Issuu

October

2026

Volume 53 Issue 03

WEEK IN SIDECHICKS

THE CITY OF SWEET PEOPLE

CHAIN REACTION

THE VALENCE ISSUE THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

53 03

10.09

MANAGING EDITORS

Annelie Delgado Elliot Stravato FEATURES

HEAD STAFF WRITER

Julia Sprung

Manuela Guzmán R'27

ARTS

Nadia Mazonson Gabriella Miranda Sasha Watson

03 WEEK IN SIDE CHICKS Julia Sprung

EPHEMERA

06 THE CITY OF SWEET PEOPLE Talia Reiss

Anika Kotapally Keya Mehra Kendall Ricks

09 CYCLES

Evan Gray-Williams, Maxwell Hawkins & Andrea Li

DESIRE, I WANT TO TRACE YOU Lily Ellam & Ro Milly Thomson

12 *ANGH—

Nadia Mazonson, Illan Brusso, Emma Chandler, Audrey He, Mohamed Jaouadi & Ekaterina Michkovskaia

LITERARY

Chloe Costa Baker Audrey He Alya Nimis-Ibrahim METRO

Layla Ahmed Isabel Tribe Ben Underwood METABOLICS

Ray Eggerts Evander Gray-Williams Nahye Lee SCIENCE + TECH

Daniel Kyte-Zable Coby Mulliken Lila Rosen

14 “SORRY”

Ryan Connors & B. Simbana-J

SCHEMA

Selim Kutlu Mo Saoud

16 CHAIN REACTION Maia Riggs

WORLD

Caiden Demundo Eric Ma Neda Ravandi

19 I REMEMBER EVERYTHING Maxwell Hawkins

DEAR INDY

Ilan Brusso Talia Reiss

20 BULLETIN

Sarya Baran Kılıç & Rainier Pederson

BULLETIN BOARD

Sarya Baran Kılıç

DESIGN EDITORS

Mary Elizabeth-Boatey Sara Parulekar Kayla Randolph

FROM THE EDITORS

DESIGNERS

Isabella Castro Olivia Falk Dasha Derevianko Caroline Fenton Hongrui Guan Koji Hellman Rose Holdbrook Jordan Kinley Jennie Kwon Soohyun Iris Lee Sullivan Molloy Zara Lagumdžija Mailee Phan Cathy Rong Radhika Tibrewala

Andrea Li Cindy Li Peter Zettl

WEEK IN REVIEW

01 FUERZA INTERIOR

Masthead

MVP

Jordan Coutts

Benjamin Flaumenhaft STAFF WRITERS

Carolyn Nakawungu Batabye Sebastian Botero Joy Chen Jacqueline Dean Benjamin Flaumenhaft Lucas Friedman-Spring Kaliyah Graham Paulina Gąsiorowska Mohamed Jaouadi Elena Jiang Annie Johnson Evan Li Nathaniel Marko Ekaterina Michkovskaia Maia Riggs Fatima Shafi Samdöl Lhamo Sichoe Riya Singh Josh Stearns Ellie Wu Ange Yeung Zoe Yu SOCIAL CHAIRS

Benjamin Flaumenhaft Evander Gray-Williams Rachel Sang FINANCIAL COORDINATORS

Sasha Gordon Constance Wang

DEVELOPMENT TEAM MEMBERS

Aram Adler-Smith Avari Escobar Maira Magwene Muñiz Mingnah Ng Inderjot Nijjar Alexander Sayette STAFF PHOTOGRAPHERS

William Bigby Pin Kasemsri

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Jaxon Rivera Serena Yu

ILLUSTRATORS

Rosemary Brantley Kieran Campbell Daria Derevianko Joy Dunn Cayden Garrett Koji Hellman Claire Hua Madeline Kim Paul Li Ellie Lin Megha Nambiar Mingnah Ng Camila Salinas Alexandra Sanguinetti Cindy Wang Ella Xu Naomi Zaro Faith Zhao COPY CHIEFS

Jordan Coutts Kainalu Faucher COPY EDITORS

Aram Adler-Smith Nabiha Allahwala Christine Anyanwu Tyki Cantu-Wang Emma Yvonne Chandler Karen Le Emma Mathew Advaith Shyam Ambreen Sidhu Zeke Tesler WEB EDITOR

Casey Gao

WEB DESIGNERS

Julianne Jin Savv Omare Rachel Sang

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR

Inderjot Nijjar

SENIOR EDITORS

Benjamin Flaumenhaft Paulina Gąsiorowska Nahye Lee Nadia Mazonson Talia Reiss Kendall Ricks JOURNALISM LEADS

Jacqueline Dean Talia Reiss

DIVERSITY LEAD

Nahye Lee

STAFF LIASON

Nadia Mazonson

*Our Beloved Staff

I seek

MISSION STATEMENT I am repulsed by my cowardice

I am attracted

Object

I cower

I am repulsed -CAP

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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.

WIR X METABOLICS

Week in Side Chicks

( TEXT JULIA SPRUNG DESIGN OLIVIA FALK ILLUSTRATION ROSEMARY BRANTLEY )

c I’ve just had my head in the wind and in the rain. I want someone to fuck me up. I can’t stand to speak like this and yet it must be said. I don’t understand why everything is in order—it no longer gives me any satisfaction. I do my laundry, soon I’ll change my sheets—but I can’t stay too long anywhere or with anyone. Love feels real only in the comings and goings. I want to touch many things and then to marvel at the cleanness of my hands. Do you chuckle only / At the feeble / Save the growl / For the able / You are yourself / Unstable in yourself / At the present moment / You walk as though you / Might fall in love / With a melon / Remember the next thing / Soft and yielding / Squelch of seeds / Until the end of / Your uncertain days I see you—I know you. I know that you want things; I know that you want them to want you. Does it make any difference, if I pretend not to know you? Will you only then be able to fall in love? I walk around and see that you look at me. The eyes are the backdoor to the loins. I might as well begin, just for myself, by explaining how and why I chanced upon desire and perception as my topic. There was someone whom I wanted, in whose soul I had no interest. I find them attractive, but I am not the only one; I have a kind of animal awareness of their presence, without the will to do much about it. Besides, I am not sure what there is to do. I have very little faith in their capacity to afford me any kind of sexual satisfaction. It occurs to me that female animals never seem to derive much from sex other than fullness; perhaps I too ought to think less of pleasure. There are stronger things than orgasm. But I wanted to talk to them and so invented this article as a pretext. Pretending to have an intellectual interest in sexual matters is a great way to suggest that you lack any corresponding practical one. And so I had a meeting, sent a few texts, made overtures in the dining hall; I spoke to nine people, though I could’ve had 11. I pretended that I was curious, when what I really wanted was to stop thinking entirely. How and why does the individual want what he wants? How does he decide that his desires are legitimate? How, indeed, does his anticipation of their reception interfere with or enable his expression of them? And of course I do like to talk and think about sex; prudishness has always seemed to me the coarsest thing of all, in its unshakable assumption

of the body as a source of filth and dishonor. It seems to suggest that we had better just keep the coarseness inside, cold and shy and raging—and I have a great fear of coarseness, of running my fingers along some plane of my heart only to find grit and grease. Deliberately I found again the memory of my brother, aged thirteen, telling me, brushing crumbs from his face: When I am older, I am either gonna have two girlfriends and one side chick at the same time, or one girlfriend and two side chicks. Will they know about each other? Of course not, what’s the point? I’m hungry—where’s Mama? My brother, I knew, might be somewhat difficult as a lover—he had made me promise, earlier this summer, that I would love him more than the husband and children to come. We had been fighting ever since his puberty began; now, we have found a strange peace. He would be my side chick, a position better than it sounds. For more often than not, passion belongs to the side chick—the mistress, the lover, the secretary. A side chick was, I surmised, explicitly not the point; it existed to choose you, in order not to be chosen by you. The side chick could be a vehicle of anti-sublimation—a departure from some clouded sense of purpose, an escape into the finer vapor of inclinations chosen only and ostensibly for their very distance from real aims. Lying is no mere incidental necessity; it is the very point of the side chick, whom one both has and eats. With the side chick, you get what you want without having to admit that you particularly want it. In this sense, there is something neurasthenic about the whole situation. A few weeks ago, I told a former boyfriend that, if my side chick had been my interest in other boys, his had been his madness. I have noticed that the relationships in which each is disparaging of the other tend to endure. Admiration and compatibility can get you only so far. There are usually more reasons to be apart than to be together, if one courts and mates in the spirit of efficiency. It might be in monogamy with the side chick that you find the force to push you forward into time—the force of desire inexplicable and therefore undeniable. You cannot deny what you have never stated—it states itself. You can excuse efforts great and passionate by pretending not to be serious. Again, I made an effort to think about sex. I heard someone talking at length about her interest in smut and very carefully let it make an impression on me. From

an early age, she said, she had had such a specific type. I remembered then a friend of mine who once announced, confidently and in confidence, that she was a squirter. This was clearly quite important to her. And I was left to wonder how on earth people said such things about themselves. It seemed to me disgusting to decide that you were the one who knew what you were. I have always assumed that the legitimacy of one’s truest self was ultimately contingent upon recognition—better yet, upon praise. But I will listen now to the recordings. All that I will do to them will feel like a lie. Still, I’ve railed against the sin of omission for far too long. It is time to commit, lest I be confused when called to account. Any sense of duty is an assertion of possession: You need this from me, you are gaping without it. And it is true that all of this belongs to me, regardless of its worth. The lie needs its liar, though the recordings remain aloof. Indifference, I say, is only the furthest development of awareness. Something like that. +++ In her apartment: female, heterosexual Well, if none of these questions stands out to you, let’s start with this one. Are you self-conscious about your sexual desires? I think I was very conscious of my sexuality from before [I became sexually active]...but it was all very inward-facing and independent…I’ve definitely oscillated between kind of caring about kind of unhinged sexual behavior and preferring that to wanting a stable and forward-facing relationship. Do you know how you are perceived? I don’t think I want to be perceived as anything…And it’s hard for me to keep my mouth shut so many of my friends know when I like someone, but I would never outwardly go to them and say that I liked them or express interest in an overtly sexual manner…Because, especially for women, I think there’s this shame around being too forward and being predatory?….But I don’t know if that’s an internal ‘women face more fear of rejection’ or internal ‘women are scared of how they will be perceived by being too forward.’ But how do you think you are perceived? I think that those people that I interact with for the

VOLUME 53 ISSUE 03

WIR X METABOLICS most part…on the average day to day, they would probably see me as sexless…I think as someone who doesn’t run in the scenes where sexual encounters often happen in terms of the fact that I don’t go out to parties anymore, I don’t really drink anymore. [...] Both after I hooked up with [X] and after I hooked up with [Y], they went around sharing details. Oh, I am so sorry. Wait, I’m okay with it now. I think also people perceive me as…I am harder on myself with how I think people perceive me than how they actually do. [X] shared details of what I wanted to do, et cetera…Since then, I really changed the way that I think about sexual encounters [outside of relationships]…I realized that that aspect of sexuality made me feel gross and was not something that I wanted. Outside of Ceremony, tables empty on account of the wind: male, heterosexual I don’t really think I’m sexually perceived, at all, which may be false…I think people understand my existence generally as sort of self-consciously anachronistic and sort of infatuated with the anachronism of it. Do you think that you’re handsome? Maybe not in a general interest way but I think it seems that there’s a contingent of people who find me attractive, you know? [...] I think heterosexual male decisiveness is difficult insofar as you don’t want to be…At least from my experience, it begins to feel slightly coercive very easily, which is maybe sort of not you know not giving, not ascribing power of self-determination to female sexual partners. How and when do you decide to express what you want? Generally, the first few times I sleep with anyone, I feel very hesitant to suggest anything in particular…I also think my idea of what I don’t want has a lot to do with, you know, what I imagine the other person doesn’t want…A heterosexual encounter can be a very overdetermined thing, a very sort of perniciously mediated thing…I think part of it, you know, is growing up in a moment of tremendous litigation and regulation of male sexuality, much of which was positive. I’ve had one sexual partner who thought I was sort of a passive chud for these things. I perceive you as extraordinarily ambivalent about being aggressive or imposing yourself in any way. I actually think that if you relaxed a little bit about this, it would be better. Yeah, I think imposition is maybe a better word than aggression here. Blue Room, at night: female, bisexual I’m fine expressing [what I want], but I just don’t want the other person to. I don’t want the other person to want me, and I also just don’t want it to happen…I would lose respect for them. For anyone who wanted to. This has happened many times, even with people that I do want. I never, ever, ever pursue anything of my own accord…I feel fine about it. I think. I mean, this is what I say often…People are like, ‘Oh, you’re asexual, you have no desire…’ But I’m like, ‘Actually, not at all…’ There’s a lot of desire…But I just want other people to be equally attuned to the degradation and disgustingness of this all. Tell me more. I just think that it’s disgusting to be wanted. When another person is expressing—is flirting or expressing a sexual desire, I’m just like, ‘That is so

