The College Hill Independent V.27 N. 5

the college hill independent .

October 11, 2013 : Volume 27 Issue 5 a Brown-RISD weekly

managing editors David Adler, Doreen St. Félix, Ellora Vilkin news Simon Engler, Joe de Jonge, Emma Wohl metro Megan Hauptman, Rick Salamé, Kat Thornton arts Becca Millstein, Grier Stockman, John White features Lili Rosenkranz, Josh Schenkkan science Golnoosh Mahdavi, Jehane Samaha SPORTS Tristan Rodman interviews Drew Dickerson literary Edward Friedman EPHEMERA Molly Landis, Ka-

THE indy volume 27 #5

tia Zorich OCCULT Julieta Cárdenas X Lizzie Davis list Claudia Norton, Diane Zhou design + illustration Mark Benz, Casey Friedman, Kim Sarnoff Cover Editor Robert Sandler Senior editors Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Sam Rosen, Robert Sandler Staff Writer Alex Sammon STAFF ILLUSTRATORs Andres Chang, Aaron Harris web Houston Davidson COPY Paige Morris Cover Art Lizzie Davis MvP Julieta Cárdenas P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 & theindy@gmail.com & @theindy_tweets & theindy.org 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.

news fROM THE EDITORS “It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

–A. Bartlett Giamatti Lockers covered in cellophane; iced champagne and beer.

Hats are made for the occasion. October features many celebrations just like this: the divisionclinching party, the wild-card party, the divisionseries party, the championship-series party. By the end of the season, there are 19 celebrations of this kind. 19 specific hats are worn (out of the 38 specific has that are made).

On each occasion, for the winning team, more anxiety awaits. How to follow up this performance?

How to continually improve on greatness? Many collapse under the pressure. Champions repeat less than one fifth of the time.

It is designed to break your heart. The losers go home, to their families, their friends, their places of residence. They regroup, re-tool, re-adjust.

We are comforted by the thought: there is always next year. -TR

2 Week in Review simon engler, joe de jonge & emma wohl

3 Port Sorrow alex sammon

METRO 5 Bzzzzz rick salamé

7 Homeless in RI erin schwartz

ARTS 6 Inventory becca millstein, grier stockman & john white

13 Step 2 My Girls sheila sitaram

OCCULT 9 Cootie Shot! julieta cárdenas

EPHEMERA 11 Your Fortune molly landis & katia zorich

SPORTS 12 The Fairest Play zeve sanderson

SCIENCE 14 Bacterial Biodiversity jehane samaha

LITERARY 15 Two Poems mika kligler

INTERVIEWS 17 Jodi Kantor sophie kasakove

X 18 O Holy Thigh robert sandler

WEEK ON THE ROAD

by Simon Engler, Joe de Jonge & Emma Wohl

Roads stretch across the map. They bring us to each other. They take us home. To new cities. To the Olympics. They take us to the drivethru, to pick up chicken nuggets, in a Tesla.

This week, look with the eyes of travelers, fueled by innovation and by animal protein. Start cruising—but don’t forget to tie your hair back before you put the top down. This is the week on the road.

CHICKEN TO GO i bet that you like the speed and the pleasure of the drivethru. That you know what it’s like to move a half-used packet of Dentyne Ice out of the cupholder so that the buffalo sauce can go there instead. Unfortunately for you, it’s been a bad few weeks for fast food.

To begin: a group of scientists has finally looked at chicken nuggets under a microscope. Results were published, if you can believe it, in the American Journal of Medicine on September 13. What the researchers discovered is disgusting: more than 50 percent of the nuggets they looked at were made of nerve cells, bones, skin, or fat tissue. The nuggets, picked up from restaurants in Mississippi, even included cells from the linings of internal organs. Don’t worry, though. The nuggets are still premium.

And there’s more bad news yet. Quick Service Restaurant is the fast food industry’s leading publication, and a special report released, in the October issue claims that drive-thrus are slower than they’ve been in decades. It takes 190 seconds, on average, to get a hamburger from the window at McDonalds—enough time for a customer to listen, to nearly any song in LMFAO’s catalogue. While that seems fast, it’s actually the longest the McDonalds drive-thru has taken in 13 years, which, in the time-confused minds of fast food executives, is an eternity. QSR wants to qualify the bad news, though.

“That’s not to say the decline in speed is a bad thing,” the magazine reports. “Times, of course, are changing. Food isn’t so simple anymore. Burgers and fries have become burrito bowls and salad kits.”

Yes, fast food is getting more complicated. Burgers and fries have become burrito bowls and salads—and it’s all taking longer, too. But let me soothe you. These changes are part of an intricate process, a process that leads to places beyond our understanding. For example: Chicken breasts have become chicken nuggets, and chicken nuggets have become chicken organs. Chicken organs will then become—but there is no further step. We are approaching the void. And it tastes just the same. - SPE

OCTOBER 11 2013

CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT in a 30-second youtube clip, a 2013 Tesla Model S goes up in smoke. We don’t see how the fire started, we just see the flames growing larger, shooting up into a sky already dark with smoke, getting worse as firemen approach to stop them.

We hear a man driving by remark, “Wow, I can feel the heat in here.” In 2013, the electricity-powered Model S was ranked the safest car ever made.

There’s a certain glee to the observers watching a groundbreaking invention from an upstart car manufacturer—costing over $95,000 and aimed at revolutionizing the way we drive—explode with such force. Nowhere is this clearer than in the viral video, where a voice off-camera cackles and murmurs, “Oh, that’s a Tesla, dude!” “Oh shit,” another voice replies.

After the video went viral this week, Tesla went into a downward skid in the stock market. The crash was poorly timed to correspond with a downgrade by the financial services management firm Baird. The grade dropped from “flawless execution” to “neutral,” essentially because Tesla couldn’t possibly continue to grow like it did in the beginning of the year. Meanwhile new questions arose about the safety and market viability of electric cars like the Model S. CEO Elon Musk, whose name and outsized personality are invoked whenever his cars are discussed, took to his blog to respond to the public’s concerns: “For consumers concerned about fire risk, there should be absolutely zero doubt that it is safer to power a car with a battery than a large tank of highly flammable liquid.”

Musk sold his first piece of software when he was 11; he is also a co-founder of PayPal and SpaceX, a corporation that aims to colonize Mars, and the chairman of a solar panel installation company. He dreams big; he sees the internet, alternative energy, and space as the new frontiers that will save the planet. Questions of the car’s safety are unfounded, Musk says. In August, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which ranks cars’ crash safety on a scale of one to five, gave the Model S—the first highway-capable sedan powered by electricity—a 5.4.

So what caused the car to crumple and burst into flame?

It doesn’t have a huge gas engine in its hood, just a sheet of lithium-ion battery cells under the cabin. In Washington this week, the Model S collided with an unidentified metal object in the road, causing significant damage to the front and forcing the driver to pull over. The photographs and video that circulated on the web are from after the fire department exacerbated a small, contained fire by poking holes in the roof of the car’s hood, Tesla officials said. Since the crash, the NHTSA has been in furlough and unable to revisit its rankings.

But Tesla keeps chugging along the road, not unfazed but undeterred in its march of progress. The man whose car caught fire still proclaims himself a fan and plans to buy another Model S as soon as the insurance goes through. - EW

THIS IS TORCHER the song and dance leading up to the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, has begun. On Monday October 7, the Olympic flame arrived by plane in Moscow from its ancestral home of Olympia. From Moscow the torch began what will be the longest torch relay in all of Olympic history. It will cover 65,000 km, and more than14,000 people will bear it.

The journey will take 123 days. It’s going underwater in Lake Baikal, the largest and deepest freshwater lake in the entire world, home to about a fifth of the world’s unfrozen surface freshwater. The torch is climbing to the peak of Europe’s tallest mountain, Mount Elbrus. (Though it might actually be in Asia.) It is also going to the North Pole, and on a nuclear powered icebreaker. It is even going to the International Space Station, in what will be the Olympic torch’s third trip to space.

Things haven’t gone so well so far. In Moscow on Monday—day one of 123—the torch went out while held by Shavarsh Karapetyan, a former Soviet champion finswimmer best known for saving 20 people aboard a bus from drowning in the toxic lake near where he and his brother were training, a feat that ended his career. This was on the torch’s way to the Kremlin where Putin was waiting to light a bigger torch and give a speech. A security guard quickly re-lit it with his zippo—all this caught on tape by Reuters. Zippo quickly jumped on the marketing opportunity, posting the video on Twitter: #ZippoSavesOlympics.

But that’s not really kosher. The torch is supposed to be the same flame that got lit in Olympia! Apparently there are back-ups. During the Montréal Olympics in 1976, a rainstorm extinguished not just the torch, but the whole Olympic Cauldron. An official re-lit the cauldron with his lighter, but they had to put the whole thing out so they could light it again with a true Olympic flame.

We are now a few days in, and according to Radio Free Europe the torch has gone out at least three more times.

Maybe it’s the torches? Designed to look like the feather of the mythical Russian firebird, they were manufactured in a Siberian factory that, in the regular season, makes ballistic missiles for submarines and parts of the very rockets that will bring the torch to space. Well, in Putin’s words, the relay “will show the world Russia the way it is.”- JJ

news █ 02

perils of lampedusa North African immigration to Europe

by Alex Sammon Illustration by Diane Zhou

brown wooden caskets fill the loading bay. There are 194 in total. They are split into three parallel lines, with a handful of small, ivory children’s coffins off to the side.

