October
02
2026
Volume 53 Issue 02
04
A LIVELY EXPERIMENT
07
“OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND EAT WHAT I GIVE YOU”
14
MEMORY, THE CUP, THE CLIP
THE PROXIMITY ISSUE THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
53 02
10.02
MANAGING EDITORS
Annelie Delgado Elliot Stravato FEATURES
HEAD STAFF WRITER
Julia Sprung
Valeria Dumitrascu R’28
ARTS
Nadia Mazonson Gabriella Miranda Sasha Watson
03 NEW BEGINNINGS RISD Sequential Arts Club
EPHEMERA
04 A LIVELY EXPERIMENT
Nadia Mazonson, Talia Reiss & Ben Underwood
07 “OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND EAT WHAT I GIVE YOU”
Anika Kotapally Keya Mehra Kendall Ricks LITERARY
Paulina Gąsiorowska
Chloe Costa Baker Audrey He Alya Nimis-Ibrahim
IMMACULATE
METRO
Layla Ahmed Isabel Tribe Ben Underwood
Alya Sophia Nimis-Ibrahim
12 SAAB-LOVING IN THE 21ST CENTURY
METABOLICS
Ray Eggerts Evander Gray-Williams Nahye Lee
Ellie Wu
14 MEMORY, THE CUP, THE CLIP Lucas Friedman-Spring
SCIENCE + TECH
Daniel Kyte-Zable Coby Mulliken Lila Rosen SCHEMA
16 A GOOD STORY
Selim Kutlu Mo Saoud
Benjamin Flaumenhaft
WORLD
Caiden Demundo Eric Ma Neda Ravandi
18 CLOSE READING
Ani Delgado & Elliot Stravato
DEAR INDY
Ilan Brusso Talia Reiss
19 OR, AND, INDIE GOES BUZZFEED
BULLETIN BOARD
Ilan Brusso & Talia Reiss
Sarya Baran Kılıç
DESIGN EDITORS
20 BULLETIN
Mary Elizabeth-Boatey Sara Parulekar Kayla Randolph
Sarya Baran Kılıç
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 A HOP, SKIP, AND A JUMP
10
Masthead
MVP
Indy Jesus
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
FROM THE EDITORS
*Our Beloved Staff
Lately we have been lurching. Over the potholes frowning on Thayer; between one library and another; on a bus that is uncertain of everything except how it will appear: belated and woefully underfunded. These intervals we traverse, stumble through, are rain-swollen and kinetic, humming with an energy we can’t quite seal in a name just yet. We’d like to explain to the strangers we’ve sat near why our legs beneath the table keep vibrating, pulsing against the ground, kneeing the air into submission: it’s because of the weather. Outside it is pouring—we close our umbrellas and open the door. Behind us, nothing locks. When we walk it is always across the grass. We’ve mastered the geometry of ambling. Maybe we’ll try to make something of these aimless peregrinations: a knit scarf, a defunct map, a print newspaper, a wooden chair; something to sit on at the end of it all, where we can rub soft our aching calves.
MISSION STATEMENT
- CAP
The content of all News & Publications groups recognized by USC/GSC is generated independently from Brown University. The statements, views, opinions, and information contained in the publication are personal to those of the authors and student group and do not necessarily reflect those of Brown University. The publication is not reviewed, approved, or endorsed by Brown University or its faculty or staff.
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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
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
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.
( DESIGN JAXON RIVERA, SULLIVAN MOLLOY, KOJI HELLMAN )
( GRAY HAIRS BY JAXON RIVERA )
( #NEWBEGINNINGS BY ALEXANDRA SANGUINETTI )
( OVERBOOKED BY JENNA JEAN-BARNARD )
RSAC, RISD Sequential Arts Club, is a meeting space for artists who make comics, storyboards, and animations. They meet every week on Sundays, and can be found on Instagram @risd.rsac.
( JUST DO IT! BY KAHLAN MAGUIRE )
JAXON RIVERA R’27 will never learn to drive. ALEXANDRA SANGUINETTI R’27 turned into a bus. JENNA JEAN-BARNARD R’27 might be right behind you. KAHLAN MAGUIRE R’27 is clutching her heart in fear.
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A LIVELY EXPERIMENT THE PROVIDENCE PRIMARIES AND MOVEMENT-BUILDING IN RHODE ISLAND
c On September 2, one week before Providence’s Democratic primary, young volunteers crowded a small office on Steeple Street. Sitting on a patterned rug, members of the RIFT/AFT Local 6516 union, which encompasses Brown’s Graduate Labor Organization (GLO), called hundreds of voters. They hoped to turn out the vote for Miguel Martínez Youngs, a city council candidate and longtime member of the housing justice organization Reclaim RI. As the policy director for the Providence City Council—a position he stepped down from to run his campaign—Youngs had written April’s rent stabilization ordinance. His affordability-focused campaign appealed to the graduate laborers of AFT Local 6516, whose office displays a cardboard coffin with the sharpied label: “ADMIN PROMISES.” “We were just powering through lists,” said Youngs. “That was one of those moments where I was like, ‘Oh, I think we got this.’” A week later, Youngs won his race by a margin of 74 votes, which he attributes to GLO’s organizing. He was one of eight progressive candidates to secure the Democratic nomination for city council, which would constitute a majority of the 15-member body. Perhaps the biggest upset of the cycle was the widely-covered mayoral primary, in which democratic socialist David Morales ousted Mayor Brett Smiley, the incumbent since 2023. These victories are a testament to years of movement-building on the Rhode Island left, driven largely by labor unions and housing organizers. +++ Indispensable to this left-labor coalition was Reclaim RI, which endorsed a slate of 17 candidates in this primary season and organized a massive volunteer field operation. Reclaim was founded in 2020 by a group of organizers who worked on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in Rhode Island. Observing the loss of political momentum and infighting which had emerged in the vacuum created by the end of the Sanders campaign and waning Black Lives Matter protests, Reclaim’s founders sought new strategies to build mass left-wing political power and organize people who weren’t already activated toward socialism. In 2020, Reclaim knocked 6,000 doors to mobilize voters; all four of their endorsed candidates—including then-newcomer David Morales— claimed victory in the RI General Assembly elections. “I think that really accelerated conversations within Reclaim,” said Dan Denvir, a co-chair and founder of Reclaim, “as to how we can orient towards masses of ordinary people [outside] the activist bubble, because ultimately the socialist or left political project is about building majority support in society, winning governance power, and transforming people’s lives.” Reclaim’s organizers quickly realized that the most strategic way to reach people was not to relay their own ideology to voters, as they’d done with the Sanders campaign, but to directly engage with one of the most basic material struggles facing Rhode Islanders: the cost of housing. The housing crisis in Rhode Island was severe—by the beginning of 2021, more than a third of Rhode Island households were cost-burdened—prompting Reclaim’s decision to reform as a housing justice organization. “There are limitations to being a general-purpose
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progressive electoral organization,” said Dennis Hogan, a Reclaim organizer and co-founder. Their strategy, he explained, “came out of looking at other kinds of organizations that build mass bases,” such as labor unions, who conduct electoral work in addition to organizing workers. “We felt like the actual gap was that there was nobody doing that for tenants. Tenants are almost fully unorganized, and so going forward, our strategy should be to build a base of tenants […] and to use our political and legislative operation to be in the service of building tenant power.” Going forward, Denvir explained, Reclaim began “experimenting” with all types of tenant organizing, “mobilizing militant minorities of tenants [...] for these fights against their slumlords.” Reclaim also began advocating for renter-friendly policy at the state level, successfully passing legislation approving housing bonds, eliminating rental application fees, and securing funding for public housing developments. But they still hadn’t succeeded in building supermajority tenant unions, and when it came to just-cause eviction protections, one of Reclaim’s most substantial fights, “we kind of hit a wall in the General Assembly,” Hogan said. In the face of active opposition from the Rhode Island Coalition of Housing Providers—a landlord advocacy organization with coffers filled by real estate lobbyists—the legislation stalled. “We built a substantial amount of political power [which] we were able to translate into some legislative victories,” Denvir said, “But when it came to a true confrontation with the power of capital, of business, of private property, i.e., the landlord lobby, we were not powerful enough.” Sensing that the conditions were more favorable for a win in Providence, whose city council had a progressive majority, than at the state level, Reclaim launched an aggressive campaign for rent stabilization this past winter. “When it came to [state] politics, because we didn’t have enough power to dictate outcomes, we had to negotiate from a position of weakness. So we played very nice,” Denvir explained. “But then we came into Providence, where we’re not trying to win Brett Smiley over.” When Smiley, as expected, vetoed the legislation, Reclaim campaigned relentlessly to override the vote in city council. Despite widespread popular support, they fell short by just one vote: Ward 1’s John Goncalves, who’d spent months telling Reclaim’s organizers that he was undecided while receiving donations from landlords. In the meantime, the acuity of the nationwide housing crisis catalyzed the re-centering of what has come to be termed “affordability politics,” a platform espoused by an energetic cadre of democratic socialist and progressive politicians such as Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed. Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City “smashed things wide open,” said Kat Kerwin, a field organizer for Reclaim. That national momentum, coupled with Rhode Island’s housing crisis, caused “the political consciousness to shift such that people want socialism,” Kerwin said. “They want people running for office who are talking about affordability and are leading on things like rent stabilization because it’s urgent.” In 2025, it became clear to Reclaim organizers that municipal politics was a terrain where these battles for housing could be fought and won. That December, Jill Davidson—a champion of rent
( TEXT NADIA MAZONSON, TALIA REISS, BEN UNDERWOOD DESIGN OLIVIA FALK ILLUSTRATION MEGHA NAMBIAR )
stabilization—overwhelmingly won a special election for city council in Ward 2, one of Providence’s wealthiest and whitest wards. “We really shifted the focus of our attention into city politics because [...] there was an opportunity there to pass legislation in a more favorable setting, where we actually did have a legislative majority of progressives,” Denvir said. “And with [the 2026 primary] elections coming up, we felt like there was also an opportunity to set the agenda on a citywide level that was not possible on a statewide level.” This summer, Reclaim launched a major municipal electoral operation: they endorsed 17 candidates, recruited over 200 volunteers, launched 61 canvasses and knocked over 24,000 doors. In contrast to earlier, more limited campaigns, Reclaim now had the infrastructure and political power to recruit and run candidates who came directly out of Reclaim’s membership, including Youngs. The group worked closely with Morales from the outset of his campaign, embedding key organizers in the campaign’s leadership. Of the 90,000 doors knocked by the Morales campaign, Reclaim tackled more than 22,000. +++ Reclaim, with its organizing prowess and infrastructural flexibility, was a natural “membrane and hub,” as Denvir put it, for a coalition linking electoral campaigns and major players in Providence’s left-wing ecosystem. Volunteers from Reclaim, the Rhode Island Working Families Party (RIFWP), and labor unions such as SEIU 1199NE and AFT Local 6516 converged during the primary. In an article for Dissent, Hogan described the Morales campaign as a “movement multiplier, neither hijacking existing organizing infrastructure for his own electoral effort nor relying only on outside organizations to carry his message for him.” The success of this coalition indicates, in the first place, the power of an endorsement. According to Kerwin, 1199NE, AFT Local 6516, and RIWFP were “super valuable in terms of being validators. Many of our city council candidates, particularly, were endorsed by so many organizations that their opponents actually looked very weak.” She said the early endorsements “proved viability” for Youngs’ campaign in particular, prompting the majority of the sitting city council to endorse him over Goncalves in Ward 1. Labor played a particularly outsized role in the primary victories. “There is no precise precedent or parallel to organized labor playing such a massive ground-floor role in cooperation with the socialist left in these sort of electoral insurgencies,” Denvir said. Notably, Reclaim RI has long maintained a working relationship with 1199NE, a powerful healthcare workers union that recently ended the longest hospital strike in state history at Butler Hospital. 1199NE has previously supported Reclaim RI’s rent stabilization fights, and, according to Denvir, Reclaim used 1199NE’s organizing strategy as a model for tenant organizing. In this race, 1199NENE “put [in] a big energy with their political operation and their membership,” said Youngs, emphasizing that they represent the “true working class.” AFT Local 6516 volunteers boosted poll visibility across the city on primary day, holding signs
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and wearing GLO shirts outside of polling stations. Michael Ziegler, AFT Local 6516’s executive director, showed up at Vartan Gregorian Elementary at 7 a.m. for a poll-watching shift, scribbling down the names of voters as workers called them out. This helped campaign strategists determine which supporters hadn’t voted and still needed to be contacted. For Ziegler, the value of a union endorsement is the human resource. “To be a little cute with it,” he said, “it is labor power.” RIWFP, a progressive political party which has typically focused on state-level legislative and electoral advocacy, was another important partner in these municipal victories. RIWFP has worked closely with Reclaim and 1199NE for years—they sit on the party’s State Committee, helping make decisions about endorsement and legislative strategy. In June, RIWFP endorsed Morales alongside its own slate of city council hopefuls and was in near-daily communication with Reclaim about how to best support their candidates. Anusha Venkataraman, the party’s state director, emphasized the importance of distribution of labor. “Reclaim really successfully turned out a lot of people that had been activated by [RI]WFP,” said Venkataraman. “Between the strategic advice, the tools, electoral know-how of [RI]WFP and the organizing prowess of Reclaim, I think we had a really complementary partnership.” As Denvir put it, “We’re certainly concerned about the prerogatives of our own institutional and organizational power, but we don’t seek to dominate other organizations on the left. In fact, we’re extraordinarily oriented towards building [...] Reclaim as a hub in a powerful left wing ecosystem.” +++ Coalition building carried the exciting potential to function as it did in New York City, where Mamdani and his opponent Brad Lander cross-endorsed each other—an immense sacrifice from Lander, who was projected to lose. The move positioned coalition building as a long game, movement outweighing the individual candidate. These municipal triumphs in Providence reflect the sweeping progressive and socialist primary wins across the country. In some ways, the Providence primary campaigns were directly modeled off the successes of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign and NYC-Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA)’s primary wins this summer. Many organizers who helped lead socialists to victory in Providence— including Kerwin and Ben Shanahan, Morales’ campaign strategist—came directly out of the NYC-DSA organizing scene, and Reclaim’s field model was scaled directly off of NYC-DSA’s. Both campaigns featured an upswell of volunteer support, similar message discipline regarding housing and affordability, and candidates who’d come directly out of the labor and tenant organizing ecosystems which helped lead them to victory. But Morales also received material support from democratic socialists in New York City and Philadelphia; Denvir, who hosts The Dig, a podcast
