The College Hill Independent — Vol 51 Issue 5

Masthead

MANAGING

Sabine Jimenez-Williams

Talia Reiss

Nadia Mazonson

WEEK IN REVIEW

Maria Gomberg

Luca Suarez

ARTS

Riley Gramley

Audrey He

Martina Herman

EPHEMERA

Mekala Kumar

Elliot Stravato

FEATURES

Nahye Lee

Ayla Tosun

Isabel Tribe

LITERARY

Elaina Bayard

Lucas Friedman-Spring

Gabriella Miranda

METRO

Layla Ahmed

Mikayla Kennedy

METABOLICS

Evan Li

Kendall Ricks

Peter Zettl

SCIENCE + TECH

Nan Dickerson

Alex Sayette

Tarini Tipnis

SCHEMA

Tanvi Anand

Selim Kutlu

Sara Parulekar

WORLD

Emilie Guan

Coby Mulliken

DEAR INDY

Angela Lian

BULLETIN BOARD

Jeffrey Pogue

Lila Rosen

MVP

Gersson, Bringer of Champa

Elliot Stravato, Bringer of Forks

20 BULLETIN

Lila Rosen & Jeffrey Pogue

FROM THE EDITORS

It was a dark and stormy design copy and the Miller Lights were flickering all Stranger Thingslike. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this issue,” whispers TA STN hears a gurgle from the corner (m dash) the fridge has been unplugged for seven months and something evil has come to life inside. In vain, SJ takes TR’s ID to get Andrew’s pizza, but it flies away in a tempestuous Page-Rob wind tunnel of bats and nails. Back in Conmag, a piece is named “Diegetic-Affective Poetics of Acoustic Vicinities” (Derrida is involved, and it’s unreadable), the FTE is a “Haunting Slam-Prose Poem” (“Look at those gorgeous / Miller Lights”), and TA thinks the DISS issue is “derivative.” To make matters worse, SK cannot find a cigarette; NM smoked the last one and has been outside violently coughing for a full hour. STN ventures out into the wild in search of sustenance. After trekking through hordes of scooters and hand-holding couples, they reach the boba shop. SJ takes a sip of her boba only to find worms. They journey on, and find that only other open business on Thayer is on the BDS list. They return empty-stomached. It is 11pm. A text arrives: LS has only drawn the title of his comic and “is at a thing.” TR, stressed, starts to sweat and opens a window. In float the ghosts of AD, LS, and EV ND instantly picks a fight with EV, whipping up a storm of old Nosers and purple Doritos and extension cords and locks of SK’s hair. By the time the paper goes to print, the sun has risen. STN, exhausted, victorious, trudges home to sleep for 2 hours before their 9ams.

DESIGN EDITORS

Mary-Elizabeth Boatey

Kay Kim

Seoyeon Kweon

DESIGNERS

Millie Cheng

Soohyun Iris Lee

Rose Holdbrook

Esoo Kim

Jennifer Kim

Selim Kutlu

Jennie Kwon

Hyunjo Lee

Chelsea Liu

Kayla Randolph

Anaïs Reiss

Caleb Wu

Anna Wang

STAFF WRITERS

Hisham Awartani

Sarya Baran Kılıç

Sebastian Botero

Jackie Dean

Cameron Calonzo

Emma Condon

Lily Ellman

Ben Flaumenhaft

Evan Gray-Williams

Marissa Guadarrama

Oropeza

Maxwell Hawkins

Mohamed Jaouadi

Emily Mansfield

Nathaniel Marko

Daniel Kyte-Zable

Nora Rowe

Andrea Li

Cindy Li

Maira Magwene Muñiz

Kalie Minor

Alya Nimis-Ibrahim

Emerson Rhodes

Georgia Turman

Ishya Washington

Jodie Yan

Ange Yeung

ALUMNI COORDINATOR

Peter Zettl

SOCIAL CHAIR

Ben Flaumenhaft

DEVELOPMENT

COORDINATOR

Tarini Tipnis

FINANCIAL

COORDINATORS

Constance Wang

Simon Yang

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Lily Yanagimoto

Benjamin Natan

ILLUSTRATORS

Rosemary Brantley

Mia Cheng

Natalia Engdahl

Avari Escobar

Koji Hellman

Mekala Kumar

Paul Li

Jiwon Lim

Yuna Ogiwara

Meri Sanders

Sofia Schreiber

Angelina So

Luna Tobar

Ella Xu

Sapientia Yoonseo Lee

Serena Yu

Yiming Zhang

Faith Zhao

COPY CHIEF

Avery Liu

Eric Ma

COPY EDITORS

Tatiana von Bothmer

Milan Capoor

Jordan Coutts

Raamina Chowdhury

Caiden Demundo

Kendra Eastep

Iza Piatkowski

Ella Vermut

WEB EDITOR

Eleanor Park

WEB DESIGNERS

Casey Gao

Sofia Guarisma

Erin Min

Dominic Park

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS

Ivy Montoya

Eurie Seo

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Jolie Barnard

Avery Reinhold

Angela Lian

SENIOR EDITORS

Angela Lian

Jolie Barnard

Luca Suarez

Nan Dickerson

Paulina Gąsiorowska

Plum Luard

MISSION STATEMENT

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/ or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

*Our Beloved Staff

An Indy Horror Story

FEATURES

c I am a chismosa, contrary to what my father would have wanted. Growing up, he never failed to remind me, “Es malo chismear.” He said it was rude to talk about people, to judge, to pry. He said I needed to mind my own business.

I’ve never been good at that. As a kid, I’ve always been curious about people: what they think, what they feel, how they experience life. Can this curiosity, this desire to know, to exchange information, to relate to others, be that bad?

In English, chisme translates to “gossip.” In some ways, the two terms are quite similar. According to MerriamWebster, gossip is defined as “chatty talk” or “rumor.” A ‘gossiper’ (chismosa) is thus a person who “habitually reveals personal or sensational facts about others,” someone who talks about the “intimate details of other people’s lives.” Like chisme, even the definition of gossip we use today connotes ill intent. A habit of intruding and judging.

The feminist thinker and writer Silvia Federici traces the origins of gossip to women in premodern European society. She writes that, at the time, women in rural or urban areas were not dependent on men for their survival. They enjoyed relative autonomy, working, weaving, drinking, and chatting with other women. It was these strong female friendships that empowered women to advocate for themselves, and thus it became the imperative of men to dismantle the female friendships that undermined their power and authority.

Women openly denounced their assaulters in the courts, and at home, they resisted their husbands’ attempted displays of patriarchal authority. In 14th century Italy, a woman named Sitella was able to successfully testify against her husband in the Episcopal court, describing how he “threatened her, beat her, deprived her of food and drink, and tried to kill her.” Although her husband claimed that this violence was justified, that it was just the “appropriate amount to correct his wife,” the court agreed to dissolve the marriage. Though this was a win for Sitella, she was forbidden from remarrying.

The implications of female friendships made women the targets of patriarchal violence to the extent that there was a proclamation in England in 1547 that forbade women from meeting together “to babble and talk.” It ordered their husbands to “keep their wives in their houses.” Because gossip networks were often used to communicate information that threatened men—naming abusers, exposing secrets, forming alliances, organizing acts of resistance— men strategically dismissed this dialogue as mere “idle talk.”

Simultaneously, gossip was denounced as “malicious and attention-seeking.” Though the characterization of gossip as both idle and pernicious seems contradictory, it underscores men’s willingness to impose any narrative necessary to stifle female agency. Women accused of gossiping were put in ‘scold’s bridles’ which would literally lock their heads and mouths in iron muzzles, forcibly revoking their ability to speak. In England, during the 13th and 17th centuries, “cucking and ducking stools” were used to prove whether women were witches. Attached to a beam, women were forced to sit, tied to ducking stools, and progressively lowered into the water. If the woman could evade death, she was condemned as a witch. If she drowned, she was absolved of her crime—it only cost her her life. Calling women witches, much like calling them gossips, justified such violence. In turn, the violence demonized the term ‘gossip’ and condemned its practice. By subjecting women to such violent displays of public humiliation, men made the repercussions of subverting the patriarchy quite clear.

Much like gossip has been stigmatized in the Western world, chisme is socially and culturally stigmatized in Latin America. The word chismosa is often used as an insult to

CHISME: SHIT TALK, DESAHOGAMIENTO, AND RADICAL RESISTANCE

( TEXT MARISSA GUADARRAMA OROPEZA DESIGN SELIM KUTLU ILLUSTRATION PAUL LI )

describe women who are deemed untrustworthy and shallow. Though we all love chisme—talking about what that tía said at the family reunion or your cousin’s new boyfriend— nobody wants to be labeled as a chismosa, because then they will call you metida (nosy) or a mentirosa (liar)...but that’s another story.

In the Latine context, the stigmatization of chisme is mostly tied to its role in the cultural maintenance, preservation, and survival of Latine peoples and forms of being. For Boricuas, Mexicanos, Cubanos, Dominicanos, Venezolanos, Peruanos (you get it), chisme is a way of life. It is a form of reciprocal, often oral, knowledge sharing that has historically enabled Latine communities to navigate exclusionary spaces and support each other.

Take, for instance, the immigrant experience. Imagine you were forced by economic conditions to leave your home and move to a place where you don’t know the language. You’re trying your best, but you’re perceived as deficient—maybe you’re experiencing microaggressions, and constantly being reminded that you are not like those around you: white, English-speaking, ‘true’ Americans (whatever that means now)—and for these reasons, you don’t deserve to belong. So, what do you do? You talk shit. You speak your truth, and you do it in your language. You remind yourself que eres chingona because there will always be someone who reminds you that by their standards, you are not enough. But why should we even care?

This kind of ‘shit talk,’ this chisme, is a survival tactic commonly practiced between women, women of color, migrant women, and racialized peoples. Shit talk for them is not about just talking shit for fun or to be mean, it is about finally speaking and releasing all the pent-up feelings of exhaustion, frustration, anger, fear, uncertainty—a way of coping with the heaviness of everyday life.

Gossip is often exchanged by comadres, which originally meant “godmother” but now transcends its strictly religious significance. In Latine communities, comadres can describe strong friendships between women built on mutual trust and companionship. Like González Ybarra and Player theorize in their article “Chismosas Against White Hetero-patriarchy,” (which you should all go read!), chisme exists at the margins of dominant spaces: elite spaces, male-dominated spaces, white spaces. At Brown, for instance, Latines must practice chisme to remind each other that they belong here, that they are not the grade they received, or that snarky remark a classmate made; that they know what it’s like to be so far from home.

Thus, it is in chisme that people of marginalized identities can affirm each other and their existence. It’s where we can make light of those who attempt to diminish and define us. It is a mechanism of defense with the potential to create a sanctuary, where what cannot be said in dominant spaces can be said. It is where women can talk about anything and everything: sex, motherhood, politics, remedies, and discontentments. It is where we gain the power to confirm—confirm that the things the oppressor makes you feel are untrue.

Chisme theorists call this practice desahogamiento. Desahogamiento is a specific kind of emotional liberation and healing achieved through community, through chisme The English translation for this liberation is “to vent,” but the Spanish word directly translates as “to un-drown.” To

un-drown through a process of reciprocal care, done in confianza (trust), for the purposes of letting go of all social pressures and related forms of frustration (I love it when our community becomes academics and actually theorizes helpful shit). For instance, in their “Therapeutic Latinx Story-Sharing or Chismorreo,” Ramos et. al find that this kind of chismorreo or desahogamiento is a therapeutic practice because it allows people not only to connect, but also to embrace each other’s complexities. It is where chismosas can learn to understand each other through their community, and share the necessary words they need in order to come up for air (to undrown).

However, this fluid process of connection is not always possible. Sometimes, women must support each other anonymously. For instance, during the #MeToo movement, women circulated online spreadsheets where they could anonymously name and identify their harassers as well as describe the violence they had experienced. These “whisper networks” emerged as alternate ways of transmitting information about instances of sexual violence in lieu of safe processes for reporting. Whisper networks, then, were a radical, shared reclaiming of voice through collective anonymity. Together, these spreadsheets helped women create powerful “rumors” that helped them hold men accountable for their actions through public shaming (oh, how the tables have turned). They were essential in validating women’s experiences and preventing future instances of sexual violence.

The logics of delegitimization are not reserved to just chisme and gossip, but also Indigenous knowledge systems. It is a well-polished colonial tool. After all, Indigenous communities spanning Abya Yala, the Indigenous name for the “Americas originating in Latin America,” have long used oral history as their primary form of transmitting, maintaining, and preserving knowledge such as leyendas (legends), “tales of gods and spirits,” Indigenous agricultural knowledge, and spiritual beliefs. Successful colonial domination has always necessitated knowledge-based violence. Gossip and chisme are but the latest narrative constructions weaponized against certain kinds of conocimiento, knowing, that have been inconvenient for the dominating class.

Though the word has been historically delegitimized, chisme has survived—and it’s everywhere. With friends, at the panadería with that sweet lady I love at the checkout register, at family parties that you didn’t really want to go to.

