The College Hill Independent Vol. 39 Issue 5

INSIDE: MONICA HUERTAS FOR WARD 10, THE UAW-GM STRIKE, AND FRANK CAPRIO’S MYTHOLOGY OF THE ‘NICE JUDGE’

A Brown/RISD Weekly / October 11, 2019 / Volume 39, Issue 05

the

Indy Contents

From the Editors

Cover Maybe So J. Keonona Yamauchi Boulos

It’s 9:44 PM. All I ate today was a bagel, lox, lox cream cheese, garlic-chive cream cheese, plain cream cheese, capers, pasta with spinach and onions, hummus, a few bites of a rotisserie chicken, a shot of vodka, two glasses of wine, and a slice of chocolate-raspberry cake. That might sound reasonable for a day’s sustenance, or maybe even a little excessive, but you have to understand: I’ve eaten all of this in the last three hours. Since 7:07 PM, to be specific.

News 02 Week in Tête-à-Têtes Ricardo Gomez & Hal Triedman

Today, Wednesday, October 9, I celebrated Yom Kippur, the holiday in which Jews atone for the wrongs we’ve committed in the last year. As part of the process of atonement, we complete a 25-hour fast (no eating, no drinking, no indulgence), using asceticism to induce self-reflection and reckoning. For this reason, we are probably not supposed to love Yom Kippur, but it’s one of my favorite Jewish holidays. Maybe this is my attraction to the mystical strain of Judaism, with its emphasis on embodiment of spiritual practice. I derive a lot of meaning from singing in community, but perhaps more than anything (and maybe this is a bit masochistic), the physical practice of deprivation reminds me that I’m alive. I’ve fasted every year since I was twelve years old, and so by now, rather than physical hunger, what I feel more intensely is a headache that feels somewhat like a large pair of hands gently compressing my skull.

11 Shifting Gears Cate Turner Metro 03 The Bully Buster Deborah Marini 13 Right & Wrong & Right on Red Nick Roblee-Strauss Literary 05 Possessions Matthew Litman

This Yom Kippur, I have reflected on atonement: on the people I’ve wronged in the last year, the ways I can right those wrongs, and the ways I can avoid them in the future. As is the intention of the custom, fasting today has forced me to remind myself that the discipline required for teshuvah is possible as long as I tell myself it is required by higher law. That discipline requires me not only to fast, but also to avoid doing anything that necessitates repentance during my fast. Last year, in a moment of mutually-reinforced crankiness about 22 hours in, I got into a fight with one of my friends about Drake’s Yom Kippur observance. This year, I tried to hold my tongue.

-GS

Science + Tech 07 Mosquito Trap Emma Kofman 15 Game Change Miles Guggenheim Ephemera 08 Where Are You Going?

Eve O’Shea Features 09 Dirty Undies Isabel Guarnieri

Mission Statement

Arts 17 Within One Frame Zach Barnes X 18 Squintings Justine Nguyễn-Nguyễn and Ryan Cardoso

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed

by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.

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

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

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

11 OCTOBER 2019

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

VOL 39 ISSUE 05

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

Illustration Editor Pia Mileaf-Patel Ilustrators Alana Baer Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Fatou Diallo Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stoll Eliza Macneal Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Owen Rival Charlotte Silverman Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Stephanie Wu Art Director Claire Schlaikjer

Business Somerset Gall Emily Teng Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel Alumni+Fundraising Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs

Managing Editors Ben Bienstock Tara Sharma Cate Turner MVP Claire Schlaikjer *** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Senior Editors Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

WEEK IN TÊTEÀ-TÊTES

BY Ricardo Gomez & Hal Triedman ILLUSTRATION Charlotte Silverman DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

THE NAMESAKE Name recognition is important in politics. Regardless of a politician’s public favor, constituents must know who they are before passing judgement on them. For most politicians, making their name usually takes time, money, charm, and a penchant for not doing embarrassing things on camera. Then there are the lucky ones who don’t have to work quite so hard to establish their name in the public consciousness—the heirs to political dynasties, the recipients of massive fortunes, and a remarkably serendipitous California businessman named Raul Ruiz.

Ruiz, a 57-year-old businessman, is the Republican congressional challenger for the 36th Congressional District of California. Fortunately for him, his opponent, the current Democratic incumbent in the district, is a 47-year-old doctor also named Raul Ruiz. Over the coming year, the two namesakes will be engaged in one of the most confusing political battles in the country—and only one Ruiz will be left standing.

The 36th Congressional District of California is about 40 miles east of LA. It’s relentlessly sunny and mostly comprised of desert, interspersed with some fruit farms. A plurality (49.8%) of its residents are Hispanic or Latinx. It is home to the insta-famous town of Coachella, and is politically relatively moderate, leaning Democratic by an average of about 2 percentage points.

Over the next 13 months, this dusty clime will be the site of one of the many down-ballot congressional races between a right-wing, socially conservative Republican and a left-of-center, moderate Democrat that will take place in relatively competitive exurbs and ruralities all across the country. The narrative framing that is starting to take shape in this battle royale (or perhaps more aptly, battle Raul) roughly parallels what is happening in other so-called purple districts across the country. In this case, though, the different Raul Ruizes show that not everything is in a name.

The Republican Ruiz is attempting to connect the race to national issues on his website by linking the Democratic Ruiz to controversial national figures and the conservative bogeyman of ‘radical socialism.’

“AOC, [Democratic] Congressman Ruiz and the rest of the liberal partisans,” Ruiz says, are pushing “big government policies” and “threatening what makes this country great.” At least publicly, local issues take a backseat—the word “California” is not written a single time on the Republican Ruiz’s website. For the moment, however, the spotlight rests squarely on his name. When asked by Politico about the significance of the shared name, Ruiz, 57, shakes off the accusation that he will unfairly benefit from his opponent’s name recognition, instead staking his chances on life experience. “I’ll say this,” he notes, “I had the name first.”

As a counter to this national narrative, the Democratic Ruiz is attempting to establish a sense of local exceptionalism. Instead of charging headlong into the Washington game of tit-for-tat, he runs as far

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

as he can away from it, claiming that “Washington is a disaster, filled with career politicians focused on petty partisan politics and their own perks and privileges. I am not a career politician and I never will be.” Ruiz’s campaign is relentlessly local—his issues page is entitled “Working for the people of California.” And it’s no wonder that he seeks to differentiate himself so aggressively from the Republican Ruiz. After all, although his opponent had the name first, he was the one to make it famous.

Nevertheless, neither right-wing Republicans’ calculated national narratives, nor moderate Democrats’ dissembling local narratives are entirely indicative of how they would behave as elected officials. A Republican Congressman Raul Ruiz would almost certainly vote in line with the interests of local corporations that supported him, in addition to publicly waging the Right’s culture war. A Democratic Congressman Raul Ruiz would almost certainly be forced to take positions on controversial issues like impeachment, in addition to looking out for the local little guy.

But will any of these media maneuvers or machinations really matter for either Raul Ruiz? At the end of the day, both of their political fortunes lie in one name.

As yard signs, distinguishable only by the color, spring into existence in hundreds of front yards; as local talk radio hosts bicker about the candidates’ political positions, only to realize they’re trashing the same person; as both Raul Ruiz’s accidentally begin to answer each other’s questions on the debate stage—only one thing will be clear to the voters of California’s 36th District: they’re in for a Raul-ly wild ride.

-HT

CONSIDER THE WALRUS

actions of the Northern Fleet servicemen.” The purpose of the expedition has been to survey Arctic glaciers and wildlife, but after losing a boat to a giant mass of tusked blubber, the RGO has also reconfirmed that “the polar latitudes are fraught with many dangers.”

The walrus attack probably took the Russians by surprise, given their history of ostensibly peaceful relations with the marine mammals. Indeed, just over 10 years ago, images of a particularly sleepy walrus taking a moment to rest and nap atop a Russian submarine spread throughout the media landscape. This image, presenting an encounter between human and walrus as a rare peculiarity, has fed a perception that the Russian and walrus kingdoms have lived wholly at peace and that all has been well on the Arctic front.

But despite the cuddle-buddy relationship between Russian submarines and walruses that makes walrus-human interaction seem rare, walruses and humans are actually constantly in contact due to climate change-induced disruption. Both species are confronting the crisis together, and one party is definitely more to blame for increasing temperatures than the other. Russia is among the many states enabling Arctic degradation. In 2017, Russian President Vladamir Putin visited Franz Josef Land for a frosty photoshoot, commenting on how opening navigable corridors into melting ice for natural resource extraction will create great economic opportunities.

Policy stances of states like Russia are greatly exacerbating the climate crisis, especially in the Arctic. As reported in the College Hill Independent’s last piece on the plight of the walrus, temperature increases alone have been disastrous for the beloved water behemoth.

Melting sea ice has forced our flippered friends to find increasingly precarious places to rest, causing the deaths of hundreds of walruses who can’t survive the search.

The drastic depletion of these walruses’ Arctic habitat should come as no surprise after the world’s hottest summer—this July was Earth’s hottest month to date. With this round of record-breaking temperature increases witnessing yet another round of failing political action, it seems apt that walruses are no longer content to go down slumbering quietly. Instead, they are fighting back.

Climate protesters across the world are taking to the streets demanding an end to approaching climate change business as usual. Taking to the waters, the walrus has heard the call and answered. The walruses’ attack on the Russian Navy can be explicated as an act of solidarity saying that business as usual will no longer be tolerated; if the walrus could speak instead of just attack, it might be heard saying, “You’ve really collected enough data, now please just stop melting things!” The walrus might not be the ecomilitant the world needs, but it may be the ecomilitant the world deserves.

The Arctic’s Franz Josef Land is a lonely archipelago whose only inhabitants are Russian military personnel.

Last week, off its somber shores, a walrus charted a steady course through the frigid waters. But upon spotting a Russian Navy vessel, the walrus was struck by rage, casting the scene into a dire turbulence. Breaking the cold air and shaking the water in a frenzied tumult, the walrus closed its eyes and charged, determined to drag the Russial vessel into the inhospitable depths.

The incident was reported by the Russian Geographical Society (RGO) who, focusing on the human side of the story, described how a walrus sank a Russian Navy vessel attempting to carry scientists to the shore of one of the archipelago’s islands to conduct research. The assailed vessel was dispatched from the Atlai—a sturdier, more walrusproof Russian Navy craft—conducting a scientific expedition to the Arctic’s Franz Josef Land.

The Northern Fleet, the Russian Navy in the Arctic Ocean, issued a statement saying, “serious troubles were avoided thanks to the clear and well-coordinated - RG

NEWS

02

THE BULLY BU S TER

She stood amid overturned toy castles and idle trucks from. and talked canvassing routes, missed calls from “I’m not a career politician,” Huertas emphasized constituents, and the newest batch of yellow T-shirts throughout her conversation with the College Hill and posters on her front porch. The conversation Independent. She stands in contrast to the besmirched with Jen, her campaign manager, was cut up by quick image of Luis Aponte, the Democrat who held the Ward comments to the little kids dodging the toys, yellow 10 seat from 1998 to his resignation in July, which set “Monica Huertas, Democrat for Ward 10” signs, and off this hurried special election. Aponte, Providence’s congregated ankles of pamphlet-laden volunteers—all first Latino councilman and first Latino council presindicators that this family’s home was moonlighting ident, was held in high regard by his constituents. as a campaign headquarters. It could have been a According to public opinion, he was on track to evenscene from The West Wing, if Aaron Sorkin knew how tually run for Mayor of Providence—until the Board to write women. of Elections indicted him on embezzlement charges Thirty-year-old Monica Huertas is a social worker, in 2017. Despite the charges, Aponte still won the 2018 a mom of four, and, through years of activism and Democratic primary to Pedro Espinal by a slim margin action, a well-established citizen of Providence’s Ward of 24 votes. Espinal is running again during the special 10. Her first political act, she said, was being born a election, but his campaign has been slowed by the Puerto Rican woman, and since then she has fought recent discovery of the $93,000 that he owes in back for justice against any force that has tried to trample it. taxes. The winner of the primary, set for October 10, She has consistently been one of the strongest voices will be a shoo-in for the general election. Natalia Rosa speaking up for the two neighborhoods—Lower South Sosa, a law office assistant, and Orlando Correa, an Providence and Washington Park—that make up her ironworker whose support for the Fane Tower has won district. Residents of her district, like many members him endorsements from local labor unions like Iron of marginalized groups in Providence, have had their Workers 37 and the RI IUPAT (a progressive painters’ health jeopardized by local industrialization and union) are also running. Correa’s underdog “I’m not a their security endangered by the precarious housing politician, I’m just a hopeful citizen” persona mirrors market. When a corruption charge vacated the Ward Huertas’, but his widespread labor support seriously 10 councilman position, Huertas knew that it was time threatens her environmentally-geared candidacy. to get a “bigger seat at the table” to continue fighting “Growing up, if there was a bully, my mom was

03

METRO

BY Deborah Marini ILLUSTRATION Georgianna

Stoukides DESIGN Daniel Navratil

like, ‘You better hit him back,’” Huertas told the Independent. “She understands the system and how there are bullies, and so she did that same threat against me [when the seat opened]: ‘You better stand up against them!’”

