The College Hill Independent — Vol 51 Issue 6

Tarini Tipnis B’26.5

Selim

Angela Lian

Lila Rosen & Jeffrey Pogue TINNITUS

Masthead

MANAGING

Sabine

Nadia

WEEK IN

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

Paulina Gąsiorowska

Emilie Guan

Coby Mulliken

DEAR INDY

Angela Lian

BULLETIN BOARD

Jeffrey Pogue

Lila Rosen

MVP

Mamdani's wife, G-d, Mikayla Kennedy

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

Naomi Nesmith

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

MISSION STATEMENT

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

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

Week in the Nees

( TEXT MARIA GOMBERG DESIGN CHELSEA LIU ILLUSTRATION SUZIE ZHANG )

our friends suggests that we should buy a Guinness and split it seven ways using straws, milkshake style. I conjecture that you can’t do that with a dark beer, and that it’s not classy what we are doing and that everyone should behave. Nick tells me to look at my bloody face in his phone camera, and to “shut the fuck up.” There is that joking of his.

Instead of buying anything we kind of awkwardly mill around at the bar until the bartender kindly asks us to show ID. I do so happily sometimes unprompted. Everyone else is a wuss and takes it as a sign to leave.

c It’s Wednesday. We are on the town. I am twentyone-and-a-half years old and I have a Montgomery County Library card to prove it. Just kidding, it’s my real ID, and you should get one too. I went to the DMV last week, so I can tell you how to make an appointment. I’ve had vodka soda before. I also went to Paris on family vacation once—they drink absinthe over there. It tastes like licking a bulb of fennel and makes you high. You should try it. I love books, and movies. I am tall, and I am ready to fucking party. Let’s. Get. Lit.

We are on the town. We haven’t even pregamed, because that is for babies! We had drinks with dinner that our friend made using a mortar and pestle. He crushed that ice so thin it was basically water. There was also wine in the chicken dish and in the rice. Purple rice we called it. We ate it, and now we are tipsy. Tastefully tipsy. And we have all talked about our former friend’s new friends.

I am wearing Blundstones and a cardigan. Nothing special, but I look hot.

It’s Nick’s 21st—mine was six months ago—so we are going to the bars. I’ve been to many bars. I like a Dive. I’ve been to Glou, Seaweeds, Wickpub Nick-a–Nees—you name it, I drink there. Nick has never been to Nick-a-Nees which is funny because his name is Nick. You can’t blame him because he isn’t 21 yet, and he didn’t have a fake because he didn’t go in on the order freshman year because we weren’t good enough friends yet. Now, I want him.

There are seven of us going out tonight, and we are doing this thing where we go to seven bars and each one of us buys a round at one bar. By the end of the night, each one of us will have had seven drinks. One per bar. But each of us would have only had to pay for one drink. No. That’s not right. For one check. Is the term tab appropriate to use? Bill. That way we can all try all of the bars and decide once and for all which is the best bar.

We are going to go east to west, and north to south. We hit the ‘Weeds first. That’s what we call it. We would have started at the GCB if it weren’t full of ops. Man, everybody I’ve ever kissed is down there throwing darts and getting hammered. What a freakshow! At weedies we get a pitcher for like seven dollars. That’s a dollar per person. That’s pretty good. We have this thing that we do where we heckle the bartender—we call him by a different name every time. Once we also took nautical decor from the bathroom, and now we have an oar in our living room. Today we each drank half a plastic cup of watereddown pale ale. Beer is an acquired taste that I have acquired and that I am sure that one day you will too. Fuuuuuck I’m sooooooo faded…

We are back on the town. Mac forgot his wallet, so we all had to wait for him on the curb. It’s fucking cold on the street, all these bitches are wearing tank tops? I have this cardigan. I am smart. I dress

smartly. It makes me look like I have places to teach. Like Cornell. Mac is back. I guess we are going into GLU. Glu is French French for drinking? Or maybe fish? We order a round of drinks for the table but also a chocolate chip cookie. Some bars have things you can snack on, even Dives. I am disturbed to find out that the chairs were plastic. They look so inviting from the window. I mean I’ve been here before and everything! I just thought—I mean remembered–this place as classy? I ordered an old fashioned, stirred please. It tastes like shit! I take big sips of it but it doesn’t make me feel too hot. The people at the next table are on a date. They are talking about moving together after only six months of dating. We scoff into our cookie. Who does this shit. Pffft. Milenials. We walk back into the street. I think we might have forgotten to tip. But it was hard to tell under that dim lighting. As we wait for our friends to come out of the bathroom, the sweet smell of CHOMP comes wafting in our direction. I love CHOMP because they have elevated American fare, which is actually my favorite global cuisine. One time I went to CHOMP on the first date with a guy from my sustainability course. He ordered a CHOMP Mac and Cheese burger, which is maybe a little bit of a red flag but otherwise he was very nice it just didn’t really work out. That is kind of why I like Nick. He isn’t so nice but we are very compatible. He can be very deprecating of himself and others which is very funny.

Once everyone pees at Glu, and all of us are finally ready to go, we keep on walking down Ives. The next stop is a new spot. We love checking out new spots near us. There aren’t a lot of people we know there yet. No ops or anything. No ops, just vibes. Club Frills is fun! It’s like…elevated. We ordered a bunch of cocktails and a jello shot that came shaped like a deviled egg. We couldn’t tell if it was vegan or not, so Meg couldn’t try it. She was very disappointed and wept bitterly into Nick’s sleeve. I wanted to throw my “teeny-weeny-martini” in her unkempt, fucked-up, snarky, shit-eating face. Martinis are super classy, but I can’t lie, some tastes are not as easy to acquire as others. I guess the same thing could be said about stupid idiot Meg…Anyway…Things got a little tense for a second there, but they have a claw machine and really small tacos, so how mad can you be?

By the time we leave the bar, people are visibly wasted. I am really drunk too, but I think you can’t tell. I drank in high school so I am really good at performing sobriety. Ask me to walk a line right now and I’ll do it. See? I am touching my nose. I can do it with my eyes closed, and also while jumping up and down, on one foot. Watch me? Is everyone watching? Wait guys… Fuck.

Well, that was a flop! Onto the bars for GenXers! The Point and The East End wouldn’t let us in, because apparently my “face is bleeding a concerning amount” and because “we have a hard time believing any of you will buy anything here and also we are a little concerned that you might be trafficking that girl in the cardigan,” respectively. Nick’s RISD friend, who’s name is Nick, had a tomato on him (he is quirked up like that) so we threw it at the store front of the East End. We are so impromptu.

A couple people wanted to go home after that, including Nick, but I begged him to keep going. We only had two bars left on our list, and the skyline looks romanti I mean! Beautiful! Classy! Hot—no not Hot! It looks good from the not-pedestrian bridge. The car bridge. Ghaaaaaaaaa!!!!

Everyone capitulates to me. They usually do. My great grandmother’s late fourth husband was a hunchback who achieved both love and greatness due to his resilience and zeal—it runs in the extended family. So after some coaxing we went on to a tiny bar. Now this is what I call class. It’s like having drinks in a country club, or a backyard. It’s also closed now, so you can’t have any. We remember when Providence was different and better and had better bars. You remember, the new gentrified Providence of the 2020s. Now it’s all Starbucks on Thayer and Dunkin on Gano. If they build another Antonios or Bajas I’ll lose it.

I fall flat on my face outside the Pizza Marvin. I think that’s my professor. I’m pretty sure her butch wife, and their many butch children watched me eat shit. I hope I didn’t ruin their marinara pies. I crawl to WickPub on all fours.

By the time we get there, nobody really wants to buy drinks. But Nick wants a shirt, which apparently they give you on your twenty-first birthday. When we ask for a shirt they look at us like we are crazy. One of

1. This is a real menu item at the (relatively) new bar on Ives. It’s made with something called Weenie distillate, and is priced at $12.50, which is on the lower end of all their cocktails. If, like me, you are disturbed by diminutives, I recommend getting the JAUNE JAWN aka the JOHN JOHN (Again, this is a real menu item). It is a chartreuse-based cocktail that somehow manages to be made both with plum vinegar and yellow bell pepper.

Tiny Bar is just a few houses away from Nick-ANees. You can actually hear the live music coming from over there. Nick-A-Nees is my favorite bar if you can’t tell. It’s a real Dive, as in they sell little neck clams and people bring their dogs to fight for a turn at the billiard table. My cool friend, whose dad is a medium-famous North-East based folk-country star, took me there when I was having a hard day. I had a cider and cried to the cover of Rivers and Roads. There is a jukebox, shit strapped to the ceiling, and cake-mix cake on the food menu—grunge aesthetic. I insist we start going there immediately, as in right now, our drinks can’t wait.

By the time we arrive my face is really swollen. People look at me kind of funny, but I don’t care about what others think, I am just me. It’s still kind of summer so there is a band of seven 40-75 year old men and a nine year old girl playing string instruments outside. It’s very beautiful. It is like the great American West. I take a little bathroom break to tend to my wounds before my night really starts. There is a Miller High Life Mirror—in my reflection I see that I’ve lost a sleeve and my chin is crooked. I smile a toothless grin, and go back out. As I walk past the bar, Dwayne, the bartender, gives me a knowing nod. I’m a regular here. This is my spot and nobody can take it away from me.

Most of our friends seem to have left while I was gone. It’s just Nick and Meg left, swaying to a mandolin solo. I decided to take charge of my life. I kiss him, with all four of my remaining teeth right in the middle of Nick-A-Nees. It was fuckin’ perfect, and I hate her.

MARIA GOMBERG B’26 imagines a crazy night out.

THIS IS FOR ALL OF US

COLLEGE HILL DEPORTATION DEFENSE NETWORK AND THE FIGHT FOR IMMIGRANTS WITHIN RHODE ISLAND

*For the sake of legal and professional protection, some of the interviewees in this article have been anonymized.*

c On November 6, 2024, the day after Trump’s election as the 47th president of the United States, undocumented Brown student M felt “melancholic” and “shocked.”

“When Trump was elected, nothing was safe,” M remarked. M is a member of the Brown Dream Team, a student group dedicated to supporting and advocating for the undocu+ community on campus and in Providence. “I just knew it was going to be an extremely difficult four years, since he kept saying he was going to come after immigrants harder than ever.”

M was not alone in this concern. For V, another undocumented Brown student, finding out Trump won the election was crushing, but not surprising. “I had already accepted the fact that he would be elected and become the president before the results were even out,” V said. “Once my fears were confirmed, I had to pull myself together.”

On January 20, 2025, the night of Trump’s inauguration, the president signed off on a slew of executive orders that instituted sweeping attacks on asylum laws, refugee admissions, and birthright citizenship. The administration also regulated cartel activity across the southern border, labeling cartels and international gangs as foreign terrorist organizations, and declared a state of emergency to allow military control of the border. These orders, paired with the Laken Riley Act, signed on January 29, 2025, which mandated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain immigrants charged with criminal offenses prior to conviction, laid the foundation for an extensive and violent attack on immigrants in the United States.

In Rhode Island, Trump’s campaign has spurred increased organizing around immigration. “People understood when [Trump] was elected that protest and community building was necessary,” Aidan Choi B’26, a community organizer, said. “There was an energy present.” This energy manifested in an outpour of mobilization efforts in defense of immigrant communities—one which has since reconfigured collaboration between Providence organizing groups. Outreach branches such as the College Hill Deportation Defense Network (CHDDN), otherwise known as the College Hill Outreach Group, emerged, creating a basis for additional community organizing.

“Attacks against all of us.”

The group that would become the Deportation Defense Coalition of Rhode Island (DDC)—composed of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and Alliance to Mobilize our Resistance (AMOR)—was first brought together as an early coalition dedicated to planning the “We Fight Back” national protest on the day of Trump’s inaguration, which sought to address the “long-term struggle” against “the many attacks we knew Trump would launch,” according to Choi. However, as the need for a coalition dedicated to unified deportation defense became apparent, weekly planning meetings for the protests soon became meetings for the DDC.

The coalition is made up of six outreach groups based primarily in Providence: Southside, West End, Central Falls/Pawtucket, Greater Olneyville (including Silverlake), North Providence, and College Hill.