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

embarassing…and base,’ and I’m like, ‘You are humiliating yourself…’ I don’t know that I feel that my wanting is that disgusting. Not really at all. But if it’s ever directed towards me, and honestly often when I see it directed at other people too, but not as much, especially towards me, I’m like, ‘That is disgusting…’ If I were to go along with that, I guess, I would think of it as an ultimate failure. I’ve given in to their little game. I’ve given them what they wanted and I’ve lost in the largest way I possibly could. Can I ask about men and women? Yes. I’ve only had sexual encounters with women. And do you think that any of this would play out differently with men? I feel frightened of it a bit. Yeah, I was too. There was a period, sophomore year, where I was being haunted by [the specter of heterosexuality] and I was in New York City and I was like ‘I have to get out of here because the sky…the skyscrapers are just…’ It was everywhere. ‘I just must get out.’ Barus and Holley: male, heterosexual How would you describe yourself? Tall. Heterosexual, I’m not…I’m a boy…intimidating… Uh, I think I’m tall, which is what girls find attractive…I think that helps a lot. Got the [foreign] accent. Some people like that, some don’t. Do you like the way you look? It’s like, whatever. Okay. Can’t change it. Do you consider yourself attractive? I would say physically, yes. In the sense of, like, I’m athletic…And well built. In that sense, I would say, yes…I think I’m just average looks, but I’m just tall and well built so that helps…That makes everything better. You know? Makes things easier. [...] I feel like I’d always be interested in someone that would have the potential to be interested in me… Megan Fox, I probably wouldn’t try my luck. How can you tell whether a girl is interested in you? Enthusiasm. No, body language…I don’t know. If they kiss you. So you wait for girls to kiss you before you decide whether or not they like you? Normally helps…You’ve probably written more than I’ve done in the last year. No, I’m joking. That’s kind of grim. I think it’s fun to write things down. And it’ll be fun to make you up as a character in the article. You can embellish left, right, and center if you want, if it’s not looking juicy enough, you can just say… No, it’s okay. I will find the juice in this conversation. When I’m in that scenario...I don’t care too much about what I want. I’m more like, what they want or what they’re comfortable with…If you’re going somewhere with an attractive girl, you’d want to sleep with them. But it’s not like a…‘Oh, I want this. I need this…’ Try and progress things further and ask if they’re okay with that…I don’t know. If they say yes, you progress further, if they say no, then you don’t. And how do you feel if they say no? Fine. It’s not that deep. Every girl’s different in terms of enjoyment. Some people enjoy some stuff more than others. Do you think that girls fake? Yes. Do you think or know that anyone has with you? Yes…Um, thumbs down. Big thumbs down…And we

had a conversation and she promised never to do it again. And if she wasn’t going to finish, or whatever, just to tell me, and then it’d be fine. Everything seems to be fine for you. Like, is there anything that bothers you? I’m gonna…Let’s see. If she saw my penis and said, ‘Ew,’ that’ll be, then, a bit of a hit…I feel like it’s not really a done thing, though. It’d have to be extreme for someone to do that. [...] I’d rather make the first move, but I’d rather they didn’t, that they made it clear. Because you get some girls saying, ‘I gave him hints,’ and then just didn’t. I’m not gonna give you…Just come and kiss you if you, like, make eye contact with me once. It’s not really how it works. What about eye contact twice? Bump it up to three and maybe you’ve got a deal. Barus and Holley, again: male, homosexual When I first came here, I was pretty unconfident with myself, right? So freshman year, I literally didn’t do anything, right? Last year, December. That’s when I started. And I was like, you know, ‘So I’m gay, and I use apps, right?’ So that just makes it a lot easier because, I don’t know, being in person kind of feels uncomfortable sometimes, especially when you know, you don’t know the signals that people give you or something like that. I’m completely oblivious. I just need bluntness, right? If people are messaging you, they’re like, ‘I want to suck your dick.’ Like, great…Basically, I was like, ‘You know what, I’m kind of fucking bored, so let’s go ahead and get something, and then let’s try and see if it’s nice, see if it’s fun…’ The more guys I started to meet and, I guess, they expressed that, you know, they liked how I looked and they had fun, right? Then I got a little more confident in myself, just in terms of being in my own body. [...] I always, when I do sexual things, it’s more towards pleasing the other person. Because that’s just how I am…But I also like getting my own stuff. Have you ever had a crush? Yes. Have you ever acted on one? No. Would you ever? No….Okay, so actually, in high school, I had a crush but I wasn’t out then…I was just like, ‘I’ll just worry about this next time, I’ll look from afar, and I’ll focus on other things to distract myself from that crush.’ And yeah, that worked out. I do have a friend with benefits that I, you know, kind of had started to get feelings for. I did act on that and he was like, ‘Oh, let’s just keep it at a distance…’ For me, being open in terms of communication is so important…If I’m just keeping these feelings to myself and just suppressing them, then that’s just gonna well up for me and just become overwhelming. And so to express what I feel about him…and how he wants to set things, like, this boundary that he wants between us two, that is important to me, so I know in my mind, ‘Oh, I can’t chase this.’ And I’ll be fine with that. What do you like about yourself? I like how I like to be prepared. When I go to do something for the first time, especially sexual, because I don’t want to be the virgin that just made things horrendous, because they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. So, of course, I did research. Of course, I did research about how to suck a cock, you know? I should have. It’s not that intuitive.

METABOLICS WIR X METABOLICS

It’s not. It’s not. Anything else that you’d like to tell me? I had a threesome. That was fun, yeah, it was great. Would you do it again? Yeah, I mean, I did it again, the week after, same people…The one on one is more about that connection that we’ve been talking about. But then the threesome is more like, ‘Oh, it’s hot.’ It’s, it’s a lot of dick… it’s not really taboo but it encroaches on that territory a little bit. So that’s what makes it exciting. Fourth floor of the SciLi: male, heterosexual What do you think you look like? I would describe myself as tall in certain scenarios… People like my hair. I don’t like people touching my hair though…Girls do like to touch hair. I don’t fuck with it. Really? Because then it gets messed up…and then if you have shit to do afterwards it’s just kind of like, ‘Oh.’ But if it’s at night, then that’s chill. I feel like now I can pinpoint a type of person that would be attracted to me versus not. Are you more likely to pursue a girl like that? No. So you’ll pursue anyone whom you find appealing? Yeah. What’s wrong with that? I think that’s adorable. If a girl is into you they either maintain eye contact or they look like– you can tell that they’re a bit nervous to be around you…I think it’s easier to tell if someone is super interested or super disinterested. It’s kind of hard to tell if someone’s like ‘fifty-fifty’ on you. Do you feel that you know what you want, sexually? Yeah. One hundred percent. One hundred percent… Well, actually it depends on the person that you’re having sex with. Because that person likes and doesn’t like specific things, right? But I’m lowkey down for a lot…except, I don’t know, when people touch my butt or anything. It’s kind of weird. Do you consider yourself sexually competent? Yes…I think, at least for guys, I think being satisfied sexually isn’t as much about feeling satisfied physically but feeling satisfied emotionally that you satisfied someone else…I feel like it’s the point of sex in the modern day. Is this something that you have trained yourself to feel or been taught to feel? Or something that occurred to you naturally? I guess something that just happens when you first start being sexually active…even if [a sexual act] makes you feel good, that is significantly outweighed by making someone else feel good, right? Do you know what you like? There’s different vibes of sex, obviously…There’s a more emotional level to it that you only feel when you have sex with someone that you really love. It’s like you get a feeling across your entire body, it’s a weird feeling but it kind of makes you feel…like a little numb and a little bit sad and it doesn’t happen every time, obviously. And a little bit cozy, a little bit like you’re sitting in front of a fire with a blanket and like a really good cake or something like that…It’s a weird feeling

to have. Campus Center basement, rain, a room with a piano: female, bisexual Do you know what you like? I started masturbating very young, which I guess is kind of normal…But I don’t really know why I like the things I like…I like when someone bites my stomach or touches my hands a lot. I’m not always having sex in my head but, you know, pretty often kind of…I don’t know, sometimes I think I’m so gross. But then most of the time I’m really, like, in love with myself. How can you tell whether someone is attracted to you? I think most of it is eye contact, and I think that I’m good at letting people know how I feel. And I’m sort of a creep about it…When I know that I’m interested in someone, I do kind of scheme and sneak and prowl around and stuff…I don’t know, I feel kind of like a middle-aged Woody Allen character when I have a crush, a little bit, and it’s kind of embarrassing but actually I’m proud of it. Are you embarrassed by anything that you want? There are lots of things that I think about and I like, but I wouldn’t want to do, I guess because of the way that they…There are a lot of words, I think, also that just sound bad and gross and are sort of ugly words. Like, I wouldn’t really want to be spanked, but I like the idea of it. I mean, sex with an octopus is also a really, it’s kind of an ancient thing…I kinda would like to have sex with an octopus, but it’s not feasible, really…Also, I don’t wanna be spanked. It’s more just like someone, the idea that someone could be. [...] I’m good at gauging levels of disinterest…If someone will do things that make me feel really doubtful and bad…then I feel like a big chump. But, and I know that I’m not a chump, because I’m just doing what I want. I’m always doing what I want, not always, but you know, I try. And when someone makes you feel like a chump, do you lose interest? Oh, not really…it’s really hard not to want what you haven’t got. Do you like Sinéad O’Connor? Yes. Me too. So yeah, that’s like a phrase I can repeat. And I can listen to the song a lot. And it’s kind of true…I honestly sort of have what I haven’t got already because it’s like, I can have sex with you in my head whenever I want…I don’t know, I do sort of go back and forth between feeling really wrathful and then feeling crazy love and it’s like, ‘I love you, but you’re not even, it’s not really you that I love. It’s you in my head, which is lowkey just me.’ So that’s also not a bad place to be.

sometimes bold, eyelashes occasionally—at the evaluation of the object, just to see. It has always felt to me dishonest to insist on the emotional and sexual freedom of contract—everyone says that you must do what is best for yourself and that you are on the hook only in exchange for that for which you have asked. There is a date and a time and a term of obligation. People have no right to ask imprecise things of each other, must be whole unto themselves, ‘must rely’ on their “friends,” whatever that means— and none of this is true. I owe a great deal to those of whom I have never asked anything, or never asked clearly. I will play the clinician. These recordings present the overwhelming importance of possibility in sexual excitement. Things could happen: you could linger by the phallic skyscrapers; someone, somewhere could be spanked; sex, next Tuesday, might feel like a fire and a cake; and there is just a chance that your hook-up will love you back. And somehow it is alright that none of it happens—this is in fact what keeps everyone going, the sense that they are often in the antechamber of reality. Though the side chick sees you as you are, she will never know you in the world. When desire possesses us, we are alien to each other. I like that state, I really do. But it is in this antechamber of reality—damask drapes, Eames chairs, side chicks—that we are unafraid to keep wanting and thus it comes about that we try and try again. Do you feel that you know what you want, sexually? I just have a really high libido, I’m really horny, I want to be free to desire at any moment of the day. And orgasms, lots of orgasms. Have you ever been embarrassed by your desires? I am embarrassed to be seen as full of desire; I hate expressing things first; I resent rejection—but what really kills me is the certainty that he finds my desire for him entirely disgusting. Do you feel good about the sum total of your sexual experiences? Yes. They’ve gotten better and better. And everything is a mess right now. That’s unambiguously my fault, though. I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted—and you know what, it’s good. I am in a good mood. But when there’s something that I want I’m just convinced that I’m supposed to have it. If I’ve been trying, a bit, to honor those relations of reciprocity that I never entirely chose, it’s only because I’ve always subscribed to the other side of the principle. You can be owed things for which you would never ask. Those are the things that I want. I’m scared, sometimes, that I wouldn’t get them if I asked for them. But if I had to ask, I might stop wanting them. Because then they’d really be mine. And there’d be no point to that, no point to that at all. JULIA SPRUNG B’28 is looking for a

side chick—she responds to email.

