The College Hill Independent Volume 42 Issue 4

VOLUME 42 ISSUE 4 26 FEB 2021

STAFF

THIS ISSUE COVER

Cottage Industry Chair Kelsey Roebelen Week in Crossword Bianca Eagan & Loughlin Neuert

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS PRINTED BY TCI PRESS IN SEEKONK, MASSACHUSETTS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

TWITTER @THEINDY_TWEETS

INSTAGRAM @THEINDYPVD

Mimetic Absurdism Justin Scheer

01

WEEK IN REVIEW Loughlin Neuert Nick Roblee-Strauss

02 WEEK IN REVIEW

NEWS Bilal Memon Rhythm Rastogi Giacamo Sartorelli

03 FEATS

ARTS Amelia Anthony Nell Salzman

We Like the Stock Lucas Gelfond

05 S & T

METRO Mara Cavallaro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini

What’s Happening, Where Are You Going?

Audrey Buhain

07 ARTS

SCIENCE + TECH Bowen Chen Anabelle Johnston

Shifting Goalposts Loughlin Neuert

09 METRO

LITERARY Audrey Buhain Alisa Caira FEATS Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger Emily Rust

Good Fortune Chong Jing Gan

11

LIT

Untitled Nicole Kim

12

LIT

DEAR INDY Gemma Sack Cal Turner Sara Van Horn

Why Won’t Brown Talk About Divestment?

Brown Students for Justice in Palestine

13

NEWS

EPHEMERA Liana Chaplain Anna Kerber

Misty Dorrit Corwin

X Yukti Agarwal Seth Israel

16 X

The State of Nursing Homes in Rhode Island Nell Salzman

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Erotic Triangle Sara Van Horn & Cal Turner

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SOCIAL MEDIA Justin Scheer

METRO

DEAR INDY

FROM THE EDITORS The Farmer’s Almanac claims we are going to have a March blizzard. The bunny cover may return. We are skeptical of the veracity of meteorology as a discipline. But we are big believers in carpe diem. So, we’ve really been seizing the day—sunbathing on the Main Green, drinking in the musty smell of fresh leaves, strolling through Prospect Park with a date at sunset. It’s easy to forget Monday evening Indy-related obligations amidst all that. But like all true journalists, the mundane and the monotonous calls to us. We shuffle our lives to spend hours hunched over our screens, concocting immaculately written, radically leftist takes on the hottest goss from College Hill.

Our Indy spies are everywhere. We know all about you, kiddo, who’s responsible for the superspreader last weekend. You cancelled dates. An alternative to superspreading might be staying inside, perhaps taking a seat on some colorful reading chair, and flipping through this volume’s fourth issue.

- APA

BUSINESS Jerry Chen Evan Lincoln Isabelle Yang DESIGN EDITOR Ella Rosenblatt COVER COORDINATOR Sage Jennings DESIGNERS Malvika Agarwal Anna Brinkhuis Clara Epstein Miya Lohmeier Owen McCallumKeeler Issac McKenna Jieun (Michelle) Song Mehek Vohra Sojung (Erica) Yun ILLUSTRATION EDITOR Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Sylvia Atwood Hannah Chang Ophelia DuchesneMalone Camille Gros Sophie Foulkes Baylor Fuller Mara Jovanovic Olivia Lunger Talia Mermin Jessica Minker Rachelle Shao Joshua Sun Evelyn Tan Joyce Tullis Floria Tsui Dorothy Zhang

STAFF WRITERS Leela Berman Osayuwamen EdeOsifo Tammuz Frankel CJ Gan Lucas Gelfond Leo Gordon Gaya Gupta Evie Hidysmith Rose Houglet Amelia Wyckoff Muram Ibrahim Nicole Kim Alina Kulman Olivia Mayeda Drake Rebman Issra Said Justin Scheer Ella Spungen COPY EDITORS Alyscia Batista Grace Berg Elaine Chen Megan Donohue Nina Fletcher Christine Huynh Madison Lease Jasmine Li MANAGING EDITORS Alana Baer Anchita Dasgupta Peder Schaefer SENIOR EDITORS Audrey Buhain Andrew Rickert Ivy Scott Xing Xing Shou Cal Turner Sara Van Horn MVP Sage Jennings

MISSION THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS A PROVIDENCE-BASED PUBLICATION WRITTEN, ILLUSTRATED, DESIGNED, AND EDITED BY STUDENTS FROM BROWN AND RISD. OUR PAPER IS DISTRIBUTED AROUND PROVIDENCE’S EAST SIDE AND DOWNTOWN, AS WELL AS ONLINE. IN ADDITION TO PUBLISHING 20 PAGES OF ORIGINAL WRITING, REPORTING, AND ART ONCE A WEEK, THE INDY FUNCTIONS AS AN OPEN WORKSHOP IN WHICH WRITERS, ARTISTS, AND DESIGNERS COLLABORATE AND PROVIDE FEEDBACK ON THEIR WORK. THROUGH AN EXTENSIVE EDITING PROCESS, WE CHALLENGE EACH OTHER TO BE RESPONSIBLE, INTENTIONAL, AND SELF-CRITICAL. WE ARE COMMITTED TO PUBLISHING POLITICALLY ENGAGED AND ACCESSIBLE WORK. WHILE THE INDY IS FINANCED BY BROWN UNIVERSITY, WE HOLD OURSELVES ACCOUNTABLE TO OUR READERS ACROSS THE PROVIDENCE COMMUNITY. THE INDY REJECTS CONTENT THAT EXPLICITLY OR IMPLICITLY PERPETUATES RACISM, SEXISM, HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA, XENOPHOBIA, ABLEISM AND/OR CLASSISM. THOUGH THIS LIST IS NOT EXHAUSTIVE, THE INDY STRIVES TO ADDRESS THESE SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION BY CENTERING THE VOICES, OPINIONS, AND EFFORTS OF MARGINALIZED PEOPLE IN PROVIDENCE AND BEYOND. THE INDY IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING: WE ARE ALWAYS WORKING TO MAKE OUR STAFF AND CONTENT MORE INCLUSIVE. THOUGH OUR EDITING PROCESS PROVIDES AN INTERNAL STRUCTURE FOR ACCOUNTABILITY, WE ALWAYS WELCOME LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

WIR

i n

If anyone wants to write about this for WiR just let us know. We are honestly surprised that there is a shortage. This brand isn’t very good and we are shocked by how many people love it.

Across 1 Winter hours on the west coast 4 A wee pour of whiskey, say 8 The Cardinals, on scoreboards 11 Side of a diamond, maybe 13 Of the force, noted user 14 Words of surprise, maybe 15 _____ Thomas, famed Pistons point guard 16 Unit of laundry 17 East Side Mini ____ 18 “Mess with the honk, you’ll get the bonk” meme (two words) 20 Piece of plumbing useful for right angles 22 Personal ID number you shouldn’t give out 23 Worst day of the week, abbr.

24 Wagering words 26 Issue of the Indy in need of WiR writers?

(We want you!!)

27 A Swedish foursome you can tell your mamma (mia) about?

29 Midwestern variant of 14 across often accompanied by ‘sorry!’

30 Warm up before a game, say (two words) 33 Verticals, graphically 35 Put this in the bowl before the milk, you monsters 37 Passed quickly on the street 38 All of us, per Carl Sagan 39FedEx alternative with iconic brown shorts 40 Keep them about you!

42 System underpinning SNAP benefits 43 “Look Pops!” alternative 45 Mmm Whatcha ___ 46 Basketball stat that generates points for a teammate, abbr.

49 ______ Suleman, noted reality TV figure 50 Keeps one’s score even on a golf hole (two words) (Look, we hate golf too, we hate it for its classism, racism, waste of public space, hoarding of water, and general icky-ness. We think they should turn all golf courses into parks and public works. That’s the world we’d like to live in. Guess in the meantime it’s fair game for the crossword.)

52 Short shot in golf (see 50 across for manifesto) 53 Last name of singers Este, Danielle, and Alana 55 Prefix with -bian and -theater 56 Bake sale organizers, abbr.