In addition to educating the public on their rights and providing support to Rhode Island communities affected by ICE, the DDC runs a phone hotline: a safe, verifiable place to report ICE sightings across Rhode Island. Deportation defense hotlines run by organizations such as AMOR and ONA have existed in Providence before, which, according to Choi, laid the groundwork for a network “as widely developed as [the] one that has been done by the DDC.”

DDC and its ICE alert hotline were released at the February “Chinga Tu Maga” protest and rally, organized by AMOR and PSL, as a means of consolidating a network to address ICE activity occurring in the Southside, West End, and the Greater Olneyville neighborhoods. But, as time progressed, the number of reports in different regions skyrocketed.

After a high schooler’s encounter with ICE at Kennedy Plaza, in which, according to Choi, the student was “profiled and shaken down,” volunteers from Brown’s campus and the College Hill community mobilized, taking to buses around Kennedy Plaza to inform students and the public on their rights. As abductions at the Garrahy Judicial Complex and Providence County Superior Court increased over the summer, the need for a College Hill network, which was officially started this September, became obvious.

“it’s like living in a jail cell”

For undocumented students, receiving support from their peers is a contentious issue. “People don’t understand [undocumented] status and the limitations,” V said. “They know it’s ‘a bad thing,’ but

( TEXT NAOMI NESMITH DESIGN ROSE HOLDBROOK ILLUSTRATION LUNA TOBAR )

people don’t understand the specific limitations […] People should know what it entails to have [an undocumented] identity.”

Those limits are both mundane and all-encompassing: ineligibility for certain jobs, research funding, internships, or study abroad; fear of flying; worry that any interaction with police could spiral. Some undocumented and DACA-mented students structure their whole academic paths around buying time in the US. “Students with this background pursue research so that they can stay in the country longer and do something about their status later,” V said.

At the same time, V emphasized that most undocumented people’s aspirations are painfully ordinary: “We all just want to live a normal life. Many undocumented people’s biggest dream is to work. I just want to have a job and be employed,” V paused. “That’s dehumanizing at times. It should be a given—and we should be allowed to dream bigger.”

Etta Robb B’26 described the current moment bluntly. “Working people and immigrant people are under such heavy attack right now,” she said, pointing to the sheer scale of ICE activity in the state. “It’s not being talked about enough. There’s a lack of awareness because ICE hasn’t made it onto campus, but

there have been over 300 people detained in Rhode Island by ICE so far, some being as young as 3 years old […] There’s so much fear for people that they’re not leaving their homes or going to the store or the doctors. Fear is the new pandemic for so many people because of ICE.”

Robb emphasized that for her, protection from this fear is best found in community. “A lot of what’s happening with ICE is showing us that the best way to protect each other is with each other. Not an institution looking to comply with federal mandates.”

Choi described the logic of ICE raids in succinct terms. “The whole purpose of ICE is terror, right? The whole purpose of one kidnapping is to make sure that the entire community cannot function. No one’s picking their kids up from school. No one’s going to the grocery store. A community is literally paralyzed.”

By engaging community members and bringing them into the network through training, this paralysis was reframed as something that could be challenged. “We’re literally saying: We need to take back the agency of our community,” Choi said.

For Josué Morales B’26, that meant starting something very concrete: a running and walking campaign to raise money for ONA, a local immigrant-justice organization, through the community initiative Miles for Migrants. “The hope is that we have dialogue with people—like, ‘Hey, I’m running because of immigrants.’ ‘Why immigrants?’ ‘Oh, let me tell you about ONA.’ Get conversations going with people and spreading awareness,” said Morales.

It’s not just symbolic. The campaign has pulled in friends, teammates, and strangers who stop Morales and friends on the street. “Sometimes I’m walking and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re going to do that run, right?’ And I’m like, yeah. They’re like, ‘How do I get involved?’”

“Where really is safe?”

Students are not the only people on campus fearing immigration attacks. When Felix, a Brown Dining Services employee, was abruptly fired last spring due to an expired green card, the news spread quickly. “It was very hard not just for him but for all of us who are immigrants,” P, a coworker, recalled. “Everyone was on edge and worried.”

Felix applied for an extension for his green card before its expiration on March 3, but the card expired before he received a response. According to P, due to a University policy stipulating that every worker must have either citizenship, a green card, or a valid work visa for the duration of their employment, Felix was told he had to be fired, but would be rehired upon providing proper paperwork. However, on Thursday, March 13, 2025, the morning that his paperwork came through, a campus-wide hiring freeze was enacted and Felix was told his Brown termination would stand.

To many workers, this decision represented the shift in climate under Trump. “We felt like it was a slap in the face,” said P.

Felix would eventually get his job back, but only after months of financial precarity and community action. “He didn’t have family here—no pay, nothing,” P said. “It was very hard. He lived off student donations for a bit. The union helped him with gifts too.”

“It could happen to any of us.”

For many in Brown Dining, fear is not abstract— it’s bureaucratic. Workers spoke of green cards, citizenship exams, and costly work visa renewals that determine their livelihoods. “[Naturalization] costs close to $800, and it’s supposed to go up again,” P explained. “[This administration] is making it harder and harder.” In reference to the citizenship exam, P added, “Before, you needed to know 100 questions and be asked 10. But now [you need to know] 130 questions, and it’s more expensive.”

When Felix was fired, workers’ fears of instability crystallized into something communal. “Everyone felt it wasn’t right the way things happened to him, and if it happened to him, it could happen to any of us,” P said. Dining staff became hyperaware of their vulnerability—even those with permanent status. “Brown staff, especially dining services, is filled with immigrants,” P noted. “All came from other countries, all have friends and family in risky situations.”

The firing mobilized both the dining workers’ union, The United Service and Allied Workers of Rhode Island, and student networks such as the Student Labor Alliance. “Students heard the story, but the way they heard it, ICE had come and got Felix— which wasn’t true,” P said. “So they fact-checked, started the petition, and sent it to all the [union] members and the student body. [Together with the union], they got about 700 signatures and brought it to the president.”

President Christina Paxson met with the workers and acknowledged the injustice. “She was really nice about it,” P said. “Made the meeting easy to talk to her.” Student and union efforts ultimately helped Felix return to work, but not before he endured three months without pay and two rejected unemployment claims. “We had to fight even after he was brought back,” she said. “We had to fight to make sure he received backpay.”

If fear defined one half of the story, solidarity defined the other. Workers spoke with gratitude about student support. “It feels great. Students always ask how workers are,” P said. “The way students treat us is awesome.”

The organizing also led to institutional change. Union leaders collaborated with immigration lawyers and the University to provide workers with translators and other resources to help prevent future cases.“Sometimes it has to happen to one person in order to prevent it from happening again,” P reflected.

“We all just want to live a normal life.”

Since its formal establishment this fall, the CHDDN “very quickly saw a lot of participation. First 70 people [joined], then from there it has continued to grow,” Robb said. To date, the CHDDN currently has upwards of 150 members, and there are over 1,800 members in the DDC’s WhatsApp alert channel. “Right now the College Hill Deportation Network has all types of people—students, grad students, faculty, staff, outside community members, folks who are just in the neighborhood,” Matisse Doucet B’27 said.

The network’s efforts are an extension of Providence’s rich history of deportation defense work. Even prior to Trump’s first term, community efforts in Rhode Island have historically blocked ICE and provided resources for undocumented people. “The people joining [the CHDDN] so heavily is new, but it is built off the labor of the other groups that came before,” said Maya Lehrer, a member of PSL.

Support from the community has shaped the network’s current model. Upon noticing an ICE vehicle or presence anywhere in Rhode Island, community members can call or message the hotline. In turn, a defense network volunteer is sent out to the reported location to investigate. If they confirm that ICE is present, an official notification goes out to the appropriate region’s WhatsApp group chat so undocumented members can avoid ICE and others can mobilize to prevent a deportation. CHDDN volunteers also take shifts at Providence courthouses to inform passers-by about the hotline, identify ICE presence, and report to the network when abductions are underway. Regular courthouse shifts are a feature unique to the CHDDN, whereas other regional networks do more “door-to-door knocking,” Doucet said.

CHDDN has also been applying pressure on the Rhode Island Judiciary to allow virtual hearings as an option for the courthouses they patrol. “City hall has already offered virtual hearings within the municipal courts as a result of community members and coalitions organizing,” Robb explained. “It is obvious why this is necessary in this time so people can do their legal proceedings.” She expanded on this: “There was a woman who was a victim of domestic violence who came [into court] to testify, and right after her testimony she was kidnapped.”

Speaking to the success of the broader DDC, Doucet said that “we’ve been able to push ICE out of our community over 20 times since July.” He added, “It’s easy to postulate and to talk about supporting our immigrant communities in different ways, but I think it’s an entirely different thing when you’re actually willing to put your material support behind it and actually do courthouse shifts and talk to community members about their experiences and try to kick out ICE when they’re nearby.”

The CHDDN is not the only organization that has noticed increased community engagement. Along

with an influx of community members looking to take action within local organizations, collaboration among community organizations and campus groups such as PSL and Dream Team has increased, creating an intercommunity discourse on rapid response and immigration rights.

“The best way to protect each other is with each other.”

After the targeting of international students and professors in the spring of 2024, including the detainment and deportation of Transplant Nephrologist and Brown Assistant Professor of Medicine Rasha Alawieh, whose legal challenge of the deportation was dismissed on October 31, the “focus became supporting international students as well as organizers being threatened for their politics,” Choi said. M noted that for members of the Brown Dream Team, “there used to be a clear divide between visa students and undocumented students, and this moment has caused the line to blur. Before we didn’t really have a reason to get involved with them [in a way that attracts more attention to us], but now we’re collaborating.”

Dream Team has also continued fundraising and fulfilling mutual aid requests. M referenced another Dream Team member’s GoFundMe, which amassed $3,000-4,000 to help pay legal and living fees after most of the student’s family was deported. They’ve also fundraised in collaboration with different organizations such as Sunrise, raising about $2,000 for African immigrants and for undocumented students in Rhode Island.

While this tangible financial support has proven necessary for students facing legal battles and crisis amidst deportation threats, M emphasized the importance of participating in other in-person action-oriented efforts, such as the one offered by the CHDDN. “Get informed. Understand [community organization] missions even if you can’t accommodate things in your schedule. If you can, join CHDDN and the broader deportation network. A lot of Brown students are American citizens and getting in between undocumented people and ICE is important.”

In their appraisal of community-building for students like them on campus, V and M both voiced gratitude. M listed Dream Team as a safe haven, describing it as a place “where you didn’t have to explain yourself, where you can be understood.” V listed several professors and the help of workers within Brown’s UFLI center as a “big help.”

Still, the tremendous pause on life that Trump and his administration has caused for undocumented students like M and V cannot be understated. “If you go and protest, or make an op-ed or social media post with your face in it [as an undocumented person], you can get doxxed,” M said. V echoed this tension: “I never really feared going outside as much as I do now. [I] used to travel by airplane, through states, walk by the river. Now it’s [questions like] should I take the RIPTA? Is that something safe for me to do right now?”

M re-emphasized that many Brown students remain disconnected from the challenges their peers face: “The distance allows them to turn a blind eye to the issue. [But students] have a lot more in common with undocumented people than they realize.”

Robb echoed this, linking the cause to a broader struggle for liberation of all people. “This is a larger fight for working class people that immigrants are on the front lines of,” she said. “This is for all of us.”

NAOMI NESMITH B’26 wants you to join the ICE alert WhatsApp and fill out the CHDDN interest form!

CHDDN interest form:

WhatsApp group link:

Language After Imperialism

BETWEEN LINGUA FRANCAS IN ALGERIA AND BURKINA FASO

c In September 2022, during Burkina Faso’s second coup d’état in nine months, Captain Ibrahim Traoré seized state control from Lieutenant Colonel PaulHenry Sandaogo Damiba, dismissed Damiba’s provisional government, and suspended the constitution. In December 2023, his government adopted a draft of the revised constitution that recategorized French from an official language to a working language. In its place, Burkina Faso’s most commonly-spoken Indigenous languages—Mooré, Bissa, Dyula, and Fulfulde—assumed official language status.

In his comments on this article of the constitution, Burkina Faso’s prime minister called the change “a matter of political, economic, and cultural sovereignty,” because “no one can truly flourish based on the concepts of others” [translated from French]. This decision aligns with Traoré’s own anti-imperialist— and particularly anti-French—ideology. When the language amendment went into effect this past August, Traoré explained that if the country is “truly free from French colonial rule, then an African language should be adopted and used consistently across Burkina Faso.”