+++ I return to my own company. I am congested from a cold but enjoying it—it keeps me from feeling alone. Desire, I think, has much more to do with subject than with object—I thank the recordings—but the sense of subject casts a backwards glance—sometimes shy,

VOLUME 53 ISSUE 03

METRO

The City of Sweet People CONVERSATIONS ON SUBSTANCE USE, HOUSING, AND HARM REDUCTION IN WOONSOCKET, RHODE ISLAND

( TEXT TALIA REISS DESIGN ISABELLA CASTRO ILLUSTRATION MADELINE KIM )

Last names have been omitted and one interviewee, Alice, has been anonymized for the purpose of privacy. c One year ago, Kevin looked down the barrel of the busy season: In the colder months, when the leaves heap and snow drenches the city of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Kevin makes the majority of his annual income as a landscaper. Plowing for days at a time, he’d begun to fall asleep on the job. His boss suggested he try cocaine, promising it would keep him “up.” “By the time spring came, plowing was over. I didn’t want to do it no more,” he told me, referring to the drug. But by that point, Kevin’s life was getting harder. His apartment building had been sold, and he’d lost the “working understanding” he’d had with his old landlord, who would wait until the end of the off-season to require rent payments, “plus, you know, a little extra,” said Kevin. “The new landlord just evicted me instead.” He set up a tent outside and made it as beautiful as he could. “I had it all set up, and there was no trash, no nothing,” he said. He spent thousands of dollars he’d earned working at Dunkin’, even installing a television. But to his surprise, the City of Woonsocket tore his tent down—likely the result of the city’s 2025 encampment ban. Around that time, Kevin’s mother was in and out of a rehabilitation program for a crack cocaine addiction, and his father had been deported to Laos. Kevin didn’t need to be “up” anymore; he wanted to be “nice and mellow,” to ease his anxiety after hard days. He started smoking crack, believing it would produce that calmer feeling. “Honestly, to me, it does,” he said. “Everyone else, they feel different.” +++ I met Kevin at Woonsocket’s World War II Memorial Park, a gathering place for many of the community’s unhoused people. I’d read a recent Atlantic article that upset me. It was “The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs,” in which Michael Powell tactically dismantles harm reduction, an approach to addressing opioid use disorder that prioritizes safety over abstinence. Powell visits cities that have embraced harm reduction, and—quite the voyeur—watches people use drugs from the edges of parks and markets. He has a bit of rhetorical fun, sensationalizing struggling people as playground urinators, troubled women in states of attractive undress, and “hyperkinetic in the way of the strung

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out.” Powell relies heavily on statistics to show that “overdose-death rates climbed sharply in nearly every city where the strongest harm-reduction policies were in place,” teeing up an argument that harm reduction is not only ineffective, but counterproductive. “That is what’s called confounding,” said Dr. Francesca Beaudoin, the dean of Brown’s School of Public Health and an emergency physician who specializes in opioid treatment. “Guess what else was happening during that time? Surge of fentanyl. We watched housing affordability [decrease] over time. There’s so many other things that were happening in parallel. So, to just point to one thing is really hard to untangle. And it presents a naive and incomplete view.” Powell never once interviews someone who uses drugs, just hand-wringing parents, politicians, and store owners, who gripe about living in “the zombie apocalypse.” Rhode Island sees hundreds of opioid overdose deaths every year, but recently, overdoses have decreased at a higher rate than any other U.S. state. The improvements reflect the statewide Drug Overdose Prevention Program and The Action Plan, collaborative efforts between the Rhode Island Department of Health and the Governor’s Overdose Task Force. The initiatives have harm reduction at their core, increasing outreach to impacted communities and distributing supplies such as Narcan (naloxone)—an opioid antagonist that reverses an overdose in minutes.

“Harm reduction is about saving lives, about keeping people alive,” she said. “You can’t help people in recovery with substance use disorder if they’re dead.” Still, the City of Woonsocket—which historically has the highest rate of overdoses in Rhode Island—faced two overdose spikes over the summer. Unlike Powell, I wanted to understand this crisis from the people who are affected the most: people who use drugs, people who have lost loved ones to drug use, and people who have been unhoused. I called a Woonsocket 20-year-old named Xavier Green, who runs a popular homeless empowerment program called Trash4Cash, paying people five dollars for every bag of litter

they collect. He offered to introduce me to the community members he’d met through the initiative. With a stack of pizzas, the two of us gathered a small group on the park’s sunny bleachers. +++ Elijah, also 20, went to high school in New Jersey. When he graduated, he said he didn’t have many friends, and he felt “lost.” Seeking comfort during a period of immense loneliness, he started taking painkillers. “For the first month, [...] I thought it saved my life,” he told me. But over time, the pills started to lose their appeal. He didn’t like the way they slowed his brain, and his family was worried about him. Elijah’s mom sat him down for a talk. “Seeing her cry, it really stuck to me,” he said. “I was just like, ‘I gotta stop doing this.’” But when he tried to quit, he couldn’t. He was uncomfortable and sweating, a common symptom of opioid withdrawal. “Everything felt…I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “It was not easy.” He moved back to Woonsocket, where he grew up, to get a hold of his addiction. By now, it’s been a month since he last used drugs. He wishes he’d had access to the services available to people who use drugs in Rhode Island, such as Woonsocket’s mobile recovery van operated by CODAC Behavioral Healthcare. A statewide nonprofit, CODAC has been providing addiction support since the 1970s. The van is the first in the nation to provide methadone—one of three FDA-approved medications for opioid use disorder— which works by binding to the opioid receptor in the brain and mitigating withdrawal symptoms. “I know many people who are on methadone that if you ran into them in the street, you would never ever know,” said Beaudoin, who has staffed the CODAC van since its inception. “That’s their medication that they take for their chronic health condition, for their opioid use disorder.” When the van opened its doors, it received a cease and desist letter from the City of Woonsocket. “When it comes to addiction treatment, there is this ‘not in my backyard’ mentality,” said Beaudoin. Though the van remained open, severe barriers to access persisted. Methadone is highly regulated; for years, patients needed to visit the van daily to receive a dose of methadone. “In the beginning, there’s an advantage to

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seeing someone who has a severe opioid use disorder,” said Beaudoin. “If they come every day, you are getting to lay eyes on them every day, you’re getting to help them with other social determinants of health.” Along with a physician, the van always has a nurse and a peer recovery support specialist who helps patients access social services. But the regulations presented challenges for patients without personal transportation. Before the van’s founding, the location of the only opioid treatment program was across town. Beaudoin remembered patients whose only viable bus route required them to connect in Providence and take another bus back to Woonsocket—a two-hour journey in total. But the van’s mobility is limited, too. It parks in the same place every morning so that patients, especially those without a functioning cell phone, can reliably find it. “If you had another chronic disease—let’s say hypertension, diabetes, cancer—we would not ask you to go get life-saving treatments and show up every day in person to get those therapies,” said Beaudoin. “I would have a hard time going somewhere to get medication every single day, and I have many more resources than my patients do.” After taking the liquid medication, patients need to show that their mouths are empty and that they aren’t pocketing any methadone to redistribute to others. “It is this very paternalistic approach to methadone that you can’t be responsible with your own medications. You’re going to sell them to other people and do harm, or you are going to harm yourself,” said Beaudoin. Now, regulations have relaxed such that stable patients can take home a bottle with 28 days of medication. Beaudoin estimates that 150 patients actively use the van’s services. Although Beaudoin predicts that some people will need to take methadone for the rest of their lives—the way some people with hypertension will forever need blood pressure medication—she emphasized the role of methadone, and harm reduction writ large, as a crisis management strategy. “Harm reduction is about saving lives, about keeping people alive,” she said. “You can’t help people in recovery with substance use disorder if they’re dead.” +++ Alice, a classmate at Brown, was 10 years old when the younger of her two uncles overdosed. He was around 50 and had been homeless and using heroin for most of his life. His final dose had been laced with fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that had overtaken the drug supply just a few years prior, rapidly accelerating the opioid epidemic. By the time her mom received the phone call, her uncle had already passed away. After graduating from a trade school in Rhode Island, Alice’s uncle never managed to find steady work. He was haunted by a difficult childhood: His father had left when he was very young, and he watched his stepfather abuse his mother before ultimately leaving, too. “I just think the world wasn’t made for him to end up in a stable position,” said Alice. He was quiet, “maybe a little bit autistic,” she said, and “just a sweet soul.” She often calls him the “best-dressed homeless person,” because every season he’d buy a new wardrobe and leave on the tags, keeping every item in pristine shape until he returned them. He bounced between shelters and rehabilitation

facilities in Rhode Island but never managed to stay in one place for long. Each time he left rehab, he quickly resumed drinking and taking drugs. I asked Alice why. “His pain was more mental,” she said, “and he didn’t know how to deal with it.” Alice’s mom cared for her brother how she could; she took in his dog for months on end, setting aside a deep aversion to pets. “It would be hard for me to imagine [my mom] not looking after her older brother just because of how she acts with homeless people now,” said Alice. Her mom gives money to nearly every homeless person she encounters and criticizes people who refuse to donate out of concern that their money will be used for alcohol or drugs. She tells Alice, “If there’s any way the money I give this person can ease them of their woes, it doesn’t matter what they use it for.” Her mom’s older brother had more physical woes. “He became a truck driver, and that’s a career that isn’t so kind to your body and doesn’t have the best working conditions and hours,” said Alice. “His drug addiction started when he got injured, I think at work, I think his back, in some kind of accident, and he was prescribed opioids for the pain.” Alice was a toddler, she thinks; it was the early 2000s, when Purdue Pharma was aggressively flooding workingclass communities with OxyContin. Purdue manipulated doctors into pushing the drug using faulty science and monetary bribes, ultimately causing an opioid epidemic that has killed more than 700,000 people in the United States. “He started taking medication and just never stopped,” Alice said of her eldest uncle. The same physician continued to supply the drug for more than a decade after the injury. “Whenever my mom sees [the doctor] in public, she has, like, a panic attack. He gives her a very visceral response.” Alice’s uncle died right before she started high school, for reasons likely unrelated to drug use. He’d been prescribed OxyContin until the very end of his life, a drug that made him volatile at times, and that ignited arguments with his sister, who encouraged him to quit. Still, Alice remembered him as fun and generous. “He really loved me. He gave me everything he had,” she said. “He would get me Christmas gifts that were cute, and we’d play wiffle ball. You know, uncle things.” When he died, he left Alice money to pay for her education. “It was more money than my mom thought that he had,” she said. “He was a loving person, and it just went off the deep end.” +++ As Powell builds sensationalized scenes of people “in the thrall of the drug,” he manipulates our impulse to cope with human suffering by writing it off as someone else’s avoidable mistake, something distant, an ugly inconvenience that makes us “fatigued with our compassion,” as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, told him. That way, we can accept the lazy answer: intensify policing, clear people’s homes, lock people up. Anything to keep the parks pretty. Hyperpolicing is a banal solution, one that clearly failed in President Nixon’s infamous War on Drugs. Kevin has already lost two tents during police sweeps like the ones Powell praises. He’s been to jail before on felony charges, as has his father. “They want to help you out, they want you to stay out, but then every situation that you run into almost brings you back,” he said. The conditions

of poverty, homelessness, and mental illness are likely among these situations, as well as the structural issues that produce them, such as a lack of social support. “You see a problem, come with solutions,” said Beaudoin, responding to Powell. “Why are there so many people unhoused?” I asked Adrian, an unhoused woman in Woonsocket, how she lost her home. She had been living in an apartment near the park when her landlord came and claimed she owed $6,000. A few days later, he was demanding ten. “I was like, ‘There’s no way I can pull ten thousand out my butt,’” she said. Fearing police involvement, she left with her three teenage daughters. For months, Adrian and her girls have been sleeping on a mat on the street. “I just want them to be able to go to school, finish school, have a house that they can call their own home, like they did for five years in my other house,” she said. “It’s not that I can’t pay bills. I want to go back to work. I can’t go back to work with having my daughters outside, right?” She worries about her children witnessing drug use in the park. “I don’t want them going in the path of thinking it’s okay to do what other people are doing out here,” she said. Someone Powell interviewed, a person named Shabnam Nolan who directs a Burlington youth empowerment center, wondered why drug users’ “right to ‘dignity’ violate[s] children’s right to come to our center without seeing blood and needles?” The uneasiness about children’s exposure to drug use evokes the conservative parental rights movement, much in fashion right now, that often instrumentalizes a puristic view of youth to suppress queer and transgender presences. Of course, “nobody wants to see people around them nearly overdosing on a substance or unable to find housing, and those people don’t want that for themselves,” said Beaudoin. But Adrian attributes drug use to the incommensurable challenges of poverty and homelessness, not harm reduction policies. She doesn’t use drugs—a point of pride for her, which she asked me to specify in this piece—but she understands the impulse: “Some people got homeless, and then they became a drug addict or alcoholic because it makes you that way. Yeah, you’re depressed every day,” she said. When she needs to cry, she sends her girls to the library, where they often spend cold or rainy days. She worries about the winter coming; in the winter of 2023, a lovingly remembered Woonsocket man died from sleeping in the freezing cold. Adrian hasn’t been able to secure beds at either of the local shelters, which are operated by the Community Care Alliance (CCA) and Open Doors RI. “It’s gonna snow, and then where are we gonna sleep?” she asked. +++ Adrian isn’t the only one struggling to find shelter. I met Pamela under the awning of a small building, sitting on concrete with two little dogs and a sequined backpack from Victoria’s Secret PINK. She was teary-eyed, having a lonely day. “I had everything until I went through a divorce,” she said. “I had two cars, a beautiful home, I had fucking flowers and gardens. But this is where I have to be because I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