published by the New York-based socialist magazine Jacobin, held fundraisers for Morales in both cities. At the New York City fundraiser, in what would become a focal point for one of the more notable attack ads from the Smiley campaign, Denvir said, “David is going to turn Providence, RI into a laboratory for municipal socialism.” Compared to states like New York, Michigan, and Colorado, where local DSA chapters were heavily involved in successful campaigns, Rhode Island’s chapter of the DSA (RI DSA) has been conspicuously absent from this electoral cycle. RI DSA declined to endorse Morales or any of the democratic socialist candidates for city council. The lack of endorsements were not necessarily value judgments; the chapter’s bylaws preclude candidates running in the Democratic Party from chapter support. In 2023, RI DSA—then Providence DSA— passed a resolution stating, “Workers need a democratic political organization to fight for their interests, separate from the capitalist class; The Democratic Party, which is internally undemocratic and controlled by capitalists, will not be that organization.” Effective immediately, the chapter would only endorse independent socialist candidates in order to “encourage the construction of a working-class socialist party in Rhode Island.” With the ratification of the resolution, RI DSA made a ‘clean break’ from the Democratic Party. The ‘clean break’ strategy is not the only avenue DSA members nationwide have offered as a path to socialist governance. A ‘dirty break’ entails running candidates on the Democratic Party line while simultaneously creating the infrastructure for a mass socialist party—the approach taken by the majority of successful democratic socialist candidates in recent elections nationwide. According to Tony, a 2023–2025 RI DSA co-chair no longer affiliated with the group, the makings of their clean break date back to 2021 when the chapter passed a resolution stating, “DSA-endorsed politicians are expected to play an oppositional role in the political system. They should not support establishment Democrats for the purpose of gaining the favor of Party leadership.” The resolution came after a contentious 2021 election for House Speaker in which Morales, then a representative in Rhode Island’s General Assembly, voted against Democrat Joseph Shekarchi at the behest of RI DSA. Shekarchi, whom Tony characterized as a “mobbed up eviction lawyer,” won handily in a 59-9-4 vote against Republican Blake Filippi. In 2023, Shekarchi ran for reelection. Again, RI DSA asked Morales to abstain. This time, to RI DSA’s chagrin, Morales voted for the incumbent speaker. “When a candidate violates their agreement [to DSA bylaws], that does not mean an immediate de-endorsement. That would be way too fast,” said Tony. “You have to have some patience with people and some generosity with the way they make decisions.” But according to Tony, Morales “refused to speak with [RI DSA]” when asked to explain his decision. Consequently, RI DSA withdrew its endorsement for Morales. The decision was controversial; according to
Tony, “when [the chapter] voted to de-endorse David, a bunch of people—sort of right leaning members— left the chapter.” Only one candidate earned an endorsement from RI DSA this electoral cycle: Brittany Kubicek, an independent running for Providence’s District 5 in the Rhode Island State House. A Navy veteran and engineer, Kubicek is a member of RI DSA running on an explicitly socialist platform. On the front page of her campaign website, Kubicek outlines why her supporters should join RI DSA and links to their “Get Involved” page. Otherwise, the highlighted issues on her website are housing, healthcare, infrastructure, energy, labor, ICE and police, climate, education, and Palestine. While her campaign website does not indicate that the numbers beside each issue denote their importance, the placement of “1. Housing” at the top is, at least, good marketing. Kubicek vows to fight for a statewide rent freeze, the construction of high-quality public housing, and stronger tenants’ rights—goals which, albeit in a weaker form, are shared by all of the candidates endorsed by Reclaim RI. As the chapter’s electoral strategy mandates, Kubicek’s support from RI DSA requires a “fully DSA-accountable campaign run by DSA members.” This requirement entails taking chapter guidance on campaign messaging and staff. Once elected, candidates must publicly promote RI DSA’s platform, take guidance on political messaging, endorse all other candidates RI DSA endorses, and not endorse any other candidates without chapter approval. Twelve days after the primary, Kubicek attended the public meeting of RI DSA’s electoral committee—a group she chaired for over a year before launching her campaign. Other than nearly unanimously refusing to collaborate with Reclaim despite their shared interest in socialist governance and affordability, the committee made few decisions. Members counseled Kubicek to decline endorsements from other progressive organizations and debated how to publicly distinguish Kubicek from Morales, effectively dismissing the momentum of Morales’ democratic socialist campaign. In a particularly heated moment of indecision, Kubicek said, “I’m not trying to get de-endorsed, all right?” The meeting’s chaos speaks to a pattern of disorganization within RI DSA. “Do I think that Rhode Island DSA has the capacity to pull off the cross-slate electoral victories? With a left governing majority in a city and a mayor’s race right now?” asked Kerwin. “No, they don’t, because so often they are disorganized,” she said. “I think Brittany is an excellent candidate, though, and I think if anyone can do it, it’s her.” But without backing from the Democratic Party, independent candidates like Kubicek lack access to infrastructure such as the Voter Activation Network (VAN), the party’s database of registered voters, their voting history, and contact information. The latter was essential for the canvassing and phone-banking efforts that Reclaim championed this cycle. Along with its partner platform NGP, which tracks fundraising and ensures legal compliance, VAN has been the cornerstone of Democratic campaigns since its
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founding in 2001. Access to this data infrastructure compelled Youngs to run as a Democrat, a “super practical answer” to the tricky dilemma of party identification, he said. “Holy Lord, if I didn’t have VAN, I don’t know what I [would have done], like the whole top-level strategy is derived from VAN,” he added. The last time a non-Democrat served on the Providence City Council was 2002, when David Segal—Morales’ campaign strategist—became the first Green Party candidate to ever win a Rhode Island election. Youngs noted that Segal, who also represented Ward 1, became the default minority whip on an otherwise Democratic council, enabling him to sit on every committee. “That is an intriguing thing that could entice a minority party to assert itself now,” said Youngs. “But [...] to run outside of the Democratic Party, I think, would require us to have some semblance of that data infrastructure that we can wield as an independent party.” RI DSA’s ‘clean break’ was met with significant backlash in the chapter convention: “A lot of yelling and storming out; all the theatrics you want,” said Tony. In a 2024 article for the Marxist magazine Cosmonaut titled “Ending the One Party State,” Tony defended the chapter’s move. “The Democratic Party in Rhode Island is no more or less corrupt than in any other state,” he wrote. Given the state’s small size, he continued, “the quotidian corruption of capitalist parties (or, perhaps, their normal functioning) is simply more apparent, as if seen under a magnifying glass.” At the end of Tony’s article, he reiterates the chapter’s dedication to its now-defunct Medicare For All working group and writes, “Our electoral committee has developed a campaign plan and is gathering the resources to run an independent socialist in 2026.” The logic that associates losing an election with failure, he added, “relies on an underdeveloped notion of winning [...] Disagreement with these conflations can mean only one thing: that one is a raving sectarian.” With the chapter’s move to halt Democratic endorsements, Tony’s faction of RI DSA—“the revolutionary socialist left,” as he called them—became leaders in the organization. Defending his faction as “strongly in a tradition of electoral engagement,” Tony said in his interview with the Indy, “[the] electoral stage is one of many agitational spaces […] but you don’t have any illusions that that’s really the way that lasting political change is made.” Though he expressed optimism about the future of running independent candidates in Rhode Island, Tony granted, “I think it would be short-sighted to judge the validity of independent politics by the outcome of a single election.” Short-sighted or not, Providence’s progressive wins required a coalition of organizations dedicated to addressing the material conditions of working people today. “There’s a debate on the socialist left more broadly that pits this electoral work [against] forms of mass organization like tenant organizing. Reclaim really rejects that as a false division,” Denvir said. “I think this election is a proof of concept that those are two profoundly important mechanisms to build left-wing and working class power, and that if you design them effectively, they build each other.” +++ An important element of Reclaim’s strategy this cycle was their endorsement of 17 candidates, most of
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whom had cross-endorsed David Morales. It is certainly anomalous that a housing justice organization—albeit one with a history of engagement in electoral work—operates like a traditional political party, which typically runs a defined slate of candidates. But “this amazing process of slatification,” as Denvir put it, was less an effort to seek ascendance for Reclaim in Rhode Island’s left ecosystem, and more a strategy which emerged from the issues themselves: “David [Morales] at the top of the ticket and all of these left wing city councilors [were] running on basically the same agenda, centered on capping the rents and transforming Providence’s housing market so that it can really be a city for all,” Denvir said. “And it was the messaging framework and the polarization instantiated by the rent stabilization campaign that was then the framework of the electoral campaign.” This “slatification” laid the groundwork for a cross-canvassing strategy in which campaigns and organizations within the left coalition pooled their limited time, volunteers, and resources. Organizers made strategic use of the coalition’s volunteer force, devising cross-canvassing routes to cover the most ground. Venkataraman cited Amy Santiago’s campaign for state representative in House District 7. Located in Providence, the district includes parts of Wards 5 and 6, where Jackie Goldman and Miguel Sanchez were running for city council, and Morales for mayor. “Why have four totally separate canvass operations?” she said. In those wards, volunteers for Reclaim and other progressive organizations would triple canvass for Morales, Santiago, and Goldman or Sanchez. Cross-canvassing operations also allowed campaign teams to make strategic decisions about volunteer and resource allocation. For instance, the Morales campaign didn’t knock any doors in Ward 12 or Ward 4 for the last three weeks of the race because Reclaim’s volunteers were already out triple-canvassing for Morales and city council candidates Althea Graves and Justin Roias. The cross-canvassing operation demonstrated the challenges and merits of building a broad coalition across campaigns and organizations whose strategic and ideological priorities were coinciding, but not always identical. Although Reclaim knew early on that Annajane Yolken would handily win Ward 13, Federal Hill’s left-wing stronghold, they kept sending canvassers. The typical strategy would be to focus canvassers where down-ballot candidates faced a tougher race, but the Morales campaign needed to juice Ward 13 turnout for the mayoral election. In other cases, some organizations had different favorites: for instance, 1199NE and RIWFP didn’t endorse Graves in Ward 12, so Reclaim organizers could only rely on their own resources to support her campaign. In the last weeks, Reclaim’s field operation focused on Ward 1 (Fox Point and downtown), in addition to Wards 4 and 12. The race was particularly charged: According to Denvir, Reclaim had vowed in May that if Goncalves did not vote to override Smiley’s rent stabilization veto, Reclaim would “primary him, defeat him, and end his political career.” Goncalves blocked the override; Reclaim ran Youngs to unseat him. Youngs’ campaign was an uphill battle. Goncalves, who grew up in Ward 1, was generally perceived as strong on constituent services, and he’d outspent Youngs six to one. But in the month leading up to the primary, a canvassing operation headed by Reclaim and staffed heavily by GLO volunteers—many of whom lived in the ward—knocked on around 7,000 doors for Youngs. “When you make a pledge like that, you often can’t be certain whether that’s a check you can cash. [We made] a bet that it’s an extremely [renter-heavy] ward and that the majority of that ward would vote for someone who supported renters in Ward 1 rather than corporate real estate interests,” Denvir said. “It was extremely hard fought, and we won because we had Miguel Youngs, an incredible candidate.”
+++ In a 1663 Royal Charter, King Charles II praised Rhode Island for its “lively experiment” with religious freedom and granted the colony permission to govern without a mandated religion. 363 years later, Denvir cited the charter to ground his claim about Morales’s forthcoming ‘socialist laboratory’ in state tradition. “This idea of innovative policy laboratories was not novel to me, nor was it some kind of particularly extremist comment,” he said. “You have to try things, fail, and then adapt. That is how you build a strong political project and strong organizing methodology.” While the hugely successful political project of today’s Rhode Island left is the result of years of trial and error, the urgency of issues supported by Reclaim’s slate contributed to their wins as well. “When we would open our canvases, [everyone] would say why [they] were there. Almost everyone’s reason was rent stabilization,” said Kerwin. “People go out and have those same conversations with their neighbors [...] asking those agitating questions” and centering “people’s material conditions.” She recalled reuniting with a childhood friend’s mom from the South Side: “I haven’t seen her in decades, but she had just come organically because she was so excited about what was happening. And that’s kind of why this was so special: We were pulling all types of people. It was really a multi-generational, multi-racial movement.” Electoral work is important, but it’s not the only work. This electoral organizing is part of a broader fight for working power, proven by Reclaim RI and RIWFP’s deep alliances with labor. “Movement work is layered,” Kerwin said. “Right now, we’re creating the base layer. Our council candidates are going to someday be our mayoral candidates, our state rep candidates, our Congress candidates. And the people that are out knocking doors for them are also building a movement. They’re developing leadership skills.” Although “campaigns are finite,” in Kerwin’s words, electoral work can move people toward more radical, long-term political engagement. In the week following the primary, Reclaim hosted a new members meeting followed by a general body meeting. Days after that, The Providence Journal reported that Smiley would not endorse Morales in the November general election. “The Democratic Party is going to have to make a decision about how wide their arms are to embrace [socialism] into the Democratic Party coalition,” said the outgoing Mayor. “The Smiley campaign put socialism on the ballot more than anything,” said Denvir. “And socialism won.” NADIA MAZONSON B’27, TALIA REISS B’27 & BEN UNDERWOOD B’27 are pipetting worker power in
the laboratory for municipal socialism.