In its own effort to move away from French influence, Algeria has elected to prioritize English over Indigenous languages. Algerian president Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who argued that French should be categorized as a “spoil of war,” increased the government's efforts to expand English language education across the country. Just last spring, the Algerian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research directed all public universities to begin transitioning their first-year medical and scientific courses into primarily English instruction, starting in September 2025.

Even as English has become a global lingua franca, French has continued to occupy this role in North and West Africa. French remains a useful political tool in the countries’ diplomatic efforts with France. Algeria continues to demand acknowledgement and reparations for crimes committed during the colonial era, while Burkina Faso seeks to facilitate economic and political relationships with France, despite expelling French military troops in 2023.

Moreover, Burkina Faso’s decision to designate English, alongside French, as a working language, and Algeria’s efforts to expand English education, reflects shifts in the global linguistic hegemony. For decades, the French language dominated world affairs due to the French empire’s reach across North America, Africa, and Asia. However, the British empire’s expansion led English to rival French as the global lingua franca. When the British empire began to shrink, the American empire sustained English usage across the world, securing its position as the dominant lingua franca by the end of the Cold War. As a result, English is the most studied language in the world and the official language of nearly 60 countries.

Yet, even as English attained this status, Algeria’s promotion of the language did not pick up until 2023. English has been a foreign language option since 1993, but historically, students could only begin learning it in the first year of middle school, whereas French could be studied from the third grade. This discrepancy remained even under Western pressure to reform the country’s curriculum after 9/11. As Algeria adopted reforms centering Anglophone education, English curricula have remained underdeveloped. According to English language teachers surveyed for a 2019 study, this demonstrates the government’s “little” interest in advancing English “as a very

important language in [...] the Algerian educational system.”

In an effort to bolster English education, Algeria has relied on support from the U.S. and the British Council, a UK government–sponsored charity providing English courses, to establish sociocultural and academic programs. Similarly, the U.S. has shaped Burkina Faso’s English curriculum with the English Access Microscholarship Program, in which the U.S. Department of State provides between $25,000–150,000 to American and Burkinabè non-profits to administer English-language education programs. The politically charged nature of English language programs in both countries reflects the challenges inherent in creating a post-colonial linguistic identity.

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Prior to French colonization, Algeria had a remarkably multilingual landscape. Indigenous Imazighen tribes spoke their own languages, such as Kabyle and Chaoui, which originate from before the Arab conquest (647–709). Algerian Jews, whose communities arrived as early as the end of the Third Punic War, primarily spoke Ladino and Judeo-Arabic. Even as Algeria remained largely autonomous under Ottoman rule from 1516 to 1830, a period known as the Regency of Algiers, government entities continued to use Ottoman Turkish to maintain communication with Constantinople. At the time, Arabic was not recognized as an official language, but it was the most common language in the country.

A similar plurality of languages characterizes Burkina Faso’s history. Under the Mossi Kingdom (11th–19th centuries), the Mooré language dominated the government. Although the Mossi people remained in power for centuries, the country remained highly multilingual, with 70 languages spoken today. The Fula people introduced Fulfulde to northern and eastern Burkina Faso, while the Dyula people introduced Dyula to the west. Since the Mossi ruled from the capital city of Ouagadougou, Mooré became the most common language there.

While expanding their authority in Algeria throughout the 19th century, the French also occupied Burkina Faso—called Upper Volta at the time— in 1896. Missionaries and early colonizers spread French through religious institutions; the language was formally introduced through secular schools, the first of which opened in Bobo and Boromo. These schools followed a typical French curriculum, including philosophers such as Voltaire, aiming to foster loyalty to the metropole and assimilate Burkinabè into French society. In doing so, traditional forms of education grounded in oral history were devalued. Although the metropole indirectly ruled by co-opting local chiefs during the colonial era, the French government was still able to introduce a linguistic homogenization policy that rendered French a civilizing and unifying language. +++

After Algeria won its independence in 1962, the country grappled with persisting French institutions. Algerian Presidents Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumediene instituted a period of Arabization under their tenures (1963–1965 and 1965–1978, respectively), determined to create a unified national identity and begin restoring Algerian livelihood. Linguistic

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policies instituted during this time propagated Arabic as the country’s sole language.

Though Arab Algerians constituted the majority of the population, Imazighen tribes remained a sizable minority, especially since most Algerians have some degree of Amazigh ancestry. This overlap in identity is reflected in the Algerian Arabic dialect, which has Tamazight influences. During the colonial era, French colonizers attempted to sow separatism in the country by dividing Algeria’s population using the Kabyle Myth, which characterized the Indigenous tribes—namely Kabyles, the largest in Algeria—as “inheritors of a Western Roman tradition,” and thus more similar to the French than Arab Algerians and other Imazighens.

This ideology contributed to French policy that simultaneously prohibited Imazighen people from attending Arabic-language schools and opened ministerial schools to facilitate the Kaybles’ assimilation into French society. In 1857, France even established a separate administration for Kabyles that granted better taxation, judicial, and governmental policies. These legal distinctions emerged from the metropole’s efforts to “de-Arabize” Algeria, which colonial authorities believed would occur by diminishing the presence of Islam in the country. In essence, the French capitalized on tensions between Arab and Imazighen peoples, a tension that would remain fraught after decolonization.

The National Liberation Front (FLN) led resistance efforts during the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962) and included Imazighen people among its membership. However, the FLN forbade Imazigh militants from speaking in Tamazight, an umbrella term for Algeria’s Indigenous languages. When the FLN became Algeria’s sole political party after decolonization, the Algerian government viewed the Imazighen people as a threat to Algerian unity. In 1989, revisions to the Algerian Constitution designated Arabic as the country’s only official language, which meant that Tamazight was not taught in schools, even in majority Amazigh regions. Following a series of protests, the government established the Haut Commissariat à l’Amazighité to promote the Indigenous languages, but Tamazight would still not be recognized as a national language until 2002. In 2016, another revision to the constitution granted the language the same official status as Arabic. Despite expanded Tamazight language education in the country, students in a 2018 study ranked the language below English and French when considering which language should be promoted in Algerian multilingual educational curricula. Notably, Tamazight speakers also favored English education to further distinguish themselves from Arab Algerians.

In July 2022, Tebboune announced that English would become the primary foreign language option in public elementary schools over French because “it is a reality that English is the international language.” The Ministry of Higher Education additionally cited Algerians’ interest in English as a result of its status as the lingua franca in business, science, diplomacy, news media, and entertainment. Promoting English language education has the potential to increase Algerians’ economic opportunities, and to allow the country to have a tangible impact on the international stage. This change in language policy also underscores increasing tension in relations between Algeria and France—relations which have been especially fraught since September 2023, when France sided

with Morocco in the dispute over Western Sahara’s independence.

At the same time, these policies reaffirm English’s dominance in the world without providing support to develop Indigenous languages that could provide a counteraction to imperial influence. In stark contrast to funding Algeria receives from the U.S. and the U.K. for English education, in 2017 the government rejected an initiative that would have formalized funding for Tamazight education, prompting countrywide protests.

In addition to their negation of Tamazight languages, Arabization policies since the 1960s have focused on increasing Arabic literacy. However, Algeria lacked sufficient infrastructure to internally sustain these studies. Algerian teachers were not qualified to teach Modern Standard Arabic, which was a priority for the government as a means of strengthening Islamic and pan-Arab identity. As a result, the government implemented curricula from Egypt and hired teachers from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, starting in 1964.

In 1991, the government adopted a new law to continue Arabization. Among its articles was a requirement that all official documentation, media content, and advertisements be either originally produced, translated, or dubbed into Arabic. Although this law was inconsistently enforced, it still reflects an effort to achieve the initial goal of complete Arabization by 1998. Moreover, promoting Arabic was not necessarily a rejection of foreign languages in general, but a rejection of French in particular. Pro-Arabization lobbies influenced the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education to include English as a foreign language option in September 1993.

Even as Algerians started to increasingly view English as the language of science and opportunity over French, pursuing English study remained a challenge. Until Tebboune’s presidency, French was still the primary foreign language option, especially for university-level scientific and technical study. Additionally, teachers believed that students often elected to study French over English because the country’s low English-speaking population limits the language’s utility. Despite these challenges, multilingualism is viewed favorably by younger Algerians; university students from a 2018 study consider this change critical to moving beyond an Arabic-French binary in the country. +++

Burkina Faso obtained its independence in 1960. Maurice Yaméogo became the country’s first president that year, and he soon instituted language education programs intended to promote a national identity and aid in the country’s development. In 1961, in order to advance literacy and vocational training, the country opened its first rural schools that operated in each region’s language because these regions had been neglected under the colonial system. The government intended for these schools to support the development of a national identity. Still, some Burkinabès opposed the use of national languages because they thought it would lead to a “ruralization of education” that would prevent farmers’ children from learning French. These concerns were rooted

in the language’s framing during the colonial era as a means of socioeconomic mobility. Despite this opposition, these schools remained in operation and were strengthened by national literacy programs that were introduced in 1967.

Even as presidencies changed, the government continued forming new programs and organizations to develop a sizable teaching force who could educate future generations in Burkinabè languages. Sangoulé Lamizana’s administration established the National Office for Permanent Education and Functional and Selective Literacy, as well as the Department of Linguistics at the University of Ouagadougou, to lead language planning efforts. This partnership helped form schools that taught in Mooré, Fulfulde, and Dioula, as opposed to French. That same year, in 1978, the country’s new constitution designated all Burkinabè languages as national languages.

In 1983, Thomas Sankara assumed Burkina Faso’s presidency. Sankara rejected loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, advanced a national literacy campaign, and renamed the country from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso. This name reflected the three national languages: Burkina came from Mooré, Faso came from Dioula, and Burkinabè has Fulfulde influences. Sankara used these particular languages because they are the most commonly spoken ones in Burkina Faso. Yet, for the Burkinabès whose identities center on the country’s 67 other languages, his decision suggests that under both French and Burkinabè authority, the country does not view all of its cultures equally.

Working to increase Burkina Faso’s self-sufficiency, Sankara became a political target for the French. He was assassinated in 1987 and replaced by Blaise Compaoré, who reversed Sankara’s nationalization efforts and withdrawals from the IMF and World Bank. Compaoré was overthrown in 2014, and three years later, the Burkina Faso government asked the French government to release military documentation on Sankara’s assassination on behalf of his

widow, who alleged that France had masterminded the attack. This incident indicates conditions that cause countries like Burkina Faso to maintain French in some capacity, despite anti-French or anti-imperialist ideology.

Although Compaoré was responsible for his predecessor’s murder and undid many of his policies, he still worked to advance Burkinabè languages. In 1991, the baccalauréat—a national exam that students must pass to secure their high school diploma— offered Mooré, Dioula, and Fulfulde as optional subjects; four years later, the government granted all Burkinabè languages (in addition to French) the status of languages of instruction. Alongside these internal efforts, the nongovernmental organization Solidar Suisse developed and oversaw a system of French-Burkinabè bilingual school education that began with the students’ regional language before gradually introducing French. Solidar Suisse supervised these institutions from 1994–2007 before handing them over to the state.

While Compaoré’s policies promoted Burkinabè languages in an educational capacity, the usage of these languages was otherwise minimized. For instance, a 1995 decree directed news media to promote Burkinabè languages. Yet, one Burkinabè linguist found that media outlets broadcast in a low percentage of the national languages, and non-French broadcasts remain in the least-viewed time slots. The country’s mining industry also operates in French. The 2005 Decree on the Management of Mining Authorizations and Titles required all correspondence and requests to be written in French. Documentation in other languages had to be accompanied by a French translation, or else it would not be admissible. This is because French companies assumed control of Burkina Faso’s mines after Compaoré reversed Sankara’s nationalization directives. They have since been renationalized under Traoré’s presidency.

Linguistic identity has always been contested. Even in France, French was a language of the bourgeoisie, spoken by only 10% of the population before the Revolution. French became the country’s dominant language only when the French government implemented a program of homogenization and modernization—the same framings it would use throughout its empire. Yet, postcolonial contexts pose unique challenges in the pursuit of linguistic identity and policy. Embracing Indigenous languages highlights lingering issues regarding how Algerians and Burkinabès navigate their identities. In prioritizing imperial languages, Algeria and Burkina Faso may very well improve their ability to participate in international affairs, even if it limits their ability to fully decolonize. In their efforts to remove one colonial legacy, these leaders may very well implicate their countries in another.