57 Birds noted for their wisdom 58 Timepiece for the ultra-wealthy 59 Suffix with organ or vegan 60 Lead in to -zeball or -zebag 61 Kind of pill, with ‘cap’

31 A very small particle, but even smaller than usual (this one is really rough I’m sorry just try and get the acrosses) 32 Kiln for drying hops, and an apt anagram for the puzzle’s theme 34 Stuck in ____ (two words) 35 Variant of ‘Bro’ 36 Noise an old floorboard might make 41 Famous potatoes?

44 Banned chemical famously written about in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring 45 Guy who bugged out?

(Or a savory Central Asian pastry) 46 Fruit you might find with a famous Newton 47 Biome just south of the Sahara 48 Brand of 35 Across that are explicitly not for silly rabbits, but rather for kids.

50 Around 1.6 kilometers 51 Pollution portmanteau 52 One measurement for inflation, abbr.

54 Tool for punching leather [find the answer key on the back cover]

ILLUSTRATION EVELYN TAN

D o w n

1 Steps, in Seville 2 Descendant of a notable family, or a kind of Toyota 3 Coffee alternatives 4 Blowin’ in the Wind singer 5 Kind of beer you could give to a baby?

6 Toothpullers assoc.

7 Word game played by (group of people) that creates an (adjective) story for everyone to (verb)?

8 Things that Indy editors may get up on?

9 Sports feat accomplished by the Chicago Bulls and the Houston Comets 10 Where you park a car 11 Fruits you might find with a famous Newton 12 Home, broadly speaking 17 Cool amount of money?

19 Unit of 35 across 21 Went with the flow 25 Elo Mus Compan?

26 Action with a knife 27 Office helpers, abbr.

28 Apt fish for a frat house?

30 Brand of 35 Across that has experienced an acute shortage in recent weeks, depriving customers across the nation.

DESIGN MEHEK VOHRA

3 0

Down

TEXT LOUGHLIN NEUERT & BIANCA EAGAN

W Week in 35 Across e k

FEATURES ILLUSTRATION JUSTIN SCHEER AND SYLVIA ATWOOD TEXT JUSTIN SCHEER DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

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Elijah Schaffer is a C-list political pundit, one of many aspiring Rush Limbaugh-esque alt-right reactionaries. In the early afternoon of January 6, he tweeted a picture from behind a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office. Congressional staffers had evacuated the room only moments before, leaving an email inbox still open on the desktop monitor. The Twitter caption read, in part, “BREAKING: I am inside Nancy Pelosi’s office with the thousands of revolutionaries who have stormed the building”. Shortly thereafter, edits of the original photo began to proliferate throughout Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram, many of them changing the content visible on the desktop screen. The first one to appear on my timeline, providing satirical reprieve from a feed of solemn riot commentary, showed the digital music production program Ableton Live superimposed on the desktop monitor, the image of which is supposed to (I think) evoke the idea of a certain trap music subculture of young music producers “in the stu[dio]”.

I won’t try to draw some tenuous connection between the Capitol raid and a niche trap music subculture. The meme is funny precisely because there is no connection between these images, both of which bear distinct cultural and political resonances which, in their combination, force a viewer to try to discern a substantive message, if only for an instant.

The comedic climax lies in a sudden realization of the perversity of that effort, the absurdity of any imagined truth or meaning supposed to exist in the image, an instant resignation to the fact that the image is nonsense—a cognitive ‘short circuit’ of sorts.

That is, at least, according to the conceptual framework of the joke articulated by late 19th-century aesthetic theorist and philosopher Theodore Lipps, a framework which I posit for the sake of argument since it might help make some sense of a particular brand of meme-based humor. The thrust of any joking remark––or, in this case, joking image––is a contrast between meaning and meaninglessness; a joke is a joke if “we attribute significance to it that has psychological necessity and then, as soon as we have done so, deny it again,” Lipps theorized. We discern truth or assume sense, however momentarily, in the joke just as one would in a non-joking remark, thereby lending the joke logical or practical bearing on or relation with reality, when one knows that it cannot contain these things. The aforementioned ‘short circuit’, the essence of the joke as one would perceive it, occurs when we become aware of this contrast, recognizing the lack of sense, truth, and practical consequence where we had thought those things to exist just a moment before, instantaneously transitioning to “the consciousness or impression of relative nothingness”.

We can extrapolate here, applying this framework generatively to the greater category of jokes to which the capitol riot memes belong, a particular brand of internet humor breaching the realm of absurdism. At issue, more specifically, is a topical or (in some capacity) relevant satire of people, institutions, or events whose ‘punchline’, as in the Ableton meme, is nonsense. Think-pieces on the topic of meme humor––or, as many of them use interchangeably, ‘Gen-Z humor’––tend to miss this point, speaking far too generally on the entirety of picture-based jokes on the internet. Usually, these articles articulate a thesis to the effect of ‘Gen-Z uses meme humor as a coping mechanism for their mass trauma,’ where, in their formulation, Gen-Z’s experience growing up in the post-9/11 era and through the 2008 Financial Crisis constitute the most pertinent of their ‘trauma’. This trauma is said to manifest in nihilistic attitudes regarding politics, economics, society, etc.

They point to moments when internet social spaces, dominated by their so-called ‘Gen-Z’, satirized dire, consequential events—like the Capitol riots—with memes, arguing that ‘Gen-Z’ chooses to engage with these events on the level of humor so as to avoid earnest consideration of the future.

The generational analysis employed in these arguments is sorely inaccurate; such sweeping generalizations ought to be met with skepticism, particularly when they border on generation-wide, mass psychological diagnoses. Moreover, I think there is another element to meme humor, specifically the nonsensical, absurdist meme humor at issue, that this argument misses. This is a more active, communica-

tive purpose than a mere shielding of oneself from the world and the depressive psychic damage one tends to incur by engaging with it. Namely, this humor expresses an absurdist worldview; it does not simply make fun for the sake of making fun, but also for the sake of pronouncing an understanding of the world as absurd, chaotic, and meaningless.

If at the core of the comic process is a contrast between supposed meaning and actual meaninglessness, supposed truth and actual non-truth, then perhaps recasting discourse on major events, politics, and so forth, in joke form and, moreover, with absurdist overtones, is an oblique political or philosophical expression (as absurd as that might sound). This is an expression of disillusionment, an embrace of the absurd, pronouncing that politics, for instance, is in reality fundamentally nonsensical; that perhaps we have for so long lent politics “logical consequences in excess of its true content” and we are now to “deny these consequences” as we have “recognized the true nature” of politics, as Lipps might describe it. It follows, then, that politics, in its apparent entropic deterioration toward absurdity, is comical. +++ The Capitol riot was not satirized in nonsensical memes in order to cope with the ‘trauma’ of the event (it seems unlikely that the creators of these memes felt personally affected by this event), nor to avoid seriously processing the moment. Rather, these memes were precisely the medium through which one processes the event; for those who engage with this

FEATURES

kind of meme humor, their intuition tells them there is an essential absurdity there, at Nancy Pelosi’s desk temporarily occupied by a rioter, at bodies scaling the capitol walls in fanatic service of a conspiracy theory propagated by a deranged media machine, at the fact that no amount of fact-checking or appeal to reason could have subdued such profound conspiratorial rage. The whole event was an attempt to achieve nothing in particular by a group whose ostensible motivation to “stop the steal” is premised on a total lie. Surprisingly––but also unsurprisingly––we now know that many rioters didn’t even vote. Presuming, for the sake of argument, that the rioters sought something material and meaningful in preventing Congress from certifying the election, it’s clear that upon breaching the Capitol they proceeded to thrash about, haphazardly looting souvenirs and brawling––or in some cases, taking selfies––with cops. Consider the Tweet containing the source image for the meme we considered earlier. That one would even suppose this hysterical mob to be a group of “revolutionaries” is funny. And so the whole thing is quite hollow; there is so much built on so little––almost no truth or reason or meaning beneath what, at first, looks quite substantive. Through this absurdist lens, the whole event appears to be, by Lipps’ definition, one big joke.