+++ When Huertas moved into Washington Park, one of the two neighborhoods that makes up Ward 10, a neighbor asked her if she had heard about the National Grid’s Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) storage facility a quarter of a mile away from her house. She hadn’t, so she went to her first No LNG in PVD meeting. The environmental activism group was formed four years ago in response to National Grid’s attempt to build a new LNG liquefaction facility, in which natural gas tapped from pipelines running beneath the city would be “supercooled” into a liquid that could be kept easily and cheaply in the storage facility, which was built in the 1970s and previously supplied by truck deliveries.

Inspired by the first meeting, Huertas quickly took charge of the group and led it in the fight against environmental racism and against National Grid, whose liquefaction plant would be constructed within a mile of the “11 Providence Polluters”—facilities, including a liquid asphalt plant and a Univar chemical plant, that the EPA has identified as especially prone to toxic

11 OCT 2019

: s a t r e u H a c i n Mo Democrat for Ward 10 chemical releases.

The factories on the Port of Providence already release roughly 4.4 thousand pounds of emissions a year into the air less than a mile from the Ward 10 neighborhoods, which are largely composed of minority and low-income groups. For three years, Huertas and No LNG picketed along busy highways, flooded the statehouse, and ran an education program throughout the community to raise awareness of both National Grid’s insidious proposal and the dangerous factors already at play. “It’s been a slow and long road, but it’s been something powerful,” Huertas said.

Even though the Rhode Island Department of Health was critical of the proposed facility because “it continues that historical pattern of discounting the voices of the people that live in the region” and sets dangerous precedents, the proposal was eventually approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whose report asserted that the facility is a “safe” distance from existing and future residences.

However, even though the project has not yet been decisively cancelled (and some estimates suggest that construction could begin in 2020), the facility still has yet to be built, and both Huertas and No LNG are optimistic that the delays and standstills will continue.

The liquefaction facility is just one of many acts of discreet environmental violence—waged through polluted air and toxic water—against people living on the front lines of the heavily-industrialized port.

Huertas cited the area as having the ninth worst asthma rates in the country; in 2018 alone, Huertas’ child was in the hospital seven times due to asthmatic complications and aspirations. Two of these visits were spent in the intensive care unit. “They were literally fighting for their right to breathe clean air,” said Huertas. During this time, she continued to fight for No LNG, because, if the city wasn’t going to take any measures to protect its citizens and her children, she would have to mobilize and fight these blatant acts of environmental racism herself.

“When something happens in our neighborhood— there is a shooting or some violence—they want to say that it’s us,” Huertas said at a rally in 2018. “But when they’re killing us, because it’s Corporate America, they don’t say shit.”

Crossroads Family Shelter, of which she is now a board member, and went to the Rhode Island Department of Human Services for childcare when she was at school and her husband was at work. DHS turned her down because “a four-year program is too long of a stretch,” but they did offer to pay for a six-week CNA course.

There’s nothing wrong with being a CNA, said Huertas, but the pay gap between CNAs and social workers would make it necessary for DHS to pay for childcare until her kids aged out of the system—a much longer span than the three or so years for which she needed help. The variability of resource availability and efficacy shocked her then and continues to motivate Huertas to improve the system today. “I’ve been a part of this system my whole life,” she said. “A lot of things are fucked up, and that’s one of them.”

But alleviating some of the stresses of homelessness is only a band-aid to a much bigger problem.

Huertas’ first goal in office is to enact some form of rent control legislation and eventually use taxes on large companies to generate funds to improve Providence communities and to encourage small, local businesses and developers to construct affordable, subsidized, and mixed-income housing.

“They’re creeping up over here, pushing out people.

They need to start paying their fair share of taxes.

Something’s gotta give,” she told the Independent.

“It’s good to build, but you have to build good things.”

The bullies that Huertas opposes are building things— LNG facilities, Fane Towers—on the municipal dollar, much to the detriment of the municipality. Fane “Hope Point” Tower is a proposed luxury housing building currently going through the approval process; it’s slated to be built on land originally intended for a public, riverside park and is currently eligible for $25 million in tax credits.

+++

The residents of Ward 10 and their homes are not safe because of the insidious air- and waterborne toxins seeping into their homes from the port. The homes that make up Ward 10 are not stable because of the dwindling (and nearly nonexistent) stock of affordable housing and residents’ lack of means to hold on to such housing. The concept of community is rooted in safety +++ and stability, and these two factors feed each other: When a home is stable, it is safe, and when it is safe, it The Lower South Providence and Washington Park is stable. How can a community persist when neither neighborhoods of Ward 10 have also been struck by safety nor stability feel guaranteed? the blight of Providence’s expanding colleges—such Huertas knows the disillusionment of instability as Brown, Johnson & Wales, and Providence College— at an individual level, and she knows it at the commuwhose land acquisitions and student populations nity level; her frustration with the system is born of seeking short-term housing have gentrified the area experience, and the promises that she makes to the and raised market rates. Wages are no longer livable people in her community are shaped by an inimitable and rents (let alone mortgages) are no longer feasible. foundation in strife and triumph and a genuine belief Barring a drastic policy change, the combination that she can accomplish these towering feats. of these two destructive factors inevitably leads to “I’m a social worker, and I’m going to do the social the displacement of people. Affordable housing is work, literally,” she told the Independent. She said one of Huertas’ many lofty goals, and although she’s that this background is crucial to understanding the conscious of the scope of the City Council, she’s no systems in place and how policies can interact with less confident in her ability to help her community and mold these systems, and, most importantly, to through these bold efforts. avoiding the hubris that keeps people from admitting Huertas and her siblings were raised between that they don’t know all the answers. “I just speak my Puerto Rico and Providence by their single mother, truth and the community’s truth.” who, as an employed certified nursing assistant To understand the “community’s truth,” Huertas (CNA), couldn’t always pull the funds together for rent. has been canvassing Ward 10 every day since the elecHuertas’ childhood was colored by these sporadic tion was announced: From 5:30 PM to 8 PM Monday experiences of homelessness. Then, while in school through Friday (after she gets off her nine-to-five at at Rhode Island College, she experienced homeless- the foster care agency), and from 12 PM to 8 PM every ness again, at which point she was raising two young weekend, she goes door to door with her kids, who are children and getting a degree in social work, all while veteran door-knockers from Huertas’ time leading No still a kid herself. She spent time and got assistance at LNG, in tow. “In one night, I may only make it to five

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

homes, but that’s because three of those five homes I’ve visited have wanted me to come in and sit down, and I’ll spend half an hour or more with them,” said Huertas.

She’s met a boy with multiple sclerosis and his mom, who carries him up and down three flights of stairs multiple times a day. She’s met, to the excitement of her kids, a woman with a shark in a fish tank. She’s heard complaints about the air, about the schools, and about the government while standing in people’s front yards, leaning on their porches, and sitting in their living rooms. She’s put names and faces to houses previously seen only from a distance and has genuinely personalized the entire process as a result.

Huertas intends to keep up this open line of communication once in office through the establishment of a Ward Committee (an open monthly meeting where constituents can voice their opinions and problems directly to her), Ward 10 holiday parties, and the reestablishment of the block parties that once united the community.

While walking the streets of Lower South Providence, knocking sporadically on the two to three doors on a street that she had previously missed, Huertas passed a number of big blue signs reading, “Orlando Correa, Providence Ward 10,” and passed a number of pamphlets the Correa campaign left in its wake. If you were just polling campaign signs, Correa would seem to be Huertas’ biggest competitor, and, if you look at their policies at a distance, he is also her most analogous rival. He shares her deep roots in Ward 10 and the drive to construct affordable housing, and he even shares the self-selected label of “environmentalist” with Huertas. But Correa's promise to fight for the building of the Fane Tower, sets him at odds with Huertas. Huertas said that he isn’t “a true environmentalist” and that his pro-industry stances are incompatible with environmentalist ideology, suggesting that Correa will prioritize short-term economic wins (such as the Fane Tower) over longterm, sustainable efforts, although he doesn’t have a political track record to prove or disprove this theory.

Correa has also been endorsed by PVD Firefighters IAFF 799, while Huertas has won the endorsement of RI Democratic Party Women’s Caucus. She is also one of 25 candidates supported by the new RI Political Cooperative, a progressive grassroots group similar to the Justice Democrats that brought national attention to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign.

Huertas walked up to the last house on Swan Street confidently, her posture defying the exhaustion that a full day of canvassing brings. The door already sported a “Sorry We Missed You!” flyer from Correa, but Huertas avoided disturbing the pamphlet when she knocked her familiar, oft-repeated knock, whose tone and rhythm she perfected after knocking on nearly every door in Lower South Providence and Washington Park.

“I don’t want to knock like a bully,” she told the Independent.

+++ “The kids in my neighborhood are invested in my campaign,” Monica said at a patio table in her backyard, fitting in a quick lunch before canvassing while watching her son Alex try to open the chain link gate.

“That’s what keeps me motivated. When they tell me, ‘Monica, we’re winning,’ I say, ‘Yes the hell we are.’”

DEBORAH MARINI B’22 is also not a politician.

METRO

04

BY Matthew Litman ILLUSTRATION Charlotte Silverman DESIGN Christie Zhong

POSSESSIONS

All Al could talk about was how excited he was for dinner. He said his wife was cooking something special.

“I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s going to blow your mind.”

He laughed to himself, shook his head, and went to get a soda from the machine. When he came back, he patted me on the shoulder. “It’s gonna be great. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.”

Al and I covered sports together my first year at the paper, and we’d shoot the shit over our cubicles, slouching on the dividers, talking about how bad the local teams were, gambling on the high school games.

He showed me around my first day, took me out for lunch, gave me a tour of the town, with its Main Street facing the ocean and the stacks of pink and yellow homes behind it. It was a small town, and when Al noticed my watch, he made a joke that I was too rich for it, which was funny, because Elena and I were pretty poor.

We didn’t know too much about each other’s personal lives—we never really asked. He was married, had a grandkid, and that was about all I knew. I told him we decided to rent up here after Elena got laid off, and he said we picked a good spot and seemed like people who’d fit right in. A month or so later, Al invited me and Elena over for dinner, and before I knew it, I’d said yes. We weren’t real friends with anyone in town yet, Elena didn’t think we ever would be, but the weather was changing, and I was caught off guard by the nicety of it all. Of course Elena and I fought about it when I got home, but I told her it would be rude to renege on him so soon like that. I’m not that kind of guy, I said. I work with him, for Christ’s sake. +++

anywhere didn't care that much. There was a wooden crate at the end of someone’s driveway selling firewood.

The logs were tied together in fours with white string, and a sign read “One Bundle, $4.” On top of the crate was a Folgers container where the money went. Then I saw a bucket below with kindling. Another sign: “Take what you need (just not the bucket).” When I came to a certain evergreen, the final checkpoint before a near-vertical hill, I stopped and turned around. The road continued up and down for what seemed like miles, but I never figured out exactly where it ended, I never ran that far. It seemed aimless, and therefore endless, so I never bothered to try.

I enjoyed running but I got nervous sometimes. I always heard someone else’s footsteps along with mine, steps just a second out of tune with my own so as to create the illusion that they were in fact someone else’s. I would turn my head every couple minutes, just to be sure, but nothing was ever there.

I got back to my car and reached for my keys. I didn’t feel them. I turned out the waistband pocket. I looked where I was, down at the gravel, up the gentle hill I’d just come down on, but saw no shine or glimmer.

It was about a mile and some change until home, and I figured I didn’t have any more time to look for them, so I left my car in the lot and ran home instead, licking the rain that fell on my lips.

Elena was on the couch with her hair in a towel.

She was looking at her face through a hand mirror.

Unaccustomed to unemployment, to time spent not working, she began to work on herself. She had long kept a notebook that listed all of her FLAWS and THINGS TO WORK ON and THINGS WORTH KEEPING and was always looking for more things to write down. Recently it seemed like that was all she thought about. When I was sad, I browsed through the notebook to remind myself that she too had her problems.

She looked up when I walked in.

“Where were you?”

“I lost my keys. I had to run home.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know. I lost them. Somewhere along where I was running, I guess.”

She sighed and put her head in her hands. I sat down next to her and stroked her back.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You didn’t get the wine.”

“I didn’t. That’s true. I’m sorry.”

“We don’t have anything to bring.”

“We’ll think of something,” I said, not really knowing what. “We’ll bring ourselves, right?”

“That’s not enough.” she said, deflating in my arms.

“Well, yeah,” I said.

I went home early that day to get a run in. The trail I liked was right off of the grocery store’s lot, the only one in town, so I promised Elena I’d get a bottle of wine to bring over. Rain started just as I got on, a steady drizzle. A good rain, not too hard.

The trail took you to the town airport, which was where I liked running the most. The road beside it was flat and made for easy running. It was bordered by the airport on one side and a trailer park on the other. The runway was this huge piece of black pavement that stretched a half-mile long. Barely used, too.