There will be more in the cluster tomorrow. The island’s nearby airport hangar now functions as a makeshift morgue—body bags and hearses crowd the area, another shipment of coffins is on its way. Italian authorities expect to need at least 100 more by the week’s end.

The scene on the southern dock of Lampedusa is grave. On the night of October 2, a 65-foot fishing boat left the Libyan port of Misrata. On board were an estimated 500 North African refugees, most from war-torn Eritrea and Somalia. In the early morning hours of October 3, the boat neared its destination of Lampedusa, a small island province just south of Italy’s mainland.

The frenzied hours that followed have caused some confusion about the chain of events. But there are some things of which we are certain. The boat’s motor failed around sunrise. Just 800 meters from the shoreline, the vessel began to take on water. Lacking flares and needing some sort of distress signal, passengers took to lighting t-shirts and jackets on fire, hoping the flame would attract surrounding ships.

The fire quickly spread out of control, igniting an explosion on the port side of the boat and forcing its passengers to quickly evacuate to starboard. This resulted in a major weight imbalance, causing the boat to capsize. Without warning or access to floatation devices, the boat’s 500 passengers were thrown overboard. A small handful was able to grab lifejackets, while others clung to empty plastic water bottles. Yet the majority of passengers did not know how to swim, and the available forms of floatation could not prevent them from drowning. Many passengers were unable to escape even the ship’s hull.

Onlookers told Al Jazeera that a nearby boat came within close range of the burning ship, yet failed to extend any sort of assistance. Meanwhile, there have been accusations that the Italian Coast Guard did not act in an expedient manner. Vito Fiorino, a fisherman and first responder, indicated that the Coast Guard was “focusing more upon ensuring footage of the rescue mission than the rescue itself.” Internal investigations have been launched to look into both of these matters.

Nearby fishermen were the first on scene, all too familiar with the drill. Some were able to pull a handful of victims aboard, but, covered in gasoline spewing from the boat, many slipped through their fingers. Domenico Colaptino, a local fisherman, told reporters that in a matter of minutes, the majority of the African refugees on board sank to the bottom of the Lampedusan coastline, a watery mass grave that has claimed a documented 20,000 lives since 1988.

While many details are still contested, it is unanimous that rescue efforts proved to be insufficient. Of the initial 500 passengers, only 155 are confirmed to be alive. This number is not expected to increase in the week ahead.

When news of this tragedy reached the Italian mainland, shouts for immigration reform swelled. Cecile Kyenge, Italy’s first black Minister of Integration, was adamant that looser immigration policies would be enacted in coming weeks. An official statement from the European Union stated that an international revision of immigration policy would be at the top of the docket for meetings next week. “The rules must be changed,” Kyenge said. “I hope this never happens again.”

03 █ NEWS

+++ in 2013 alone, it is estimated that some 30,000 immigrants will make the voyage from Northern Africa to Italy, most of who will journey through Lampedusa. These immigrants—largely Syrian, Eritrean, and Somalian—are often fleeing political persecution and insurgent violence, rampant in all three countries. Human rights groups estimate there to be at least 10,000 political prisoners in Eritrea alone.

Lampedusa is the largest of the Italian Pelagie Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, which isn’t saying much. The island is roughly 7.5 square miles, with a population of only 5,000. Its location in the Mediterranean has made it a tourism hotspot.

Temperate summer weather and calm, pristine seas attract thousands of tourists to Lampedusa every year, a destination that is far enough from mainland Europe to seem exotic, yet close enough to feel safe. Still, while hotels are filling up during the summer months, so too are the island’s immigration holding tanks and deportation centers.

These factors have turned Lampedusa into an epicenter of African immigration.

Italy’s minster of the interior, Angelino Alfano, has likened Lampedusa to Checkpoint Charlie, calling it the true “dividing line between the northern and southern hemispheres.” The same features that attract tourists also attract an onslaught of immigrants.

Lampedusa’s location near Northern Africa (a mere 70 miles from Tunisia) has made it an immigration hotbed, with thousands of migrants passing through every year. The calm summer seas and proximity to Tunisia are supposed to make the journey less perilous.

Boatloads of immigrants have been passing through the island for decades, and many consider it to be the “backdoor to Europe.” Domenico Colaptino, who pulled 18 victims aboard his family’s fishing boat, told the BBC, “wrecks are so common off the coast of Lampedusa that fishermen often damage their nets on residual debris from sunken vessels.” +++ even now, the 155 survivors of the tragic shipwreck wait in an Italian holding tank, under surveillance, hoping that they will not be forcibly returned to Northern Africa. The tank has been designed to hold 500 people while cases for asylum are being reviewed. Yet that number often swells into the thousands when large boats arrive. Due to increased regulation in recent years, these 155 survivors can expect to be there for multiple weeks.

Many of them, ultimately, will be deported.

Italian immigration policy has been devised to function like a game of Capture the Flag. If refugees and asylum-seekers can make it to the Italian country, they are eligible to apply for asylum or work permits—in essence, they are “on base.” However, if the vessel gets caught in transit by the Italian Coast Guard—tasked, importantly, with handling immigration—they are either sent to jail or deported back from whence they came. Often, newspapers report, they are returned to a war-torn African country that is not even their own.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

And this explains why Lampedusa, which is geographically closer to Africa than Europe, is such a popular destination. If refugees and immigrants can survive the 70-mile trek, there is some potential for asylum. This phenomenon has caused Lampedusa to develop a massive holding cell for migrants, one of the largest developments on the otherwise bucolic island.

Italy has long been a nation of emigrants, not immigrants. In fact, the country didn’t even have an immigration policy at all until 1986. Silvio Berlusconi and his notorious right-wing constituency passed the current immigration policy in 2002, called the BossiFini Law. The law looks askance at the plight of Northern Africans, drawing a hard-line between extreme cases of humanitarian asylum, which they claim to be legitimate, and other forms of immigration, which do not qualify for state support. Only Africans in the absolute poorest of conditions maintain eligibility for asylum. The Bossi-Fini calls for armed naval boats to patrol the coastline for immigrant ships, hoping to minimize landfall all together.

The economic downturn in 2008 coincided with two more ad-hoc asylum laws, ratcheting up Italy’s refusal to take on African refugees. According to Camilla Hawthorne, an MPA holder from Brown University, the laws allowed for “persistent surveillance of the predominantly African immigrants that reside within the country, and an increased ability to detain and expel migrants.” It is now nearly impossible for foreign workers to gain citizenship or access to public housing. Undocumented immigration is subject to a four-year prison sentence. While Hawthorne emphasizes that attributing this issue to fear of economic failure and xenophobia is an oversimplification, systemic racism certainly plays a substantial role. In the words of Berlusconi, “the left wants a multiethnic society— we don’t.”

This legislation has served to keep the Coast Guard busy—just days before the tragedy on October 3, a boat with 398 African immigrants was captured and eventually sent back, a best case scenario according to the letter of the law. Yet the majority of these boats are barely seaworthy to begin with, and lucky to even accomplish the one-way journey. A return trip is even more likely to result in tragedy and loss of life.

Smuggling, as a result, has become a huge business. Consider the Doctor, the nicknamed navigator of the most recent shipwreck. The Doctor is a Tunisian native who has been arrested multiple times on trafficking charges. Processed and deported back to Tunisia by Italian officials, the Doctor has returned to smuggling, underscoring the futility of the Italian system. He is estimated to have pocketed a cool $678,000 on this voyage alone, without a successful arrival.

And The Doctor is not the only one. There are thought to be more than a handful of trafficking companies, running ships full of refugees on a close to daily basis. At the same time, fear of Italian Naval patrol has forced the journeys to become even more dangerous—ships travel at night, often without lights whatsoever, so as to avoid attention. The result has been calamitous.

OCTOBER 11 2013

+++ journalists and political figureheads alike have clamored for reform for years now.

Even Pope Francis, perhaps Italy’s most prominent person, thinks this trend is downright unconscionable. He has called for a sympathetic revision of the immigration law on multiple occasions.

During a visit to Sicily in July, he stopped off at Lampedusa, and lamented the state of affairs. Standing on the sandy beach of Lampedusa’s southern shore, he called out political actors for “global indifference” to the crisis at hand, encouraging an overhaul of the current structure. His demands were ignored.

Hans Lucht, an anthropologist at the Danish Institute for International Studies, points out in a recent New York Times editorial that the European Union still has extensive plans to construct an extensive border surveillance system, called Eurosur (colloquially, Fortress Europe). Despite this new political rhetoric of humanitarianism, Lucht points out that “there is a growing acceptance that a watery graveyard is a necessary evil for the maintenance of a free and prosperous Europe.” Despite the obvious moral failings and proven futility, Europe seems content to build higher walls and bigger barriers, intent on keeping the Africans out.

