The College Hill Independent V.28 N.01

managing editors Julieta Cárdenas, Simon Engler, Tristan Rodman news Sebastian Clark, Alex Sammon, Emma Wohl metro Megan Hauptman, Rick Salamé, Kat Thornton arts Greg Nissan, Maya Sorabjee features Kyle Giddon, Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan TECHNOLOGY Houston Davidson SPORTS Zeve Sanderson interviews Drew Dickerson literary Eli Pitegoff EPHEMERA Molly Landis, Matthew Marsico OCCULT Addie Mitchell, Eli Petzold X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff list Claudia Norton, Diane Zhou design + illustration Mark Benz, Polina Godz, Casey Friedman, Kim Sarnoff Cover Editor Polina Godz Senior editors David Adler, Grace Dunham, Sam Rosen, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin Staff WriterS Lisa Borst, Vera Carothers, Sophie Kasakove, Becca Millstein, Abigail Savitch-Lew, Carly West, Sara Winnick STAFF ILLUSTRATORs Andres Chang, Amy Chen, Aaron Harris, Jack Mernin web Edward Friedman, Patrick McMenamin COPY Mary Frances Gallagher, Paige Morris BUSINESS Haley Adams Cover Art Polina Godz MvP Polina Godz ISSUE 1 // VOLUME 28

news

2 Week in Review

alex sammon & emma wohl

3 Thanks, Obama

sebastian clark, alex sammon & emma wohl

METRO

5 Small Room, Big People kat thornton

7 Ocean State Futures

megan hauptman, abigail savitch-lew & rick salamé

EPHEMERA

6 Data Tank

molly landis & matthew marsico

FEATURES

9 Plane People josh shenkkan

16 Re:calibrate kyle giddon

P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Generation Progress/Center for American Progress. Generation Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at GenProgress.org.

ARTS

11 Floppy-Eared Hat maya sorabjee

TECH

12 Black Boxed

houston davidson

FOOD

13 James Mark john white

SPORTS

15 Early Risers zeve sanderson

fROM THE EDITOR S There are certain places (or at least two—the KimIl Sung Mausoleum and Versailles) where you’re asked to wear surgical slippers over your shoes. You’re also forbidden to slip-skate on the parquet floors.

I had come to Versailles with a pony-tailed tennis pro named Christopher. We were, you might say, tourists. Through the mesh of the slippers I could see the outline of his K-Swiss.

“Your feet are very narrow,” the docent said. We followed her to the hall of mirrors and this is what we saw:

LIT

17 I’m too Zoned 4 This eli pitegoff

X

18 Coconut Shrimp layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

theindy.org // @theindy_tweets

WEEK IN DELIVERY

by Alex Sammon & Emma Wohl Illustration by Layla Ehsan

This holiday season was tough. Surely, no one at UPS wished for the harsh snowstorms that prevented the timely arrival of countless Christmas presents.Confidence is low. But it’s a new year, and everyone deserves a second chance. From us to you, it’s the week in delivery.

SWIPE FOR LIFE The preeminent pro-life organization on the web is making its mark on your smartphone. The Online for Life “Prayer App”— which went viral at last week’s March for Life, the largest pro-life event in the world—makes praying for the unborn as easy as up-voting a potential mate on Tinder. The process is simple: scroll through a list of potential sinners and select a target. Then swipe left over a message about someone considering abortion in order to pray that she changes her mind. An orange-tinted picture of an adorable child and the announcement “Prayed!” replaces the message. It’s so easy, you may save a few lives by accident as you try to scroll down.

“The Online for Life Prayer App underscores the importance of prayer in the battle to end abortion,” its website states, “while involving the pro-life community in such a way that keeps them actively engaged in rescuing unborn children and families from abortion.” The app monitors Online for Life’s success in preventing abortions along with the individual user’s progress. By locating women who contacted, scheduled an appointment with, or visited a Pregnancy Resource Center—“faux-clinics” masquerading as health centers, whose only service is often to give sonograms and advise against aborting, without doctors or nurses on staff—the app makes a direct link between the user’s prayer, the work of these clinics, and a woman’s decision not to have an abortion. For each of the women who contacts one of these centers or decides not to abort, the Prayer App declares a victory. And for each swipe, subscribers are praying for a woman in a particular location—or more accurately, her child, “Baby number 1455” as of press time.

When she “chooses life” the app posts a notification immediately, giving prayer the type of instant gratification Internet users have learned to expect.

The focus on babies saved is important—the Online for Prayer app makes no actual reference to women. Instead, it talks about the child and announces, for instance, that “Someone considering abortion in San Antonio” contacted a Pregnancy Resource Center. But that doesn’t mean that the mastermind behind the pro-life app doesn’t consider gender relevant. On the contrary, Online for Life CEO Brian Fisher sees stopping abortions as his duty as a man. The tag line to his book, Abortion: The Ultimate Exploitation of Women, reads, “Men started it. Men oppress with it.

Men can end it.” With the swipe of a finger. -EW

JANUARY 31 2014

HOT PIZZAS A refresher: Cops and Robbers is a children’s game derived from tag. Children split into two teams (cops and robbers). Cops run around to tag the robbers; robbers sprint to avoid metaphorical incarceration.

The game was invented in 1931.

In his youth, Tuscaloosa resident Michael Antonio Long was never a huge fan of the game—too much running.

Long, 20, is a man who appreciates the comforts of the 21st century. He gets his mail delivered, his food delivered, his Netflix delivered. So, his solution to two of life’s most fundamental imperatives (food and rent) should come as no surprise. Armed with an empty stomach, an empty wallet, and a loaded gun, Long phonWWed up the local Domino’s and ordered a couple of pies for delivery.

The unsuspecting delivery boy strode right up to Long’s doorstep, where Long and a friend forcibly extracted the delivery boy’s wallet—and the two pizzas. Presumably thrilled with the efficiency of this “two birds, one stone” approach (an idiom which may have been all the more appropriate had the firearm been used), Long and his friend then sat around the living room table and feasted.

Though little is known about Delivery Boy, he seems to be an astute observer. Realizing that he had privileged knowledge of the perpetrators’ sedentary location, he promptly phoned the police, who had no problem locating the suspects. They too strode right up to Long’s doorstep and were greeted by Long and friend chowing down on cheesy contraband.

“We don’t typically see a suspect call a delivery driver to their actual address to commit a robbery,” remarked Tuscaloosa Police Sgt. Brent Blankley, enthused by the handiness of the whole ordeal. Blankley certainly has a point—hiding out at a crime scene, which doubles as home, hardly seems to fit the criminal mastermind aesthetic.

Running around was all well and good for the 1930s, but this is a different era, one of couch-side convenience. To call Long a lazy criminal seems too pejorative; to call him a modern luminary seems overblown.

Let’s just call him hungry. -AS

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WE ARE ALL IN DISSECTING THE TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim nations (Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Singapore, the US, Australia, Peru, Vietnam, Malaysia, Mexico, Canada, and Japan) that encompass 39 percent of world trade.

It has outraged many, from lefty activists to libertarian bloggers. Despite the vitriol, there remains confusion as to what the TPP will mean. Wading through the bureaucratic jargon, Indy News has created a pocket guide.

WHAT IT IS

HOW IT’S HAPPENING

WHERE IT’S HAPPENING

President Obama has said that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will “boost our economies, [lower] barriers to trade and investment, [increase] exports, and [create] more jobs for our people,” but beneath the rhetoric of commonwealth and economic growth is an agreement that is neither free nor restricted to trade.

Only five of the 29 chapters of TPP actually deal with matters directly relating to trade. The other two dozen would tighten intellectual property law, liberalize the financial sector, breach consumer and labor rights, and stymie action on climate change. According to Dr. Matthew Rimmer, of Australian National University, TPP is “a Christmas wish-list for major corporations.”

State leaders and their trade delegations have conducted the negotiations in complete secrecy. If it were not for published WikiLeaks drafts on the IP chapter and a “state of play” analysis after the 2013 Salt Lake round of negotiations, public knowledge of any of the provisions would be nil. The most fervent reactions have come from grassroot networks, which view such secrecy as an attempt to bypass the democratic mechanisms that they used to stall prior similar legislation– namely, the 1999 and 2010 expansions of NAFTA and the 2011 SOPA and PIPA bills.

The US Trade Representative (USTR) is quick to point out that 300 “stakeholders”—a hodgepodge of civil society groups, academics, and simply concerned citizens—were invited to comment on the agreement at the July 2012 round of talks in San Diego. Yet these stakeholders were never granted access to the text on which they were meant to comment.

Similar stunts have been pulled in other would-be member countries; Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade held a “public forum” on the negotiations, but on the day before the event, rescinded the invitations of all registered journalists, stating that the meeting was “off-the-record.”

Neither has Congress been afforded access. US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in May 2012 that “the majority of Congress” has been “kept in the dark” on TPP, while major corporations—like Halliburton and Chevron—have been “made privy to the details of the agreement.”

Wyden’s concerns over corporate influence appear to be founded. One TPP provision, the Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS) would establish supra-national tribunals that would issue binding rulings, irreversible by appeal to any judicial court, that would grant corporations the right to sue member countries if they hamper “expected future profits”— in essence, elevating corporations to the legal status of sovereign states and formalizing the excision of corporate power from state control. Public policy would become a matter of purchasing policies from private industry. As Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, has stated, ISDS would constitute “a corporate coup d’etat.”

The USTR has stated that ISDS will be “subject to appropriate safeguards,” but that is hard to imagine. A similar provision in the US-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty recently allowed Chevron to sue Ecuador for fining the corporation $18 billion, following its spilling of 16 million gallons of crude oil.

As mentioned in his State of the Union Address, President Obama is now seeking “fast-track” trade promotion authority to bring US accession to TPP and the upcoming, and similarly frightening, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. If passed, legislators would not be allowed to amend TPP’s text, a direct breach of the US constitution, which grants Congress the power to regulate international trade.

Health The TPP’s shoring up of intellectual property law would grant Big Pharma a monopolistic stranglehold on the international distribution of drugs, reshaping health care across the globe.

First, existing medical giants would be given legal footing on which to prosecute and prevent the distribution of cheaper, generic drugs. Under the guise of patent infringement, companies acting to proliferate medicine with more accessible pricing would be effectively outlawed. This means that prices on cancer drugs, the HIV/AIDS cocktail, malaria treatment, etc. would shoot up astronomically, pricing out needy populations in the developing world. Furthermore, it would preclude government-sponsored medical programs (e.g.

Medicare, Medicaid) from bargaining with Big Pharma for bulk drug prices. The end result is massive price hiking and profit increases for the world’s major drug distributors, namely Merck and Pfizer.