I think it’s time to tell my dad that chisme isn’t all that bad. Shit-talking, after all, can be fun and affirming, but most importantly, it is a way to build those not-so-silent solidarities through friendship and care, even, or especially, when that care sounds like “standing on business.” To be a chismosa is to talk shit, to assert our right to exist, our right to take up space, to be multiplous and fragmented and imperfect. It is sacred, a way of co-creating magic together.

MARISSA GUADARRAMA OROPEZA B’27 le gusta mucho el chisme, clearly.

HOUDINI IN PROVIDENCE: “WHAT CHEER!”

c On October 4, 1926, Harry Houdini stepped onto the stage of the Providence Opera House¹ with a mouth full of needles and a fistful of string. According to Providence Journal clippings from the week after the performance, onlookers watched in disbelief as he “swallowed a dozen needles, took [the] spool of thread and a glass of water, and removed the needles, nicely threaded from his mouth.” The act was the first of many performed that night, and Houdini proceeded to entertain, enthrall, and amuse his audience for the next two and a half hours. Photographs taken during the performance show a crowd completely swept up in the daring display set before them. One witness, described as a “dapper and jaunty gentleman,” called the event “The Cat’s Meow,” noting that “it was entirely Copaceitic, my Old Woman and I thought it was just Hotsy-Totsy really, such a ball, such a ball.” Another woman was seen fainting atop another woman who had just fainted. Another woman fainted atop them shortly after.

The show would mark Houdini’s tenth and final appearance in Providence following a long history of stunting in the city’s streets and squares. On a mild-for-the-Northeast winter’s evening in 1911, the master illusionist leapt off the Crawford Street Bridge and into the Providence River while handcuffed and bound in a burlap sack. In 1917, over 20,000 spectators swarmed what is now Kennedy Plaza to watch him dangle upside down in a straightjacket from the fourth floor of the Evening News Building and miraculously escape unharmed. And who can forget the master illusionist’s first visit to the town of “what cheer,” in which Houdini landed a triple backflip after jumping feet first from the newly constructed “The Minden” apartment complex? However, the show was not without its fair share of controversies. Local journalists with nothing better to do claimed to have witnessed Houdini performing the all-too-common illusionist practice of wire fraud. Although no photographs of quality survive from the incident, critics procured “undeniable evidence” of fishing wire being used to facilitate the magician’s descent. Oh, what cheer? Oh, what a scandal!

However, what made Houdini’s 1926 appearance stand out from his previous feats was the morbid events that followed soon after. Unbeknownst to him, the show would be one of his last; on October 31, 1926—just three weeks later—he passed away from a case of acute appendicitis caused by a series of strong punches to the gut.² Although it is unclear if the Providence performance was definitively the last, Providence locals have always been comfortable with being “one of,” so let’s leave it at that. According to an oddly sensual review of his 1926 appearance from the Providence Journal titled “The Gay Deceiver," the audience was entranced by Houdini “as his thick, powerful arms and sensitive fingers moved in the beautiful, certain rhythm of their art.” Shortly after, Houdini launched into a vitriolic rant about the fraudulent nature of psychics and spiritualists “interlaced with uncomplimentary references to the mediums encountered in his experience.” He offered $10,000 to anyone who could produce “‘physical phenomena’ that Mr. Houdini himself cannot reproduce or explain ‘by natural means.’” Over the course of his lifetime, Houdini devoted an excessive amount of his time and money toward exposing phony clairvoyants, traveling the world on a personal mission to ruin the careers of those he deemed con artists in disguise. In 1924, Houdini successfully exposed Joaquín Argamasilla (known as the “Spaniard with X-ray Eyes”), who claimed to have the ability to read handwritten notes and the numbers on dice through closed metal boxes. During a private session, Houdini spotted the shady Spaniard secretly lifting his blindfold and peeking under the edge of the box when he thought nobody else was looking. Before his untimely death, Houdini promised his wife Bess that if he ever found a way to communicate from beyond the grave, he would contact her. Bess held a séance every year on the anniversary of her husband’s demise, a tradition continued by Houdini enthusiasts far beyond her death in 1948.

¹ Now home to the Providence City Council, site of demonstrations to deaf ears.

² Houdini’s great-nephew, George Hardeen, convinced that his great-uncle’s death was carried out by vengeful spiritualists, called for the exhumation of Houdini’s body in 2007. The exhumation never took place, as the accusations were revealed to be a publicity stunt promoting a biography titled The Secret Life of Houdini, which claimed that Houdini had been assassinated by a shadowy cabal known as the “Psychic Mafia” via the injection of an experimental serum while at the hospital.

On October 31, 2022, the yearly seance to contact Houdini’s spirit was conducted at the Edgewood Manor in Providence, Rhode Island, now a bed and breakfast with as many negative reviews as it has spirits (see fig. 01). Attendees, who were slim in number but exuberant in spirit (jaja spirit), spent two days wandering the historic property’s poorly repainted halls, shooting the shit and snapping flicks for the ‘Gram. The manor provided attendees with a full-course Italianx dinner and an hour-long magic show before the seance, transforming the commemorative event into a full-blown fiesta. A local magician who goes by the pseudonym ‘Ben’ took to the stage first, executing a popular Tik Tok card trick performed to the soundtrack of Now You See Me 2. His act was assisted by his buddy Charlie, who was later asked to leave after hitting his pen (vaping is strictly prohibited at the Edgewood Manor). You can read more about the altercation between Buddy Charlie and the guy at the security desk on Page 7. Besides the brief interruption of (vape) smoke and mirrors, the show was considered by all to have been a “jaunty old time.”

The seance itself was led by a Certified Evidential Psychic Medium best known for “her uncanny ability to connect Heaven to Earth” and for charging $25 for “spirit photos” at a self-run gift shop on the outskirts of Coventry, Rhode Island. As the medium doodled³ on a notepad and murmured Pig Latin in an ominous tone, one attendee’s wife was “taking the photos along with a few videos” and noticed “a mysterious blue dot moved around the medium and attendees while being questioned.” While many witnesses presumed this phenomenon to be the work of H.H. himself, a few keen Houdini aficionados⁴ were quick to note that the legendary escapologist rarely appeared to the public in his Blue Orb form. After the seance, the group had a “wine and pizza party in the seance room while signing the Official Houdini Séance programs,” completely oblivious to the translucent visage of Harry Houdini hovering overhead, a scowl etched across his face as deep as the engravings on his tombstone.

LUCA SUAREZ B’26 and MARIA GOMBERG B’26 are smoking mirrors.

[fig. 01: Google review of the Edgewood Manor Bed And Breakfast, which contains startling implications for the after]

( TEXT LUCA SUAREZ & MARIA GOMBERG DESIGN KAY KIM ILLUSTRATION LUCA SUAREZ)

³ “You may see the Certified Evidential Psychic Medium ‘doodling’ away during your session. This is another means of communication that they may sometimes utilize when working with Spirit. You will leave with their ‘doodles’ for an extra $25 fee. Spirit photo not included.”

⁴ Known affectionately as “Houdiniheads” by members of the illusionist community.

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?

HOW ISRAEL ENGINEERED ‘VOLUNTARY’ EMIGRATION FOR PALESTINIANS

( TEXT ABOUD ASHHAB DESIGN ESOO KIM ILLUSTRATION KOJI HELLMAN )

c Since the October 7 attacks, Israeli leaders have proposed multiple plans for the complete ‘population transfer’ of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Some projects, such as those quietly greenlit by the Biden administration, proposed the resettlement of Gazans in the Egyptian Sinai and Jordan, with Washington offering desperately needed International Monetary Fund (IMF) debt forgiveness to both countries as cushions for their complicity in ethnic cleansing. President Trump, in his Gaza Riviera proposal, boldly floated the idea of resettling Palestinians in Libya and unnamed African states, a suggestion later denied and condemned by the Arab and African Leagues. The expulsion of Palestinians—through resettlement or ambitious vanity construction projects—is not a novel concept, but part of a long history of Israeli attempts at pushing Palestinians to emigrate from the occupied territories.

Even before Israel’s founding, labor Zionist leaders preached the mantra of “maximum land with a minimal number of Arabs,” emphasizing the self-sufficiency of Jewish colonies in Mandatory Palestine and the use of only ‘Hebrew labor’ (avoda ivrit). This economic policy laid the groundwork for Israeli demographic engineering. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, wrote candidly about the ‘Arab question’ in his diaries, proposing that the indigenous population be quietly “spirited across the border” by denying them employment. This idea of denying Palestinians their right to work would become the central impetus for Israeli schemes of emigration.

The year 1967 proved a watershed moment in the Israeli state project. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Israel had occupied the remainder of the land promised by the British and, with it, two of Judaism’s holiest sites: the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. While Israeli leaders remained divided on the political future of the Palestinians in these territories, they adopted a consensus of encouraging emigration. Although still majority Jewish, Israel now exercised sovereign control over two million Palestinians who, if population growth remained constant, would eventually become a demographic majority. Today, Palestinians comprise 44.5% of the population between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. A substantial portion of this rapidly growing Palestinian population was refugees in the Gaza Strip, expelled only twenty years earlier. On a larger scale, many Palestinians were committed to opposing Zionism and exercising sumud, or steadfastness, through their continued presence in their homeland.

Carrot Before Stick: Manufacturing ‘Voluntary’ Emigration

Israel’s emigration policies in the 1970s and 1980s mark a particularly insidious chapter in its history of

ethnic cleansing. It represents a form of twisted irony: Although today’s Israeli policymakers obsess over containing and constraining Gazans within an openair prison, their predecessors were consumed by encouraging urban expansion, mainly as a means to force Gazans to leave. Nearly half of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation lived in the narrow, coastal Gaza strip, primarily in refugee camps with swelling populations. Israeli leaders figured that if Gaza’s main issues were overcrowding and poverty, then they could encourage Palestinians to leave through promises of land and employment elsewhere.

Although today’s Israeli policymakers obsess over containing and constraining Gazans within an open-air prison, their predecessors were consumed by encouraging urban expansion, mainly as a means to force Gazans to leave.

In 2016, Israeli scholars were granted brief access to national archives regarding the occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank from 1967 to 1969. Part of these newly accessible archives were general security memoranda from the ’70s labeled “meetings summaries of the chief of staff committee for civilian matters in the administered territories,” seemingly placed there mistakenly by the Israeli security ministry. These documents revealed what Palestinians had been claiming for decades: that there was an explicit policy from the highest levels of government to coerce Palestinian emigration from the occupied territories. In June 1967, the Israeli cabinet discussed how their victory in the Six-Day War would “open opportunities” for resolving the “refugee problem,” a euphemism for transferring Palestinians to Arab countries. The underlying intention, as articulated by Minister of Trade and Industry Ze’ev Sherf, was to send Gazans to faraway countries with a demand for labor—mainly in Latin America, which already had a large Palestinian population. Sherf and others reasoned that the military dictatorship in Brazil (which Israel armed and supported) would have no problem absorbing one million Palestinians, since “in the previous ten years Brazil had absorbed tens of thousands of migrant workers from Japan.” As Sherf asked: “Why wouldn’t they absorb Arabs as well?”

Israel’s incentives—that is, carrots—centered around employment in construction and manual labor, as had been a tactic since the early days of the Mandate. Many Gazans before the occupation were seasonal laborers in Egypt, meaning they became quite dependent on the Israeli labor market for employment. This contrasted with the situation in the West Bank, which was the manufacturing and agricultural center of Jordan before 1967. Israel, from

1968 until the First Intifada in 1987, pursued a dual policy of providing jobs to Palestinians while stunting local Palestinian agriculture and manufacturing through land theft and settlement expansion. In many cases, Palestinian construction workers quite literally built the very Israeli settlements that had swallowed up their lands and entrenched Israel’s economic dominance in the occupied territories. These ‘carrots’ of employment were used to encourage emigration by manufacturing poverty and unemployment within Gaza by offering job opportunities outside.

On September 28, 1967, during one of the first security cabinet meetings that discussed the administration of the territories—the adjective “occupied” was conspicuously absent from government communication—Governor Mordechai Gur announced that the aim was for Palestinians to feel “hopeless” regarding their economic conditions. Israeli officials deliberately kept unemployment in Gaza high at roughly 55%, even as the rate in the West Bank remained below 20%. A November 1967 budget document explicitly stated that “unemployment rates in the Strip should be ‘close’ to pre-war ones” (Gaza’s unemployment rate was estimated to be above 50% before 1967, as most workers worked seasonally in Egypt) and prohibited unemployed Gazans from working in the Israeli economy. The budget guidelines made clear that the military government would not create any new sources of livelihood for refugees.

Israel created specific construction projects for Palestinians near its border with Jordan, where, in the words of senior defense official Zvi Zur, “it’s easy for them to walk eastward” into Jordan, never to return. Starting in 1968, monthly free shuttle buses ran from Gaza’s refugee camps to the West Bank, designed to “open the eyes” of refugees to better opportunities elsewhere, as put by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. Dayan proudly declared the plan a success in 1968 when 40 unemployed men from the Strip, hired to work in the Jordan Valley, crossed into Jordan after a few days of labor. “This is their transfer,” he announced with confidence to a ministerial committee.