Regardless of these obstacles, many refugees would rather take their chances with the open seas than with the war-torn landscapes of Eritrea, the militant occupation of Somalia. A reporter for the Guardian was able to converse briefly with an 18-year-old Eritrean who survived the shipwreck. He calls himself David Villa, in honor of a famous Spanish soccer player. He maintains that this shipwreck was but a small hiccup on his path to Switzerland, his dream destination. He is relieved to have made the journey, and excited for his new life. “I want to be a nurse,” he says from a holding tank. While bureaucrats and politicians prepare to discuss a new immigration bill, there is still a likelihood that he will be sent back, only to risk his life once more. +++ back on the pier, a single red rose adorns each and every coffin. Roses don’t grow in Italy, and least not in this bulk. The majority of these flowers are grown in Northern and Western Africa. Now, a local fisherman throws a dozen of them into the water, a sign of respect for those who died.

ALEX SAMMON B’15 is team Francis .

NEWS █ 04

apis providentia Beekeeping geography in greater Providence

by Rick Salamé Illustration by Aaron Harris and Casey Friedman

dr. jane dennison’s honeybees wake up around 10:30 AM in late September.

They won’t fly if it’s too cold and, lately, mornings have been brisk. The little insects—smaller and less fuzzy than their wild relatives, the bumblebees—exit a large, fragrant wooden box out of a little slit at its base and then fly off to forage for pollen. Some likely fly over the houses of relatively suburban East Providence, cross the Seekonk River, and enter Providence’s East Side. Anywhere within two miles is foraging territory. They cross the irrelevant property lines, city limits, and zoning boundaries that demarcate commercial, residential, and agricultural space. In the median strip of Blackstone Boulevard they forage the flowering trees and ground flowers. In the backyards of East Side residents they find pollen in flowerbeds and bushes. They stuff their corbiculae, the little sacks on their back legs, with the pollen of plants—Asian, American, African, European—and head back to the hive with the world in their pockets. +++ “nature, except in a surviving landscape park, is scarcely to be found near the metropolis,” wrote historian Lewis Mumford. But, for the honeybee, a species whose decline has been greatly publicized, the artificial world of the city is not so inhospitable an environment. According to a 2010 compilation of data by New York City Department of Parks employees Fiona Watt and Bram Gunther, 27 percent of the land area in the average American city is covered with tree canopy. That translates into about 2,000 acres of potential tree forage alone for the average urban beehive, according to trade magazine Bee Culture. The average hive, Bee Culture notes, only requires between two and 20 acres worth of pollen and nectar per year, depending on the forage material. And, besides being relatively abundant, urban forage is of high quality.

According to Dennison—an officer of the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association and pediatrician, who keeps six hives in her hometown of East Providence—many residents of the relatively affluent East Side of Providence hire landscaping firms that plant their gardens with a wide variety of flowers and flowering trees. While environmentalists may bemoan the introduction of nonnative plant species into new environments because they can unbalance ecosystems and crowd out indigenous species, Dennison notes that, as far as bees are concerned, the more horticultural diversity the better. “A simple pine or oak forest isn’t good for bees at all!”

Dennison exclaimed.

Scott Langelais, an urban beekeeper who recently relocated from Providence to Johnston, agrees: “A lot of

people would think that a rural environment would be better but that can actually be challenging… an urban environment can be very good because there is a wide variety of plants,” he told the Independent. James Lawson, Bee Inspector for the State of Rhode Island, called Dennison’s and Langelais’s views on the beekeeping, or “apicultural,” upsides to urban landscaping, “right on the money.” “You have a lot of different types of pollen coming in,” he said, and a varied diet is key for honeybees.

But urbanization has created some statewide problems here in Rhode Island. While the decline of crop agriculture has been something of a blessing (“there’s not a lot there for [bees],” says Lawson), the shrinking dairy industry has been another story. “In 1940 there were over 1,000 dairy farms in Rhode Island, now there are eight or ten,” says Lawson. “With dairy farms you have pastures, you have fields…[now] a lot of that forage area has left [and] the native colonies have reduced in numbers.” This despite the fact that managed colonies in greater Providence appear to be thriving—although their owners can give them supplemental food that native colonies don’t get.

In an urban context there’s also “a risk of the environment being oversaturated,” as Langelais explained.

Oversaturation (also called “overstocking”) occurs when too many bees are drawing upon limited resources. “Where we were in Providence there were six or seven other beekeepers nearby, and that can create a lot of stress on the natural environment,” Langelais said. And in the absence of a regulatory framework to ensure responsible hive placement, urban bees will continue to be more susceptible than their rural counterparts to the strain imposed by beekeeping’s growing popularity.

“The idea that just buying and slapping down beehives anywhere is somehow good for all concerned,” writes Toni Burnham, a DC-based veteran beekeeper and outspoken advocate for bee-friendly laws, “is the kind of logic used by people who hoard cats.” An extra hive may be good, but an extra twelve isn’t.

The situation is further complicated because places like East Providence might provide inferior foraging because they are less affluent. According to Dennison, who has been keeping bees in East Providence for years, many locals have to do their own landscaping, resorting to a “hardier, more durable, and less varied assemblage of plants,” which translates into inferior foraging. As we stood, tending a hive together, she pointed to two houses across the street. “Those people do their own landscaping,” she said of the house on the right, and listed the handful of plant species in their yard. “But this guy,” she said, pointing to the densely planted house on the left, “hires a landscaper and planted a bunch of flowering trees.

>2,422 BC

I think he’s Italian. Anyways, that’s much more horticulturally dense.”

But Lawson doesn’t seem particularly concerned about East Providence’s lower rates of professional landscaping. “I don’t see any difference between landscapers or homeowners,” he said, “It’s just about being sensitive to putting up plants that are good for honeybees and native bees.” Increasingly, he observes, people are actually buying apiculture-enhancing plants, like sweet pepper bush, on their own. And while that’s great, Langlais was careful to downplay the importance of the individual piece of property to the overall environment.

“Don’t overthink what you want to plant in your own yard for your bees,” he said, “because they will fly elsewhere. They are extremely efficient at finding good forage.” And when a hive’s average range covers 8,658 acres, a lot of people would have to be making the same mistake for it to become anything close to a crisis.

But even if your own backyard flowers aren’t too important for your bees, residents of economically disadvantaged neighborhoods often cannot exert influence over what is planted or what chemical treatments are used elsewhere in their city where their bees are foraging. And “the truth,” writes Toni Burnham, “is that people of less economic means are also people of less green space” in their own communities. So the people who might gain the greatest benefit from honey production are often at a distinct disadvantage in creating a good environment for it. But Providence isn’t DC. “I don’t think that’s a problem here,” said Rich Pederson, City Farm Steward at the Southside Community Land Trust in Providence. I was prodding him for a confirmation of Burnham’s thesis, but it wasn’t going to happen. His organization’s two hives at City Farm, on the corner of West Clifford and Dudley streets, not only sit directly on a three-quarter acre farm but also have access to two parks, a cemetery, and a community garden in the immediate vicinity.

And given the low density housing found most everywhere outside of Downcity, there are plenty of neighbors with flower patches. “In terms of problems,” Pederson says, “the biggest challenge with urban beekeeping [in Providence] is people’s fears of bees.”

If Providence grows and becomes denser in the future, beekeeping will probably become more complicated, but for now, the honey is flowing and one by one other Rhode Island municipalities are legalizing the little insects, bringing bees closer to home. The city is buzzing: listen.

RICK SALAME B’16 is honey, baby.

1852 AD 1538 AD

moments in the history of beekeeping

05█ metro

Images on the walls of the sun temple of Nyuserre Ini, Pharaoh of Egypt, show workers harvesting honeycombs.

600–300 BC The Picts, an ancient people in modern day Scotland, make beer out of honey.

The Spanish introduce European honeybees (Apis mellifera) to the Americas.

1740 AD North Carolina allows taxes to be paid in beeswax.

L.L. Langstroth,Congregational minister, patents the movable-frame hive that is still in use today.

July 2, 2008 Traffic is stopped for two hours as a massive swarm of bees occupies the intersection of Weybosset and Westminster streets in Providence. “At least they’re all bee-having,” said Providence police officer Tony DaSilva.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

INVENTORY

by Becca Millstein, Grier Stockman & John White Illustration by Mark Benz

Inventory. Taking stock. It’s a check-list, cross it off.

Go to Venice, take a drive, come, and back again.

We bring you Inventory: Your chance to know it all.

DANCE DANCE RESOLUTION

IT’S ALL GREEK

david dorfman dance—a New York–based, award-winning modern dance company that has performed all over the world—recently made the interesting decision to use online crowd-sourced fundraising for a trip to Massachusetts. The company’s Kickstarter campaign ended on October 1 after having received $10,713 from 153 backers in 34 days.

Because the campaign surpassed its $10,000 goal, David Dorfman Dance will be able to participate in a week-long residency at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (or MASS MoCA). There the company will complete work on their new, hour-long dance piece, Come, and Back Again, which is described by their website as a “kinetic anthem of reckless personal abandon.” Thanks to the Kickstarter funds, the many parts that make the dance piece so dynamic— including five dancers, five musicians, video projections, and a junk-strewn set co-designed by street artist Swoon and Brooklyn-based sculptor Jonah Emerson Bell—will all be able to come together at MASS MoCA. David Dorfman Dance’s decision to turn to Kickstarter points to an interesting trend: Dance projects by both young, independent choreographers and, more recently, established choreographers and companies are increasingly finding funds this way. Last August, the New Jersey–based American Repertory Ballet joined Kickstarter in order to fulfill an invitation to perform at the world-renowned Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, also in Massachusetts. They surpassed their $5,000 goal and performed at Jacob’s Pillow a couple weeks later. In fact, though many of the most publicized and profitable Kickstarter projects have been films (the Veronica Mars movie broke records last March by reaching its $2 million goal in less than ten hours), dance projects have the highest success rate among all of Kickstarter’s project categories.