LAYLA AHMED B’27 is learning Arabic so she no longer has to speak to her Algerian family in French and English.

The End is ?

PLEASE STOP SERIOUSLY ENGAGING IN SENTIENT

AI DISCUSSION

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c Within the next five years, artificial intelligence will match human intelligence. This, according to some of the foremost technocrats in Silicon Valley, is a mathe matical, statistical near-certainty.

They say, when this so-called ‘artificial general intelligence’ or ‘AGI’ that matches human cogni tive ability arrives, it will exponentially ‘recursively self-improve.’ It will quickly—over a period of years (as they call it, a ‘soft takeoff’) or days (a ‘hard take off’ or, onomatopoetically, ‘going FOOM’)—surpass all human intelligence: becoming ‘artificial superin telligence’ or ‘ASI.’ Humans will lose all control over this ASI. It will inexorably pursue optimal function (‘instrumental convergence’), posing an existential threat (‘x-risk’) to humanity that will probably bring about a techno-apocalyptic mass human extinction (‘the Singularity’). The only way to prevent this AI doomsday is to develop AI aligned with human intentions and values (‘alignment’) and hope that is enough to prevent our eventual superintelligent AI overlords from killing everyone.

AI

B (P(A|B)), depends on how likely B would be if A were true (P(B|A)), multiplied by the prior probability of A (P(A)) and normalized over the overall likelihood of B (P(B)).

They call this abstruse, jargon-filled, techno-apocalyptic posturing ‘rationalism.’

Don’t confuse it with the kind penned by René Descartes. This techno-rationalism originates from the blog of a lifelong science fiction fan, transhumanist-by-eleven, singularitarian-by-sixteen, ‘autodidactic’-middle-school-drop out whose primary ideological recruitment tool was his longer-than-War-and-Peace Harry Potter fanfiction. Meet Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Science fictional ideas deeply informed Yudkowsky’s perception of AI. He cites Edward Regis Jr.’s Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (1990), an exploration of fringe, maverick transhumanist science, as why he’s “taken for granted” inevitable superintelligence since eleven. At sixteen, Yudkowsky decided Vernon Vinge’s True Names and other Dangers (1980), a science-fiction novella about the Singularity and societal consequences during emerging superintelligence, constituted rigorous hypothesis. True Names inspired Yudkowsky’s singularitarian epiphany, inspiring in him “a vast feeling of ‘Yep. [Vinge is] right.’”

Science fiction isn’t a strong basis for scientific legitimacy. Yudkowsky struggled to get researchers and financial backers on board with his Singularityfocused exploits. So, over the next decade, he reverse-engineered mathematics to ‘rationally’ prove these science-fiction-based ideas true.

Yudkowsky laid out this reasoning on his new rationalism-centered blog, LessWrong, across two years of daily posting. He later synthesized these essays into rationalism’s foundational text “The Sequences.” They introduce a statistical framework— Bayesian reasoning—which Yudkowsky argues posits the only reasonable basis for forming rational, true beliefs, free from cognitive biases. Yudkowsky further claims this Bayesian reasoning proves that the superintelligent apocalypse is imminent.

Quick statistics lesson: Bayesian reasoning underpins rationalist reasoning, so here’s a crash course (shoutout

For example, suppose about 2% of Brown students are Indy* staff (P(A) = P(Indy*) = 0.02), and we assume 80% of Indy* staff members bring up theory in casual conversation (P(B|A) = P(theory|Indy*) = 0.8). These values serve as our priors. Then, if we assume 10% of Brown students in general would bring up theory in casual conversation (P(B) = P(theory) = 0.1), we can figure a 16% probability that someone who brings up theory in a casual conversation is an Indy* staff member (P(A|B) = P(Indy*|theory).

Bayesian reasoning extrapolates this equation, generalizing how beliefs should rationally change given new evidence, or ‘priors.’

However, Bayes’ Law (and, therefore Bayesian reasoning), is only as accurate as the probabilities and assumptions one uses. If calculations involve arbitrary probabilities—say, probabilities regarding AGI or ASI developments—then the final conclusion will also be arbitrary. My Indy* theory calculations are as scientifically sound as the imagined probabilities I derived from my heavily biased intuition. Of course I ‘proved’ there’s a good chance casual theory conversations come from Indy* staff: my intuited ‘stats’ were contrived from this preconceived belief! Without an empirical basis, Bayesian calculations simply become convoluted conjecture. Any conclusions drawn are post hoc justifications of belief, not conclusions based on sound statistical reasoning.

The Sequence’s mathematical basis seems sound; Yudkowsky argues that for any beliefs to be true, they need to be based on empirical evidence. If one uses Bayesian reasoning to inform their beliefs, those beliefs will always be close to truth.

In later Sequence essays, however, Yudkowsky uses this evidence-based epistemic rationality incorrectly to substantiate his belief in eventual AI-induced mass human extinction. He begins by positing science fiction-informed theories as fact: orthogonality (AI morality does not scale with intelligence), instrumental convergence (AI will pursue any subgoal necessary to achieve its primary objective), AI-FOOM (AGI will quickly, quietly explode, or go ‘foom,’ into ASI), and alignment difficulty (imbuing human values in AI will be extremely hard).

Yudkowsky then argues, using skewed ‘Bayesian’ reasoning, that AI development only has one possible trajectory: a model that matches human cognitive ability (AGI). Soon after, AI-FOOM will occur, where that AI will recursively self-improve, surpassing humans (ASI). The only way to mitigate human

ASI, due to its natural inclination toward instrumen tal convergence, will just kill everyone in pursuit of its goals. A common rationalist parable goes like this: an AI is created with the harmless goal of maximizing paperclip production. That AI, upon becoming superintelligent, instrumentally converges—turning everything in the universe into paperclips.

Yudkowsky’s priors are entirely arbitrary; based on his science-fiction-informed intuition, he presupposes a 50% independent probability that ASI will cause human extinction. He then uses conditional probabilities from his similarly intuited theories— orthogonality, instrumental convergence, AI-FOOM, alignment difficulty—as evidence. Using these (entirely made up) values, he ‘mathematically’ proves there is a 95+% chance of AI doomsday.

Despite this shoddy statistical backing, LessWrong and its rationalism paradigm have attracted a milieu of Bay Area tech workers and entrepreneurs. LessWrong started niche in 2006— mostly composed of fellow transhumanists and singularitarians following Yudkowsky from the blog Overcoming Bias, his old posting haunt. By 2015, one massively successful Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfiction later, the forum was booming with card-carrying rationalists. (Even now, 10 years after HPMOR’s ending, the plurality of site referrals come from Yudkowsky’s fanfiction.)

Although most were initially ambivalent to Yudkowsky’s AI doomsday proselytization, they were drawn to his Bayesian groundwork. Rationalism offers a seductive framework: Reasoning can triumph over cognitive bias; belief can be distilled into empirical truth. However, Yudkowsky thought up rationalism to justify his belief in AI doomsday, not the other way around! Since the meat of LessWrong is ultimately his apocalyptic fantasy, these newly dubbed rationalists quickly adopted Yudkowsky’s AI doomerism as well.

Yudkowsky’s masturbatory diatribe details how rationalists are the only people who see the world empirically. Their unique clairvoyance allows them to see the apocalyptic danger facing humanity. This resonated strongly with already self-important techbros. Many already wholeheartedly bought into a techno-fetishist framework; they believed in their own messiah-like ability to ‘save the world’ with their superior technological intellect. Rationalism gave this masculinist fantasy the veneer of scientific legitimacy.

Rationalists soon became entwined with a sister movement, Effective Altruism, which, according to the Center for Effective Altruism, seeks to “us[e] evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit

others as much as possible, and take action on that basis.” To an effective altruist: it’s more moral to become a Wall Street lawyer and donate your millions than to lawyer for legal aid. Anyone can replace your legal aid work, but nothing will get donated if someone else takes the Wall Street role.

Longtermists, at the core of the EA movement, factor ASI-induced human extinction into their ‘maximal benefit’ calculus. The most ‘effective’ altruism is focusing on preventing AI-induced human extinction. Why put energy toward the billions suffering today under global poverty, climate change, or war, when that’s barely 1% of the future unborn trillions?

From this feedback loop, rationalists and EAs cemented their beliefs: Because we cannot stop superintelligence from existing, the only way to (possibly) prevent mass human extinction is to align it with human intentions and values. Human morals can offset orthogonality and instrumental convergence. Their superpowered reasoning makes them the only people rational enough to see this reality, so it is their responsibility to save humanity.

As AI development grew throughout the 2010s, the close-knit community of early AI researchers and workers produced ample kindling for an ideological wildfire. Rationalist doomsday belief—born from pseudo-mathematic conjecture—became fallacious truth. The Sequences became the ideological backbone for companies spearheading AI research and development. Debate was centered around not if machines could match human cognitive ability, but when. The Singularity, despite having no basis in empirical research, became the assumed endpoint of AI development.

Today, those young, insular rationalists have become the most powerful technocrats in Silicon Valley. AI doomerism has become the guiding principle for the people behind the world’s most influential AI companies—Shane Legg, co-founder of Google DeepMind; Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI; Dario

Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, to name a few. All rationalist LessWrong frequenters, all entrenched in Yudkowsky’s AI to AGI to ASI projection.

This devotion affects the entire structure, policy, and goals of their AI companies. Although 76% of actual AI researchers believe that current neural network architecture is “unlikely” or “very unlikely” to yield AGI, these CEOs devoutly believe that an AI with human cognitive ability will soon emerge. A “50 percent probability by 2028,” according to Legg. To Amodei, the “next two to three years.” To Altman, “by 2030.”

This obvious contradiction exposes rationalists’ selective vision. They believe in an imminent AI doomsday due to their ostensibly mathematically sound Bayesian reasoning, while dismissing the actual AI researchers telling them otherwise. After all, it’s more attractive to think yourself a techno-alchemist–savior, birthing new life while simultaneously saving the world from otherwise certain destruction, than a mere machine learning engineer. So: impending apocalypse it is.

To prevent from accidentally harbingering destructive superintelligence, each company maintains a comprehensive ‘AI safety’ policy, each of which cites AI alignment and developing friendly AGI as top priorities. In doing so, they prioritize Yudkowsky’s Bayesian reasoning over the scientific method: They work backwards from the assumption of a predestined Singularity endpoint rather than forward from existing infrastructure toward unknown possibilities. If an LLM acts in a way that contradicts its inputs, rationalists project disobedience and deception on what could easily just be buggy code. Every marginal machine learning unknown or advancement becomes more evidence of eventual superintelligence.

‘AI safety’ has become an alarmist movement itself, branching off from rationalism and EA. ‘AI safety’ is a misnomer; ‘AI existential risk catastrophizing’ would be more apt. AI safety ‘experts’ work off the EA principle that preventing imagined mass extinction is more effective humanitarianism than addressing existing problems. As per the Center for AI Safety, “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Forget the myriad of tangible issues—the AI psychosis, unsustainable energy consumption, the fluency heuristics, the trust gap—LLMs have already caused. These real issues need tangible fixes, ones that require technocrats to sacrifice some of their billions. It’s much easier to buy into a techno-savior fantasy that the harm you cause today is in service of some greater, future altruism.

In fact, if techno-doomsday is imminent, there’s no point addressing any problems that are not, literally, world-ending. This allows billionaire CEOs to legitimize their dismissal of grounded social concerns they find inconvenient. They can make racism, sexism, global poverty, and environmental decay seem frivolous in the face of looming extinction.

This posturing of imminent AGI is certainly good

for business—who wouldn’t want to invest in the companies on the verge of, as Altman puts it, “magic intelligence in the sky”? Who doesn’t want to use the LLMs that, as Amodei promises, will soon be “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”? If these chatbots are as much on the cusp of human intelligence as ‘experts’ profess, they must be pretty brilliant. Especially if we need to fear them usurping humans.