Chile Chile leads Latin America in TPP negotiations. Santiago already has free trade agreements with every country in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Chilean observers worry that the current agreement will bring new restrictions without any new benefits. As the NGO Derechos Digitales noted last May, “the contents that are being incorporated in particularly sensitive areas, such as intellectual property and digital rights, services and investment, capital movements, environment, and regulatory coherence, among others, go far beyond what at the time was negotiated in those agreements.”

Michelle Bachelet, the former president who will assume the presidency for a second time this year, has voiced her opposition to the TPP in interviews and on Twitter, where she linked to an online petition for open negotiations. A group of 50 legislators, academics, journalists, and activists published a petition for transparency in national newspaper El Mercurio.

But Theodore Khan, a researcher in international studies at Johns Hopkins University, told The Santiago Times that Chile has little recourse other than to accede, “even at the expense of adopting standards on intellectual property and other issues that are being pushed by the US,” because Santiago needs to maintain its economic ties to the US.

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Banking Policy The TPP is a sweetheart deal for bankers. Transaction taxes like the Robin Hood Tax (one-half to one percent of Wall Street transactions) are explicitly illegalized. Consumer protection provisions like the Glass-Steagall Act, which prevents banks from using consumer funds in risky investments, are strictly forbidden. Regulation stemming from the 2007 financial collapse would be summarily rolled back, and banks in all TPP nations would be free from the aptly named “too-big-tofail” size limitations on banking operations.

Internet Freedom The TPP’s intellectual property legislation proposes to dramatically alter public Internet usage. The TPP has effetively revived the Internet usage act SOPA (euphemistically, the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” which was defeated in Congress in 2012). Corporate content would be granted exclusive copyright for 120 years, allowing private media giants to run roughshod over creative commons. Perhaps most shocking, however, is the blank check given to Internet providers like Time Warner Cable and Verizon, who would be given free reign to conduct international surveillance of web use, able to fine users for transgressions as minor as sending a purchased song to a friend.

Labor The labor provisions of the TPP affect developed and developing countries in distinct ways. In countries like the United States, the TPP promises to lower wages for middle and lower class workers, and furthers the persecution of unionized labor.

Any growth in GDP will be applied to “high income earners.”

Labor forces of the developing world would be locked into low-wage slavery, barred from collective bargaining, workplace safety regulations, and workers’ rights movements. This provision will codify a labor system that impels factory workers as young as 14 years old legally work 12-hour days.

Environment The transcript of the TPP environmental chapter states immediately that the TPP is a commercial agreement, not an environmental one. The policy proposes an avoidance of many environmental regulations and penalties. The aforementioned Investor-State Dispute Resolution provision gives all corporate entities involved the capacity to sue governments for financial compensation if any new environmental tariffs are implemented. To exact environmentally-motivated fines against the world’s biggest polluters, governments will have to pay these companies for their subsequent loss in profit. Simply, environmental enforcement becomes punishable by law. Massive producers like Halliburton would take over their own export regulation, able to sell natural gas to any TPP nation while bypassing all current review of the environmental and economic impacts of extraction. The US Department of Energy would be summarily removed from all oversight.

Canada When Canada gained admittance to the Trans-Pacific Partnership early in 2013, it agreed to abide by any parts of the deal that had already been negotiated. Canadian critics of the TPP share the concerns of opponents in other countries—that the deal has been negotiated in secret and gives legislators little room to negotiate. But many critics in Canada have also railed against the effects of individual platforms in the TPP, almost as soon as those platforms have been made public. The Canadian wing of the organization Doctors Without Borders called the deal “the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines,” due to the protections it grants pharmaceutical companies in extending their monopoly on brand-name drugs.

While the majority of public knowledge about the agreement comes from leaks and independent investigations, Harper’s government seems to have created a civilian consultation group with access to the TPP negotiations—composed, digital law expert Michael Geist argues, of lobbying firms— whose members had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. That group was discovered because someone in Harper’s office accidentally sent a non-disclosure agreement to representatives of an anti-TPP organization.

Vietnam Garments were Vietnam’s second-largest export in 2013, and the industry will be Vietnam’s top priority in TPP negotiations. In the same year, Bangladesh—the world’s secondlargest garment manufacturer after China—faced a series of controversies from collapsing buildings to fires to mass strikes over wage non-compliance that brought attention to the poor treatment of its garment workers. International boycotts and demands for better working conditions followed. Constituents of the Vietnamese industry are hoping to avoid those pitfalls.

Workers and trade union representatives have been making gains in the past year, to the point that they now meet regularly with management and educate each other about their right to safer workplaces. But agreements between labor and management are in a delicate balance, and the new trade deal could threaten workers’ position by strengthening managers’ and factory owners’ negotiating position. © Indy News 2014

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THIS TOGETHER

by Sebastian Clark, Alex Sammon & Emma Wohl Illustration by Casey Friedman

December 6 2013

literary

â–Ą 18

TWO HOURS IN PROVIDENCE chatting nonviolence with electoral candidates

by Kat Thornton Illustration by Pierie Korostoff

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2014, the candidates for Rhode Island governor and Providence mayor gathered in a softly sunlit room in Lower South Providence. Rick and I left campus about 12:30. We biked down Angell until we hit downtown, stopped to make conversation with a group protesting the arrival of Peggy Cabral (controversial Dominican TV host and widow of former Dominican populist leader Jose Francisco Peña Gómez) and then we got onto Broad Street. Our destination: The Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, 265 Oxford Street.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr., whose principles could be seen pasted to the walls of the institute, the candidates had agreed to sit on panels and answer questions about their policies toward nonviolence. It was the first time the politicians would be sitting and speaking side by side in public. +++ “Hey, you guys know where you’re headed?” a cop driving in an unmarked sedan said to Rick from his passenger seat window as we biked down Broad Street on the way to the event.

“Yeah, the Peace Institute, it’s just down there right?”

Rick said back. We looked at each other, confused about his concern for us at midday on a busy street.

“Oh good. And you know where it is? Just down there a few blocks, off to your left?” he asked.

“Yep,” said Rick.

“Alright—you don’t want to make a wrong turn in this neighborhood!” he said, and then drove off down the road.

We had only been on Broad Street for three blocks and there was nothing particularly threatening about our environment: we saw people waiting at bus stops, shops with colorful awnings, commercial corridor banners and houses on the side streets.

We arrived about five minutes after talking to the officer.

The Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence is housed in an old Catholic convent that looks like a lot of the other French Gothic churches built in Providence when religious communities grew over time around the city. It is thin, vertical in its mass distribution, and made of a deep red brick that makes it stand apart from the painted wooden houses that surround it. Built in 1929 by designer-architect team Murphy, Hindle and Wright, the convent was part of St. Michael’s Catholic Church, which also had a school and a rectory. The church hed been built for the largest Irish Catholic community in the state at the time. After the convent closed but before it was the Institute, the building was a state rehabilitation center called the Talbot House.

A few police officers stood out front, including our friend from the sedan, who later told Rick his name was Perez (Lieutenant Oscar Perez, commanding officer of Providence Police Districts #2 and #3). I wanted to ask him why he stopped us, why his concern was so great that he pulled over on a busy road. I should have asked him on the spot because I didn’t get a response from his office when I called later. He stood with a group of colleagues and smiled a big smile at us and nodded hello as we locked our bikes and got in line to enter the front door. A woman standing at a table in the front entrance asked us to sign in or put a business card in the jar. A giant paper notepad had a handwritten welcome on it.

The room for the panel was packed. Young campaign staffers mingled with journalists, activists, and elderly members of the community. Before I knew the building used to be a convent, the room just felt like a place of religious gathering. Like a lanky rectangle, the room was narrow but had high ceilings and windows that stretched along the two long walls. It reminded me of the synagogue in my hometown. Those walls were painted sea green, a color that’s supposed to calm the mind. Sitting at the table in the front of the room were three of the five candidates for governor: Todd Giroux, the business-minded radio talk show host from Bristol, Angel Taveras, the current mayor of Providence and a child of the south side, and Gina Raimondo, the current state treasurer and the candidate with the largest campaign fund. To their left were the two moderators for the event: Ian Donnis, political reporter for Rhode Island Public Radio, and Bill Malinowski, longtime writer for the Providence Journal.

Teny Gross, the Institute’s executive director, introduced the panel and asked the audience to keep their questions away from the root causes of poverty and to focus instead on policies aimed at nonviolence. A woman sitting in front of me prepared her phone for live tweeting.

The moderators asked various questions about how the candidates intend to promote nonviolence in the state.

Responses were capped at two minutes, which kept the gubernatorial panel to a neat hour. If I had to sum up each candidate's responses in one paraphrased sentence, it would be as follows: Giroux, wearing a suit and revealing more nervousness about public speaking as the event went on, said, “When I was a kid, I learned karate and punched the school bully, and then the principal shook my hand.” His other points about investing in the state, unfortunately, were overshadowed by statements like these. Taveras, speaking in his soft tone of trademark gentility, said, “Violence is a cancer.” He said that a few times. Raimondo, grinning for an estimated 85 percent of the presentation, said, “As a mother, I want to invest in nonviolence.”

All the candidates gave specific numbers for money they would direct toward nonviolence policies. Raimondo said she would invest in statewide comprehensive pre-kindergarten.

Taveras said he would earmark $2 million for a summer job initiative. Throughout the Q&A, the costs of not preventing violence surfaced and resurfaced: $94 million annually for state gunshots, $5 million for one fatal shooting, and $432,000 for survivors of a gunshot wound. There were 105 people shot in Providence in 2012. 13 homicides, 276 weapons offensives, 117 robberies with firearms, and 2010 aggravated assault with firearm in 2013. You do the math.

Last week on January 26, three shootings took place in one night in two different parts of the city. “Providence man, 24, is city’s first murder victim of 2014,” the next day’s Providence Journal read. It is expected. It has begun.

Sitting in the crowd was Sister Ann Keefe, an elderly nun who co-founded the Institute. She received a round of applause during the introductions. “She’s amazing,” Gross told The Indy later. “She’s founded more nonprofits than any Ashoka [a global social entrepreneurship incubator] fellow.”

She’s a legend in the local community, having joined St. Michael’s Church in 1982. She has been battling brain cancer for the last year, and stood up and sat down slowly when Gross mentioned her by name.

The mayoral candidates numbered five: (sitting from left to right) Brett Smiley, a local business owner and former chair of the Providence Water Supply Board (whom I spotted sitting inconspicuously with the public at a city planning meeting a week later), Lorne Adrain, former chairman of the R.I. Board of Governors for Higher Education, Michael Solomon, current city council president, Jorge Elorza, former housing court judge, and Christopher Young, a man whose simple biography you cannot find on too many local news websites because he seems to have spent most of his last three decades running for public office. Brett Smiley said he planned to tax gun sales by an additional 10 percent and use the increased revenue to fund nonviolence programs. Adrain expressed a desire for more police officers in the city. Both Solomon and Elorza spoke about the need for nonviolence training in schools. Christopher Young went straight to the issue that appears to have dominated his previous campaigns, saying that abortion is a basic form of violence as well as a product of racism. Young also mentioned that he helped paint the walls of the very room we stood in, which Gross told me later, simply was false.