According to the website’s own statistics, 71 percent of Kickstarter dance projects reach their campaign goal, followed pretty closely by 64 percent of theater projects and, more distantly, 55 percent of music projects. Only 40 percent of film and video projects succeed, and there are several categories—including publishing and fashion—which have even lower success rates. Of course, these statistics can be accounted for to some degree by the fact that films on average require much more money than do works in the performing arts. Additionally, though Come, and Back Again was already David Dorfman Dance’s second Kickstarter campaign, the dance world at large seems to still be learning the online crowd-funding routine: Dance consistently has by far the smallest number of live projects of all the categories (54 at press time, compared to film and video’s 832), which helps make them more visible than other categories’ projects.

Therefore, it seems very likely that David Dorfman Dance will come back to Kickstarter for more. - JW

for the 55th venice Biennale Art Festival, Russian artist Vadim Zakharov has re-embodied the myth of Danaë in the Russian Pavilion at the Giardini. Zakharov, a leader of the Moscow Conceptualist movement, is the first artist to utilize the entire museum chamber for a single installation. The two floors of the chamber represent two distinct spheres of the installation. No men are permitted to enter the first floor of the pavilion. They must remain behind the glass handrails of the wraparound balcony, peering down into the glimmering mirage of gold coins pouring from a large shower head in the center of the ceiling. On the wall of this room of reflection, the words beg the men: “… the time has come to confess our Rudeness, Lust, Narcissism, Demagoguery, Falsehood, Banality, and Greed, Cynicism, Robbery, Speculation, Wastefulness, Gluttony, Seduction, Envy, and Stupidity.”

There has been considerate displeasure among male visitors, with some exhibiting aggressive behavior in their attempts to access the golden womb of the pavilion.

Within this womb, female visitors gaze upwards through protective clear plastic umbrellas at the golden rain pouring down onto and all around them. The golden coins shower down, the women collect them and put them into buckets.

The buckets are returned to the second floor, where they begin their abrupt descent again.

In the Greek myth, King Acrisius of Argos, who has no male heirs, asks an oracle if his luck will change. The oracle responds that yes, it will—and then his daughter Danaë’s son will murder him. To prevent the prophecy from being fulfilled, Acrisius locks the childless Danaë in a bronze tower where no men can reach her. Though impenetrable to mortal men, the prison is no barrier for Zeus, who enters in the form of a fine golden rain. Zeus showers Danaë in the rain and she becomes pregnant with Perseus, who does indeed go on to kill his grandfather. Zakharov has given a figure to the myth in the Russian Pavilion; it contains the womb that no man can enter and a continuous golden shower.

At first glance, Zakharov’s exhibit seems to criticize the power of commercialization in Russia, greed, and male privilege. But if you look a little closer, this first impression is complicated. On one face of the coins, handcrafted by Zakharov, a woman’s figure holds out her dress and welcomes the falling coins into the folds of fabric. On the other side are the four words: Trust, Unity, Freedom, and Love. For Zakharov, the falling coins do not represent a modern conception of money—they are called “Danaës” and, in their cyclical journey through the museum, represent the dynamic driving force of the female. Zakharov oscillates back and forth between positions on the symbolic meaning of the exhibit-—once he suggested that the exhibit should force people to reflect on their values but later explained, “I didn’t want to create a special installation, just follow the structure of the myth, identifying a very simple and linear solution.

Instead some people began to talk about issues connected to humanity although it was not my intention to place the myth in these terms.” By incorporating the visitors as a moving part of the exhibit, however, he has invited them to enter the body and, through their participation and understanding, change the meaning of the myth itself. - BM

OCTOBER 11 2013

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU if you find yourself driving along Interstate 10 this month, look up. You are part of an elaborate, 2,640 mile long, multiple-artist collaboration to re-envision the cross-country road trip. The undertaking, entitled “The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project,” is the brainchild of LA-based artist Zoe Crosher and the Los Angeles Nomadic Division, a non-profit public art initiative. In practice, the project is a series of artistproduced billboards and activations stretching from Florida to California along the I-10 freeway. In theory, the project will, Crosher writes on her website, “map out the American fantasy of Westward expansionism by moving through and punctuating the narrative of the landscape itself.”

Crosher’s project conceptualizes an old fixture in the American imagination: the lore of moving west. The very taming of the western wilderness came to define the American spirit in the 19th century; the roughness of the process inspired strong artistic and literary response. Like Crosher, mid–19th century artists like George Catlin of the Hudson River School (1825-1870) and transcendentalist poets like Henry David Thoreau were intensely preoccupied with what Crosher describes as the “loaded threshold,” the point at which you hit the border or reach the shore and you can’t push further. Crosher’s work powerfully reimagines this mid– 19th century anxiety in a 21st century context, embodied in the last physical structure of high-speed consumerism: the billboard. In her own words, the project allows artists to “explore their shared investigations in the development of society and cities, specifically the westward manifestation that has built Los Angeles into the cultural epicenter that it claims today.” - GS

ARTS █ 06

ON THE OUTSIDE Homeless advocacy in Providence

by Erin Schwartz Illustration by Andres Chang

i am in kennedy plaza on an evening in early October when I meet John Freitas. Gray-bearded, wearing a vacation t-shirt and baseball cap and finishing his cigarette, he is rough around the edges but friendly. He jokes with the small group of student volunteers from HOPE, Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere, while we wait for the bus. John is the outreach coordinator of the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project (RIHAP). Every night for the past four years, Frietas has taken a group of volunteers to make the rounds in the neighborhood of South Providence where Elmwood splits off from Broad Street. Starting from the Dunkin Donuts parking lot, John walks up Broad, takes a left into a residential neighborhood, and stops at a camp carved out of overgrown scrub, impossible to see from the street. He points out the bedding on the ground and tells me that there is space for as many as 20 people here when it gets crowded, but there is just one man here now. John asks him about the area shelters—who has hot water, who’s serving only rice and beans. The two briefly complain about services, but there is a marked difference in how they talk about the shelters; John was homeless in Providence for six years but now has an apartment, while the man he speaks to is still sleeping outside. Though the way John speaks about the shelters shows the intimate knowledge of a member of the homeless community, he also speaks as protector of that community, as an authority who mediates the ambiguous space between the homeless and the shelter system.

We leave the camp and walk back through the cemetery, then check behind McDonald’s and 7/11. John knows the spots where people sleep around here well, but it still struck me how often he needed to introduce himself. Even though he has been travelling this route seven days a week for several years, the homeless population of this small neighborhood of South Providence is large enough that there are, it seems, always new faces. +++ rhode island has one of the highest costs of living in the country, and one of the top 10 rates of homelessness. In Providence, an hourly wage of about $20 an hour—a yearly income of $43,560— is necessary to afford a two-bedroom apartment at market value.

According to a study from HousingWorks RI, the average renter in Providence earns $27,657 annually, making an average apartment far from affordable.

Housing is considered “affordable” if it costs 30 percent or less of an individual’s total income; across Rhode Island, 15 percent of residents are routinely paying 50 percent or more of their income for housing. Melissa Husband of the Providence Community Action Program estimates some households pay rates as high as 80 percent.

The allocation of more than half of a household’s income to rent payments forces households to prioritize shelter over equally pressing needs—food, clothing, medical bills. Paying such a large proportion of their income for housing makes renters vulnerable to sudden financial changes, like layoffs or medical emergencies, which are often the tipping point where income is no longer enough to cover housing costs.

As housing costs rise and affording an apartment becomes financially infeasible, the semi-homeless—those who do not have stable housing but are not sleeping outside—enact strategies to stay inside. Husband says she often sees clients staying with relatives, cramming multiple generations into one apartment, and jumping

07 █ METRO

from place to place without paying rent, staying as long as they can before eviction. Many end up in the shelter system. This presents another challenge, as many of the shelters in Providence are overfull; a 2012 survey by the RI Coalition for the Homeless counted 370 beds in all Providence shelters but 469 occupants. Those who stay at the shelters are a mix of individuals and families, the chronic homeless and the underemployed. Bernard Lessing of the Rhode Island Family Community Action Program says that 40 percent of the individuals who stay at their shelter are employed; Husband describes 65-70 percent of the households supported by their program as working poor, employed but still unable to afford housing. +++ john’s mission for the Outreach Walks is simple: check in on the people who are sleeping outside and see if they need help. Tonight, we are leaving plastic bags full of blankets at the empty campsites because it is starting to get colder out. These walks are homeless advocacy from the bottom up. The work John and his volunteers do is not meant to be comprehensive, to get the homeless inside or in a job; instead, they intervene to meet the day-to-day needs that are not being covered by the shelter system. Some of the people we met were barred from certain shelters, and the reasons for expulsion can range from a personal disagreement with the management to a violation of the shelters’ rules against drug use. John tells me the story of a man who was evicted from a shelter, but was told that the reasons why were confidential and, as an ex-client, the shelter was not obligated to share the information with him. RIHAP’s initiatives are aimed at problems like this; they focus on homeless individuals instead of the system of social services. Their most recent success is the State government’s passage of a Homeless Bill of Rights, and John fills me in on their next project: creating regulatory standards for shelters to make sure their services are consistent and humane.