Such an event, viewed through such a lens, could only warrant a jesting response. One can only engage with the absurd event on the level of the event itself––with equally absurd humor. Anything else would take the event far too seriously, would lend too much credit to the supposed motives and reason behind the attack. One immediately rolls their eyes at the grandiose language with which figures like Biden met the ordeal in its aftermath: “At this hour, our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times, an assault on the Citadel of Liberty, the Capitol itself … An assault on the most sacred of American undertakings, the doing of the people’s business.”

That deranged moshpit of petty larceny and Pagan cosplay (you know, the guy with the horns) is totally inconsonant with Biden’s assessment of the event as an “assault on the Citadel of Liberty… the most sacred of American undertakings”. While Biden’s speech is surely more serious than a photo of Ableton running on a Congressional desktop, as perhaps the President’s words ought to be, the latter must be, from the absurdist point of view, a more sincere commentary on the riot, as perverse as that may seem.

The desktop meme reckons and engages with the riot on its own, fundamentally comic terms. Biden, on the other hand, seems to have fooled himself, not because his assessment is incorrect or inaccurate per se, but because he and the surrounding political establishment, insulated in their stately, comatose myopia, seem to miss the absurdity of the whole thing. Biden fails to see in the riot a glaring contrast between meaning and meaninglessness, between truth and non-truth––which the absurdist eye spots in an instant––and in this sense doesn’t quite get the joke of it all. To stand up and assert the moral high ground against the Capitol rioters is to miss the point entirely. And it’s kind of cringe.

+++ What do we make of perceived deterioration of reason and order in politics, society, economics, and so forth, toward an absurd world if, in fact, the memes really reflect as much? There are certain contemporary phenomena that might confirm the unreality recognized in this perception: the ubiquity of impossibly complex and abstract financial systems which wreak very material havoc or, as I have already alluded, the efficacy of the various political mechanisms of Trumpism, particularly those relying on conspiracy theory and persistent lying, etc. It’s hard to say, in any objective sense, whether society and (geo)politics are really any more chaotic or absurd than they’ve been in past eras. All that can be said for certain is that our access and relationship with that absurdity––that is, the spectacle of the absurd thing, whether it be the Capitol riots or something else––has shifted fundamentally.

An event like the Capitol riot would not, on its own, elicit such nonsensical and jesting responses as the meme we considered if not for its particular spectacularization via social media. Granted, the Capitol riot and the spectacle of the Capitol riot are inextricable; the riot would not have happened if not for its presence in various media and the riot can only bear any trace of reason if understood as a spectacle, a symbol of upheaval, and nothing more, certainly not a “revolution”. Nonetheless, the way people saw images of the riot, wherever they were in the world, added yet another dimension––permeating, intimate, and disturbingly vicarious––to the absurdity.

Consider, for instance, the countlessly many Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch point-of-view livestreams, broadcasted directly from the phones of the rioters themselves. If one was so inclined, they could enter the mob and participate virtually, in real time or retroactively, in the smashing, the looting, and the brawls. As the spectacle of the event effectively becomes an unmediated first hand experience of the event, the absurdity of it becomes simultaneously more pervasive and normalized in our collective psyche. These live streams are, in and of themselves, absurd, especially in light of the fact that many of them were monetized; on top of it all, streaming platforms and livestreaming rioters profit, however marginally, from the spectacle of American political decay.

It’s noteworthy, then, that the source image for the meme we originally considered was a photo taken by a rioter and published to Twitter in real time. In the face of all of this, whoever superimposed a window of Ableton Live running on the desktop computer in the original image––along with the scores of people who published other edits of the same photo to different online spaces––underscores and satirizes not only the absurdity of the event, but the absurdity of the spectacular form of the event.

Internet commentators, by coopting and subverting its POV and livestream format, thereby simultaneously compounding and poking holes in the spectacle; Thus online jokesters, in a feat of rhetorical genius, engage with and undermine the spectacle on its own terms, rendering impotent the self-proclaimed “revolutionary” who posted the source image in earnest––in other words, it makes that rioter/pundit Elijah Schaffer look very stupid.

This is the strength of the Meme (as opposed to the meme), by which I refer to the social-psychological, sociocultural phenomena of replication and mutation, and not just a funny picture on the internet. One image of Nancy Pelosi’s computer screen multiplies virally, mutated by edits with each new iteration; such a memetic proliferation of this absurdist critique is very successful at hijacking the same spectacular forms of the riot itself, taking part in the absurdity. Here, those expressing the absurdist worldview, all too aware of the entropic trajectory of the world, society, and politics, dive headlong into the endlessly interwoven complex of online memetic propagation, perhaps the most chaotic of things.

JUSTIN SCHEER B’23 hates to be that guy.

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WE LIKE THE STOCK WallStreetBets after the fall and the future of retail investing

TEXT LUCAS GELFOND

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION JOSHUA KOOLIK

content warning: suicide mention

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A post titled “FOR ALL THE BIG FUCKING HEDGE FUNDS MONITORING US, THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM US TO YOU, WE FUCKING OWN YOU NOW, FUCK. YOU. GO BUY THE FUCKING NEWS. LIKE AND COMMENT SO THEY SEE THIS POST. FUCK YOU MELVIN CAPITAL. FUCK YOU CITRON RESEARCH. YOU HAVENT CLOSED SHIT. THIS IS GONNA GO DOWN IN HISTORY,” written by user Flexinzack, topped Reddit’s WallStreetBets community on January 27.

On January 28, the stock price of GameStop—a financially troubled retail video game store—hit a high of $483 per share, up from only $20 a month before. The gains were largely attributed to WallStreetBets, a high-risk stock discussion community, in which users had aggressively promoted purchasing and holding the stock.

Hedge funds suffered huge losses: Melvin Capital bet heavily against GameStop, losing 53 percent of its value in January. The firm exited its GameStop position on January 27 after Citadel and Point72 invested $2.75 billion in an emergency influx of cash to stabilize the fund, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Images posted to WallStreetBets painted the stock’s surge as the ultimate David and Goliath story; a group of scrappy Reddit users worked to beat the mighty hedge funds through solidarity, and they had won. The community rejoiced. “I want to thank you guys for saving my best friend’s life!” Reddit user MasterTheGame wrote, claiming that earnings from GameStop paid for his dog’s surgery. “I find myself in a position to pay for a service that I hope I never need to use,” user psytokine_storm wrote, captioning a screenshot of a $5,000 donation to a children’s hospital.

This dynamic rapidly reversed. On the day the stock hit its peak, Robinhood, a popular no-fee stock trading platform, restricted trading of 13 companies’ stocks (including GameStop) “due to ongoing market volatility,” allowing users to sell but preventing new purchases. Robinhood, often praised for its mission of ‘democratizing finance,’ had reneged on its end of the deal, provoking outrage across the political spectrum. Users quickly provided resources to join class action lawsuits and file complaints with relevant financial authorities.

New winners were quickly crowned. Companies like Citadel and Robinhood, which make money simply by processing stock trades, profited immensely from the boom in trading. Institutional investors like BlackRock, which owned 13 percent of GameStop, had opportunities to sell with immense gains. Where Reddit’s uprising had hoped for a bang of hedge fund bankruptcies, the surge instead ended with a whimper of panic-selling in the wake of trading restrictions.

For some who sought a sense of revenge or justice in their trades, such restrictions confirmed their deeply held beliefs; the little guy never comes out on top. David, a 27-year-old self-identified Marxist-Leninist user of WallStreetBets whose name has been changed for privacy reasons, said the hatred toward hedge funds represented larger skepticism of the economy’s fundamental fairness, a distrust rooted in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

“You just have this entire generation that was traumatized and disillusioned with capital from the beginning and never saw justice for the people who orchestrated that, and the people who took multi-million dollar bonuses the year after it happened with the money that we all financed,” David told the College Hill Independent. “[Hedge funds] made a bad bet and the rules of their own game meant that they were going to be bleeding out of their eyeballs for it, and that’s very satisfying to a bunch of people.”

The story of GameStop reflects the greater reality of our current financial system—even when it seems like the underdog might be winning, those with capital usually come out on top. +++ A report from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority found a surge of new investors in the pandemic, the majority of whom were under 45. These new investors have lower incomes and are more likely to be racially or ethnically diverse than those who owned investment accounts before 2020.