Leaving the event, Rick and I saw the smiling Lieutenant Perez again.

“You two know the way home now?” he asked us.

“Sure do,” we told him.

KAT THORNTON B'15 calms the mind.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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2014

. . . in big refrigerated data centers. Folks at Google called it “the cloud.� (http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-12-12/google-and-the-wisdom-of-clouds)

Already this year in Rhode Island: the unemployment rate rose to the highest in the nation, the temperature oscillated between extremes, and student protestors dressed as guinea pigs gathered in front of the state house. Looking forward: some big predictions for the country’s smallest state.

Economy

In the future, all economic activity will be handed over to robots, freeing Rhode Islanders to live a eudaemonic life of leisure and personal development. But in the meantime, the state with the highest unemployment rate in the country will have to find more immediate solutions to its economic malaise. With state and federal elections coming up, figures from gubernatorial and mayoral candidates to university presidents is preaching a new vision of the Rhode Island economy—but not the same one.

The loudest story of the future, and the catch phrase of Democrats, technocrats, and university spokespeople is the “knowledge economy,” an economy driven by hightech research and development, universities, biotech, and healthcare services. Everyone from Mayor Taveras, Governor Chafee, and US Senator Jack Reed to Brown University, the University of Rhode Island, and the 195 Redevelopment District Commission is simultaneously demanding and predicting a post-industrial economy in which informationrich services drive the bus. For the Providence Journal’s John Kostrzewa, the “knowledge economy” isn’t just the future of Rhode Island—it’s also its past. “Rhode Island has fallen behind,” Kostrzewa wrote in December 2012, “because the state has not made the transition from a post-industrial economy to a knowledge-based one in which people use technology and their brains more than their hands to do work.”

One problem with all this is that a state economy built off of advanced research and healthcare—what bloggers like to call “meds and eds”—has the potential to create a two-tiered labor force with a massive income divide between highlyeducated, highly-skilled workers in fields like education and healthcare and lower-skilled workers in dependent service industries. And, a second problem, a local “meds and eds” economy is risky as higher education becomes an increasingly concentrated sector with a disproportionate amount of resources going to a small number of geographically clustered institutions—according to Richard Florida in The Atlantic and Aaron Chatterji in the New York Times. Only a few cities will be able to keep brains and cash from going elsewhere, they argue. But Providence might be insulated from this risk because it has sufficiently prestigious institutions to survive and even benefit from industry concentration, according to Florida.

For gubernatorial front-runner General Treasurer Gina Raimondo, the economic future of Rhode Island is right with its economic past in manufacturing. Her campaign unveiled a “Rhode Island Innovation Institute” to “make Rhode Island a leader in manufacturing again,” according to her website. But there’s a twist: rather than producing textiles the

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manufacturers of the future will be commercializing advanced technologies developed in the research laboratories of Rhode Island universities. Per Raimondo’s proposal, the government will facilitate the flow of information and capital from the academy to the workshop. It’s the same old knowledge economy that everyone’s been talking about for years, but with a blue-collar tinge. It remains to be seen exactly how she will “foster collaboration” between the relevant institutions.

Across the aisle, Republicans rarely bash the knowledge economy. But perhaps sensing that “meds and eds” has become the Democratic party’s talking line, the RI GOP has chosen to make hay out of Rhode Island’s high taxes.

According to CNN Money, Rhode Island has the sixth highest taxes in the country, but it’s highly uneven across different taxes. Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Block’s economic platform has only five items—three of them are reductions or restructurings of taxes and the other two just reduce state expenditures. As for his primary opponent, the entry portal to Republican gubernatorial hopeful Allan Fung’s website proudly states, “On day one of a Fung administration I will declare Rhode Island ‘Open for Business’.” Perhaps he’s referring to reports like that of the Tax Foundation, a conservative think-tank that ranked the state 46 out of 50 for “business tax climate” for 2014. The unemployment insurance tax is a losing 50th place.

But while the rates on the books might be high, businesses might not have it so bad in lil’ Rhody. Between Hasbro’s $1.6 million tax exemption; the $75 million loan guarantee for failed video game company, 38 Studios; and the Renaissance Hotel’s $9 million tax break, it seems that Rhode Island and Providence love to cut tax deals with corporations.

According to WPRI, the city has made 100 “tax stabilization agreements” since the 1980s and 44 of them are still active.

Fête Lounge in Olneyville, for instance, pays only 35.04 percent of their would-be assessed commercial property tax.

No matter how bad the tax environment is, expect rates to lower if Republicans take control of the state government this November. Limitless prosperity for all nightclubs is sure to follow.

None of these proposals are really that radical. All of them have been part of the tired and thread-bare conversation for years, and neither Governor Chafee’s budget nor the legislators on Smith Hill are making big plays in 2014. The future is just going to be the present, and the present is just like the past. 75 percent of respondents to a poll on the Providence Journal website say the state economy will be worse in 2014. Ten percent think it will be better. The poll is still open. Maybe things will change. –RS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by Megan Hauptman, Richard Salamé & Abigail Savitch-Lew

Climate & Environment

Much of Rhode Island sits directly on the water, which means that the Ocean State faces dire changes to its beaches, cities, and marine commerce from future sea level rise spurred by climate change. By 2100, the ocean that surrounds Rhode Island is predicted to rise at least three to five feet, flooding low-lying coastal cities and towns, and inundating rivers and waterways further inland. The walkway along the Providence River, leading to Waterplace Park—the outdoor amphitheater illuminated by floating torches during WaterFire—would be entirely submerged. And if the sea level continues to rise past five feet, much of Providence’s downtown would follow soon after. Storm surges, intensified by shifting global temperatures, could cause more intense coastal flooding before the arrival of next century. Rising sea temperatures have already endangered winter flounder and other cold-water species that thrived in the Narraganset Bay; continued temperature raises will likely change the make-up of New England marine life drastically, also affecting the state’s fishery economy.

This past month, Governor Chafee addressed the effects of climate change on Rhode Island in his last “State of the State” address. Chafee is stepping down from his post as Governor at the end of 2014, but in this January speech he pledged to use his last year to address environmental concerns and to protect the state’s natural resources, starting with a voter referendum on borrowing money for a $75 million environmental bond. Public water improvements, flood prevention, green infrastructure construction, and shellfish management and restoration ($3.2 million slotted for artificial oyster reefs and the like) are just a few of the items outlined in Chafee’s proposal.

Rhode Island, which lacks its own fossil fuel deposits, already depends on outside oil pipelines and coal producers.

Chafee proposed that Rhode Island participate in a consortium of New England states to build up their collective hydro, wind, and solar power infrastructures, rather than continuing to rely on non-local, costly, and pollutant-heavy energy sources. This proposal is likely to meet resistance from more economically conservative, business-friendly members of the state legislature, as debates around climate change often pit the economy against the natural environment. Probusiness groups and leaders point to jobs lost in the energy industry if more stringent environmental sanctions are levied.

But this is a false dichotomy, according to Rhode Island’s Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has repeatedly called the Senate’s attention to the negative economic impacts of climate change in an ocean-dependent state. Tourism revenue is already being lost as beaches shrink and collapse, many fishing jobs are likely to be made obsolete by warming ocean temperatures and species change, and negative health impacts will continue to grow as a result of increased pollution and environmental degradation. Senator Whitehouse, who headlined a 40,000 person rally against the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline last February in DC, is the Senate’s most vocal member on climate issues; he’s given a floor speech on climate change every week that the Senate’s been in session since April 2012.

As a representative of a state whose history, economy, and identity are tied to the ocean, it’s fitting that Whitehouse talks a lot about global warming. Apocalyptic visions of climate change are not unique to Rhode Island, but as a state with nearly 500 miles of ocean coastline, the effects of climate change and sea level rise are already becoming visible. The future is, unfortunately, not too hard to picture. –MH

JANUARY 31 2014

Upcoming Legislation

Exasperated by gridlock in Washington, donors and PACs of the right and left have shifted their focus to gaining influence in state legislatures. Blue states are getting bluer and red states redder. Policy on abortion, gun control, voting rights, and other issues remain in flux. Rhode Island, the most Catholic state in the union—and one of the most blue—wages its own peculiar battles.

Compared to its neighbors, the Ocean State has historically taken a conservative line on abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, Rhode Island is one of 19 states that, except in cases of threat to life, rape, or incest, prohibits insurance coverage of elective abortion for state employees. It’s also one of 32 states that, except in specific rare circumstances, does not provide coverage of elective abortion for Medicaid recipients. But Governor Chafee has enough on his plate without micromanaging the reproductive lives of Rhode Island women. In 2012, sidestepping state lawmakers who wanted to ban insurance coverage of abortion on the new insurance exchange, Chafee used his executive powers to create an exchange that did offer coverage of abortion. The debate heated up last year, when the Rhode Island General Assembly passed a bill allowing the sale of license plates with the words “Choose Life” to fund a Christian pregnancy clinic that opposes abortion. Governor Chaffee promptly vetoed the bill.

Activists on both sides of the issue are likely to be busy this spring. Pro-choice Rhode Island lawmakers are talking with the Rhode Island Coalition for Reproductive Justice about how to expand access to family planning services and reproductive healthcare for lower-income women. “We as legislators have to make sure that our specific beliefs—whether they be inspired religiously or politically—not interfere with a woman’s right,” said Democrat Josh Miller at a State House press conference hosted by the Coalition on January 21.

Meanwhile, anti-abortion activists continue to oppose the lack of a single abortion-excluding plan on Rhode Island’s healthcare exchange. Kristen Day, Executive Director of Democrats of Life, says Rhode Island has violated a citizen’s right to not support the procedure. Rhode Island is one of a few states in which all the plans offered on the marketplace include abortion coverage, and federal law states that each state must include a plan without abortion coverage on their exchange by 2017.

On voting rights and gun control, the Ocean State ain’t so blue. In 2011, Rhode Island joined seven red states in passing laws requiring the presentation of photo ID at the polls. State Senator Gayle Goldin, of Providence’s East Side, says the measure to repeal the law did not make it out of committee last year despite widespread disapproval, and that the portion of the law requiring a photo ID is set to go into effect this year unless lawmakers win their repeal.

Last summer, with gun-rights activists protesting outside the State House, a measure to ban semi-automatic assault weapons and high-capacity magazines died in the General Assembly. Lawmakers did pass bills making it illegal to knowingly use a stolen weapon, prohibiting the possession of weapons with altered identification, and creating a task force on gun background checks. On January 23, the task force advised the state to submit mental health information for people prone to violence to the FBI’s federal backgroundchecking system. While Rhode Island received a good rating for gun control from smartgunlaws.org, a website maintained by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, it is one of only 15 states that does not submit mental health records to the federal system. Goldin says she and others will be reviewing the task force’s recommendations to determine next steps.