Note: Tony declined to have his last name printed due to concerns about doxxing.
METABOLICS
“OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND EAT WHAT I GIVE YOU” bible eaters past and present ( TEXT PAULINA GASIOROWSKA DESIGN MARY-ELIZABETH BOATEY ILLUSTRATION NAOMI ZARO )
n October 24, 2022, Young America’s Foundation (YAF)—a prominent organization for conservative American youth—posted an eight-second video on X captioned: “Protestors have now shredded The Bible [sic] and one began eating pages.” The clip, taken outside the Memorial Union building at the campus of the University of WisconsinMadison (UW-Madison), features an anonymous redhead swaggering about a sidewalk littered with ripped-up pieces of paper (Figures 2a & 2b). They start out holding a handful of this paper, and end by biting into it—a bite so vigorous it brings a shake to their head and a smile to their face. Earlier that day, YAF’s UW-Madison chapter (UW YAF) hosted a screening of What Is A Woman?—a 2022 documentary in which Matt Walsh, a far-right political commentator, purports to “explore the changing concepts of sex and gender in the digital age, particularly the transgender rights movement, anti-transgender bigotry, and what it means to be a woman.” UW YAF’s event, attended by Walsh himself, sparked a robust protest in support of trans and women’s rights, coordinated by the Madison Abortion & Reproductive Rights Coalition for Healthcare and the Madison branch of Socialist Alternative. The protestors were soon confronted by a small group of counter-protestors who rallied in support of Walsh, with one reading passages from a Bible into a microphone. The protestors surrounded the counter-protestor, got ahold of the book, and tore it up. As captured in YAF’s video, this rendered the Bible ripe for devouring. A mere three minutes after YAF shared the eight-second recording with its X followers, Walsh took to his own account and commented on its significance: “Well, you can be on the side that eats the Bible and castrates children, or you can be on literally any side but that one. Your choice, America.” Despite the authoritative clarity of Walsh’s ultimatum, his claim might confuse many a self-respecting Biblical scholar, as one of the most famous accounts of a person eating a Bible comes from, well, the Bible.
In chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament (and thus of the Christian Biblical canon), the narrator, who identifies himself as “John,” hears a heavenly voice which calls on him to “take the scroll that is open in the hand of the angel” (NRSVue Bible, Rev. 10:8). John goes to the angel, from whom he receives the command: “Take [the scroll] and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach but sweet as honey in your mouth” (Rev. 10:9). John obeys, describing his gustatory experience with the angel’s exact diction: “the little scroll […] was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter” (Rev. 10:10). At the end of the chapter, John receives another order: “You must prophesy again about many peoples and nations and languages and kings” (Rev. 10:11). As the Book of Revelation was written at the end of the 1st century CE while the Christian Bible was only canonized in the late 4th century CE, this episode never defines the “little scroll” as part of the Bible per se. However, the word bible derives from biblía [βιβλία], the plural of the Ancient Greek word biblíon [βιβλίον], which has been translated as “little scroll.” The tracing of this etymology, in conjunction with the divine source of the “little scroll,” makes it clear that in this chapter John consumes the Word of God materialized. To quote David Ganz, Professor of Medieval Art at the Kunsthistorisches Institut of the University of Zürich, in his 2017 article “Touching Books, Touching Art,” a Biblical exegesis of this episode would not interpret it as “an exhortation to imitate John
Figure 1. Albrecht Dürer, St. John Eating the Book (Series: Apocalypse), woodcut printed on paper, 39.4 cm x 28.5 cm, 1498. The British Museum, London, 1879,1213.39
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Figures 2a & 2b. Still from Young America’s Foundation (@YAF), “Protestors have now shredded The Bible and one began eating pages,” X, October 24, 2022
literally,” but rather as belonging to “a long tradition of interpreting the act of eating the book as a metaphor for the interiorization of the written text.” The angel commands John to ingest the “sweet” words of God’s written plan, digest the “bitter” message of His inevitable judgement, and egest it in the form of a new “prophecy” for all the world to hear. The logic of this miraculous process engages with the premod-
While a figure of speech might safely dwell in the realm of metaphor, the naturalistic image confronts its audience with the physical infeasibility of John’s task. ern understanding of the mouth as a bidirectional sense-organ, with taste as the incoming sense and speech as the outcoming sense. Thanks to such intertwining of eating and speaking, the written Word of God is metabolized into John’s prophetic utterance. Significantly, John consumes the “little scroll” under direct orders from heavenly beings—a guarantee that his act of digestive interiorization will be an act of interiorizing God’s truth with the integrity of its prophetic meaning preserved. With his mouth acting as a conduit for divine meaning, even adopting the angel’s interpretation of his own bodily experience to the letter, John’s act of faithful devouring (from the Latin devorare) proves an act of ultimate devotion (from the Latin devovere). This is a gentler version of the Old Testament episode that inspired John’s narrative, which comes from the beginning of the Book of Ezekiel, written seven centuries earlier. There, the heavenly voice that addresses Ezekiel frames his digestive act as proof of not only his belief, but his obeisance: “But you, mortal, hear what I say to you; do not be rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you” (Ezek. 2.8). Thus, even in a non-literalist reading, Bible-eating emerges as the ideal of literal, truthful, orthodox interpretation. This procedure recalls the central mystery of Catholic Christianity: the transubstantiation of
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bread into flesh, which commences with the priest re-embodying Christ’s words: “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matt. 26.26) and concludes with the congregation consuming what they believe to be the literal flesh of Christ. The opening words from the Gospel of John, whose author is traditionally understood to be the same John from the Book of Revelation, complete this triangulation of bread, flesh, and word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God […] And the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1.1–14). In the words of Peter Stallybrass, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania, from his chapter on “Eating the book, or why we need to digest what we read” (2019): “If one eats god as flesh, one is also eating him as word, since he is word and flesh alike.” Here, the Bible blurs the lines between food, language, and body, enabling intimate communion and interplay. ’’’ hroughout the late medieval and early modern periods, when manuscripts were still written on animal-skin parchments and books were printed using ink balls permeated with printers’ urine, “St. John Eating the Book” was a particularly compelling motif for European visual artists. For instance, the back of a bronze cover to a German manuscript translation of the Book of Revelation ca. 1500 depicts John right at the moment of ingesting the biblíon (Figure 3). Due to the book form’s gradual transition from the scroll to the codex since the the time the Book of Revelation was originally written, this biblíon is no longer a “scroll,” nor even “little.” Rather, it gets visually translated into a hardbound stack of rectangular pages the size of John’s head. Such a shift in the physical characteristics of the object of consumption, Stallybrass argues, renders the divine task before John “a far harder act of mastication and digestion.” Moreover, judging by the pen, ink, and half-written, wide-open codex beside him, John’s body will not be transubstantiating the
ingested book into egested speech, but rather into another physical book. In an increasingly text- and book-oriented culture, spurred on by the advent of the printing press less than 50 years earlier, it is now John’s scribing hand, rather than his bidirectional mouth, that gets to embody the correct interpretation of God’s word. In capturing this scene—the angel with columns for thighs looming large over the consuming John, both of them set against a natural landscape—in visual form, the back of this bronze book cover exhorts its viewer to ponder, “What would it mean to eat a Bible, like, literally?” far more viscerally than the Biblical passage ever could. While a figure of speech might safely dwell in the realm of metaphor, the naturalistic image confronts its audience with the physical infeasibility of John’s task. The practical details of consumption become explicit, forcing the viewer to empathize with the distressing embodiment that Bible-eating must entail. The source artwork for this book cover, which comes from a 1498 series of woodcut illustrations of the Book of Revelation designed by Nuremberg-born artist Albrecht Dürer (Figure 1), makes this confrontation even more powerful; Dürer’s carved contour depicts John’s grasping hands, gaping mouth, and furrowed brow with more clarity and sharpness than the bronze book cover ever could. The “little” differences between the Book of Revelation and the Book of Ezekiel, but also the bronze cover and the Dürer print, prove another point: A motif, even if it serves as a model for literal, exact, and correct interpretation, cannot preserve its integrity in the face of the inevitable processes of transmission, transmediation, and translation— processes that are transformative, but nonetheless necessary for its survival. The metaphor of Bibleeating as the interpretive ideal cannot escape the implications of the literal digestive process as one that transforms, and potentially destroys, its object. Of course, that is not to say that the 2022 Bibleeating incident at the UW-Madison campus is a continuation of the lineage of this Biblical motif—at least, to quote Walsh, not “literally.” The redheaded protestor is not acting on the level of textual trope or visual representation, but of real life. And a book— even a paperback, which the counter-protestor’s Bible appears to be—is hard to bite into. As the slivers of
METABOLICS
Figure 3. “John and the Strong Angel,” Apocalypse with Rule of Saint Francis in German, back cover and pendants, bronze, 13.2 x 10.5 cm, ca. 1500. Münich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 111
paper scattered about the sidewalk reveal, the best (nay, only) way to physically eat the Bible, cover and all, is to tear it apart, ensuring not the preservation of its divine meaning, but its total material destruction. To eat the Bible—actually, seriously, “literally”—is to render it illegible, unrecognizable as “The Bible,” indiscernible from any other book. If we invert Stallybrass’ argument that “if one eats god as [flesh], one is also eating him as [word],” then the scene on that sidewalk is one of bodily mutilation as much as textual desecration. The mouth of the redheaded protestor fails to transubstantiate the Bible pages from a physical (and inedible) substance into a divine (and edible) one. Instead, it substantiates them, insisting upon their material status as mere pieces of matted cellulose fiber—a compound indigestible by the human body, simply passing through the digestive tract without ever undergoing interpretation. Unlike John, the protestor is not reducible to a mouth understood as an obedient bidirectional translator between the written Word of God and the spoken Word of God; their Bible-eating mouth is the same mouth that shouted down Walsh and advocated for trans and
The logic of this miraculous process engages with the pre-modern understanding of the mouth as a bidirectional sense-organ, with taste as the incoming sense and speech as the outcoming sense. women’s rights. To recall the phrasing from the Book of Ezekiel, their mouth is “rebellious,” and does not discriminate between the sacred and the profane— that is, until their digestive tract eventually excludes the Word of God materialized from being part of the only thing our bodies can create through literal digestion: shit. The incident at UW-Madison is reminiscent of the titular concept from the 1988 article “Metaphorinto-Narrative” coined by Regina Barreca, Professor
of English at the University of Connecticut, to define a distinct feature of women’s comedy writing. “Rather than creating a world/object/action that accrues meaning through repeated appearances in a text,” she writes, “metaphor-into-narrative illustrates the stripping away of symbolic or over-determined meaning in order that the ‘original’ significance of the word/ object/action should dominate.” The digestive act of the redheaded protestor is a gesture of literalization that queers the Biblical motif—a queering that substantiates God’s meaning as a lack of meaning, and in so doing enables their body to make its own meaning, to originate its own significance. The conservative approach to the book/body/word is to preserve it whole, stable, and significant. The queer approach to the book/body/word is to take it apart and render its significance null or anew. To borrow Barreca’s phrasing, when confronted with the Bible-eating incident that occurred on October 24, 2022, at the UW-Madison campus, “we are given a shock both to our powers of belief and disbelief”—not in God, but in language itself. Grainy and brief, the video posted by YAF is the closest we may ever get to the truth of that event. The anonymous redheaded protestor, never even acknowledging the presence of the camera, does not call for interpretation. Like that handful of ripped-up Bible pages, their act is categorically indigestible. It can be a source of wonder or disgust, a matter of taste or distaste, but it does not fill us with catharsis or understanding. In Barreca’s words, “There is little relief in this comedy; it is more apocalyptic than reassuring.”
contemporary implication of disaster rather than the original meaning of revealing, we ironically return to the linguistic context of the Biblical motif. According to Barreca’s logic in “Metaphor-intoNarrative,” the redheaded protestor’s vigorous bite into a handful of Bible pages shakes up “our prepared interpretative strategies,” and in so doing “revives the ‘dead’ metaphor” of Bible-eating. Her appeal to literalization as revival—that is, to re-literalization— resonates with Stallybrass’ own conclusion of his re-materializing interplays of body, bread, and word in “Eating the book”: “Texts have bodies. It is indeed through their bodies—the manuscripts that scribes copy out, the printed texts that compositors set up in print, the email attachments that we send to each other today— that texts are constantly resurrected. But for words to be made flesh and to dwell with us, they must become part of us.” The Bible-eating protestor executed a far harder act than that of merely preserving or destroying the lineage of a Biblical motif. Despite, or perhaps exactly through, a desecration of orthodox meaning, they produced a miracle of semiotic opening. With no divine guarantee or oversight, they came closer to the physical, literal, visceral truth of Bible-eating than any textual account, visual representation, or metaphorical interpretation ever could—all through their own, embodied and original, apparatus. PAULINA GASIOROWSKA B’27 om
’’’ pokálypsis” [ἀποκάλυψις], an Ancient Greek word translatable as “revelation,” is the first word of the Book of Revelation. Indeed, the Book of Revelation is at times referred to as “the Apocalypse of John.” By defining the digestive act of the redheaded protestor as “apocalyptic,” with Barreca’s use of the term referencing the
nom nom nom nom nom.