And, with these powerful technocrats gaining more power as the AI industry grows (OpenAI is now the world’s most valuable private company!), their apocalyptic diatribes have helped legitimize reactionary, right-wing policy under the guise of ‘rational’ governance. They provide ‘reasonable’ advocacy for the Dark Enlightenment, which argues against progressivism, political correctness, and even democracy itself. After all, if the masses are too emotionally entangled in ‘frivolous’ social issues to recognize the looming threat of AI doomsday, then maybe only the ‘rational’ technocrats should be entrusted with power. Altman and other AI safety experts advocate ‘responsible scaling’ and ‘techno-capitalism,’ both of which argue for these billionaire CEOs to use their ‘superior rationality’ to regulate themselves. Surely it’s just coincidence this ‘rational’ paradigm stands to greatly increase the material power and influence of these overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male technocrats.

Yudkowsky once claimed people work too much on “unimportant problems” regarding AI because the “important” problems seem too scary. The implication being, non-believers ignore the AI apocalypse because it scares them. The ‘smaller’ AI problems of environmental decay, cognitive decline, and psychosis are just easier.

I think it’s the other way around. Yudkowsky, with all his convoluted statistical theory, is the one afraid of uncertainty. He bought into speculative science fiction as an impressionable preteen. Rather than questioning these arbitrary beliefs with age, knowledge, and experience, he doubled down; he can’t face his own capacity for ignorance, even as a child. It’s easier to believe himself an entirely rational and reasonable person than to accept fallibility to emotion and irrational belief.

Yudkowsky is not unique. The tech sphere is full of people afraid of messiness in human reasoning and truth. In avoiding discomfort, they cling to ‘rationality.’

When powerful people adopt this exculpatory brand of ‘rationalism,’ it becomes a dangerous veneer. It ‘rationalizes’ their inaction as statistical triage. It allows them to appear ‘altruistic’ in their avoidance; they can work to prevent their imagined armageddon while ignoring the concrete problems they perpetuate. Conveniently, this heroism requires little tangible sacrifice.

‘Rationality’ helps them shirk that discomfort.

JODIE YAN B’28 is irrational.

A SPATIAL EXPLORATION OF ANGELS IN AMERICA AT THE GAMM THEATRE

c Tony Kushner’s Angels in America arrived in the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (the Gamm) in June 2025, with Part I: Millennium Approaches concluding their 40th anniversary season, and Part II: Perestroika opening their 41st in September.

Angels, a six-hour, two-part staged play, shows the interpersonal change in the lives of two couples— Prior and Louis, and Harper and Joe—in 1985-1986 New York City. As they navigate the challenges of love, religion, politics, and sexuality in the midst of the AIDS crisis, their seemingly separate worlds collide.

Written by Kushner in the early 1980s, the struggle with HIV, loss, and sociopolitical change represented within Angels was the reality of its audience’s lives—especially when staged in local theatres. The Trinity Repertory Company production of Angels, including both Millennium and Perestroika, was the first in Rhode Island. Directed by Oskar Eustis the 1996 production starred Brian McEleney, the director of the Gamm production. “When I played Prior in 1996, the play was more about visibility for our gay community and the lives that were still being lost to AIDS,” wrote McEleney in an email to the College Hill Independent. “The disease was still a big part of our collective lives, and we all felt a deep responsibility to represent the lives of everyone affected by that terrible time.”

In a printed conversation with the Gamm’s associate artistic director, Rachel Walshe, McEleney writes: “Every revival of any play exists in at least two time periods: the time it was written and the time in which the audience is seeing it.” The Gamm connects community history to the present. During the run of Millennium, audience members were greeted in the lobby by AIDS memorial quilts from Rhode Island, and every show ended with a call for donations to BCEFA (Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS). Both Millennium and Perestroika also fundraised for Open Door Health—Rhode Island’s first LGBTQ+ community health clinic, a primary care provider committed to destigmatizing HIV treatment, and an active participant in the mission to end global HIV infections.

“Every single night, there were people in the audience, parents, friends, partners of people who died of AIDS,” said Rachael Warren, who played the Angel. “That history is so necessary for all of us, but especially for queer people. We’re living in this age now where people [in America] are able to live with AIDS as a chronic illness and not as a death sentence. There’s a lesson [from the AIDS crisis] of how we all came together across the queer community. It’s important to remember how lesbians really showed up and helped caretake for gay men. There was a unity then that I think we need now.”

Angels as a play is also resonant beyond its depiction of the AIDS crisis. Kushner’s text has an internal metaphysics, one where raw material, represented by the Angels, can only be transformed by people, whose ability to imagine, dream, hallucinate, and desire drives the forward momentum of the world. This notion is central to McEleney’s interpretation of Angels, who notes that “[Kushner] rejects the notion of a past greatness that must be restored, and proposes a future that we all must be engaged in creating.”

To dive deeper into the staging of Angels at the Gamm, I talked to the director Brian McEleney; Rachael Warren, who played the Angel; Haas Regen, who played Prior; and Tony Estrella, who played Roy Cohn, and is the artistic director of the Gamm.

McEleney’s direction for Angels at the Gamm is built on a foundation of theatre as hyper-realism. Haas Regen, who played Prior at the Gamm, and was a former student of McEleney, recounts in a conversation with the Indy that “Brian talks about it all the

( TEXT CINDY LI DESIGN CINDY LI )

time. [Theatre] cannot be natural, it has to be magical realism. It has to be more to teach people how to be real, honest, and truthful.” To create this heightened reality, McEleney and set designer Patrick Lynch prioritized maximizing intimacy in the Gamm’s 200 seat blackbox space. “A focus on acting rather than on spectacle and special effects would be paramount in our thinking,” wrote McEleney to the Indy “I wanted to find the most bare-bones kind of set that would foreground the work of the actors as the primary storytellers of the play. [But] I didn’t want a completely empty space. In trying to imagine what the simple container for the play should be, I settled upon the image of a public men’s [restroom]—a fairly neutral space that nonetheless would be filled with graffiti that consisted mostly of homophobic slurs and crude sexual comments.”

The restroom is inherently a place of contradiction—a public place for private and vulnerable acts. Tony Estrella, the actor for Roy Cohn and the artistic director of the Gamm, describes it as “a repository of shame [...] I just wash my hands in the bathroom, no one wants to admit they actually used the toilet.” The public men’s restroom also contextualizes the stigmatization of AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s, when Angels takes place. At the time, HIV—a virus transmitted through bodily fluids—was inextricably linked to the shame, guilt, and secrecy of sex for queer people. McEleney emphasizes this, saying, “I wanted to remind contemporary audiences that there was a time not that long ago when homosexuality was illegal, misunderstood, and generally an object of public and personal approbation.”

Making the restroom a theatrical space is also inherently both transgressive and discomforting: spectating in a restroom is offensive, but in a theatre, it is consented, permitted, and encouraged. When the public men’s restroom becomes the theatrical setting at the Gamm, the permission to spectate is given with guilt: we are looking at something we ought not to be looking at, but we cannot look away.

The set of the Gamm’s Angels also wants to be looked at. The three-sided box set taps into the specific backrooms-esque mundanity that populates every office, school, and hospital—hyper-realistically quotidian, borderline-liminal. The set is filled with recognizable architectural details: green-gray tiles from floor to wall with a harsh division into cool white paint, a drop ceiling with acoustic paneling, one unexplained off-centered pillar, and frosted window panes above light-tan doors.

Brian McEleney, Jeanine Kane, Rachael Warren, Haas Regen, and Ben Steinfeld in rehearsal.

Photo courtesy of the Gamm Theatre.

In Angels, despite Louis’ best efforts to defend his apartment to Joe as “messy, not dirty, dust, not dirt, chemical-slash-mineral, not organic…” the Gamm’s set he gestures to is sticky and tactile, to the point that audiences couldn’t resist walking up to touch it during intermission. Every surface is stained. Graffiti is scribbled over the walls: “my mother made me a homosexual,” “if I gave her the fabric would she make one for me?,” “738-5251 I will piss in your mouth,” “the best thing about fucking men is that it’s against the law, but you JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK.” Above the roof of the set is the word “ANGELS” in large metallic type. “IN AMERICA” is written on the back wall of the set, each letter a different typeface.

The overwhelming liminality also permeates the stage space outside the set. Four rows of four, doublebar fluorescent tube lights illuminate everything in excruciating detail. Harsh, and unforgivingly bright, they extend from the back of the set to the front rows of the audience.

One of the concepts in the world of Angels is a state Harper describes as “a threshold of revelation.” In the play, Harper identifies this moment when, in a valium-induced hallucination, she suddenly encounters Prior, in a fever dream of his own. Harper describes this threshold of revelation as a place where one can intuit things about the world and other people.

This threshold of revelation is a precipice of change. Following Harper and Prior’s encounter, Harper is prompted by Prior’s intuition to confront her husband, Joe, about his repressed homosexuality. Prior hears the voice of an Angel telling him to prepare the way for the Angel’s infinite descent.

Regen’s experience portraying Prior led him to “realize that the threshold of revelation appears in other places [in the play]. So the way I started thinking about Brian’s concept of staging is essentially the manifestation of threshold of revelation. If you [the

audience] are intuiting these things about what the characters are going through, it’s because you’ve gone into the third dimension and can hear what they [the characters] are saying.”

Simultaneity of fiction is inherent in Kushner’s text, where the action of two different locations culminates in one scene. In Act 2, Scene 9 of Millennium, for instance, Prior and Louis argue in the hospital, while Harper and Joe argue in their apartment. Their lines are spoken in quick succession, addressed to each other, but also seemingly to the other couple not in their room. In the staging of this scene at the Gamm, a hospital bed becomes the hospital, while a couch on the opposite side of the stage becomes an apartment in Brooklyn.

However, simultaneity in Angels at the Gamm also permeates the staging where Kushner’s text does not explicitly dictate such overlaps. To foreground the work of the actors beyond just the set design, McEleney wanted to “give all the actors (and their characters) a more constant presence throughout the play, so that the overall effect would be one of a true ensemble telling interconnected stories, rather than a series of unconnected two-person scenes.” The stage often becomes a container for multiple fictional locations at once, divided thinly by the furniture. Warren describes this as something carried over from “old school Trinity [Repertory Company] productions. Often the whole community, the whole world is present while the other scenes are going on.”

Frequently, this overlap comes from the need for actors, not explicitly as their characters, to facilitate the scene by making sound effects with physical props, singing, playing the piano, and moving furniture. In the process, audiences witness moments where actors slip in and out of character. For instance, when Belize and Louis go to Roy Cohn’s hospital room after his death, Estrella says he has to “wheel the bed out after I’m dead. And then I have to get in the bed, open my mouth, and get into a death position. The audience watches me do it. There’s no illusion. I really

look dead for the five minutes that I’m dead. And then after that, I’m up, and I walk out of the scene.”

Actors also facilitate scenes that their characters don’t participate in. This creates moments where the stage is populated simultaneously by actors both within and outside of the fiction. In a scene where Harper is getting arrested and Hannah picks up the call from the police station, Warren describes that “Haas, who plays Prior, is on stage to do the [police] siren, and I’m on stage with a glass and a spoon to make the phone ring. We’re there as Rachael and Haas watching that scene. We’re not in that scene. We’re watching it, enjoying it, waiting to do our thing that helps them complete that part of the story.”

Gabrielle McCauley and Haas Regen in Act 1, Scene 7 of Millennium. Photo by Cat Laine, courtesy of the Gamm Theatre.

Often the whole community, the whole world is present while the other scenes are going on.

Overlap is also created intentionally between characters “to underscore the idea that each of the main characters is undergoing a similar crisis of personal change,” writes McEleney, “and that each of their stories mirrors that of all the others.” These moments trap the characters on stage in between their scenes with no dialogue or stage directions of their own from the play. They enact extended sequences of movement that reflect their emotional

state from the end of their previous scene to the next. Often, this can look like leaning on walls, slumping into chairs, or turning in bed. Regen describes these movements as “not really busyness, but stillness.”

For example, while Louis has an argument with Belize about abandoning Prior, Prior struggles to get out of bed, put on clothes, and go to the hospital for a medical examination. “Brian told me early on not to think about being sick,” said Regen. “You can’t act ‘having AIDS.’ You can’t act ‘being sick.’ You can act being off center. You’re trying to figure out physically how to stand up and be in your center core from a technical point of view as an actor, but also you’re trying to find your center as a character. And that was the feverdream for me, not ‘I’m sick,’ but where is my center? I’m bewildered. I’m floating. Where am I going?”

