underscored the necessity for novel, innovative modes of recruitment. For Army recruiters, video games present an opportunity to target introverts in the comfort of their own homes—a place beyond the reach of traditional recruiting channels. Soldiers in the Army’s esports team are assigned a unit and compete full-time to make “soldiers more visible

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“TODAY, GAMES DON’T MERELY MIMIC WAR, THEY SHAPE OUR PERCEPTION OF IT.” and relatable to today’s youth.” Last year, Vice reported that the Army had allocated millions to sponsor a variety of esports tournaments, popular streamers, and Twitch events, with the aim of reaching a Gen Z audience. With laser-like precision, the military is now using social media tools to target their advertising at favored demographics.

These newer recruitment methods have met resistance and controversy. During a US Army esports stream in 2020, one Twitch user caused a stir by commenting “What’s your favorite u.s. w4r cr1me?”—using numbers to prevent triggering the word restrictions imposed by the Army—along with a link to the Wikipedia article on US war crimes. He was quickly banned from the chat in an act some have equated with government censorship. The incident attracted national attention when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) put forward legislation to prevent the Army from using Twitch to recruit. “Children as young as 13 and oftentimes as young as 12 are targeted for recruitment forms that can be filled online,” she claimed in a speech to the House. The amendment was rejected, but reflected both grassroots and institutional opposition to the Army’s newer recruitment methods. Ultimately, the Army was forced to retreat from Twitch.

Once soldiers have been recruited, the final stage of video game militarization begins: training. In September 2023, the Air Force launched an esports tournament with the directive to help airmen “better understand mission logistics choices and prioritization while under attack.” 3D simulations are nothing new for the military, but they are now ubiquitous. And why wouldn’t they be? Video games have been shown to improve reaction time, hand-eye coordination, teamwork, communication, problem-solving, and many other skills.

Moreover, they are a cost-effective and low-risk activity, which can meaningfully supplement (but not replace) combat training. On a psychological level, however, video games have much the same effect on soldiers as they do on teens—desensitizing them to violence and leaving them ill-equipped for the real burdens of war.

Do wars shape video games, or do video games shape wars?

With the advent of immersive and realistic gaming experiences, the line is blurred. Game designers do policy work for think tanks in Washington, while generals supervise film sets in Hollywood.

Video games are being used as PR, recruitment, and training tools for a new crop of Gen Z soldiers. What’s more, game mechanics are permeating the front lines, redefining the modern battlefield.

American soldiers pilot Predator drones with Xbox controllers, while every day in Ukraine, unmanned weapons accelerate our troubling march toward autonomous warfare. What happens when war and game become indistinguishable? We now seem destined for a world in which buttons replace guns, and pixels replace people.

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UNITED STATES

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Underregulation, Miseducation States must expand protections for homeschooled chilcren

by Sophie Forstner ’24, a Political Science and Education Studies concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Sophie Spagna ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

Since October 2021, a couple based in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, has actively helped their homeschooling network raise children to “become wonderful Nazis.” They have openly provided thousands of families with lesson plans and other teaching resources infused with Hitler quotes and homophobic, racist, and antisemitic slurs. In February, the leaders of this NeoNazi “Dissident Homeschool Network” were unmasked as Logan and Katja Lawrence. In response to public outrage, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) began an investigation into the operation. A week later, the ODE released a statement concluding its investigation and saying that there was nothing to be done, as this homeschool network meets state standards and complies with Ohio’s new homeschooling law.

Without oversight, the homeschooling system leaves children vulnerable to indoctrination, abuse, and neglect. The United States needs to follow the lead of other nations and advocacy organizations by passing child-centric homeschooling reforms. Questions of who gets a seat at the table in writing these reforms should be decided based on who has the interests of young students, not the power of God, on their side.

Homeschooling systems in many states are already dangerously underregulated. The states with the least restrictive laws, which include Alaska, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Texas, often do not even require families to notify their state or district of their intent to homeschool. Now, a recent surge in deregulation is only making matters worse.

The Ohio legislature recently rolled back its already minimal standards for homeschoolers, including the requirements that home teachers have high school diplomas and submit progress reports on their children’s learning. Now, the state only requires parents to send in a curriculum plan and sign a form affirming that they will teach their children for 900 hours each year.

There is no mechanism for the state to monitor students’ progress or receive any updates throughout the year. Craig Hockenberry, the superintendent of the Poland School District in Ohio, expressed concern over these changes, stating, “There are some kids that may not be progressing properly, may not be learning to read and write very well, need social interactions, mental health support, medical support, and we no longer can evaluate that or deliver any service to them at all.”