I think the town only had it for the summer people that owned planes. There was a washed out blue hangar with rotting iron at its sides, and the planes there were prop planes, like the toy kind I used to have as a kid. It looked like something from a film set, surrounded by shorn green grass and leafy pine, and when the sun hit just right, the field lit up all emerald-like.

The road winded into a little neighborhood, a scattering of one-story homes and empty trailer lots and mailboxes that showed off a family’s personality: +++ an open lobster trap with overdue bills, a giant golf ball with a latch, and those regular mailboxes with Al lived in a Colonial. That’s what Elena said as we red-colored flags because most people living there and drove up towards it, coming out from a dirt road

05

LITERARY

surrounded by pine. It was painted green, with white paneling, and had a wraparound porch and a Jesus figurine above the doorbell. Al opened the door graciously, just like his figurine would have, raising his eyebrows, the hairs of which were colored such a white they were almost see-through, as he let us in.

I introduced Elena in the doorway. Al took her hand and kissed it. I had never done that to Elena, at least not in public or in that formal kind of way, and looked at her to see if she thought it was nice. I saw her blush and felt a little outfaced. Al took us into the kitchen, where his wife was bent over a steaming pot.

“This is Cheryl,” Al said, and for a moment I thought he meant the pot. I then looked at the actual Cheryl, a short woman with a large forehead and straw-colored curls. A paper bag squirmed beside her on the counter.

“Al has told me so much about you,” she said.

"Well I’m afraid I haven’t heard a thing about you,” I said, which made Al laugh so hard he slapped me hard on the back. Elena rolled her eyes. Cheryl smiled politely like she’d heard it before and knew it was true, which it was.

“What’s in the bag?” Elena asked.

“Great question!” Al said, plucking the paper bag off of the counter. Cheryl turned back to the pot. He opened it under our faces, like a magician revealing the bunny inside his hat. “They’re lobsters. Our neighbor works on a boat, he dropped them off today.”

The little crustaceans had rubber bands around their red and black marbled claws and looked quite cramped inside the paper bag. Their antennas folded onto themselves like thin licorice and their bodies twitched and rolled onto each other.

“Cheryl makes the best lobsters,” Al said. “You wait until you dip some of the meat into the garlic butter sauce she makes. I hate this word, but—” “Alan, don’t.”

“It’s orgasmic.”

“Jesus, Alan.”

“Like real, pulsating sex.”

The paper bag rustled. The water bubbled. +++ “Why don’t you all sit down by that table over there,” Al said, without looking at me, pointing to their living room. “I’ll make some drinks and be right over.”

We walked to a cocktail table with four chairs around it. In the middle of the table was a jarred butterfly, very elaborate-looking, with shiny red wings splattered with black specks, like camouflage, that turned orange at their ends. It was enclosed in a mason jar and stood upright as if it were floating. There was a needle glued to the base of the jar on which the butterfly’s body was skewered. Against the wall was a bookcase with six more jars of preserved butterflies, with more along the window sills, the arms of the sofa, and stacked on top of hard-to-reach places. All different colors, mish-mash like tie-dye, placed liberally around the room like lanterns or lawn gnomes. There was

11 OCT 2019

a monarch, its black veins tracing out small cells of tiger-orange, one with sea-blue wings clipped with white and red dots along its banding, and another with black wings flecked with green. I pictured Al in some humid forest wearing a bucket hat and khaki pants, armed with a net, his paunch sticking out from underneath his button-down shirt, trying to capture one as it flew away.

“Butterflies,” Elena said. “My mom says they symbolize the soul.”

Elena’s mother taught nature classes at a summer camp. She was also a classics major. I wondered if Elena liked them. She never mentioned butterflies before, so I assumed they meant nothing to her. But I overthink everything, so naturally I overthought the butterflies.

There were too many of them. I took Elena’s hand in mine and squeezed it. She pulled away and took her seat.

Al came in with four drinks and an ice bucket on a tray and set them down on the table, moving the jarred butterfly carefully towards the far edge of the table. He brought in a couple of cans of seltzer too. Al sat across from me, next to Elena. The table seemed larger then, and they seemed farther away.

“Cheryl’s just waiting on the lobsters,” Al said.

The glasses were sweating, and Elena wiped her hand on her thigh after she took one and sipped it.

“Really good, Al,” she said.

“What’s with the butterflies?” I asked.

“Oh, you know, just a hobby. Monarchs. Red Admirals. Swallowtails. They light up the room. I like catching them. And I gotta do something else with my time, you know. Writing about sports sometimes makes me wish I never got into the paper at all.”

“What’s your favorite one?” Elena asked.

“Favorite sports team?” Al said.

“The Red Sox,” I said.

“Butterfly.” Elena said.

“Oh, that’s a good question,” Al said. “A much better question. You’ve got good questions.”

Al trailed off and Elena listened with her eyes.

Everything seemed to pull away from me in that moment, which was good and bad. Good because I could only listen to Al for so long, and bad because I felt a bad thought coming on. I thought that maybe Elena didn’t love me anymore.

Before I worked at the paper, I didn’t do anything.

I didn’t run, go grocery shopping, pay my own bills.

Elena worked at a marketing firm in the city and I survived by her account. She didn’t hold that against me, at least didn’t show it, which I appreciated. I cooked for her when she came home, queued up movies the New Yorker told us to watch, booked tickets to shows the New Yorker told us to see. I felt bad, but I trust she knew that, because she never asked how I was doing.

The thing was, I had all these questions running through my head. Incessant questions. Insistent questions like What am I doing? What does that look mean?

Am I taller than that guy? How could she love me? Do I love her? It got to the point where the questions became worse than the thing itself and made it impossible to do anything. I sat out on the fire escape all day long smoking, keeping track of the delivery trucks that loaded out on the side street below, watching people through adjacent windows as they walked across their lofts. I cried easily then too, especially when we went to hear the symphony. But one night, Elena confided to me that she also had these questions and showed me her notebook. I opened it, read a couple of pages, then asked her to marry me.

I’d gotten better at dodging the thoughts, the questions, but they came back sometimes: alone in the car, at night before I fall asleep, or in a coworker’s living room waiting for dinner.

When I came to, Al and Elena were laughing.

“What did I miss?” I asked.

“Weren’t you listening?” Al said. “Where’d you go?

Is he like this with you too? Half the time I talk to him and he doesn’t seem to listen.” Al took his glass and twisted it in his hand.

“Sometimes,” Elena said. “He lost his keys on a run today.”

“No kidding. Your keys, huh?” Al said. He took a drink and sucked in his lips. “Sometimes I look over the cubicle and he’s just staring at his computer, like this.”

Al put his drink down and raised his hands in the air, as if they were hovering over a make-believe keyboard. He slacked his jaw, widened his eyes, and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

sat there frozen. He kept still for a couple seconds, then started laughing, but he started choking and and broke into a fit.

“That’s karma,” I said, and Elena give me a sharp look.

His coughing was really loud. Elena rubbed his back. I turned around and saw Cheryl emptying the pot of lobsters into the sink, the steam rising and making her face invisible.

I turned back and Al was wiping his face, apologizing.

“Getting old,” he said.

“It’s a bummer,” I said. “Maybe they’ll give you an intern.”

The lobsters slid across the metal sink, clinking and clanking as Cheryl tried to pick them up. “Damn things are too hot,” she said.

Al got his breath back and started talking again.

“You guys fight a lot?” he said, pouring a can of seltzer into his glass.

“Here and there, I suppose. Who doesn’t fight?” I asked.

“I’m sure there are people who don’t,” Elena said.

Color filled her cheeks.

I wanted to press her hand but she seemed so far away. I smiled, tried to convey the thought, but her eyes danced around my stare. I was feeling a little buzzed. We really never fought that much, at least not in the traditional way. We mostly fought with ourselves and took it out on each other.

“Me and Cheryl fight all the time,” Al said. “I say you aren’t married unless you’re fighting,” he said.

“Christ, I’m too old to drink.”

Al got up and took out a bottle of gin from a cabinet and set it on the table. He studied the back of it like it was some ancient artifact.

“Anyone want seconds?” Al said. “I’m out, myself.”

I poured some for Elena and myself and gave a splash to Al, who took it back in one swig.

“We’re like that story,” Al said, raising his empty glass.

“Which one?” Elena asked.

“I forget.”

heard my breathing. There was another snap from the kitchen, and Cheryl entered the room with a bowl of lobster meat. I sat back down and noticed a broken jar below me, the red and black butterfly impaled with a shard of glass.

Drool trickled down Al’s chin and he started to gurgle. Elena made a move towards him.

“No need,” Cheryl said, cradling the bowl with her hands. “This happens all the time. He’s fine.”

She set the bowl of meat down on the table and went back into the kitchen. I looked at Elena, and she said we should leave.

“I thought I saw his hand on your lap,” I said.

“You’re crazy,” she said.

I turned towards Al, who let out a hiccup, and mumbled an apology. Then two black lines suddenly appeared on the corner of his bottom lip, like the hands of a climber grasping for the top of a cliff. I leaned in closer and watched a butterfly crawl out of his mouth, walk up to the bulb of his nose, and unlatch its paperthin wings towards us: a flush of blue from indigo to baby, with streaks of sunset-yellow shooting out towards its edges. They opened and closed rhythmically, like a song, and matched my breathing. I relaxed my hands. From the kitchen I heard butter frying, and I figured Elena was right. +++

Elena fell asleep in her clothes that night, and when she did this, it usually meant that she wouldn’t wake up until noon the next day, so when I woke up I went on a run knowing I had time. I took the same route I did the day before and found my keys on the edge of the road.

I was a bit hungover and my feet plodded against the pavement, everything feeling heavy, like I was running with concrete-filled shoes.

As I ran, I started to hear someone else’s footsteps behind me. These sounded different than usual, louder, and drastically out of step with my own, as if they were indeed someone else’s this time, and the farther I ran, the closer they seemed to get. I was too scared to turn around, I didn’t want to see, so I kept running: past the airport, past the evergreen, past the rundown houses There was an awful crack from the kitchen. It sounded and uncut lawns. I ran to see where the road would take like a bone being snapped in two, a clean break. I me, where aimless and endless met their ends, and turned and saw Cheryl with a pair of metal clamps wondered if I’d even be able to notice. wedged between a lobster’s claw. There was another hellish crack, and with a fork she pulled out a long, white, red-veined piece of meat from the shell. I looked back at Elena and wondered whether we would be good parents.

Al yawned, his mouth opening egregiously wide, and placed his hand on Elena’s shoulder. He squeezed it gently, then placed his hand back in his lap. Another snap came from the kitchen.

“Lobster rolls,” Al said, his eyes barely half-open.

He was blitzed. “She’s making lobster rolls.” Al said.

“You like lobster rolls?”

He moved his hand onto Elena’s thigh. That’s what it looked like, anyway, with his arm stretched out in that direction. He didn’t seem to think twice about it.

“I like lobster rolls. All of that meat. The bad part is getting it out of the shell. Eliminates that whole step.”

He breathed in, closing his eyes, then opened them and looked into mine.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, his hand still on Elena’s thigh.

Another snap, another piece of meat leached from its shell.

I got dizzy, and I assume the color drained from my face. I looked at Elena but she was looking at Al. I wondered why she wasn’t looking at me and started spinning off reasons. My leg started to shake. Up and down and up and down like a heartbeat. Elena was wearing some kind of blouse, and she looked just like the day I met her, a memory that I made different each time so it was always like I was meeting her for the first time, or not meeting her at all. I looked down at my glass and realized I had finished it.

“Really,” Al said, laughing. “What’s wrong with you?”

Before I knew it I’d punched Al. The impact crept all the way up my arm and along my chest, a snake trail of electric force. For a moment I thought I was having a heart attack. Al was splayed out in the chair, eyes closed, his head and neck craned upwards towards the ceiling, mouth open, slack and all like a stretched-out piece of chewed gum. I only

LITERARY

06

MOSQUITO TRAP

Everything you (wish you didn’t) need to know about Triple E Consider this hypothetical scenario: Mosquitoes carrying an infection with a 30-percent mortality rate have taken over, and you are the only one authorized to release a secret weapon that will completely eradicate them—what do you do? The knee-jerk response might be, “Blast the mosquitoes, of course!” But what about the fallout, the unintended consequences? One should try to calmly navigate the panic and fear, taking time and space to examine the repercussions of their actions.

Are you willing to take a gamble on what your actions would mean for the precariously balanced ecosystems that human survival and flourishing depend on? It’s possible that rescuing some humans from one threat could end up worsening the already dire ecological crisis that threatens us all. +++ Very dangerous but also very rare, eastern equine encephalitis virus (Triple E) is an infection transmitted to humans through mosquito bites. In the United States, there have been more cases of Triple E in 2019 alone than in the preceding 50 years. Climate change is generally thought to be at the root of this uptick.

Warmer weather delays the first frost in many eastern states, which allows for mosquitoes—who need bodies of water to reproduce—to thrive for longer portions of the year.

Triple E infections normally remain in a closed, back-and-forth loop between birds and mosquitoes.