The characters seemingly do not hear what is happening around them, but by being on stage, they actively uphold the boundaries of the fictional location in which their previous scene took place. Yet, their movements are synchronized to the words being spoken, forcing actors to apply the dialogue spoken about other characters as being about their own character. They must listen, breaking the fictional barrier of sound. “You hear different things every night. And it and the things that are tied to you become part of your story and your journey,” said Regen.

“Bewilderment” became part of Regen’s journey in this production. In the play, this term is used by numerous characters. But Regen points out that ‘“Bewildered’ is a word that we all know, but not a word that we use. [For Kushner] to use the word over and over, it has come to mean to me that the characters are all bewildered and they’re just trying to put themselves back together.”

Angels at the Gamm is bewildering. The constant presence of actors, both as characters and in the staging “blurs the line between the actor and the character,” says Warren. “When you see actors transforming, as an audience member, I think there’s some part of you that understands that ‘we’re capable of that same transformation.’”

To return to Regen’s theory of the Gamm’s staging as a threshold of revelation—if theatre is a threshold of revelation, then by spectating, we are intuiting our own capacity for transformation, rehearsing for the work we must undertake together when we leave the theatre.

After the final performance of the Perestroika, a forklift drives into the theatre to commence demolition for the next production. The great work begins.

CINDY LI R’26 is wondering if you have six hours? Because she wants to tell you so much more.

Rodney Witherspoon II, Tony Estrella, and Rachael Warren in rehearsal. Photo courtesy of the Gamm Theatre.

(Top) Jeff Church and Rachael Warren in Millennium Photo by Cat Laine, courtesy of the Gamm Theatre. (Bottom) Ben Steinfeld and Haas Regen in rehearsal. Photo courtesy of the Gamm Theatre.

Ahead the Canyon — 2 Cyanotype on cotton, lace with denim backing, 2025

SELIM KUTLU B/R’29 is the human incarnation of Cleveland Dam.

“Like Years of Therapy in One Night”

ENTHEOGENESIS®, ACULTURALITY, AND AYAHUASCA FOR “EVERYONE”

( TEXT EVAN GRAY-WILLIAMS DESIGN ANAÏS REISS

ILLUSTRATION ROSEMARY BRANTLEY )

Due to legal and professional concerns surrounding drug use, the names of sources have been changed.

c “I’m trying not to get emotional.”

Keith is choking up. Robin places a hand on his shoulder and softly says, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

But Keith wrests himself back under control—an impressive maneuver, given the emotional intensity of the experiences he’s describing to me. His childhood was a minefield of maltreatment, inflicted by both of his parents; Keith’s mother was regularly physically abusive, his father a manipulative narcissist whose rare acts of corporeal violence dwarfed those of his mother. When he grew up, he was diagnosed with PTSD— “Combat-level,” he specifies. His psych was shocked he wasn’t an addict, an alcoholic, or suicidal. He seemed to be functioning, capable, and in control. Looking at Keith, it’s hard to imagine him as anything but. Even as he recounts the pain of his past, he maintains the confident patter of a Wall Street businessman giving the presentation of a life-

room couch, has a mild tan and a warm smile: the epitome of center-left, upper-middle class, early-tomid–50s beauty. She’s a preschool teacher, and it’s easy to imagine her beloved by the three- to five-yearold students she cares for. I should know; 15 years ago, I was one of them. Keith, her partner—they’ve been together for a little under two years—is a big, steady man: square white teeth, square white jaw, square white haircut.

But 20 years ago, Keith was living in a state of perpetual fight or flight. Hoping to heal, he tried EMDR. He worked with a Jungian analyst. At the behest of his girlfriend at the time, he even saw a shaman in north San Francisco for guided shroom journeys. None of these therapies quite satisfied him. None of them truly “rewired [his] system.” Then, five years ago, Keith found something that did: ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca goes by many names: yagé in Cofán,

and Amazonia; shori, mii, or uni in Yaminawá; pinde in Tsafiki, spoken by the Colorado people of Ecuador; jono pase in the Tacanan language of the Ese Ejja people; and over a dozen others. The word ayahuasca itself comes from an Indigenous word used by the Quechua people of the Andes. Keith calls it “aya.”

Ayahuasca is a naturally occurring hallucinogen and an entheogen: a psychoactive substance used primarily for religious or spiritual purposes. Brewed from a combination of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and one of several plant species containing dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ayahuasca has been ritually consumed by Indigenous communities in the Amazon and Orinoco basins for hundreds of years. Although it is unclear when it gained prominence across the Northwest Amazon, archaeological evidence of its use—such as small ceramic vessels associated with ayahuasca consumption and ritual snuffs containing DMT—dates back thousands of years. Written references to ayahuasca appeared in Western records in the 1600s, as European colonization spread down the Amazon River. Ayahuasca—and the peoples who used it—were quite literally demonized: 17th and 18th century Christian chroniclers accused Indigenous shamans of collaborating with the devil.

Although Indigenous use of ayahuasca was discouraged and suppressed by Christian colonizers during the 18th and 19th centuries, Indigenous communities continued to use it. Among Indigenous Amazonians, ayahuasca has historically had a variety of uses, depending on the community. Groups used it to locate game animals, to wage warfare and interpersonal conflict, to heal by communicating with spirits, to see faraway people and places, to maintain social order, to engage in astronomy and artistic pursuits. Ayahuasca ceremonies occupy a morally ambiguous position within Indigenous communities. Those with the power to use and facilitate the use of the drug— typically dubbed ‘shamans’ in Western literature, although this terminology obscures the diversity of Indigenous practices—must constantly negotiate their own benevolence in the eyes of their community. While a practitioner’s proximity to the drug lets them cure disease, it also makes them capable of destruction and tragedy. In any Indigenous community, ayahuasca usage is deeply rooted in the social fabric that surrounds it.

In the mid-20th century, Western fascination with psychedelics mushroomed: ayahuasca became one of the darlings of countercultural movements, who imagined Indigenous communities as living in idyllic harmony with nature, and ayahuasca ceremonies as potential gateways to access some of this ‘noble savagery’ for themselves. Psychiatrists began to investigate potential clinical uses for psychedelics in the 1950s and 1960s, although this research was largely abandoned in the 1970s due to political and legal anxieties. In the past two decades, medical research into the use of psychedelics to alleviate mental health woes has once more regained momentum, accompanied by a resurgence of Western interest in using entheogens in their spiritual, recreational, and even profit-generating practices.

Retreats, sanctuaries, and healing centers offering ayahuasca journeys to the desperate and/or wealthy have proliferated, within both Amazonian countries, where ayahuasca tourism draws tens of thousands of visitors a year, and the continental U.S. Although many Westerners prefer to travel to Peru, Colombia, and Costa Rica, hoping to access the most ‘authentic’ experiences possible, others share information online about groups that conduct ceremonies in Texas, Florida, Illinois, Colorado, North Carolina, and so on. These organizations often precariously straddle legal boundaries. Despite the reemergence of psychedelics as a therapeutic tool, ayahuasca remains classified as a Schedule I substance, federally illegal outside of limited religious circumstances: only two organizations, Santo Daime and União do Vegetal, have received official exemptions for the spiritual usage of ayahuasca. Even in the famously drug-friendly Portland, where Keith and Robin reside, you can’t go to the doctor and walk out with a prescription for Banisteriopsis caapi. Of course, this doesn’t stop the more determined— and privileged—from accessing it anyway. +++

Keith and Robin patronize ALUNA Healing Center, a plant medicine “sanctuary” in Northern California that offers ayahuasca retreats alongside other psychedelic and therapeutic experiences. ALUNA’s website—done in whites, creams, and translucent browns, sleekly organic, Pottery-Barn-does-yurtlife—bills their ayahuasca retreats as “two nights of sacred ceremony” at $1,450–1,650 a pop. Keith tried to attend a ceremony “once a quarter,” he says. He’s done 12 journeys since his first experience. Robin has done only one—a birthday gift from Keith half a year ago—but she is eager to attend another. She is just as excited as Keith to journey together on psychedelics as they journey together through life.

All ALUNA ceremonies are facilitated by “ENTHEOGUIDES®.” Robin describes these staff as “therapists,” but Keith jumps in to correct her. The Entheoguides aren’t therapists. They aren’t there to treat you—only to allow the aya to do its thing.

Eight of ALUNA’s nine Entheoguides are white, and none are Indigenous. The Dutch couple that owns the sanctuary, Attila and Alexandra, narrate their transition from six-figure salaries and luxury company cars to their current lives. Attila details his decades of experience “driving results for companies like Unilever, MARS, McKinsey, Danone, and Delhaize.” Further down the page, he proclaims his more recent devotion to “life and love over security and power [...] to [...] the amazing power of the courageous Lion Hearted love of awakening.”

Although ALUNA attempts to position itself outside of the competitive rat race of corporate life, its enterprise is dependent upon, and enmeshed within, capitalism. Entheoguides are certified in “Quantum Angel Healing®,” in “SoulBodyFusion®,” in “Transformational Breath®,” in “Rebalancing Bodywork®,” in “Temple Somatics®.” You can be trained as an Entheoguide yourself at ALUNA; each of the three levels costs either $2,850 or $3,350, depending on whether you want to sleep in a private room.

On its home page, ALUNA entreats visitors to “read more about our church ‘Entheogenesis.’” The linked page clarifies: “ENTHEOGENESIS® is ALUNA’s legal entity. It is a spiritual corporation/church.” The ENTHEOGENESIS® page lists its central tenets. First: that “natural ENTHEOGENS were manifested through the Divine Creator in order for all humans, regardless of religion, race, sex, or gender, to facilitate community with the Divine Creator.” It’s hard not to notice the absence of one particular characteristic from this list: the ability to pay.

On its ayahuasca info page, ALUNA contrasts the “Traditional Use” with the “Western Approach” to the entheogen, which is “now being used as a medicine

ALUNA’s website—done in whites, creams, and translucent browns, sleekly organic, Pottery-Barn-does-yurt-life— bills their ayahuasca retreats as “two nights of sacred ceremony” at $1,450–1,650 a pop.

in itself, not only as a diagnostic tool and plant ally for shamans […] a remarkable evolution.” While Indigenous practitioners place ayahuasca firmly within the social context of a given community, Western groups prioritize individual experience and responsibility; ALUNA calls this “a more fitting approach in this new paradigm where we become more souvereign [sic] of our healing.” It would be difficult for ALUNA to do otherwise; its clients travel thousands of miles and pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of receiving Entheoguided treatment. The ALUNA clientele scarcely constitute any kind of grounded community.

ENTHEOGENESIS®’s ayahuasca is simultaneously individualized and universal. Keith is emphatic about this: “Ayahuasca is for everyone,” he says when I post a careful question about Indigenous representation among ALUNA’s facilitators. Indigeneity is not a requirement. In fact, the couple agrees, the most ‘traditional’ ayahuasca experiences are often the worst. They tell me stories of acquaintances who have gone to Peru—the epicenter of ayahuasca tourism, where white Westerners seek out ‘authentic’ psychedelic traditions—and have been bitterly disappointed. According to Keith, the Indigenous Peruvian guides did not adequately prepare their clients for the purging nature of the drink, causing them to be “bitch-slapped”—one of Keith’s favorite epithets—by regurgitation. The Peruvian guides prioritized profit over the experiences of their clients; they gave them less ‘pure’ ayahuasca; they didn’t respect the plant. Robin and Keith place purity and respect at the core of their ideal entheogen experience, themes they seem to have inherited from ALUNA itself, just as the sanctuary inherits much of its rhetoric from other Western ayahuasca practices. Before partaking in an aya ceremony at ALUNA, like other retreats, clients are required to follow a strict “Dieta”: no dairy, sex, alcohol, or other drugs, and only unprocessed, organic, and fresh foods. Both the respect and the purity that ALUNA prioritize are not tied to any cultural values. They respect the aya, not necessarily towards the communities from which it originated. They prioritize the purity of the drug, rather than any specific religious tradition. At ALUNA, Keith and Robin know that they are in safe hands—ones that, they believe, put the experiences of customers above the capital that can be gleaned from them, although one might find that difficult to square with the price tags attached to many of their ceremonies. At ALUNA, they know that the drugs—and, by extension, their own wellbeing—will be treated with respect and held to the highest standards of purity.