Under Ohio’s new system, the Lawrences’ homeschool network is not only legal but also may soon receive taxpayer money. The Ohio legislature has introduced a “Backpack Bill” that provides state funding for students to attend private schools or to be homeschooled. If this $1.13 billion bill passes, the Lawrences could be paid $22,000 a year to teach their kids. At least eight other states have passed similar laws.

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), a Christian advocacy organization that “work[s] with legislators to craft homeschool-friendly laws” and “help government officials stay in compliance with those laws,” has taken the lead in lobbying for many of the recent policy rollbacks. The organization believes that THE GAMES ISSUE

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“Questions of who gets a seat at the table in writing these reforms should be decided based on who has the interests of young students, not the power of God, on their side.”

“God has given all parents—no matter their religious beliefs or form of spirituality—the right and the responsibility to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

The HSLDA’s political wins not only affect the content that homeschooled students are absorbing but also their safety and well-being. Teachers are the primary reporters of abused children, so keeping young students out of schools may close off a path to safety. Currently, only Pennsylvania and Arkansas provide protections for at-risk children. Pennsylvania prohibits families from homeschooling their children if any adult in the house has been convicted of certain crimes in the past five years, while Arkansas law stipulates that families cannot homeschool their children if there is a registered sex offender living in the house. The other 48 states do nothing to protect homeschooled children from abuse.

This is particularly alarming in light of a 2018 report released in Connecticut, which examined six school districts across three years and found that 36 percent of homeschooling families had been reported for suspected child abuse or neglect at least once to the Department of Children and Families.

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That being said, not all hope is lost; although not as successful as the HSLDA, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) is making strides in protecting children’s education and safety, advocating for “child-centered, evidence-based policy and practices for families and professionals.” The group has won several small victories, such as persuading North Dakota to pass a law in 2023 that required homeschooled students with learning disabilities to receive formal assessments. In addition, the CRHE’s child-centered policy recommendations provide states with a starting point for creating a homeschooling system that supports children, rather than harming them. Suggested regulations include protections for at-risk children, such as the creation of a flagging system, an annual assessment of children by mandatory reporters, and a prohibition on parents convicted of child abuse or sexual offenses from homeschooling their children.

Homeschooling can be a very beneficial choice for some learners, but in order to prevent disastrous outcomes, there must be oversight and accountability. Instead of caving to the demands of HSLDA like Ohio did, states

should enact more homeschooling regulations.

New York could serve as one potential model.

The state requires that home teachers submit an annual instruction plan for their students, which must include material on subjects such as math and language arts. It also mandates that students reach certain standardized testing benchmarks.

States can also follow the example of other countries. In Canada, each province determines its own homeschooling policies, but all provide regulation and oversight. For example, Quebec requires families to notify the Minister of Education and school board of their intent to homeschool each July, submit an outline of their student’s learning project for approval, submit mid-term reports on their student’s learning progress with proof of some form of evaluation, attend a monitoring meeting with a representative of the Minister of Education that must be attended by their child, and submit a year-end report with proof of the child’s completion of their learning project. Similar reforms must be implemented in each US state until all state systems are properly regulated. Currently, even states that require notification or hometeacher education often completely lack accountability throughout the school year. The most important reform for states to adopt is the monitoring meeting, as Quebec does. State officials must periodically check in on homeschooled children to protect them from abuse and ensure that they are receiving a quality education.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, homeschooling’s popularity has increased significantly, with rates rising by about 30 percent since 2019. To protect young learners, we need more, not less, oversight. Without proper safeguards in place, we certainly should not provide monetary incentives that enable a broken system.

INTERVIEW

RETHINKING THE HISTORY OF THE FREE MARKET An Interview with Jacob Soll

Interview by Emma Stroupe ’25 Illustration by Alexandra Zeigler ’24

Emma Stroupe: What inspired your book, The Free Market: A History of an Idea?

Jacob Soll: There’s this idea in economics called general equilibrium, by which the market corrects itself. It’s very utopian and I don’t see any political examples of it working.

Before 1850, economic thinkers used the words “free market,” and every single state was developing itself. I found myself thinking that this is just not the story we’ve been told. The bad guy in this whole story is Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who’s supposed to be the anti-free market guy.

I found him to be the precursor to 19th-century American, and 18th- and 19th-century German, Japanese, and Chinese economic policies. And that just made me stop and think.

ES: How do you think we got to a point where it’s Adam Smith that gets taught as the foundation of modern economic ideas?

JS: If you read Smith, he doesn’t make a lot of sense for a modern economy. He is writing economic thought for agrarian landholders in Scotland who are trying to modernize their farms. He called artisans, merchants, and manufacturers “the unproductive class.”

Colbert represents an absolutist government.