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METRO She tried to land a bed at a local shelter, but they wouldn’t accept her emotional support dogs, who are “the only reason I’m living,” she said. Without a permanent mailing address, she stopped receiving the nearly three hundred dollars of food stamps she used to rely on every month. CCA provided a bus ticket, but the support isn’t enough, and she has no income to supplement it. “I went to eight different fucking job interviews, and I won’t get hired because they just want fucking teenage kids right now that don’t show up to work, and all I want is a job,” she said. Homelessness has tested her faith: “I used to sing in the choir, sing in [...] midnight mass. I don’t believe in God anymore.” But at the park, she has a network of friends who take care of her, filling the vacuum left by the lack of municipal support. For the most part, she relies on two older men named Pops and Billy—Billy’s white beard and red cap have earned him the nickname Santa Claus. Today, Pamela hadn’t been to see them, preferring to watch from afar as they talked. “If they see me, they’re gonna cry. I know Pops is gonna cry. He’s one of my best friends, and he’s the one that helps me,” she said. I asked her what she’d like to tell the government and the media. “I want to say that they need to stop fucking calling everybody that’s homeless scum and a drug addict,” she said. “I’m not here fucking selling drugs, doing drugs, buying drugs.” Like Adrian, she wears abstinence as a badge of honor. I wonder if the aggressive stigmatization of drugs by anti-harm reductionists like Powell played a role in producing this kind of in-fighting, whereby unhoused people—rightfully desperate for dignity—criticize members of their community who use drugs to distance themselves from the shame. Pamela did admit to drinking. “I’m an alcoholic,” she said. “I’d like to get rid of that, too. But if I go into a rehab, fuck, I have nobody to take my fucking dogs, so I can’t.” Contrary to Powell’s idea that people need a “firm push toward treatment” by way of the legal system, Rhode Islanders who struggle with addiction want care. “People

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don’t want to be held captive by a substance,” said Beaudoin. “Every single patient that I take care of is motivated, and their goal is to stop using fentanyl and other street drugs.” Many people have just hit a wall when trying to access care, or they have found it insufficient for their needs. Pamela is desperate for alcoholism support, but without the kind of family Alice’s uncle had—a sister so generously willing to care for a dog—she’s largely alone in recovery. To be homeless with dependents (children and dogs) requires unimaginable sacrifice. “I don’t care about me. I should. My kids is like, ‘Yeah, we do care about you.’ I understand. I care about them more,” said Adrian. “I want them off these streets.” +++ I came to my meeting with Dr. Beaudoin with this heaviness sitting hard. “Part of the problem with the Atlantic piece was this utter lack of empathy and the idea that a park should be for, I don’t know, upper-class people, because it’s hard to look at people suffering,” I said. “And I had a really hard time going to Woonsocket and talking to people and encountering utter human misery, like, very, very hard [...] How does it feel to be treating people who are really in the depths of suffering?” She paused, frowning slightly. “At the end of the day, these are still people who do have moments of joy in their life,” she told me, “even when from the outside it appears maybe not.” She recalled a patient who shared a tent with her beloved cat. “If you talked about this person’s cat, her face lit up, and there was joy there. People want to laugh, and people want to smile, and most humans have a good sense of humor,” she said. During her shifts, she brings clothing, donuts, and, this month, Halloween candy. “And guess what? People that are living in a tent want to eat a Reese’s peanut butter cup, too, and they get excited about that,” she said. She hugs her patients regularly, remembering how rarely many of them

are touched. “When I go there, I choose not to just see the despair pieces.” At the end of my conversation with Adrian, she’d told me that when other unhoused people—presumably hungry themselves—see someone giving out food, they always encourage Adrian and her girls to go eat first. In this public park, the homeless community has built a space of care where they can share resources, laugh and cry, and marshall the strength to keep going. They provide for themselves the humanity so often missing from these ‘crisis prevention’ mechanisms. Harm reduction attempts the same humanization. Testing someone’s heroin for fentanyl may not curb their addiction, but it could keep a 10-year-old girl from receiving the call that her loving uncle has died. Methadone has tremendous power to treat opioid use disorder as what it is: a chronic health condition, not dirty or shameful, just a disease with a medicinal remedy. Powell quotes Daniel Vigo, the Province of British Columbia’s chief scientific adviser on toxic drugs: “Harm reduction gets people in trouble when it stops being one part of a holistic strategy and it becomes an ideological movement.” Ideology aside, a holistic strategy appeals—but not one that ramps up policing to displace and destabilize human beings; one that provides social services, boosts employment opportunities, and regulates rent hikes and manipulation by landlords, the factors that have left Rhode Island’s homeless population vulnerable to drug use. Until we see this sweeping municipal action, the people of Woonsocket will need to keep relying on each other. “I don’t have much, but I will give to somebody if I see somebody needs something,” said Adrian. “We’re not bad people. We’re sweet people.”

TALIA REISS B’27 donated to the community’s Amazon Wishlist using the link below.

( TEXT ANDREA LI, EVAN GRAY-WILLIAMS, AND MAXWELL HAWKINS DESIGN CAROLINE FENTON ILLUSTRATION CLAIRE HUA )

CYCLES Flyway c At 12, I thought myself a minor miracle, thought I’d always get better at drawing. Open-mouthed, I hit the dirt under swingsets, amassed, hard, and swallowed into the air. Two girls bite down on berries, hard, red bits and I imagine bitter crowing from the other braced girls. I am always expecting to return, like practice, but I know no other way to live. Girls— the two of them—mutter death-mercies to our school nurse. On Wheeler, turning geese below us, Nan finds wild blueberries between the smooth white beams of the mountain— Is there a word for these rocks besides “face”? I think of the pair and the narrative laughter. EVAN GRAY-WILLIAMS B’28 ate ants in kindergarten (they were spicy) but never unidentified berries.

LITERARY

Variations on a theme

When he was camper of the day at basketball camp. Half-court. Arthur launched the greasy ball and it hit the backboard like a drum. Here he is with his sticks sticking out of his backpack. Long shorts over pink knees. Orange stretched out in a waxy sheet. Drumming on a waxy sheet with an orange ball. When all the boys dribbled and it sounded like that. Snares on the backbeat. And the whistle. These were the basics of basketball. When they’d play on clay courts at recess and Arthur was the best because he was camper of the day at basketball camp. And the whistle. Here’s Bennet pulling a stick sticking out of Arthur’s backpack out of Arthur’s backpack. Backpack under a chair under an acoustic ceiling. Tennis balls on chair legs. Chalk sounding like skin against skin. Jude’s legs shaking and everyone can feel it. Here’s the brass bell. A brass disc. Hit the splash cymbal. Fridays at Arthur’s because Arthur had a pool. Wobbling blue rectangle. Red umbrella above a shadow and a pale stomach. Manny’s dad made the biggest splash. Booker swam there and back without coming up for air. When we pushed Manny’s dad in the pool at Arthur’s tenth. Danny dropped the watermelon. His hands were wet and the watermelon was waxy. When Arthur’s shoulders were pink and Bernard put sunscreen on him. He put his broken sticks in a bucket. He broke his first stick in Will’s garage. He

Arthur at the drums

Cycles

broke his second bone on a half-pipe. First on the swings. He wore a brace. He made it from half-court at basketball camp. Chalk on his fingers. White on pink skin against skin. Pink bathing suit under a blue rectangle. Arthur made it there and back. This is what Bennet looked like without glasses. Bennet played bass. Arthur broke his first stick while Bennet played bass. He kept his broken sticks in a bucket. Fill up the bucket. Because this was a summer. Because Arthur was the drummer. Arthur at the drums. Danny on the keys. Bennet on bass. Bernard’s little sister sings. Arthur. Bennet. Danny. Bernard’s little sister. Arthur was camper of the day at basketball camp some summers ago. Don’t forget it. Camper of the day at basketball camp. Half-court. Arthur launched the greasy ball and it hit the backboard. MAXWELL HAWKINS B’27

Everything turns and turns, becoming a faint slushy haze of gray. What matters is the end of the rope, which is frayed and thinking about converting to Buddhism. It is a bald and ascetic incarnation. Conclusions find themselves in lethargic orgies, orgasm transmuted into a means toward an illimitable limit. As x approaches infinity, infinity flinches and turns inward. She is a good girl who tells mother every thought that is run over in her head, how her body catches on the tracks like a zipper, how the train marches forward. She is a bad girl who does not try hard enough in school. Tomorrow is Monday and on Mondays the gulls always raise themselves to the trees, fighting back putrid waves of red that bat their eyes on the shores, oil and sweat and blood from the turning, returning boats. She promises that there will be no self for anyone to find here, only a dense spatiality that gathers itself into a skirt, pleat-kissed and waistband-noosed and a pure, terrible white. There will be no girls who gather years like scabs on their skin. There will be no time at all. Of course, I am lying. Oaths are premised on the possibility of their rupture: I put on an old dress and it rips down the back, cleaving a band of tan-yellow-peach into the screen-black fabric. Only the waves are suited for rotation, for running their gentle palms over the infinity they have tamed. I wake up as the moon assembles itself and mourn the date crucified on the wall: another sun has perished in its endless dance with the sky. Tomorrow is Tuesday and on Tuesdays the gulls always die. I watch their light bodies fall to the red-black shore. It is dusk. Beneath the closing firmament, I pretend I do not have a name. I know it will always fall short of itself, the great length of everything. ANDREA LI B’28 is spinning around and around and around…

read the back of your shirt.

CYCLES VOLUME 53 ISSUE 03

SCHEMA

( TEXT LILY ELLMAN &

ROMILLY THOMSON DESIGN CATHY RONG )

c Desire draws you all over College Hill. In this schema, we look for the ways in which walkers pave desire paths across campus. No, we’re not talking about tracking your journey to your Perkins paramour from freshman year. Let’s talk about dirt paths. A desire path is an unofficial shortcut created through foot traffic. Robert Moor of The New Yorker describes them as “cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails).” These traces of pedestrian movement provide a visual probe into how public space is used. They are democratic cousins of the official Brown University–sanctioned pavement. The cement routes are already memorialized by the institution’s published map. Here, we honor the self-justifying tracks.

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SCHEMA

LILY ELLMAN B’27 & ROMILLY THOMSON B’27

are boots on the ground journalists.