It’s only when specific subspecies of mosquitoes that bite both birds and humans becomes infected that a threat is posed to human populations. Large animals like humans and horses, unlike birds, are considered “dead ends” for the virus. In these animals, the concentration of the virus in their bloodstream is too small for a mosquito that bites them to become a carrier. That’s the good news, and partially explains why this infection is so rare among humans. However, once infected, horses have a 90-percent and humans a 30-percent mortality rate, with Triple E causing encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. (Triple E can also cause non-encephalitic presentations of the infection, or entirely asymptomatic ones.) In the non-fatal cases where Triple E affects the brain, survivors are left with permanent brain damage, which can manifest as seizures, altered personalities, paralysis, or cognitive impairment. Often, these lingering symptoms, known as sequelae, kill the patient within a few years.

Mosquito breeds that bridge the infection from birds to horses are much more common than those that bridge the infection to humans, making a vaccine for horses profitable and commercially viable (one dose sells for around fifty dollars). In the 1980s, a vaccine for humans was invented by the US military to provide protection for troops and researchers. However this

07

SCIENCE + TECH

vaccine did not provide long-term inoculation, and because the virus is incredibly rare among humans, it was deemed virtually unprofitable and thus not worthy of production. So, although a vaccine does exist, it is not available to the general public. Instead, experts recommend an integrated mosquito mitigation (IMM) approach. Much of this approach involves meticulous attention and participation on the public’s part.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s webpage on integrated mosquito management is broken up into subsections: conduct mosquito surveillance, eliminate places where mosquitoes lay eggs, control larvae and pupae, control adult mosquitoes, and monitor control programs. The most straightforward suggestions are to cover up, limit time outside during peak mosquito hours between dusk and dawn, use insect repellent, and keep well-maintained screens on open doors and windows.

To help inform and guide the terrified public, the CDC dedicates an entire page, titled “Prevention,” to helping the user navigate the use of insect repellents.

It even offers a search tool that lets you specify the criteria you are looking for in a repellent (duration of protection, for mosquitoes and/or ticks, active ingredients), and returns a useful table. The CDC promotes caution with children: Do not spray a baby under two months old; instead, dress them in long clothing and cover strollers with mosquito netting. Towards the bottom of the page, it recommends treating your clothing with permethrin, an insecticide that targets insects’ nervous systems, as mosquitoes can still bite you through your clothing. However, this preventative measure is not without its own risks, which the CDC barely mentions on its website. The National Pesticide Information Center (NPIC)’s fact sheet on permethrin is more illuminating and gives one pause when considering its use. Permethrin is highly toxic to insects indiscriminately, damaging the populations of beneficial insects such as bees and flies. Permethrin is incredibly toxic to aquatic animals and fish; it stays on clothing through multiple washes, and it is highly probable that spraying, wearing, and washing this insecticide on our clothing will negatively impact the bodies of water around us and their marine life.

Additionally, Permethrin is toxic to cats, and can even be deadly for them; the NPIC warns the consumer to keep freshly treated clothing away from pets until they’ve dried. The priorities of the CDC are clear: We live in a human-centered world and we must focus on maximizing human survival at any and all costs.

Removing standing water is another effective way to mitigate mosquito populations, since mosquito larvae and pupae are aquatic. The IMM articles frequently mention abandoned tires as hot spots for mosquito breeding, as though they decorate every corner. But what to do with standing water you can’t

BY Emma Kofman ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN Daniel Navratil

dispose of? The CDC recommends using “(EPA)registered larvicides according to label instructions.” If this doesn’t nip them in the bud, and the pupae mature, the next step is to apply adulticides, which kill fullygrown insects. One of the most effective ways to do this over large areas is through aerial pesticide spraying, a controversial practice most recently deployed in some counties in Michigan, where nine people have tested positive for EEE this year. Aerial spraying gives affected residents pause: What makes this airborne chemical safer for them or their pets than the mosquitoes it is targeting? A smaller portion of residents are also concerned about the effects of aerial spraying on the ecosystems around them.

Rhode Island—with three confirmed cases of EEE this year and one death—conducted two rounds of aerial spraying on September 8 and 11. This is only the second time Rhode Island has ever opted to conduct aerial spraying for mosquitoes; the last time was in 1996. The insecticide to be sprayed is chosen by state and local officials and determined based on the results of regional mosquito insecticide resistance.

The amount being sprayed is often minor enough, at generally one or two tablespoon per acre, that officials claim the spraying should be harmless to humans. The CDC writes, “If people prefer to stay inside and close windows and doors when spraying takes place they can, but it is not necessary.”

However, beekeepers are especially wary of aerial spraying programs. The insecticides used, although allegedly safe for humans and animals, can kill bees that come into direct contact with them. The spraying being timed at night should assist with protecting bees, as they are normally in their hives during those hours— however, beekeepers have been advised that they may want to keep their colonies on lockdown during treatment times. An unanswered, less-examined question that does not show up on the CDC’s FAQ: What happens to the bat that eats that collateral bee? Or the spiders that eat the mosquitoes? And the animals that drink the treated water? As beekeeper Betsy O’Neill mentions to woodtv, an NBC-affiliated news station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, “Definitely what we want to first go to is the humans. But as humans, we need all these integral parts of nature, and it’s there for a purpose.” +++ What O’Neill is referencing is the myopic, anthropocentric view humans tend to take when threatened by natural forces: that the only important things are our lives and our childrens’ lives. What this viewpoint often neglects are the subtle ways in which our lives and wellbeing are predicated on the flourishing of a complex and delicate ecosystem—we don’t know what happens when mosquitoes disappear. The webbed dependency of the natural world is what makes total mosquito eradication, a process being piloted in other parts of the world, especially scary.

The long-term effects of humans playing “Mother Nature” in both the cases of aerial spraying and the release of genetically modified populations into the wild are nowhere near fully understood. The potential ramifications and unintended effects of such actions could ripple out irreparably for generations to come. We have barely scratched the surface of all the complexities of how climate change caused this uptick of virus-bearing mosquitoes in the first place. In much the same way, we cannot entirely understand all of the long-term after-effects of the solutions and techno-fixes we employ in response to this problem. Still, the paranoia and fear around every bug bite remains, elevating what is normally an itchy nuisance into an existential threat, a fear that your days are numbered.

So…do you choose to release that secret weapon? Are you sure you know all of its costs?

EMMA KOFMAN B’20 wants an anti-itch cream that actually works.

11 OCT 2019

in . ed

ays, so I

d walk wit

h

yw

ings for

lly kn ow ctua

h of t s e p y t hose

ea

Bu t

s ’m uppo s

oing in. g

ea

c

at d

s e t yp e s ho of

irectio n

I’m supp

os

o eg b o t ed

I

w ut o b pa

i th

h

k

y jagg ays, km ed l a so I w wa l

t wi

m et ger. I g n ofe

ixed u

ng an yw

st

in an ce r t a

ve anyon belie t ’ n do

e d t o be

ing

e anyon

st tu ally know s f or certai

n

ed w

to b

eg oin g

ge jag my

mixed u p n get abo sw fe u t a gger. I w hat dir ec t i on I

in. B ut I do

ie v

g

wa l

alk Iw

t io

up about

ays, so

jag k my

o

n’t bel

w

yw an

td a h tw

a lk

fo rc er tai n

it h s wag

I’m s up os p

g e r .

I of e n get mixed

n

ings

du p abo u

ire c

those t

c

yp e s of th

get mixe fen Io

a I don’t believe anyone t Bu

ws

tua

lly kno

hs g wa

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

08

DIRTY UNDIES

BY Isabel Guanieri ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

content warning: sexual violence I bought my first thong when I was 15. It was a cinnamon color with light blue polka dots, framed by a white lace trim. To my teenage self, there was something about wearing the thong that felt rebellious; I wondered what people would think if they knew I was wearing it or saw it slip out of my waistband. That thought was both alluring and terrifying to me—the thong was a symbol of women’s sexuality and confidence that I was not ready to inhabit but wanted to try on.

The thong works to conceal but also be revealed.

Thin strips and a string rear render it invisible, almost a second skin. When hidden, the thong’s discreetness makes it acceptable. According to the Forbes guide “What Not to Wear to Work,” anything that reveals panty lines is inappropriate office attire. A thong at work can be a way to comply with workplace respectability. When rendered visible, however, the thong becomes imbued with meaning as an overtly sexual object. The thin straps are easily altered, allowing the wearer to reposition or reveal them in low-riding clothing. Thongs heighten the bodily form, creating lines that accentuate the waist and shape the butt.

Thongs also feel flimsy and delicate, often incorporating materials like lace, cotton and silk that are associated with femininity. Made visible, the thong can be a tool of seduction, a symbol of overt feminine sexuality. In the context of the workplace, this visibility would sexualize the thong wearer and become entirely inappropriate.

At 15, I already knew what it meant to wear a thong—or, rather, what it meant for someone to see I was wearing a thong. This was bound up in conceptions of women’s sexuality that I had both absorbed and was afraid of having imposed on me. The thong held dual meanings for me: It was a signal of sexual availability and confidence that I could either exert or have mapped onto me. Kept secret, it only had as much power as I inscribed to it. What I didn’t know was that these implicit associations were entangled with the media’s portrayal of the woman who ushered thongs into popular consciousness, a woman whose name became the site for sex shaming on a national scale.

That woman—Monica Lewinsky—wore thongs.

The thong staked its place in history with a mention in the Starr Report, independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s official report to the House based on his investigation of President Bill Clinton. According to the account, Monica Lewinsky initiated her first sexual encounter with President Clinton by lifting her jacket and showing him the straps of her thong underwear. This act became a tabloid sensation as the country was consumed by the salacious details of their affair. A Salon article from 1998 reads: “Eve had her apple. Monica had her thong.” Never mind that Clinton was the President of the United States and Lewinsky a 22-year old White House intern; to the press, Lewinsky was a skilled, manipulative temptress—the thong, her weapon of choice.

Monica Lewinsky showed the world how powerful a woman’s sexual confidence can be. A woman and her thong almost toppled a President. The thong could have been read as a tool that empowered Lewinsky, who made the thong visible in an office setting to display her interest and availability. But the media instead transformed the thong into a tool to humiliate her. “Thong Snapper” became one of the media’s many derogatory nicknames for her during that era. In an interview with Lewinky in 1999, Barbara Walters asked: “You showed the President your thong underwear. Where did you get the nerve?” Lewinsky

09

FEATURES

responded: “If you take my word for it, it was a small, subtle, flirtatious gesture. And that's me.” That innate boldness made Lewinsky the central villain in a story that was really about the most powerful man in the world exploiting a severe power imbalance for his own sexual pleasure, then making Lewinsky the scapegoat. This was the beginning of the thong’s place in pop culture: the material site where discourse around women’s sexuality revolved around a tiny slip of fabric.

+++ When I tell my parents I’m writing about thongs, they start awkwardly gyrating and singing a tune I don’t recognize. You have to listen to the "Thong Song!" they tell me. It’s a cultural reference I am too young to remember, an unfortunately catchy single by SisQó released in 2000 that peaked at #3 on the Billboard Charts. In the hook, SisQó implores: “All night long / Let me see that thong!” The music video is filled with dark- and light-skinned women of color dancing in thong bikinis, with a mostly-clothed SisQó at the center. Here, the thong is stripped of the autonomy and confidence that Lewinsky demonstrated and is instead an object upon which men can project their fantasies around sex and women’s bodies.

This projection of fantasy is underscored by how and when the thong is made visible in the video.

The video opens on SisQó in a house in Miami, as his young daughter approaches him and holds up a lacy red thong, asking “Daddy, what’s this?” SisQó freezes, dumbfounded, and presumably looking for an appropriate response. In a bizarre transition, the video pans to buses filled with women, with intermittent scenes of SisQó grinning while twirling the thong around his hand, as a voiceover narrates, “This thing right here is letting all the ladies know what guys talk about.” This line positions both the thong and women's bodies as subjects of male conversation and scrutiny. Through the rest of the video, the thong is made visible on women’s bodies through fabric and in the form of thong bikinis. In the final scene, the women’s neon thongs glow under sheer clothing in a black-lit club. Even distorted through the semblance of fabric, the thong’s limited visibility encourages imagination around a woman’s body that is never fully revealed.

Later in 2000, SisQó released a remix of the song and an alternate music video featuring the Black female rapper Foxy Brown. In an attempt to give the women in the video more agency, Brown starts off the song by saying, “This thing right here/ Is the official ladies anthem”—disrupting SisQó’s claim that the thong is “what guys talk about.” The song continues to say, “Ladies, I want you to put your drinks down [and] pull your thongs up,” a call for women to take more control of their bodies and exert sexual confidence through the thong. But this call is fraught for reasons beyond the thong’s history. As Miller Young explores in her book A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, when Black women exhibit sexual confidence they are seen as playing into the Jezebel stereotype. The Jezebel has an insatiable appetite for sex and a flagrant disregard for nudity, and the trope often coincides with visual racialized tropes, such as a big butt, that emerged out of the colonial exploitation of African women. Despite the lyrics that compel women to take more control over their sexuality, the music video still centers around SisQó ogling barely-clothed women of color. The new video continues to present women’s bodies as sexualized objects, placing

Brown’s attempts to reclaim the thong in tension with racialized stereotypes and the male gaze that shapes the video.