Colbert also said something that really upset Smith: Manufacturing was the most important thing for an economy, not farming. Colbert becomes the poster child for what we call mercantilism today. This myth begins when agrarian lords, who say they’re for free markets, want no taxes on landowners. These lords believed free markets were for farms and that anything

Jacob Soll is a professor of History and Accounting at the University of Southern California. He has published several books including The Information Master and The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations. His most recent book, Free Market: The History of an Idea, examines the emergence of the idea of free markets from a historical perspective and offers new insight into how mythology surrounding free markets and general equilibrium has emerged. Professor Soll has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and frequently contributes to publications such as the New York Times and Politico. having to do with industry should involve the state, which is more or less true.

I think the Smith mythology begins in the 1930s. American companies pushed really hard to build up Smith and a sort of mythical idea of free market thought. At this point in time, corporations were really scared about communism and FDR. They started creating think tanks and these myths that become really powerful. If you want to know why we have so much economic trouble and things don’t work out the way we think, maybe it’s because they’re teaching all of this stuff upside down and backward.

ES: As a historian, how do you think that the anti-government narrative came to be, given that at the beginning of free market thought the state was said to be crucial?

JS: Many people want the government to stay out of the economy until the government has to bail them out. As the state gets bigger in the 18th century and corporations get more powerful, the idea that you can have an economy without state involvement becomes a kind of fantasy that I would say is perpetuated after World War II. But can you find me an example of a major successful industrial economy without massive government involvement? In the 2008 crisis, there wasn’t any state that didn’t intervene. Just like with Covid-19, there wasn’t one industrialized nation that didn’t go in and pump huge amounts of money into its economy. Without that, there would’ve been a world collapse.

The reality is we have these public-private partnerships. You have companies created by people, but they rely on infrastructure, they rely

on education, they rely on all sorts of subsidies, whether it be Amazon relying on the Postal Service, or whether it be Walmart relying on Medicare. Now in lots of other countries, you can say, “I want less state,” but no one says “no state.”

“No state” is an American kind of mythology.

ES: With the emergence of new markets like cryptocurrency or climate technology, why is it important to understand these historical perspectives and the historical trajectory of economics?

JS: We’re dealing with these myths that keep making us crash into the wall. Economists try to create universal mechanisms. Turns out some mechanisms are universal, but many are just historical or cultural. People are making policy off of these economic ideas and myths. There’s not a lot of discussion in the economics world of how completely disassociated they are from reality.

That goes for the left and the right. To separate history from economics is madness, and yet, that’s what we do. An economist who actually knows history is a rare and important thing.

Where a historian works with the idea that we’re seeing the parameters of what we don’t know and cannot know, the economist gives us these hard answers, which are often proven wrong really quickly afterward, and yet their credibility is untouched. The way we think about credibility needs to be revisited, starting with Smith.

Edited for length and clarity.

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Toeing the (Picket) Line The UAW needs to better navigate the job loss the EV transition is likely to cause

by Steve Robinson ’26, an International and Public Affairs concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR illustration by Ashley Nguyen ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

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Amid the ongoing United Auto Workers (UAW) union strike at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, one might expect the political conversation to polarize along pro-labor and pro-management lines. Some prominent Republicans have been predictably anti-union. Presidential candidate Nikki Haley, for example, proudly labeled herself a “union buster.” Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), when asked how he would address the strike as president, fondly recalled former President Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in the 1980s. But former President Donald Trump and his populist acolytes, as well as some more traditional conservative politicians, appear willing to leave the party’s reflexively anti-labor orthodoxy in the past. The primary partisan fissure has instead centered on electric vehicles (EVs).

Trump recently predicted that “the US auto industry will cease to exist” as a result of the EV transition and that “ all your jobs will be sent to China.” Other Republicans shared this sentiment. “There is a 6,000-pound elephant in the room: the premature transition to electric vehicles,” Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) said of the strike. The “premature transition” Vance refers to is one of the Biden administration’s key legislative accomplishments. Amid policies like tax credits for electric car buyers and investments in charging infrastructure and battery and EV manufacturing, as well as proposed automobile emission regulations, the EV market share is projected to increase from 2.4 percent of all passenger vehicles in 2020 to 17 percent in 2024.

The administration aims to increase EV sales to two-thirds of all vehicles by 2032 and said in a statement earlier this year that “the path to netzero emissions by 2050 is creating good-paying manufacturing and installation jobs on the way.”

The UAW leadership has tried to split the difference between EV optimism and pessimism.