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IMMACULATE c Chastity stopped at Walmart before her shift. Fluorescent light branded a dull throb into the bowl of her eye. She skimmed the drug aisle, picked up a bottle of Advil, went to check out. She recognized the woman at the counter. Box dye-black hair and thin lines branching out from the corners of her eyes. Every time she checked her out, after Chastity tapped her credit card against the screen, the woman would say, “That little beep just took your money!” This time, when Chastity set her bottle on the counter, the woman asked, “Having some pain?” The last few times Chastity was here had been the same deal, more Advil. “Yeah, I get these headaches. They just keep getting worse.” “Oh dear. Have you seen a doctor?” Chastity shook her head. “He’ll probably tell me I’m faking it anyway.” The woman laughed. “Yeah, and then he’d charge you a few hundred bucks for his trouble!” “Yup.” “Well, you know what? My friend has trouble with pain. Her back, her hips. That’s how it is with us old people.” The woman leaned forward. “And she sees this lady. A healer. She’s an Egyptian witch or something. Fixes her right up! And cheaper than a doctor.” White bursts of light flared over the woman’s right eye, then her nose, then her mouth as she spoke. Chastity pressed her palm against the counter. “I’ll have my friend set you up an appointment. Come back tomorrow and I’ll give you the details. But don’t tell anyone else, alright?” The woman winked, then tapped her screen. “That’ll be nine twenty-nine.” Chastity pressed her card against the screen. The card reader beeped. “That little beep just took your money!” She laughed. “Thank you. Have a nice day.” “Bye now!” On the drive to work, Chastity decided she would see this witch healer. Couldn’t hurt. ᛤ
“Who told you that? If anyone here’s Egyptian, it’s you.” The woman pulled a plastic block from her tank top, her fingers gliding past the fat silver cross that sat inside the curve of her chest. Chastity looked down at her hands, flushed. The woman pressed the block to her mouth, exhaling cotton candy. She pulled a tattered deck from a cup holder and spread the playing cards out on the center console. “Pick one.” Chastity scoffed. The woman waited. “Fine.” She picked a card. “King of Spades. That’s the best one.” “No, Ace of Spades is the best one.” The woman took the card from her hand and put away the rest of the deck. “You got head pain?” “Yeah.” “Fifty dollars.” “You haven’t done anything.” “You want me to fix you up or not?” Chastity handed over the cash. “Describe the pain to me.” She pressed her palms against her temples and described the pain as ripping, tearing, squeezing, pounding. Her words tumbled over each other. The shape of her pain shifted as she spoke. She described the length of it and it lengthened. She described the width of it and it widened. When she went silent, the woman spoke. “I’m going to touch your head, OK?” She nodded. The woman muttered something, then cupped her hands around Chastity’s head. She leaned forward so that their foreheads touched. Sharp pain surfaced at the point between Chastity’s eyes. It mounted into gripping, immobilizing agony. Red flashed behind her eyelids, and she thought she might die. Then, nothing. Her mind weightless and pure. The night’s eyes winked from the window. She noticed the crisp ridges on the dashboard, the lines on the pads of her fingers. Chastity smiled involuntarily, laughed. “Thank you! Thank you! Oh, I feel so much better! How did you—” The woman waved her away. “You’re welcome. You can go.” She turned to leave, then stopped. “What if I need to see you again?” The woman pulled a slip of paper and a ballpoint pen from the glove compartment, scribbled her number, then held it out. Chastity shoved the slip into her back pocket. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she repeated, stepping out of the truck. The woman didn’t reply. ᛤ
She pulled into the dark Walmart parking lot a couple days later, scanning for a red F-150 with its brights on. Spotted it. Parked her car a few spots away and walked over, a sharp pang flashing on the right side of her brain. Past empty cars idling with the heat on blast. The air was so cold it burned her throat. She tapped on the window until the driver rolled it down a crack. “Car’s unlocked.” She opened the door. The woman behind the wheel was young, around Chastity’s age. Soft, Chastity thought. There was a softness to her. Rosy roundness, pale in the cold parking lot light. White-blonde hair pulled back. Translucent fullness spilling from her tank top. Chastity slid into the passenger seat. “You ain’t Egyptian.”
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On her drive to work the next morning, Chastity passed a doe and her fawn winding through the trees, the fawn stumbling in the snow. She laughed to herself. In the dish pit, she sprayed chunks of meat off each surface, then stacked plates and bowls on plastic trays and slid them into the Hobart. She pulled down the bar of the machine, and its great metal cage slammed over the tray. Then, the sound of boiling water surging through the cage. When she opened it again the dishes on the tray shone, immaculate as the smooth glass of her mind. By the time she clocked out, her clothes were soaked under her waterproof apron, and mustard had somehow gotten on her pants, and her face was warm and moist like wet soil. Back at her apartment she scrubbed her lips, arms, stomach, legs under boiling water. The washcloth wasn’t working well enough, so she walked dripping to the kitchen and retrieved the sponge on the sink. She scrubbed herself with the rough green side of the sponge until her skin was pink, the layer that she had worn that day spinning down the drain. That night, the whisper of a headache lulled her to sleep.
ᛤ
The pain came back, worse. It thudded in the lump at the base of her skull, at her cheekbones. So she called the woman. This time Chastity opened the door of the truck without knocking. A strand of hair hung against the woman’s white neck, and Chastity almost reached to brush her fingers across the skin there. Instead she asked, “Hey, what’s your name by the way?” “Faith,” the woman said. “You?” “Chastity.” “I guess we both got shit names.” Chastity shrugged. A purple lanyard hung from the rear-view. A man with yellow braids and a horned helmet. “You a Vikings fan?” “Sure. My people.” The heat pumping into the car was suffocating, but Chastity didn’t say anything. “And you’re Native or something I guess then,” the woman, Faith, said. “What? No, I’m Norwegian like you.” Faith smiled. “Seriously, what are you really?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know?” “I was adopted. I don’t know.” “Well you’d still know if you were adopted.” “We never talked about that sort of thing, alright? Can we just do this?” “Jeez. The cards are in the glove compartment.” Chastity found them and held them out to her. Faith shook her head and said, “Pick one.” Chastity picked one, the Three of Hearts. Faith took it from her, then pressed the pink plastic block to her mouth, inhaling. “Ninety dollars.” “What? It was fifty last time. You think I have ninety bucks on me?” “Rent went up. If you don’t like it, you can get out.” Chastity rifled through her bag, pulled together seventy-nine dollars in bills and another three dollars in coins. “This is all I have.” Faith took the money. “Where do you live, anyway?” Chastity asked. “About forty minutes north of here. You?” “In town.” “Alright. Describe your pain to me.” It was like a ring of thorns, Chastity told her. It was like a drum full of water. Faith’s icy fingers and her hot breath, and the beat of the drum, faster, louder, deafening. Then the clear. “Thank you,” Chastity breathed. Faith was silent, arms wrapped around herself. ᛤ At work people were talking about the new war, what it was doing to gas prices. If that was what was raising them, Chastity was against it for sure. Her boss came around to the dish pit at the start of her shift that day and told her she hadn’t been spraying the dishes down enough, that some of them were coming out of the Hobart with brown crust stuck to them. Chastity knew she wasn’t the problem, but she just said, “Yes, sir” and got back to work. Her head got bad again. She had to press herself against the edge of the sink to stay vertical. When she got her paycheck that week, she called Faith. Faith didn’t pick up. She was in bed waiting for the Advil to kick in when Faith responded that she could meet her, now. Faith hadn’t put on mascara, and her eyelashes glinted silver in the glare of the headlights. A blanket was strewn across the passenger seat. Chastity tossed it to the back before she sat down, empty pop cans
LITERARY
( TEXT ALYA SOPHIA NIMIS-IBRAHIM DESIGN ROSE HOLDBROOK ILLUSTRATION JOY DUNN )
clattering at her feet. “Where’s your vape?” “I quit.” Chastity pulled out a wad of bills. “It’s one-thirty now, by the way.” Faith said it with her hands on the wheel, looking out the windshield. “What? You upped it last time too! I don’t got money for you to keep doing this.” “Well if you don’t, you might as well go,” Faith snapped. “Why’d you raise it?” “Gas.” Chastity’s head throbbed. “Cause of the war. Prices are shit.” She fished in her bag for more of the crisp bills she had withdrawn that day and passed them to her. “You know, people die in wars,” Faith said. “Not us.” The Vikings lanyard twisted in the stale air. “What do you think your headaches are from, anyway?” Chastity shrugged. “You tell me.” Faith slid the cards out of their paper case, and Chastity picked one and handed it over. Faith looked at the card. “You’re getting dizzy? Or having a hard time standing up or something?” “Yeah, how did you know?” Faith showed her the Two of Diamonds, like that meant anything. “OK, go ahead,” Faith said. It was colors, Chastity told her. Faith pressed her palms against her temples. It was green on black. It was white on red. It was pressure without sound. A wail, holding something broken. A scream. Then, the silence. The lightness. “I’ll see you next week,” Chastity said as she stepped out of the truck. She floated back to her car, mind empty but for air pushing upwards, lifting her body this way and that. It was Faith’s gentle hands that had lifted her. ᛤ “I missed you,” Chastity told her one night. Faith just looked out the window and pressed the plastic block, which had made a reappearance, to her mouth. Faith’s nose was swollen, dark crescents under her eyes, but Chastity didn’t ask about it. She just handed her a wad of cash. The next time she saw her, Faith gave her a loop of wooden beads, a silver cross dangling from it. She showed her how to move the beads through her thumb and pointer finger. “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” Faith told her saying it three times a day would make her headaches better. Chastity said she must be the only Norwegian Catholic in the state. And Faith said she wasn’t a Catholic but it worked. Chastity watched the pain from a distance, detached, as though it were happening to somebody else. Knowing it would pass soon enough. She said the prayer and moved the beads through her fingers whenever she remembered. She sold her plasma when the money was low. Got dizzy watching her insides slip away from her in rivulets of black, curling around the heavy machinery. Sometimes, sitting in the lot outside her apartment, her eyes blurred over, and she would trace patterns into the foggy glass of her car window. When her vision came back into focus, it would be Faith’s name, written over and over again with lines the width of her fingertip. And at night she would appear to her, the silver cross hanging against her chest. She would whisper something and shuffle her cards. Her pink mouth, golden wisps of hair, soft palms pressed against her temple. This vision was more vivid than anything in waking life.
ᛤ The line cooks were talking about war again, and gas. They were talking about turning a sand desert into glass. Chastity was sitting in the break room too, but they didn’t talk to her. That week the pain was worse. Moving signs blurred together on her drive to work. By lunchtime the pounding had spread to her whole body. When she stood up and went back to the dish pit, her vision darkened for a moment. Then a hot metal rod pierced her brain. Bile rose in her throat. She swallowed it down. It came up again. Warm liquid poured from her mouth into the sink full of dishes. Someone was beside her, then. She told them she was fine. Just needed to get to her car. In the car, she called her, and when she didn’t pick up, she called again. Told her she needed to see her. Please, she said. And Faith said, okay. Chastity got out of her car when she saw her pulling in. Stumbled to her truck. Handed her all the cash she had. “Please,” she repeated. Dizzy now, shaking. Faith’s fingertips like needles on her scalp, piercing spirals into its center. The way the cold burns before it numbs you, then washes you in heat. Chastity tipped her head back in relief. When she lowered her head, Faith was folded against the steering wheel. “Faith? You alright?” She didn’t respond. Chastity touched her arm, and she shifted away from her. Faith opened the car door, leaned her face out, and vomited onto the slick pavement. And again. She shook as she heaved, retching until nothing more would come up. She wiped her mouth on the back of her sleeve and moved back into
When she opened it again the dishes on the tray shone, immaculate as the smooth glass of her mind.