Israel even offered financial incentives: a one-time grant of 35 Israeli lira (equivalent to an average weekly salary) for every refugee who emigrated to the Jordan Valley, plus food packages for families who left together. The emphasis on entire families leaving was crucial—as long as one family member remained in a refugee camp, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency would not remove them from aid lists, potentially allowing them to return.

Ship Them Off To Paraguay

Perhaps nothing reveals Israeli intentions more clearly than their schemes to relocate Palestinians to South America in the ’70s and ’80s. The Committee for Civilian Matters in the Administered Territories, flush with postwar hubris, devised plans to settle

costs, and pay the Paraguayan government $33 per migrant. They offered $330,000 upfront for the first 10,000 migrants, though the money was largely used to bribe Paraguayan military officials, rather than to create the opportunities Israeli government agencies advertised to Palestinians.

This policy reveals how Israeli officials viewed Palestinians at the time: as a surplus population that could be exported anywhere, regardless of their ties to their homeland. Palestinian refugees who had been expelled from their villages just twenty years earlier were now being sold to a South American dictatorship like agricultural tools. The plan collapsed violently when two young Gazans who had emigrated to Paraguay stormed the Israeli embassy in Asunción in May 1970 and killed the ambassador’s secretary, forcing the Paraguayan government to end what had largely been a failed project.

Unintended Results

These carrot policies initially showed dramatic results. Between September and November 1967, monthly emigration from Gaza jumped from 80 to 2,796 people. Between December 1967 and July 1968, an average of 2,802 Gazans left each month—approximately 32,300 per year. This was nearly 8% of the Strip’s population. On January 9, 1968, Dayan told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that “with the right treatment it is possible to remove from Gaza a large portion of the refugees and perhaps even most of them.”

But Palestinian resistance and regional politics thwarted these ambitions. By late 1967 and early 1968, many Gazans who had been encouraged to move to Jordan had begun joining the armed militias of the Fatah party and the other resistance movements in refugee camps on the East Bank, which were used as bases to launch attacks against Israel. Ada Sereni, who headed Israel’s unofficial emigration agency, warned Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in July 1968 that impoverished emigrants from Gaza were arriving at Jordanian camps near Karameh, Fatah’s headquarters, where joining the resistance became their only option for survival. The very policy designed to reduce Palestinian resistance was inadvertently strengthening it.

This created a security paradox that Israeli officials hadn’t anticipated. The irony was profound: Israel’s emigration policies were directly feeding Palestinian armed resistance. Israel’s 1968 defeat to Palestinian fedayeen (freedom fighters) at the Battle

borders to Gazans entirely on July 30, 1968. Overnight, emigration dropped from thousands per month to just 50 in August, 46 in September, and 25 in October.

In short, Palestinian sumud proved more powerful than Israeli manipulation. Despite manufactured poverty, bribes, and schemes to ship them across the world, Palestinians refused to abandon their homeland in the numbers Israel had hoped for. This resistance forced a fundamental shift in Israeli policy.

The Turn To The Stick

Recognizing the futility of ethnic cleansing through carrots, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir began to adopt a stick approach—during an August 1969 meeting of the Ministerial Committee for the Territories (MCT) she acknowledged that the idea of Palestinians “pack[ing] their belongings and leav[ing] in a caravan” was “delusional.” Multiple factors drove this strategic shift. First, the Jordan border closure eliminated the primary emigration route. Second, growing Palestinian resistance in Gaza—labor strikes in the First Intifada, as well as a nascent armed movement which would become Hamas—demonstrated that economic pressure without outlets for emigration was creating an explosive situation. Third, Israeli officials recognized that sustained occupation required a different approach, one that prioritized control over expulsion, at least in the short term.

But the underlying goal never changed. If Israel could not depopulate Palestine through economic opportunities abroad, it would create miserable conditions at home, making emigration an eventual necessity. In February 1969, Israel reversed its economic policy on Gaza, allowing Palestinians to work in Israel for the first time—not out of benevolence, but because intelligence reports showed that roughly half of Fatah fighters had joined due to poverty rather than ideology. Yet even this policy shift was aimed at forcing emigration, albeit this time through the selection of secondary students in Palestine who wished to study abroad. Defense Minister Dayan bluntly explained the logic to his staff at the MCT like so: Educated young people were “the rowdiest” population, the most likely to organize resistance, and the most capable of emigrating successfully.

This selective approach manifested in two key policies. First, in 1969, Israel allowed Gaza schools to return to Egyptian textbooks and matriculation exams from before 1967, knowing that this would

would go [every year] and hopefully we’ll never see them back [here] again. If we are preparing emigration plans, this emigration is the most important one.” Although Dayan’s policy was opposed by some ministers for allowing Arab nationalist rhetoric to enter students’ minds through Egyptian textbooks, it was ultimately implemented, deliberately targeting the most educated and politically conscious segment of Palestinian society. A similar policy was adopted in the West Bank, where Palestinians took the tawjihi, the Jordanian secondary exams, and many went on to study in Jordan.

The results were significant, but far from Israel’s original ambitions. Between 1968 and 1987, approximately 94,200 Gazans (23.5% of the 1967 population) left the Strip, with educated young men comprising the largest demographic. Yet this was nowhere near the mass depopulation Israel had envisioned. By the 1990s, Palestinian demographics had ‘stabilized’ from Israel’s perspective—not through successful removal, but through Soviet Jewish immigration and higher Orthodox Jewish birth rates maintaining the demographic edge held by Israeli Jews. With the Oslo Accords, the idea of driving Palestinians out of the Occupied Territories altogether was sidelined; West Bank and Gaza Palestinians became ‘Green ID’ holders, no longer solely citizens of Egypt or Jordan as they had been before.

Fast-forward 30 years, a Second Intifada, and a genocide later, Israeli policies toward forced Palestinian emigration have taken a more unabashed approach. House demolitions, settlement expansion, and extrajudicial killings in the West Bank have only increased since October 2023 as the international community has focused on Gaza, allowing Israeli settlers, in tandem with the military, to push Palestinians out with minimal outcry. Israeli leaders were even able to codify these emigration schemes in the ceasefire agreement, stipulating that many Palestinians from Gaza kidnapped by the Israeli military be deported to Egypt and preventing the return of Palestinians who had left Gaza for medical treatment.

ABOUD ASHHAB MPA’26 is boiling carrots and snapping sticks.

( TEXT TARINI TIPNIS

DESIGN ROSE HOLDBROOK

ILLUSTRATION SOFIA SCHREIBER )

DEATH IN MINECRAFT SURVIVAL MODE

c After defeating the Ender Dragon—the “final boss” of Minecraft*—the player is prompted to return to the main dimension, the Overworld, through the End Portal. As the player jumps through the portal, the rules of the game’s world-making begin to denature. Minecraft doesn’t usually rely on expositional text for the player to navigate the game. Items are designated with straightforward labels—“birch plank,” “iron helmet,” “stone pickaxe”—and the gameplay operates on a familiar video-game vernacular: hearts equal health, armor protects against damage, food restores hunger. But the End Poem operates in a different register. The poem stages a lyrical conversation between two speakers who offer counsel to the player, meditate on the division between in-game and real experience, and even theorize on the meaning and structure of the universe. As large sections of text scroll across the screen and a piano softly plays, the player glimpses beyond the veil, confronted with a game, as the poem acknowledges, “less terrifying than staring at the reality behind the screen.”

The End Poem escapes Minecraft’s diegetic framework. Diegesis is the stylization of fiction through in-game narrative rules. Diegetic elements include everything that makes up the in-game world and its internal mechanics. What happens, then, when the in-game and the real begin to mix? Though the player is not dead, the End Poem can teach us something about how death, time, and narrative are structured.

The idea that death may become meaningful in a game that offers an option to respawn indefinitely is, on the surface, a paradoxical one. Further, since the End Poem is not strictly the end of the game (the End Portal returns the player to the Overworld where they may continue playing), linking death to the End Poem may seem counterintuitive. And yet, the End Poem is a kind of dying. The Ender Dragon is dead, and the only diegetically-acknowledged Minecraft milestone dies with it. A certain kind of goal-oriented play has reached its terminal limit. What does it mean for Minecraft’s narrative possibilities to be foreclosed? What does it mean to die in a game where the player can respawn indefinitely? From The End, let us return to the beginning…

*Minecraft is a sandbox video game developed and published by Mojang in 2009. Players navigate a procedurally-generated, three-dimensional environment composed of rudimentary blocklike units. The game blends material logistics, governance, and world-building. As of 2025, it is the best-selling video game of all time.

Taking Inventory

All living creatures in Minecraft are called mobs, but Steve is set apart. The division emerges not merely from differences in physical appearance, or because Steve is the only mob identified by name rather than species. The fundamental difference is that Steve— the character—is a vessel for the player. Steve stays in the world; the player leaves. Steve dies in the Minecraft world, and of course, the player does not.

As a result, Steve has the ability to respawn, unlike other mobs in the game. As Steve, the player dies—sometimes strategically, sometimes accidentally. Each time, there remains the option to keep playing. If Steve’s death does not entail a permanent end, then what does his death mean? The language of the End Poem posits an answer: “Death was a temporary inconvenience.” An inconvenience how?

In Minecraft, death depletes or extends the labor, resources, or materials expended by the player. At the moment the player dies, they drop the materials in their inventory at the spot that they are killed, and the player respawns at their bed. So drowning in lava, for example, might cause the player’s items to be incinerated and lost forever, which takes time and resources to craft again. Dying thousands of blocks away from their base will require the player to gather additional materials to return. Death is not linked to the end of life, but instead, the suspension or deceleration of in-game progress. Progress is, of course, complex and variably understood. Indeed, the game represents it as a nebulous thing. Though the player can choose to pursue in-game advancements—like defeating certain bosses, crafting certain items, walking a certain distance, or farming a certain amount— these are minimally incentivized. There is no in-game benefit to gaining advancements. No new blocks, resources, or items are gained, only a symbolic and self-defined sense of completion. And yet, undergirding all progress in the game, whether through the advancement system or not, is the degree to which the player transforms their world. The player extracts resources, builds into the land, and interacts with other mobs. The player’s modification of the landscape, then, is what death stalls. Death has to do with the transformation of the world.

Death Screen

When Steve dies, a translucent red screen— the death screen—appears over the in-game world, offering the choice to respawn or quit to the title screen. The screen’s appearance marks the peculiar disappearance of all pigs, zombies, and other mobs, leaving only the trees, waterfalls, and surrounding environment intact With the death screen comes a splitting of time: the passage of worldly time continues but mob-time is suspended. On the one hand, the sun still sets, the days still pass, and the surrounding world remains unchanged. On the other hand, the mobs disappear upon the player’s death (and return unchanged upon the player’s respawning). Steve’s death therefore amounts not to the suspension of all in-game time, but the suspension of mob-time.

The death screen is a spatializing mechanism—a site where the suspension of mob-time is given form. The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin describes such fusions of space-time as “chronotopes” (literally, “time–spaces”). In his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” he describes that “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” While space and time are always intrinsically linked, Minecraft’s death screen renders their relationship with unusual immediacy. Steve’s death produces a space—the death screen—for the suspension of mob-time. Per Bakhtin, this amounts to both a “thickening” of time, as well as a “charging” of space as both gain inseparable significance in the meaning-making of the game.

The disappearance of all mobs is an uncanny and isolating experience for the player. As long as the player suspends the return of the mobs—avoiding respawning—the world remains empty. The longer the world is empty, the more the death screen asserts itself as an inhabitable non-space, an unnerving and lonely site for the player to rest. Hauntingly, this suggests a time before mobs, perhaps one before Steve existed to observe it.

The death screen also has a meaningful connection to narrative. The screen displays a “score”— the total number of experience points (an in-game currency) collected by killing mobs, smelting ores, mining, trading, or fishing. When the player sees the score, they are encouraged implicitly to make a more comprehensive snapshot of their progress. Experience points notwithstanding, the player need not conceptualize their progress using statistics officially tracked by the game. Historicizing their gameplay may involve remembering the number of wither skeletons killed in the Nether, how much iron they gathered on a mining trip, or how many sections of a build they finished—none of which are directly cited on the screen. Additionally, the death screen—which offers the choice to leave the game or respawn— demonstrates that dying requires defining the meaning and stakes of returning or quitting. This is also a kind of historicization—a measurement of the

world, its narrative, and its time. On the death screen, mob-time pauses and the player recounts their prog ress. This is significant—one may narrate the world only when mob-time is suspended, when Steve’s respawning and the re-spatialization of the in-game world is delayed. This is because the delay confers a static, articulable completeness onto the Minecraft world, turning it into an image. Like a picture, the death screen freezes mob-time and allows for historicization. In the threshold between respawning and quitting, we can begin to see how the end of the player’s life gestures to the composition of the world.