The aggression with which he goes after some of these institutions for their bedbugs, cold showers, bad food, and mismanagement shows that the shelters occupy an ambiguous place from the level of the street. They provide important services, but abuses of power or misuse of funds do not go unnoticed.

We are walking through the cemetery between Elmwood and Broad, one of the most frequently used campsites in the neighborhood, when John notices someone sleeping upright on a sofa. This catches his attention, and Barbara, another organizer of the walks, attempts to wake her up, to make sure she is all right, but the woman is unresponsive to noise and shaking. Someone calls 911. Soon after, we see the flashlight beams of four EMTs coming towards us through the trees. Barbara explains, and the EMTs are able to wake the woman and get her on her feet, asking her questions about alcohol consumption. One of responders turns and advises us not to come around here at night because we could get hurt.

“We know these people,” he says.

“We know them too,” Barbara insists. “We’re here every night.”

“We really know them.”

The exchange is disquieting not only for the characterization of the homeless as dangerous, but also for the claim of “really knowing” them. Someone who only interacts with the homeless in situations that highlight addiction does not “really know” the homeless community. But according to John, many shelters do not understand the homeless community’s needs either, and the Outreach Walks offer

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

a window into a specific experience of homelessness that cannot be taken as paradigmatic. Attempts to understand homelessness often lead to frustration and disagreement because it is such a multi-faceted issue. There is a powerful instinct to essentialize the homeless, but that in reality the homeless population is incredibly diverse necessitates widening its definition, challenging the location of homelessness as outside and other. +++ employed homelessness is markedly prevalent in Rhode Island.

Bernard Lessing attributes this to shifts in the state’s labor history.

Lessing says, “Rhode Island, by and large, has been a working-class state, with the textile and jewelry industries…but what’s available now are jobs at the higher end where you need a BA or post-secondary education, so there are many families in the core cities that are struggling.” Most of Providence’s factories closed decades ago, but the lost jobs have not been replaced. The work that remains tends to be in the fast food, janitorial and service industries, with little security and few benefits.

Low wages are especially damaging when coupled with an insufficient affordable housing stock. In 2006, the state government passed a $50 million bond for the creation of new units and refurbishing of old apartments as affordable housing, and another $25 million was approved in 2012. But Jim Ryzek of the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless says, “if you look at the numbers, it’s really a drop in the bucket.” The money helps, but it is not enough to make up for such enormous shortages. Shelters are also dependent on federal money to keep operating, money that has been disappear-

OCTOBER 11 2013

ing over the past several years. Ryzek says a federal grant that began in 2008 kept the growth rate of homelessness in the single digits.

That federal funding was cut in 2012; the same year, the RI Coalition recorded a 12 percent increase in the homeless population.

When I asked Jim Ryzek what needed to happen to alleviate homelessness in Rhode Island, his answer captured the central tension in homeless advocacy: “You can… promote programs that build [housing] units and subsidize them to levels people can afford, or, you can have a living wage law at $20 an hour.” Advocacy groups tend to do the former; they lobby for cheaper housing or more space in shelters, but the dependence on the state that this approach entails leaves affordable housing vulnerable to budget fluctuations and changing political agendas. Homelessness is a problem, in part, because the task of providing shelter to people at every economic stratum is handled first by a market that has little incentive to build low-income housing, then second by social service groups that try to bridge the gaps. A solution like a higher minimum wage would give more power to those at the ground level to bridge these gaps themselves.

Ryzek dismissed a living wage law as politically unachievable in the near future. In the mean time, people like John and Barbara are walking, checking in, giving out blankets, and meeting the day-today needs of Providence’s homeless individuals.

When John walks into a campsite, he shouts, “Anyone home?”

The choice of words recognizes that the space we are entering is private, not public—someone lives here.

ERIN SCHWARTZ B’15 is grounded.

METRO █ 08

ACCIDENTALLY

by Julieta Cárdenas Cootie Catcher by Julieta Cárdenas & Katia Zorich

fear comes from the unknown, the hidden or the invisible. It’s all in your head, but cooties feel so real. For those unfamiliar, perhaps you’re too young—or worse—too old and have forgotten, cooties is an imagined disease that affects school children across the world.

Reports that date as far back as 1969 record analogous diseases in England, Spain, Madagascar, and New Zealand (Ioana and Peter Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground). The geographically and temporally pervasive phenomenon of cooties testifies to complicated magic; childhood imagination opens the gates to inherited rituals of diagnosis, prevention, attack, and purification.

+++

INSTRUCTIONS BELOW

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How was I supposed to know? the acknowledgement of cooties goes hand in hand with recognition of difference between individuals. Cooties are the things that other kids have. There are, of course, several modes of ostracism that form in social dynamics, but gender difference is one supported by the places of quotidian kid life—toy store sections, bathrooms, and in some instances separate schools and sleepaway camps. When a child plays doctor, the gender of their patient turns symptomatic; gender is no longer only a fact of difference but can be used as proof of their oncoming diagnosis. Girls will say, “Boys have cooties,” to which the boys will reply, “No, girls have cooties.”

I have grown up—a little—and have witnessed an expanded recognition of gender identities in cultural and political realms. Although name-calling still exists, I am optimistic that the act of assigning someone a gender they did not agree to has gained a self-aware valence.

Dividing bathrooms and toy stores into girl and boy sections looks antiquated in light of this progress. Yet, I feel that cooties have not lost their gender-biased associations. In fact, I think that cooties will always be tied to a gender guessing-game. It is hard to openly ask of someone if they could like you, or to know if you like them. The internal dialogue of such a confused young person may go like this: “Are we compatible? I am not sure... Well, for now, I guess you have cooties.” In this way, the child-doctor can use their diagnosis of the other as a place-holder for making up their own minds. Cooties remain amorphous in definition because the people assigning them may not yet be comfortable stating their desires or their discomforts.

In retrospect, the energy we had put into the diagnosis, protection and contagion of cooties seems to qualify the words of those who were supposed to be wiser than us; “He is just being annoying because he likes you.” If I could travel back in time I might say, “Well, actually, he only has cooties because you like him.”

Sometimes I’m scared of you. cooties are passed through touch. Touching crosses a boundary of consent. When touch happens accidentally, consent gets confused. If you sit next to someone you like, do your thoughts get muddled? And if you accidentally touch them, do they all of a sudden know this? If you touch them a little bit on purpose do they know it all the more? Are there people who can claim concentration of such Spartan strength that they are immune to this kind of distraction? Through touch, are thoughts revealed?

Children give power to cooties by way of animism. Contagion through brief touch requires the aid of magic. The cootie leaves an impression on the sentient memory of what was touched, be it skin, sweater, or notebook. The cootie will remain for as long as you let it stay.

I would say that most cooties begin through touching of the “accidentally on purpose” kind. The blushing that follows small embarrassment becomes the physical signifier that your body has acknowledged the transference of thought. You stay still, head down, hoping no one noticed. Then, silence is broken, and someone points and shouts, “Eww, cooties!”

Don’t you know I still believe? i think that cooties incubate in the murky waters of crushes. There is a squirminess that follows the acknowledgement that, if you like someone, they might like you back. This is a personal squirminess, but a universal experience. Either way one must seek protection.

You probably have met someone who had cooties, or maybe you had cooties.

Either way, there is a cure to be found in the past, within the structure of an established set of children’s rituals; cooties can be treated by the application of a “cootie-shot.” Find someone who for sure is not infected. Someone you trust to touch you. If you can swing it, try to find someone a little cooler than you. They must take a pen, crayon, or their very hand and transform it into a syringe. While you hold your breath, they have to concentrate. “CrissCross Apple Sauce, You just got a Cootie Shot.” It’s over, you will be okay. It’s been a long day, it’s been a long party. Treat yourself to some apple juice or apple-brandy, whatever, and have yourself a nap. +++ ugh. you’re still awake? If you can’t fall asleep because your thoughts keep moving toward adulthood, discomfort, or crushes then there is one more thing you can try: The Cootie Catcher.

JULIETA CÁRDENAS B’14 is a little know-it-all

09 █ occult

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ON PURPOSE eww, cooties

OCTOBER 11 2013

occult █ 10

a new overtime Game Theory and the NFL

modern artwork lined the walls of a large, south-facing office in Greenwich Village. It looked like a young bohemian’s dream. As I gawked at one of the pieces—a Sol Lewitt original—Steven Brams, a professor in his early seventies, walked in. He welcomed me to his office hours with a firm handshake and an inviting smile, and we began to talk all things game theory, his voice becoming increasingly animated as he pulled his books from the shelves. Game Theory and National Security, Game Theory and the Hebrew Bible, Game Theory and Humanities, to name a few. His topics of interest were nearly endless, but there was a common thread. Game theory offered him a mathematical lens to understand a nebulous world. Suddenly he asked, “What are you interested in exploring?”

“Sports,” I said tenuously, nervous that my interest wasn’t worthy.