ᛤ Faith stayed there for an hour, maybe two. It was a new moon, and the moon would be right out in front of her windshield this time of year. She kept her eyes fixed to that spot where she knew the moon was. Heard the girl start up her car and roll out of the lot. Nothing. Not even a thank-you. Not even a good-bye. Should’ve sold that damn rosary. She started up her engine when the white spots cleared some. Yeah, this was the worst one. She was the worst one. She drove up that road that went straight north. Her mouth was dry and sour. And yeah, there was that ripping. “Like your brain is giving birth,” the girl had said once. She described it pretty well. Faith was probably going to retch again. At least there was nothing left to throw up. Took about forty minutes to get to that clearing between the pines. The clearing sloped down into the lake, dotted with a handful of red and black fish houses. She drove along the path she had shoveled, a couple yards out onto the snow-covered ice of the lake’s surface. Took her bottle from the backseat, swished some water around her mouth, and spat it out onto the snow. Brushed her teeth. Then she put the sunshades up against all the windows, turned off the engine, and climbed into the backseat. The blanket she was using was so goddamn thin. I better get a new one, she thought as the beat of her mind lulled her to sleep. ᛤ That night, she saw her, and she saw herself too. She sat on a throne, black hair falling around her shoulders, tall and proud. In her arms she nursed a silver-haired infant. Faith, the child. Chastity, the great mother, from which all light emanated. She, the third, floated above, awash in the golden heat of her. Until, blinded, she returned to the darkness. ALYA SOPHIA NIMIS-IBRAHIM B’28 had a dream
about Tolstoy.
her seat. Pale wet streaks shone on her cheeks. “Are you okay? What’s going on?” Chastity reached for her again. “Can I drive you home? What’s happening?” Faith stared back at her, face contorted under a gray sheen. “Where do you think the pain goes?” Faith said, her voice strangled. Chastity paused. “What?” “All that pain has to go somewhere. Someone has to hold it.” Through the window, Chastity saw lights dancing across translucent vomit. “No,” she said. When Faith didn’t say anything, she latched her fingers onto her forearm. “I can’t, though. You know I can’t.” Faith didn’t move. She was still looking out of the windshield. Chastity didn’t know what she was looking at. The trees, maybe, or at the streetlights, or maybe that bug splattered on the windshield. “Faith. You know I can’t hold all of it alone.” Faith was quiet then. “I can’t help you anymore. I can’t.” Looking straight ahead. Maybe she wasn’t looking at anything at all. Chastity was quiet too. Then she got out of the truck and walked away. ᛤ Chastity drove home with a buzz in her mind. Sitting on the cool tile of her bathroom floor, for the first time in a long time, she cried.
VOLUME 53 ISSUE 02
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WORLD
SAAB-LOVING IN THE 21ST CENTURY ON HYBRID WARFARE, THE AI RACE, AND MUTUAL AID IN THE SAAB COMMUNITY
c “I got made fun of a lot in high school for driving a Saab,” Mike Digiorgio told me over the phone while putting tools away in his Saab-tuning shop. “Back then, the general opinion was like, ‘Saab, that’s weird. Those things are hard to work on. Why would you want such a strange-looking car?’ And nowadays, it’s like, ‘Oh, that car is cool as hell. I love the way it looks. Why haven’t I seen more of them?’” +++ I met Mike through the Saabs of New England Facebook group, which has over 6,000 members, regular meetups, and posts with titles like “Has anyone checked out this honey yet?” and—referring to an anatomically incorrect AI-generated image of a Saab—“Snot AI.” The group clearly shows Saab owners’ love for the car and community: In response to someone’s post last Thursday, September 26, about selling their 2002 Saab 9-3 SE, Stefania Olochwoszcz commented, “Two cents of free advice? Keep it. Get active in the community. Best group of folks you’ll ever share the road with.” Sure enough, the forum is full of diagnostic questions and enthusiastic answers, like David Hajian’s about his classic 1978 sports sedan—“I’ve noticed my 99 EMS (2.0 B motor N/A) has been kind of ‘lurchy’ when accelerating with a cold motor”—which collected a whopping 25 comments discussing fixes. There’s also no shortage of photos admiring Saabs, such as long-time Saab-enthusiast Don M.’s post of his 9-5 wagon in Connecticut with the nor’easter sunset in the background and the caption “Hey, good lookin’.” In the comments? None other than a reply from Hajian: “Right back at ya,” with a winky face emoji and a photo of his own Saab in Providence, silhouetted by the pink and purple sky. The unique cars Saab created drew—and continue to draw—a likewise uniquely enthusiastic crowd. In fact, at the tail end of the 1980s when the Internet was just getting started, it was Saab lovers who created the first-ever online community dedicated to cars. “Saab people were always really
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tech-savvy,” Mike said. “Even nowadays, you go to Saab meets, and you see who’s driving them: It’s people who do math for Bose, or NASA engineers, people who are unbelievably intelligent in their respective science field.” Perhaps that’s because Saab was ahead of its time, holding a uniquely holistic approach to design that stemmed from a need for safety and efficacy. In 1937, under the threat of World War II, Saab was first created as an arms manufacturer to fulfill the Swedish government’s need for warplanes. (Saab is an acronym for Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, meaning ‘Swedish Aeroplane Company.’) When WWII ended and plane demand tailed off, Saab began to make cars. Incorporating their aerospace expertise into human-centered car design, Saab created a legacy outlasting the company itself. For instance, Saab was among the first to align the car’s center of gravity with the driver’s hips, allowing for both increased safety and a more enjoyable driving experience. Saab went on to continue innovating in ergonomic, intuitive, and safe design, popularizing a wraparound windshield to minimize blind spots, a safer and more conveniently located key fob, a hatchback able to fit massive objects into a small car, and many more innovations. These details elevated Saab’s cars, so much so that even after Saab Automobile AB went bankrupt in 2011, enthusiasts kept finding ways to keep Saabs on the road. Another part of Saab’s design ethos was its social production model. In the late ’80s, Sweden had one of the highest-paid workforces in the world: Workers at Saab’s factory in Malmö enjoyed four-day workweeks, managed their own production teams within the different ‘product workshops’ (chassis, engine, fascia, glazing, door, interior, finishing), and rotated jobs to keep developing skills without having to leave the company. This model aimed to provide workers with an engaging and fulfilling work experience, which Saab viewed as necessary in the modern age. As a result of their human-centered approach to manufacturing, Saab had great employee retention, an educated workforce, and well-designed,
( TEXT ELLIE WU DESIGN SELIM KUTLU ILLUSTRATION PAUL LI )
high-quality cars that benefited from the collaborative atmosphere of the production process. But these social initiatives weren’t profitable: After only three years of operation, Saab’s Malmö plant closed in 1991, and eventually, the entire car division went out of business. Unfortunately, great products don’t always translate to a competitive advantage under a capitalist market economy. In 1989, Saab sold 50% of its auto division to General Motors (GM) after years of weak sales driven by price increases and intense competition. Yet, this investment didn’t save Saab: After a brief period of shared ownership, GM bought the rest of the company in 2000, marking the beginning of the end for Saab Automobile. Mike believes GM’s acquisition of Saab was somewhat inevitable. “I think at some point they did need somebody to come into the company and make it work more efficiently,” he told me. “But I think the way they did it was cutting corners. I think they lost focus on why people love Saabs.” Take the iconic Saab hatchback, for example. The large trunk opening provided van-level storage in a small, sporty car: “Every person who was ever in one of those cars has a story about something they fit in the back of it. Usually it’s like, ‘I fit a whole refrigerator in the back of my 9000 and just closed the hatch on it,’ or like, ‘Oh yeah, I moved into college in one trip in my classic 900 because it was so big inside,’” Mike told me. No other company had that—not Volvo, BMW, or Mercedes. But, in a GM-led attempt to compete with these companies, Saab got rid of its hatchback. “All of a sudden they’re trying to be as sporty as a BMW and as luxurious as a Mercedes, and they lost the one thing that nobody else had, which was this amazing storage space of a hatchback,” he said. “I think that started to drive customers to look at other options.” +++ “People hear the word ‘Saab’, and they think ‘cars,’” said Dr. Brennan Phillips, a professor of ocean
WORLD
aims to damage critical undersea infrastructure, including the fiber optic cables that provide 99% of transatlantic internet access. In 2022, a Russian trawler repeatedly crossed a Norwegian cable before it broke due to physical damage. Although investigators found seabed marks indicating that an anchor or net was dragged along the seabed, no concrete evidence could link the Russian vessel to the cable damage. In 2025, the evidence was clearer: A Chinese vessel cut the cable connecting Penghu Island to the main island of Taiwan, shutting off internet access, ATMs, and even the Taiwanese Coast Guard’s secure communication lines. Hybrid warfare utilizes both weapons and non-military tools. This is clear in the RussoUkrainian war, which has developed the way modern wars are fought through the combination of new technologies (drone warfare, bots used to stir up dissent, etc.) with tactics including attacking civilians, information warfare, and destroying museums, art, and culture—even kidnapping children. To counter this all-encompassing approach to war, countries like the U.S. are enhancing their own defense capabilities in a new arms race aided by AI: American forces are developing drones to keep up with Russia, submarines to keep up with China, naval mines and AI-assisted mine countermeasures to keep up with Iran, and more, all in an aim to achieve both defensive superiority and deterrence. engineering at the University of Rhode Island and a National Geographic Explorer. “But Saab has been involved with underwater robotics for [over] three decades, if not longer at this point.” While Saab’s cars rose and fell, its defense branch (Saab AB) continues to manufacture a large array of military technology today. No longer primarily an airplane manufacturer, Saab has diversified through a number of acquisitions and mergers: In 2000, Saab acquired Swedish defense company Celsius’ advanced Bofors missile technology; in 2006, the radar and electronic warfare technology from Swedish telecom company Ericsson; and in 2007, the UK company Seaeye’s electric underwater robotics technology. Not all of these acquisitions were peaceful: After the Swedish Defense Materiel Administration cut contracts from German-owned defense company Kockums and Saab poached their key personnel, Swedish forces raided their shipyard for classified submarine engine parts. In 2022, Saab received a $173 million, 10-year contract with the U.S. Navy to build MK-39 anti-submarine warfare targets—a sort of practice dummy used to train sonar operators—from their office in our very own Cranston, Rhode Island. In fact, Saab is one of many defense and dual-use (possessing civil and military applications) ‘Blue Tech’ companies operating in RI, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Anduril Industries, and smaller startups including HavocAI (which builds drone swarms), Regent Craft (which aims to use high-speed seaglider planes to reduce regional transportation costs), and Juice Robotics (which designs drones connecting underwater sensors capable of sending streamable data up to 1000m deep). These companies came to Rhode Island because of its unique coastal geography, top talent, and institutional backing. With its miles of coastline and shallow bays, the state’s history as a naval technology center spans from the Civil War to WWI and WWII. Moreover, institutions such as the Naval War College and Naval Undersea Warfare Center continue to provide infrastructural support for undersea technology development, which is currently in a phase of particularly high growth: Under the Biden-Harris administration, RI was designated an Ocean Tech Hub; and this August, RI secured yet another grant of millions in federal funding to support its rapidly growing underwater defense industry. This reorientation towards the ocean and American underwater defense capabilities reflects a broader trend of totalization in warfare, wherein nations compete for complete control and dominance over rivals. We see this in the proliferation of ‘hybrid warfare,’ where attackers aim to disrupt both military targets and civil society. The ocean is a prime site for hybrid warfare, being a nexus of trade and communication. Take the pressing security issue of China and Russia’s suspected
+++ Saab’s trajectory from car company to war company reflects how modern warfare has become—and is always becoming—more totalized. In a cycle of negative reinforcement, we feel that we need to continue developing technology to be dominant—but so does much of the rest of the world. For instance, new mine countermeasures (MCM) technologies like Saab’s 2026 Multi-Shot Mine Neutralisation System (MuMNS) are a solution to a problem that poses more problems yet. Although mines can look relatively unassuming, they can cause heavy damage; in fact, since WWII, more ships have been lost to sea mines than any other maritime weapon. MCM technologies play a vital role for countries, including the U.S., in contested waterways such as the Strait of Hormuz, an instance of hybrid warfare wherein Iran uses naval mines to threaten commercial vessels in response to American territorial incursions. With MCM technologies, navies can clear a safe path through dangerous waters and protect the flow of trade (90% of which happens by sea), a task especially important to the stability of the world economy. Saab’s MuMNS is also the world’s first fully autonomous mine countermeasure system, able to detect, identify, and neutralize threats at sea. This technology aligns with Saab’s earlier work in artificial intelligence (AI) integration, particularly their 2024 Autonomous Ocean Core, a control system that allows for full automation of large craft (e.g., warboats). In a promotional video for the Autonomous Ocean Core, Saab tells us: “In order to protect our way of life and keep our oceans open and safe, we have to be everywhere, all at once.” It’s an impossible task for humans, but what about a “cognitive ally that doesn’t eat, sleep, or leave”? For Saab, that “cognitive ally” is AI. “[T]o extend our reach, we look to autonomy,” a nondescript blonde woman in a neon safety jacket tells us, with the gray ocean behind her, a stealth ship slicing through the waters. But what is “autonomy”? Is it the ability for AI to automatically replan routes and avoid obstacles or determine its own enemy targets? Saab’s Autonomous Ocean Core possesses both a “Safety Mode” and an “Assault Mode,” which allows for “no performance limits” in “high-risk situations.” The future could be fleets of autonomous vessels, able to “find what doesn’t want to be found” and “predict the unpredictable,” which suggests an eventual point of mutually assured destruction. This is reminiscent of the nuclear arms race, yet this time, it’s not humans pressing buttons to fire weapons, but AI agents that have their own biases, make their own mistakes, and crucially, lack the capacity for moral judgment. Perhaps we should follow the call to slow down and regulate our development of AI—a call that is
even advanced by AI leaders, from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to Grok's Elon Musk—and ensure its ethicality and safety before applying it to such dangerous machines. Despite Saab’s characterization of its AI-powered Autonomous Ocean Drone as the “offspring of evolution,” automation of underwater apex predators is a deliberate choice. Emerging undersea technologies, however, are often dual-use: Take Dr. Phillips’ Juice Robotics’ unmanned data collection system, the High Dive, which furthers scientific research in hard-to-reach areas such as the Arctic and lowers the risks and costs of inspecting offshore energy and ocean infrastructure. +++ When asked about why Saab failed, most Saab owners say that the company had lost what made it Saab: a human-focused design ethos. One could argue that the defense company Saab AB is in no danger of bankruptcy, having made millions in profits last year. However, its trajectory towards building AI-powered autonomous fleets suggests otherwise: As autonomization makes it easier to go to war, we may experience more conflict, much like how we have hybrid warfare attacks even during ‘peacetime.’ Simultaneously, conflict becomes more dangerous: think hacking, faulty or biased data, and fatal miscalculations. If these autonomous weapons systems were to ever fail in a spectacular way, not only would Saab no longer be in business, but all of humanity’s existence could be at stake. Despite Saab Automobile’s collapse, the Saab community still thrives through new networks of mutual aid. Speaking with the current President of the Saab Club of North America, Shelly Baxter, I saw just how dedicated and supportive the Saab community is. More than a car, Saab is a lifestyle: “The mentality is […] seeing the young kids that are interested in the cars, and the older guys that have spare cars, giving them cars,” Shelly said. “They’re not great cars, right, like the kid’s gotta work on it, the kid’s gotta do all this stuff, but it gives the kid the opportunity to get into the Saab world.” Through their dedication, Saab lovers have built a community that’s even more an embodiment of Saab’s original human-centered ethos. Yet, wouldn’t the preferable alternative be if Saab Automobile were still around today? If Saab had been able to, in Mike’s words, “do the right thing, even though it was expensive and different”? Under the immediate pressures of competition, it’s a hard choice for anyone to make: to sacrifice one short-term ‘good’ for a longer-term ‘good.’ But that long-term is our shared future, too. As supportive as the Saab community’s networks of mutual aid are, we don’t want to create an analogous future where AI has destroyed our infrastructure and autonomy, leaving us to rely on the kindness of our neighbors for a part that is no longer in production. ELLIE WU B’28 misses the hatchback she never had.