Its president, Shawn Fain, has insisted that he

supports the EV transition in theory but has been disappointed by its rollout. Many EVs and EV components are being produced in anti-union, anti-worker red states after the Biden administration failed to secure a provision for more generous tax incentives for vehicles made with union labor. “These companies are taking the billions of dollars in our tax dollars, but they’re trying to drive a race to the bottom by paying substandard wages and benefits,” Fain said. The UAW is withholding its endorsement in the presidential election until Biden proves he can make the transition work for working families. But this reluctance to support Biden’s policies wholeheartedly is insufficient on its own. By aligning itself with the EV transition, even conditionally, the UAW

is potentially alienating itself from the workers it exists to serve.

Auto workers seem doomed to lose regardless of which EV policy is chosen. As Republicans suggest, there is strong evidence that EVs will reduce overall employment in the auto manufacturing industry within the next few years.

EVs are less complex and easier to manufacture than their internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts: A Tesla has just 17 moving parts compared to roughly 2,000 in a typical ICE vehicle. Ford and Volkswagen estimate that this less complicated manufacturing process will require 30 percent less labor than ICE manufacturing does. “That means we will need to make job cuts,” Volkswagen’s CEO said.

The Biden administration’s goal, given this reality, is to ensure that the auto manufacturing jobs that continue to exist stay in the United States. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-wing think tank, estimated in 2021 (prior to many of the Biden administration’s major EV policies) that, without government support for domestic EV manufacturing, the auto manufacturing sector could lose over 75,000 jobs by 2030. With government support, however, the industry could gain over 150,000.

But the federal government cannot prop up the American auto manufacturing industry forever. The Biden administration can only justify giving someone earning six figures a $7,500 tax break on their new Tesla due to the existential

threat of climate change. Once EVs have penetrated the market and the United States has successfully transitioned to clean energy, the federal government will feel considerable pressure to discard climate-protective EV subsidies.

As a result, jobs will be shipped back overseas where cars can be produced more cheaply. The United States may end up with a similar slice of global auto manufacturing, but in a transformed industry that employs fewer people. If Republicans kill federal support for the domestic EV manufacturing industry, though, EV jobs may never come to the United States in the first place.

The prospects for auto workers look grim.

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“Private sector union membership has dwindled to just 6 percent from roughly one-third of the US workforce in the mid-1950s, largely a consequence of a union organizing process stacked against unions and favorable to union-busting corporations.”

part, it is likely that Fain feels a genuine moral obligation to wield his power in a way that avoids threatening the planet’s future and promotes a transition away from fossil fuels. But the UAW’s conditional support for the EV transition is also a political calculation. Fain would almost certainly publicly condemn the Biden administration’s support for EVs if the labor movement was traditionally associated with the Republican Party and, reciprocally, Republicans supported pro-union and pro-worker legislation. The movement’s close alliance with the Democratic Party is likely factoring into the UAW’s position, which seems calculated to demand more of the Democratic Party without besmirching one of its recent legislative accomplishments. This would risk the UAW’s demands falling on cooler ears at the White House, which might make it more hesitant to continue investing as much as it has in protecting auto manufacturing jobs. President Biden certainly would not be joining the UAW picket line.

But the labor movement cannot afford this kind of political operation right now. Unions are on life support. Private sector union membership has dwindled to just 6 percent from roughly 44

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one-third of the US workforce in the mid-1950s, largely a consequence of a union organizing process stacked against unions and favorable to union-busting corporations.

American workers’ lack of trust in unions has also likely contributed to this decline.

The perception that unions function more as progressive advocacy groups than collective bargaining coalitions is at the core of this distrust. The UAW, and the labor movement more broadly, cannot allow any doubt that it is fighting for its workers and not a progressive agenda in Washington. There is clearly already some rank-and-file resentment toward UAW leadership, evidenced by the auto workers who showed up to the Trump rally to hear him rail against EVs and union leadership. If the UAW, a famously powerful union, can lose the trust of its own members, convincing skeptical prospective union members to enlist is likely to be an uphill battle. Fain’s calculation makes good political sense in the short term but risks undermining the UAW’s authority and the legitimacy of the labor movement.

The UAW’s current approach—conditionally supporting Democratic policies to hasten

an EV transition that is expected to hurt auto workers in the long run—thus carries substantial risks to the credibility of the UAW and the labor movement as a whole. The alternative—aligning more with Republican rhetoric and trying to impede the inevitable shift to EV production— could doom the American auto manufacturing industry. The UAW would be betting it all on horse-drawn carriages just before the advent of Ford’s Model T. How, then, should the UAW move forward?

Political parties cannot be expected to fully represent the interests of a constituency as narrow as auto workers. Only unions can. The UAW’s best option is to forge its own nonpartisan path.