Recent innovations in the stock market have facilitated such increased access. For example, Robinhood’s largest source of revenue is payment for order flow. In this system, market makers like Citadel pay Robinhood to complete its orders, allowing it to offer fee-free trading to its customers. Another innovation, fractional share purchasing, allows customers

to own stock without paying the price of one entire share. Many brokers have also followed Robinhood’s practice of eliminating account balance minimums, which has increased access.

Economics Lecturer Brad Gibbs B’93, who currently teaches Corporate Finance at Brown and previously worked as a managing director at Morgan Stanley for 13 years, told the Indy that the disparity between returns on capital and returns to labor have presented a compelling case for the democratization of finance and more participation in stock ownership.

This disparity is not accidental; broader trends of weak regulation, increases in corporate power, and decreases in labor union participation shoulder some of the blame. Perhaps equally significant, however, was the legalization of “stock buybacks” under President Ronald Reagan. The practice allows a company to use profits to buy back its own shares, creating demand for its stock and subsequently raising its price instead of increasing salaries or investing in essential business functions. Because participation in the stock market is heavily correlated with wealth, these gains have accrued unevenly. The rich get richer, and the working poor don’t benefit. Increased participation of lower wealth investors might allow them to benefit from some of these gains, but increased access may also expose first-time investors to more risk. “The flip side is: I’m concerned about financial literacy, I’m concerned about not fully comprehending leverage, and perhaps not a fulsome enough recognition that stocks can go down as well as up,” said Gibbs.

A section of WallStreetBets lists “YOLO” posts, which typically show screenshots of particularly risky bets on large sums of money in trading apps like Robinhood. A post on February 1 depicted a $1 million order of GameStop at an average of $257 per share. Another, from January 28, showed a $194,000 investment at nearly $375 per share.

While Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev repeatedly boasted the financial gains of Robinhood’s investors in his testimony to the House on February 18, he declined to report such gains as a rate of return; even if investors overall profited on Robinhood, they may have made significantly more money investing in index funds like the Dow Jones or S&P 500 which are more stable and likely to grow in the long term.

It remains unclear whether Robinhood actually benefits first-time investors. A complaint filed in December 2020 by the Massachusetts Securities Division alleged Robinhood used “aggressive tactics

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to attract new, often inexperienced investors” and “strategies such as gamification to encourage and entice continuous and repetitive use of its trading application.” In his testimony before the house, Tenev noted that 13 percent of Robinhood users perform trades involving stock options, a particularly risky investment vehicle, on a monthly basis. Robinhood’s interface also centers around individual stocks which, combined with fee-free trading, may facilitate day trading, a strategy centered around short-term price fluctuations that has repeatedly been shown to lose average investors money.

In the absence of substantive financial literacy materials, Robinhood’s suite of advanced financial tools may also pose a danger to less experienced investors unaware of the risks of certain trades. In June, 20-year-old Alexander Kearns died by suicide.

Kearns’ parents estimated he only had about $5,000 invested initially, but his Robinhood account showed a negative balance of $730,165 after trading risky and elaborate options contracts. Kearns may never have owed so much; while Robinhood did not release the details of his account, the value may have represented an intermediate step of a complex trade. Regardless, shortly after, Kearns received an email requesting “immediate action” and payment of more than $170,000. Kearns’ subsequent response to customer service went ignored until after his death, when Robinhood notified him that he did not actually owe any money. While impossible to know all factors contributing to a suicide, Kearns left a note that was shared online by his cousin. “How was a 20 year old with no income able to get assigned almost a million dollar’s worth of leverage?” the note reads.

“There was no intention to be assigned this much and take this much risk, and I only thought I was risking the money that I actually owned.” Kearns’ family filed a lawsuit against the app in February.

“A painful lesson,” Kearns writes, closing the first paragraph of his note. “Fuck Robinhood.” +++ Robinhood’s actions proved to be immensely controversial. The company claims it restricted purchases of stocks like GameStop to reduce the collateral demands on it imposed by the National Securities Clearing Corporation. Robinhood reports that the NSCC demanded it post $3 billion in collateral to process Robinhood’s trades. Tenev noted in his House testimony on February 18 that the company has raised $3.4 billion as a cushion from future market volatility, repeatedly referring to the GameStop surge as a ‘black swan’ or ‘five sigma’ event, meaning it has a one in 3.5 million chance of occuring.

Many users were unmoved by this explanation, instead convinced that executives on Wall Street were manipulating the market to take advantage of retail investors on Main Street. Andreas Repeta, a 27-year-old private investor from Sweden and WallStreetBets user, told the Indy he believed that Robinhood was induced by its business partners to impose restrictions on buying. Repeta said he thought prices would have risen much higher without such restrictions, which undermined faith in the fairness of the market. “I think [the hedge funds] should have felt the pain and they should have been held responsible and realized ‘we’re responsible for our trades, if we put on a bad trade, and we didn’t hedge it with options or liquidate it, [that] we’re going to go bankrupt if we took excessive risk.’”

Repeta’s suggestion—that wealthy investors pocket gains when high-risk investments increase, but cheat their way out of losses when such investments go belly up—shows the way hedge funds and other wealthy investors may play by different rules than normal people.

of Robinhood’s business model; Citadel pays Robinhood to route and complete its trades. Citadel makes money doing so because, as long as it processes roughly the same number of orders to buy and sell, it can sell to and buy from itself, making money on the ‘spread’ between bids and offers.

The practice has proved controversial in the past; pioneered by fraudster Bernie Madoff, Citadel itself called the practice “anti-competitive” noting it “creates an obvious and substantial conflict of interest between broker-dealers and their customers” in a letter to the SEC in 2004. “Payment for order flow, at the end of the day, is legalized bribery that appears to incentivize brokers to violate rules,” Dennis Kelleher, president of a firm which lobbies for more stringent financial regulations, told the Wall Street Journal.

The role of WallStreetBets also reinvigorates debates about the use of social media in market manipulation. GameStop’s stock price peaked shortly after Elon Musk tweeted, “Gamestonk!” Stock prices for companies have unpredictably surged in the wake of Twitter trends in the past; Clubhouse Media Group’s stock surged from about $2 in January to nearly $15 in February after Clubhouse, an unrelated invite-only social network, trended on Twitter. Repeta noted that, while he already believes hedge funds have influence over traditional media, many may invest time and resources into influencing subreddits like WallStreetBets in the future.

Potential for manipulation aside, WallStreetBets’ efforts brought many obscure concerns about the stock market into public view. In his testimony to the House, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman seemed optimistic. “WallStreetBets may look sophomoric or chaotic from the outside, but the fact that we’re here today means they’ve managed to raise important issues about fairness and opportunity in our financial system,” Huffman said. “I’m glad they used Reddit to do so.”

The uproar around GameStop has allowed for much more imagination about the future of our financial markets and how our economy might be more just. ‘Democratization of finance’ must include more earnest efforts to teach financial literacy and

push users toward longer term growth investments, even if these infrequent trades are less profitable to companies like Robinhood. New regulatory scrutiny toward particulars like settlement dates, payment for order flow, and stock buybacks is a positive step.

Companies like Reddit must also double down on their commitment to investigate potential vote manipulation on their sites as social networks have increasing sway on financial markets.

Ultimately, it is hard to imagine many of these changes coming about when money and power are concentrated in a few large firms, who exercise immense influence over the political sphere. For now, companies who facilitate such trades will continue to accumulate wealth, even if it leaves their customers in financial ruin. In the end, the false David and Goliath narrative of GameStop’s rise obscures the reality that the system still benefits the most powerful companies, even if one or two hedge funds are burned in the process.

In the meantime, WallStreetBets will continue to be its offensive, crass, reckless, and, at times, endearing, self. In lieu of financial prudence (deemed “boomer strategies”), many users eschew faith in markets or underlying value for preference and camaraderie. Ask WallStreetBets users why they bought GameStop, and many have a simple answer: “We like the stock.”

LUCAS GELFOND B’23.5 thinks Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager should run the SEC.