VOLUME 53 ISSUE 02
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SCIENCE + TECH
MEM O RY,
THE CUP, THE CLIP : HAS SOCCER ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT CLIPFARMING? ( TEXT LUCAS FRIEDMAN-SPRING
DESIGN RADHIKA TIBREWALA ILLUSTRATION MADELINE KIM )
c The basic character of soccer is disagreement. How many of the hours that will have composed my life will I have spent discussing the comparative merits of Didier Drogba and Zlatan Ibrahimović, Eden Hazard and Mohamed Salah, Arjen Robben and Franck Ribéry, and—of course—Messi and Ronaldo? The latter is a particularly elemental, primordial distinction. Henry Adams observed one instance of this pattern in his writing (in The Education) on the virgin and the dynamo. Barthes noticed another in an essay on the Tour de France when he counterposed “Bobet [who] is an entirely human hero who owes nothing to supernature and derives his victories from purely earthly qualities” (Ronaldo) with “Gaul [who] incarnates the Arbitrary, the Divine, the Marvelous, Election, complicity with the gods” (Messi). It is a taste for the mystical, the desire to live in a world flushed with a sort of mysterious, lunar light that brings one into Messi’s camp; the wish of the Messi fan is to be carried down to wondrous depths where strange shapes of the warped primal world glide before your eyes and to see God’s foot on the treadle of the loom. The Ronaldo fan, on the other hand, wishes to beat his mother to death with an expensive sneaker. It is, of course, true that every sporting contest is a kind of disagreement. The soccer player, in his incessant pleading with referees—nearly weeping at the injustice of the calls—evinces a belief in the power of disagreement, a belief that the referee may actually change his mind (this does, of course, not ever happen—though a 1903 rulebook circulated in Argentina allowed an apology, if accepted by the aggrieved opponent, to take the place of referee sanction “as long as his [the offending player’s] apology was sincere and was expressed in proper English”). There is, though, one point of agreement in all of this discord that is native to soccer fandom. This one point of agreement, nearly universal among anyone invested in the sport, is that soccer is worse now than it once was. Many bemoan the increasingly riskaverse, technocratic nature of the sport—exemplified by Pep Guardiola’s dominant, somewhat bloodless Manchester City team of 2016–2026 (Guardiola resigned earlier this year), the moments of incandescent genius—Garrinchas and George Bests evading flashily blackguardish fullbacks and firing in goals from 30 yards out before returning home to drink themselves to death—that once characterized the game replaced by 10 men in sky-blue playing lethargic, UAE-funded¹ keepaway and trying to get the ball to a target striker who seems to touch it only to score ultimately dull tap-ins. This change in the tenor of the game is attributed to either the so-called “inversion of the pyramid,” the midcentury tactical revolution that placed the majority of any given team’s players in defense rather than attack, or the increasing financialization of the sport (some critiques draw a straight line from latter to the former). Odder circles blame the ’70s era Dutch Totaalvoetbal (Total Football) project that dispensed with positions altogether and gave the impression, at its most effective, of a guy getting jumped by ten men in exceedingly short shorts, and, at its least effective, a posse of lanky ants scurrying feverishly in search of some illusory crumb. Those attributing the decline of soccer to Totaalvoetbal understand modern, possession-heavy
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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
brands of soccer to be derived from some tactical innovations made by TV vet Johan Cruijff during his time as head coach of FC Barcelona. The problem with contemporary soccer, for the anti-Cruijffians, is that the true character of that originally English game—guys kicking the ball as hard as they can in the direction of the other team’s goal and hoping that something happens—has been superseded by a sort of continental foppery involving things like inverted wingers and punishment for intentionally injuring opposing players. That the new football hegemony
is an institution—like feminism, or the EU— designed primarily to dispirit The True Englishman is self-evident; that the lost ideal of the game, John Terrys and Geoff Hursts bludgeoning each other in the goalmouth, is vernacularly known as “Brexit Ball” is no accident. More reasonable critiques of modern soccer involve the basic scheme set up above: that the bigger a business soccer becomes, the more the risk-taking that once made the game exciting is discouraged in the name of the supreme corporate values of
SCIENCE + TECH
efficiency and risklessness. The Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano begins Soccer in Sun and Shadow, his 1998 history of the sport, with a rather neat articulation of this attitude: The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots. In this fin de siècle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable. Nobody earns a thing from the crazy feeling that for a moment turns a man into a child playing with a balloon, a cat toying with a ball of yarn, a ballet dancer flying through the air with a ball as light as a balloon or a ball of yarn, playing without even knowing he’s playing, with no purpose or clock or referee. Play has become spectacle, with few protagonists and many spectators, soccer for watching. And that spectacle has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organized not to facilitate play but to impede it. The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength, a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy, and outlaws daring. This is, of course, rather corny stuff. Galeano is an author best suited to the black-and-white case, whose sensibility is less cringeworthy in the more plausibly Manichaean cases of (neo)colonialism in Latin America (as in his The Open Veins of Latin America) and histories of indigenous dispossession (his Memory of Fire trilogy); Galeano is a sentimentalist, and sentimentalism is a literary disposition better suited to some sorts of material than others. And it is partially sentimentalism—described elegantly by Cleanth Brooks as “nearly always involv[ing] an over-simplification of the experience in question [and taking] a short cut to intensity by removing all the elements of an experience which might conceivably militate against the intensity”—that is his error in Soccer in Sun and Shadow. Galeano writes that “[n]obody earns a thing from the crazy feeling that for a moment turns a man into a child playing with a balloon…” Is this true? Is there not a relation between the profitability of a spectator sport and how exciting of a spectacle it is? And is not the spectacular nature of the sport the very precondition for Galeano’s engagement—as spectator—with it? Galeano, here, is like a tourist at some landmark complaining that he can’t enjoy it because there are too many tourists there. Vexed by a perceived overmediation of the game that, for him, occludes its basic essence, Galeano, and the Galeanoesque soccer nostalgiac, forget that it is in fact that very mediation that is the condition of possibility for their encounter with the sport. A recent piece—Corley Miller’s “The Clip Stage” in n+1—on this year’s World Cup focuses on an (allegedly) new way of mediating soccer, claiming that “the clip—on social media, or in a licensed highlight package—is something like the primary episteme of the World Cup, for the simple reason that there is too much soccer. The group stage, which concluded
on June 27, featured 72 games, or around 120 hours of game-clock runtime.” There is something true about this; it is hard to fault Miller’s logic here—there really is just far too much soccer to actually watch; who, if not a resident of either country or some sort of potentially dangerous pervert, was actually watching Ecuador and Curaçao struggle to a 0-0 draw? But has this not always been the case? Has there not always been too much soccer? Innumerable pointless friendlies; sluggish, futile Supercopas; the FIFA Club World Cup; the UEFA Nations League (today the Faroe Islands and Kazakhstan drew 1-1). So why the clip now? I would suggest that the logic of the clip is not a useful mode of access to a particular regime of the game but is rather emblematic of what has always been the way soccer is processed. Much of Miller’s piece is dedicated to establishing what literary genre soccer is: “if the goals are poems, the sport itself is stubbornly prosaic.” The poem is not the oddest posited correlative for the goal (for Galeano “the goal is soccer’s orgasm”) but the point of this all remains somewhat elusive. Reconciling soccer and literature is a common, though somewhat fraught project. I remember my father giving me a copy of Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick on the occasion of my first start for my high school’s varsity team. I—an exceedingly anxious young man and a goalkeeper—knew by the title alone that the book would entirely misunderstand the sport; the penalty kick, recognized as basically a free goal, is maybe the only moment in which a goalkeeper is not anxious; in this situation, the goalkeeper’s possible actions are a totally unexpected save (heroic) or conceding a goal (the expected outcome, for which a goalkeeper is never faulted). Indeed, perhaps the contemporary piece of writing about soccer—Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch—at no point fails to assume the basic incompatibility of soccer and writing. In his 2016 cultural history of the sport, the academic and critic Joe Kennedy describes (incisively, accurately) Fever Pitch as “a manual designed to assist Guardian readers in justifying the fact that they occasionally tuned into Match of the Day. An answer to those who alleged that football was either a pointless waste of time or a pernicious vehicle of false consciousness, it positively revelled in football’s primitivism, situating it in opposition to, say, theatre or art cinema.” The inability of soccer to be literature or art cinema or “theatre” is perhaps due to the fact that soccer has always been about clips. The predominance of the form has less to do with fixture bloat (and the clipfarming that inevitably accompanies big-viewership occasions like the World Cup) than this fact. The logic of the clip predates social media itself. The BBC’s “Match of The Day”—a weekly compilation of highlights first aired in 1964 is a very near cousin of, say, “Emre Mor Harika Çalımlar GOLLER 2018 (TÜRK’ün Gücü) • Best Skills • HD”² or “Adel Taarabt Best Goals and skills 2015.” Even Soccer In Sun and Shadow eschews any sort of particularly rigorous narrativity and takes the form instead of a confetti of exciting but ultimately discontinuous events: “Goal by Zizinho,” “Peñarol’s Glory Years,” “Goal by Rahn.”
For Miller, the problem of the clip is that it effaces the “exhausting valiant constancy” that is the essential spirit of the game. The clip rejects its context, forgets that most of the effort in any given soccer is expended not in making things happen but in making things not happen—in, as we are, the postlapsarian era of the inverted pyramid. A privileged clip of Miller’s essay is Nestory Irankunda’s goal contra Turkey in Australia’s inaugural match of the ’26 World Cup. In the clip of Irankunda’s goal “the game keeps proving that it can occur. Irankunda’s parents can flee Burundi, give birth in a [refugee] camp in Tanzania, move to Perth and Adelaide, drive their son to practice after practice. He in turn can thrive in Australia, wash out from Bayern, not quite settle into the English second tier—and then score that goal at the World Cup. The clip, as many times as you watch it, will always stage a microcosm of this triumph, this profound unlikelihood.” Here, the clip contains both the fact of its implausibility and the facts of a world—ambivalently external to the clip— that made its content implausible in the first place. Can we have it both ways? Can the clip be pernicious—insofar as it conceals, in the brilliant actuality of its presence, that which would have rendered it impossible—and utopian³ insofar as it stages a triumph of the unlikely over the likely, a triumph whose glory is its very incompleteness? Necessity, defeated, is sublated in the moment of grace that is the clip. The presence of the not-clipped within the clip is decidedly ambiguous. But the fact is that this form is not imposed from the outside by some fortunate or unfortunate confluence of ever-increasing amounts of soccer and ever-decreasing attention spans. It is in fact immanent in any encounter with the game due to its essentially tautological nature of the clip: it is a technology of memory, and what is selected to be memorialized is selected exclusively on the basis of its memorability. If the clip refers ambivalently to its context, it refers more powerfully to an idealized version of “soccer as it was.” The felt history of soccer, if the game is always remembered in flashes, is a sort of clip compilation. The clip then refers to this ideal order that soccer-as-it-was has been remembered as. +++ In 2021 Erik Lamela scored an extraordinary rabona (a move where a player wraps their kicking leg behind their standing leg to strike the ball) versus Arsenal and it was assisted by Lucas Moura and the sun was hitting my dog’s back in a very peculiar way. My brother had just moved to Salt Lake City. My friend Jacob texted me; he’d been watching the game but, in the bathroom, had missed the goal. I was 16. It was springtime and I felt extraordinarily old. LUCAS FRIEDMAN-SPRING B’27 remembers Kurt Zouma’s 2019 run versus Ajax—which did not result in a goal.