“I have an idea,” he said smiling, and we got right to work. +++ part of our love of sports comes from our love of meritocracy. When I was applying to college, it was this part of sports that I loved most. Why this college and not that? My acceptances and rejections felt arbitrary; sports offered clarity.

At the end of a game, the scoreboard tells it all. And there’s something refreshing about an environment in which the best man, woman, or team wins, and wins because of skill, hard work, and performance. When this environment dissolves, though, even momentarily, our understanding of sports is shaken. Doping, cheating, even a missed call: we, sports fans, are enraged because the game is decided by some external force, because it’s no longer meritocratic. The game is no longer just the game.

If meritocracy is part of our love of the game, then the tie is one of sports’ most important decisions. In some sports, it’s easy—basketball, baseball, tennis, and golf just keep playing.

But football is unique: it’s too physical to allow for uncapped game play. Imagine a fifth, sixth, seventh period—the 300 pounders trudging down the field, on the verge of vomit, injured players falling left and right. There must be something different.

Before 2011, the NFL used sudden death to decide a tie—in other words, the first to score won. But deciding who kicked and who received to start presented a problem in an overtime system that put such a premium on ball possession.

The league decided on a coin flip, and, expectedly, the coin toss winner won 60 percent of overtime games. It was an oft-bemoaned statistic by the media and fans alike, and finally, in the spring of 2011, the NFL Competition Committee convened to think critically about how to create a fairer system. +++ in its decision, the league removed the ability for a team to win on an opening-drive field goal. The Competition Committee reasoned that, by removing this ability, the coin toss loser would have a greater possibility of getting the ball back and winning.

Well, yes, that’s true, but they missed the point: the rules still allow chance to play too big a role in deciding the game’s outcome. In sports, luck is what happens when preparation

bears will start on defense anywhere in grey area

only do better by bidding up to the 29 yard line; any lower than the 20 and any higher and the 30 and they’d do worse than their honest bid. The same principle is true for the Bears, but they could only do better by lowering their bid down to the 21. The lower bidder is capped by the upper bid, and visa versa.

Since each game presents the teams with different matchups, a team’s indifferent point—the point at which it thinks it has an equal chance of winning regardless if it starts on offense or defense—will likely change depending on its opponent.

And given that the bids are private, there would be no way to know which team is the higher or lower bidder, let alone by how much. Essentially, it’d be too hard to game the system.

+++

+++

as professor brams and I talked in his office, most of our discussion focused on what fairness would look like in football overtime. We deemed a rule fair if each team, whether it is on offense or defense at the start of overtime, prefers its role to its opponent’s role by the same amount. He suggested a solution based on fair division theory, a branch of game theory that explores questions about how to fairly divide goods.

Our proposal uses a procedure used in settling, among other things, divorce disputes. To understand the theory, assume that two people, Sarah and Jake, are getting divorced.

They’re trying to figure out who gets what, but they’re stuck on their house. In an envelope, each writes the monetary value he/she assigns to the house in question. This value should indicate their unique indifference point—any less money, and the house would be preferred; any more, and the cash would be. Jake assigns a $250k value and Sarah $300k, so Sarah pays Jake $275k and keeps the house. Each party does $25k better than his/her bid and walks away happy. Fair.

Back to football. Instead of bargaining with money, the teams would bargain over the yard line from which play starts by bidding on its location. The yard line selected would be be the average of their bids, with the low bidder playing defense and the high bidder playing offense.

Say the Chicago Bears, which have a strong defense and a weak offense, and the New Orleans Saints, which have a strong offense and a weak defense, go into overtime. Each team would bid its respective indifference point, which is the point at which the team regards its chances of winning to be equal regardless of whether it starts on defense or offense. Any closer to its end zone, and the team would prefer to start on defense, and any further from the end zone, offense. The Bears bid their own 30-yard line (70 yards away), and the Saints bid their own 20-yard line (80 yards away).

Play would start with Saints on offense at the average of 25, giving each team a 5-yard perceived advantage over its bid: the Saints would start 5 yards closer to the end zone than their bid (starting with the ball from the 25 versus the 20), and the Bears would defend from 5 yards farther back than their bid would have allowed (defending from the 25 versus the 30).

Given their unique strengths, both teams should be equally happy with the outcome.

Our proposal has another important component: it encourages an honest bid. Let’s revisit our hypothetical overtime game. What could a team bid to do better than if it bid its actual indifference point? The lower bidder, the Saints, could

we aren’t the first ones trying to fix NFL overtime. The most talked about solution is to implement the college overtime system, which gives each team the opportunity to score from their own 25. After both teams play offense, the team who has more points wins; if it’s still a tie, the teams reverse who starts with the ball and continue playing. Other than the fact that it’s the logical equivalent of decided basketball overtime with a half-court game, it’s—you should know what’s coming—not fair. Of the 328 college overtime games played from 1996 to 2007, the team that won the coin toss chose to play defense first in 324. It’s the opposite incentive than in the NFL system because playing offense second gives a team the knowledge of how many points you must score in order to tie or win. While both teams get possession, like the NFL system, an advantage is given because of a coin toss.

The second popular proposal came from a pair of business school professors at UC Berkeley. They also proposed bidding on the yard line, but instead of taking the average, the team that bids closest to its goal line starts with the ball at its bid. In our hypothetical, the Saints would start with the ball at the 20, not the 25. That is, they do no better than their bid, while the Bears do better than their bid by 10 yards. Even though the Saints start on offense, I’d much rather be in the position of the Bears. This may seem like a trivial difference, but if we’re going to take fairness seriously, we must be explicit about our goals. An important component of fair division theory is allocating resources so that the parties themselves believe they are equally advantaged (or disadvantaged). In the UC Berkeley proposal, the team who starts with the ball is always at a perceived disadvantage given the two teams’ unique preferences. +++ it was about a month into working together that I heard about the UC Berkeley proposal. In Brams’s office, I complained: “It’s just so similar.” But as he explained the difference between theirs an model and ours, I began to understand that game theory was about more than a game. It was about justice, about meritocracy. This wasn’t just a technical obsession; it was a philosophical pursuit. Our system was fair, and theirs wasn’t. It was just that simple.

ZEVE SANDERSON B’15 always runs through the line.

saints will start on offense anywhere in grey area

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saints score here

bears score here

meets opportunity—the miraculous shot and the unbelievable catch, while unlikely, are a result of hard work. But chance is a statistical probability—it’s the spinning of the roulette wheel, the roll of the dice. Chance, unlike luck, isn’t meritocratic.

It’s hard to watch two teams beat each other (equally) senseless for 60 minutes, only to have the winner determined largely by heads-or-tails. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happening. Of the first 25 overtime games played under new rules, the coin-toss winner won 16—actually raising the percentage from 60 to 64 percent. This number will probably drop in the coming years—one mathematician estimated 56 percent—but it’s indicative of the rule’s irresoluble flaw. A game is decided partly because of chance.

saints offense and bears defense equally happy.

10

OCTOBER 11 2013

by Zeve Sanderson Illustration by Sam Rosen & Casey Friedman

Sports █ 12

AMERICAN SPECTACLE fashion’s new body

by Sheila Sitaram Illustration by Andres Chang the lights reveal a flat interior space with no formal runway in sight. Three black vertical lines mark the floor. At the far end of the room, a flat, structured backdrop looms large, flanked by staircases on each side. As the stiletto-clad editors—masters of their own studied, jaded mien—slink into their seats, the lights jolt to a blackout. But then—there is light again, electronic drumbeats pulse, and faint flashes of strobe punctuate the atmosphere with a galvanizing insistency. Two models have appeared at the top of a central, lofty platform. But are they models? Their forceful gait and clouds of untamed hair suggest otherwise. They split up and mirror each other while descending the stairways. As they march, they repeatedly make a salute of sorts, bringing one arm across their chest to their heart over and over again. Another pair of figures appears on the platform. Again and again, the pattern repeats. The pulsing music grows louder and more frenzied as women both black and white continue to materialize into the space, as if they have been conjured in a dream. It’s September 26th at the Palais Omnisports de Bercy in Paris, and Rick Owens has just introduced his Spring 2014 collection.

Known for his unmistakable dark glamor sensibility, Owens is fashion’s go-to designer for industry insiders sworn to the singular cult worship of his witchy, cunningly draped silhouettes. Combining a neutral color palette with an updated casual luxury feel season after season, it comes as no surprise that Owens has his origins in Los Angeles, and his designs reflect the type of nerve that can only be mustered by an American in Paris.

The show continues: the figures finally stomp their way into the empty floor space. Unlike typical runway shows, their movements fill the open space with ease. Instead of retreating backstage mere seconds after making their way to the flat stage, the women stand their ground. It is all too apparent that none are wispy models that popular aesthetics of fashion call upon. Strong in countenance, physical strength, attitude, and presence, these primarily black women are part of four American college step teams — the Zetas and the Washington Divas, both from D.C., as well as Soul Steps and Momentum from New York. Their explosive, collaborative step routine comprised Owens’ entire runway show. Fashion often discusses the supposed merits of a kind of undone, casual, urban modernity, and these nebulous imaginings were finally clarified in Owens’ concept for spring. Clothes that not only looked good, but also were made to move in stayed true to his sporty style enlivened with touches of draping. Four groups of women formed an array of black, white, dark grey, and khaki garments in a sumptuous array of jersey, knits, and leather.