In the media circus that surrounded Monica Lewinsky in 1997, the Boston Globe described her as a Jezebel, placing a white woman within a racialized stereotype and equating her supposed promiscuity to the hypersexuality imposed on Black women. While media outlets slammed Lewinsky daily, the repercussions for white women were instead deflected by constructing her licentiousness as almost “black.”

+++ In 1999, between the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal and the release of the “Thong Song,” thongs were the fastest-growing category of women’s underwear.

According to the Wall Street Journal, thongs won over the mainstream market by disassociating from sex and catering to fashion utility by eliminating panty lines—severing them from Monica Lewinsky and the “anything-goes beaches of Brazil.” Through this new marketing, the thong became “naughty for nice people,” and started to be sold at expensive clothing stores like Sak’s Fifth Avenue and J. Crew that cater to predominantly white audiences. As hypersexuality

11 OCT 2019

Seeing and unseeing the thong in pop culture

was imposed on Black women, distancing from this On social media, this movement was accompanied sexual appeal sanitized the thong to make it more by people posting photos of thongs with the hashtag palatable for white consumers. #ThisIsNotConsent. Through this trial, the thong But the thong was never able to completely became a tool for justifying the objectification of a rebrand itself. Abercrombie & Fitch came under fire in minor’s body and manipulating the agency a thong 2002 when they released a line of thongs in children’s can give a woman. But the protests and social media sizes printed with sayings such as “wink wink” and backlash recast this reading, reclaiming the thong as “eye candy.” According to CNN Money, much of this a symbol to resist patriarchal judicial systems that blowback came from conservative Christian nonprofit condemn survivors. organizations. The outrage is understandable, as the thong and the slogans attached encouraged the sexu+++ alization of girls as young as ten. However, critics used language that disparaged all expressions of women’s There is a part of me that wants to throw out all my sexuality, arguing that the thongs “turn wearers into thongs and chart a new path. I’m not alone. In recent sex objects and victims of lost innocence.”According years, the popularity of the thong has decreased. to Bloomberg Businessweek, one critic of Abercrombie & Younger generations are embracing granny panties, Fitch even claimed that the underwear would increase prompting headlines like the New York Times’ 2015 the risk of sexual assault.

“Young Women Say No to Thongs.” This move to The male gaze on the thong and a woman’s body fuller styles is celebrated as a way for women to buy can be twisted and used to justify violence. Last year underwear that is comfortable and for themselves in Ireland, a 27-year old man was acquitted of sexu- rather than for a man’s visual pleasure. Even trying ally assaulting a 17-year-old girl after a trial in which to avoid panty lines has been construed as catering to the lawyer mentioned that the girl was wearing a lacy male-dominanted office standards. thong. According to NPR, the verdict set off protests New boutique underwear businesses championed across the country in which people carried thongs by young white women entrepreneurs are capitaland signs reading “End victim blaming in the courts.” izing on this shift. One of the offerings of the clothing

label Me and You, featured in the Times article, is a pair of pink granny panties with the word “Feminist” printed in curly red font. The founder of Me and You, Julia Baylis, told the New York Times: “Most lingerie is designed to appeal to a man. For us, that’s not even a consideration. This is underwear you wear totally for you.” In contrast to sexualized thongs, granny panties convey self-respect, independence, and a rejection of dressing for men’s pleasure. While there is nothing wrong with seeking comfort in your second skin, framing the thong as purely an object of men’s pleasure delegitimizes the confidence it does give women.

Moreover, drawing on the way the thong is framed by the male gaze perpetuates the racialized dichotomy of women’s sexuality, as these white women entrepreneurs frame themselves as too pure for the skimpy thong. If modesty and sex are oppositional, whiteness and Blackness too exist on divergent sides of that spectrum.

So what do we do with the thong considering the space it occupies in pop culture?

In 2019 and in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Monica Lewinsky reclaimed the narrative that once ostracized her, becoming a powerful anti-bullying advocate and even admitting to herself how her consensual relationship with President Bill Clinton should be read differently based on the staggering power differential. I deeply admire Lewinsky’s resilience. As I approach the age she was when the scandal broke, I struggle to imagine how I would fare in her shoes. But I wonder how her whiteness may have protected her from a legacy of hypersexuality.

Twenty years after the Starr Investigation and due in part to the labor of the Black women that founded the #MeToo movement, history will look kindly on Monica Lewinsky. The societal investment in white innocence is what makes her reinvention possible, an option not afforded equally to all women. Most people my age still associate the thong with sex and sexual confidence, but its negative association with Lewinsky has largely faded with time.

By choosing either to highlight or obscure the thong’s relationship to racialized sexuality, white women have continually redefined the thong’s meaning in fashion and pop culture. But Black women have been involved in this construction as well. In Foxy Brown’s verse in the alternate “Thong Song,” she calls for a world in which thongs personally and sexually empower women. Removed from the male gaze and stereotypes of hypersexuality placed on Black women by white audiences, the thong takes on the meaning the wearer wants to ascribe to it. A reconsideration of the thong requires a shift in how we process women’s agency and sex positivity across race, gender and class lines.

My underwear is not a political statement. It is a profoundly personal one based on what makes me feel most comfortable and how I want to frame my body. I used to say it was all about the panty lines, and that is a part of it—but I am no longer afraid of people knowing or even seeing that I wear thongs. In our media, our music, and our courts of law, women’s sexuality is constantly being turned into the subject of outside gaze and public negotiation. But in the end, it is a decision I make for myself every morning. And I choose a thong every time. I love thongs for their capacity to be redefined on my own terms.

ISABEL GUARNIERI B’20 threw out all her granny panties years ago.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATURES

10

SHIFTING GEARS On September 15, nearly 50,000 United Automobile Workers (UAW) union members formed picket lines outside of General Motors factories across the United States. Launched in response to problems negotiating their contract, it was the union’s first strike since 2007.

More than three weeks later, the UAW-GM strike continues. Over the course of negotiations, GM has cut off, and restored, healthcare coverage for striking employees. The company has lost an estimated $600 million, and 34 of its plants have temporarily shuttered.

To better understand the implications of the strike, the College Hill Independent spoke with retired labor organizer and social activist Frank Hammer. Over the course of his 32 years working at GM, Hammer held the positions of President and Chairman of UAW Local 909 in Warren, Michigan, as well as UAW-GM International Representative. He also co-founded Autoworker Caravan, an advocacy group linking current and retired autoworkers. Hammer discussed the automotive industry crisis of 2008-10, class consciousness in union organizing, and transnational labor solidarity.

to go out and organize unorganized workers where the work would have been sent. So the UAW preferred to keep workers in the plants, and they conceded to the two-tier system.

Can you talk about the Wall Street crash and other economic events of the last 12 years, and what effect they’ve had on the UAW?

My view on that question is different from what’s generally out there. The general view is that the US government under President Obama had rescued the auto industry and it survived and the companies thrived and so on. My view is actually that the auto companies were looking for such a financial crisis to actually implement cutbacks against the UAW agreements [...] and they used that as an opportunity, with the US government’s help, to really decimate the contractual rights that were previously won. For example, we lost the right to strike—the right to strike was suspended for half a dozen years. We lost overtime pay premium after eight hours. Contractually, they had to pay us timeand-a-half after eight hours, but now they only have to +++ do what the law requires, which is after 40 hours, and things of that order. There were a lot of changes for the It’s been 12 years since the UAW last voted to UAW. strike General Motors. Can you explain your demands this time around and why you’re There have been several rounds of contract negostriking? tiations in the past five years. Why is this one different? Why are you striking now?

The strike, of course, is the result of GM and the UAW not being able to come to terms on a new contract. I think one of the main reasons, if you were to ask The 2015 contract expired, and they did not reach rank-and-file workers, is that everybody understands agreement on new terms for the contract. That’s what that all the concessions that have been made in the prompted the strike. The UAW describes the issues in UAW agreements, going back to 2007, have resulted a very general way, in terms of what they’re actually in General Motors regaining profitability. Over the bargaining for, but that includes things like job secu- last three years, I think, they have made 35 billions rity, a means by which temporary workers can become dollars, and in the meantime, workers in the plants are permanent workers, the question of health care for in very onerous situations with this multi-tier structhe current workers, [...] the question of the future of ture and workers getting $15 dollars an hour or less. I the four US plants that were idled. Those are some of think that people thought it was time to demand that the issues. One of the strong issues has to do with the the company share that surplus value that workers are multiple-tier system that exists in all the GM loca- generating, that more of it ought to go to the workers tions, in terms of people doing similar work and getting and not so much to the bankers and to the GM finandifferent rates of pay and different benefits. ciers of Wall Street.

When did that multiple-tier pay system emerge?

In GM, it emerged in 2007. That’s when the two-tier system was first negotiated. It was actually before the Wall Street financial crisis, before the bankruptcy bailout in 2009—it was actually implemented a couple years before that. It was basically done on the argument that the UAW would either accept the two-tier structure in the plants, or GM would outsource the work to non-union locations, and the UAW would have

11

NEWS

workers in the Big Three. If you fast-forward to today, GM is now the smallest employer of UAW members [among car manufacturers] in the US, with around 46,000. We’ve been shaved to one-tenth of what we were, just as a force to be reckoned with. It’s happened through automation, it’s happened through the decline in market share, it’s happened through outsourcing.

In many ways, we’re not the formidable force that we were in the ’70s. This has made for changes in terms of power, workers’ sense of their own power, and so on.

That’s one change.

The other change that I’ve observed that is critical is the agenda of management and union partnership.

Even though it was present, even in the ’70s, it really grew and became a thing, and actually took over the entire ideology of the union and the union leadership.

So that had an impact as well, in terms of disarming the workers from seeing themselves as class-conscious fighters versus being a partner and helping GM become more competitive in the name of job security.

What exactly is management-union partnership?

The idea was that we shouldn’t be adversaries, that the conflicts were of no benefit to either party. That’s the theory of it, that we should instead work cooperatively, and that if the union looked after GM’s competitiveness, GM in turn would look after the workers’ benefits and job security and so on. That was the formula, and it was institutionalized in things that were called “joint activity centers.” They were institutionalized through a financing mechanism that was agreed to through the contractual agreements. It became an army of joint activity-appointed personnel and appointed workers, downtown in its own building, and then also in all the plants. So, a real structural change in the structure of the way the union operated within General Motors. It became this partnership at all levels, and you had all kinds of advocates of it who were appointed staff in order to carry it out.

How do you see union organizing now? What place do you think it has in progressive politics more generally? It’s something that’s been talked about a lot recently, because there have been high-profile strikes, with the teachers union and You’ve been involved in activism for 50 years and others. How do you see this strike fitting into you’ve had a lot of different roles in this union. that?

You’re also a former General Motors employee.

Could you talk about how you’ve seen labor orga- I think that this strike is quite significant, in the sense— nizing change over the years, through all the and I am speaking partly from having been on some different positions you’ve occupied? of the picket lines in Detroit—that there really is an outpouring of class feeling among autoworkers, and Back in the ’70s, when I hired in at GM, there were a sense of solidarity. For example, my plant is one of 450 or 500 thousand workers that, alone, just worked the four that are in the process of being closed, and for GM. We were a massive force, as manufacturing there are only a handful of individuals working at my

11 OCT 2019

BY Cate Turner ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Christie Zhong

The United Automobile Workers strikes General Motors

plant. So our picket lines are staffed by Ford workers and Chrysler workers. They’re doing it as an act of solidarity and this class feeling—that we’re all in this together, that Ford and Chrysler workers understand, “hey, we’re next,” that we’re all family. To me, it really represents a very interesting dynamic that you wouldn’t have seen without the strike. Now that it’s out there, now that people have had these feelings of solidarity, walking the picket lines with each other, supplying food and supplying water, all of those kinds of things, I think that it’s opened up a new avenue to see the manufacturing workers in the US in a different light. Most of what you’re talking about—the strikes, the organizing efforts—have been in the public sector or in the service sector. So I think this is a major break from that, and it portends, depending on where things go, that there’s going to be more organizing in the manufacturing sector than previously.

What’s the general sense of where you’re at with negotiations right now? Also, how can people who aren’t directly connected to the UAW support the strike or get involved?

The latest communication [from UAW leadership], which was over the weekend, established that negotiations aren’t going so well, that, in some ways, they went backwards. For example, GM earlier on—at the very beginning, before the strike began—said that they were offering to put some work in the Detroit location, and over in Lordstown, Ohio. Now, the word was that they’re withdrawing those offers. I think the way it’s being presented to the public is that negotiations are getting to a tenuous moment. It could be that these are public pronouncements to wear the strikers down to get them to be accepting of an agreement that’s not quite up to their standards, and that that might be the intention. But that’s speculation—we’ll see. There’s no doubt that General Motors is playing hardball, and that GM showed itself when, without notice and without warning, it cut off the healthcare of all striking workers, which it had to retreat on and reinstate it. I don’t know what the status is now. Clearly, GM is wanting to get its way. I think that workers understand that and will continue with the striking process.