It needs to acknowledge the inevitability of the EV transition and the harm it is likely to cause to American auto workers and, with this reality in mind, demand that automakers and the federal government look after their needs now and in the future. Pretending the problem has a simple solution, especially to protect a political alliance, does not serve auto workers or the labor movement. To successfully navigate the EV transition, the UAW needs to talk straight and not place partisan politics over its members’ welfare.

INTERVIEW

INCENTIVIZING DEVELOPMENT IN DETROIT An Interview with Mark Skidmore

Interview by James Hardy ’25 Illustration by Alexandra Zeigler ’24

James Hardy: Some have said that the current property tax system incentivizes blight. I’m interested in how that works.

Mark Skidmore: Well, the property tax is supposed to be based on the market value of a property, which includes the structure as well as the land. In most cities where there are high concentrations of people, the land value is higher, so that incentivizes people to build up and make the most use of that land. That tends to be true in Detroit as well. The land is valued highest in the core of the city, and then less as you move further out, especially in some of the very challenged areas. And then, actually, as you get closer to the suburbs, the land value starts to go back up again.

But at any rate, you have the structure and the land, and a typical property tax assesses the entire bundle and then bases the tax on that.

With a land tax, we say, “Well, we’re not going to tax the structure. We’re only going to tax the underlying value of land.” And so that imposes a cost on holding high-valued land in an undeveloped state. Because if you’re not generating a lot of revenue and you have this vacant property, say, in downtown, then your tax payment is pretty low, if you base it on the structure and the land. But if you do a land tax, you’re going to end up increasing the rate to generate the same amount of revenue.

In downtown Detroit, there are a lot of empty lots that are just used as parking for when there’s activities. And the tax right now on that land is very low. There are fairly wealthy people who own those vacant areas, but it doesn’t cost them a lot to hold it in an undeveloped state. When

Mark Skidmore is a professor of Economics and Agricultural, Food, And Resource Economics at Michigan State University. He holds the Morris Chair in State and Local Government Finance and Policy and is the co-editor of the Journal of Urban Affairs. He is a visiting fellow and distinguished scholar at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, where he recently co-authored Split-Rate Property Taxation in Detroit.

activities come to the city and parking happens, they generate a fair amount of revenue. So there’s not a huge incentive to necessarily develop the land. But if you start taxing land only, then in addition to increasing the cost of holding the land in its undeveloped state, you don’t penalize somebody for investing in the land. So if you build something on it and make something happen, that new development, the structure, isn’t taxed. You remove the penalty associated with development and you increase the cost of holding land in an undeveloped state. So if you happen to have undeveloped land in a prime real estate area, then it encourages you to either sell it and let somebody else have it or do something with it. That doesn’t solve every problem, but it could move development forward and encourage new activity.

JH: What’s the difference between a split rate tax and a full land value tax? Why do you think Detroit might be better suited for a split-rate than a land value tax?

MS: If you have a pure property tax, the rate is the same on land and structures. A land tax is where structures are taxed at zero. If you wanted revenue neutrality, you’d apply a higher rate on the land. A split-rate tax is where you increase the rate on land and reduce the rate on structures. So you’re moving in the direction of a land tax, but you’re not going all the way. It’s kind of an in between. And I think it’s probably, really driven by feasibility. For example, if you go all the way to a full land value tax, suppose you’re a relatively wealthy person who owns the empty parking spaces and parking lots in downtown

Detroit. As you move towards a land value tax, the cost of it is going to increase. So you could imagine the political balance of who’s going to oppose moving toward a land value or split rate tax and who’s going to support it. I think it was probably thought that a split-rate tax was more politically feasible than going to pure land tax.

I think we’re getting close. The state is working to develop the legislative language that would empower Detroit and other communities to adopt a split-rate tax. I think that’s going to go through, but I’m not 100 percent sure that it’s actually going to be implemented yet because of the political tension. I am really hopeful.

Edited for length and clarity.

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It’s Always Sunny in Texas Republican state legislatures are teaching climate denialism as their classrooms overheat

by Daphne Dluzniewski ’26, an International and Public Affairs concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR illustration by Samantha Takeda ’27, a prospective Painting major at RISD

On August 25, a Texan high school football player ended up in the ICU after experiencing heat stroke during a game. The tragedy occurred during one of Texas’s hottest summers on record.

As classes resumed session and blistering temperatures persisted, school districts across the state were forced to adjust their programming to accommodate these brutal conditions, with some shifting to indoor recess and relegating outdoor extracurriculars to early in the morning or late at night. Similarly, a September heatwave prompted schools in the Northeast and Midwest to resort to half-day schedules or full cancellations. Elsewhere, in states like Florida and New Mexico, extreme heat coupled with failing HVAC systems made students and teachers feel unwell to the point that they were unable to learn or work. Scorching temperatures, which are lasting later and later into the school year, are a direct result of climate change.