+++ GameStock’s price hovered around $40 for most of the beginning of February. Robinhood removed all buy restrictions on February 5. On February 24, the stock surged again to about $100 in the wake of news about the departure of the firm’s Chief Financial Officer. As the volatility continues, the impact of GameStop’s first surge has raised numerous new questions about investment strategy and the regulation of financial services.

Regulators have also begun to reconsider the legality of payment for order flows. This is the basis

06

TEXT AUDREY BUHIAN

DESIGN MICHELLE SONG

ILLUSTRATION IRIS WRIGHT

ARTS

What’s Happening Where

07

A priest, a wife, and a daughter drift into a door frame as though their bodies are being pushed through water. The entry is slack and passive. Their faces show a fear of going any further. Catching sight of what lies beyond the door, the priest begins to trace a mournful sign of the cross into the air, but the video frame is already slipping away, impatient. The frame turns instead towards a dying man lying at the far end of the bedroom. An overhanging Our Lady of Guadalupe watches while sweat discharges from his brow. In pursuit of agency, he bows his head to accept the lighter offered by an extemporaneous, skeletal hand. With a drag of his cigarette, the room pinwheels into optical oblivion. His irises come alight at the mirage. Amid his distraction the three figures slip away from his bedroom door, leaving space for another to slip in. Wheeling herself forward on a toy rocking horse, a red-dressed child inches into view. A beat of recognition passes, and his tired eyes capsize beneath the weight of a smile. The dying man beckons the child to his side and she follows—wordless understanding stringing her along.

The red-dressed child is Laura Lee Ochoa, bassist of the musical trio Khruangbin, and this is the animated music video for the song Cómo Te Quiero from their 2018 album Con Todo el Mundo. In lieu of a signature sound, the Houston-based band holds down an extensive track record in experiments with sonic fusion. From the extravagant reverb of 1960s Thai funk to the propulsive guitar work found in Persian rock, Khruangbin is known for their instrumental soundscapes that never fully belong to any one place. It’s this demonstrated affection for synthesis and expansion that makes the quiet world of Cómo Te Quiero profoundly distinct and curiously precious.

I came across the animated video by chance three years after its making, yet somehow the timing was just right. Lee Ochoa’s retrospective gaze mirrors my memories of the past year with more fullness than seems possible. A loved one in my life is dying. He sees figures in his bedroom that I cannot identify.

Around him, our relatives wonder if there is a medication that will stop the apparitions where they begin.

The mutability of these circumstances across life and art illuminates the ways that an encroaching death is pushing me towards a discourse of preventive care—care that intends to tether its recipient firmly to the land of the living. As a consequence of its representations throughout medicine and media, this fearful display of love is often upheld as an infallible cure to the drifting mind—perhaps the only thing that can be done to seize agency on behalf of both the dying and their loved ones in the face of loss. Yet in the midst of losing a loved one in my life, the world of Cómo Te Quiero invites me to consider otherwise. I begin to understand the ways that even care can blur the line between what it means to hold onto someone and what it means to hold them back. +++ ¿Qué pasa, a dónde vas?

No pierdas la cabeza Sacas tus dientes para mí Y cuéntame una historia Te esperaré, y al final Siempre estarás What’s happening, where are you going?

Don’t lose your head Pick up your teeth for me And tell me a story I’ll wait for you, and at the end You will always be On a sonic level, Cómo Te Quiero deploys lyrics with restraint and understatement. Occupying a slim 30 seconds of the four-minute song, the lyrics are taken from six phrases of a letter written by Lee Ochoa to her grandfather after his passing. Working in tandem with Khruangbin’s reputation as a largely instrumental group, their one-sided conversation is bottled into vocals that prefer slippage and collision over an offer of legibility. In the few seconds that a guitar riff wanes, freeing up space for lyrical clarity, any vocals that may have been coherent are sieved through a tremulant Leslie speaker. Designed for use on electric organs, the speaker was made to recreate the resounding quality of elaborate pipe organ systems—never to modify the human voice. The effect of running Lee Ochoa’s vocals through its pivoting design is an echoing, sonic cloud, often gone before its shape can be discerned.

These qualities of capture and escape channeled by Cómo Te Quiero’s instrumental composition are a beautiful fit for the video’s auditory landscape. As she began collaborating with Sanam Petri—the video’s creative director—over the animated elements of Cómo Te Quiero, Lee Ochoa honed in on the unpinnable final days of her grandfather’s life. They were filled with vivid visions—a pinwheeling bedroom, someone’s skeletal hand—that she could discern from his bedside recollections but never see for herself. In an interview with Khruangbin’s North American record label, Dead Oceans, Petri likened these visions to experiences from another dimension—images, sounds, and sensations culled from a different set of physics and temporality. “Laura always wondered what the world looked like in those last days, what was happening behind his eyes,” Petri recalled. With their energies set on mapping this uncharted inner world, they agreed that the video would “take the viewer on that last journey with him, back though his mind one last time. One last great adventure of a grandfather and granddaughter.” +++ As the video picks up from her grandfather’s beckoning, Lee Ochoa crosses the bedroom to stand by his side. He takes her by the shoulders into his embrace and begins to recount his visions. He starts by taking a breath around his cigarette, released as smoke from his pursed lips. Initially a realistic rendering, the plume of smoke begins to unfurl and swell across the screen, surpassing even the rectangular bounds of the video frame, until it is recast as part of a pastel cloudscape. An airplane soars out of the cigarette clouds, and through the windows, Lee Ochoa and her grandfather are seated as its passengers. From here, her grandfather’s visions continue to lead them through a journey of changeable matter, landmarked by cycles of material creation and collapse. Yet all throughout, exactly where they are headed remains unknown.

The images that Lee Ochoa’s grandfather witnessed in his final days might be termed as ‘deathbed phenomena’—incidents which encompass a range of sensory experiences while remaining rooted in the distinct context of death drawing near. Medical practitioners and writers disagree whether deathbed phenomena are comprised of visual stimuli that can be more accurately described as visions or hallucinations. In the world of Cómo Te Quiero, the term ‘vision’ feels most appropriate.

Hallucinations refer to the perception of forms and figures in an external space that others would view as empty, whereas visions invite a consideration of these forms and figures’ potentially spiritual dimensions. Deathbed visions are distinguished from hallucinations for their capacity to situate the dying in encounters which usher them towards a departure from this world. Airplanes, trains, and concrete roads are all symbols that appear across comparative medical accounts of deathbed visions, and lead their recipients towards a literal point of departure. Deathbed visions have also manifested in incidents where dying individuals tell their loved ones that they need help finding their shoes, even as they are bedbound. Many images that emerge in deathbed phenomena fit cleanly into these explicitly navigational examples, though they may also manifest as more symbolic points of departure. A characteristic vision recorded across medical accounts of deathbed phenomena is the appearance of a salvational figure specific to the individual’s cultural context, who presents themself as a spiritual guide for them to surrender their trust in. Another is the appearance of a loved one who also presents themselves as a guide away from this world. In many cases, these guides are loved ones who, unknown to the individual, have just passed away themselves.

In contemplating how these visions unfold for their recipients, the image that comes to mind might be an abrupt switch, where the individual’s material environment is suddenly replaced with the sensory atmosphere of deathbed phenomena. Yet these visions rarely appear as straightforward divergences from their environment, rather unfolding as integrated fusions of the two—for instance, ladders, staircases, and stepping stones that extend from a bedroom corner into an unknown beyond. The deathbed phenomena that unfold throughout Cómo Te Quiero extensively map the onset and tipping points of such integration.

As Lee Ochoa and her grandfather cross a river by boat, the water beneath them begins to contract, kaleidoscoping apart until it eventually lends shape to a set of blue playing cards. The video frame pulls away from its tight view of the cards, revealing that they are held by a life-sized incarnation of Our Lady of Guadalupe. As she slides her cards across a table towards Lee Ochoa and her grandfather, the river’s blue shifts once more, this time into a pattern streaked with white. It is the precise pattern of the striped pajamas worn by Lee Ochoa’s grandfather all throughout the journey.

g,

ARTS

Are You Going?