Manchester City’s owner, Emirati vice-president Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan is known mainly for his ownership of the club; large collection of superyachts; and disquieting chumminess with former Janjaweed warlord and current head of the RSF Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa. 2 A video that opens with perhaps the greatest clip of all time, in which Mor, of an exceedingly boyish cast recalling Phaedrus, a precocious catamite of one of Plato’s middle dialogues, chops the ball behind his standing leg before touching it with the outside of his other foot to split an opposing, Moldovan fullback (a move known as a McGeady spin) before almost immediately dribbling directly into another defender. Unfortunately, Mor would be thereafter doomed (largely by this tendency to lose the ball immediately after performing analogous flashy tricks) to berths on increasingly obscure Turkish clubs. 3 Is the clip utopian? Is clipfarming utopian? Insofar as it advances a system of valuation generally orthogonal to the goal (the, as we have learned, orgasm of the sport) is clipfarming queer in its disruption of an implicitly reproductivist (besides Galeano’s orgasm comment, I think of a famous tweet by journeyman striker Tammy Abraham) teleology? 1
VOLUME 53 ISSUE 02
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A Good Story ( TEXT BENJAMIN FLAUMENHAFT DESIGN CAROLINE FENTON ILLUSTRATION ELLIE LIN )
FEATURES
MY DALLIANCE WITH THE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISTS
c I’m anxious at the club fair because I just know the grass is done for. Everybody mills about the Main Green: how to help people, how to be employable, how to get sex, etc. Meanwhile, sigh, the grass, the perfect grass. Don’t we want perfect grass tomorrow? This year, I arrived with a book in hand, uncouth, a bibliophile. I’d come from the library, and, fretting about whether or not to put the book in my bag, I failed to act. The book was Death in a Shallow Pond by David Edmonds, something like an intellectual history of the movement that came to be called Effective Altruism (or, EA). My sense of EA was very diffuse; I couldn’t quite get a handle on whether it was a school of thought or a collection of non-profit organizations. That’s why I checked out the book: to find out what one thing had to do with the other, and what any of it had to do with doing a good job at doing good. Edmonds’ title is taken from a thought experiment initially set forth by famous vegan and moral philosopher Peter Singer in his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” The experiment went, “If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.” The experiment illustrates the principle that we are obligated to prevent bad things from happening, provided we do not, in so doing, sacrifice anything of comparable moral significance. The pond scene is locally bounded, but the obligation stands regardless of our physical or relational distance from the suffering. Responding explicitly to a famine in East Bengal, Singer’s argument had an avowed practical implication: people in affluent countries ought to be donating a lot more of their money to end suffering around the world. Effective Altruism was founded in the late 2000s by readers of Singer. The movement tries to actualize the shallow pond argument by researching how to do more good. Adherents seek rational and empirically evidenced methods for doing so. As one now-paradigmatic example went, mosquito nets are cheap and highly effective at preventing the spread of malaria; ergo, donating one’s money thataway was a safer bet for efficient good-doing than, say, tipping generously, funding an opera house, or even donating to UNICEF. Effective Altruists take the more efficient mode of good-doing to be the ethically superior one. Following from Singer’s dismissal of arguments for the ethical relevance of distance, Effective Altruists have continued to wonder what common-sense constraints might be inhibiting good-doing: What do we owe to animals? To future lives? And so, simply put, the goal has been to maximize the good, a goal which seems always to sit somewhere between a guiding question and a telos. I was wandering about the crowded Main Green when my friend Una smiled over and gave me a hug, which really was funny because she happens to be the reason Effective Altruism came across my desk in the first place. Una’s a member of the EA club on campus. Last spring, we frequently found ourselves caught up
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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
in lengthy conversations about the movement and related matters. Sometimes we’d be at odds, but more frequently we’d leave each other entirely confused. The thing is, I had been spending much of my time in college running away from conclusions. Una seemed to know that conclusions did things, itself a conclusion I was bent on calling into question. But, really, I found her attentiveness to action quite smart. Her conclusion about conclusions revealed itself in the form of her thinking. Just when I thought I’d presented a compelling enough critique of utilitarianism, Una’d remind me that what we’d actually been discussing was our peers’ career choices. Sometimes Una would label my argument as a ‘cop-out,’ by which she meant that I was critiquing certain conclusions simply to evade action. It’d be easy to read this accusation as anti-intellectual, but it never struck me as such. Instead, Una’s use of the word ‘cop-out’ seemed to raise the question of what thinking and action owe to each other. Making an argument and then having it labeled as a ‘cop-out’ was like thinking very hard about the lyrics of a pop song, remembering that the point of pop is not to think but to have fun, and then realizing that the conditions for this remembering were furnished by the song itself. This resistance to thinking makes the pop song and EA particularly intriguing objects of thought. Una admitted to me, albeit jokingly, that she has before considered writing about EA for this, very leftist alt-weekly publication. She told me this just as we’d gotten to talking late in the afternoon a few days after the club fair. I’d told Una I myself was planning to write about EA, and she’d agreed to speak on the record. I ask her why she thinks the Indy should cover Effective Altruism, and she raises an article the paper published last fall which argued that veganism be taken more seriously by leftists. Veganism and EA are kindred causes, both demanding we rethink what counts as morally relevant. Una had heard that the article was hotly debated among staff after its publication, and she thinks it’d be good to keep conversing about the limits of our ethical concern. Did I remember why, in particular, people were critical of the article? I offer, “I think people find that when veganism is positioned alongside matters like racial justice, that it’s trivializing of more, maybe, humanistic concerns. What do you think of that?” “I think it’s good to stay away from saying, ‘Our meat-eating is just like the Holocaust.’ Because it will make people angry, and for no other reason,” she offered, mostly in jest. “Like…” “Like, I don’t feel as extreme about it, but I understand why [some vegans] do. And, the reason [people] think it’s trivializing is because they think meat-eating is a trivial moral issue.” “Mm.” “Mm.” “Cheers.” “Cheers.”
Una is studying abroad at Oxford this year; we speak during her single week on campus before she heads across the pond. Oxford is pretty much where Effective Altruism began. In 2009, the young philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill founded Giving What We Can, an organization dedicated to effective philanthropy. In the ensuing years, similar groups cropped up with EA as their guiding principle, and the movement grew in prominence, gaining particular popularity in Silicon Valley. In high school, Una had a general sense that EA was kind of weird, particularly following the arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, a high-profile Effective Altruist and CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange who was convicted of fraud in 2022. The event seemed to shift the public’s perception of EA toward skepticism, and Una’s interest in the movement thereafter has always been coupled with a certain awareness of this general consensus. Una spent the summer after her first year at Brown working on a farm and reading Singer’s Practical Ethics. By fall, she was vegan and decided to sign up for the introductory fellowship organized by the EA club on campus. Interestingly, the fellowship seems to be the club’s main endeavor. It’s a weekly reading group whose members make their way through the EA handbook over the course of the semester. The handbook, freely accessible online, is a collection of blog posts that describe the principles and practices relevant to the movement, each with an estimated reading time labeled at the top and a comment section at the bottom. The sections of the handbook vaguely map onto the historical evolution of the movement’s thinking. It begins with more straightforward concerns surrounding the maximization of the good: comparing charities, measuring marginal impact. The later chapters focus on matters that have become more relevant to the movement in recent years, such as longtermism (the idea that future lives might be morally significant) and, relatedly, existential risks that threaten the destruction of humanity entirely, like AI. Una’s fellowship group started out seven strong and ended up with five participants. “It was exciting,” Una explains, “to get to talk every week about exactly what I wanted to be talking about with people who wanted to be doing the same. It wasn’t like, ‘These are my new best friends,’ but […] such a setting had been missing from my social life.” During the fellowship, Una finally felt like she could engage meaningfully with EA’s open philosophical questions. +++ Una let me know that there was somebody at the table who somehow did EA as a job. She’d come to campus to help with recruitment during the club fair. We meandered through the crowd, and, approaching the table, I said hi to Enzo and Charlie, two juniors in the EA club. Both agreed to talk to me for my article. Then, I introduced myself to Sarah, the woman
FEATURES from higher up. I asked how long she would be in town and wondered if she’d be willing to talk to me. She said she’d love to do a coffee chat, and I quickly clarified I was hoping the meeting would be more like an interview. Over text, we agreed on a time, and she suggested Coffee Exchange. I forgot, for a moment, that she wasn’t my peer. Settling in at a sunny table a few days later, I learn that Sarah was here to help out under the auspices of her own organization. Sarah is Sarah Bluhm, the cofounder of the Network for EA Support and Training (NEST). Bluhm helped found NEST after working for some time at the Centre for Effective Altruism. She made the switch out of a commitment to “people being independent thinkers who have an environment that encourages them to think critically and to understand their own values deeply.” It wasn’t that the Centre was antagonistic to independent thinking, she explains, but that they simply were not willing to die on the hill of free discourse. NEST essentially provides mentorship and logistical support to EA clubs on college campuses across the country. In describing what she does, Bluhm uses the word “organizing.” When I ask if she means the word in the sense typically associated with activism, she explains, “I think of the other words you could use, you could say we’re doing leadership. I don’t think that’s what we’re doing. I do think we’re kind of just arranging people in configurations so that they have a good time together, and have a productive time as well.” Generality appeals to many Effective Altruists. Everyone who spoke with me tells me they are drawn to the idea of doing good broadly, without committing to any particular cause. This commitment to not committing colors EA rather apolitical; as in, the handbook never tells adherents who to vote for or what to think about geopolitics. Such agnosticism also implies a certain deferral of choice in the particulars to the logic of a general principle. Bluhm almost seems invested in organizing EA clubs in such a way that participants remain enthusiastic about choice. The “Mission and Values” section of NEST’s website states that they have a “liberal conception of EA.” “We expect disagreements,” the page reads, “we don’t expect to resolve all of them.” In a forum responding to an essay by Peter Singer in the Boston Review, Rob Reich, professor of Political Science at Stanford, criticizes EA for being anti-democratic. He argues, albeit somewhat speculatively, that the prioritization of the good above all else implies a system wherein all political engagement is simply instrumental to good-doing. We might not immediately take issue with our politicians setting themselves before the task of doing good, but Reich points out that, without a more robust account of what politics is for, we’re likely to end up with power legitimated by expertise (that is, in good-maximization) instead of by the will of the people. I wonder if NEST’s style of “organizing” attempts to synthesize utilitarian ethics with more explicitly liberal modes of expression. The organization’s mission, indeed, is perhaps even more concerned with a certain form of collective thinking than with the maximization of the good. The only problem then seems to be how to identify Effective Altruism as Effective Altruism at all. Certainly, at some point, the club will need to give its members some answers about how to do altruism effectively. When Bluhm tells me what she herself so enjoys about EA spaces, she frequently describes some sort of discourse, but it isn’t always clear what precise form of discourse she has in mind. She expresses excitement about getting to think about “really fundamental questions of how much we value existence.” Moments later, however, she seems to suggest that such questioning has a limit: “I mean, there are philosophers who spend their whole lives thinking about population ethics. But [insofar] as I want to be a morally informed individual, it’s nice to just have this community that has a bunch of what they think are the best takes on these questions today.” Does an EA club pose questions or provide answers?
When I speak with Charlie, he expresses some annoyance with this ambiguity, and the resultant potential for misunderstanding. He tells me he wishes the “Introductory Fellowship” would be called something different, like “Introductory Reading Group.” And what, I wondered, would the name “Introductory Reading Group” sound like? “Like we were reading about a discipline as opposed to a movement. Even though, yeah, I also don’t really know how to describe it to people: as like a movement, or a philosophy, or a prescription, or what. ” +++ I ask Una what she makes of the fact that her peers in the fellowship were not her “new best friends.” “I think it’s probably good,” she says. She then describes having felt even more at a distance from Effective Altruists at conferences she’s attended away from campus. The distance, she explains, “probably means that I’m not doing motivated reasoning… That feels promising to me. That I actually do like these people and their ideas, not just their outfits or whatever.” Then, she admits, “And it’s also a sign that these people are different from me. Some people in EA don’t care about living a beautiful life. There are some differences between me and EA people I meet that are very important, which is good evidence that EA is not perfect for me.” “What are some of these differences?” “Like, not caring about art.” “About art?” “Yeah, though surely many of them do, but maybe sort of not in a full way…not thinking that there are any answers in art.” Una’s thinking about, let’s say, the aesthetics of EA is unsurprising in some sense, but then also entirely enigmatic. It seems like a good idea to participate in morally upstanding groups, not merely in groups we’ve been convinced are morally upstanding because they seem pretty cool. It’s rather a stranger idea to take the uncoolness of a group as something like proof of not having confused our aesthetic inclinations for ethical convictions.
And yet, all of this is not so far off from the way Enzo speaks about the place of EA in his social world. I ask him if, in doing EA, he feels he really gets to be a part of something. “Yeah, I definitely do,” he says before adding, “And I try to be aware of that.” He starts, “I try to be aware of when my motivations are more based on…,” and then he doubles back, “Well I actually don’t know if that’s really fair because I don’t think that anyone, or at least very few people are able to be pure and motivated by altruism all the time…but I definitely feel it’s important to monitor the way that a movement or organization is feeling about itself, and how and what is motivating people to be a part of it.” Una doesn’t want her ethical decisions to be aesthetically motivated; Enzo wishes to keep his ethics separate from social incentives. And yet, the two both acknowledge the impossibility of ever getting entirely outside of aesthetics or social motivations. Enzo simply acknowledges that one could never be entirely guided by ethics. For Una, remember, it’s not only promising that she might not like her peers’ outfits; this feeling is also concerning, and it seems to be an indication that EA doesn’t quite get it all right, aesthetically. There might be something ethically relevant about the way things look.