Aesthetically, Owens went back to the basics, and all was business as usual. +++ for singularly minded fashion editors, the exciting show suggested the turning over of a new leaf. Fashion critic Tim Blanks hailed the event as, “a joyous assault on fashion orthodoxy,” a sentiment echoed by Owens himself as he proclaimed, “we’re rejecting conventional beauty, [we’re] creating our own beauty.” But in considering the long history of stepping as a dance form performed by African-American sororities and fraternities, it is evident that Owens is simply repackaging a distinctly American art form for a Eurocentric audience unversed in its specific codes and origins. While the steppers’ comprised more women of color than in any of Owens’ previous fashion shows, their presence was not enough to

13█ arts

answer fashion’s never-ending string of meek pleas for more open standards of beauty. Their exhilarating performance only serves as a brief diversion from the ultra white, hyper-thin ideal embraced by most of the fashion industry.

Owens has a history of engaging elements of urban black culture for shock value as well as aesthetic merit. Many of his signature silhouettes appropriate the baggy jerseys and head-wraps we associate with casual athletic wear and hip hop culture, and he revises them with a touch of geometric construction and luxurious materials. His decision to call his Spring 2014 collection “Vicious” is reflected in his encouragement of the dancers’ scowls and intense facial expressions present throughout the show. However, the dancers were told to make faces more vicious and more often than is customary in traditional stepping. Arin Lawrence, one of the dancers in the runway show, expressed concern, stating that “we’re not angry and we’re not trying to scare people,” further expressing that “constant and consistent pressure to make weird faces was tough.” In explaining why he made this choice, Owens stated, “I was attracted to how gritty it was, it was such a f**k-you to conventional beauty.”

Some dancers like Duneia McManus were in agreement, stating, “it’s just grit.” In some ways, it almost makes sense that women who do not conform to the criteria enforced by the industry have the right to publically express their pent up frustration when they are finally granted (temporary) admittance to the exclusive world of fashion. Dancer Adrianna Cornish was more sentimental about her show experience, proclaiming, “It’s something I never would have dreamed of, and I really don’t have the words to describe it,” while in the midst of tears. Unfortunately, Owens’ attempt to redefine beauty comes off as a hurried attempt at provocation that relies on unsavory stereotypes to attract attention. Even prominent fashion critics like Suzy Menkes of the International Herald Tribune seemed dangerously unaware of Owens’ perpetration of an angry black woman trope, blindly reasoning that, “the sheer energy was electric and also joyous, the deliberate snarls on their faces a hilarious contrast to other runways with typical, pallid, unsmiling models.” Stepping has never been a cheerful, carefree form of expression, emerging first as a South African mining dance performed as a rebellious alternative to drumming, which was restricted by authorities. Given this history, scowling faces interspersed with strong, forceful movement can hardly be viewed as comical. To put it bluntly, “like all women, black women want to feel happy, sexy, alluring, maintained, elegant and beautiful,” said cultural writer Amanda Williams. +++ it comes as no surprise that designers aren’t exactly known for prioritizing moral responsibility in their work. Creating a singular, provocative artistic vision is the driving force behind their decision making process. In defense of Owens, one could

argue that designers are always in hot pursuit of cool, which is often mistakenly defined as novelty. Because it’s difficult to reinvent cool season after season, it follows that the fashionable woman is always a larger than life woman of fantasy. Designers like Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons or Miuccia Prada of her namesake fashion house are consistently successful in this respect, bestowing viewers with access to their enticing interior worlds. Their creative visions loudly proclaim their otherworldly roots, and tempt us with the possibility of a blissful, magical existence insulated from harsh reality. But for all their innovation, using a diverse range of ethnicities and body shapes is never a part of the picture. For those in search of a fashion moment to top Owens’ Spring spectacle, it was glaringly apparent that even the most highly anticipated shows would still quite literally pale in comparison.

Owens has admitted his difficulty with planning fashion shows, stating, “I didn’t like the idea of presenting something that [the industry] considered a fantasy.” He then continued, “I didn’t like it that you saw things on the runway that were just there to impress you.” Unfortunately, Owens’ use of American female step dancers to present his collection is a short-lived attempt to show us something new. While this decision is rooted in reality, he exoticizes them for the sake of attracting media attention. His modified vision of the woman who wears Rick Owens is not a viable alternative that will shift the fashion mainstream away from its thin, white status quo.

Rick Owens hasn’t successfully cobbled together a contemporary vision of black beauty or of the beauty of bodies larger than a size zero. Considering that he is a white, American male designer, his appropriation of step culture and female bodies outside the traditional scope of fashion is inherently political. Given his access to knowledge and resources, he has a responsibility to refrain from creating singular occurences of cultural exploitation for the sake of ruffling a few of fashion’s feathers.

Owens’ clothes function as a countercultural uniform for those brave souls who dare to stand in stark, monastic contrast to the hyppereal, technicolor offerings held up as the best contemporary fashion has to offer. Unfortunately, the privilege to celebrate difference has not been fully extended to women who are outside fashion’s irrational boundaries governing skin tone and body size. Owens’ spring presentation didn’t put these women’s bodies in a space to be seen as beautiful because magazines and other fashion media still haven’t been convinced to expand their narrow depiction of who belongs.

They passively congratulate his efforts instead. Fashion shows are supposed to reveal the beauty of the clothes. However, they can’t do this effectively unless they treat women’s bodies respectfully.

Fashion is touted for being part and parcel of the social and cultural context it sprouts from, but we have a painful aversion to examining the surrounding milieu, preferring instead to dwell on inconsequential details. Concocting reductive tropes to summarize collections that are already so abbreviated, so devoid of genuine innovation serves to fill space that was once filled by an unbounded passion.

SHEILA SITARAM B’15 will soon be another American in Paris.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

hone in things an egg could be mistaken for how an eyeball looks from the back of the socket, an ogre’s antibiotic pill, where goose bumps come from, a hackeysack of human scalp, the father of all hiccups, angel shit.

15 █ literary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by Mika Kligler

Odyssey Sylvia the Independent Woman feels self-conscious as she makes her way through the dimly lit room, brushing bodies on either side. She senses Tobias the Ponzi-Schemer son of Matteo the Long Finger-Nailed son of son of son ogling her. Maybe he’s just looking. Across the room Sylvia the Independent Woman sees Jeremy the Tall-Like-Really-Tall of Magog, Canada, makes her way toward him—he doesn’t look at Independent Woman. Independent Woman feels fingers of Danielle the Crazy graze her thigh as she passes, feels eyes of Ponzi on her. Danielle was Crazy before the divorce, thinks Independent Woman, Crazy in the womb.

Woman twists as Crazy grabs her wrist, Ponzi is moving, honing in to intervene gallantly. Tall-Like-Really-Tall sees nothing hears nothing over the purr of the pale, dimly lit sea.

OCTOBER 11 2013

literary█ 16

RISKY BUSINESS

An interview with Jodi Kantor

by Sophie Kasakove Illustration by Aaron Harris

The New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor is a selfproclaimed “journalism junkie,” and it shows. Even over the phone, Kantor’s enthusiasm for her work is conspicuous as she flits excitedly from topic to topic, every answer leading to another question. Whether her story takes place in the White House or at Harvard Business School, Kantor’s work is marked by her ability to discover the human element— to look beyond what is and find what is interesting. Widely known for her political journalism, in particular for her 2008 book, The Obamas, Kantor has explored numerous other issues, most recently the gender and class divisions at Harvard Business School (HBS). This project is one of great importance and controversy that involves recognizing and responding to the acute inequality deeply embedded in one of the world’s most influential institutions. We speak here about Sheryl Sandberg, cat-calling business students, and the chicken and egg.

The College Hill Independent: A lot of your work has focused on issues of gender and sexuality. Do you make a conscious effort to address those issues in your work, or are those just the stories that appeal to you?

JK: I have been writing stories about gender on-and-off for years. I just found a story I wrote in 2006 about the class gap in breast-feeding. I wrote about how upper-class women have a lot of access to lactation rooms and lactation help and working-class women have almost none. The lede of the story was about Starbucks and about the disparity between access to lactation rooms between executives in Seattle and baristas. I also covered Hillary’s campaign in 2008 where a lot of gender issues came up. So it’s something I’ve been interested in for a while.

Last year I did start thinking about the whole debate started by Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg and how much rhetoric there is around gender in this country. There are a lot of columnists who write about gender and every woman has her own personal truth, but I thought there was a lack of reporting on gender, of any new supply of information feeding the debate. There weren’t many stories that were, rather than being really ideologically driven, nuanced examinations of complicated situations. That’s what I’m working on right now.

The Indy: In September you published two articles in the Times in which you explored the gender and class inequalities at the Harvard Business School. Through writing these articles, were you able to get a sense of what about the Harvard Business School environment has made these issues so prevalent?

17█ interviews

JK: Well first of all I should say that HBS has made great progress, and that’s really what the story is about: the hard, surprising process they went through to go from being a tough environment for women to a much better one. As far as the original problems go there are a couple things.