In terms of how people can support, clearly the best way is—if you’re in a town or an area where there is a GM distribution center or a GM facility—coming out in support of the picket lines is the best way of engaging in support. I know that there are folks in non-GM locations that have talked about organizing informational tickets—for example, at auto dealers. I don’t know that that’s actually going on, but I know that, for people who want to lend some support and be visible about it, that’s one of the ways that people have spoken about doing it.

In terms of contributions and donations, I know that

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the local unions can’t accept financial donations, but strikers can receive donations in kind. That’s probably one of the best ways to help the picketing workers, by keeping them supplied with foodstuffs, rain gear, any one of a number of ways that people can lend support to the strikers.

Is there anything else that you think is important to highlight about this movement?

One is that those of us who are activists within the ranks have really tried to promote an international approach to this struggle, because we understand that GM is an international corporation, and, as it is, we have workers around the world who are currently engaged in fights with General Motors, and that it would be incumbent upon us to close ranks and reach out to the workers. For example, there are strikers right now in South Korea who are striking over issues with GM. We have Mexican workers who work at a truck plant in Silao who were laid off as a result of parts shortages due to the strike. But I know that some of them were fired because of support for the GM strikers in the States. We have workers in Brazil, members of a union called Con Lutas, who are also engaged in the campaign against precarious work with GM in São Paulo. And we have workers in Colombia who are engaged in the fight with GM who are workers who sustain injuries in the workplace and are subsequently fired because of those injuries, and are cast out on the street without any compensation. They’re engaged in a battle with General Motors to get their jobs back, to get compensation. There are all these organized fights, it seems, for people who are strikers here in the US to reach out and become more unified across borders.

What steps do you think should be taken to create solidarity across national borders?

A couple of us are in Oshawa right now, and last night there was a wonderful solidarity rally by members of the Unifor Local 222 who themselves are confronted with the closure of their GM facility in Oshawa. Many workers turned out in solidarity with GM workers in the States. We had a great rally, a great gathering, and I think it’s energized the Canadian workers. I think more gatherings and more connections of that order are what we should be doing.

CATE TURNER B’21 doesn't know how to drive, but does know to stand with the union.

NEWS

12

BY Nick Roblee-Strauss ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Kathryn Li

RIGHT & WRONG & RIGHT ON RED Judge Frank Caprio has a knack for extracting narratives for his courtroom reality show, Caught in Providence, where Providence’s traffic violations are put in the spotlight. While the arraigned come to his court with a traffic violation, Caprio pries and takes away a story. The result: heartwarming comedy.

In one February 2019 episode, Alyssa Supriano approaches the mic in Caprio’s courtroom to make her case for her speeding ticket for driving 30 miles per hour in a 25 MPH zone. She explains that her violation was a necessary transition while slowing down, and therefore she should be granted some leniency. Caprio, however, distracted by his own clairvoyance, gives her story little attention. “You know sometimes I have these extra-sensory feelings.” Caprio adds, “I would bet that she’s some kind of an entertainer. Some kind of a dancer.”

She is, in fact, a former professional dancer and she explains what she can do: “I can do a handstand. If I do a handstand can I get a warning?” The courtroom breaks into laughter and with Caprio’s go-ahead, she proceeds to do a handstand. As she got back on her feet, Caprio remarks: “Well, we have a two-minute

13

METRO

threshold. You have to do something for two minutes to get special considerations in this court.” He then smiles and explains his reasoning (which is her reasoning, reiterated) to dismiss her case. The show is more than mere antics, though, as the intro articulates: “This is the courtroom of Frank Caprio. Where people and cases are met with compassion. A courtroom like no other. This is Caught in Providence.”

Certainly, Caprio shows compassion when he addresses the arraigned. While his interest in personal narrative offers an opportunity for holistic justice, it also intentionally doubles as a ploy for entertainment.

While on one level his process is an acceptance of Supriano’s reasoning, his method is a sort of wild goose chase as he searches for her nugget of star power ripe for television. Caprio’s manner is applauded by fans for his ability to see the humanity in all and his commitment to offering low-income individuals a break. That said, this kind face of justice in Providence is the sole regular presence for the city on nationally syndicated TV. His practice of personal inquiry is much too heavyhanded to purely represent a pursuit of justice. The show itself, while perhaps illustrating an imaginary

forgiving judicial system, comes at the cost of coerced participants who must perform for the cameras or risk wasting Caprio’s time.

A Courtroom Like No Other The Providence Municipal Courts are open 7:30 AM to 2:30 PM, five days a week. But when I visited Caprio’s courtroom on September 23, his session began at 5 PM. Caprio is a quasi-retired judge; he serves just one week each month in traffic court. His courtroom itself is an aberration from the norm in Providence with an airy lobby and gleaming wood interior. Six producers and cameramen sit and stand to Caprio’s right monitoring the cameras set up around the room.

Frank Caprio presides above it all. He looks around as a stroke of genius presents itself: “Let’s get the baby in the shot.” The plaintiff looks through the crowd and asks: “Which baby, your honor?” Caprio laughs, and the producers beam at the three babies present. One couple offers to move into frame with their cradled child to honor Caprio’s soft spot for young families.

With his brother Joe Caprio serving as the show’s

11 OCT 2019

A look at Frank Caprio’s courtroom reality show: Caught in Providence

executive producer, Frank has the ability to call the shots himself.

The procedures begin. Some of the arraigned are clearly intent on winning over Capiro, while others are just there to try their luck in traffic court. Caprio begins by explaining the defendant's traffic violation: usually a right on red when a sign explicitly prohibits it. He asks for the defendant’s explanation of the situation. Three people try (unsuccessfully) to apply the classic Rhode Island excuse: “I don’t know such and such street, I’m from Massachusetts.”

One woman, when asked why she turned right on red, explains that she was in a rush and missed the sign.

Caprio turns to a computer screen projected on the wall. The footage is pulled up and played. The cameras clearly show her pass the sign, and seeing no pedestrians or cars, continue on. He asks to see the clip again.

She bows her head. The prosecutor interjects, “I didn’t see the sign either.” Caprio chortles, “Case dismissed.”

She moves toward the secretary who handles paperwork, and they wave her away.

Stakes on the Small Screen Since the show’s inception in 2000, Frank Caprio has slowly risen to his current (under the radar) fame. The show has been syndicated nationwide on Fox since September 2018, allowing Caprio to reach a wider audience than ever before. Aided in large part to the virality of the show’s YouTube presence—the Caught in Providence channel has 576,000 subscribers and 124 million all-time views—this glimpse into Providence traffic court entertains an ever-growing audience dedicated to his work. In the comment section on a recent clip posted to his YouTube channel, fans express their adoration for Caprio and his manner. J is ScoobysMom comments, “I Love Judge Caprio, he's the kindest man,” while Denise331 says, “Judge Caprio for President!” Caprio himself proudly highlights this in the courtroom room with letters sent from across the country and, he revels, “as far away as Sweden!”

Shown in almost every region of the United States as weekday programming, the show continues to place Providence and its traffic court in the public eye, but not without raising questions about the ethics of the show. What are the implications of using arraigned people and their stories for entertainment? Does the show serve as a publicity stunt for the Providence Police Department?

Courtroom reality shows are tremendously popular and broadly replicated in the US, and Caught in Providence was one of the first shows of the genre. In the highest rated courtroom reality show, Judge Judy, Judge Judy Sheindlin similarly uses her charismatic personality for entertainment in the courtroom. As an arbitrator, her process toward legally binding “arbitration award” takes place on a set dressed like a courtroom. A key difference between Judge Judy and Caught in Providence is that while Sheindlin’s subjects have chosen to have their cases heard by her specifically, receiving a Caprio judgment is the luck of the draw.

Caprio’s show has a more convincing claim to realism than others in the genre, as it at least takes place in an actual court. In my visit, I heard no suggestion of these defendants were cast or handpicked; after roll call, Caprio makes it clear that defendants may request that their court session not be filmed for the show. At the same time, some defendants, conscious

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

of the gains to be made from playing into television tropes, might perform to encourage a pardon, whether as perfect victim or as comedic value. This creates a dilemma for the arraigned: a choice between kinder treatment with unwanted publicity on-camera or an unfilmed alternative.

The mere presence of cameras in a space of justice alters its course. In the Sixth District Court just a 15-minute walk away, police prowl the aisles to ensure that no one records the session. When I observed arraignments at the district court, police barked at me for taking notes. Caprio’s courtroom is not monitored by law enforcement. The only policeman present is out of uniform and serves as the prosecutor (a constitutionally questionable practice only legal in one other state, South Carolina). The camera seemingly influences police to replace aggression with jokes and niceties. This is not to say that this is an ingenious act, but certainly the optics are better in Caprio’s courtroom.

With Caprio representing the Rhode Island criminal legal system in the national media, his demeanor overshadows a much grimmer reality.

Naughty or Nice Frank Caprio makes a point of considering the holistic situation for each of his cases. He intends to let people off the hook if they express good intentions. He asks about their families, congratulates single mothers for their hard work and independence, and then clears their fines. But where a formal ban on unpayable fees and fines would address the issue more broadly, the Caprio method requires charm and a willingness to perform for the camera in order to earn a sympathetic pardon.

This past spring, the College Hill Independent reported on Rhode Island’s court debt crisis, detailing the burdens this debt places on low-income people.

With over $50 million in outstanding court debt and 4.5% of the state’s population owing money to the district court, the Independent found that protection from unpayable fines were rarely upheld. The burden of this is immense and lenient judges play a key role in upholding existing laws. In 2008, Senate Bill 2234 created the requirement for ability to pay hearings, so that no fees and fines would be assigned to those who demonstrate serious financial need. Proposed this past January, House Bill 5196 would have improved accountability on these measures, but the bill was recommended for further study and has since remained untouched. It is crucial that judges, like Caprio, consider ability-to-pay when assigning fines to combat cyclical poverty, although many are currently failing to do so.

Who Wins?

exclusively on Caught in Providence as the unbiased traffic camera, is let off the hook for the reality of on-the-ground policing. As in cities across the country, Providence residents have repeatedly accused the city’s police of profiling. In 2017, when the City Council passed the Community Safety Act (now named the Providence Community–Police Relations Act) to curb profiling incidents, the police union retaliated in a statement citing it as unnecessary.

The ethics of turning people arraigned in Providence into an eccentric cast of characters ripe with humorous explanations of petty crimes is questionable. Traffic court’s stakes seem light. Conviction is not on the table, and fines ranged from $40 to $160 on the day of my visit.

Producers reward those who play into this paternalistic narrative with niceties. During my visit, after Caprio waives her fine, one woman says, “Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.” The producer to Caprio’s left gives her two thumbs up. She repeats a little louder and into the mic, “I really appreciate you doing this for me.” This subtle moment of performance makes for compelling, if not entirely honest TV. “I believe in you,” Caprio chides. “You are gonna be very successful. Give back. Remember to give to your community.”

But when Caprio hopes to create a moment, the defendant does not respond with the show’s required subservient graciousness. “I do,” she says. “I work as a social worker.” Caprio waves her away. The policeman-prosecutor tries to explain the difference between volunteering for a cause and being paid for it.

Exasperated, she says that she helps people and doesn’t do it for the money. She leaves the stand annoyed and disrespected, but without a ticket. While Caprio seemingly hoped this woman would play the part of grateful subject, her existing contributions to her community as a low-income public servant ruin his savior agenda. +++ Caprio comes to the courtroom equipped with his own tricks. He takes a moment away from someone’s testimony to read a letter from a fan who wished to remain semi-anonymous. “This one makes me teary,” he begins. “She’s a fan of the show. Her name is Cher— not who you’re thinking though.” He goes on to say how Cher from Maryland admires his work and has enclosed a check to give to someone who deserves it. He smiles as he looks up from the letter and looks into the eyes of the woman facing him. She’s a single mother, works in a nursing home, and made a right on red while driving to pick up her child from school.

Her eyes are respectfully cast down as she awaits her verdict. “And you deserve it,” he says. This moment will likely be screened nationally, and no doubt many will feel touched by sweet moment. But only in this courtroom do the “deserving” get off.

In a rare moment of clarity, the comment section on a recent YouTube video speaks to broader systemic issues not represented by the show, as Bear420bear laments: “If only real courts were like this America wouldn't be so screwed.” Defendants across the country continue to face unpayable fees and fines when their story is not heard. This fate—no one deserves.

Unlike the national media, the show frames Providence and Rhode Island judicial system in a positive light. A lenient judicial system contrasts with the narrative of corrupt lawlessness, mafia-run Providence put forward by the podcast Crimetown, which focuses on Mayor Vincent “Buddy” Cianci and mob boss Raymond Patriarcha. Caught in Providence offers a new (albeit 81-year-old) Italian-American patriarch to preside over the city’s reputation with a NICK ROBLEE-STRAUSS B’22 paid a $25 Providence gentle manner and an all-but ominous voice. parking ticket in July. Had he known he could, he’d The Providence Police Department, represented have taken it to TV.