Keith and Robin’s journeys at ALUNA have felt both individual, traveling deep into their conscious and unconscious minds, and universal, offering them a taste of something beyond themselves. They talk to the dead. They see through the eyes of their ancestors. They relive snippets of their own past lives. They heal their minds. Robin says that an ayahuasca retreat is “like years of therapy in one night”; the ALUNA website similarly likens the effects of a ceremony to “10+ years of psychotherapy.” Keith and Robin feel they gain access to a higher power during their psychedelic experiences. Robin terms it “divinity.” Keith calls it “infinity.” But, just like ALUNA

itself, they’re wary of using terms associated with any particular spiritual tradition, or even describing the drugs and rituals in straightforwardly religious terms. I ask Keith if he would characterize his usage as “medicinal, or spiritual, or therapeutic, or…” but he waves away the question.

“You can use whatever adjectives you want,” he says, but none of them can capture the immensity of the experience. Keith credits his ayahuasca retreats at ALUNA with massively alleviating his PTSD symptoms. Many of his triggers have disappeared; those that persist have been ameliorated immensely. While Robin does not believe that she came into the ayahuasca ceremony with anything “diagnosable,” she feels much less anxious and “deprived” since her first journey. More importantly, she feels it has improved her relationships with her two teenage children. While journeying on psychedelics, she saw their beauty and power as she never had before. Now, she’s found herself being more patient and forgiving when they disagree.

+++

At the end of our interview, I ask Keith and Robin about their plans to do psychedelics in the future. Keith remarks that he’s really due for another guided shroom journey. Both he and Robin microdose a few times a month, but he needs to go deeper; he’s been having problems at work, and wants the creative boost of shaman-assisted psilocybin. Many of his friends back in the Bay Area, where he lived until a few years ago, are part of an entrepreneurs’ group that gets together to talk through business issues and take large doses of magic mushrooms under the guidance of a facilitator. Although Keith cannot join this organization—he’s technically not an entrepreneur—he believes strongly in the application of psychedelics to maximize profit. In addition, Keith and Robin want to return to ALUNA this winter, this time with Robin’s two teenage children. Keith wants to journey together on ayahuasca, all four of them; he hopes a taste of infinity could tear down the walls between them. For Keith, Robin, and many Western practitioners, their acultural understanding of entheogens like ayahuasca allow them to cast the drugs in a wide range of roles: psychologist, spiritual, business consultant, and family counselor.

For all its distance from ayahuasca’s Indigenous and socially-situated origins, Keith and Robin’s journeying has changed their lives for the better. Yet their experiences are priced at thousands of dollars, stripped of local cultural and social connotations, and predicated on a global capitalist system that exploits the very Indigenous communities where the entheogen originated. Ayahuasca ceremonies have helped Keith; that’s why he pays thousands of dollars every year to attend them. But as I listened to him describe his journeys and scrolled through ENTHEOGENESIS®’s tastefully beige website, it was hard not to wonder: who pays the real price for the “ALUNA experience”?

EVAN GRAY-WILLIAMS B’28 is rethinking those shrooms he wanted to do over winter break.

( TEXT MAIRA MAGWENE-MUÑIZ DESIGN SOOHYUN IRIS LEE ILLUSTRATION MEKALA KUMAR )

c ‘Muscle mommy’ influencers are all over the internet: recommending workout routines, demonstrating how to do a proper Romanian deadlift, advertising Gym Shark sets and Lululemon leggings, and selling us all on the world-altering power of protein powder. A muscled back, a flat and defined abdomen, and developed glutes comprise the sculpted body of the ‘muscle mommy’ (I’m looking at you, @leanbeafpatty). This toned body type recalls the hourglass figure that Victorian-era corsetry made popular within fashion. There is no denying the gendered history of weightlifting: Bodybuilders, power lifters, and Strongman competitors evoke the images of a man. However, in contrast to the body shape of female lifters, men have broad shoulders and a triangular shoulder-to-hip ratio. Personally, I find it wonderful to see more women in the free-weight section of the gym. At the same time, fitness culture has long faced a fundamental dilemma: Is fitness about building a healthy body or a beautiful one? As more women flock to the weight rack, this tension between health and aesthetics becomes increasingly apparent.

The question of whether to exercise dates back to antiquity. The ancient Greek physician Galen heavily disapproved of excessive exercise, comparing athletic men to “lower animals” in his Exhortation to the Study of the Arts, Especially Medicine. On the other hand, JeanJacques Rousseau, a modern French philosopher, wrote in his treatise Émile that he yearned for a return to “naturalness.” He criticized the prevalence of delicate bodies, and advocated for boys to be educated like “young animals.” Yet women were often excluded from this narrative. Much of the health advice that was catered to women before the 20th century centered on Lamarckism, a concept that dubiously claims that babies can inherit a fitter body and a sharper mind due to their mother’s physical training, and that bodily neglect would lead to effeminacy in baby boys. Rousseau claimed that, “Women should not be strong like men, but for them, so that their sons may be strong.” Even when women were told to exercise for their own health, there was an implicit understanding that it would benefit the men in their lives—not just their offspring, but their husbands, who would enjoy a wife with a sexually appealing and desirable body. Although Lamarckism is less prevalent in contemporary discussions about exercise, there remains an insistence that women work out

On the other hand, the 18th-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft embraced the ideals of “physical strength, education, competence, and independence” for women in A Vindication of the Rights of Women Wollstonecraft believed that preventing a woman from strengthening her body and mind also precluded her from achieving dignified beauty. While Wollstonecraft brought much-needed attention to the benefits a woman could enjoy from working out, her argument still rested on how exercise could improve a woman’s relationship with a man. She argued that a strong body and a smart mind allowed for partnership rather than conservatorship in marriage, which, of course, was at the forefront of Victorian women’s minds. While it was a departure from the usual misogynistic reasons, the argument continued to qualify women’s exercise with reference to an external male factor.

In the post–World War II era, women were encouraged to perform weakness for their husbands to reestablish the social order that had been disrupted when women joined the wartime workforce. At the same time, they began to advertise fitness to other women, highlighting first its ability to transform the body aesthetically and second how it could strengthen it. This prioritization of aesthetic improvement is often justified using the argument that female exercise would never have gained such popularity any other way. Danielle Freedman, the author of Let’s Get Physical, explained that women’s fitness proponents “realized that selling strength for strength’s sake at that time to women would have never gone over. And…pretty savvily packaged exercise as a beauty tool.” Women’s fitness culture in the 1950s fits well with Wollstonecraft’s view that a woman’s power over herself stems from the “dignified beauty and true grace” she acquires through exercise.

In 1975, up-and-coming female powerlifter Jan Todd broke a 49-year-old record for heaviest deadlift by a woman at 394.5 pounds. Todd started lifting in college before the passage of Title IX, and she had to request special permission to use the barbell. Throughout her decade-long lifting career, she was considered to be the strongest woman in the world. Todd dedicated herself to strength training in more than the physical realm: She is currently a professor of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas at Austin. In her doctoral dissertation Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful, she explored the history of women in exercise and coined the term majestic womanhood. Todd’s concept of majestic womanhood expanded precisely on “an ideal based on size, physical strength, intelligence and independence” first explored by Wollstonecraft. However, in contrast to Wollstonecraft and the ’50s understanding of exercise as for purely aesthetic ends, majestic womanhood focuses on the connection between exercise and development both physical and mental.

Todd’s conception of majestic womanhood is in line with the historical consensus that strengthening one’s body works in tandem with nurturing a stronger mind. For Todd the primary value of exercise lies in cultivating mindfulness. When engaging in physical activity, many experts recommend having a heightened level of awareness of one’s own body. This is especially true for weightlifting: Correct form is essential for the safety and effectiveness of an exercise. Weightlifting is just as much about the act of lifting a weight as it is about assessing the

response afterward. This creates a positive feedback loop where the weightlifter should, in theory, respond to their body’s current needs and condition by assessing themselves. In short, this mindbody connection increases the woman’s strength both mentally and physically. When asked why she lifts, Todd answered: it “keeps [her] in pretty good shape” and satisfies “a fascination in what is difficult.” Todd has never looked like the slim-thick influencers we see today, and she has never had an hourglass figure. Her body was not curated for appearances, but for function, supporting herself as she lifted hundreds of pounds. The earlier focus on dignified beauty and performing weakness is put to the side; instead, majestic womanhood has evolved to consider the significance of exercise for mental growth and practical use of the body.

It may not be entirely accurate to say that majestic womanhood has been erased from women’s fitness, but it does seem to be buried deep under a host of other considerations. Even though influencers emphasize independence, confidence, and sisterhood, mirroring many of the goals of majestic womanhood,”these are overshadowed by goals related to the body’s aesthetic. If you look up “fitness” on Instagram, the feed is filled with hundreds of ‘before-and-after’ posts: Women show off their transformations into lean, strong goddesses. Workout recommendations then follow, and they increase especially in the spring when everyone rushes to get their ‘summer bod.’ Sometimes, influencers post occasional videos focused on not looks but their experiences in the gym, how exercise makes them feel. These insights reveal other motivations for working out: increased flexibility and mobility, rehabilitation and physical therapy, and emotional and mental release. Still, it can be quite jarring to go from sincere reflections to a body-check video with TikTok songs in the background.

For all their parallels with the ideals preached by the women’s weightlifting movement, ideas like Todd’s majestic womanhood do not often appear in weightlifting culture, which instead prioritizes aesthetic beauty as Wollstonecraft did. Wollstonecraft’s small, but significant, addendum to her idea of women’s empowerment was that of an ideal, dignified, and graceful body, an image that continues to plague contemporary women’s weightlifting. Many of these posts showcasing intense physical transformations garner millions of views, and bury messages about physical and mental health. Women’s fitness was founded on the problematic assumption that women should selflessly improve themselves for others. A woman’s personal reasons for exercise are overlooked in favor of a fixation on the aestheticization of the body. Through the lens of majestic womanhood, the aesthetic values that motivate 21st-century fitness influencers can be replaced by a holistic framework that emphasizes a woman’s own desire for health, confidence in her body, and heightened self-awareness. Women’s fitness can raise the bar by focusing on the mental and physical cultivation of strength.

MAIRA MAGWENE MUÑIZ B’29 has never tried protein powder.

High T i d e s

c It’s almost a magic trick. Like when some daring illusionist would lock themself in a straitjacket and risk death, wiggling free just as the water crested their head and their lungs ran out of oxygen. Of course, there was rarely any real risk, but the thrill was in pretending otherwise, in sitting in the audience, gasping as though you could actually watch someone die in front of you. This is like that, except the straitjacket is the boy’s own flesh, and the thrill is more about your own death than his.

Some of the ads call him “a vision of the future.” When it spreads by word of mouth, “monster” or “freak” is more likely said with that sickly sweet sound of jealousy.

When you enter the tent, he looks ambiguously young—not enough to concern you, to tug on your heartstrings and make you cry out for all this to stop, but enough to seem otherworldly. Baby fat cheeks but old gray eyes. Smooth skin but weathered from the sun. A boyish mop of black hair but when it catches the light, some strands gleam silver. It’s hard to estimate his size, distorted as it is by distance and water. On the upper end of five feet but not quite six. Slim but not starved. The tank he stands in is only about a foot wider than him, two feet taller. He’s naked, for better viewing.

Like that magic trick, water pours in. It’s quick. No need to drag it out since there’s no means of escape. That’s not what you’re here to see. Once he is submerged, you wonder for a moment if it’s all been a lie. You wonder if you’ll watch him drown, and part of you wants that. You would drown if they stuck you in there. But then, in thin strips, his skin peels away, scraps falling to the bottom, water tinged red. He doesn’t have scales; instead he is a pale gray—shark skin. He floats there, breathing fine and staring blankly at you.

No one cheers.

The pills were a controversial invention, partly because they were kept secret until after the first deaths.

Over the years, the hurricane season got worse, got longer, became less of a season and more of a constant. Hectic—people had hardly returned from the last evacuation when the next one rang out. Deadly. People ran out of gas, the highways clogged, riots broke out. Untenable. If Florida was to remain occupied, the people would need to be durable enough for a hurricane.