While students and educators across the United States are burdened by the effects of extreme weather, they are being actively misled about its environmental causes. Earlier this year, the Texas State Board of Education “altered its internal guidance to schools … to emphasize the ‘positive’ aspects of fossil fuels in science textbooks.” In Oklahoma, as record-breaking heat forced schools to modify recreational activities and motivated lawmakers to implement updated development plans, school officials simultaneously embraced inaccurate climate education.

In September, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters announced that schools can now show videos produced by conservative media group PragerU, whose content on climate change wildly distorts scientific facts. One PragerU video even claims that global warming is beneficial because it means “fewer people will die from cold.”

“Accurate, nonpartisan climate education is essential for equipping the next generation of leaders and innovators with the tools to address a world ravaged by global warming.”

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One explanation for these states’ hypocrisy is the looming influence of the oil and gas industry.

In 2021, Texas oil and gas companies contributed $1.1 billion to the Texas Permanent School Fund, an endowment that distributes necessary funds to school districts. Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board (OERB) incentivizes educators to adopt pro-oil and gas pedagogy by offering them free lesson plans and curricular reimbursements. In 2017, 98 percent of school districts in the state utilized OERB materials.

The hyperpoliticization of climate change is another cause of disinformation in the classroom. As the topic is considered a liberal talking point, rejecting even the existence of climate change has become politically necessary for Republican lawmakers hoping to maintain support from voters. In the first 2024 Republican presidential debate, when moderators asked candidates to raise their hands if they thought humans contributed to climate change, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis shot down the inquiry.

He later assured voters that he had not put his hand up. However, despite his efforts to downplay the issue, DeSantis signed a bill allocating

$640 million to helping Florida mitigate “the impacts of sea level rise, intensified storms, and localized flooding.” As he reckons with worsening environmental conditions in his state, his administration continues to feed children climate misinformation. In fact, Florida’s Department of Education also recently approved the classroom use of scientifically erroneous PragerU videos.

Government officials justify these decisions by claiming that climate change curricula force left-wing ideology onto schoolchildren. For example, former Lieutenant Governor of New York Betsy McCaughey wrote in a New York Post op-ed that teaching kids about climate change is indoctrination. Instead, she proposed students be taught age-appropriate topics like how to “identify mammals, reptiles, fish and birds, oceans, plants and deserts.” Yet teaching about climate change can be just as objective, and is just as important, as teaching about animal classifications and biomes. The claim that certain anthropogenic events contribute to global warming is a scientific fact. Moreover, presenting this information does not necessitate that teachers

advocate for fossil fuel companies to be banned or that children should take a partisan stance.

On the other hand, there is nothing objective about school boards encouraging educators to discuss the benefits of fossil fuels. Likewise, there is nothing appropriate about states allowing teachers to show PragerU videos that compare citizens fighting against renewable energy measures to Polish Jews fighting against the Nazis. The contradictions underlying conservative arguments, along with the duplicity of legislators who support unfactual curricula while preparing for climate-induced extreme weather events, reveal the irrationality of withholding climate science from students.

Accurate, nonpartisan climate education is essential for equipping the next generation of leaders and innovators with the tools to address a world ravaged by global warming. Considering children are already overheating in classrooms and collapsing on football fields, lawmakers opposed to the prospect of climate education must put political divides aside to address this topic with the foresight it merits. American children deserve at least that much.

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Sowing the Seeds of Inefficiency US agricultural subsidies hurt small farmers across the globe

by Aman Vora ’27, an International and Public Affairs concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Elizabeth Long ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

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This fall, as senators, representatives, and the American people turn their attention to the torturous annual process of funding the government, another bill will be lurking in its shadow, waiting to be renewed. The Farm Bill is a onethousand-page behemoth. It has shaped every aspect of American agriculture since President Franklin Roosevelt signed it as part of the New Deal in an attempt to revive the US farming industry in the wake of the Great Depression.

This year’s bill will be no less ambitious, with an estimated cost of $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

For starters: What is actually in this little-known trillion-dollar bill? Eighty percent of funds will be allocated toward food security programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps low-income families purchase groceries. The rest of the funds—$12.6 billion this year—will be paid out through a system of crop and emergency insurance policies that are expected to subsidize 62 percent of the cost of insurance premiums for farmers. These funds effectively pay farmers to produce specific types of crops like soy, wheat, and corn.