The specter of death haunts the game from the very beginning. Worlds in “survival mode” are inhabited by a vast array of industrial, architectural, and built structures, all inoperative: abandoned strongholds, broken-down mineshafts, overgrown dungeons, and ancient temples. Everywhere, the world is seeded with civilizational structures but the beings with the capacity to create them are absent. Steve is one of one; he is the only mob capable of creating the structures that predate his existence. This tension engenders a fundamental loneliness within the game. The world is populated by structures that suggest a history and a human community, neither of which are present or accessible to the player through the game. The everpresent reminder of a civilization that has somehow ended—or paradoxically, never existed—generates a perpetual unease that gestures to the player’s own death. The player cannot really die in the same way that these non-present civilizations seem to have. Granted, the player can choose to delete the world, thereby destroying their builds, or they can never open the world again, suspending their presence indefinitely. But the player cannot vanish. The player cannot permanently die. Yet permanent disappearances, which are impossible for the player, are present everywhere in the Minecraft world. The game contends with two kinds of death: The death of the player, which is always temporary, and the death of these vanished civilizations, which is permanent. Let’s return to the end.

The End?

The End Poem drastically transforms Minecraft’s gameplay. The poem, which plays after the player defeats the Ender Dragon, functions very similarly to the death screen. Like the death screen, the End Poem suspends mob-time. Like the death screen, the player respawns at their bed once the poem runs its course. But uniquely, the End Poem introduces narrative into the game at the precise moment of that narrative’s dissolution, the moment when the narrative goals are no longer relevant.

The End Poem reinscribes narrative into the gameplay exactly after the Ender Dragon dies. Its narrative concerns the enmeshment of the ‘real’ and ‘in-game’ worlds. The poem scrolls across a black field

temporally, situationally, and structurally to the short dream. But as the line between Steve and player blurs, the rules of the short dream are increasingly annulled, the diegetic framework of the world splinters, and the principle of immersion—the sense that the experience of playing is so absorbing and realistic that the player is inside the world—fails.

The enmeshment of the ‘real’ and ‘in-game’ attunes the player to the constrictions of Minecraft’s gameplay, which include everything from its use of color, to its stylization of trees and the logic of redstone (blocks used to build complex circuits). The limits of Minecraft’s gameplay are what make the game so distinctive and compelling, and it is precisely through the End Poem’s discussion of the liminality between the real and in-game worlds that those limits best reveal themselves.

The player defeats the Ender Dragon. Now what? The End Poem withholds narrative answers. The speakers do not disclose any hidden truths or any new goals for the player to pursue. But the poem doesn’t leave the player without any clues whatsoever. The poem emphasizes the structural limits—the diegetic framework—of the game, reenlivening the player with a sense of agency. The only person capable of answering the question, “now what?” is the player. The game has always depended on the player to extract goals, historicize their gameplay, and make important decisions about their progress. But with the End Poem, the player’s narrative stewardship of the game is declared with renewed force. Ultimately the End Poem teaches the player that defeating the Ender Dragon was their goal all along, not the game’s. The game recognizes and relates the limitations and distinctions of its own design, demonstrating the player’s fundamental agency, which finally allows the player to build with an empowered sense of purpose: the player, now and always, determines the goals and objectives of their gameplay.

The player may return to the Overworld, continue to play, continue to labor in mines, and continue to die, but the game will never be the same. In the short dream of the game, we may choose our goals however simple, tedious, serious, or causal. As the End Poem concludes:

Steve

TARINI TIPNIS B’26.5 is defeating the Ender Dragon.

Ender Dragon

SAVE RIPTA, GROW RIPTA

CHRONICLING RIPTA’S IMPORTANCE TO RHODE ISLANDERS AMID SWEEPING SERVICE CUTS

c For Mary Russo, working as a nursing home cook meant early mornings. Her shifts began at 5:30 a.m., the exact time when the first RIPTA Route 27 bus departed from Centerdale—Russo’s stop. Thankfully, her commute was only two miles long, and the bus would arrive at 5:30 every morning. Her managers didn’t mind her being a few minutes late.

Years later, while working as a line cook, she’d come out of her shift at the other end of the day: 11 p.m., Wakefield, no buses in sight. “They stopped running at 11. I was getting out at 11, so it was difficult. You had to Uber to the next bus that would pick you up,” Russo recalled. “No matter what you do, you got to find some alternative method to get around.”

I met Russo on a rainy Sunday in September, more than two decades after she last boarded the earliest 27 bus at Centerdale. It’s 11 a.m., and we’re riding the southbound R line to Slater Mill. We complain about the gloomy weather, mist fogging the windows around us. Russo is in her 60s, currently out of work after an accident damaged her knees.

While she is not currently employed, she still uses the RIPTA daily, “just travelling back and forth, doing some errands,” she tells me. Today, she’s headed to renew a book at the Pawtucket Public Library: When You Find My Body, something she picked up just for fun.

On August 28, two weeks before my conversation with Russo, RIPTA’s Board of Directors approved a sweeping set of service cuts in a 7–1 vote. As of September 27, 46 of the bus system’s 67 lines provide reduced service, with longer intervals between buses and shorter operating hours. Weekend service was eliminated entirely for routes 23, 68, 69, and 72—which RIPTA identified as “lowest-performing”—and six other lines lost service on either Saturday or Sunday. According to RIPTA’s Director of Communications & Public Outreach Cristy Raposo Perry, the cuts will provide $4.4 million toward the authority’s $32.6 million operating deficit heading into the 2026 fiscal year, which began on July 1, 2025.

“Sunday’s really bad,” Russo tells me. The wait time for the R line “used to be 10 minutes, and it went up to 15, and now it’s 20,” she said. After 6:30 p.m., the wait times increase to every 30 minutes.

Russo’s 25 years of working in healthcare attuned her to the necessity of consistent service throughout each day. “Nursing homes, like any healthcare, don’t shut down,” she said. Since the harshest reductions are during off-peak and weekend hours, the cuts hit riders who work nonstandard hours—those in healthcare, shift work, gig work—especially hard.

The reduced hours create logistical issues for riders in other walks of life, too. Liza Burkin of the Providence Streets Coalition, an alliance of community organizations advocating for streets that allow people to “move safely and easily no matter how they travel,” emphasized that even a five-minute increase in wait time creates ripple effects for every rider. The coalition received 250 responses to its survey assessing the effects of the cuts on riders. Speaking to the results of that survey, Burkin said, “We’re seeing a lot of high school students really struggling to get to school on time or having to wake up at 5 a.m., whereas before they could wake up at 7, and then having a lot of trouble staying awake in class.” She added that delays also cause riders to miss their transfers. These disruptions impede basic mobility for the more than 75% of RIPTA riders who do not have access to a vehicle.

“I cannot get to work if they cut the 13 and 23 on Saturdays,” she said.

“If I can’t get to work, I don’t have a job.”

The service reductions implemented this September are a moderated version of a July proposal, which laid out an even deeper slate of cuts that would have affected 58 of RIPTA’s 67 routes. Nine routes and two Flex Zones—areas without fixed route coverage that receive abridged, on-call service—would have been completely eliminated, seven would have lost route segments, and eight would have lost all weekend and holiday service. If enacted, the plan would have

( TEXT ELENA JIANG DESIGN EUNGYO (JEN) KIM

ILLUSTRATION

MIA CHENG )

been “the largest service reduction in the agency’s 59-year history,” the Rhode Island Current reported. The proposal drew swift backlash from riders statewide.

For Erica Shirley, who testified at a hearing in Warwick on the proposed cuts, an average Saturday involves catching a bus on Route 13 or Route 23 to get to her job at Marshalls. The proposed plan would have eliminated Route 23, and Route 13 would no longer have run on weekends. “I cannot get to work if they cut the 13 and 23 on Saturdays,” she said. “If I can’t get to work, I don’t have a job.”

Stories like Shirley's filled every minute of the 12 public hearings RIPTA held after its July announcement. Across 10 days, over 600 Rhode Island residents showed up to defend a public transit system that they cited as their primary method of transportation to doctor appointments, workplaces, and grocery stores. Devin Guirales spoke on behalf of his mother, who relies on the bus for appointments at the diabetes clinic. After him, Zach Fratus shared that if Route 23 was eliminated, he would have to walk two miles to a Route 13 stop to get to work. Burkin recalled the outrage she felt at the hearings. “It's absolutely devastating. It's horrific. It's people begging for a basic service that they need to live their lives,” she said. But what was particularly disappointing for Burkin was the fact that the majority of state legislators who hold decision-making power over RIPTA funding, especially Governor Dan McKee, were absent.

“It’s ridiculous because we come up with the same thing every year [...] I mean, I get that we have to talk to politicians and everything, but they’re obviously not listening,” Shirley said at the hearing.

Shirley’s testimony is demonstrative of a yearslong frustration that residents’ demands for stable RIPTA funding have not been addressed. In 2023, dozens of advocates packed Kennedy Plaza to urge Governor McKee to increase state funding for RIPTA, marking the birth of the Save RIPTA campaign, a coalition of organizations calling for the survival and expansion of RIPTA through state funding. About two months later, Governor McKee recommended $10 million in COVID-19 relief funding for RIPTA, less than 10% of the $110 million advocates had said RIPTA would need to bridge its deficit and expand service in line with a State Planning Council-approved plan. That same month, RIPTA announced a proposal to eliminate or reduce service on 28 bus routes, citing a driver shortage. After 11 public hearings, which consisted of hours equally packed with public testimony on the importance of RIPTA as those this year, the board resolved to keep routes the same, despite facing a $18 million budget deficit.

Given this context, the cuts that came into effect this September mark a breaking point: Mounting public alarm over RIPTA’s funding problem has not stopped it from continuing to lose service. But a joint statement issued by the RIPTA Board and Governor McKee seems to downplay the gravity of the reductions, describing them as “a foundation for RIPTA to build a more modern and financially sustainable transit system.” In an email to the College Hill Independent, Raposo Perry wrote that the agency plans to focus on “what a high-capacity transit corridor could look like, how to reimagine our main transit center, and […] a plan for more rapid bus lines.” But, coupled

with service cuts, this forward-looking plan rings hollow for a ridership that has seen its transit service hampered by a growing funding deficit for the last two years.

Though RIPTA’s funding streams have faltered due to the pandemic, its continued budget deficit arises directly from the refusal of legislators to meet the agency’s need for state support. Between fiscal year 2019 and fiscal year 2024, state subsidies’ contribution to RIPTA’s operating budget dropped from 44% to 37% of the total operating budget. Additionally, despite its $32.6 million deficit at the beginning of this fiscal year, McKee’s proposed fiscal 2026 budget in January did not provide RIPTA with extra funding, leaving it to deal with the shortfall on its own.

Fortunately, the General Assembly’s budget rewrite in June directed an additional $15 million to RIPTA through a 2-cent increase in the gas tax and a raise in the allocation of funds derived from vehicle registration fees that the bus system receives, helping the agency decrease its deficit to $17 million. Two months before McKee published an August letter, in which he stated his belief “in the value of public transit,” he refused to sign the revised budget, citing his disapproval of the gas tax increase.

In a public statement on McKee’s proposed budget, Save RIPTA contrasted Governor McKee’s reluctance to boost transportation funding with the proactivity of other states’ officials, many of whom have responded to the nationwide transportation crisis with renewed investments. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, for example, announced an $8 billion transportation plan in January, and Pennsylvania redirected $154 million from highway projects to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority last year.

For John Flaherty of Grow Smart RI, an organization striving to revitalize Rhode Island’s neighborhoods to center sustainability and economic opportunities for all, RIPTA’s current financial crisis tells a longer history of political inaction: “There’s been a long-standing—I say long-standing, I’m talking decades—lack of political will to develop a truly sustainable and reliable funding source for public transit.” He pointed to the tendency of state officials in recent years to “cast doubt on whether RIPTA was being run efficiently” to justify withholding funding from the bus system. “I think that [is] really more of an excuse to lean on because they [aren’t] prepared to make the decision to support it financially,” Flaherty said. When Governor McKee and the General Assembly helped bridge RIPTA’s deficit last year, they did so on the condition that RIPTA complete an efficiency report. The report, released on August 7, came to a major conclusion, according to the Rhode Island Current: “There’s no way to save costs without cutting service.”

“[RIPTA has] been so starved for cash that there is always this tension between: ‘Do we provide service as far as we can to as many corners of the state as possible? Or do we concentrate on running a much more frequent service, but only in the metro region?’” Flaherty said.