Business schools reflect the business world. In certain places in the business world it’s still perfectly normal for everybody to go to a strip club after work. And so Harvard Business School for a long time reflected that character. Harvard also has this section system that’s really unusual where first-year business students are put into these groups and they take all their classes together. That means that a lot depends on which section you’re assigned to. You can get assigned to a section with a positive dynamic or you can get assigned to a section with a negative dynamic. What happened for a long time is that the sections were kind of breeding ground for bad behavior. In the late 90s there was pretty much open sexual harassment in the sections. The sections controlled the classrooms; the professors go in and out. So the professor would walk out of the room and all sorts of crazy things would happen. So negative things have happened too in recent years but not on the level of a decade or two ago.

The Indy: Do you attribute the inequality at the Harvard Business School to the school itself or the business world at large?

JK: It’s a chicken and the egg problem. One of the reasons I first got interested in this story is that people in the business world would tell me that the business schools were part of the problem. They have to recognize that they have the ability to influence the situation for better or worse.

The Indy: One quote from the article that I found particularly striking was a quote from a female professor who asked if HBS should be trying to change the gender inequality in the business world “900 students at a time” or if they should be preparing students for the world in which they are about to go? That really seemed to capture the problem.

JK: Yeah and there’s also an anecdote later in the story that addresses that same question. William Boyce who is the co-founder of a very powerful venture capital firm came to campus and he came to give a talk on getting into venture capital. This was the fall of 2011, a woman, an HBS student, raised her hand and asked what advice he had for women who wanted to go into his field. And he said, “Don’t.” He laughed and said, “I have to tell you the truth about these small firms, the men really don’t want you there. I suggest you choose a field where you’re going to encounter less friction.”

The women had a split reaction that ran exactly along the lines that you mentioned. There were women who were really offended who walked out and told people on campus that they were really upset by what had happened. There were other women who thought that Boyce was being honest and that he was just conveying the world as it is and warning them away from a potentially bad situation. I was very interested in that split reaction because it really speaks to that debate of what do women need to be prepared for if they’re going to go into this world.

Another professor told me a fascinating story that I didn’t put in the piece along the same theme. She said that few years ago male students were more likely to make inappropriate comments to her about her clothes or her body. She said that students have stopped making those comments in recent years because the atmosphere has changed so much on campus. The professor said that she actually misses these comments because they gave her an opportunity for her to show the younger women how to handle stuff like that: how to be tough and unflappable. Her worry is these things no longer happen in the open anymore but happen in the background where it can’t be addressed as easily.

The Indy: Have you experienced any of these same issues in the journalism and writing world?

JK: Absolutely. The issues in journalism are a little different than those in the business world but absolutely. You can’t watch news TV without noticing the gender dynamics there.

I’m lucky enough to work for a newspaper that is incredibly supportive of women. We have a female executive editor-the first ever in the history of the Times. And yet there’s no pretense here that we have as many female bylines on the front page as male ones.

The Indy: Through exploring the issues of both class and gender, these articles raise the question of which of the two causes a bigger divide, both at HBS and in the country as a whole. After writing these two articles, do you have an answer to that question?

JK: I knew way before I wrote these articles that class was the bigger issue in the country by far. A woman who goes to Brown or RISD has much more in common in terms of life prospects with the men who go to Brown or RISD than she does with a woman who works at a grocery store for $8 an hour or who doesn’t have a job at all. There are a lot of questions though about the complicated ways in which gender and class interact. For example, at HBS, women feel really excluded from Section X, the super secret society at HBS that consists of extremely wealthy students. There are both gender and class elements to that. Or look at the earnings gap which shows that 10 years after graduating from business school men make significantly more money than women at the mean.

Do women MBAs want to make more money and are not able to, or are they making different life choices? It would be fascinating to see the numbers coming from Brown. How does that look 10, 20, or 30 years after graduation? These are all questions about the way gender and money interact.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Friday, October 11 Escape From Tomorrow

4:30PM, 6:30PM, 10:30PM // Cable Car Cinema & Cafe, 204 South Main St., Providence // $9.50/adult, $8/student It’s a black and white movie that ‘dissects the mythology of artificial perfection while subversively attacking our culture’s obsession with mass entertainment.’ Despite a reference to a ‘nagging wife’ in the description, this might be good. Escape from Tomorrow premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. I read somewhere that it’s more fun to talk about than to sit through.

Sojourner House Masquerade Ball

7PM // Biltmore Hotel, 11 Dorrance St., Providence // $50-$75

The List Wednesday, October 16

Megan Moore: Natural Formations

Magic Lantern Cinema presents

Printmaker Megan Moore makes delicate collages of flora and fauna that reward extended viewing. These fragments of the natural world come together into new formations, but if you look closely they begin to deconstruct into their parts, ranging from clippings of mandalas to Victorian wallpaper.

by Shawn Greenlee

4PM-6PM // Sarah Doyle Gallery, 26 Benevolent St., Providence // Free TEMPORARY OCEAN with a live performance

Monday, October 14 PRONK!

Day and evening // Go to the corner of Tockwotton and South Water St. and move toward the noise.

Sojourner House is having a masquerade ball to fund-raise for the upcoming year. Sojourner House is an organization that provides resources PRO(vidence ho)NK is street band festival that hosts brass bands from around the world on Indigenous People’s Day. There’s a lot of horns. for those experiencing domestic violence in Rhode Island. The ball will There’s a lot of drums. Big Nazo is making an appearance and so should be semi-formal. There will be specialty desserts and a silent auction. you. Other people that are also coming include: Extraordinary Rendition Band, the What Cheer? Brigade, Detroit Party Marching Band, Saturday, October 12 Environmental Encroachment from Chicago, Perhaps Contraption from London, YoungFellaz from New Orleans, Minor Mishap from Austin, Euro Horror Marathon Os Siderais from Brazil, and more. This is one of my favorite nights of 12PM-12AM // The Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence // the year. $12-$25 Prepare yourself for an all day marathon of 35mm euro horror film prints Megan Moore: Hybrids Collage Workshop including Lucio Fulci’s “Hell Trilogy.” There will also be screening of 1PM-2:30PM // Sarah Doyle Gallery, 26 Benevolent St., Providence // “The Gates Of Hell,” “House by The Cemetery”, and “The Beyond” plus Free three more titles to be announced.

Bringing your own materials is optional, but she will also be bringing her own trove of materials for attendees to hack up and paste back together.

Open Studio 4PM-7:30PM // AS220 131 Washington St., Martha Street Entrance, Providence Tuesday, October 15 Want a peek inside? Justine Mainville, Kevin Steinhauser, April Gramoli- Efficient Reading Workshop ni, Rich Giasson, K Lenore Siner, Cara Adams, Chris Hampson, Amanda 12PM-1PM // 301 J. Walter Wilson, Brown University, Providence Burgess, Sarah Quenon, Amanda Burgess, Joe DeGeorge, Jason Are you finding that when you read, you quickly forget what you’ve just Curzake and many others will open their studios to the public. read? I have this problem a lot. Join Learning Consultant, Pat Dickson, for a workshop with tips on how to actively read, which will save time in Sunday, October 13 the long run.

The Caribbean feat. Matthew Derby, Animal Hospital Trio

9PM // Machines with Magnets, 400 Main St., Pawtucket // $7, all ages

Ada Lovelace Day Edit-a-Thon

The Caribbean is a DC based band that likes reading Specifically, they like Providence’s Matthew Derby and they’re facilitating a night of conversation, readings, and music with him. Matthew’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Believer, The Columbia Journal, Fence, and Guernica. Animal Hospital will be perfoming for the first time as a trio.

Have you ever noticed that your favorite female scientist isn’t represented on Wikipedia? Come edit her existing article or make her one if she doesn’t have one already! Anne Fausto-Sterling will teach you how.

Snacks will be provided.

3PM-8:30PM // 305 Pembroke Hall, Brown University, Providence

9PM// Machines with Magnets, 400 Main St., Pawtucket // $5 An undulating cine-installation where flicker films give way to experiments with audio-visual feedback, optical soundtracks, and the materiality of light and sound. Aleatory and programmed images emerge onscreen from an evolving field of color and movement in a room swelling with reflected waves and strangely affective resonances. The installation includes film and video works by Paul Sharits, Billy Roisz, Mike Stoltz, Donna Cameron, Guy Sherwin, and Beverly and Tony Conrad, and a live performance by Shawn Greenlee.

Thursday, October 17 Paul Myoda, Glittering Machines

5PM, various times until Oct. 26 // Yellow Peril Gallery, 60 Valley St., Providence Glittering Machines is an installation of interactive illuminating sculptures that respond to the presence of viewers, by Chepachet-based sculptor Paul Myoda. Myoda makes cybernetic sculptures, which are dynamic, interactive works of art that investigate and borrow from various biological systems.

Flickers: Rhode Island International Horror Film Festival

7PM-11PM, various times until Sunday // The Vets Auditorium, One Avenue of the Arts, Providence // $10 It’s four days of horror, murder, mayhem. Featuring the macabre and thriller genres with a wry twist. There will be screenings at multiple Rhode Island locations including the Bell Street Chapel Theatre, the Paaf Theatre at URI, the Providence Public Library in Providence and the Jamestown Arts Center in Jamestown. Come pee your pants. I’m pretty sure the seats are velvet.

In the know? E-mail listtheindy@gmail.com.

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