Despite US politicians parading these subsidies as a way of preserving the “family farm,” this long-standing structure ensures that smaller farms suffer while conglomerates producing and purchasing specific grains and legumes save big: In 2015, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that half of Farm Bill subsidies went to households with incomes above $140,000. Just 23 percent of farms with income under $100,000 received funds, compared to 69 percent of farms with incomes over $100,000. The multinational meat processor and marketer, Tyson, has seen its profits increase 33 percent since the 2018 Farm Bill took effect, while everyday farmers’ share in every dollar spent on food remains at an all-time low. Research in a 2011 Food & Water Watch report further revealed that Farm Bill subsidies save soda companies around $100 million per year on purchases of notoriously unhealthy high-fructose corn syrup.

As Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) reiterated earlier this year, “The broken American food system is working against nearly everyone it touches, from farmers to families buying groceries to workers and communities. In fact, the only winners seem to be the massive, consolidated

“Despite US politicians parading these subsidies as a way of preserving the ‘family farm,’ this long-standing structure ensures that smaller farms suffer while conglomerates producing and purchasing specific grains and legumes save big.” multinational corporations that dominate our food industry.”

The Farm Bill’s impact transcends American family farms. Instead of allowing consumers in developing countries to purchase food at lower prices, US subsidies have decimated agricultural industries worldwide. With the Farm Bill throwing billions upon billions of dollars into subsidizing cash crop production, American crops have become the cheapest on the international market. This forces small farmers across the world to compete without the advantage of comprehensive national agricultural subsidies, which are rare at the Farm Bill’s scale in developing nations.

The United States has a long history of suppressing the economic growth of its southern neighbors in particular. In 1954, a CIA-directed coup deposed Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, and replaced him with the genocidal Carlos Castillo Armas— all to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company. This triggered the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted for decades, destroyed millions of people’s livelihoods, and decimated the country’s economy. Though the 2023 US Farm Bill does not aim to overthrow any world leaders, it ties into a greater legacy of using American economic might to bully developing nations.

Several states across Africa and Latin America have called attention to how US subsidies manipulate agricultural markets and produce lost farming income, with varying results.

In Burkina Faso, researchers linked US subsidies to the estimated loss of 1 percent of GDP and a 12 percent decline in export earnings, despite production costs being one-third of those in

the United States. More recently, the Argentine agricultural sector—once a success story, alongside Brazil’s, for its profitable soy industry—has required government intervention due to drops in the price of soy. Though it would be a stretch to suggest that Argentina’s $56 billion International Monetary Fund bailout was induced by US soy subsidies, it is impossible to ignore the glaring pattern of American subsidization neglecting international welfare.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has tried to hold the United States accountable for the impact of the Farm Bill. When Brazil challenged US cotton export subsidies in 2004, the WTO imposed a $830 million sanction on US cotton products. Ultimately, the United States agreed to pay Brazil $300 million in damages and end its cotton export subsidies.

Congressional reports have found that liberalization agreements reducing subsidies and tariffs are the only effective means of helping the agricultural sector in developing nations. Yet, between 2001 and 2011, trade talks pitting US trade representatives against their counterparts from agriculture-dependent countries yielded only marginal cuts to the billions in subsidies US farmers receive. It is time to end the subsidies and buyback programs advertised as altruistic donations to hunger-stricken regions and replace them with aid that does not come at the expense of local producers.

When President Roosevelt introduced the Farm Bill, the need for agricultural subsidies was clear: An economic depression threatened the livelihoods of millions of American farmers. Today, with farmers earning above-average median incomes, that fails to be the case.

Instead, new epidemics face the United States: Over 10 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions (and 40 percent of methane emissions) are linked to agriculture; 34 million Americans are food insecure; and more than 70 percent of Americans are classified as overweight or obese. The answer to these immense problems is not to increase subsidies but to divert the money back to protecting the interests of American citizens and global food security.

Policymakers should build on the Inflation Reduction Act by expanding the Agriculture Conservation Easement Program, which allows landowners to conserve farmland. Policies should incentivize clean energy infrastructure for rural farms and increase research funding for solutions that increase energy reliability and reduce emissions. The Farm Bill should have a role in a healthier America too; while subsidizing vegetable production is likely not sufficient to change the dietary habits of Americans, a pilot study refunding 30 cents of every SNAP dollar spent on vegetables increased vegetable consumption by 26 percent.

This year’s Farm Bill presents a clear opportunity to ameliorate a national health crisis driven by the types of food consumed by Americans and to put the United States on track for net-zero emissions in agriculture by 2040.

Ultimately, whether it also brings this century of international economic oppression, brought on by anticompetitive and devastating subsidies, to an end comes down to the congressional willpower to override the lobby of megafarms and suppliers—the only true beneficiaries of American farm subsidies.

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Need for Speed Understanding the radically slow Massachusetts State Legislature

by Justin Meszler ’26, an International and Public Affairs concentrator and Senior Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Daniel May ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

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A crisis of dysfunction and lethargy appears to have taken hold in American state legislatures.