Burkin argued that legislators’ deprioritization of public transit boiled down to “blatant disrespect,” as “a lot of people in power don’t have the lived experience. They don’t ride the bus, and they don't know

people who rely on the bus.” This disconnect between RIPTA riders and legislators has hindered what public transit could look like for Rhode Island, Burkin said. State officials’ sidelining of RIPTA funding is counterintuitive given the ways a robust transit system can serve as “an engine of economic development,” Flaherty emphasized. He pointed to the Rhode Island Executive Office of Housing’s Housing 2030 plan, which calls for 15,000 new homes to be built in the next five years to increase housing affordability. A healthy bus system creates an incentive to build housing units along busy transit corridors, avoiding the higher costs that come with parking space, Flaherty said. Increased bus ridership would also bring Rhode Island closer to its legally mandated goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. But these benefits fail to materialize when state legislators do not fund RIPTA enough to encourage a broader ridership, which Flaherty attributes to a perception amongst many legislators that the bus system is a social service for low-income residents.

The vision of Save RIPTA lies here: a world where RIPTA can focus on bettering and expanding their routes rather than fighting to keep them.

Flaherty is hopeful about the upcoming legislative session. The public hearings brought the issue of public transit “right into people’s living rooms” in a way that felt unprecedented, he said. In light of the service cuts, the stakes for riders around the state— the tens of thousands of necessary RIPTA journeys made every day—have become difficult to ignore. “If you're a legislator, whether you're in leadership or you’re rank and file, the question is, ‘How do we do this? How do we fund transit in a much more reliable and sustainable way?’” he said.

Save RIPTA plans to build on the momentum of the last legislative session, when their package of bills to boost RIPTA funding was sponsored by legislators ready to center public transit in State House conversations. Flaherty emphasized the uniqueness of this environment. “This last legislative session […] I witnessed much more support from rank and file members of the General Assembly than I have seen maybe in [the 20 years] that I've been doing this,” Flaherty said. Save RIPTA plans to reintroduce several of the bills next year alongside new funding streams, Burkin wrote in an email to the Indy. “Our message to decision-makers is that we are agnostic as to which they choose, but doing nothing and letting the system die is unacceptable,” she wrote.

The coalition's goals extend beyond just securing operational funding. “We would prefer to call [ourselves] ‘Expand RIPTA’ or ‘Grow RIPTA,’ but unfortunately that is not the political reality we’re in right now,” Burkin said. Save RIPTA will continue advocating until legislators commit to creating an ideal public transportation system, where people “ride transit because it's good and safe and easy,” and because “it's faster than driving, better than driving,

and more sustainable than driving,” Burkin insisted. The vision of Save RIPTA lies here: a world where RIPTA can focus on bettering and expanding its routes rather than fighting to keep them.

+++

Every weekday afternoon, Alexa Threats rides the R-line to pick up her two children from SouthSide Elementary Charter School in Providence, a 40-minute bus trip from her home in Pawtucket. In the morning, the trip takes double the time.

I met Threats mid-journey on a Wednesday. She’s sitting toward the front of the bus in a red hoodie. It is September 24, three days before the cuts are slated to take effect. She tells me that her 10-year-old daughter, Olivia, is “super, super smart” and wants to “design the tallest building wherever she lives when she gets older.” Her son, Kyree, is only six years old, but already knows the city inside and out. Threats appreciates that the RIPTA brings her kids to school so they can learn: “I’m sitting there like, ‘I don’t have no Uber money to give to my kids. No one can give me a ride. Alright, well, to the bus stop!’”

On the same bus, I met David, a New Yorker who arrived in Providence in the 1970s. As we speed through downtown, he tells me about how the streets have changed: “There was a smoke shop there. There was a sneaker place over here. There was a Japanese restaurant over here.” Although things have come and gone, RIPTA’s buses have remained a constant on Providence’s roads, with the passage of time marked in the change of its fare from a zone-based $1 to $3 dollar scale to the standard $2 fare. He gets off on Empire Street for the Providence Public Library.

When the bus pulls back into Kennedy Plaza, I’m talking to another rider, Chris, about his upcoming job interview at a group home. He’s standing, one hand holding the railing of the bus and the other wrapped around a backpack. “I’m trying to prepare myself today. Get on the bus, go find where the job place is at, so that tomorrow, I can go straight to the place,” he tells me. His phone is broken, but the people at his stop were able to point him to the right route to take. “So I’m going to get on the bus, try to figure it out. And then try to find some clothes to wear and look presentable.” I wish him good luck, and he gives me a firm handshake before we part ways at Stop J.

Two weeks later, I met high schooler Kelisyana Reyes at the same place. She’s sandwiched between two friends on the bench, all of them hiding out from the afternoon drizzle. They’d taken the Route 20 bus to get to Kennedy Plaza, where they plan to hang out and maybe go to the mall. She tells me that she switched from riding the school bus to riding the RIPTA a year ago because she “just felt like it.”

“I’m an outside person, and I like being around people. And staying on a [RIPTA] bus for an hour or two, going in circles and picking up everybody…” She trails off.

“Do you like that?” I ask.

“Yeah. Kind of.” Beside us, a bus sputters and exhales. She looks around the plaza and smiles.

ELENA JIANG B’27 wants you to sign up for updates from Save RIPTA at pvdstreets.org/save-ripta/.

( TEXT ANDREA LI DESIGN JO LEE

ILLUSTRATION AVARI ESCOBAR )

c She twisted her hair into a knot that poked at her neck. Leaning to the sink, she turned on the tap and let water pool in her hands, which she then slapped against her face. Though she’d gone to bed at 9 last night, a litany of discomforts had tugged at her consciousness—it had taken hours to drop into a shallow sleep, and when she had opened her eyes, she felt as though she had only rested for a few minutes. Groaning, she’d hurled her alarm clock against the wall. Now, she re-entered her room to change and squatted to inspect the broken pieces.

The clock was shaped like a large, cartoonish rat carrying a block of cheese embedded with a digital screen; it had emitted loud squeaks in lieu of beeping. A college friend had bought it for her out of concern for her sleeping schedule. “To make your mornings less terrible,” he’d said, only half-joking. She regarded the beheaded mouse with apathy—yet another mess to kick under the bed.

If he was still alive, she thought, her friend would be off making his own messes, or trying to clean others’ up, like he had done with hers. At first, she had appreciated his worry for her, but she grew to resent the way he always touched her shoulder. “You can’t get an internship with grades like these on your transcript,” he’d say, flipping through her B-minus tests, “You’d better start working harder.” As she stared at his mouth forming each word, she imagined him masturbating to his own speech, pleasured by the idea that he would mold her to his vision. He’d fix her. He’d teach her about economics, then he’d explain the stock market and how to find a job; she would cling to his arm at networking events; she would become his newest asset. Her anger had reached its climax during an argument in the last year of college, after he’d made a comment about her unrefined man-

ners at a restaurant. She did not respond; she merely set down her fork, wiped her mouth, and shoved his face into his plate of pasta.

In the week leading up to the news of his death, incessant nightmares had plagued her—the night before, she pushed someone’s head underwater, and after the body stopped struggling, she laid it on the ground and pulled out its eyes with her bare hands. Upon awakening, she’d found that she had gripped one of her pillows so tightly that the threads had ruptured; she’d spent the day with an uneasy feeling that kept flaring up like a bad cough.

Later that evening, she learned about her friend’s death through a Facebook post. He’d drowned the previous night: an intoxicated trip to the beach, she assumed. The news filled her with a feeling she did not want to place, so she kept scrolling as heat spread through her hands, her heartbeat pulsing in her temples.

Now, walking up to the window in her apartment bedroom, she pressed her forehead against the glass. The sky was still dark, with bursts of orange beginning to emerge from behind the rumpled clouds. It would snow later. She missed the warmth of her coastal hometown, missed the coast in general—the sound of waves breaking against the rocks; ocean water licking her ankles as she ran into the surf; the way sunlight exploded into a thousand more suns on the water at noon. Two years had passed since she’d been home, and three months had passed since her last conversation with her mother.

“When are you coming home?” her mother had asked.

“I don’t know if I can,” she’d responded, pinching the bridge of her nose between two fingers. She squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed. “I’m really busy. They just laid off a bunch of people—you know, we’re

trying to consolidate, bring in higher revenue or whatever—and I just got a raise, and I have more hours—”

“Are you next?”

“What?”

“Are they firing you next?”

She clenched her left fist until her palm ached. “No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

“I need you to be certain. Can you be certain?”

There was a long silence.

Her mother sighed, the noise harshened by phone static. “I wish you would say something.”

“I’m sorry,” she responded in a quiet voice.

“Sorry,” she whispered again now, removing herself from her memory, opening her eyes to the sunrise, feeling once again the icy glass of the window against her skin.

Truthfully, she had not gotten a raise. She was working overtime because she’d seen what her peers were off doing, with their vacations in Italy and their Manhattan penthouses and their Newport yacht parties; and then there was the ever-present sensation that others were sizing her up and expecting her to be something. A long time ago, these pressures would have swirled into a furious storm inside her; she remembered how in high school, she would scream and throw her heaviest books against the walls until the floors trembled, and how afterwards, she would refuse to speak to anyone for days. By the seventh fit of this kind, her parents sent her to a psychiatric ward, where she’d spent a year in group therapy sessions until she no longer snapped at the nurses’ prying questions. She grew numb. She was a success.

But there were feelings within her that therapy could not anesthetize. Her friend from college had groped at the areas where her fury hibernated, eroding her mask until it was no longer a mask; he’d bro-

ken a prolonged period of blankness as she found herself relinquished to rage. Even after she had removed him from her life, she found that his presence lingered.

She’d entered college with a desire to return home, and she’d graduated with a job in finance thousands of miles away. Although she told herself that it was for her own sake, she knew she wanted to prove herself to her friend, or to the specter of him that still haunted her. Her mental state was pristine, she imagined herself telling him. Look, she was even working a real job—she had never been better.

For the first few months of the job, she’d made sure to sleep nine hours each day, to never eat more than five ounces of boiled chicken at each meal, and to keep her facial expressions neutral: if she slept more, she could work and earn more; if she ate less, she could be beautiful; if she composed herself, she could be respected. Even at her lowest, she never cried: there was something degrading in that pitiable act of leaking. All together, she could become perfect—that would show them. But lately, she’d been slipping back into her old habits.

She shook her head. Enough ruminating. She had to change out of her pajamas.

As she peeled off her nightshirt, she squinted in the floorlength mirror at the growing eyebags that bloomed bruiselike beneath her narrowed eyes. Recently, she’d been noticing small shifts in her body. The insomnia that started right before her friend’s death had intensified, forcing her to twist in bed for hours before she could even begin to drift off. On the weekends, she’d begun taking afternoon naps, which made her feel like a helpless child swaddled in a quilt; these naps were dreamless, but the nightmares returned without fail each evening.

Another problem—she’d been forgetting things. The other week, she forgot to wear a bra to work. She hadn’t realized until her coworker pulled her aside and motioned for her to look down, where she saw her nipples, erect and slightly darkened through her white blouse. Blushing, she’d pulled on her sweater with a rapidity that mussed up her straightened hair. That same day, she’d walked to the office kitchen to eat lunch, but the only thing she remembered was opening the door to the break room; from here, her consciousness jumped to an hour later, when she found herself standing in front of the fridge with a sauce-covered mouth, holding an empty lunch box and a fork. Neither were hers. She’d scrambled to put them back, washing the fork and leaving a 20-dollar bill in the stained Tupperware.

And the most distressing problem—for the past few days, she’d felt a pair of eyes on her as she went about her daily life, washing her face or fixing her makeup. They jabbed like two fingers into her flesh and dragged up and down, leaving indents in the nooks of her body. Somehow, she knew it was the probing touch of her friend, and each time she sensed his presence, she’d whip her head and slash her eyes around the room. No one was ever there, yet she always felt a breeze snaking down her neck like a cool breath.

But there was no more time to think: it was already 5:30, and her bus would arrive in ten minutes. This did, however, leave her with just enough time to run through the daily breathing exercises that, according to the Internet, would stimulate her parasympathetic nervous system in two minutes or less.

Closing her eyes, she inhaled, then exhaled, then inhaled, then held her breath until it pushed out against her chest. She held her breath and imagined she was a rope stretched over a deep valley. She held and imagined snow piling onto her face. She held and imagined herself throttling a brick in her grip—one

hand over the other, the coarse surface scratching her fingers—before slamming it against her head. She held and imagined herself plunging into a dull numbness. This was solace, she thought, silence and darkness and ice.

The stale air tumbled out. Now she was in an ocean. Swaying with the waves, she brought her hands to her throat, expecting the flesh there to give; indeed, her skin was dissolving, peeling away in soft, round patches, revealing the convulsing red underneath. All over her body were open wounds that bled incessantly, red strings dancing through the open water, yet she did not feel anything except a deep heat thrusting its way through her limbs: it was as if she were being rendered anew, her appendages remaking themselves from the bone up, the water aching, the water purifying, the water running, she was running, running—sprinting, back on solid ground, away from and toward a throbbing light reflected off a distant body of water; sand sprayed up to her thighs; she was not in pain, she was full of breath—

She opened her eyes. She was at her desk. Her fingers were twitching on the computer keyboard. As she blinked, the fluorescent lights blinded her; she felt the heaviness of her legs on the chair and the cool AC whispering onto her back.