METRO

14

GAME CHANGE In 2014, a break-up on social media exploded into an online battleground. Here, on the planes of Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit,­two sides clashed without mercy over the culture and meaning of video games.

Today, although the conflict has died down, the specter of Gamergate still hangs over American politics. In the worst of cases, it remains deeply entangled with the lives of Zöe Quinn, Briana Wu, and other women in game development and criticism, who faced harassment, threats, and, in some cases, campaigns that forced them to quit their jobs.

In August, the New York Times ran a collection of op-eds that aimed to cover the political and human cost of the event. Whether through developing modes of harassment waged by legions of anonymous trolls or tactics of disinformation, Gamergate reflected a blueprint for the storm of disinformation the alt-right would unleash onto the 2016 election and beyond.

While focusing on the human and social cost of Gamergate is vital to its coverage, it is equally important to trace the conflict through the actual objects, worlds, and stories that were fought over. More than simply describing and condemning the wrath Gamergate emblematizedand unleashed, the goal of this article is to contextualize the ways of thinking and seeing that were projected onto the virtual realm of games, before they were then reflected out onto American politics. +++ Like the fuse of any mythic war, this one’s was lit by an intimate relationship. Eron Gjoni, a young man from Boston, had a broken heart and was angry. His girlfriend, Zöe Quinn, had cheated on him, and instead of turning his grief inward, he decided to produce a sprawling, frantic 9,424-word narrative of the breakup.

The immediate effect was simple and devastating.

The messages and documents he attached to the post fueled Quinn’s terrifying, ceaseless harassment at the hands of online misogynists. She was hacked, naked photos of her were circulated on the internet, and her home address in Boston was published, making the violent threats she frequently received each day alarmingly tangible. The thematic effects of Gjoni’s story, on the other hand, were what elevated it to the axis of a culture war. While Gjoni’s post focused on villainizing Quinn, its drama was set inside the world of the independent video game industry. After all, many of the men Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping with were either game developers or game critics. On an even deeper level, when Eron described their breakup, he often put

15

SCIENCE + TECH

it in terms of a relationship between an authoritarian game developer and a helpless 8-bit boyfriend player.

This portrayal of a female developer as unfairly overpowered became incredibly valuable to a heavily male culture of gamers who felt under threat from a “New Wave” of independent games and the forms of criticism developing around them. At the time of Gamergate, the independent gaming industry was hitting its stride. Software that allowed small teams to code their own unique worlds and stories was more accessible than ever before. Over the past decade, games have slowly transitioned away from the confines of a CD drive. More and more, platforms like Steam have allowed users to purchase, maintain, and download games from an online marketplace. There, high-budget games created by industry giants can be sold next to an expanding library of independent titles representing a growing diversity of voices and forms.

While some independent games sought to match the absorbing gameplay experience of Call of Duty or World of Warcraft, other developers played with their interactive form. These games were more interested in conveying a specific message; often, these messages spoke to the diverse experiences of new developers.

Depression Quest, the first game Zöe Quinn created and eventually put on Steam, was a perfect example of this burgeoning style.

Rendered primarily through text, Depression Quest stripped the idea of a game down to it essence: a dendritic network of pathways that could be navigated according to the player’s choices. Unlike traditional RPG adventure games that gave the player free rein over navigating each path, Depression Quest placed stipulations and restrictions on players throughout the gameplay, which aimed to simulate the difficulties of living with depression. Through its form and content, Depression Quest forced the player to purposely and consciously grapple with their own social position outside of the game.

For a large portion of the gaming community, this was an unforgivable sin. These ‘gamers’ did not play games to deliberately contemplate their stauses in the outside world; they played them to forget their situations and identities. From the free feeling of running and gunning, to the intensely layered and intricate procedure of leveling a World of Warcraft character, playing video games connected players with the liberating experience of an alternate reality. There, corporeal identity could be translated into fantasy avatar.

These players purchased games to escape the world rather than investigate it.

However, with the rise of independent gaming, ‘reality’ was beginning to intentionally and visibly project itself onto the virtual. A framework was emerging for an argument that could never resolve itself, one where the two sides approached the idea of video games from two different theoretical visions.

And to light the fuse, “the zoepost” gave each side of the debate an avatar to project onto. On one side, there was Gjoni, the male wannabe developer whose life had been ruined by a ‘New Wave’ feminist game developer. On the other side, there was Quinn breaking into a male dominated industry and changing the idea of what a video game could be: a vessel to deliver social and political messages.

Days after the Zoepost, articles were published with titles like “The Death of Gamers and the Women Who Killed Them,” “Why We Need More Developers like Zöe Quinn” and “Gaming is Leaving ‘Gamers’ Behind.” These articles defended Quinn and attacked the gamer norm, which, the writers argued, leaned heavily upon masculine fantasies of war, crime, and sex even as it claimed neutral escapism. In the same ways film theorists criticized cinema for delivering a male-centered view of the world in the 1960s and ’70s, these writers critiqued video games for centralizing male protagonists and relegating women to the background as objects to either save, fetishize, or commit violence upon. In every case, these claims were legitimate, but the problem for some gamers was that they were applied via a tradition of criticism that placed art and society in dialogue with one another.

Absorbed in gunfights or flying spaceships at light speed, some gamers refused to connect the immersive, seemingly disconnected world of games to the putside world. For those resistant to the independent gaming industry, games were not preconstructed stories or messages—they were blank worlds that individuals were encouraged to make their own. If you didn’t like how women were portrayed in one world, the argument went, you could immerse yourself in a world where they were. RPG games like World of Warcraft, after all, had female avatars, and that must have been enough. Any projects that sought to create an aesthetically and politically self-aware narrative, however, defeated the immersive quality of video games. From this approach, video games were not only alternate, but anti-realities that notions of politics and aesthetics had no business meddling with. At the height of Gamergate, no one more fully occupied this stance than Milo Yiannopoulos, then a Breitbart.com tech writer, who rose to prominence as a far-right racist commentator

11 OCT 2019

BY Miles Guggenheim ILLUSTRATION David Gonzales DESIGN Christie Zhong

A narrative of Gamergate through the lens of games

after covering the fallout of Gamergate. Reflecting on the conflict, years later, he wrote: “Games function as escapism. Many of the people who play them are escaping from the harsh vicissitudes of the real world, letting off steam in a safe virtual environment. The last thing they want is to have white guilt foisted on them by social justice warriors.”

Yiannopoulos saw video games as ideally a space devoid of any social responsibility—an anti-reality where players had ultimate power, to be anyone and do anything without consequences. In the grand strategy of Steve Bannon, Breitbart executive chairman, Yiannopoulos was also tasked with unleashing the politics of this anti-reality against the vulnerable foundations of “fact,” “responsibility,” and “truth” that feminists and other socially conscious people in gaming needed to effect a progressive vision. +++

protected. Just as gamers felt they could live without consequence in a virtual space, 4channers truly believed that they could say and argue what they wanted in the same vein. In his article “How imageboard culture shaped Gamergate,” published in 2014, Jay Allen showed how these sites created a subculture that was at once existentially absurd and dangerously serious. On imageboards, he writes, “Everyone’s anonymous, so a poster can just join the winning side of an argument, cheerfully mocking their own older posts.

One poster can even play both sides from the start.

Every anon can choose whatever opinion they want to have on a post-by-post basis, so everything flows smoothly even as people hatefully attack each other for having the wrong opinion. Anons believe in this free marketplace of ideas: good ones survive the firestorm, while bad ones burn to ash as everyone dogpiles on mocking them.”

In this way, while games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty created a hypothetical space for an anti-reality, imageboards and subcultures crafted and refined the politics of this alternate world. In their discourses, not only was any conscious stake in real-world identity considered a weakness, it was antithetical to the production of worthwhile, universally accepted ideas.

But, of course, there was nothing universal about these imageboards. In almost every case, the Darwinian logic of their supposedly egalitarian conversations were played out through a subculture of white men. At the end of the day, denial of the so-called world of identity was contingent on the homogeneity of the groups that were escaping together.

Thus, as reality came in to change the nature of video games, the culture of a toxic-anti reality poured out to return fire. Every doxxing plot, every empty bomb threat, every fabricated fact that came out to disrupt the foundations of reality was crafted in the anti-social context of these imageboards. What was first a defense of an alternate world developed into an assault on the real world. Bannon and the alt-right simply saw the opportunity to side with anti-reality, an alliance that would serve it well in 2016.

According to an article by the Intelligencer, Bannon hired Yiannopoulos because he saw potential in his ability to speak to a culture of “disaffected” gamers more eager to stand up for their own plots of virtual ground than national ground. Unbeknownst to many, Bannon only entered the business of ‘alt-right’ journalism after a failed bid with the virtual markets of World of Warcraft. Ironically, the business model linked the real world to the sprawling fantasy realms of World of Warcraft using the labor of low-paid of Chinese workers mining virtual currency.

Bannon’s false assumption was that players in the West would pay for their virtual currency with real money. The WoW community, however, rejected Bannon’s influence with ruthless principle. Navigating through the anonymous player chatrooms that disagreed with his business model, Bannon learned that anti-reality had its own space, its own values, and even its own politics, In Joshua Green’s book, The Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of The Presidency, Bannon reflects on that time with a tone of epiphanic insight, “These guys, these rootless, white males, had monster power. It was the pre-Reddit.”

In 2014, MILES GUGGENHEIM B’20 was irrigating But Reddit was on the horizon, and so was 4chan. his Minecraft farm.

As Bannon suggests, like World of Warcraft, these imageboard chatrooms granted a zone of anonymity, not unlike the realm of video games, that allowed them to develop their own unique subcultures, free from social norms. Like computer games, 4chan provided a space where anonymity was not only enjoyed but

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SCIENCE + TECH

16

WITHIN ONE FRAME Human closeness in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour content warning: suicide Last month, the film Joker won the Golden Lion—top honors—at the Venice International Film Festival.

That the comic-book movie, which was directed by Todd Phillips of the Hangover franchise and portrays the title character as an alienated urban loner who eventually explodes into violence, won one of the world cinema circuit’s most prestigious awards came first as a bit of a surprise, and then curdled into something more dispiriting. Superheroes don’t save the world anymore, it seems—instead, they’ve taken it over, as stories of them and their nemeses dominate every aspect of culture.

Twenty-five years ago, Venice bestowed the Golden Lion on an altogether different sort of film. One of the great works of the New Taiwanese Cinema, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour never made much money at the box-office (Joker made $93 million last weekend), and generated little in the way of hot takes. It was a film that could use every bit of help it could get in building an audience; no mass of DC Comics fans eagerly awaited its premiere. What it did have was a charged, artful intimacy. Maybe Joker does too—I haven’t seen it. But it’s also a behemoth, currently taking up all the oxygen across a wide swath of the nation’s cultural conversation. So as a brief reprieve, let’s give something small and beautiful—Vive L’Amour, say—a little room to breathe. +++ Vive L’Amour begins with a temptation: A key sits in a lock, unattended and waiting to be turned. A man’s hand enters the frame and fingers the little flashlight that dangles from the keychain, but a door down the hall opens and calls him away. He remains in the blurry background of the image, attending to his business with the person in the corridor, but when he’s finished and once again alone, he returns to the key and steals it out of the lock, pocketing it as he dashes into the elevator. He has been tempted, but maybe not as we expected; he doesn’t turn the key, but takes it, exhibiting not an impulse to enter, but an intention to return.

A small, wordless drama that plays out in a patient single shot, this scene is as good an introduction as any to the film’s magic, and to the movement broadly known as the New Taiwanese Cinema. Though its representative works are often freighted with historical and political concerns—it arose in the midst of the nation’s modernization and the gradual institution of democratic reforms that came after the death of authoritarian leader Chiang Kai-shek in 1975—they always ground themselves in intimate moments, flashes of human quirk and feeling in the course of a seemingly static realism.

The New Cinema continued through the 1990s and counted among its ranks filmmakers like Tsai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Edward Yang. It was arguably Taiwan’s first national art cinema; the country’s film industry prior to the 1980s was rigidly controlled, by Japanese colonial power until the end of World War II, and by Chiang Kai-shek’s regime thereafter, which promoted a “healthy cinema” that smacked of propaganda. Created, then, in a time of newfound artistic freedom, the movement’s films are infatuated with their own medium, always pushing towards new expressive possibilities.

It’s true that the New Cinema didn’t make big

17

ARTS

box-office waves, and that it alienated much of its Taiwanese audience. By any popular measure, the films comprising the movement are slow, keenly observed but undeniably subtle and cumulative in their effect. The movement received a major stamp of approval from the international cinema circuit, however, when Hou’s film City of Sadness was given the Golden Lion in 1989.

Five years later, Vive L’Amour won the same award.

Its story revolves around the apartment to which that opening key belongs, an empty Taipei flat that real-estate agent May Lin (Yang Kuei-mai) is trying to sell, and follows the three individuals who pass through it, often unwittingly sharing the place with one another.