Only 4 percent of US adults say that the American political system is working extremely or very well. Government shutdowns are becoming increasingly common. According to a 2020 study by the Pew Research Center, nationwide trust in government has remained at 20 percent or below for the last decade. In some states, this defectiveness appears particularly dire: As of August, Massachusetts had enacted just 0.2 percent of the bills introduced in its legislature this year— that is 21 out of 10,508 bills. Advocacy groups have identified low legislative productivity as proof of broken state legislative institutions. In the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot, the recent global surge in the boldness of autocrats, and other growing challenges to democracy, citizens need to see government institutions working for them. But resoundingly, the American people are dissatisfied.

A 2021 study from the Center for Effective Lawmaking found that voters value the trait of productivity in lawmakers but have little knowledge of their congressperson’s legislative effectiveness. One might assume that this phenomenon is similarly evident at the state level.

While many state legislatures must increase productivity, the public’s understanding of legislative accomplishments through media, academia, and advocacy groups must also shift toward a more accurate, informed understanding of what it means for a legislature to be effective. By grappling with the productivity of their lawmakers, voters can more effectively hold state legislators accountable for dysfunction, identify disparities across states, and build a stronger democracy.

There is no universally accepted measure of legislative effectiveness, and advocacy groups

and academics have taken several different approaches to quantifying it. Should we be evaluating the sheer number of bills passed each session by a legislature? The passage of a bill is a tangible event that the media can report on and constituents can easily recognize. However, the number of bills passed by a state legislature is not necessarily an accurate measure of its productivity. State legislatures are in session at different times and for various lengths. Texas, in addition to semi-frequent special sessions, is in session every other year for a few months, while states like California have a full-time legislature. Moreover, bills are not evenly passed over the length of a session. This metric, like many others, contains crucial flaws, which have only complicated debate among advocacy groups surrounding how to address structural problems in state legislatures.

Measuring the proportion of introduced bills that get enacted also holds challenges: Many pieces of legislation might be incorporated into the state budget, which may be passed annually or biannually, and some state legislative cultures may value selectively introducing a few priority bills over a deluge of thousands of bills. Moreover, some legislatures pass larger omnibus bills rather than many smaller bills, so superficially comparing the amount of legislation over time omits essential data. Thus, this metric does not account for the quality of the legislation itself.

For instance, the Massachusetts State Legislature initially seems much less effective than Colorado’s. While Massachusetts enacted just 0.2 percent of the bills introduced this year, Colorado’s 484 passed bills represent 78 percent of the legislation introduced in the legislature.

This difference is magnified by the fact that the Massachusetts Legislature has double the

“By understanding legislative effectiveness more holistically, one can more accurately assess the extent of the problem in state legislatures and evaluate potential institutional changes.”

membership of the Colorado General Assembly and is in session year-round on a full-time basis, whereas Colorado is only in session for the first four months of the year. However, the Massachusetts Legislature has frontloaded hearings on its calendar this session to enable committees to have more time to consider and revise bills. So, bill passage rates will likely dramatically increase toward the end of session.

It is essential to holistically evaluate what a bill accomplishes—in terms of constituent services, budget items, and the contents of the bill itself. Despite slow movement on many pieces of legislation, the Massachusetts Legislature and governor achieved universally free school meals, in-state college tuition and financial aid for undocumented high school graduates, free phone calls for people who are incarcerated, and several other measures through the state budget this year. These initiatives were formerly part of bills championed by advocates and legislators but were ultimately included in the budget rather than directly passed through traditional means. Through this more nuanced, qualitative approach, Massachusetts appears much more productive than at first glance.

Similarly, Minnesota made headlines this year for having one of the

most ambitious legislative sessions, codifying abortion rights, increasing school and environmental spending, establishing statewide paid sick leave, and taking many other progressive actions. However, they only passed 1.39 percent of bills introduced—94 out of 6,777. Recognizing the qualitative contents of the bills over quantitative metrics reveals an incredibly active state government.

By understanding legislative effectiveness more holistically, one can more accurately assess the extent of the problem in state legislatures and evaluate potential institutional changes.

One key institutional factor may be an individual lawmaker’s power in advancing their agenda, which is dependent on the level of professionalization of the legislature, the size of their party’s majority, and committee chairs’ autonomy.

To reestablish trust with the American public, the answer lies beyond simply increasing state legislative productivity—media, academia, and advocacy groups must work to build a more accurate public understanding of government.

Then, voters may accurately evaluate the effectiveness of their state governing institutions and hold states accountable at the ballot box.

Democracy will be stronger because of it.

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CONGRATULATIONS!