Her colleague, walking past, paused in front of her.

“You good?” he asked, folding his arms over the top of her cubicle. As he looked at her, his roaming gaze became needles on her flesh; he was searching for a vein to puncture, or noticing that there was no blood left to draw.

“You seem really tired,” he added.

Cupping her elbows in her hands, she glanced at his face before returning her stare to her lap. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she responded hoarsely. Her tongue felt like a block of flesh forced into her mouth.

“Are you sure?” he replied, and when she nodded, he smiled. “Hang in there,” he said, rapping the top of the partition with his knuckles before walking away.

She stared at her hands, lifted a finger, then touched it to her brow. There was not a word written on the screen in front of her. The display was asleep. She could not remember how she had arrived at work, but she could list the names and picture the faces of all her third grade crushes, relay mushroom identifications she had memorized at eight in case she was ever stranded in a forest, and recall the color of the walls of the house she had lived in until she was ten, and for a few minutes, she sat there, too disoriented to move and increasingly afraid of a warm sensation pulsing through her chest that she could not name (Annabeth, Christine, Ximena) or that she refused to identify (death caps are always white and always kill); clickclack, click-clack, she heard (pink, pink, pink and yellow, peeling around the bottom left, covered in daisies). Click-clack, click-clack. Behind her, her coworker was typing up yet another memo about the financial woes of a company that was on the brink of bankruptcy; to her left, her other coworker—the one who spit when he talked—mumbled a mantra of numbers under his breath, the figures copulating and birthing larger figures as he went on and on and on. A senseless lineage splattered onto his desk. To her right, a small window stretched open, but she could see nothing beyond the dirty glass save for a vague outline of snowfall. In her head, she heard her college friend: Go take a nap, stop thinking so much. She felt him watching her. Take a nap and you can get back to work.

“I can’t fucking take this anymore,” she thought, or thought she thought. Now the faces all turned to gawk at her with the same eyebrows raised at the top of each dull forehead. She cleared her throat and tore her gaze from the room to look out the window.

“I’m leaving,” she said finally. The words ran clear from her throat and spilled into the air. She pushed her chair back and stood up. No one attempted to stop her as she left the room: one by one, they averted their eyes.

that she likes to imagine. When she enters the forest there, she traces the tree bark in circular motions, and when she pulls her fingers off, they stick for a moment to the trickling sap. A warm dampness tells her that it will rain soon; a bird calls for its mate, and the waves nearby whisper secrets in her ear. She is not worried about going hungry because she knows which mushrooms are safe to eat. She is not worried about being found because she knows which mushrooms are poisonous.

Always, though, there arrives a moment when she feels the other side invade her body—she feels her eyelids squeezed shut, or metal rolling on her tongue, or fabric scratching against her skin, or a gaze on her back. Always she awakens to the ocean back in its place. It is at the center of her window and she cannot unfocus her eyes to unsee the glass.

This time, though, feels different. There is a strange richness to the blue of the sky; a renewed warmth flows from the sun and sinks into her skin, and in the air lingers a sweetness she has only smelled in spring, even though it is always autumn on this side of the shore. She turns around—she has never been able to do that before—and she sees. The water is gleaming under the sun, and it oscillates in an unfamiliar, steady pattern. She sees it now. She runs until she reaches the edge between liquid and land, where the seafoam laps at her feet. Then she turns to the eyes.

She looks at you. You blink at her. The woman speaks in a voice that is not a voice. It is so difficult to extract the vision of the other from one’s understanding of the self, she says, so humor me, and close your eyes.

Well, she says, they’re still open. Instead, how about this. Let’s consider some facts. The corrosion of the body comes from skin itself—-the degradation of flesh, rendered raw in daylight—but it is only realized when the gaze fuses with skin. Do you realize this? Here, I’ll demonstrate for you, she says. You watch as she takes off her clothes (now, do you take pleasure in my bareness?) You watch as she peels off her skin (you see, I have shed myself of myself) You watch (all around me there are eyes / they see me and they seize me) She puts on her shirt (do you enjoy how I am integrated into another form?) She has forgotten to put her skin back on (I have inhabited another digestible shape / this time in the form of a hysterical amnesiac) and so her blood seeps into her shirt (I leave and enter another room / but this movement does not escape you) The body moves away, into the ocean (I / submerge underwater / slake off physical form / laugh and turn around / the laugh is a silent one / the back becomes the front / stop and start / tower below you and smile a bit / the smile is a frown as well / that gapes empty in a faceless face / your eyes move left to right / fingertips skim over your eyes and make them trace a linear path / horizontal left right vertical down down down up down / the fingers close your eyelids / the body that is here is yours / the other body dissipates / becomes liquid / the other body is not here / you remain on the shore)

ANDREA LI B’28 is considering many facts.

The girl is sucking on a piece of rusty metal in a sunlit room. It tastes salty, like sweat, or like the ocean that kisses the shore beneath her window. Still sucking the metal, she observes the water below. Today, it touches the cliffs with a tenderness, but sometimes, it beats the rocks with a desperate fury. Then sometimes it leaves, pulled back to the faraway island

Exercises of/in Attention WHAT HAPPENS WHEN NOTHING HAPPENS?

c It begins with a window. For a few seconds, a tunnel swallows the daylight, and suddenly it becomes bright again. As a train moves forward, the Norwegian landscape unfurls in slow motion: snow thickens next to the tracks, and in the distance, a mountain appears, only to recede again. This simple passage is the entire premise of a national broadcast: Bergensbanen: minutt for minutt (Bergen Train: Minute by Minute) and it shows, in a sense, nothing more than the landscape, documenting the journey of a train from Bergen to Oslo. The route is so common to Norwegians that one might expect such a broadcast to pass unnoticed, glimpsed only briefly before attention drifts elsewhere. Instead, when it aired in 2009, the broadcast drew over a million viewers.

This was only the first of many such broadcasts. In the following years, the state broadcaster Norsk rikskringkasting (NRK; Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) expanded on its initial experiment, airing a 134-hour knitting marathon, a salmon run filmed in real time, a minute-by-minute chronicle of a reindeer migration, and other similar broadcasts. The shortest of these programs lasted only one hour, the longest nearly 379 hours—roughly sixteen days. Each was broadcasted only once, aired in its full length with no interruption or temporal jumps. They were accompanied by minimal narration, and had no plot or climax. Each appeared to ask its viewers to dwell in a world where nothing seemed to happen, and to discover that this nothingness was its content.

Sakte-TV (Slow TV, as it came to be called) was never anticipated to succeed—the producers themselves expected indifference. “It’s [...] one of those ideas you get late at night, after a couple of beers[...] And when you wake up the [next] day, [you think] ‘ah, it’s not a good idea,’” Rune Møklebust, one of the producers, said in an interview. “Of course it’s boring,” Thomas Hellum, the other producer, added. Still, families gather for watch parties, and pensioners watch in sync with one another. Some Norwegians

just leave the broadcast running while doing something else entirely, as some sort of ambient audiovisual company. On average, anywhere between 500,000 and 2,000,000 viewers tune in. Even those who watch alone participate in a distinctly collective experience: Slow TV “generate[s] a sense of togetherness and unit[y],” according to Elisabeth Urdal and Roel Puijk in an article published by Sciencenorway It is tempting to simply call this unity a nostalgic imagining, to argue that Slow TV represents a longing for a return to a more synchronized self-contained world, before algorithms hyper-personalized every second of visual media consumption. Take the German show Tatort (Crime Scene, literally “the doingplace”)—a weekly crime series that has aired every Sunday night since 1970—as an example. Watching Tatort has long served as a national ritual: each weekend, roughly a third of all Germans will tune in, watch, and then talk about the episode on Monday. Unlike Slow TV, however, Tatort provides a shared event because of its plot, its suspense, and its predictability (or, sometimes, lack thereof). Slow TV, by contrast, has built its spectacle around the absence of event, around its viewers’ shared endurance of uneventfulness. Why, then, would anyone watch Slow TV voluntarily? Even its producers think it’s boring.

In the 1960s, the psychologist Daniel Berlyne proposed that our attention depends on the maintenance of what he referred to as “optimal arousal,” a balance between the familiar and unfamiliar. Viewers are drawn to a gentle oscillation between the soothingly certain and the dangerously speculative: too much novelty exhausts us, and too little deadens us. Slow TV exploits this equilibrium: the camera does not shift quickly, but it never ceases to move; the composition is stable, but it is always changing in imperceptible increments. A snowfield darkens,

a rock face glints, a bird flies by, the reflection of the camera operator flickers across the windowpane. The viewer, then, experiences the low hum of anticipation that something might—just might—happen.

This form of anticipation sustains attention. In a media environment calibrated to demand constant reaction, the gentle form of alertness elicited by Slow TV might even feel restorative: as one begins to notice the smallest details (the sound of wind in the microphone, the way light reflects on scratches in a window), one begins to notice the act of noticing itself. The appeal of Slow TV, then, might not lie in what is shown, but rather in the mode of attention it invites.

It would be easy, at this moment, to call Slow TV an antidote to sensory inundation, a reprieve from the relentlessness of an online feed. But this reading, as plausible as it sounds, doesn’t account for the question of why Slow TV, of all counteragents to overstimulation, has become so popular. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord writes that “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” For Debord, representation names the substitution of the lived experience with its image, a process in which the world is not encountered but mediated as a spectacle. The spectacle, then, is the social relation those images produce: a condition in which experience itself is displaced by its representation. In this way, the act of living becomes indistinguishable from the act of watching. Slow TV, for all its languor, is not exempt from this process: its very premise—the transformation of ‘unmediated’ life into viewable form—reproduces precisely the logic it might at first appear to resist.

To film a train journey, for example, and insist that it is ‘real’ or ‘authentic,’ is to spectacularize the ‘real’ and the ‘authentic.’ It is to convert the ordinary into an object of consumption, to extract from mundanity the very fascination of the mundane. The broadcasting of a train, the salmon, a knitting circle,

( TEXT PETER ZETTL DESIGN SEOYEON KWEON ILLUSTRATION SUZIE ZHANG )

and cruises along the fjords is not an escape from spectacle, but rather spectacle’s perfection: Slow TV is a carefully refined exposition of calm.

Yet watching need not necessarily entail passivity at all: the French philosopher Jacques Rancière argues in The Emancipated Spectator that watching is not as similar to consumption as Debord assumes.

“To look is to interpret, and interpretation is a form of action.”

To look is to interpret, and interpretation is a form of action. A viewer who decides to watch a train for seven hours does not merely receive images; they compose them, and arrange them together into a personal narrative of duration. Through this lens, the meaning of Slow TV dwells not in the footage itself, but rather in the temporal exchange between broadcast and viewer: the program reveals its full potential only when the viewer gives their time in equal measure to that which was recorded. This reciprocal giving is almost intimate, a form of co-presence sustained through parallel acts of attention where both viewer and broadcast participate in the unfolding of time.

Rancière’s spectator, then, is not Debord’s alienated consumer, but a dedicated participant in meaning-production. It is precisely this activity that, in Rancière’s framework, might turn Slow TV into a site of contemplation: when nothing happens, one turns inward to stay engaged. Most commonly, when modern media wants to evoke a specific emotional state, it will conduct the audience’s response through deliberate auditory, visual, or textual sensory input. Emotionally suggestive lyrics, evocative colors, upbeat rhythms lead the way. Slow TV is less directional in fostering mindfulness; although the scene is chosen deliberately, it is not produced with a set intention. It is precisely this less structured invitation for contemplation that renegotiates the agency the spectator has in letting their mind wander. The viewer is permitted to drift, to think alongside the image rather than through it. Consumption of media, in this way, drifts away from the principles of consumption itself: the moment the meaning of the image recedes is when it really comes forth. What we truly encounter, then, is not what the image shows, but what it allows us to feel once it becomes peripheral in significance.

These two positions—alienation and participation—appear to coexist uneasily within the same act of watching. Institutional encouragement of meditation seems almost merciful; it reads as a legitimization of rest, a de-stigmatization of deceleration. Suddenly, the state becomes a custodian of slowness. However, the expenditure of time that Slow TV requires could just as well become a surrender of agency. Watching along feels soothing, calming; the experience borders on hypnosis. What might have begun as an experiment in attention risks turning into its opposite: not an active seeing, but a passive absorption, an anesthetization. In a TED Talk about Slow TV, Hellum recalls an elderly man who reported being so enveloped in Bergensbanen, he forgot he wasn’t actually on the train at all. He even got up when the train conductor announced the last stop. This could be read through Debord’s theory of the spectacle: interest is satiated not through fulfillment but perpetual circulation, delaying or entirely deferring the recognition of representation. Nothing hails the viewer back into

their awareness of consumption. Slow TV, in this way, becomes an addictive anti-spectacular spectacle that soothes the viewer by suspending the very need for anything concrete to happen. +++

Although these arguments partly account for Norwegian audiences’ captivation by Slow TV, another reason might lie in the promotion of an exclusionary version of national identity that is captured in the televised settings. Nearly all of NRK’s programs are set in landscapes and social environments that double as symbols of a highly particular, traditional vision of Norwegian identity: the fjords, the mountains, and secluded rural interiors where people knit. These settings are not chosen arbitrarily; they represent the Norwegian national mythology commonly referred to as friluftsliv—“free-air life”—in which nature is not just scenery but the very essence of a Norwegian identity.