Witnessing the dead in Khruangbin’s mixed-media farewell, Cómo Te Quiero Throughout the video, every vision experienced by Lee Ochoa’s grandfather is simultaneously rooted in and subversive of the built environment of his bedroom. Each image that brings him closer to death sinks itself deeper into the likeness, and subsequent distortion, of the tangible objects surrounding him.

As the construction of his visions lends these objects a second life beyond their material reality, the room itself is transformed into a site of constant rediscovery amid death. +++ As much as these visions are capable of rooting themselves in material surroundings, the spatial laws that they abide by are ultimately incoherent to material reality. There is no road that takes us from our bedrooms to the next life, and there is no ladder that allows us to pass clean through our ceilings. As deathbed visions unfold according to their own laws of physics and temporality, they bump up against those of this world. This interfacing isn’t an inherently incompatible event, but it certainly can be. As loved ones in proximity to the dying witness these visions from afar, they are ultimately bearing witness to the bypassing of a once-shared reality.

When the dying transcend a shared reality to engage in visions that guide them towards departure, loved ones might feel that they have been left behind.

Tugged by the urge to reel them back into a shared reality, loved ones may respond to the visions disclosed to them with denial, medication, or a blend of both. Sedation or major tranquilizer drugs might serve as tethers to a materially coherent existence, but not without the cost of severing the dying from the interior journey elsewhere. Reaching for medication likewise severs loved ones from the opportunity to meet them where they stand: before a permeable door between worlds. Beyond the spiritual guidance they offer, I begin to understand how deathbed visions fulfill the urgent, cerebral function of introducing the dying to the logics of a more nebulous, unpinnable beyond.

Although loved ones cannot accompany them through that permeable door, the visions that prepare the dying for passage can be held rather than turned away. After a year of navigating the final moments of my own grandfa-

ther’s life beneath a language of fear, Lee Ochoa’s uncompromising understanding of her grandfather’s journey is unbearably beautiful. The destination is his alone, but she joins him through every reconstructed reality as a passenger and co-conspirer. I think about where I stand in position to this permeable door, and I wonder if children are naturally more equipped to handle the logics of what lies beyond through the recency of their entering this world. Yet, there is a startling maturity to the end of the video, where Lee Ochoa’s grandfather has died and the room is emptied of his physical form. She sits alone on an unoccupied bed, and the frame follows her gaze as it lingers over the images that guided her grandfather through his final journey: his flooring patterned after a certain river’s blue, the portrait of Mary with her hands clasped over her chest, an airplane lazing in the skies overhead. It stirs the gentle realization that everything necessary to return to the world she shared with her grandfather still lives, catalogued in every likeness that his visions breached. To be able to hold these memories in her mind, all she had to do was bear witness. +++ In his final days, Jose Guillermo Ochoa Jr. often asked his granddaughter “¿Cómo me quieres?” which translates from Spanish into “How do you love me?” The answer she reserved for him alone was “con todo el mundo,” meaning “with all the world.” By name alone, Cómo Te Quiero is nestled at the heart of its parent album, riffing off this well-worn exchange to capture the bond between grandfather and granddaughter. The conversation between song and album is simple yet apt, honoring the time that has passed rather than moving against it. With the time that remains, I hope I can do the same.

AUDREY BUHAIN B’22 is coming of age.

08

METRO

Early in October of 2019, a change happened in downtown Pawtucket. With Halloween looming, Old Slater Mill, the historic textile factory, opened up for ‘haunted tours.’ The city took pains to keep the 19th century setting intact—they removed what didn’t fit.

For much of that prior summer, communities of people experiencing homelessness passed afternoons along the river in Roosevelt Park. Once the tours started, city police took an active role in dispersing those communities. The move-alongs prompted most of the people to skip Roosevelt Park around dusk and head a few blocks south to their campsites by the river.

Three years from now, if all goes according to plan, that part of riverside Pawtucket—where these campsites still sit—will be transformed. An ambitious development proposal, approved in gradual stages over the last year, aims to permanently alter land on both banks of the Seekonk River. Its flagship piece of construction, a 7,000-seat minor league soccer stadium on Taft Street, will be flanked by a scattering of parking garages, public riverfront walkways, a pedestrian bridge, a multi-use commercial property, and a market-rate housing development across the river on Division Street. New visuals released on February 5 show the city’s vision of a well-lit and walkable riverside park running along a stadium full of fans. It appears that residents of the new housing complex would be able to watch games from their living room windows.

These are two different Pawtuckets. The plot of land known as Opportunity Zone # 44007016700 and the development that will replace it, Tidewater Landing, exist on the very same ground. Yet, stakeholders from each aren’t debating against each other. For the most part, they aren’t even thinking about each other. They lobby different parts of the government, attend different meetings, fight for different orders of magnitude of money, and measure success by entirely different yardsticks.

Both matter.

TEXT LOUGHIN NEUERT

DESIGN ALANA BAER

ILLUSTRATION CAMILLE GROS

TIDEWATER

09

With the country in crisis and the arrival of stimulus checks promised by the Biden administration seemingly on perpetual delay, it feels increasingly urgent to understand how public money is being used for this project. The development plan for the Tidewater Landing lot (on Taft Street) and Division Street lot—collectively called the Tidewater Landing project—exists within a national debate between public financing and corporate welfare. The development in Pawtucket employs various public and private financing mechanisms. The first, Tax Increment Financing (TIF), functions by raising revenue directly for the city to be used for infrastructure. Most cities aren’t liquid enough to front a new construction project, so the government often seeks investors by issuing a TIF bond. Investors buy that bond, provide the government with the up-front cash needed to build the infrastructure, and are paid back (with interest) by the rising property tax revenue.

The Rhode Island Commerce Board approved 36.2 million dollars in TIF bonds for the development on February 5.

Another funding logic, ‘Opportunity Zones,’ accounts for 14 million dollars of the approved funding plan and comes in the form of direct incentives to private developers—they enable developers in specific census tracts to avoid paying tax on their capital gains. Opportunity Zones were folded into Trump’s 2017 tax bill alongside sweeping tax cuts for the rich and broad incentives for corporate welfare. Rhode Island’s 25 zones, selected by Gina Raimondo’s office in 2018, stretch all across the state, including plots of land in Providence, Warwick, Woonsocket, Pawtucket, Cranston, and Westerly.

Projects directly funded entirely by the public belong to the public. Projects funded by private investors and developers, even when they are heavily subsidized by the government, belong to those private developers. When the public is at the wheel, lawmakers can plan development that prioritizes community interests: renewable energy and sustainability, affordable housing, and public transportation access. When private developers are at the wheel, they can prioritize profit, putting dollars towards luxury housing, retail space, and parking. The housing units of Division Street do not contain a unit of explicitly affordable housing. The developers were able to avoid binding agreements that would have forced them to provide affordable units.

Shifting Goalposts An assymetrical story

The link between Opportunity Zones and the current development of Tidewater Landing and Division Street is clarified by the website of the developer itself, the Phoenix based Fortuitous Partners. Throughout the website, Fortuitous Partners continuously references its commitment to pursuing business in these census districts where “new investments, under certain conditions, may be eligible for preferential tax treatment.”

In Pawtucket, the story is pretty clear: a medium sized market with a recently vacated sports team? A city willing to pay some of the bill? A workable construction site on an Opportunity Zone? This was like chum in the water for developers across the country. Fortuitous Partners got there first.

Prior proposals for development of Downtown Pawtucket focused on a conversion of the current site of the Apex center, that ziggurat-ish highway mall, to a lasting home for the PawSox. All endeavors to keep the PawSox from becoming the WooSox hinged on a similar development package that would have encompassed the Opportunity Zones of the Apex lot, Taft Street, and Division Street.

State Senator Sam Bell, in an interview with the College Hill Independent, pointed to the flaws in the proposed budgets that sank the early plans. “They needed to go really big,” Bell said. “With any project that has a high degree of associated cost, you have to plan something really big so that you can build something profitable enough to offset the initial investment.” Any development on this particular land, Bell argued, had a list of secondary costs that built up steadily. Interstate 95, which cuts right alongside the project, serves as a key example: it requires a greater level of expenditure to mitigate the noise of the highway, Bell said. There is also the problem of the terrain, as Bell pointed out. The site’s position along the river and the riverside bluffs adds a whole host of added geologic and landscaping costs.