In the meanwhile, let’s hope the Rhode Island GOP can think of better fundraisers than the one they hosted last September—a semi-automatic rifle raffle. –ASL

METRO

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AERODYNAMICS

by Joshua Schenkkan Illustration by Sara Khan

Flying is intimate. I realized this somewhere over Virginia as I cradled the head of a woman who’d begun to go into withdrawal several hours into our flight. Until I’d met Roxanne, I’d treated airplanes the same way most of us treat subways, or buses, or coffee shops—as a space in which we acknowledge the immediate proximity of others while doing our absolute best to ignore them.

This flight, though, I’d forgotten to pack reading material or headphones. I was anticipating six hours of SkyMall when I arrived at my seat, greeted by Roxanne and four mini-bottles of Sutter Home.

“Great,” she said, eyeing me nervously. “You’re young. You like to drink, right? You’ll be my new best friend who I’m never going to see again.”

The flight was divided into three acts: in the first, Roxanne ordered us a steady stream of screwdrivers and told me about her childhood; in the second, Roxanne cried on my shoulder while she sweated through her Oakland Raiders sweatshirt; in the third, Roxanne drummed her fingers on the tray table while she repeated under her breath, “I need to get off this goddamn plane, don’t you?”

I never found out what she was withdrawing from, and true to her word, I never saw her again. But my interaction with Roxanne made me realize what makes air travel distinct: nowhere else are you literally strapped next to another person, often for hours at a time, whom you’ll never see again.

It’s a fact so obvious that entire industries have catered to our desire to block out the anonymous person next to us: noise-canceling headphones, portable entertainment devices, in-flight Internet providers. In an age where we ask ad nauseum, “Is technology making us lonelier?” we’re increasingly dependent on those technologies that promise us solitude.

I was already commuting across the country six times a year when I met Roxanne, but after our encounter, I stopped flying with distractions. Something happens when you’re suspended miles above ground with nothing but the person next to you. Maybe it’s the anonymity and physical proximity. Or maybe, it’s the collective discomfort born from the knowledge that your survival depends on someone whose only visible credential is a dinky pair of aluminum wings. Whatever the cause, the result is that planes make people the most transparent and honest versions of themselves—for better or worse.

used to play hooky every once and a while. We’d load our BMXs in the back of my truck, and hit these jumps at a park across town for hours. But this one time, I got a little too eager. You know that moment when…”

Todd trailed off. He squinted for a few seconds.

“You know that moment when you’re just flying through the air. And you’re looking down at the place you were supposed to land, and you’re like, ‘Oh shit, I ain’t gonna land there’?”

I nodded in agreement, completely unaware of what that moment might feel like.

Todd chuckled.

“I kicked the bike away, but it was too late. I hit the ground with the side of my foot, and that popped that bone clean out of my ankle—my tibia, I think it’s called. So I’m starin’ at my tibia, and that little fucker’s just starin’ back at me. I holler at my friend, who I can hear runnin’ to me, and I says to him, ‘Bubba, I’m gonna need you to do two things.’”

He paused for dramatic effect. “‘Thing One: I’m gonna need you to run to the car and bring me my cigarettes.

Thing Two: I’m gonna need you to call an ambulance, cuz this poor ‘sumbitch ain’t goin’ nowhere.’”

Todd chuckled to himself. A flight attendant announced our descent into Denver. As the trees and houses came into view, Todd began to bounce his knee. He pulled out his wallet and showed me a picture. It was his wife and son.

“I can’t wait to get home,” he said nervously. He pointed to his son. “I’m gonna buy that fucker his first BMX.” He tapped the image of his wife, a young, attractive brunette in an unflattering grey turtleneck.

“And her? I’m gonna give her a bear hug so big it’s gonna crack a rib.”

Todd didn’t say goodbye when we reached the airport. As soon as we got off the plane, Todd took off towards the baggage claim in an awkward loping gait, and I tried to find my connecting flight.

IAD to BOI CLT to DEN “That, my friend, was the first time I got hit with a brick by a meth head.”

I gave Todd an understanding nod—probably the same one I would give to a friend who’d told me he’d lied to his parents, or had cheated in high school. It happens to the best of us.

“Yep. Out in the middle of the desert where I growed up. Tiny little town east of San Bernadino. We’d been drinkin’—me and a few buddies—and one of ‘em was a idiot. I mean a fuckin’ idiot. He shouted somethin’ racist at some Mexicans we was drivin’ by, and I sped off ‘cuz I didn’t want to have to fight ‘em.”

Todd took a sip of his ginger ale. He was in his mid-thirties, heavily tanned and heavily muscled. He was returning home from a six-week job fitting rooftop water pipes on a naval base in the Caribbean, which he’d proved to me earlier by showing me the fiberglass scars that covered both his hands.

“So we stop to get some gas a few miles up, and as we’re about to pull out, this truck full of Mexicans screeches in front of my truck. I try to pull out, but then I hear this big crash. One of them fuckers’d thrown a brick through the back window of my truck. So I hop out, ‘cuz the first rule of being a man is, ‘Never let somebody throw a brick in your truck’” He squinted at me, drained his plastic cup, and then crushed it in his hand.

“But then I realize a couple’a things. Thing One: They’re screamin’ and yellin’ in a way that means only one thing—crank. Thing Two: if somebody throws a brick at you, always look for a second brick. One of ‘em ran up behind me and clean knocked me out.

You can still see the scar here” Todd took off his trucker hat and, turning the back of his head towards me, pointed to a crosshatched white line.

“Sonofabitch gave me thirteen stitches, then stole my truck. Lemme give you a piece of advice, kid. Always look for the second brick.”

Todd leaned back, causing the chair to groan uncomfortably. It was clear that I was meant to reciprocate with a story where I, too, learned the dangers of immigrants on methamphetamine. I was considering reappropriating a storyline from The Shield when Todd spoke.

“You like biking?”

I began to tell Todd all about my brief stint as a competitive cyclist; the race where I got heat stroke while racing down a dormant volcano; the 215-mile ultra-ride I did in under 12 hours. Saving the best for last, I was about to tell Todd about the time I was nearly hit by a semi-truck when I noticed his frown.

“Not that kind of biking. The kind of biking men do. You know. Motorcycles, BMX.” Deflated, I told him that I used to ride over some dirt jumps behind my house. He grinned and smacked his tray table, causing the passenger in front of him to turn around and glare.

“So you do like biking. Boy, have I got a story for you–you ever seen a bone stick clean through the skin?”

I hadn’t.

“Me and my buddy used to work on a construction crew outside of San Diego. We

09

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FEATURES

The first time Billy Ray cooked crack, he was in his pajamas.

“These brothers showed up a few hours later than they was supposed to, so I was all in my jammies. But when two brothers show up with a kilo of the raw, you scootch yourself on out of bed.”

Under the guidance of the two young drug dealers, Billy Ray cooked through the night and well into the next day. By nightfall, he’d turned eight ounces of cocaine into sixteen ounces of crack, netting an approximate profit of twelve thousand dollars. “‘Course, the brothers only gave Billy Ray about five hundred dollars and a couple of stones, but that was four hundred dollars and a couple stones more than Billy Ray would’ve made cookin’ at Chili’s that night,” he cackled.

I’d met career stimulant users before, but none quite as eccentric looking as Billy Ray. He wore a royal blue, wide-collared shirt underneath a neon-orange sweater vest, a pair of wide-legged jeans, and a tattered pair of Air Jordans. He was missing all but three of his teeth, and his skin was a matrix of broken capillaries. He sat in the middle seat, his unfathomably large paunch nearly spilling into the lap of the frail octogenarian on the aisle.

Billy Ray was from West Virginia, though he’d spent most of his life as a chain-restaurant chef in Akron, Ohio. He liked to cook, but his first and only love was drugs.

“People tell me I got a drug problem,” he said after ordering a diet Sprite and nearly spilling it on the old woman beside him. “To them I says, ‘The only drug problem Billy Ray has is when he gets to a new city and can’t find none.’”

He began cooking crack as a way of supplementing his modest income reheating Triple Dipper platters and Big Mouth Bites. He lived on the outskirts of an Akron housing project, and was approached one day after work by two local drug dealers. He was white and lived outside of the immediate vicinity of the projects, he explained, and so they were less likely to get caught cooking in his apartment. By some logic, this made sense, but I had always assumed that cooking crack created some kind of odor.

“Oh, most surely do,” he said, licking his lips. “Smells like your brain’s just… frying.”

Several hours and half a dozen diet sodas later, we touched down in Boise. As we stood up, I asked him what he was doing in Idaho.

“I’m taking my momma to my nephew’s graduation,” he said, turning to the old woman next to him. “Why you think I’m all dressed up so nice? Ain’t that right, momma.”

The old woman on the aisle, his mother, the woman who’d almost certainly just listened to her son explain the ins-and-outs of cooking crack, smoking heroin, and tell an extended joke involving “that new 69 position,” stared blankly at him. Nonplussed, Billy Ray turned back towards me.

“She a good old Catholic woman, but she got one foot in the grave and can’t hear none very well,” he announced. His mother cleared her throat uncomfortably. She seemed on the verge of saying something just as the passengers began to move down the aisle, sweeping both her and her son toward the front of the plane.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

PVD to OLD I didn’t believe in destiny, but I knew I was destined to sit next to Dawn when I saw her in the boarding line. The nervous energy, the pastel-pink fleece jumpsuit, the dog-eared copy of Love as a Way of Life: Seven Key Aspects to Transforming Every Aspect of Your Life. I can spot a Deepak Chopra fan from a mile away, and I’ve long since accepted that, sooner or later, I will have sat next to all of them.

Dawn was about 5’6” with impeccable posture. She had earnest blue eyes and a blond bob that hadn’t had a hair out of place since the ending of her first marriage in 1981. When she wanted me to know that she was listening, she touched my arm with her small, perfectly manicured hands.

By the time beverage service arrived, I knew that Dawn was 57 years old, worked at a museum in Bristol, Rhode Island owned by Brown University, and was a strong believer in fate—a belief confirmed by the fact that she, a university employee, and I, a university student, happened to be sitting next to each other. She had a 30-year-old daughter whose capacity for love and charity never ceased to amaze her: she worked for an organization in Uganda that taught women in rural villages to make bracelets sold to women in American suburbs.

Dawn had just finished describing the nature of her daughter’s soul (“It’s just so… vast”), and was beginning to describe the “nobility” of the Ugandan people, when a flight attendant arrived and offered us something to drink. The flight attendant was Black, with an unidentifiable accent. Dawn’s eyes widened.

“May I ask… Where are you from?” she said softly.

“Senegal,” the flight attendant smiled. “Would you like anything other than water?”