Along with May Lin, there is Ah-jung (Chen Chaojung), a man she takes back to the flat one night, and Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), the key thief of the film’s beginning. Both men sporadically sneak into and stay at the apartment, unbeknownst to May Lin. Under the gaze of Tsai’s attentive, often still camera, the comings and goings of this trio sometimes feel like a sex farce, slowed down. There’s even a decent pratfall. But the film makes of its premise something deeper, kinkier and more melancholy than an arty Feydeau redux. A sequence near the beginning follows Hsiao-kang as he enters the apartment for the first time. He wanders through the rooms. He takes a bath. And then, sitting half-naked on a bed, he raises a knife to his wrist. We wonder: Was this his intention from the moment he took the key? Tsai lets us stew in the despairing enigma of his creation, shooting Hsiao-kang first through a window, and then moving in, putting us up close with him in the dark room, his heavy, nervous breathing audible, his wrist just below the frame. It’s an agonizing minute or so of film, one that might begin to feel exploitative. The shot’s insistent, unsettling length certainly bespeaks an artist constrained by little but his own intent. But Tsai isn’t mining the moment for suspense; rather, he’s interested in simply looking at people in pain, in what we might see and what we don’t. The camera can only look so deeply, and pain can only etch so many lines across a face. Eventually, Hsiao-kang drags the knife across his wrist, and lets it clatter onto the floor.

Just as this occurs, May Lin and Ah-jung arrive together at the flat and begin taking each other’s clothes off, not aware of the man bleeding out in the bedroom across the hall. When Hsiao-kang hears them, he gets up and stanches the bleeding, and then walks over to the partially open door behind which the two others are now having sex, drawn to these people, irrepressibly curious. A shot shows him from behind as he stands, one wrist slit, listening to the sounds of others’ intimacy. It’s a perfectly bleak distillation of the paradoxical alienation of urban life—he is at once desperately alone and surrounded by the lives of other people.

Vive L’Amour was far from the only film of the New Cinema to take up the theme of the city’s peculiar human effects. Unlike Truffaut and Godard gazing upon the historic avenues of Paris, the filmmakers of the New Taiwanese Cinema lived and worked in a rapidly growing place; Taipei’s population more than doubled in the decades leading up to the movement’s flourishing. An artistic reckoning was inevitable. What it does it mean and how does it feel, to live among so many? In Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, for instance, a family lives in a Taipei apartment that looms above a busy highway, and Yang sometimes shoots them from from the outside looking in—until, that is, someone shuts the blinds and the windows become mirrors, and we’re suddenly faced with the lights of buildings and the cars whooshing by below. A domestic scene has become a cityscape, the lightning-quick transition an indication of how barely they’re separated, of how the city’s always pressing in.

Tsai, for his part, investigates urban life on a more intimate scale, from Hsiao-kang standing outside the bedroom to May Lin and Ah-jung’s walk to the flat, an expertly choreographed, ever-so-coy pursuit through city streets, as they pass down busy sidewalks and thoroughfares, moving separately but in each other’s orbit nonetheless. And yet as much as these moments reflect particularly urban relations, they’re also about human relations in a more elemental sense. May Lin and Ah-jung first meet (if that’s the word) just before this, in a food court, him at one table as she sits down at another beside it. It’s a moment of awkward, gently aching proximity, made riveting by Tsai’s ability to make cinematic space feel electric, as if the air within his images is always charged with the potential for human connection. The two of them are

complete strangers, and yet there they are, sharing the frame—something has to spark. Another version of this movie—the kind with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, say—might have them begin to banter. But Tsai lets their relationship remain exquisitely ambiguous, keeping his camera trained on them as they sit silently, somehow apart and together at the same time.

Shots like these make us consider the associative power of the camera frame—are we always right to assume a connection between two people in the same image? Somewhere in this consideration is a muted optimism, the idea that that assumption indicates a possibility, that the yawning gaps between two people can be closed if there exists too the desire to reach across them. The film’s astonishing climax depicts an instance of such desire, as Hsiao-kang perches on the edge of the bed where Ah-jung sleeps, and slowly slides across the wide white plain of the bare mattress between them until, at last, he kisses him. Hsiao-kang begins the film with a flash of temptation; he ends it with the fleeting flush of intimacy.

This late gesture of homosexual desire isn’t a revelation, exactly. The film is suffused with it, down to the way Tsai’s camera gazes hungrily at his actors’ bodies— the haunting, resolutely interior Lee Kang-sheng especially, who has appeared in every one of Tsai’s features to date. But that desire here makes a particular kind of sense, because in the electric field of Tsai’s images, any person could connect with any other. That’s a liberatory ideal—certainly in the context of a nation still adjusting to life after authoritarianism, but so too in the here and now.

And yet Tsai doesn’t lean on this to insist that anyone can find meaningful relationships if they only know where to look. Connection’s possibility doesn’t make it any less elusive. The film ends with a fiveminute-long shot of May Lin sitting on a park bench and crying. We’re steeped in the ebb and flow of her sobs, the jagged rhythms of her breath. It’s an ugly outtake of loneliness, a scene of little drama and overwhelming emotion. As she keeps crying, Tsai’s camera unflinching, the film achieves a certain therapeutic pull, as if inviting us to cry alongside it. Vive L’Amour is a work of enormous, aching pain, and in the end, Tsai offers some frank guidance: Sometimes the only way through it is to feel it.

ZACH BARNES B’20 hopes Venom 2 wins the Palme d'Or.

BY Zach Barnes ILLUSTRATION Natasha Brennan DESIGN Christie Zhong

11 OCT 2019

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

X

18

justine nguyễn-nguyễn is an interdisciplinary artist who was once pre-occupied with re-evaluating silence and sentimentality; she is now taking a break.

FRI 10.11 Power back on for ALL! Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission - 89 Jefferson Blvd., Warwick 10AM (sharp) The George Wiley Center is fighting against utility shut-offs, which, of course, primarily impact Rhode Islanders who struggle to pay their utility bill each month. As Thea Riofrancos, co-chair of the Providence DSA told the College Hill Independent last year, “The profit model that drives the shut-off crisis is the same model that drives the climate crisis.” At a public meeting of the PUC, which regulates the state’s energy companies, the Wiley Center is asking people to take fifteen minutes out of their Friday to show public ardor in the audience against shut-offs.

SAT 10.12 Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers Weigh Off Frerichs Farm - 43 Kinnicutt Ave, Warren 9AM - 5PM It’s unfortunate that fall’s most wonderful locales—the pumpkin patch, the apple orchard, really the entire fall enterprise—have been co-opted by the biddies over the past decade. (I must admit, beloved reader, that even this List Writer was once a PSL diehard with the flannel shirt and puffer vest to boot.) But the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers Weigh Off remains untainted by the forces of Instagrammable consumption. It is nothing more than a showcase of pure agricultural might. The agrarian myth ain’t dead yet: It weighs 1,914 lbs.

SUN 10.13

THE LIST

Sad & Boujee: The Emo + Trap Party Alchemy - 71 Richmond Street 2nd Floor, PVD 9PM - 1AM

WEDS 10.16

Gov. John Kasich - It’s Up to Us True North Classroom (101), Stephen Robert '62 Hall, 280 Brook Street The image for this ambitious event features 5:30 - 7PM a cursedly photoshopped Cardi B with bluestreaked, choppy hair and two sets of upper and The Watson’s description for this event literlower lip piercings. The vibes at Sad n Boujee will ally claims Kasich is “not very interested in polibe similarly perverse: Good Charlotte and Simple tics.” The description continues: “After listening Plan will grate against Kanye and Lil Uzi, while to his impassioned thoughts on the state of our attendees will be crying and twerking (as Facebook nation, however, you'll understand where he’s user / prospective attendee Shauna A. promises). coming from.” (I’m sorry, I feel like this List entry So long as DJ Grotzsky Versace does well, you’ll is writing itself.) The only people who marked discover that Trap and Emo were a match made “Interested” in this on Facebook are cops and if you in heaven and, in fact, never mutually exclusive don’t think so, you’re probably one too. to begin with—not unlike sadness and boujeeness I might add.

MON 10.14

THURS 10.17

Madame X and Mall Grab THE MET - 1005 Main St, Pawtucket 8PM - 12:30 AM

PRONK! (Providence HONK Festival) Fox Point, between the Pedestrian Bridge and the Hurricane Barrier I can’t decide if I wanna fuck or be Madame 2 - 10PM X and both options are grimy impossible. The 27-year-old DJ helped bring grime music to her Take the beauty of Waterfire, mix with the hometown of Manchester as part of a music energy of PVD Fest, and add a healthy dose of collective called BPM: Big People Music, which anti-fascism. Bake at 350 and you’ll get PRONK!, you should also check out. If you’re in the right the best event in Providence. The beauty of mood, this shit is like maybe the next best thing to PRONK!, I think, is that you can hear it from blocks an ecstatic club experience in Berlin—or not, I’ve away. Last year, I followed the sound of horns to never been. For the record, Mall Grab is considerthe Hurricane Barrier and danced to the likes of ably more boring. But maybe that’s just because he “Gonna Fly Now” and “La Vie En Rose” in the crisp looks like every alt white dude in a hoodie. fall air. Maybe this year, you’ll join us in reclaiming the streets.

LEVIN’S LEGACY: TO FUND COMMUNITIES OR JAILS? New York City Council Member Stephen Levin ‘03, is trying to push through an $11 billion jail expansion plan in New York City. The City Council will vote on this plan next week. If Levin has his way, New York City will build 4 new massive skyscraper jails, 1-2 nursery jails for mothers and their babies, and 3-6 jails inside of city hospitals. This plan would devastatingly expand the ability of New York City’s carceral system to lock up, torture, and abuse Black and Brown New Yorkers. Levin’s vote is what he will be remembered for — in New York City and at Brown University. If Levin moves forward with voting for this plan, he, a product of Brown University, will be personally responsible for incarcerating many more Black and Brown New Yorkers for decades to come.

Rikers itself is proof that building jails will never lead to decarceration or abolition. When Rikers was built, it was billed as a “model penitentiary.” More than 80 years later, the notoriously deadly and brutal jail is known for its injustice, abuse, and corruption. In 2015, 22-year-old Kaleif Browder died as a result of being imprisoned at Rikers for three years on false charges— two of those years in solitary confinement. Just this past year, Layleen Polanco, a trans Afro-Latina New Yorker, died in solitary confinement at Rikers. Kaleif Browder and Layleen Polanco are just two of many who have been murdered by the state in its pursuit of “prison reform.” Rikers is no anomaly; history clearly teaches that there is no such thing as a humane jail. The ONLY thing New York City’s jail expansion plan guarantees is increased state violence, which will particuAs the councilperson representing District 33, larly harm Black and Brown people, especially those Levin oversees the district in which the Brooklyn- who are queer and trans, young, disabled, undocubased skyscraper jail is slated. Because of member mented, and/or poor and working class. deference, Levin is one of four city council members with the most power to stop the city from building these New York City’s community members have 12 new jails. His indicated support for the jail expan- already identified the actions that the city must take sion plan defies the demands of his own constituents — to ensure safety for all—these actions do NOT include echoed by people across the US — to close Rikers, build building new jails. Instead, Levin and his fellow City no new jails, and use the $11 billion to invest in commu- Council members must commit the $11 billion toward nity needs instead. the resources that actually allow for community safety, including housing, education, mental health resources, Since February 2018, Mayor Bill de Blasio, Stephen and harm reduction programs. Another Brown alum, Levin, and a few of his fellow City Council members Warren Kanders ’79, has also been denounced for have rationalized building new jails in New York City funding and profiting off of violence against oppressed as a way to close the notoriously brutal Rikers Island peoples both in the US and abroad. Kanders is the jail complex. This is a blatant lie. In fact, the jail expan- chairman of Safariland Group, a supplier of weapons sion plan has nothing to do with Rikers at all. to law enforcement agencies who have attacked

protesters and bystanders in Ferguson and Palestine, and immigrants at the US-Mexico border. The rise of opposition against Kanders, who profits off of police brutality, speaks to the growing acknowledgement of how profiteers in such systems must be held accountable. If Levin votes yes, he will join Kanders as a disgrace to the Brown community. Brown can and should do better.

As students and alumni of Brown University, we have a responsibility to hold Stephen Levin accountable. The era of jail-building is over. Levin’s choice will cement him in history, either as someone who wielded his power to personally ensure the torture of thousands of Black and Brown New Yorkers, or, as someone who changed his ways and called on his fellow City Council members to do so as well.

Members of the Brown community: Please sign the petition to urge Stephen Levin, ’03, to vote NO on the jail construction plan. Call, email, and engage with Levin on social media - make him account for the massive harm he is about to cause. Demand that Stephen Levin vote NO next week, before it’s too late.

ELI HADLEY B’13, MISTY WILSON B’14, JULIA CHANG B’18, SOPHIE KUPETZ B’19.5, AND MAYO SAJI B’20 believe prison abolition is the only way.