Rounding off this long list of site costs is the undervaluing of the land itself. Landlords, in Pawtucket and across the country, are able to undervalue their land in order to reduce their tax burden. Come selling time, that land can balloon back to its true market value, often disrupting the long term budgets of any development plan. Put together, the task seemed too daunting for the PawSox. They balked and chose to skip town instead.

But then, Deus Ex Arizona. Fortuitous Partners stepped in and seemed to have put together a proposal that made the numbers work. The proposal delighted the state’s top lawmakers who have been, so far, unwavering in their support. On February 4, as the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation approved the use of public funds in the developers’ plans, the list of political figures who vocalized support included outgoing Governor Gina Raimondo, incoming Governor Dan McKee, Speaker of the House Joe

Shekarchi, President of the Senate Dominick Ruggiero, and the Mayor of Pawtucket, Don Grieben.

These lawmakers see a potentially successful project, one that could bring a minor league sports team back to Rhode Island, build up a public riverfront, and make a lot of money for businesses in Pawtucket. For public officials with the next election in mind, that’s a political hat trick.

Senator Bell sees a historical legacy of the Tidewater Landing project that goes even further back, to a parallel debate in Providence. Six years ago, a push to construct a baseball stadium on the riverfront between the Jewelry District and Downtown Providence lost out to public pressure and was replaced by an investment into public infrastructure. Here, the two national models of development dueled head to head: Should the state help private entities build a private stadium? Or should the money of the people be used to, as Senator Bell says, “Build a place that people want to be in?” In Providence’s case, a concerted campaign by a group of citizens prevented the stadium deal from gaining traction. Anyone who enjoys the park space, sunflower garden, and pedestrian bridge over the Providence river can thank that campaign.

As much as there are reasons for citizens to be optimistic about the plan, there are plenty of reasons for skepticism. The public isn’t getting stiffed by any means. Fortuitous Partners are pushing forward with a plan that creates public goods, headlined by the riverfront walks and pedestrian bridge. And though they have received tens of millions of dollars in incentives and public funding, private capital still accounts for roughly 80 percent of the overall project’s budget. The deal currently includes protections for the government that seek to keep the public’s burden constant, even if costs change down the road.

Still, as the Providence anecdote shows, the fight to keep the hands of developers out of the public cookie jar is ongoing. It relies on continued attention and organization by citizens. When the forces of capital decide, and when nobody is paying attention, the winds can shift quickly. Fortuitous Partners’ website shows the speed at which they are able to affect policy. Their ‘Press’ tab prominently (and proudly) features two articles from the Providence Business Network’s Nancy Lavin: Tidewater Landing Developer Seeks State Tax Credits and Commerce Committee Recommends $46M In Public Financing, Tax Credits For Pawtucket Soccer Stadium Project. The former, indicating the firm’s first attempts to draw funding from the public, was published February 3. The latter, indicating success, was published February 4. It will take the public’s attention to keep this development a compromise between corporate welfare and public investment and not a full-on feeding frenzy of tax deferrals, credits, and direct pork.

METRO

“Stakeholders from each Pawtucket aren’t debating against each other because they aren’t really speaking to each other.

For the most part, they aren’t even thinking about each other.”

OPPORTUNITY ZONE # 44007016700 The drawings and schematics released by the Commerce Corporation and Fortuitous Partners illuminate one view of the future, but they obscure a view of the present. Today, the riverside woods of the Opportunity Zones hide a network of paths and campsites that constitute the living spaces of several dozen individuals experiencing homelessness.

Collectively named ‘Tent City’ by those living there, the campsites are located in two pockets on opposite banks of the river: one along Taft Street and one by Division Street.

Those experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness and their allies are almost unanimous in advocating for public investment in affordable and public housing. The federal government, by their (already lax) standards, deems places like Tent City to be “unfit for human habitation.” Spending public money on those experiencing housing insecurity, either pre- or post-eviction, could keep families and individuals in Rhode Island housed and build programs that help find suitable housing for those who are experiencing homelessness. The United States, the wealthiest country in the history of wealth, chooses every day to continue allowing homelessness to exist. In 2017, Rhode Island spends less than six dollars per capita on affordable housing initiatives, compared to 86 dollars in Connecticut and 100 dollars in Massachusetts. Their hand forced by the pandemic and the closure of Pawtucket’s only homeless shelter, the state opened a program to house individuals in a scattering of area hotels.

For a time, when people slipped through the cracks of social services, when bills came due, and when landlords called their lawyers, Tent City was a physical place where those experiencing homelessness could go and find community. It is painfully ironic that this place, chosen for its invisibility and protection from the government and systems that fail unhoused Rhode Islanders, became an ‘Opportunity Zone.’ A place where a couple thousand dollars could have meant the difference between a house and a tent has become a focal point, a lightning rod, used to funnel tens of millions of dollars of capital.

As most of the residents of the campsites left for hotels this winter, Jackie stayed behind at her tent on the Taft street site and has been tackling the problem of waste, putting in hours of work to manage gallons and gallons of excess food and clothes that have been donated. Will she be paid for mitigating that site cost?

Jerry, who lives on the Division side, is an accomplished stone worker whose campsite is dotted with ingenious and sturdy patios. Was he paid for that investment into public infrastructure?

In the 1950s, Pawtucket was led by a left leaning city government, and I-95 was being built.

City planners and developers in other parts of the country—like Providence—constructed segments of I-95 that cut off working class and low-income neighborhoods from city centers and wealthy communities, doubling down on segregational racial capital. Pawtucket resolved to be different. The city broke from the traditionally racist American logic that has always placed new sources of noise and pollution along and inside of communities of color.

Instead, they ran the highway right through a white, wealthy area—Quality Hill. It was a major win, the kind of policy that case-by-case critiques of racial capitalism advocate for. But on stolen land, racial capital has a home field advantage; it can afford to run out the clock. The highway came in, property values dropped, white families fled, city governments changed, and priorities shifted. Before the pandemic, many of the residents of Tent City used to make a daily commute between their campsites and the Pawtucket Soup Kitchen, which rented out time in the basement of the Holy Family Parish. That walk cuts right through Quality Hill as well. How long did that win stay a win?

Two Pawtuckets The new stadium might make life a lot better for a lot of people in Pawtucket. Its construction promises to bring hundreds of new construction jobs to the town, and a (potentially) successful professional soccer team would add on many more full-time permanent positions. Certainly for upper and middle class individuals, a new stadium and park is a popular proposal, and it seems unlikely that many Rhode Islanders are rooting for the project to collapse. “Something would be better than nothing.”

In some video conferences, allies and advocates for those experiencing homelessness wrack their brains to find small sums of money needed to plug up the social safety net for a couple weeks. In others, executives and politicians haggle over the details of a partially publicly-funded project. Housing advocates and people experiencing homelessness

have spent months searching for a ‘safe parking lot’ somewhere in the Providence area for people living in cars and campers. In parallel channels, architects for Fortuitous Developers have the leeway to design a whole sea of new parking lots for soccer fans and shoppers.

What this story clarifies is the oft-repeated fact that there are multiple experiences of any location, multiple worlds. A win in one, even a win for progressive policy, may not look like a win in the other. In writing this piece I’ve continuously bumped up against that uncomforting reality. I don’t think it feels like a win for the stadium to be built, but I certainly don’t think it would feel like a win for the deal to fall through entirely. It’s hard for me to see something that really feels like a win.

Sometimes, those worlds are separated by physical and geographic barriers. Sometimes they are separated by time. Tent City sits on top of Tidewater Landing, only a handful of years separate them. Turnstiles overlap with thickets of sumacs; the scoreboard with the fisher cat’s burrow; kitchen sinks with camp stoves; washer/dryers with twine in the trees. The excavators and pavers that will reshape the land into the big-gut stadium on Taft Street and the homes along Division Street are already parked nearby, pointed towards the woods, their wheels all caked with dry mud.