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*Angh– Excerpts on An

ARTS

xiety and Art ( TEXT NA DIA MAZONSON, EMMA CHA NDLER, AUDREY HE , MOHAMED JAOUADI, KATYA MICH KOVSKAIA, & ILAN BRU SSO DESIGN MAIL EE PHAN ILLUSTRATIO N YASHAMA Y DAVID )

rt ed Indy staff to write sho c In this issue, we ask de ma t tha ly) ad (taken bro reviews of art objects or stentially uncomfortable, exi or us them feel anxio ). ny can un e (th h lic unheim invoked a feeling of the for nt rai nst co l ma ing for Perhaps brevity is a fitt xiety, along with anguish an : ing nk thi this kind of oed from the Proto-Ind and angst, likely emerg ces en eri exp ibe scr d to de European root *angh–, use , suffocation, or “tightion lat gu an str of constraint, ness of being.” ncept of *angh– might In this context, the co but l logic for this project, provide not just a forma ty for thinking about anxie also a useful framework ed liv a as th bo ty xie ure an itself. Here, we might fig ss, real psychological distre se cau can feeling, which ilph n: itio nd co al hic ilosop and as a kind of extra-ph ur es you to think about yo osophical in that it requir it t tha in al hic sop ra-philo own existence, and ext to refore political) stakes lends existential (and the mfi co dis the by ked provo the feelings of suffocation ay life. tures of material, everyd n, do we locate anxiety, the s, thi of all in Where, rs s five reviews, our write in the work of art? Acros a structural facet of the explore anxiety both as es as an affect which emerg objects they read, and ey with the object itself. Th through their encounter d rk is unheimlich; they rea identify what in the wo ck traces, ghosts; they tra for doubles, specters, the n-recognition between moments of mis- and no e tak y the y, all fin d, self; an work, the body, and the asks litical affect, one which anxiety seriously as a po on temic modes of suffocati us to pay attention to sys and constraint.

ot quite e work is n h T e. bl si vi curve at ders Drawing ren nic. The wires ga or at e h it W qu e. ch off, e pag d not and then bran geometric an t a body on th p es gl ce a t ex an r ou be h la u it it image I endic body w What can resembles an precise, perp It hout paper. A . it ed w d es en n tli li t p , which y, sp can it be exce becoming furr nervous system , and dy. an bo a m as t u w h ou ), h re it ti 94 w e en midt (1912–19 page. A body , cleaned, dried once saw of th trud Goldsch anned om a cadaver fr sp k ed p e source or p w ri st e Gego, or Ger os had been haps that is th artist wh er P an 69 e. el 19 bl u ta ez m k en Fro blac nes as my a German-V laid out on a e spidering li and drawing. os , re th it e tu iz ec ow it gn h ch co e: : I re elf not as e lin sculpture, ar of my unease confront mys fixated on th to , e d m ed te ca rc ea p fo be y re e so many ereb d and onwards, sh e, made up of own. I am th in could be linke h it ac at m th ow a h id as e, sa t ac She s bu tabilizing, moved in sp eate volume. consciousnes d it is des cr an ld ” , u t. ts co gh ar it p ou — so th le ab s recede criptive how in doing consciousnes simple—draw y ly human des m al in e u n is av h ga “v e be to th r ce I first ng, Pape the line was e disappearan anxiety-induci th rawing without y, D sl vi u es re p eo ri se an om lt re mu er fr disappearHer sculptu in this way. Si becomes the p metal left ov ra e, sc ag g p n e si th u s, of at symbolizes the late 1970 registered, th ich the work h w o eg of G y, e d bo on n first erves have ous works. ance of my ow rmath. My n per 85/1—the te Pa I af . ut d m u ho an it se u w ty li g M bi ces, incorrd Art Drawin both its possi e, cut into pie m in the Harva re om gs fo fr an be h ed p e — p m 85 stri wing withing ti made in 19 already been l shape. A dra fu weekend, kill ar y It fe in , k. ra er or a rg w la e on this to th egation will was there porated into hat drew me a body. The n w t y om ou sa h fr ’t , it n w es ca n y li d I bo know when The a concert. out paper: a ter of clarity. ed, but I don’t at en er m p os a ap cl h a en y t be ad ge re there is the ted to might have happen, has al know is that all, and I wan I w e ll A th y. to h in w en afar, blurred or how or ev r 85/1 is pe angling. d Pa e, ut m . ho of ok it e lo insid wing w ra D er in of ta n e co ap a The sh r. It suggests -- — in, dark y rectangula 7 —--- —-- — With their th REY HE B’2 approximatel s. D va U n A ca , el o, , to er, pan hs, the wires or surface: pap wavering pat y tl t it is h u ig B . sl gs d drawin al shapes an on si en im d nderds twoe out from u ag p gesture towar e th ed ll u that e has p per. The lines pa as if someon ut ho it w g ce, the drawin a disappearan neath: It is a of s rd co re e becom remain have crime. g us to e mysterious m of fear, alertin traces of so rm fo se u iff ad he more So anxiety is ot pinpoint. T n n ca e w e rc e sou I find. It appearances a danger whos is d e or m e th which iece, the wall, on I look at the p om fr es ch in a few shadows. s the wires’ is suspended st ca y er ll ga d its the the drawing an we: the lighting of ag im ed bl dra , a dou and another There is, then ly a drawing al tral, re ec is /1. 1985. sp h is ic h k w The wor ithout Paper 85 shadow, g. w in g w in ra w d ra a D in o. . Geg g with m, Cambridge ing. A drawin I rd Art Museu afterimage. g, va n in ar ow h H s ac it ro is p it I am ap ghostly; osts’: What y, which ‘Crimes,’ ‘gh n of the bod io at eg n of kind suppose, is a

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

se to home in his 1996 Roberto Bolaño writes clo is set in Pinochet’s Chile novel Distant Star, which d’état. Bolaño’s protagofollowing the 1973 coup s as a fictionalized avatar nist is Arturo B., who act low Arturo’s jarring and of Bolaño himself. We fol of murderer-poet-aviator deeply uncanny pursuit rtment is the site of shadCarlos Wieder. Wieder’s apa are the paper on which owy violence and his skies n Poetry, spelled out with he writes the New Chilea t ated as part of the fascis vaporous letters and cre the is a poetry haunted by narrative he promotes. It r rking a nearly religious fea ghosts of colonialism, spa of laño uses multiple sets in those who witness it. Bo racters to draw out their metaphorically doubled cha The values of Arturo B. and values, fears, and secrets. affirmed because of their a fellow poetry student are eder casts a shadow on his doubled nature, while Wi Albert Ruiz-Tagle. Bolaño more innocent alter ego of their traits, using the narra‘explodes’ characters and y and reveal their seemingl tive to turn them around motivations. endless hidden beliefs and its power through Fascism in Chile gained U.S. involvement. One Pinochet, largely due to this was that it was rife systemic manifestation of ne could be your killer, or with secret police—anyo eone else to erase you. an informant who tells som at innocent citizens and Bolaño skillfully blurs wh y different? Bolaño is very assassins look like: Are the of evil—Adolf Eichmann interested in the banality nging facial expression. types who kill without cha cism is the commonplace. The weapon of hidden fas is a photo exhibition of Central to Bolaño’s story in his apartment. Guests Wieder’s that takes place time and someone vomits may only enter one at a r shows off the gruesome soon after exiting. Wiede l with the pride of a genera photographs of his ‘work’ eye his Leica camera is an with his badges. Indeed, is one of its many arms. of the state, and Wieder soned old detective ever But can Arturo B. and a sea what if it doesn’t matter? pin Wieder down? And Savage B’29 wants to read EMMA CHANDLER

Detectives next.

ARTS The Interview.mp4 A Black woman discovers, in a corporate job interview, that she has been hired as the emotional caretaker of Dick Cheney at the height of the Iraq war. The secretary is desperate to fill in the vacant position. Cheney is in the background, muttering about his kingship, his dissolving stardom, before he starts weeping. The screen is overlaid with text that reads: “shame…but gotta pay the rent.” The woman accepts the position. “The Interview” is only our entry point into Kathleen Daniel’s surrealist YouTube channel, also known as Duh Real/Kathleen Realness/Silicious. At the dawn of Web 2.0, the artist began sharing her experiments with the tools of her time: Frame Forge and Blender 3D. The result is a compilation of music videos, surrealist skits, and short-form melodramas taken from her upbringing in a Black working-class community in Minneapolis. Daniel was a loyal YouTuber from 2006–2016, a decade that was at once jarring, historical, and altogether deceptive for Black political life. Think: War On Terror, Obamacare, the Ferguson unrest following the killing of Michael Brown in 2014, all up until the dizzying rise of the Trump Administration. Kathleen lays out the contradictions of the system through trippy videos that reveal the fictitious nature of the myth around Black progress, and the underlying sick system that this myth tries, at times, to conceal. “The Interview,” as explained above, can then serve as an example of how the entry of Black women into the corporate world is

predicated on compromise. Inherent to this access is the expectation of emotional labor to stabilize white guilt, especially when white consciousness is at a vulnerable moment. Daniel translates all of her political and social agonies through a visual language that is irrational, confusing, and fissured, the descriptive qualities of that political era, without compromising the humor and the internal daily lives of Black proletariat. Anthropomorphic animals, walking skeletons, a prophetic version of John Pork, and a panoply of Black and Native American subjects. These different kinds of characters are dropped against stale urban backgrounds where they appear stiff, pixelated, and afloat. They are often glued alongside one another or put on top of each other. Through these stylistic choices, Daniel uses the composition of the images themselves to speak on different political events. Despite the continuity of the video format, there are no harmonious relationships between each other; their voices are overlapped. Violence is a recurring theme. At best, her characters develop passive-aggressive enmities. Kathleen Daniel’s work teaches us not only the necessity of abandoning legibility or aesthetic gratification in art, but to also admit psychological disintegrity amidst systems that are not fit for sanity or communal harmony.

I am anxious in the fac e of Crumbl. Unburden ed by the vowel “e” (putt ing the brand in queer company) or menu co nsistency, Crumbl is a national dessert chain that pump s out six skyscraping ne w mini-cakes and cookies every week. Examples include “Dubai-Style Ch ocolate Brownie” and “Kentucky Butter Cake Cookie.” They are suck ers for cross-promotion, pa iring up with the likes of Martha Stewart and Mi necraft to inspire their fleet of baked goods for the week. I wonder if Marth a Stewart and Minecraft have ever shared a sen ten ce before. I wonder if Du bai-Style, Kentucky, Ma rth a Stewart and Minecraft have ever even shared a page. I am, however, certain that the words Martha and butter have . So that’s something. In some ways, Crumbl is a microcosm of life today. A micro-cocoa-c osm, if you’ll allow a ref erence to the “Frozen Hot Ch ocolate Cookie,” menu #2 06. Each of these desserts , each of these masterp iec es of butter, flour, sugar, an d occasionally gummy sh arks (“Sugar Shark Co MOHAMED JAOUADI B’28 asks you to keep it Duh Real. okie,” menu #156), deser ve to be exalted as the art works they are, but jus t as quickly as they appear, they vanish. Like a tho ughtful reel that graces your fee d, these brilliant items are held captive by the nove lty-obsessed mechanism s that supply them. No tim e to savor the festive crunch of the “Birthday Cake Cookie ft. OREO ®,” nor the romantic tart of the “Chocolate Covered Strawberry Cookie.” Th ey become old news alm Content warni ng: the piece co ost the moment they become ntains mention news at all. Much like s of suicide the real news, in fact. (I, personally, am still no We expect co t over “covfefe,” if anyo mmencemen ne even remembers thi t speeches to and reassurin s.) be quippy g, like a reliab I was initiated to the fro ly strong coff However, the sted world of Crumbl by ee on a plane. one by David my bo ss, who frequently boug Foster Walla Water,” from ht them for her underce, “This is the 2005 co lings. She fed us much mmencemen un College, mak lik e a mother bird, which t at Kenyon es me feel un is to say we chewed ou easy. Wallace r refutes the ce foo d ou rselves. Primally exposes and remony conve they are delightful, but ntions, optin humor, and at ind ee d the y challenge their g for honesty times, unmas beholder, like all art sh , ked distress. ould. Upon contact wi dactic tone ca His non-dith my rries a swirli individually-generated ng narrative, letting me in saliva, the cookie surre temporarily to his mind p ndered into odd clumps of un alace. But loom derbaked batter. My oc YouTube video ing over the ula r on my phone cones strained against is the undenia Wallace’s suic the impossibly vibrant ble fact of ici ide three year ng, and my nose worked ov s later. How ca him talking ab ertime to decode whate n I listen to ve out staying al r synthetic flavoring wa ive and consc ing on “life B s wafting off the treat. ious, focusIf EFORE death thi s description seems to su ,” and know th not to? ggest that I would not at he chose rumbl for Crumbl, you have mi sunderstood me. All thi Wallace’s spee s sensory overload is jus ch reminds m of assent, synk t ever more proof that e of the stoic the atathesis, whic notion pace at which we receiv h grants us au our judgemen e these desserts is all too thority in ts of objectiv fas t. Ideally, one cookie a e facts, and whether we ta year would be released challenges ke control ov , and customers would er our reaction drive us. He st be giv en the space and time s or let them ates how stud to fully appreciate these ents need to be and aware en marvels of late capitali “conscious ough to choo sm. In stead, an I Love Lucy sty se tion to” and what [they] le conveyor belt spits ou pay atten“how [they] t novel creations at brea construct mea experience.” k-neck speed. “Here yo ning from This advice is u go ! Here you go! Here you followed by th ing section of go! Here you g—NO! SL e most chillhis speech: “T OW it down!” In fact, let Crum he truth is th these suicides bl’s yearly drop schedule at most of are actually d ini tiate a grand slowdown ead long befo the trigger.” W of the entire world, wh re they pull hat seemed li ere on ly one new TikTok is relea ke moment of th a coherent id sed each day, only one ea at the e speech, now ne w TV show per month, , through dra is a gut punch and only one travesty pe matic irony, . Was he refe r mi llennia, instead of thous re ncing himself those who fa ands of new ones each iled to remai as on da y. e Co of me on Crumbl, herald n stoic—and derive meanin a brighter future, ushe how does on g from his advi r in uto pia, and please, by God, e ce, knowing th himself didn’t bring back the “Dubaiat Wallace follow it? Style” Cheesecake—so me of us really, really mi I am both h ss it. eeding and u neurotic in th nsettled by h e same mann is vo ILA ic e, N BRUSSO B’27 is er his writing ety where an hungry and may have is. In a socixiety is simu misundersto od this assignment. lt an intolerable, th eously protru ding and is feeling calls for immediate long division erasure. By or digestive en zymes, it nee down, follow ds a breaked by an upli fting takeaway essay about . Even in an it, anxiety doe sn’t have a ri without an em ghtful place erging refram e. But it seem some contrad s to me like ictions, like those betwee archived voic n Wallace’s e and his non -existence, w to a pleasan ill never com t resolution. e It is, perhap elements of s, one of the the “day-to-d ay trenches tence” he talk of adult exis s about: sittin g in disquiet ing to a comm after listenencement sp eech from so graduation, gi meone else’s ven by someo ne you never to resonate w m et yet grew ith and miss.