“Oh my,” she gasped, giving me a knowing glance. “Do you see what I mean?

Fate.”

She turned back to the flight attendant, her eyes now sparkling. She bit her lip. It had already been an auspicious day; she didn’t want to push the limits of fate too far.

Finally, she succumbed.

“You’re from Senegal—perhaps… Perhaps you know my daughter, Autumn?

She works in Uganda… I wish I could remember the name of her village…” Dawn fumbled for something in her purse.

The flight attendant interrupted her with a bemused stare.

“I’m sorry—I’ve never been to Uganda. Let me know if you’d like anything else to drink.”

Dawn was visibly disappointed, despite the fact that Uganda and Senegal are separated by nearly 3,000 miles and eight countries. But fate could only do so much in a day.

Four hours later, we began our descent into a foggy Chicago. Dawn spent the last twenty minutes of the flight scribbling in my notebook, leaving me with an extensive list of self-help books, guides to crystal healing, and every conceivable piece of contact information, including her hours at the museum for the next six months.

“I just feel like I’ve gotten to know you so well,” she said, even though I had spoken less than a dozen words over the course of the flight. “I would ask you to come visit me, but I already know you will.”

“How’s that?”

“I just do,” she smiled. With that, we disembarked, and Dawn disappeared into the airport.

JOSHUA SCHENKKAN B’14 always looks for the second brick.

JANUARY 31 2014

FEATURES

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mortifying humor of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, a show that also placed value on the crudeness of real life.

As a result, the deadpan sincerity of a character like Parks & Recreation’s Ron Swanson has rightly earned a cult following more deserved than the overused catchphrases of someone like How I Met Your Mother’s Barney Stinson. As US television gradually ditches its canned laughter track in favor of awkward post-punchline silences, its characters become more human and more beloved in their misadventures. +++

THE ART OF DEDUCTION

by Maya Sorabjee Illustration by Aaron Harris

In the last week of 2013, a federal judge ruled on Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, relocating Sherlock Holmes and his literary companions to the public domain. No longer under US copyright law, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters would be free for use in crime novels, film scripts and the erotic fantasies of fan-fiction writers. Even before the verdict, the Baker Street resident has long been one of the most used and reused fictional characters ever—the Guinness Book of World Records consistently names Sherlock Holmes the most prolific character in movie history, with over 70 actors donning the deerstalker in around 200 adaptations. From the Muppet Sherlock Holmes comic books to Russia’s Sherlok Kholms, the consulting detective is ceaselessly reincarnated.

With his remarkably bad social skills, Holmes is a protagonist known not for any gregarious charm but for his incisive acuity. Two recent television adaptations, BBC’s Sherlock and CBS’s Elementary, illustrate our wonder at the detective’s enduring talent, yet their contrasting approaches hint at the subtle difference between cultural ideas of humor.

But what we end up appreciating lies beyond the detective’s astute deductions, within his defective etiquette. We look into his funny little brain and we find clear, comedic irony.

The 1977 John Cleese parody, The Strange Case of the End of Civilization As We Know It, has protagonist Arthur SherlockHolmes (grandson of the original) waiting around for the wicked Moriarty before realizing, “Is it only 4:43PM? Quick, Watson, get a crossword, there are several moments to lose.”

The spoof is ridiculous, but it gets at the heart of Conan Doyle’s creation—Holmes’s restless mind, usually applied to criminal observation and analysis. This is the sole element that ties together the various versions of the detective and his world, the astounding personality trait that fuels his centuryold legacy.

In the first week of this year, after a two-year hiatus, BBC’s Sherlock premiered its long awaited third season. Since its inception in 2010, the acclaimed contemporary reboot still draws from the same obsession that fuels the lawsuit against the Conan Doyle Estate—with this exceptional character and his hypnotic way of explaining the world. The show counts on the audience’s addiction to detail, unafraid to stuff its unprecedented ninety-minute runtime fully enough in order to treat Sherlock with the complexity he deserves. The contemporary setting of the show allows its writers to exploit graphics in order to fully display Sherlock’s ingenuity: we’re treated to split-second deductions via liberal use of kinetic typography and glimpses into his “mind palace,” an imaginary architecture of memories accessed via corridors and stairwells.

As Sherlock’s third season plays on British and American screens this month, its American counterpart, Elementary, continues its run on CBS. The latter, also a contemporary rethinking of Holmes, transplants the detective from Baker Street to New York, complete with a stint in rehab and an Oedipal complex. The success of both series to seamlessly transfer the detective to the present day is testament to his universal quality and hence the value of the ongoing lawsuit.

But while the two shows both present a detail-obsessed contemporary Holmes, their varied approaches to his comedic potential function as a clear reminder of the historic difference in humor on either side of the Atlantic. +++ It is no surprise that Americans and Britons can’t agree on the orthography of humour/humor, let alone what constitutes its essence. Stephen Fry, one of Britain’s greatest modern humourists, lays it down in a 2012 interview: “Comedy is the microcosm that allows us to examine the entire difference between our two cultures; ours is bathed in failure but we make a glory of our failure—we celebrate it.” He glorifies a sense of humor that revels in the miserable moments of human life, where heavy doses of self-deprecation force the audience to approach issues from which they usually seek distraction. “The great British comic heroes are the people who want life to be better, and on whom life craps from a terrible height,” Fry confirms. On the other hand, American humor tends to accommodate physicality, overstatement, and hyperbole, finding roots in the classic slapstick gags of Laurel & Hardy. And the immediacy of American comedy often advances at the expense of character development—their repetitive delivery of one-liners can lack the laughable and realistic misery of their British counterparts.

Still, recent television history suggests the gap between the two countries’ approaches to humor may be shrinking.

Ricky Gervais, co-creator of BBC’s The Office, went on to produce the acclaimed US version of the series, introducing the country to the sarcastic comedy encouraged by the mockumentary format. Caustic wit and expressionless deliveries began to seep into the American small screen, taking off in sitcoms like Arrested Development, Modern Family, and Parks & Recreation. It parallels the classically acidic, even

It isn’t easy to compare Sherlock Holmes to the likes of Blackadder’s eponymous hero, Edmund Blackadder, or The Office’s Michael Scott. Nevertheless, the third season of Sherlock focuses on developing the comedy inherent to its protagonist’s tragic flaw—the coupling of powerful intelligence with a complete lack of manners. He is unaware of his own paradox, and it’s the unlikelihood of the detective as a comedic hero that the show’s writers increasingly use.

Holmes often stares at the room in disbelief of his intellectual isolation—“Look at you lot, you’re all so vacant. Is it nice not being me? It must be so relaxing.” And still, he is unable to deliver a conventional best man’s speech—he turns it into a crime show-and-tell, and when his ultimate sincerity reduces the crowd to tears he confusedly asks, “why are you all doing that? John, did I do it wrong?”

Sherlock lays bare the situations and relationships that come from his imbalance in brainpower and sociability, particularly celebrating the softer side of Holmes and Watson’s friendship, and developing the charm of a genuine bromance. Elementary immediately denied this possibility after casting Lucy Liu as a female Watson, surrendering to the American prerequisite of always leaving open the possibility of romance. With ninety minutes to intersperse its central mystery with tangential glimpses at Sherlock’s flaws and their resulting humor, the BBC show finds lightheartedness in places Elementary does not. Watching Benedict Cumberbatch, draped in only a bed sheet, walking like a stubborn child into Buckingham palace on the command of his big brother, reminds the viewer that Conan Doyle’s creation is not simply about the inhuman brilliance of a man, but his human faults.

The CBS drama functions instead as a typical crime show: much like the same channel’s The Mentalist or Criminal Minds, it proceeds one case at a time, neatly solved in the span of forty minutes, never fully exploiting the unique Holmesian qualities of its protagonist and the delightful ironies they entail. +++ Perhaps John Cleese’s Monty Python-esque lampoon was the original comedic interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes universe: a world where Scotland Yard is found incompetent and where the audience intently follows the musings of a sociopath who can’t kick a drug habit. Then there are the detective’s ridiculous companions: a constantly headscratching doctor sidekick and a housekeeper whose sole purpose is to provide the tea. As Cleese originally suggested, the 221B Baker Street world has the makings of a situation comedy readily available within it, encouraging the viewer to laugh at the melodrama of it all. The success of this unlikely interpretation confirms the character’s capacity to adapt to bold artistic license, implying that his rightful place is in the public domain. And if Guy Richie can have a steampunk Sherlock Holmes running around a blue-tinted Victorian set for two stunt-heavy action films, anything goes. Holmes is an exceptionally accommodating character, and his world seems to be fair game.

But despite all the recent television commotion and nuances in each series’ ideas about comedy, the fact that both Sherlock and Elementary could adapt the character to the age of Google and smartphones makes them successful by definition. Because there remain a few purists who still flinch at the thought of anything but a traditional Sherlock Holmes, who insist that his only accessory should be analog, a magnifying glass. As of January 21, 2014, the Conan Doyle Estate is in the process of appealing the Sherlock verdict in order to retrieve its intellectual property. Apparently Kermit the Frog’s interpretation of Detective Inspector Lestrade just isn’t doing it for them.

MAYA SORABJEE B’16 is oft crapped on from a terrible height.

+++

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

tuning out in the sky

by Houston Davidson Illustration by Amy Chen

As the jet lurches and pitches miles above Rhode Island, a professor of furniture design presses bored thumbs into his iPad. He alternates between cruising LinkedIn, squashing evil vegetables, and crashing racecars into the racetrack walls. The proud owner of a “My Pen is Huge” graphic t-shirt, seated behind the professor, eagerly awaits an update on an NFL playoff game from an elderly woman operating as a wannabe sports announcer armed with gate-to-gate Wi-Fi. The couple next to me bifurcates. They’re watching their respective shows on their respective horizontally-palmed iPhones. Their entertainment cocoons are complete. In little time, the turbulence subdues, and the pilot superfluously informs us in an arid drawl that we’ll be doing a second lap of our approach.

For most people with a modicum of flying experience, turbulence induces more nausea than fear. When my plane met “rough air” descending into Providence, I closed my book to avoid challenging a long-confirmed susceptibility to motion sickness.

Yet, turbulence has long been an interruptor. It has interrupted the smooth flow of universal sky (blue or black or multi-colored), the procession of carts serving adults snacks, the airplane misanthropy, and the aisle squeezing. It has made the plane’s functioning a probability, a works-until-it-doesn’t.

Of course, turbulence hardly ever indicated a real shot at catastrophe. With a roughly 1 in 11 million chance of experiencing a plane crash, we would be silly to interpret with a morbid prejudice. But turbulence nonetheless set an occasion.