I’m struck by Una’s somewhat continuous discussion about aesthetics across clothing and art. This way, the place of aesthetics in her everyday life overlaps with the place of aesthetics in her reasoning, with art’s capacity to hold “answers.” One very well may find the answers to one’s moral questions in novels, in the beauty of a sentence. And whether or not one believes in this possibility may even be indicated by the extent to which one thinks about the beauty of one’s days, by one’s sense of style. Accepting as much, Una still tries to hold aesthetic preference relatively separate from her ethical determinations. But might not beauty be too big a moral deal to set aside in the name of reason? Mightn’t we want more to guide us than blog posts? Charlie tells me about how he feels toward the relative mundanity of EA. He is disappointed by the fact that the ideas are “not radical in an aesthetic way.” He explains, “It feels profound to try to figure things out. It’s less exciting to have them told to you.” “How much,” I ask, “does that matter to you when thinking about whether EA is a valid ethical system?” “I want to say not a lot because that’s what I want to say. But in truth, probably a lot, and that might have something to do with my reluctance to go whole hog.” +++ It’d be good, I think, to come to some sort of conclusion about EA’s attempts to do good better. But, then, it isn’t at all apparent that a conclusion is what my research has prepared me to make. I’d had hunches, already, that I disagreed with EA’s quantification of the good and with its apoliticism. I sought no confirmation. My questioning, instead, pertained to these Effective Altruists’ investment in the impossibility of doing two things at once. Thinking and doing, questioning and concluding. My other hunch was that EA just wasn’t sexy, and that sexiness was something I couldn’t do without. Here, too, my interlocutors seemed to be straddling things: accepting the impossibility of getting ethics outside of the demands of social reality and trying, nonetheless, to do so. But I couldn’t exactly shake my desire to think about ethics as a helplessly social thing, to take my interlocutors as subjects. Una and Enzo both told me they were nervous about being written into a narrative, about having their ideas explained away psychologically or assigned inadvertent political valences. I too was nervous. And, yet, the thought of dealing strictly with ideas seemed terribly dull. I couldn’t engage with my subjects without writing them into a narrative, but I also couldn’t find a precise pathology or historical explanation for their inconclusive conclusions. I therefore, perhaps, should not have written the piece. But the point, of course, was not merely to stop and think. The point was thinking, and somehow doing too. That’s why, I think, I wrote some scenes. I ask Una, “Did you feel like people really came to know you as a person who was into EA? Was there anything reputational about it?” “Like that one time that you and I were in the Ratty and then Jacob [came over and] was like, oh, yeah, it’s the Brown University utilitarian.” That happened last semester. This afternoon, we are in the Ratty, drinking coffee. Sometimes the sun comes through the clouds, like a detail. “I find it hard to think of something that sounds like it will make the world better enough. Like, most... Hey! I’m being interviewed for the Indy.” Over comes Jacob. “Oh my gosh. You’ve walked into an interview, and we actually just mentioned…” “I just mentioned you!” BENJAMIN FLAUMENHAFT B’27 boots on the ground.
VOLUME 53 ISSUE 02
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EPHEMERA
CLOSE READING ON THE PRODUCTION OF MEANING
( TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY ANI DELGADO, ELLIOT STRAVATO DESIGN JENNIE KWON ) c Once, on an essay for a freshman year English class, my professor told me I needed to read more closely. This week, my intrepid coeditor, Ani, took to the Zeiss Lumar V12 Fluorescence Stereomicroscope to see if we could get some real learning done. Each text was photographed with an Axiocam MrC camera at both a 100- and 1000-micron scale. How’s that for close, Professor ?
Arenas, Reinaldo. Celestino antes del alba. Ediciones Universal, 1996, pp. 121.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Back Bay Books, 1999, pp. 170.
Mustafa, Waleed. Imperfection. The College Hill Independent, vol. 49, no. 4, 2024.
DeWitte, Debra J., Ralph M. Larman, and M. Kathryn Shields. Gateways to Art. 4th ed., Thames & Hudson Inc., 2023, pp. 448.
Abbot, Stephen. Understanding Analysis. 2nd ed., Springer, 2015, pp. 74.
Day, Dorothy. Loaves and Fishes. Orbis Books, 1997, pp. 46.
ANI DELGADO B’27 & ELLIOT STRAVATO B’27
would like to thank Geoff Williams and the Leduc Bioimaging Facility.
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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
SEEK
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Would you eat alone at Panera Bread?
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WAIT
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VOLUME 53 ISSUE 02
ILAN BRUSSO B’27 BOTH AND TALIA REISS B’27 are both and-ing their way through the apocalypse.
We have good news and bad news. The bad: Providence has done all it can for you. You’ve weighed all your options, who were conveniently gathered at a gayly them ed house party with low adherence to the dress code. You’ve hit the cold, dark bottom of the awful, awful apps. But fear not! A glassy paradise awaits you, the jewel of the oft-romanticized Buck eye State. Take your life in an unexpected direction, Imogen Hea p: MOVE TO TOLEDO. Sometimes, love just needs a change of scenery, a change of pace. Take your quiet mind to a quiet city whic h confusingly has a Midwestern beach. In that saltless wate r, your better half awaits you, periodically pulling down their swim suit bottoms under the water just to feel some kind of rush. Dog gy paddle to them…go on…
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N WAIT Y WAIT
Have you been in a relationship for the majority of the past three years?
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Could you responsibly raise a cat?
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( TEXT ILAN BRUSSO AND TALIA REISS DESIGN IRIS LEE ILLUSTRATION FAITH ZHAO )
Does the prospect of dwelling within Ohio’s fourth largest metropolis call to something primal within you?
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Does something tickle you about the American inclination to borrow toponyms from the Old World?
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Do you have empathy for your father?
: wait. You are a rabbit, twitch If this is you, we command this ot. carr c isti hem ting for a eup ing with impulsivity, always hun ulus, you scroll, you stim to s ulu stim You ricochet from he. Let your soul sit for reat —b scratch, you scour, you seethe watch it crumble out and s palm r a second. Hold sand in you p by clump. Build a sandcastle of them, grain by grain, clum ething magical. Maybe use with the sand, mold it into som but we won’t be prescriptive pebbles as little sand people, e about is this: Now is not a tim ngly here. What we do feel stro sit. to e tim at all. Now is the to seek love, or in fact to seek lly that internal monologue fina if See t. wai to e Now is the tim s. lnes stil e littl a was ded does wake up. Perhaps all it nee
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You, uh, don’t need our help. So we wo n’t give it. Coolly yo glide through life, u frictionless and fre e. You teach us som interesting about “C ething ool.” “Too Cool fo r School” associates coolness with a ce rtain doesn’t care-ne ss, a nonchalance. defy this: You are co But you ol because you care , securely and unab edly. Let that care ashguide you to answ er this question fo In infancy, we want r yourself. ed a fresh diaper, an d we screamed for it. We wanted milk , so we grabbed ou r mothers’ hair an took it. Now, you ha d ve desires that are more complex and concealed, but prob ably just as violent and fundamental. them, trust them, Parse abide them! They are needs, after all .
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Do you get unrelenting emails from Planned Parenthood?
Does silence scare you?
Do you have an internal monologue?
Immie (can we call you Immie?), Indie would like to kill your OR. We do not like it. Tall OR short, chopped OR gaggy, kind OR rich, improv OR soup. No mORe! We thump at the bible of “both and,” wordier as it may be. Capitalism is all too late, the climate is all too changed—HUNTY, we don’t have time to pretend opposites even FREAKING EXIST anymore. Everything is everything is everytttthing. Your question imagines only two possible answers, stitched together with this cursed conjunction. We take your two and raise you this: four! Four answers, to be found through a rigorously under-researched flowchart quiz with about as much statistical validity as the DSM. In truth, we are all both and, both complex and immeasurable, both chopped and gaggy, both improv and soup. So while four choices still fall short, at least the fall is taller than two.
Dear Imogen,
Do you have a memory of the moment you became too old to see your mother shower? (this haunts one of us)
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Can you define historicity?
Are you silent in class?
N
Y BLANK N SEEK Y SEEK N BLANK
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and it in the black hole of your bed, Honey, love will not find you love d; goo ets beg am reels. Good won’t jump out of your Instagr lore imp We ld. wor the things in comes to those who do loving r professor, either the most you h wit rs hou ce offi to you: Go object of parental transferring stir lesbian or *both and* most r . Shake ass harder than you eve ence. Cruise Spirit Halloween n dam r you es ros the d sen must, but intended. Scroll Hinge if you rgy ene an g Chu ty. sivi pas for e ienc self. For you, Indie has no pat d z on down to the nearest thir buz and g osin cho r you of k drin el rev and t, hou wit with glasses, two space. Speak to three people nec con s rou amo rily necessa in these new potentially but not surgeons are dumbbbbbb. in bra g, thin last one and tions. Oh
Y SEEK
Do you think a brain surgeon knows more about the human condition than a psychoanalyst?
Y
Did you read either of the Bens’ articles all the way through?
Y
Do you care about Adéla?
e i d n I , d Or, an d e e f z z u goes B Should I seek love or should I wait for it to find me?
Hiding and Seeking, Imogen Heap
DEAR INDY
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Providence
Fleet Library Book Sale Saturday, October 10 at 10 a.m.–2 p.m. 15 Westminster St
From Sunrise: “So you’re interested in getting involved in Sunrise Brown? That’s awesome! You’re in the right place. Please fill out this form to join our email list, find out about meetings and actions, and so much more!”
2026 Stormwater Innovation Expo Wednesday, October 7 at 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m. Roger Williams Park Casino, 1000 Elmwood Ave Free for students, $44.52 for General Admission
Students for Educational Equity Listserv
The Past is in the Future: Conversation with Eugene Jung and Mitchell Poon Wednesday, October 7 at 1 p.m.–4 p.m. RISD Museum Chace Auditorium Free Closing Reception: Resilience Rising Wednesday, October 7 at 5 p.m.–7 p.m. The Warren Alpert Medical School Free The Event of Blackness: Melville, Ellison, Morrison, and “The Door of [No] Return” Wednesday, October 7 at 5:30 p.m. The Brown Faculty Club, Room: Huttner Room Free
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Peter Mancall on Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680 Thursday, October 8 at 4:30 p.m. 94 George Street, Room: Reading Room
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
The College Hill Independent www.theindy.org Brown University PO Box 1930 Providence, RI 02912
SUDOKU
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RISD Students for Justice in Palestine: Walkout for Palestine! Wednesday, October 7 at 1:30 p.m. Pedestrian Bridge
From Students for Education Equity: “dedicated to promoting educational equity in Providence and the communities in which Providence is embedded. If you want to get involved and have any questions about SEE, please reach out to our instagram: @s.e.e.brown! We love to learn more about what our community cares about and what they want to see us working on.”
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Filipino-American History Month: Diasporic Experiences, Activism, & the Academy Tuesday, October 6 at 6 p.m. Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America Free, registration required
Scan the QR code for our pitch guidelines, or send an email to the Managing Editors: theindy@gmail.com
Brown Students for Justice in Palestine Interest Form From Brown Students for Justice in Palestine: “Please take a moment to fill out this form. Depending on what level of involvement you select, we will either reach out to onboard you into SJP’s general body or we’ll add you to our solidarity network so you can keep up with and support the movement.”
( TEXT SARYA BARAN KILIÇ DESIGN KAYLA RANDOLPH )
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Living Archives: An Oral History Workshop Series | Session 1 Tuesday, October 6 at 4:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m. John Hay Library, Primary Source Lab Free, registration required
From Brown Rise Up: “Brown Rise Up is a student-led movement to protect every member of the Brown community from authoritarian threats. None of us should fear deportation, imprisonment, or retaliation because of who we are, where we were born, or what we believe. We will rise together to stop billionaires and fascists from invading our university—because if one of us is attacked, all of us are attacked.”
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.
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Celebrate Coming Out Day Tuesday, October 6 at 11 a.m.–2 p.m. Brown Main Greenspace Free
Brown Rise Up Student Interest Form
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On Campus
Pitch to the Indy
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International Day of Action: March for Palestine Saturday, October 10 at 2 p.m. Memorial Park, S Main St Free
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The Warped Tour Band: A Tribute to Green Day, Blink 182, & 2000’s Pop Punk Saturday, October 3 at 1 p.m.–6 p.m. Phantom Farms Brewing, 30 Martin Street Cumberland, RI 02864 From $17.85
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? Well, you can now submit it to Bulletin! Scan the QR code or email your pitch to indybulletinboard@gmail.com or sarya_kilic@brown.edu.
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Sunrise Intake Form: Welcome to Sunrise Brown!
Bulletin Submission Form
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INTAKES AND LISTSERVS
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GreySail Launch Party Saturday, October 3 at 4:30 p.m.–8 p.m. Track 15, 1 Union Station Free
Food Truck Picnic in the Park Friday, October 9 at 4 p.m.–8 p.m. Capron Park, 201 County St Attleboro, MA 02703 Free
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Friday, October 2–Sunday, October 4 at Noon–5 p.m.
Narragansett Beer, 271 Tockwotton Street $0–28.52
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BULLETIN
Narragansett Brewery: Oktoberfest 2026
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EVENTS
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THE BULLETIN