To watch Bergensbanen or the broadcast of a coastal voyage is not just to witness a train or boat, but to participate in a rehearsal of belonging. The landscapes through which the camera moves are the same ones found on postcards and brochures for Norwegian tourism. These images stand as emblems of continuity in a country increasingly thematizing imaginary changes to national identity. In 2004, following the eastward expansion of the European Union, a climbing number of Eastern Europeans began to emigrate to Norway. Following the accelerated urbanization and increased visibility of diversification that resulted from these patterns of migration, right-wing voices argued that migrants destabilized the essence of what it meant to be Norwegian. This modification of what had long been a near-mystically homogeneous and self-contained society was promptly made out to be a threat rather than plain change. The sociologist Roel Puijk writes that it was precisely at this moment that Slow TV emerged. Against this backdrop, the endless fjord and the untroubled snowfield read as assurance of an unaltered, untouched Norway, one that lies beyond the city suburbs.

While the producers of Slow TV might not be aware of these sentiments, their broadcasts certainly cater to them: the camera that glides through the countryside doesn’t linger in Oslo’s predominantly immigrant neighborhoods, in the spaces where change has become visible. Slow TV, for all its meditative capacity, reproduces a narrow image of who counts as Norwegian, and what styles of life are worth broadcasting. Slow TV’s seeming innocence, then, conceals a flawed representation of Norwegian identity preserved through a denial of the camera’s free movement. That these broadcasts are produced and aired by NRK—a public, state-funded institution— adds another dimension of complexity: it means that the spectacle of this ‘traditional’ tranquility is not only aesthetic but institutional. The state itself, in this way, becomes the producer of a slow, pacified rhythm. As benign—perhaps even tender—as this gesture may appear, it becomes ideological nonetheless.

What does it mean, then, to be comforted by such images? Does it mean finding pleasure in complicity? Does the act of watching fold back into a collective project, a maintenance of a national and ethnic sequestration? Are the images mere assurance that nothing ‘essential’ is being lost? To criticize this enjoyment is not to dismiss that it is genuine; the desire to watch time unfold without demanding too much from you may register as the satisfaction of a forgotten desire for some, but as estrangement for

others—especially for those whose own narratives have been carelessly omitted. In the modern economy of attention, watching the world move at the pace of your own endurance feels almost subversive, like a form of disobedience. But for whom? The program is state-sponsored. Can alignment with the state constitute subversion?

To sit through a broadcast of Slow TV is to confront the sheer materiality of time; the hours accumulate, and with them, a subtle awareness of one’s own persistence. The spectacle turns inward. You are no longer watching the journey; you are watching yourself watching it. In that recursive moment, something strange can happen: the boundary between distraction and contemplation begins to dissolve. When nothing happens, the surface of nothingness both conceals and gestures toward what sustains it: the machinery of the broadcast, the ideology of the state, the slow production of belonging. The same stillness that seeks to foster contemplation, then, paradoxically also obscures the political implications of its program.

+++

Suddenly, the train exits another tunnel and light shines through the window. The snow begins to recede as the tracks curve toward Oslo, and only now does it become apparent that the broadcast has actually been going for six hours. What initially seemed like a journey through nature now appears like a passage through the frozen idea of a nation, a landscape codified into harmony. Now it becomes clear this is not your window, this is not your train; it is a carefully framed glimpse of belonging. A bird flits past the glass, drawing attention to itself instinctively, and it is hard to look away, caught in the quiet image.

PETER ZETTL B’28 can be spotted in the background of the Bergensbanen program, if you watch closely enough.

( TEXT EMERSON RHODES

DESIGN

SOOHYUN IRIS LEE

ILLUSTRATION ROSEMARY BRANTLEY )

c What do I tell people about Coleslaw? Coleslaw is a DJ. Coleslaw is a drag queen. Coleslaw hosted a screening of Pink Flamingos at AS220. Coleslaw ate an entire Italian sub sandwich while clips of vintage hardcore pornography played in the background. +++

It seems almost obvious that AS220, the leftist Downtown Providence arts collective that provides affordable artist housing above their performance space, would screen John Waters’ 1972 film Pink Flamingos. Long hailed as the holy grail of queer, camp cinema, the film stars the drag queen, Divine, as she competes to defend her title as the filthiest person alive. The queer politics of the film are those of defiance. The characters commit all the crimes viewers have been taught to be disgusted by, among other things: rape, kidnapping, theft, incest, coprophilia, cannibalism, human trafficking, and blackmail. Oddly, the dominant tone of the film is comedy. The absurdity of the film’s politics is summed up in Divine’s iconic speech: “Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!” It is so absurd that one can’t help but laugh.

The screening of Pink Flamingos was prefaced by a screening of the 1968 documentary The Queen. While Pink Flamingos centers on filth, The Queen focuses on beauty. The documentary follows several contestants at the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest—a Miss America–style pageant for drag queens. Much of drag culture, then and now, revolves around the queen’s ability to be a specific definition of “beautiful.” In the 1967 pageant, the judging criteria were: walk, talk, bathing suit, gown, makeup and hairdo, and beauty, with beauty weighted the heaviest. During the final round of judging, Crystal LaBeija (the only Black drag queen competing) was placed fourth. She storms off the stage and monologues to the camera about her unfair placement. Who is considered beautiful in the drag world echoes the pageant world: the scorecard is heavily stacked in favor of the white contestants. The film is not unaware of this. While the monologue is comedic at times, for instance, in a huff, LaBeija turns to the camera and spits: “I declare her [Rachel, the winner] one of the uglier people of the world,” there is a cutting line toward the end: LaBeija, tussling with a voice behind the camera, declares, “I have a right to show my color, darling.”

Drag in the late 1960s was not a popular movement, so the film’s documentary style is surprising in its open-mindedness. The queens are people, drag is their art. The film has a distinctly liberal politics, but even still, the place of beauty is not in defiance. The ‘best’ drag queen is the queen that doesn’t look like she’s in drag at all; the contestants plump foam breasts and contour their faces with the explicit intention of drawing upon hegemonic female beauty, not a separate ‘drag’ beauty. LaBeija does not approach

drag differently from any other contestant: her gowns are just as sparkly, her hair is just as big, her eyeliner is just as cutting. She is not attempting a version of beauty that is different from her white co-competitors. It is simply a matter of her skin color; the fact that she presents as a black woman prevents the judges from seeing her as feminine and thus, seeing her as beautiful. The film’s subject matter is queer, but it fails to challenge the cisnormative ideas that dominate the queer space. The queens want to be beautiful, yes, but why this beauty? The presumption is that they want to appear feminine, but why this femininity? The film has no response. When LaBeija storms off, the film becomes weirdly apolitical. It includes LaBeija’s monologue, so it does seem cognizant of the issues that LaBeija brings up, but once that scene is over, it cuts to a melancholic shot of Rachel alone with her crown. Viewers are left with one final question: who deserved to win? It is almost completely ambiguous. The transition from The Queen’s restrained approach to queer beauty to Pink Flamingos’ deliberate disaster-con of all politics is a harsh one, one that Coleslaw’s performance is meant to bridge. After watching ninety minutes of classic drag performance, I fully expected Coleslaw to follow in a similar suit: hyperfeminity, glitter, gowns, lip-syncing to Kylie Minogue. Instead, a series of black and white clips from vintage hardcore pornography started playing. In all honesty, I can’t, with any accuracy, recount what was happening in these individual clips. I couldn’t even tell you whether there was music playing in the background. One of my few coherent memories is watching a man with a classic porn mustache vigorously (badly) eating out an unseen woman (with bush!), and thinking that’s surprisingly progressive. The clips flickered between each other with epileptic speed, and by the time I registered that I was watching porn, I was watching Coleslaw strut out to a table, unwrap an Italian sub, and messily consume it while the porn still played in the back. The paralyzing effect of the two images simultaneously cannot be understated. The performance was an exercise in extremely unusual visual stimulation. By unusual here, I do mean the pairing of the two. Seeing porn displayed so publicly produces the aforementioned paralyzing effect; it is not every day that you consume porn amongst strangers, and my first instinct was visceral discomfort. The Italian sub, while less obviously subversive, produced a similar reaction in me. We are trained not to be messy eaters; we are told to chew with our mouths closed, and to take one bite at a time. To watch someone act in direct defiance of what one has been conditioned to think is ‘correct’ almost feels comedic.

Then, Waters’ Pink Flamingos plays. Divine is a drag queen, but unlike the participants in The Queen, she seems to be striving for something other than a picture-perfect, cisnormative beauty. Divine does not claim to be beautiful. Divine’s only achievement is her filth, which she wears like a badge of honor. In the film,

Divine’s filth is mostly a composite of the various crimes that she commits: murder, cannibalism, incest, etc. One of the ways that filth is visually enforced, however, is through the expression of beauty. The characters dress in eccentric colors, overly done makeup, and obviously dyed hair. When watching the films back to back, it is clear: this is not the beauty of The Queen. The only character that does not engage in this particular definition of filth is Edie. Edie is Divine’s mother, and, despite her advanced age, she’s bound to a crib and a diaper. She is of pure heart, but she is relegated to a baby-like filth—literally, sitting in her own shit. However, while Divine seems to seek out her filth, Edie’s seems almost coincidental. Edie’s infantilization works to such a degree that you could substitute Edie with a literal child and receive an almost identical movie.

One of Edie’s defining qualities is that she loves eggs. Almost all of her dialogue in the film centers around her desire for eggs and her need for Divine or Mrs. Cotton (a friend of Divine’s) to make eggs for her. The centerpiece of this obsession is the Eggman, who, like a milkman, stops by Divine’s trailer to make deliveries. The irony in Edie’s obsession with the Eggman is that Divine and her family have chickens. Divine’s son, Crackers, lives in a chicken coop next to her trailer, but the chickens in the coop are not for eggs. Instead, they exist for Crackers’ sadistic pleasure. We realize this in the scene where Crackers rapes a woman while crushing a chicken between both of their bodies. The Eggman serves as a barrier of separation; Edie cannot get eggs from the chickens because, in doing so, she would cross into the deliberate filth of her family, something she seems wholly uninterested in.

It’s hard to imagine what Pink Flamingos would be without Edie’s character. Divine is a cannibal and murderer, Crackers is a rapist, and the Marbles (a competing filthy couple) are kidnappers and human traffickers. The politics of camp, queerness, and absurdity are not lost on me. The film is aware that these acts are wrong, yet does them anyway. This mirrors the project of queer defiance: to act against the perceived arbitrariness of morality. This is not to suggest that being queer is the same as committing murder, but at the time of the film’s release, being queer was as much of a crime as murder. Thus, their transgression of all laws elicits a liberatory feeling in queer audiences. As the tagline of the film posits, Pink Flamingos is “an exercise in poor taste.” Waters and the film are clearly not endorsing the crimes themselves. The constant reaffirmation of the filth of the characters despite the enjoyment they clearly take in it creates a clear division between portrayal and endorsement. Again, the tagline “An Exercise in Poor Taste” is self-aware enough for most reasonable audiences to assume that all participants in the film understand the artistic value in the filth of the film. Without Edie, however, watching 92 minutes of a filth-off does make one grow weary. Edie’s scenes are moments of

sincerity. They maintain some of the absurd tone the film has curated—it is a grown woman roleplaying as a child—but still, the warmth that Edie elicits in the characters and the audience is significant. In this way, Edie’s character provides a necessary respite from the general filth of the film. Edie is only gross because of the production’s deliberate uglification of her appearance. She does not commit a crime; she does not endorse crime; she doesn’t witness a crime. She sits in the trailer and wants only for the Eggman.

It’s worth noting that Edie’s devotion to eggs is the only instance in Pink Flamingos where someone eats actual food. The Marble Couple attach hot dogs to Mr. Marble’s genitals in order to flash young women and steal their purses; Divine eats dog shit; Divine and her friends eat people. There is an abundance of food, but there is very little functional eating. However, Edie eats eggs. When she requests them, there is no ‘filthy’ twist. She doesn’t want the eggs raw, she doesn’t want eggs that aren’t from a chicken, she doesn’t want the eggs for some nefarious purpose—she simply likes to eat them. It is the most innocent desire of the entire film. This love for eggs is narratively rewarded as well. Edie finds love with her Eggman, who, accepting her as she is, carries her in a wheelbarrow off into the sunset. Edie’s ending is fitting for her because it fulfills her desire.