Now that occasion is changing. Rather than sharing physiological and psychological solidarity in the face of risk, we tune out. Looking around the jostled plane, all I see are efforts to fortify personal bunkers of diversion. The heads on the planes are bowed, fiddling on devices that serve less as distractions and more as translators. They translate plane time into entertainment time. The former measures itself in risky geographic displacement hours, the latter measures itself in passive media consumption hours. Turbulence becomes a mere thing-that-happens-sometimes. True, we never thought that turbulence meant death. But now, it appears that we have cut out thinking about the remote possibility of catastrophe altogether.

In a perverted twist on the previous experience of turbluence, I scroll my smartphone, with a lasciviously morbid desire to find a song that would make a purely hypothetical catastrophe seem like a beautiful crescendo. An emotional advance on the catharsis that comes with brushing with finality.

The plane lands. Somewhat bizarrely, the flight attendant cajoles us over the intercom into a cringe-inducing applause for the pilots. We landed and we’re safe and we never had to think about anything else. Clapping. +++ If I time a song just right, arriving at the chorus as the engines lift the metallic bird into the sky, a wave of writerly satisfaction will strike me. In a moment of authorial self-congratulation, I think “Aha, this life! What a thing! Complex yet at the end of the day, so fundamentally worth it.” It’s the train-staring mood hyped up by the steroidal effects of altitude. From the air, thoughts about the ground are a travelogue and the plane is the writer’s retreat. Life and its attendant risks are to be resumed upon arrival.

As of last Halloween, the Federal Aviation Administration lifted its ban on the use of Personal Electronic Devices (PEDs) during takeoff, approach, and landing. Instead of indulging furtively, flyers like me are now free to read the Bible on a Nook, Instagram post the aerial view of a smog-filtered sunset, and sequence whatever music they like. In a press release, the FAA stated that it simply no longer believes PEDs present any threat of radio interference to the plane’s communication.

January 31 2014

The new deregulation presents a turning point in the totalizing movement to tune out the flight. Entertained passengers ignore enervated flight attendants and safety instructions, take off their shoes (a critical mistake in evacuation), and noisecancel the 90 decibels of flight. They retreat sooner, longer, and deeper. On a flight from Salt Lake City to Chicago, one flight attendant had to enlist a neighbor to jolt the Beatswearing passenger in the window to confirm his emergency row preparedness. Did he realize that he would have to initiate evacuation by yanking the red lever on the emergency door?

Vocal Confirmation? Sure.

Of course, this would be less significant were passengers retaining the lessons of safety instruction. But for the most part, they don’t: a 2007 FAA study revealed that less than half the passengers surveyed knew to put on one’s mask before assisting others. A quickly depressurizing cabin gives passengers breathing naked ten seconds before the loss of consciousness.

Under a psychological duvet, things go as they should until they don’t and then they still don’t if you don’t notice them.

Until you do. +++ The commercial airlines are down to help us forget the miniscule chance of catastrophe. Much of the communication between the cabin and the crew has embraced the comic remove from flight. Almost all frequent flyers have sat through a pilot of their sky machine doing a stand-up bit over the intercom.

Numerous airlines have chosen to translate pre-flight safety demonstration videos (PSDV) from the language of perfunctory preparedness to the language of in-flight entertainment.

Delta rolled out a holiday-themed PSDV filled with light shenanigans and a cameo by a lipstick-wearing, redhead flight attendant of the prior generation of videos, whose trademark finger wag to smokers and illicit cell-phone users gets a callback. Just this week it rolled out a ‘80s themed PSDV. Virgin produced a live-action musical to be their actual Pre-Flight Safety Demonstration Video. The Virgin PSDV asks us to join the attendants/professional dancers in the breezy second-order comfort of a spacious and immaculate hangar where relevant aircraft objects are props that cohere loosely into a mock plane. Nevermind our physical allegiance to the very first-order status of being in a plane 30,000 feet above the ground. Here, the legroom is infinite and the flight attendants are gorgeous. A song and dance for emergency preparedness.

The medley unfurls with a series of elaborately choreographed numbers. A young girl raps about the air masks, some tuxedo-clad dancers give the dubstep introduction to the life jackets, the head flight attendants return to the video’s neosoul theme for the evacuation procedure, and a young boy snatches an e-cigarette as he raps with a pitch-lowered voice about not smoking.

Quite intentionally, the glee-club aesthetic pasteurizes the possibility of disaster. When a faux-passenger executes a backwards Carlton into a cardboard evacuation door, Virgin withholds a lesson about evacuation, offering instead a parody of catastrophe. Virgin wants to poke fun at mortality without hurting its feelings. The nod and wink laden in the video’s many asides and high jinx riffs on the tropes of the PSDV. Virgin casts the passenger-audience as irony-ready customers who believe flight risk to be so negligible as to not be worth its cognitive salt. The message is clear: Listen up! You’re not gonna die!

The video ends with a string anthem that builds into a top40 climax with a surreal and schmaltzy ekstasis marked by the refrain “we’re going to live it on up in the sky.” It’s cute, then long, then vexatious. Virgin glazes the pill so heavily in either cheese or sugar that it hardly does any good.

Passenger entertainment offers myriad perks to airlines. It sustains a thriving consumer electronics business in airport terminals. It helps passengers ignore or cope with gradually decreasing legroom, decreasing on-board amenities, and increasingly economically stratified flying experiences. Finally, it strokes the abstract glamour of flight. The ubiquity of curated and branded in-flight entertainment service—Delta on Demand, American Airlines’ ON, Lufthansa Media World— confirms this. Considering the push for total entertainment and the parodic dismissals of risk, airlines don’t just want us not to die in a crash—they want us to not even think of the possibility. +++ 2013 saw 13 major commercial plane crashes. Every one occurred either during takeoff, approach, or landing. This is no anomaly. A well-known albeit reductive statistical aphorism, the “plus three minus eight” rule holds that during the first three minutes after takeoff and the eight minutes before landing, roughly 80% of crashes will occur.

Vueling, a Barcelona-based airline, cues Stereolab’s 2002 hit “Miss Modular” as the Tarmac comes into sight. I put away Vueling’s genuinely brilliant In-Flight Magazine, Ling, after reading about dsytopic robot surveillance. VuelingMusic, coopting the curatorial agency of the passenger, lowers us to the ground with a swinging French horn and cooing French vocals. This is cocktail music and it transports us to the airport lounge before the wheels are deployed. Once the plane has landed and decelerated, the Vueling in-flight entertainment DJ turns over to Bon Iver’s “For Emma”. Wistful, a Catalan girl, age 17, whispers to herself—“love this song”. Nobody claps for the landing.

HOUSTON DAVIDSON B’14 choreographs takeoff music while marking exits.

TeCHNOLOGY

□ 12

NORTHERN

a conversation with James Mark, owner of north restaurant

Carpenter and West Fountain Streets on Federal Hill meet in a large, triangular opening called Luongo Memorial Square. The darkness of the square is interrupted every night by the glow of a small, electric blue sign that radiates north from a storefront window. Inside is a dim but lively restaurant, people cozying around a few tables. A frozen drink machine filled with bright pink slush churns at the end of the bar, a bowl of strange candies sits on a narrow counter near the door, a bartender who doubles as a hostess looks up from the whole Surryano ham she’s slicing to welcome customers.

I went to north for the first time last fall. On the constantly-shifting menu are dishes like drunken and stir-fried mussels with sake, Japanese turnips, and radish; fried chicken with herb salad and grapefruit chimichurri; slow-roasted root vegetables with harissa, sunflower seeds, orange, and carrot juice. Some dishes are personal-sized, some group-sized, but all are meant to be shared. The offerings change a bit most nights, with dishes appearing, disappearing, and reappearing based on the availability of products. I got the spicy cauliflower and tried to make the perfectly-roasted flowerets last as long as possible.

James Mark, 27, opened north a year and a half ago. After graduating from Johnson & Wales, Mark helped open Momofuku Ko in New York City and its subsidiary bakery, Momofuku Milk Bar. Mark returned to Providence a few years later, where he worked at Red Fez and Nick’s on Broadway before deciding to open north. I sat down with Mark at north before business hours to discuss the restaurant, his road to it, and its place in the city of Providence.

The College Hill Independent: What’s a typical day like at north?

James Mark: I get up at 8:30 every morning. At least two of us are here by 9:00, me and another manager. We do a little bit of shopping in the morning. We buy noodles, or we get whatever random things we end up needing to get. I’m at the Pawtucket Farmers’ Market every Saturday. And then we pretty much prep from 9:00 until 5:30. It’s a very intense restaurant, because we’re busy, and we don’t have a lot of room back there.

We have staff meal at 4:30, which is not a fancy restaurant staff meal. It’s a bunch of vegetables, a starch, some sauce. We eat it standing up because we’re too busy. And then we cook from 5:30 to midnight. We don’t stop, we never close early, we do it seven days a week.

The bar stays open till 1:00. We try to get out of here by 1:30, 2:00. We do a very intense cleaning every night. I try to get to bed by 2:30, and then it’s back up at 8:30. Every manager is

13

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FOOD

five days a week. We get two days off. All my cooks and interns work four days in the kitchen, and then one day on a farm. I pay for them to do that because when I was a cook I had a couple jobs where I had to do that on my days off, and I developed a really good...

The Indy: Understanding of the product?

JM: Understanding of the product, but also a responsibility for the product. Even silly shit, like onions and potatoes and garlic and stuff that you don’t think about on an everyday basis.

How much effort goes into growing that stuff. Cooks oftentimes have a tendency to be kind of careless with things. So I send them to a farm, and they realize that you have to work really fucking hard just to get that onion, just to get that celery, just to get that parsnip. And we don’t serve a lot of meat because it’s expensive to buy well-raised meat. Not that we’re opposed to doing it; it’s that we can’t afford it. Everything on the menu’s cheaper than 15 dollars, and that’s a hard rule that we have. Occasionally we go above that, and there’s a couple more expensive dishes that are meant to feed two or more people. But we want this place to be affordable for people.

The Indy: I’m interested in your cooking jobs, like the one where you were sent to farms on your days off. Where would you say you honed your craft?

JM: I guess where I really learned how to cook was in New York. Momofuku Ko is a really intense restaurant. It’s 12 seats. They only feed 24 people a night. There’s no choices. It’s a fixed menu. It’s six years old now, and this was before a lot of [that kind of restaurant] became big in New York. There wasn’t a lot of staff. It was just a sous-chef, a chef, a cook, and me, who was kinda the prep guy. And a dishwasher. With that crew, we got three stars in The New York Times, and we got two Michelin stars. It was crazy. There was a very steep learning curve. I came out of school, had been cooking a long time, but I had a lot of bad habits that were really detrimental to what I did there.

The Indy: You threw yourself right into the fire, so to speak.