KATYA MIC HKOVSKAIA B’28 has a ka Davids (Lynch rmic bond w , Foster Walla ith ce, the protei n bar).

VOLUME 53 ISSUE 03

“SORRY”

( TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY RYAN CONNERS & B. SIMBANA-J DESIGN JENNIE KWON )

PHOTOTEXT

33 hours 25 minutes 45 seconds

c You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had. Okay, okay—it was the best. Top three of this year for sure. I got to see this place that everyone talks about because everyone has been besides me. Today has changed the way I see tomorrow. And the best part is it only cost $35.00 big ones. Of your money, of course. Thank you for that. And I know it was more than last time And I know you left work early to pick me up And I know I begged to borrow your pink camera And I know that you are the reason that I am Thank you for that. And you never complain You asked to see the plants, the kind that you haven’t seen since you left home I got lost in the excitement of the gardens. I made you this photograph instead.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

I’m sorry.

PHOTOTEXT

80 hours 1 minute 38 seconds

A couple days ago, I saw you, consciously, for the first time. I awoke from a midday nap and turned over to see you lying next to me your eyes were closed, still asleep you’ve been so tired recently, you didn’t wait to take your coat off before climbing in your hair was still damp from the rain you had on that shirt I gave you your body was more limp than I’m used to, huddled against the wall I felt the vibrations of your cries beneath me rocking my body too I sat there and stared for a moment you didn’t know anyone was watching my camera was resting

close by

you heard the sound of the shutter and looked at me as you usually do when I take a photograph: disoriented and slightly embarrassed you were now aware of my eyes and lens you adjusted your posture, fixed your hair, and took your shoes off I took more photos, but the scene had changed it wasn’t really your person anymore; you were back to being.

I’m sorry.

We challenged ourselves to eliminate the word “sorry” from our vocabulary. Every time we said “sorry,” we would make an image—of what we apologized to, our surroundings, or, out of frustration, for as long as 36 exposures of 35mm film could last us. The time is punctuated at the top of each contact sheet, evidence of how long it took for us to say “sorry” 36 times. With each other’s contact sheets of photographic apologies, we chose an image to respond to and imagine a narrative for. In these instances, we tried to discover the mindlessness of the habit. We were interested in how often we say sorry, usually without thinking, sometimes without even noticing. We apologize for existing. In the fictional writing of the actual image, the truth of the frame loses validity, and the importance shifts to the fact that we make these images as an effort to consciously realize why we say “sorry”. This collection of images isn’t about evidence. They instead now exist as an object, set in silver, that shows the repetitive act of language. RYAN CONNERS R’27 & B. SIMBANA-J R’27 love photography.

VOLUME 53 ISSUE 03

FEATURES

CHAIN REACTION THE PROVIDENCE BIKE JAM AND COMMUNITY ON WHEELS

( TEXT MAIA RIGGS DESIGN DARIA DEREVIANKO PHOTOGRAPHY JAKE PARKER )

c A zombie on a bike rides up next to me, bass booming out of a side speaker. As sunlight fades beyond the reaches of Kennedy Plaza, a ragtag group of Providence inhabitants begin to gather. Outfitted in apocalyptic fashion, they roll into the horde and prepare to traverse the city sans car. This is the Providence Bike Jam, a monthly social ride that promises a party on wheels. For the past decade, community members have been gathering one night a month to ride 12 miles around the city with a different route each time—and, excitingly, a theme. On this particular night, I entered into the dystopian world of “Mad Max II: The Jam Warrior.” My devastatingly mediocre attempt at a wasteland-chic outfit was vastly outshined by the roughly 150 individuals around me who had, to varying degrees, committed to the bit. As a steady stream of costumed cyclists began to fill up the brick plaza, I set out to speak to as many people as possible, though quickly realized this was a Herculean task. Beside me, a facepainted man sat atop an enormous cargo trailer stacked with an elaborate sound system—christened the War Rig, in classic Mad Max fashion. With a battle cry, he captured the attention of the crowd. “If you see somebody not taking care of each other on the Fury Road, you say something and you take care of them. Providence Bike Jam gets to continue because our community self-regulates well. Nobody’s gonna be the dipshit that makes the Fury Road too furious.” With a final cry, he pointed towards the streets and called: “WITNESS ME!!” And so the chorus responded, first pedals beginning to advance. +++

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The completely volunteer-led Providence Bike Jam (PBJ) always stops for at least two wild and unburdened dance parties along its route, and often ends at a local establishment: hot dogs at the Olneyville NY System, or a refreshing pint at the Narragansett Brewery. Organizers help by “corking” the streets, using their bodies and bikes to temporarily block traffic so the Jam can roll by as a unit. Every person at the Jam has a unique story, reflected in the individuality of their bikes. From road bikes to cruisers, cargo frames to electric frames, and the occasional roller blade or skateboard, no two setups are the same. Add racks and baskets, combine that with the costumes, and the group is nothing short of eclectic. Accepting my fate as one rider within the throng, I struck up conversation with an enthusiastic Jammer beside me. Connor, a young man with a black leather jacket and aggressive war paint beneath his eyes, grinned effusively as he shared his reflections on his three months participating in PBJ. He found out about the Jam from his neighbor, Phil, one of PBJ’s organizers. “He and my other friend, Matthew, were like, ‘Listen, you gotta rearrange your schedule for this. This bike jam is what you build your life around,’” he said. “And I was like, ‘All right, hell yeah, let’s do it.’ I took my bike, and the rest is history.” Connor’s bike was stolen from his driveway last month. Without hesitation, Phil lent him another one. Recently, their block has organized their own pre-Jam party, gathering for drinks and amping up before riding out together for the night. “You get off at different stops and just have a great time, and then you finish at bars, and restaurants, and you’re just meeting new people. You’re falling in love, you’re falling out of love, you’re making a nemesis, you’re making a new friend. You know, you’re doing all this crazy stuff. And that’s why I’m still coming back,” said Connor. Caitlyn, a long-time Providence resident, has been coming to the Bike Jam for four years, and also heard about it from organizer friends. Now a convert, she spoke excitedly about bringing friends into this world. “I think it’s really great if someone’s curious about biking in the city and doesn’t really feel confident on their own…it’s a great way to get exposure to kind of feel more comfortable biking around, because as a group you feel a lot more empowered.” While waiting for the Mad Max ride to roll out, I sat down on a bench beside a flannel-clad cowboy. Joshua has lived in Providence his whole life, and found out about the Bike Jam from a new friend while slacklining in India Point Park. His car has been out of commission for a few months—in the meantime, he has been biking over 1000 miles a month. He told me about growing up in the South Side of Providence, constantly riding without bike lanes amidst the chaos of the city. He added, “Almost all of my friends have been hit by a car.” According to the Providence Streets Coalition, a nonprofit organization fighting for pedestrian infrastructure and safer streets, there have been

1,236 Providence bike crashes in the last 15 years that resulted in injury or fatality. Nationwide, thousands of bikers die annually from crashes with cars, at the mercy of immense vehicular power. I asked Joshua whether he thinks bike and pedestrian infrastructure should be a higher priority within the City Council and mayor’s office. To my surprise, he responded dismissively: “I would love it to be a priority if there were not so many other things that seem to be way higher priorities. I think we can get by with what we have.” “What we have” is an infrastructure optimized for automobiles. With the advent of the motor vehicle in the early 20th century, the car industry took over public infrastructure, with corporations and auto lobbyists pushing to suppress railway transportation. As civilian fatalities rose with increased car usage, the auto lobby worked to criminalize pedestrians rather than take the blame, inventing the crime of ‘jaywalking’ and working to socially and legally institutionalize it. Today, the oil, coal, and auto industries spend over $100 million each year to shape transportation policy towards cars and gas usage. People living in America remain at the mercy of those with capital, and our mobility—or lack thereof—reflects that. Over time, households have been disenfranchised by the auto industry: In 2024, the average American household spent over $13,000 on transportation, making it the second largest annual expense category. Only 10% of the U.S. population lives within walking distance of frequent, reliable public transportation. +++ As an urban biker, I often wonder if it will be my unlucky day: if I won’t quite make a turn, or if I’ll disappear into the unforgiving traffic. Riding in a group eases these fears. There is power in numbers. In response to the anxiety surrounding urban cycling, there’s been an influx of organized bike parties across the U.S., in which residents ride en masse along a collective route. PBJ was founded in 2017 when local cyclists got tired of journeying by train to the Boston Bike Party and decided to start something of their own. At first, PBJ operated as a form of Critical Mass, a popular cycling protest format that originated in San Francisco in the early 1990s. Activists took to their bikes to contest the dominance of cars, reclaim public space, and demand safer streets through collective power. The Critical Mass movement defines itself by their imagined word ‘xerocracy’—a decentralized anarchic system in which anybody can take the initiative to print and distribute information, routes, or flyers at will. This nonhierarchical leadership structure makes the movement somewhat nebulous: There is neither one authority nor one vision of what Critical Mass can look like. Some iterations are more confrontational in their tactics, antagonizing vehicles and catching the attention of law enforcement. While others have leaned further into the social aspect,

FEATURES

visibility remains the core principle. Over time, the movement has expanded to over 300 documented chapters across the world, with many garnering thousands of people riding each week. In 2008, a Budapest Critical Mass ride achieved a new record with a staggering 80,000 cyclists in attendance. Due to the group’s disruption of public infrastructure, Critical Mass has faced pushback from drivers and law enforcement. In Portland, Oregon, altercations with the police department became characteristic of the rides: In August 2002, police officers targeted a Critical Mass ride with over 800 attendees, using pepper spray and rubber bullets to quell the “anarchist bike rally.” In 2007, the Portland ride fizzled out altogether.