In Edie’s absence, the film starts to blur the line between the filthy characters and filthy people. Once Edie is gone, filth seems not just to consume the characters, but the actors themselves. The final declarative scene of the film is a voice-over of a narrator saying, “Watch as Divine proves that she’s not just the filthiest person in the world, she’s also the filthi est actress in the world.” What then ensues is a fourth wall break, in which Divine, facing the audience, eats dog shit off the ground, as the Patti Page song “(How Much Is) That Doggie in The Window?” plays. The film’s final choice is to go beyond the character and to implicate the actors themselves in a filthifying mech anism. Divine’s actor actually eats shit in the ultimate act of service to the film’s thesis: why not? Filth, in the scene, moves from a diegetic statement to a political one. Waters is interested in seeing push the boundries of what he can show, and what his actors will do. Not for any particular reason, necessarily, simply as his personal artistic philosophy. With Edie gone, Waters and the film becomes untethered from the sincerity it once contained. It’s queer, this final scene, a final transgression probing the viewer in an explicit political manner to beg the viewer for one final consideration of social acceptibility. Though messy eating and pornography are not the same as cannibalism and murder, Coleslaw’s performance and lious sexual politics. While gresses almost every sexual norm, Coleslaw’s performance specifically indulges in a publicization of sex that the critic Lauren Berlant refers to as “a wedge to the transformation of those social norms [cis-hetnormativity] that require only its [sex’s] static intelligibility or its deadness as a source of meaning.” In essence, non-normative (non-cishet) sex is disruptive because it refuses the singular, static conception of sex (private, penetrative, between man and woman) that heteronormative norms enforce. Private, penetrative, and heterosexual sex are not necessarily bad. Rather, Berlant finds issue with these particular forms of sex when they become hegemonic norms, enforced through social shame and legislation

(such as the banning of queer identity through the Don’t Say Gay bill). Referencing the concept of the “dead metaphor” (in itself a metaphor whose imaginative power has been eroded away by sheer overuse), they argue that the presence of sex in public challenges the “deadness” of heteronormative sex by imagining new constellations of pleasure and desire. To watch porn in public, or sex on screen, is to defy the natural acceptance of sex as private. We perceive porn as filthy because it’s a fundamentally voyeuristic impulse, and to admit to watching it for pleasure is to admit to that impulse, to one’s participation in “unproductive” sex, and to the violation of sex’s supposed sanctity (in America, at least). Sexual filth in both Coleslaw’s performance and Pink Flamingos is created through the collective visual presence of sex, given that there’s a societal shame attached to pornography. Thus, it felt strange to watch porn with 30 strangers. There was a weird excitement in the air, a lot of cheering, but it’s hard to separate the cheers for the announcement of the drag performance from the cheers for the pornography itself. Porn’s presence in Coleslaw’s performance, however, was not meant to be arousing. The clips flip too quickly and are sped up too much to ever enjoy them as pornography. Instead, they become part of a larger artistic piece. Much like Edie, the Italian sub adds a slightly more accessible layer. What is Coleslaw’s performance without the Italian sub? It’s just porn. While the subversive power of visual sex is still present, what use is it to simply defy expectations and elicit a reaction simply from publicization? The Italian sub, much like Edie’s eggs, provides a necessary separation from

Edie’s love of eggs or Coleslaw’s dinner was not the point, so to speak, of the performances. The central tenet of both is not food—it’s filth. As pieces of art, the performances needed to do more than just provoke the audience with a series of increasingly eccentric images; they needed to be grounded in the real. Oddly enough, Coleslaw and Pink Flamingos mirror The Queen in this regard. In The Queen, we are cast into a world of drag pageants trapped in a specific era; the only things that connect us to the queens’ stories are their testimonials out of drag, about their families, their train trips, and what they want for dinner. Eggs and sandwiches serve as an unmistakably real part of the performance. It is not just that Coleslaw is showing me porn; she is also eating a sandwich. In Pink Flamingos, one might never want to associate with Divine, but in her care for her mother (specifically indulging her desire for eggs), you can’t help but feel a certain proximity to Divine. Thus, both works use food to assuage an otherwise uncomfortable viewing experience.

Ater Coleslaw finishes her sub, the lights in the theater turn back on. A man, dressed very plainly, enters the stage and thanks Coleslaw. He starts to introduce the next film, Pink Flamingos, but catches himself. “Does anyone have any questions left for Coleslaw before we move on?” There’s a silence in the room. A woman in the back speaks up: “How was the sandwich?” Coleslaw wipes her hands on her dress and yells from the DJ booth, “It was delicious.”

EMERSON RHODES B’28 prefers muffuletta and an intimate human connection.

Go Look!

c You trudge up the hill, cheeks numb, Merrells crusted with ice. Under February’s thin sun, everything’s dull, lackluster. Your calf spasms. Your dorm is one million miles away. Then—spear of orange. Orange? There, by the bike racks, seven traffic cones—seven strokes of good luck. What a relief, what a prize, that vital orange!

Traffic cones are designed to be hyper-visible objects: that’s stating the obvious. The semi-fluorescent, saturated orange and the dazzling stripes of reflective tape perform a visual exclamation. Come look! Yet even as the traffic cone points toward itself, it must also—to fulfill its function— gesture away. Redirect your attention to the circumstances that surround me, the traffic cone instructs. Locate the hazard, be appropriately cautious, carry on. Look at me, do not look at me. Then there’s the issue of the traffic cone’s vernacular quality. Repetition has demoted that delectable, flamboyant orange to a rank-and-file position in our streetside palette. A traffic cone is a traffic cone is a traffic cone. Visible, but not particular. Twin to all others. After my February revelation, I decided I’d stop to appreciate each traffic cone’s individuality, its color, its objecthood. Close attention translates so quickly into joy. Go look!

( TEXT LILY YANAGIMOTO DESIGN ANNA WANG )

LILY YANAGIMOTO B’27 is three cones in a trench coat.

There’s Evil Indie Air

...but at least you’ll look hot?

c The time has come. It is Halloween. This weekend is the scariest time of year for reasons entirely unrelated to spooky decor, horror movies, or supernatural phenomena. It’s much worse than any of those. This is a weekend fraught with Things Happening, and with the evil energy that’s been hovering around lately, Things are the last thing we need. And yet they march unfailingly toward us in a perfect line, ready to strike us down when we least expect it: group costume drama, poorly coordinated plans that have a 50% chance of falling through, sort-of-bad last-minute outfits, and weird drunk interactions that make you want to rip your skin off a little bit. And probably also hooking up with someone you said you’d never hook up with [again] (oopsies!*). We must resist.

But for many inhabitants of this hill we call home (College Hill, Providence, Rhode Island), Halloween is also an opportunity. Famously, it’s the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it. Or, depending on your school of thought, Halloween is the one night a year when you are your true self. Sometimes both are true. Or, Halloween is one of many nights of the year where you can put your self-appointed Good Taste on full display via a niche and esoteric costume whose meaning you will spend an inordinate amount of time explaining to all those dumb dumb silly little people who would never, ever get the reference. I have always believed that Halloween costumes are the window to the soul. Costumes can tell you

that sometimes the soul is a little bit sticky and smells kind of weird. Sometimes the soul clearly loves the sound of its own voice. Sometimes the soul is just really, really horny. Dear readers, my original plan for this super-special issue was to create an approval matrix rating costumes from despicable to brilliant, lowbrow to highbrow (entirely original and all my idea that I came up with by myself, btw), such that you could make sweeping judgments on everyone you see on Halloweekend and decide whether you like and/or respect them as human beings. Then I realized that college Halloween costumes can never truly be brilliant or highbrow. So I have narrowed this matrix to a single quadrant. You can still use it to make value judgments on people, though.

Freudian slip

MagicMike(straight,male)

Anythinginvolvinginflatables

“This is my costume” shirt:

That guy from The Bear

Female playboy bunny, male Hugh Hefner

Someone else who’s goingtobeattheparty

Schrodinger’s cat

Challengers throuple

Elphaba and Glinda

Frog and Toad

Louvre robbers NickWildeandJudy Hopps

male Magic Mike (lesbian)

The Coldplay couple

Magic Mike (straight,female)

Performative

Policeofficer (sexy)

( TEXT ANGELA LIAN DESIGN KAYLA RANDOLPH )

Thing 1 and Thing 2

Maleplayboybunny, female Hugh Hefner

Black cat

*Wasitreallyanoopsies?Ordidyouspecificallyengineeryourcostumeandfunctionattendancetocatchtheir attention? Be honest.

Charli XCX

Kpop Demon Hunters

Labubu

Sinnerscharacters

Sexy schoolgirl

Luigi Mangione

The Bulletin

EVENTS

c Clinic Esperanza

Thanksgiving Food Drive

October 28–November 20, Monday–Thursday 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

60 Valley St Suite 105

If planning to bring perishable items, please email info@aplacetobehealthy. org to coordinate a drop-off time

c Museum of Natural History Halloween Night (21+)

October 31, 7–11 p.m.

Roger Williams Park Museum of Natural History and Planetarium, 1000 Elmwood Ave

$20 tickets (online only)

c Big Fall Book Sale

November 1, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m.

Rochambeau Library, 708 Hope St

$5 to fill a bag

ISCO Spirits, 1 Sims Ave #103

Donate a box of produce and canned goods to local RI families

c Discussion and Reading — The Master’s Tools by Michael McCarthy w/ Thea Riofrancos

November 6, 6 p.m.

Riffraff, 60 Valley St #107A Free

c The Humanities Forum Keynote Lecture — “In the Open Time of Dispossession: Camp, Colony, Palestine” w/ Nasser Abourahme

November 6, 5–6:30 p.m.

Free Register at QR code

NOTICE

c Discussion and Reading — Man Hating Psycho by Iphgenia Baal w/ Nina Sannes and Cheyenne Mann

November 1, 6 p.m.

Riffraff, 60 Valley St #107A Free

c RSJPxAS220 show “To Every Orange Tree” Opening Reception

November 1, 5–7 p.m.

AS220 115 Empire St Free

c Discussion and Reading — True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Mathiessen by Lance Richardson and Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade

November 2, 6 p.m.

Riffraff, 60 Valley St #107A Free

c Criminal Justice System Book Talk

— Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future by Emile Suotonye DeWeaver w/ Brandon Robinson, James Monteiro, Melonie Perez, and Lex Morales

November 4, 7–9 p.m.

DECI Auditorium, Salomon Center for Teaching, 79 Waterman St Free

c Thanksgiving Box Community Kickoff

November 6, 5–10 p.m.

Due to the federal government shutdown, the USDA has warned that SNAP benefits may not be issued for the month of November. See the following resources in order to prepare:

Find a food pantry near you: www. rifoodbank.org/find-food

Meals on Wheels: www.rimeals.org

United Way RI Emergency Line: Dial 211 for immediate assistance

Mount Hope Farm Mutual Aid. Give what you can, take what you need. Instagram: @mounthopefarm

Address: 250 Metacom Ave, Bristol, RI 02809

Food Not Bombs Instagram: @food.not.bombs.providence

Feed RI/Hope Market Instagram: @feedri401

The Space Providence $150 grocery support Instagram: @thespace.providence Information at link in bio

Providence Vegan Deli, 783 Hope St Free meals to those in need, no questions asked

Request Meals from PVD Meal Train

MUTUAL AID

On October 14, ICE kidnapped Mamadou, a beloved Providence community member, after racially profiling and detaining him and other members of his household. Mamadou is an asylum-seeker from Mauritania who is deeply involved with his local community. The Refugee Dream Center is raising funds for Mamadou’s legal counsel. Donate at the QR code above.

Reversed –

“To Every Orange Tree” addresses anti-imperialism and political resistance. It rejects monopoly capitalism, commits to decolonization, and mobilizes toward tangible power. This exhibition remounts works previously installed in the spring of 2025 at the RISD Carr Haus Café. In the week following the show’s opening, this exhibition was forcibly removed by the school administration and Public Safety. The current iteration of the show combines works from RISD students and alumni in the previous exhibition with new works from members of the Providence community. The programming of “To Every Orange Tree” will center around collecting donations for several individuals and their families as they seek food, shelter, and medical aid under the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Donate to the funds above.

Opportunities to Donate to Local Food Distribution Organizations Donate to Your Neighborhood Food Pantry Instagram: @yourneighborhoodfoodpantry

Donate to the RI Food Bank

Donate Food w/ Project Weber/RENEW Amazon Wishlist

Email aroman@weberrenew. org to drop off a meal for the community.

What a time to give into your own charms, a time when the borders between reality and something ‘other’ become blurry. Let that magic swell around you however you see fit: protection or bold action. Love or revenge. Your closeness to the mystical can be dangerous, too. Be wary, and do not forget to guard your soul As the days get shorter, we must look for alternate sources of light. In the November haze, see the streetlights along the water as they pulse. See the jack-olanterns as they smile from porches or windowsills. On the eighth floor of a high rise above the pedestrian bridge, watch the orange light flicker while two people dance past it. Imagine them smiling.

The Magician Upright – willpower, desire, creation, Reversed – trickery, illusions, out of touch

The Sun Upright – joy, success, celebration

negativity, depression, sadness

( TEXT LILA ROSEN & JEFFREY POGUE