JM: Unknowingly. I thought I’d be able to handle it, but the truth is that they helped me out a lot. After that, I helped open Momofuku Milk Bar, which is a bakery. It was actually a really good failure on my part. I went over there to be their bread baker. I worked there for a year,

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EXPOSURE

by John White

Photographs courtesy of north

and I just wasn’t ready to figure it out. I wasn’t ready to be in a position where I had to do everything myself. I wasn’t building systems that anyone could do; I was building systems that I had to do myself, and I had to be there working from 11 at night ’til 4 in the afternoon the next day. Then I’d pass out on the train, have a two-hour commute, wake up in bumfuck Brooklyn, and have to be back at work in half an hour. That type of thing.

It was systematic failure, and the bread never took off. It never made profit because it wasn’t done in a smart way. I was trying to run the bread program of this bakery that I was the only one baking in, and it doesn’t make sense. You can’t do that by yourself. So I left there. I got really burnt out. My girlfriend at the time left me, I was sleeping on the floor of the basement on cardboard boxes, working ridiculous hours. I didn’t want any of that anymore, not even cooking. I was over it. And so I moved back up here to take a break. I came back because Providence is a really fun little city. I really fell in love with everything about it again. You can have a job that you work really hard at but still have time away from it.

run out of Savoy cabbage. There might be a farmer out there who has it, but right now I can’t get it. So that dish comes off the menu. Our fisherman is a great example of that. He goes out when the weather’s good for fishing. If it’s shitty out, then he’s not going fishing. So sometimes we go two weeks without getting a fish delivery from him. But if he doesn’t go out for two weeks, I’m not mad. He knows the ocean better than I do. I’m not going to get mad at him for not taking the risk of going out in a storm. I don’t need fish that badly. That’s why we print our menu every night. Everything’s more fluid here than at a traditional restaurant because we don’t have systems like, ‘Oh, we have a fish monger, and this fish monger has cod, so we have cod on our menu the entire year.’ We don’t do that.

The Indy: Recently Providence has gotten more attention as a food city than it has in the past.

What do you think has contributed to that?

JM: Every city has its challenges. Providence’s biggest challenge is its population. There aren’t a ton of people. The restaurant’s busy, and we’re small, so it’s great, but we have our slow days, too. And then also, a large chunk of the population—probably a quarter of it—is all students that are very transient. They’re here for four years at the most, and not four straight years.

They’re here for nine months out of the year, or eight months out of the year, and they’re very centralized on the East Side, where there’s a ton of restaurants catering towards their experience.

If I were there and didn’t know what was up, I wouldn’t leave the East Side. I fucking love East Side Pockets. I’d eat there every day. It’s delicious. But there’s a lot more to the city than just that neighborhood.

I don’t advertise. We donate fifty cents from every dish to the Rhode Island Food Bank or the Amos House. It’s a really important part of what we do, but that’s our advertising budget.

We rely on word of mouth. We rely on putting out a great product, and hopefully we get to a point where people can start to truck down here. I went to school here, and I didn’t really like it because I didn’t find any places that I loved. Nothing that made me think, ‘Wow, this place is awesome. I wanna be here so that I can go to there, and there, and there...’ So you need to build those places that people love going to. And, you know, you need jobs and all that other crap, but I have no control over that. I leave that to the big dogs that know what they’re doing. All I can do is try to create a restaurant that people are really psyched on, a reason they might want to stay in the city.

JM: There have been great restaurants in this city for a really long time. The biggest difference has been that there are food systems in place now that weren’t in place five years ago. A great example is Kingston Trawlers, or Brown Family Seafood. These are two new companies that started two years ago, and before that the fish and seafood systems here were not good. The best seafood you could buy came from Boston, which is ridiculous. Point Judith is 35 to 40 minutes away, and that’s one of the biggest commercial fishing ports in the country. And so these two companies started up, and the product is the best you’ll ever see in your life. They sell a fish that I would buy in New York City for 10, 12 dollars a pound for 4 or 5. And the quality’s better, honestly. That’s a big advantage Rhode Island has going for it now, that the quality of product you can get is so high. So there’s always been great restaurants, but the quality of product that they’re all using is way higher.

The Indy: What’s the relationship between those suppliers and the nightly changes to the menu?

JM: It’s the idea of being a seasonal restaurant. A seasonal restaurant doesn’t mean that you change your menu four times a year. A seasonal restaurant means that there’s weeks that, like, I

The Indy: Have these systems, the quality, and the prices all made owning a restaurant in Providence easier than it would be elsewhere? What’s been difficult as a small business owner in Providence?

north is located at 3 Luongo Memorial Square. It’s open seven nights a week from 5:30 to midnight. Menus are posted daily on the restaurant’s website, foodbynorth.com.

JANUARY 31 2014

FOOD

□ 14

THE RECRUIT

by Zeve Sanderson Illustration by Andres Chang

Baton Rouge, LA. May, 2013.

Dylan Moses is 6’1”, weighs nearly 215 pounds, runs a 4.46 second 40-yard dash, and has a 35” vertical leap. These are NFL quality combine numbers, so it’s no surprise he has eight scholarship offers, many of them from top football programs.

In his highlight film, which has over a million views on YouTube, he awes with his combination of strength and speed.

There’s one play where he actually picks up a blocker Blind Side style and throws him at the ball carrier, who crumples to the ground. Pause the video at any moment, and you see a battlefield of strewn bodies. Dylan Moses stands untouched, looking like Hercules.

There’s little doubt Moses will be a great college player— perhaps, one day, a great NFL player. As a running back, he has a knack for finding holes and a great change of pace on his cuts; as a linebacker, he has a natural sense for the development of a play. Nearing the end of the school year, media outlets from local Baton Rogue newspapers to ESPN flock to interview him. Such a bright future. So much potential.

Everyone wants to ask Moses about his transition to the next level, if he can handle the pressure, if the attention is getting to him. He is, after all, in the eighth grade.

lege scholarship. It’s not guaranteed—he can’t officially sign until later in high school—but he understands he can keep his scholarship offers by continuing to perform on the field.

In the mid-2000s, the University of Oregon sent their top recruits comic books in which they were the protagonists, superheroes, leading the team to championships and collecting personal accolades along the way. High school athletes are asking “who am I,” and recruiters have answers ready for them. The recruitment process, like the college application process, not only distinguishes between good and bad athletes, but also strengthens an athlete-first identity. +++

+++ Moses has monetary value to whichever school he chooses.

He’ll presumably help them win football games, which then makes them money, and in return, he’ll receive an athletic scholarship. It’s a trade—the school makes millions, Moses gets an education—but one that is increasingly being viewed as unbalanced. Moses’s value to the school, the pundits argue, is more than the value of his scholarship, so perhaps he should receive a portion of the money he’ll generate. Joe Nocera even proposed allowing coaches to bid on recruits. How to properly compensate athletes is the question in college sports right now, and it’s being argued from the newspaper to the courtroom.

But the reach of this question is limited. Pay-for-play only has relevance for major programs like the ones recruiting Moses, the best of the best. Of 228 Division I schools analyzed in an Indiana University study, a mere 23 have profitable athletic departments, all of which are in major conferences—the AAC, ACC, Big Ten, Big XII, Pac-12, and SEC. The other 205 lose money. Although it may seem fair to pay athletes from revenue-positive programs (almost always football and men’s basketball) it doesn’t seem economically feasible given that the department as a whole is losing money.

But there’s another way to consider this dynamic between university and athlete, and one that can include departments profitable or unprofitable. Moses is a once in a lifetime athlete, and if he continues on his current trajectory, he’ll be playing on Sundays in 2020, making millions. But he might not. Maybe he doesn’t fulfill his potential, or maybe he gets injured. Each year, there are roughly 5,000 Division I basketball players and 15,000 football players, most of whom will, as the NCAA advertises on TV, “go pro in something other than sports.” And this is the significance of the education a scholarship provides: it provides the ability to be successful in something other than sports. A scholarship has immediate value in the amount it would otherwise take to go to school, but it also has value in the increased financial opportunity a degree provides post-graduation.

15

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SPORTS

The argument to pay players assumes that the monetary value of the education is less than the money the athlete makes for the school. Most of the proposals, thus far, have been to make up the difference with money. Paying players may help them financially in the short-term, but a pay-forplay solution does nothing for them once they graduate.

Considering how few players will ever play professionally, a more meaningful solution to this value problem would be to increase the value of the education itself.

It is here that we find the real problem. Coaches want to win, institutions want to make money, student-athletes need to learn, and thus far only the first two have been realized.

Graduation rates for student-athletes are below 70 percent.

Grades are handed out in “athlete friendly” classes. Division I football and basketball players spend nearly four times more time on sports than class.

It’s easy to think that this is all an institutional problem and not a people problem. But this diagnosis is incomplete, because it’s forgotten about the student-athletes themselves.

Something is happening on a personal level that is making these hard-working athletes apathetic students. +++ A student begins high school in the midst of identity formation. And one of the defining decisions a high school student makes is whether to attend college or not. If so, four hard years of preparation follow. Homework must be completed, tests taken, extracurriculars fulfilled. Perhaps the decision is made following the guidance of a teacher, satisfying parental expectations, or imagining a new and better life. Regardless of the reason, the decision to attend college is an affirmation of an identity that requires a certain amount of academic success.

And the process of getting in—the years of hard work—is not only meant to distinguish between good and bad applicants, but also to strengthen an identity as a student.

By the time Dylan Moses was 14 he already had a col-

John, a student-athlete who wished to remain anonymous, was first contacted by college recruiters in his sophomore year of high school. “I had coaches calling me telling me they were going to follow me and thought I had potential,” John told the Independent. Soon he was featured in newspapers and sports blogs and received his first scholarship offer. By the time he was a senior, John said, he was one of the best players in his high school’s history and had committed to play at Brown. “Everyone knew me as an athlete. My senior year highlight film had a couple thousand views on YouTube.

That’s a couple thousand more people than ever read any essay I wrote for school. … I was going to an Ivy League college, and it was all because of sports.”

John’s identity formed around these experiences: an athlete first, a student second, and he hadn’t even played a game in college yet. He came to college with the same mindset that had thus far made him successful. He explained, “When I got to college, I wasted my first couple years. I worked hard in the gym and barely at all in class. Sports had gotten me to where I am now, but for almost everyone, that stops after college.

Sports can’t get you a job or make you money. I realized, for the first time in my life, I needed to be more than an athlete.

I needed to take advantage of the opportunities sports had given me.” He started studying hard and raised his GPA. “It wasn’t a work ethic thing,” John said. “Sports taught me to work hard. It was changing what I thought was important.” +++ This identity doesn’t just form in high-profile athletes like Moses, or in major-money sports like football and men’s basketball. A recent article in The New York Times explored early recruiting in girls' soccer, often before high school. Payfor-play is a solution for a small number of athletes in a few sports at a couple dozen schools. A far-reaching, systematic solution fairly compensating athletes must start with value of the education, not the value of revenue of ticket sales and TV contracts. Surely, the school can help once students get to campus: shorten practices, limit away games, raise academic standards. But solutions that start on campus would miss a major part of the problem.