After five miles of biking around Providence amidst shouts of joy and a bass-boosted soundtrack, we stopped for our first dance party. Jammers around me dismounted their bikes, propped them up against trees and fences. A dance pit quickly formed, strangers jumping and twisting to the beat. My friends and I began a round of ‘energy ball,’ to which seven facepainted and leather-clad Jammers joined in. After running out of creative ways to pass an imaginary ball across the circle, I set out to speak to more participants. Shawn, new to PBJ, previously participated in San Francisco Critical Mass but found it “a little too radical.” He was visiting his sister, who lives in Providence, and is also friends with some original PBJ organizers. When I pressed him on his hesitancy towards Critical Mass, he responded, “I just think they were purposely trying to disrupt traffic and stuff. We all have to live together…the cars and the bikes. And so I think it’s great to make a point that we’re out there, but I don’t want to be obnoxious about it.” This perspective is shared by many, and is part of the reason Critical Mass has changed in so many ways since its conception. Yet Shawn’s statement raises questions about the nature of protest—whose comfort is this sentiment protecting? Might the mild discomfort that Critical Mass causes be reasonable retribution for the physical harm and risk that cars pose to cyclists? Of course, most of the individuals waiting to get to work are not the moguls running the auto lobby. But these small-scale disruptions, as Critical Mass proponents might argue, are integral to breaking through the societal structures containing us. Standing to the side of the dance party, observing, was Aoife. She participates in Critical Mass rides in Boston, and came out to Providence to experience the Bike Jam. Sans costumes, her Boston rides stray further from a party dynamic. She often joins them for an opportunity to meet people, and to explore

parts of the city that may not feel as safe on her own. “I think as cyclists, we end up becoming activists and advocates for ourselves, when we don’t necessarily want to. So it’s also really important to just have spaces for bike joy and just existing. And this is kind of both. I guess this is like the Venn diagram of being both, which is awesome,” she said.

On July 26, 2019, the Providence Bike Jam debuted their first rebranded ride as PBJ, leaving the Critical Mass label behind. There is no clear answer as to why this change was made. In a blog post from 2021, a community member posted their recount of Zombie Jam, followed by a brief reflection on PBJ as a whole: “For years this was the Critical Mass ride, usually drawing 15–18 riders. Once the name changed, the popularity soared. One ride that included the Mayor of Providence, drew over 200 cyclists. PVD has become the group ride to experience.” A cursory search through the PBJ Instagram page affirms the accuracy of this statement. Though there may have been other factors at play, it is undeniable that attendance increased significantly after their rebrand. Ultimately, a Critical Mass ride is only impactful if one truly has, as the name describes, the critical mass needed to effectively block the roads. If the showing is sparse, it undermines the power of the movement: physically failing to fill the space and metaphorically indicating a lack of support for the cause. After the messaging shift to Providence Bike Jam, ride turnout grew. The format of the ride did not change significantly—the dance parties existed before the rebrand, and promotional methods were the same. Intention is what sets them apart: Critical Mass promotes itself as explicit protest, while social bike jams advertise a party on wheels. However, the ends often manifest similarly, despite opposing means. As a global movement, Critical Mass has somewhat fractured. Differing experiences with law enforcement and reception have pushed some iterations into rebrand, caused group fragmentation, or— as in Portland—ended the rides altogether. There are, of course, still successful Critical Mass contingents: Cities like Boston and Miami ride out weekly in relatively large numbers. Yet the once burgeoning movement has faltered and seemingly lost its steam. When Critical Mass started, it needed strong

messaging to gain traction. A shared label connected the huge, loud, and disruptive first rides in San Francisco to the budding rides in New York City. Having name association brings recognition to your cause, and for iterations just starting out, gives people a shared understanding of your goals. Today, however, the name Critical Mass is often associated with obnoxious disruption and aggressive tactics. Negative reputations harm the efficacy of their action, as law enforcement is more on guard and citizens are more hesitant to join. Perhaps, at its core, Critical Mass has simply outgrown its label. The project was always meant to shift and change, growing into its most regionally effective format. In the xerocratic spirit of ambiguity, one can look at the many new forms of social bike rides intertwined with advocacy and still view them as part of the same movement. Despite their departure from the Critical Mass label, PBJ’s rides are far from apolitical. PBJ participates annually in the BLOODTIDE ride, honoring horseshoe crabs and fundraising for the People’s Port Authority, an environmental justice organization fighting against industrial pollution for Providence residents. A 2020 Instagram post announced an initiative to support local small businesses struggling during the pandemic; their annual “Cranksgiving” ride combines a bike ride and a holiday food drive in support of the Amos House shelter. In January 2026, PBJ hosted a solidarity ride in memory of Alex Pretti, following his murder by ICE agents in Minneapolis. And yet, the increasingly social aspect of these rides is undeniably enticing. Perhaps this is a testament to our de-radicalization as a society, or a response to the oft-referenced loneliness epidemic. Crucially, this dynamic underscores the absence of shared public spaces, in which people can socialize free of cost. As our infrastructure becomes increasingly commercial and often hostile, we face an unfortunate reality: We are gathering less. PBJ offers the allure of a third space on wheels: a public environment with a low barrier to entry, entirely for and by the community. With ‘phoneswhile-biking’ being generally frowned upon for practical reasons (i.e. the mailbox I biked into when I was 14), the Bike Jam has created an accidentally Luddite space: not the focus of the ride, but a beautiful byproduct of its nature. Here, people are present.

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FEATURES EPHEMERA

Somewhere between the West End and Elmwood, I found myself riding alongside a shirtless and facepainted man, atop a bike with a makeshift cardboard exhaust pipe. Not only was it his first PBJ, it was only his second time in Providence. Evan is a Minneapolis local who enjoys long motorcycle tours across the country. While couch surfing during a prior journey, he befriended his host and reached out again in advance of a high school friend’s wedding in Boston. She encouraged him to come a day earlier just to participate in PBJ, and prepared a bike and costume for him. As I spoke with him, he told me about his experiences traveling the country, the many couch-surfing forums, and his thoughts on his first Bike Jam. “I have a degree in recreation and tourism. And if you’re gonna sum that up into one sentence, it’s selling an experience. And that’s what this is. You’re selling an experience to all these people watching this. That’s the most beautiful part of it. Everyone involved in this is really neat. But watching everyone else’s reaction from the outside is the coolest part for me. It’s all about the community, about the grassroots, and including the rest of the community that aren’t into it yet.” Evan’s description of PBJ as “selling an experience” unnerved me. Part of the key to the ride’s charm and success is that it is free: Anybody can bike, skate, blade, or board, and you can come and go whenever you may like. The concept of selling anything is in tension with the anarchist roots of Critical Mass, yet his comments on the community were apt—as I passed onlookers, I noticed them being palpably pulled into this world. Families on their porches, friends in hookah bars, couples in cars, and an old woman peering down from her window smiled and shouted their acceptance towards our hullaballoo. PBJ is grassroots to its core. Everyone I interacted with said they heard about the Jam from a friend, or from seeing it go by. The interpersonal relationships at the core of PBJ are what fuel its energetic character. Every person we pass gets to partake in that

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

energy, and potentially join that change in the future. Nico, a Providence local, told me about how he was skateboarding with some friends when he first saw the Jam, and they decided to simply skate along. He’s been coming nearly every month for three years now. +++ During our second dance party (below the Providence River Bridge), I finally spoke to Phil Mattes, a PBJ organizer and the Bike Programming Manager at the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, a nonprofit organization working to spark positive environmental, social, and economic development by restoring the Woonasquatucket River Greenway. In fact, it was far from my first time laying eyes on his fiery red hair. At my first-ever PBJ, Phil stole the show by pulling a saxophone from his pannier and proceeding to play along to many of the EDM mixes blasting from the speakers. A month later, I spotted him in the audience of RIPTA: The Musical—a short production by Sunrise Brown, a climate organizing group, in response to the cutting of Rhode Island’s public transit lines (I played the bus driver). Phil has been in Providence for just three years, yet he has made a reputation as a fierce advocate in the community. Bike Jam is actually part of what got him to move here. “Biking has always been political. Especially about how we use the street, who we build our streets for…what’s accessible, what’s not accessible,” Phil remarked, lamenting “the amount of pushback it takes to get a bike lane in place…to get better streets, to get a better culture around accepting bikes as an adequate form of daily transportation.” In February 2024, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley signed the Vision Zero Resolution, committing to ensure safer streets and eliminate traffic fatalities. Just two months later, he announced an expensive new plan to remove the protected bike lane on South Water Street to create two-way traffic lanes in an effort to decrease congestion. Community members quickly spoke up against the policy proposal, and the Providence City Council voted against its implementation. Due to upset from residents and organizations like the Providence Streets Coalition, Smiley

introduced an alternative plan to build raised sidewalk-level bike lanes while additionally creating a two-lane street. The plan is slated to cost the city $4.4 million. These decisions represent a larger pattern of resource allocation and community neglect that causes frustration across the Providence community. Smiley has claimed to want to make the city “safer,” yet the initial decision to remove the bike path went against data that the lanes helped reduce pedestrian injuries and fatalities. This decision precedes Smiley’s controversial push to drastically reduce funding for the Rhode Island Public Transportation Association (RIPTA), minimizing routes and altering service. Allocating $4.4 million to prioritize cars on South Water Street while simultaneously defunding public transportation marginalizes the 20% of Providence households that do not have a car—including multiple people I spoke to at the Jam. +++ Unreliant on gas prices and ill-timed transportation schedules, bicycles offer the opportunity to cover distance with the power of your own two feet. This energy independence makes movement more accessible: Bikes played a huge role in the early feminist movement, giving women the freedom of self-reliance outside of male-dominated modes of transportation. In cities dominated by car infrastructure, there is something subversive in autonomous mobility. Despite its name change and movement away from explicit protest, PBJ has upheld its role as a space dedicated to uplifting the Providence masses through grassroots organization, building a social infrastructure through which the political can be disseminated. When I spoke to Phil just before the ride ended, I asked him about the role of joy in activism. He looked out at the dancing cyclists, looked back at me, and recited a Dan Savage quote: “We buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.” MAIA RIGGS B’29 is hard at work on her costume for Halloween Jam, and wondering if she will see you there.

DEAR INDY

( TEXT MAXWELL HAWKINS

DESIGN SARA PARULEKAR

ILLUSTRATION CAYDEN GARRETT )

c Things don’t mean what they used to. Forms and conventions once held up and exalted are now beginning to peel off the wall. Why? Well, the adhesive

power of American hegemony is drying up and losing its stick. The post-WWII consensus that defined the last 80 years is fraying, and with it, the meaning of things as we have come to know them. NOOOO!!! Worse, this mass disruption has not left Indie untouched. This week, Indie will get wacky with a new guy who will eff up entirely the normal conventions of an advice section, as if to say, “the strictness of a Dear Abby–style column only works in a world with far more stability than ours.” So please, dear reader, read, as reading is the only means by which this sentence may meaningfully refer to you! Is it cooler to wear many different outfits or fewer, better outfits? -chrishatesclothes04

Those two white dots are my eyes. Come, Chris, under here. It’s warm and orange under this orange blanket. It’s orange like a mango that glows like a jammy yolk, like when you shine a flashlight through your finger. Does that ring a bell? I’m sorry if my face is greasy. I’m gonna fill this space with hot breath. Like we were in the left lung of a great beast, standing at the edge of a volcano. Can you picture that, Chris? We have history. You remember seeing that bike and disliking its rigid extension. Imagining the bike as the runt (of a family of horses) who overextended himself in a hormonal act and was solidified into a bike. You remember when we were dolls with non-euclidean haircuts on a plush carpet. A small hand moving dollward. Dressing us first in many different outfits, then fewer better outfits. Then, vexed by our unbendable knees, cutting the rest of our hair off. An image of hair follicles bigger than our eyes. And the whole time, driving our every move, plummeting history forward, not material needs or genital needs or some abstract tension between sociability and resentment—I’m anxious like a big dog in a bathtub just thinking about the possible ways you could react to the end of that sentence. It’s hard to see your face under here. Once upon a time there was a very cute boy who looked like when the dog ate the bee. He dressed the part. The lesson is this: Aesthetic value has been dislocated by an accelerating pace of change. Change of pace. There’s no value in an immediate sensory experience anymore. The color of the shoes need not match the color of the shirt. Gone are the days we analogize our garbs through food. Too, the days we call our food grub. (Chris says “grub”and I throw up in my mouth a little. I give him a knowing look. He looks away guiltily. I feel bad so I put my hand on his head. No, I’d never felt him before; I’d almost forgotten he had mass, if you will. Or, a body. So here I was in the presence of another. Help me. I felt myself filled with warm milk. For a moment—unthinking—I thought about myself. Am I an institution? Am I a slot machine? If that’s Chris, who am I? These were the thoughts that kept me up that summer.) Returning to the question. Got it. Okay, so you want to—sorry—umm—sorry. I’m sorry. In confused rage I grip the orange blanket and launch it west. The brightest white light you’ve ever seen is above us. It’s so bright it hurts. Through squinted eyes I receive an impression of a blanched face. A blanched face with a moving mouth. F-few…fewer…b-b-b-beep…beep…beep Should I drop my thesis? -THESIS_DROPPER16