So we invented the pill. I’m still not sure of the science, but who really cares about that? Results are what matters. And the result was this: it could turn you, temporarily, into a Florida scrub jay, the only bird endemic to the state. I don’t know whether the inventors liked the symbolism, or if it was the only animal that would work.

But the trials were held secretly, and those initial subjects found themself unable to turn back. As it turns out, the life of a scrub jay is none too pleasant. They couldn’t find habitat to live in. They were struck by evacuating cars. They ate fish, contaminated by red tide, and wandered, sick and delirious, on the beaches.

Eventually, the fatalities came out on the front page of the Tampa Bay Times, but by then the pill had been fixed and perfected and sold in limited amounts at an exorbitant price. Now, those who can afford it watch from the skies as the storms flood their mansions.

I frequently wonder what it must feel like to have wings, to coast in the hurricane winds, to observe the destruction as it happens. At least now, with all the people who stay and change instead, I can reliably make it out of Florida before the hurricanes hit.

For their one year anniversary, Lena sets up a candlelight picnic, waiting for Jillian to arrive. She chews on a nail, scanning for her girlfriend’s figure on the beach, the beach where they met.

At the time, Lena had been working as a lifeguard, saving up to come out to her parents and then cut

them out before they could cut her off. The classic you can’t fire me because I quit. Jillian, because she saw the world as little more than a photograph—something to arrange just so, to experience from a distance— had been walking in the surf, sneakers still on, water up to her thighs, camera hung at her belly. Jillian mentioned later that her parents liked to say they needed to put cement in her shoes to hold her in place. Lena found this hard to believe. When Jillian was by her side, anchored by joined hands or brushing thighs, she seemed, to Lena, overwhelmingly, frighteningly present. She took up space in Lena’s life like she had always been there, leaving pockets of static behind when they were apart. She had always been there; she would always be there. But when Lena thought back to this first meeting, she could see what Jillian’s parents meant—the woman standing in the water, hair dancing in the breeze, slowly drifting deeper, eyes stuck only on the horizon. Between one blink and the next, a wave had appeared and swept Jillian’s feet from her. Lena rose from the lifeguard stand and stumbled forward, breathing a sigh of relief once Jillian’s head surfaced. The relief vanished as Jillian began swimming deeper, arms flailing. Her camera had been torn from her neck. Lena, wading in beside her, told her to leave it, that it had probably been taken by a riptide. Then Jillian looked at her, and Lena spent the next hour trawling the sand until she found the ruined thing and dropped it on Jillian’s lap. She received thanks in the form of a drink and several hickeys.

Now, Lena fidgets with the candles. She moves one a centimeter to the left, then the others. It still looks wrong, so she moves them all two centimeters to the right. She gives up. Jillian will fix them when she arrives, nudging them into just the right position so that the world looks how she wants it to be, and not how it is. Lena’s hand returns to the picnic basket, pulling out the final touch—the gift: a simple polaroid camera. She couldn’t afford anything fancier, but she wanted Jillian to have something.

By the time Jillian arrives, bare feet in the sand, it’s far past the meeting time. The sun has set, and the water is black ink. Still, Lena receives her with a wide smile. They intertwine their fingers, salty palms glued together. Once the cake has been eaten and the wine drunk, they entwine the rest of their bodies, too.

While they are distracted, the waves creep closer and wrap their greedy fingers around the camera. They tug it out to sea, where the dolphins can play with her gift.

There is water in my glass that wasn’t there before. I had set it down, empty, on the countertop, then returned to my room to retrieve my AirPods. Now, I am holding them, case open in my palm, staring at my no-longer-empty glass.

It’s not full. It’s only a few drops, just enough to swirl around; a fingernail deep, if that. But it was empty. I drank it all. I came out here to refill it.

The case clicks shut. I set it down beside the glass and walk a few steps to the fridge. I peer in, pretending to choose what I’m eating for lunch, but in actuality, I’m listening as hard as I can.

I wait: one, two, three, four, five. I close the fridge. I walk back to the glass.

Two fingers full. More than before. I resist the urge to hurl it across the room.

I turn away again, returning to the fridge and pulling out the ingredients to make a sandwich. It feels important to pretend I’m not noticing. Like I’ll lose whatever game this is if I admit I’m playing.

I put bread in the toaster. Four fingers worth of water.

I cut some lettuce.

Halfway.

I take out the toast.

Two thirds.

I make a sandwich, keeping myself rigidly forward. When I turn, gripping the sandwich like I

( TEXT ELAINA BAYARD DESIGN JENNIE KWON )

have any intention of eating it, the glass is full. More than full, curving over the top, surface tension barely holding the water in. Then it pops.

Water spills over the cup’s edges, over the counter and down to the floor, rushing toward me, climbing up the fabric of my socks. It keeps coming, an impossible amount bursting from this one glass. It turns into a geyser, shooting upward, soaking the ceiling.

I drop my sandwich.

I’m knee-deep now. The wallpaper is peeling away. I can feel floorboards warping beneath my feet. The water begins to change as it flows: It gets murkier. Seaweed spews out, hitting the ceiling with a wet thwack and splashing into the growing pool below. The tiny glass disgorges fish, crabs, oysters, rays, their bodies unrecognizable until they flop free into the water. I watch as a fish opens its wide mouth and swallows my sandwich in one gulp.

On and on it goes. If I really try, I think I can hear something, a painful gurgling from the glass, like a girl bent over the toilet after a party. When the water reaches my armpits, it finally exhausts itself, giving a few last rattling spouts before falling silent with something like a sigh of relief. A crab walks over my foot. I wonder about my security deposit.

The Hap p iest Place o n Earth

Surprising no one, Disney was the last place to sink below sea level. It was in the center of the state, far away from those rapidly drowning coasts—makes you wonder if good old Walt had been thinking about this. The Epcot Ball kept shining, even as neighborhoods turned into seagrass gardens.

People still came, of course. In fact, the crowds got even bigger. They flew in from across the country, attracted by the cool ocean breeze, despite the 118 °F heat. The remaining snowbirds, the people who paid fortunes to have islands built for their mini-mansions, docked their yachts at Disney for the day.

There weren’t many true Floridians left, considering the state itself was slowly falling away. Their disappearance had been gradual. The people who could manage it—pulling from emergency or retirement or college funds—moved inland at first. Then, when the waters licked at the front porches of their new houses, they moved upward. And upward again, until they were safe, or until they were broke. The people who couldn’t afford it stayed. You could say that they went down with the ship.

Disney was grateful for that. It meant fewer people were using the residents’ discount.

Field N otes

Somewhere, an osprey makes her nest on the twelfth floor of an apartment building, where the waves smear seafoam midway up the windowed facade of the fifth floor. She roots through the empty rooms, not wondering where their inhabitants have gone. Out on the balcony, she tears out strips of an Economist and entwines them with other relics: receipts and packaging and little doodles on sticky notes.

A school of fish swims past. They’ve traded seaweed forests for wooded ones. Some huddle in the hole of a tree as a larger fish passes by. They emerge and weave through the skeletons of bushes, dead leaves resting on the surface of the water, nearly blotting out the sun.

Barnacles climb up absconded cars, sand dollars creep over interstates, hermit crabs make homes in warped vases and jars.

The water ebbs and flows, just like it did when it was contained to shorelines. Once, it made a rhythm in the scattering of sand, and now it beats a drum against concrete and windows.

ELAINA BAYARD B’27 is investing in floaties.

( TEXT EM CHU

DESIGN ANNA WANG ILLUSTRATION EM CHU )

c Life Cycle

Bed Bugs #1, #2, #3, #4 NU gold, liver of silver patina, laser-cut cardstock, 2025.

EM CHU R’27 is digging in the dirt.

INDIE’S 36 QUESTIONS TO FALL IN LOVE

c According to an extremely rigorous, well-designed, peer-reviewed study carried out last week, 97% of Indy readers are smart, funny, cool, sexy people who think they are better than everyone else. The numbers say they’ve got everything going for them… but there’s one part of life they just can’t seem to pin down. Most of the responses to Indie’s calls for question submissions involve problems with readers’ tumultuous love lives. And Indie always comes to the rescue, doling out nuggets (and when she is feeling generous, entire tenders) of advice like an adorable cherub with a wealth of wisdom and experience far beyond her years. But the queries keep on coming.

So why all the trouble with love? I’ve wrestled with this puzzle for years. Decades, even. I felt like there just had to be an easy way to solve everyone’s problems all at once, probably. So naturally, with my big beautiful perfectly pink brain, I created the ultimate solution.

You may have heard of a certain publication’s “36 Questions That Lead to Love.” Well, I have been in the Science Lab with Scientists for nearly over 20 years developing my own list, which is exponentially more efficient and successful. Dearest readers, here is an empirically-backed, 100% money-back guaranteed way to find everlasting love, just in time for cuffing season. Find someone acceptably cute. Ask them these questions on your first date. You will never have a r*lationship (or lack thereof) problem again.1

feel about French Canadian people?

28. Have you ever cheated?

1. When I was five years old, I walked in on my dad having sex with a woman who had her back to me. A week later, I asked my mom why people got naked if they weren’t taking a bath, and she asked why I wanted to know, and I told her I saw my dad naked with a woman. She spiraled and thought he was cheating on her. They divorced. It was messy and painful and caused long-term psychological damage for my siblings and I. Years later, I realized that the woman was actually my mom, and I just hadn’t processed that in the moment. I haven’t told anyone that I was the one who broke my family.

If you had to choose between cheating on me emotionally and cheating on me physically, which would you choose?

Can I have a hall pass?

On October 17th, 2025, you sent a Venmo to someone named “Avery” and captioned it with a pink heart emoji. Who is Avery and what was the Venmo for?

11/07/2025

ACROSS 1 Concern for journalists and juries

TFOOD BANKS

c Scalabrini Lay Movement Inc.

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c Women’s Refugee Care

570 Broad St Saturdays 10 a.m.–2 p.m. for fish and produce only Serves 02907 residents and all refugees from the African Great Lakes region Languages spoken: French, Lingala, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili

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What you do if you don’t go home?

Damaged, as a surface

Road Runner’s foe 15 Schwarzenegger franchise cyborg assassins 17 Number

c Better Lives RI Food Cupboard 12 Abbott Park Pl Monday 3–6 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday 9 a.m.–1 p.m. Serves Providence residents Languages spoken: English, Spanish Can visit 2x a month Take the following buses: R, 6, 17, 22, 9x, 10x, 12x, 59x, 61x, 65x, 95x c Lighthouse Community Development Corporation 11 Hawthorne St Second and fourth Saturday of each month 9 a.m.–noon Serves all RI residents Languages spoken: English, French, Spanish Take the following buses: 20, 22 c Salvation Army Providence Corps’ Food Pantry 386 Broad St Wednesday 9–11:30 a.m. Serves Cranston, Johnston, and Providence residents Languages spoken: English, Spanish Take the following buses: R, 20, 22

c 121st Annual Little Pictures Show & Sale Opening November 9, noon–5 p.m. Providence Art Club, 11 Thomas St Free c Mobility Aid Workshops w/ Lefty Loosey Bicycle Collective November 9, 3–5 p.m. 50 Sims Ave Free c Inaugural Presidential Forum, “Liberal Arts vs. Workforce Education” November 10, 4–6 p.m. Gaige Hall Auditorium, 600 Mt Pleasant Ave Free c Discussion and Reading — Happy People Don’t Live Here by Amber Sparks, Trigger Warning by Jacinda Townsend November 11, 7 p.m. Riffraff, 60 Valley St #107A Free c Discussion and Reading — Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm by Emmeline Clein w/ Rebecca Atwood November 13, 7 p.m. Riffraff, 60 Valley St #107A Free

c Stitch ’n Bitch Fiber Arts Meet Up November 7, 3–4 p.m. Red Ink, 130 Cypress St Free c Beaver Walk and Talk w/ Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council November 8, 10–10:30 a.m. and 11–11:30 a.m. Farm Fresh RI, 10 Sims Ave Free c Food Drive and Music w/ Food not Bombs PVD November 8, food drive starts at 6 p.m., music begins at 9 p.m. 25 Manton Ave $10–20 suggested donation Bring food to donate or take food home c Food Not Bombs Food Serve November 9, noon–2 p.m. Kennedy Plaza Free c The Role of the Revolutionary Party w/ Rhode Island DSA November 9, 2–3 p.m. Red Ink, 130 Cypress St Free

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.