I pushed John on when his identity began to form around athletics. He paused and thought, a lifetime of athletic achievement flashing before his eyes: “When I got recruited. It was the first time sports were more than just a game.”

ZEVE SANDERSON B’15 is a walk-on.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

IN TERRA VERITAS world waiting to download

by Kyle Giddon Illustration by Casey Friedman

It has been a number of centuries since medieval cartographers filled the uncharted regions of their maps with mythological creatures. When the known world ended, the early artists were left with only their imaginations, and so turned to what they feared. Hic sunt dracones, the old ink reads. Here are dragons.

Today, the dragons have departed; the basilisks have slithered from their nests, and the fears of modern cartographers are unlikely to include fabled beasts. But they might, instead, include concerns over our increasing faith in proprietary mapping data. Google has assembled the largest collection of geospatial resources ever seen outside government. They have mapped the streets of every nation, and in over a quarter of those countries their Street View cameras, bolted like sailing masts atop sedans, have stitched together mosaics of the roadside. At a technology seminar, a Google engineer declared that “anything that you see in the real world needs to be in our database”; a recent New York Times Magazine article recounts a Street View project leader speaking of rendering the world in “about one pixel to the inch.”

It’s unclear exactly how much money Google has spent on Street View, but the amount is considerable. We also know there have been questions about whether the investment will eventually turn a profit. But one might rightly view the undertaking as a calculated wager, a gambit, with all losses to be recouped once the prize is reached.

Jean Bauer, Digital Humanities Librarian at Brown University, says “I know people who knew that the Google scanner was coming to their street and tried to mow the lawn.”

That has the cadence of a joke. But for the business owners, landlords, and realtors whose products will be seen time and again through Street View, what other choice will they have? +++ Concern with the permanence of map displays is not only a modern problem. For centuries, cartographers have struggled with faithfully portraying what we know about the world because any printed map of the earth must be “projected”; that is, the latitudes and longitudes of the sphere must be systematically transformed so as to be seen on a twodimensional surface. But just as the world cannot simply be unfurled, a flat surface cannot accurately represent the features of a sphere. It is impossible to preserve both the area and shape

+++ The Street View image of Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California is an accurate picture in that it is a likeness of what was seen by that particular camera, at that particular moment, in that particular location, from that particular angle.

It was, apparently, a sunny day (Google cars are forbidden from taking pictures while it is raining).

One can tell by the foliage that it was spring or summer, and the long west-facing shadows would indicate the early morning. On the roadside, some people are brandishing cell-phone cameras; others are waving. One Google employee, ID badge dangling from his jeans, extends a paper sign: “Hi Mom!” This image is true, or was true, once.

“Google takes a picture of your house in the morning when there’s no one in the front yard,” says Rachel Franklin, Associate Director of Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences, and a geographer by trade, “But you have a house at night, a house in the winter, a house in the summer.”

In Street View’s rendering of the world, the sun does not set. The employees do not return to their offices. The summer does not turn to autumn, and the leaves do not fall from the trees. A location is particularized down to a single image, which, until the next Street View car rolls around, becomes indelible.

JANUARY 31 2014

of landmasses; accuracy in one must come at the expense of the other, and these distortions can be seen in the overblown sizes of Greenland or Antarctica on some maps, or in misrepresented distances and directions.

For much of cartographic history, the dominant display was the Mercator projection, derived in 1569 by Gerardus Mercator, popular because it preserved rhumb lines and loxodromes, which sailors use to chart their courses. During the nineteenth century, popular use of the Mercator began to decline because the projection wildly distorts areas, exaggerating the size of Europe and diminishing Africa. Again, the controversy was over the static and singular nature of the

image: if too many elementary school students looked only at their classroom’s copy of the Mercator, they would believe certain continents to be much bigger than they are.

Our interactions with maps today have become less global, more local. There has been only muted talk about which projection Google uses (yes, the Mercator), but as our attention localizes, so do our cartographical problems. We know that any representation of reality is prone to error, but the errors have moved from being the best we can do with imperfect tools, to alterations of the rendered world, either by error or design.

“Google’s worldview becomes the geographic truth. The stuff that they choose is the stuff that is real,” Franklin says, “That means we have to trust Google not to lie. Something always gets generalized, something gets lost, and Google gets to choose what is lost.”

The concern—editing the world—is not hyperbole.

Google has covered over areas of the White House and other federal buildings by request of the United States government.

Security is the noblest of causes, but it is a lie, Google’s lie, that suddenly becomes the truth.

And that lie will be seen by everyone. Unlike the standard data in Google Maps, which is available for use by any developer, the Street View data remains guarded, and we are uncertain of the full extent of the world-edits. Bauer also thinks the images would be exceedingly valuable if released: “You could do vector analysis on architecture images. Color palette analysis on a city.” But, she says, “You have to get the right information.”

The right information—that is the grail, and the hope. It is also, we know, a fiction. One grows leery that as private interests map the world with ever-increasing degrees of precision, we begin to trust the dubious results with ever-increasing degrees of faith.

Thankfully, Google is not the only player in the game. Two years ago, Google began to charge high-bandwidth users for taking their map data.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Adam Fisher relates that “the change prompted an exodus,” with Foursquare, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Apple, and others ceasing to use Google’s data and instead turning to OpenStreetMap, an open-source alternative run mostly by unpaid volunteers. When Apple released their own Maps app several months later, users described receiving directions to drive through buildings, and across bodies of water and airport runways. Roads, highways, landmarks, and entire towns were reported as missing from the database. Apple issued an apology, and even suggested using a competitor’s product as they repaired the issues. Perhaps they should have added dragons.

KYLE GIDDON B’15 has a whole bunch of pixels to the inch, baby.

FEATURES

□ 16

SKYPE REVERBERATIONS

by Eli Pitegoff

Because skype conjures you with strange pixels that dance around your face fractionally, and tries to freeze you

But your lips never freeze as you glitch into calculated thoughts on anti-capitalists and recline into

on the plastic sushi sculptures at that Japanese place in Ku-Damm.

And in the dark you explain your next hair color so that the speakers hum “brunette dream” as my sun sets.

Because

on your bed but my laptop never

illustration by Polina Godz

17 □ LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

A great experience for everyone!

Sentient Ham and Cheese Special

Friday, January 31 Martin Luther King in Berlin: Panel Discussion

12-1:30PM // Pembroke Hall 305, Brown University, 172 Meeting St., Providence In 1964 Martin Luther King, Jr. was visiting West Berlin when he crossed into East Berlin without a passport. He spoke to Berliners on both sides of the wall about racial divisions in America and wall-like divisions in Berlin. The discussion on Friday will be led by Taylor Branch, Author of "The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement," and panelists will include: Tricia Rose, Director, Center for the Study of Race + Ethnicity in America (CSREA), Michael Steinberg, Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities, and Andre Willis, Visiting Professor of Religious Studies.

Writing is Live: The Body which is the Town

January 29th-February 1st (Wed-Fri @ 8pm, Sat @ 3pm) // Leeds Theatre, Brown University, 77 Waterman St., Providence This play is part of a larger festival of new works made by the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies grad students. This particular play was written by Casey Llewellyn, directed by Mia Rovegno, and includes music composed by Rick Burkhardt. It’s about a nine-yearold girl whose father has been incarcerated in a private prison—she moves to the town where the prison is and spends a summer with her dad. There’s a movie crew. There’s a romance. There’s a bunch of animals. Llewellyn says you might be one of them. Reserve tickets online—Just google “writing is live 2014” or something like that.

Deleted Arrows, Tinsel Teeth, Phantom Glue, and Oughts 9PM-1AM // AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence // $6

This was the preview of Phantom Glue’s description on their website: “An avalanche of distortion, psychedelicized occult coloured howlings and roars on early colonial america colliding with... more.” I didn’t click to expand because I think that more is as good as it gets.

Saturday, February 1 Saturday, February 1 Jennifer Avery| (numb)Charlottes

Opening Reception: 6-9PM. Gallery Hours: 12-5PM Sat/Sun, 3-8PM Thurs/Fri. Until March 1 // 60 Valley St, Providence It’s pretty much dolls: 2-D dolls, 3-D dolls, paper dolls, glass dolls, small, medium and large dolls, doll dresses, doll pets, and, of course, doll furniture. Avery: “Charlotte is derived from Frozen Charlottes, the tiny, usually nude, penny dolls made in obsessive bulk during the Belle Époque. Frozen Charlottes are named after a folk song about a young woman who refused to wear her coat and froze to death en route to a grand ball.” In (numb)Charlottes, the objects are more than just dolls; they are corpses and self-portraits. I’d recommend you meet Jennifer Avery if you haven’t yet. But please, don’t waste her time.

Cheez Curlz and Money Combination Appetizer Plate

Monday, February 3 Qwo-Li Driskill on Two-Spirit Imaginings of Decolonized Futures 5:30PM-6:30PM // Smith-Buonanno, 106, Brown University, 95 Cushing St., Providence

Qwo-Li Driskill, Cherokee Scholar and Assistant Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University will be giving this lecture as part of the year-long Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown (NAISAB) lecture series, sponsored by the CV Starr Lectureship.

Tuesday, February 4 Blood Drive

11AM-6PM until 2/6 // Brown/RISD Hillel, 80 Brown St, Providence Walk-ins welcome.

Don’t Be A Stranger!

Until Feb 12 // Granoff Center for the Arts, Brown University, 154 Angell St., Providence This is the 6th Annual Brown/RISD Dual Degree Exhibition. The show focuses on themes of neighborliness, proximity, and foreign belonging.

Wednesday, February 5 Inspiration

5:30-7PM // Manning Chapel, Brown University., 21 Prospect St., Providence 1.5 hours of song! (and praise?)

Thursday, February 6 Lecture Series in Science and Capitalism: Imperial Ambitions and Colonial Organisms—When Corals Built Barriers to Commerce 4PM-6PM // Science Center, 3rd floor of the Sciences Library, Brown University, 201 Thayer St., Providence

Alistair Sponsel, Assistant Professor of History, Vanderbilt University will speak about how the image of coral reefs shifted from a threat to economic expansion to a fragile resource to be protected.

Sunday, February 2 Annual Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading 1-3:30PM // Metcalf Aud., RISD, 20 North Main St., Providence

This is the 19th time this has happened. I probably don’t have to tell you how good this poetry is, but I’ll say that the publicity description for this event used the words “powerful” , “poignant” and “often amusing.” Hughes’s works will be read aloud by members of the community and leaders of diverse backgrounds, including educators, corporate executives, writers, musicians and artists, accompanied by the Daniel Ian Smith Jazz Trio. Reception to follow.

Jumbo Calzone Maggot with Sauce Pile

This Week in Listery:

January 31, 1990 The Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s opens in Moscow.