I’m sorry, thesis_dropper16, I need the room for a second, you stay out here. The room has a low ceiling and it’s a hotel room. I’m dialing every possible phone number and saying things: I’m looking for someone, yeah. He’s got a body. Yeah. We were in this beautiful white light together. Yeah. No? Okay. Thanks. I take a drag from my cigarette and uncross my legs. I turn the nightstand lamp on. I fixate on the weak pool of light around its base. My hand approaches the bulb. I turn it off. I try to pull the blanket off the bed, thinking to launch it in some direction but it’s tucked in too tight so I stumble back. I jump to see if I can touch the ceiling but I come up short. I get a little run up this time, like a basketball player going for a dunk; I even pretend to dribble a ball, I rotate in the air, counterclockwise. I think: I want to push the boundaries of my human body. My pointer finger grazes the ceiling. Enter: THESIS_DROPPER16. ME: Sit there. (I point to the chair by the window. I touch my hair a little.) First, you shouldn’t cut your hair for someone else. No one has to like your haircut, okay? And the thesis. Drop it. Drop it and see if it makes a sound against the floor. (I do my scary laugh.) I’ve got an offer, will you take it?

hooves against a dirt path. I thought of a night in which the air felt similar. Back when I lived in a place where girls looked like boys and vice versa. A turn of the wagon. My thoughts bent accordingly: Which animal do I look like? A thing I’d like to know. The wagon halted. There was a girl on the path with a mousy bob. Her face appeared in the foggy window. What does one do with a mousy bob? -Mousy Bob

THESIS_DROPPER16: [with glasses] Depends…

ME: You can drop your thesis if there’s something else you need to grasp. I’m done answering questions. First, I need to find my friend. Then I’m gonna post AI-generated techno-optimist propaganda on Substack. Do you see it? I’m dropping the thing I’ve been psychologically conditioned to prioritize so that I can hold the thing that’s really important, as determined not by a preference ranking and a calculation but some divine calling that sounds maybe like a large glass whale. I saw it in the curtain. (I motion to the curtain with my head.) That’s so explicit, sorry. I have–THESIS_DROPPER16: It’s—

ME: I’ve—sorry…I’ve a wagon just outside, two fine mares, and a setting sun. We can drop everything and go. We can get out of here. Let’s gesture towards the room with a large swing of my arm. I said that, yeah. I do love your haircut, I’m sorry. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Come. Take my hand. (I extend a sweaty hand).

THESIS_DROPPER16: I have many questions, Indie.

(In this scene, the late afternoon sun projects orange stripes on a hotel floor. A stripe touches THESIS_DROPPER16’s shoe swinging just above the ground. I see the objects in front of me as a painting: blue sky, a white plant in a corner, meek cigarette smoke above a shriveled thing. And, now, the movement of the figure emptying the chair; the draped knit about its back coming into view. It stretches towards the door, and, with it, the scene stretching into rainbow lambswool. The lamp’s light extended as a beam, the cigarette’s filter was an orange bar. Every color, like wool—pulling, taut. So, the wool frayed and snapped and the door behind us shut.) ME and THESIS_DROPPER16 run impossibly fast down the hallway, down the stairs, and out the door. Indie! The horse is here! -Lois Thanks Lois. Time passes. For many hours, extending late into a mild night, the rhythm of my thoughts were fixed by the sound of many

I told her I couldn’t answer questions right now. I’m looking for a friend. She frowned and stomped her foot. Somewhere, I said, there is a plush carpet, two little hands, and an urge to chop. She nodded and her bob moved as if she’d nodded. I thought that if the only thing I could see was her bob, I’d be able to still read her expression rather naturally. If I were given just six photos of her bob (in temporal order) with a neutral background, I could read the scene. In that one she’s in the line for the bathroom. In that one she’s eating sheet metal. And so on. And so on. She left, and we left, too. It was here that I saw that ours was an impossible task. I looked at thesis_dropper16, his head slouched against the side of the wagon. I conceived of him as a plant. An unconscious conscious thing. I followed him there, curling into the warmth of my human body. It was, realistically, unclear where we were headed, how we would sustain ourselves, and what we were going to do once we, if ever, found Chris. Maybe I just wanted to go on an adventure. (Here, my stomach made a sound like leather being stretched and I blushed.) Maybe I thought about the questions I was supposed to be answering. No, no, that was so far gone now. As I descended into it I imagined things: Me and the mares on the beach. The chariot and my immortal companions. I remember the shrill of the axle, I remember the sea aflame. Truth brushing past us in a salt-laden air. Truths about what one ought to do. Whether one ought to do what one ought to do. I remember turning around to see that the Truth was far back now, out of reach, there, above the milky sands. It was enough to imagine. In my radical future, everyone is beneath an orange blanket. In my radical future, deontic questions have answers in reach of the armchair. I can’t say if I ever saw Chris in this world again. I saw him in an Instagram caption. I heard his name in a crowd of skin at an underwear party. I saw him in my head, too, yeah. The rest of this is shot like the end of a movie. The visual is slow motion horses running on the beach (the audio is a voiceover of the forthcoming dialogue) until I enter the coffee shop. Then, the camera is a bird’s eye view of a circular table with my client behind a coffee across from an empty chair. This dialogue, which comes just before the screen turns black, is written in white captions (while the horses run in slow motion, yeah): And, well, I was mid-thought, on Tuesday morning, walking down a quaint street with a brick sidewalk to meet up with a client, wearing the better outfit I always wear (deploying a faux pas (think: dress pants with sandals) to veil my labor), and, with the profound thoughts I’d stumbled upon, not in a thesis, but in the empty space carved out by the absence of a thesis, thoughts that rendered me first worrisome then levelheaded, thoughts about how one should appear, because we were names with hair, and ethics was semantics, and things were how they appeared, when a familiar shape passed me from behind, familiar only in the feeling I felt upon its passing (the body knew something I didn’t), and, maybe, if I could’ve gotten its entire appearance in my field of view, the truth would lay itself open to me like a pink flower, but, instead, I was there, paused in thought, recalling the feeling, and, then, revisiting that spontaneous adventure, and asking questions—finally—posing a question to the forum, which, I thought, and I still think, was the question I ask myself now, and have been asking; but, then, instead of articulating the question I entered the coffee shop and pulled out the chair with a polite smile, sat down, and said, abruptly, with a bizarre change of expression: I’m sorry, I—there’s someone outside I need to talk to. I’ll see you later. Yeah?

MAXWELL HAWKINS B’27 saw a beehive on meeting street

VOLUME 53 ISSUE 03

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

PechaKucha Night PVD #205 | Unhinged Wednesday, October 21 at 8:20 p.m. ISCO Spirits, 1 Sims Ave Free, registration required

leena aboutaleb reading from THALASSA, with Margot Ngo and Nishtha Trivedi Sunday, October 18 at 6 p.m. Riffraff Bookstore, 60 Valley St Suite 107A Free

The Providence Poetry Slam | Open Mic & Team Qualifier Slam #2 Thursday, October 15th at 7:30 p.m. AS220, 115 Empire St From $0

Claridad de careo Tuesday, October 13 at 6:30 p.m. Red Ink Community Library, 130 Cypress St

Sabor Latino Sunday, October 11 at 4–6 p.m. Casa Azul Taquería, 840 Allens Ave Apt 2 $25

5th Annual Walk Across Rhode Island Sunday, October 11 at 6 a.m. Main Green, Brown University $20, registration required

Providence International Day of Action: March for Palestine Saturday, October 10 at 2 p.m. Memorial Park (Brown’s Students for Justice in Palestine will be gathering on the Main Green at 12:30)

EVENTS

John Dunnigan: In Conversation with Amy Devers Saturday, October 17 at 4 p.m.– 6:30 p.m. RISD Museum, 20 N Main St, Room: Metcalf Auditorium Free

Film Screening & Director Talk | Skin of Glass, Denise Zmekhol Thursday, October 15 at 6 p.m.–9 p.m. Watson School of International and Public Affairs, 111 Thayer Street, Room: 155 Free

Collector’s Journey | Starting Your Collecting Journey: A Conversation with Yng-Ru Chen, Michael Rose, and Dominic Molon Thursday, October 15 at 5:30 p.m.–7 p.m. RISD Museum, 20 N Main St, Room: Danforth Hall Free

Danielle Dutton | Writers on Writing Thursday, October 15 at 5:30 p.m. McCormack Family Theater, 70 Brown St, Room: 132 Free

The Black Press@200 Colloquium: An Evening with Sarah J. Jackson Thursday, October 15 at 5 p.m. Churchill House, 155 Angell St, Room: BassPas Free

On Campus Colloquium | “Everyone Communicates:” Making Social Worlds and Valued People in the Present Tuesday, October 13 at Noon–1p.m. 128 Hope St, Room: 103 Free

Homeless Memorial Service Thursday, October 22 at 11 a.m.–1 p.m. Mathewson Street Church, 134 Mathewson St

“Since Filipino Alliance’s founding in 1988, Filipinos at Brown have advocated for Filipino language and culture courses. We recognize the importance of language in decolonizing and reclaiming our culture. Under American colonization, for example, American teachers, many of whom were educated at Ivy League colleges like Brown, actively forbade Filipino students from speaking Tagalog, Cebuano, Bikol, or other Philippine languages. As Tagalog@Yale students stated in their presentation at the inaugural Filipino Ivy League Conference, the current lack of Filipino language courses at many American universities, including Brown, demonstrates a continuation of the degradation of our Filipino languages.”

From the petition makers: “Join us in urging Brown’s administration to prioritize this essential update in support of current and future Brunonians. By doing so, we can help ensure a Brown education remains an accessible and attainable dream for all. We invite students, faculty, staff, alumni, families, and prospective students to support this effort by signing this petition.”

RAINIER PEDERSON B’28 misses the shawarma place back in Dallas.

can request Flock data for abortions, transgender healthcare or immigration under the pretense of investigating a wrongful death, child abuse or national security case, are we to believe this won’t impede the rights of Rhode Islanders? Currently, Governor McKee has implemented a statelevel 60-day pause on the installation of ALPRs while the government conducts a review. That review is supposed to come out on October 17th and hopefully become the basis for new legislation around ALPRs in Rhode Island. When we write that legislation, we will need to ensure we have strict protections against data sharing, lest our rights become stifled by the most conservative forces in the country.

From Bulletin Editor: Do you have an event or mutual aid fund you’d like to promote? Or perhaps you have a burning (but short!) opinion bite you’re dying to share? You can submit it to the Bulletin! Scan the QR code or email your pitch to indybulletinboard@gmail.com, www.theindy.org @theindypvd Brown University PO Box 1930 Providence, RI 02912

The Indy welcomes all contributions (of words, images and letters) from any current Brown/ RISD students and Providence residents, though we are primarily a workshop for student writing. Contributing writers are encouraged to pitch at any time over the course of a semester. Read our Pitch guidelines here, or send an email to the Managing editors: theindy@gmail.com

PITCH TO THE INDY

Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) have been used by police in Rhode Island since at least 2007. Over time, these devices have grown more interconnected and technically advanced, forming a net in which anyone can be tracked across the country for nearly any reason—take, for example, the Texas woman whose location was tracked across the nation after she allegedly sought an abortion (a form of healthcare currently deemed illegal in Texas). This is only one example, but we can expect similar surveillance across a host of issues, namely transgender healthcare or immigration cases. This is, to put it mildly, not ideal. Per the ACLU, there are at least 280 Flock cameras across the state of Rhode Island, but we don’t have an exact count. In a world where data is shared across government departments, if a department in Texas

DO NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL

Filipino Alliance Petition for Teaching Tagalog: From the Filipino Alliance:

Petition to Decrease Financial Aid Threshold

PETITION

BULLETIN