Back in 2019, a man named Richard gave me a tour of his campsite on the Division Street side.

He told me about the history of Pawtucket, about how the town claimed to be the starting point for the Industrial Revolution in America. He talked about the mill and about the tours. He theorized that it all had something to do with the inequalities he saw in and outside of Division Street. He believed that Pawtucket had started ‘some bad shit’ with the Industrial Revolution and that the legacies of that ‘bad shit’ were still being told.

I think Richard’s point gives us some direction.

What we need for a win to feel like a win is to bring some sort of cohesion to our society, some kind of justice: to enshrine housing as a human right, to abolish policing, to pay reparations, to put the earth over profit, and to decarcerate. The legacies of Old Slater Mill cannot be exorcised without justice, and for that we need to get comfortable with thinking through scale and thinking through time.

LOUGHLIN NEUERT B’22 is tired of murder committed by committee.

10

DESIGN ALANA BAER TEXT CHONG JING GAN

STEPPING OUT OF THE COLD HARDNESS OF WINTER MORNING AND INTO THE ASIAN SUPERMARKET FEELS LIKE WALKING INTO A FRAGMENT OF HOME, NESTLED IN THE MIDDLE OF PROVIDENCE.

The wet-market stench of scales and slime seep from the puddles of water by the fish tanks.

The dizzying rows of bottled juice, milk, and tea, and condiments—

oceans to the faraway, sweltering humidity of the Southeast Asian tropics.

In my room, bare and bereft of pieces from Singapore, I mutter each item under my breath, as if I am chanting an incantation for home:

The tinny Mandarin heartbreak ballads chime in the background.

each one triggers a glowing surge of synaptic connection in my mind, tugging on threads reaching across

Weeks later, I unearth the receipt from that visit, buried deeply into the folds of my wallet.

for good fortune, this is what you need.

1 Enoki Mushroom--$0.98,

1 Kim Chee Pickled Vegetable--$4.49,

and little fragmented memories of taste are rising up from the depths of my tongue, tingling islands of sensation on its surface, a fractured map of a region, dots of a constellation. If only I could draw them together, draw the image forth, into focus, in hopes that it would coalesce into home.

each one leads to a place that isn’t quite home. In Singapore all I eat are pieces of other places. Now, regurgitating my food into invoices, I search for something in the lines, —but there is nothing but pieces.

1 Chinkiang Vinegar--$1.49,;

But it is collapsing; the tastes are falling apart, sliding off my tongue through nervous passageways that diverge rather than converge—

Perhaps the way home is always a misdirection, a line that curves, rather than one that is straight.

Maybe that’s why the incantation also includes lines that are steeped in misspelled magicks:

1 Asian Frozen--$3.99, 1 Chili Power--$2.49.

These are strange things, nonsensical things, but that is also what home is:

not familiar, but always foreign, distant, and far, waiting at the edges of your vision, beyond the corners of the page.

The name of the supermarket, in Chinese, spelled 好运来 more accurately translates to Good Fortune Comes. It is spoken like a wish or prayer for goodwill and blessed tidings—which perhaps, strangely, is also what Providence is. As I recite it, it begins to shift—from a spell for good luck, to a recipe for transmutation. As these banal, familiar items leave my tongue, their shape morphs into something strange. I realise that perhaps home was never that easy to know, but that it is all the more precious for that. So, I take this receipt and I chew it, tear it to pieces, mix it, reconstitute and reassemble it in my mouth, hoping that eventually somthing will emerge between my lips, between the lines, birthed in voice.

CHONG JING GAN B’23 TOneeds MAKEtoANOTHER TRIPtrip TO THE SUPERMARKET CHONG JINGNEEDS GAN B’23 make another to the supermarket.

11

LITERARY

TEXT NICOLE KIM DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

강가를 따라서 걷고 있으면, 심장이 뻥 뚫린 기분이 들어. walking along the length of the river, my chest feels like it’s imploded. 식빵 속처럼 하얗고 너의 웃음만큼 둥그런 거위들의 아랫배가 내 머리 위를 스쳐 지나가고, 갓 오른 햇빛이 물살을 타면서 수줍음 한 방울 없이 내 앞에서 야한 춤을 추는, 그런 늦은 아침이야. it’s late morning. the underbelliesy of geese, soft and creamy like the insides of fresh bread, rotund like your distended laugh, sweeps over my head as the freshly risen sunshine dances shamelessly amidst the choppy waters. 커피를 담은 종이컵을 네 입술에 대면서 빨갛게 물들은 너의 귀는 젤리처럼 말랑말랑했었지. bringing your lips up to the cardboard cup of coffee, your ears dyed bright red from the winter morning were soft and gummy. 그렇게 물컹했던 너의 연골의 달달한 맛이 생각나는 오후를 기다리는 오늘이야. it’s the kind of day when I’m waiting for afternoon, remembering the sweet taste of your cartilage on my tongue, sinking into layers of coldness and watching the cars pass me by— no destination in mind. 이불같은 차가운 공기에 안겨서, 지나가는 차들과 눈빛 인사를 나누고 목적지 없이 걷고 있어. 어제 술을 조금 많이 마셨나봐. I must have drank a bit too much last night.

걸음걸이가 후덜덜하고 머리가 띵해서 그런지, maybe it’s because my gait is a little wobbly and my head feels like a blank page, but 눈밭에서 목욕을 하고 있는 갈매기들은 운동장을 뛰어노는 아이들같고, the seagulls bathing in the snowbanks remind me of children on the playground, 강가를 둘러싼 도시는 나를 잊은 것만 같아. and the city that wraps around this river seems like it has forgotten me. 아마, 넌 이 도시 속에서 아직 잠을 자고 있을 거야. 늦잠이 많은 성격이었지. nested in this city, you are probably still asleep. you had the personality of someone who needs a lot of morning sleep. 나무 냄새가 섞여진 너의 침대에 다리를 벌리고 누워서 내 생각을 하고 있을지도 모르겠다는 사실에 약간 겁이나. lying in your room, splayed out on your bed that’s mixed with the fragrance of evergreens— the possibility that I might be on your mind, too, frightens me. 눈부시게 밝고 벅차게 아름다운 쓸데없이 고요한 네가 깨어나기 전 이 세상은, walking through this waking world—blindingly bright, overwhelmingly beautiful, and uselessly still— where everything but you has risen, 너무나도 조용하다. is deathly quiet.

NICOLE KIM B’22 is sleeping in this weekend.

LITERARY

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NEWS ILLUSTRATION LUCA ANTONIO DESIGN MIYA LOHMEIER TEXT BROWN STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE

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WHY WON’T BROWN TALK ABOUT DIVESTMENT? The Brown Corporation stonewalls students advocating for justice in Palestine

In the spring of 2019, Brown University held an extraordinary student election. With an unprecedented voter turnout of over three thousand undergraduates, the student body passed a referendum that called on the Brown Corporation to withdraw all of its investments in securities, endowments, mutual funds, and other monetary instruments in the holdings of multinational companies that were complicit in human rights abuses against Palestinians. The sucessful divest vote not only endorsed the toil of student organizers, it also sparked a ripple effect nationwide, as student activists across college campuses—most notably, at Columbia—ramped up pro-Palestinian activism, passing similar divestment referendums.

These efforts signpost the beginning of a new civil awakening among young Americans who refuse to be complicit in the United States’s endorsement of structural human rights abuses in Palestine.

Yet, today, almost two years since the popular referendum, Brown has still not divested from holdings at corporations such as Caterpillar Inc., which sells bulldozers to the Israeli Defense Forces to demolish Palestinian homes and disappropriate Palestinians of their land. As if the moral imperatives of divesting were not enough, Caterpillar Inc. also falls on the list of organizations blacklisted by the United Nations for economically enabling the Israeli government to occupy Palestine in violation of international law, adding a legal motivation for divestment as well.

At a recent virtual town hall hosted by the Undergraduate Council of Students on February 4 that sought to bring members of the Brown Corporation into dialogue with Brown students, members of Brown University Students for Justice in Palestine (BSJP) confronted Corporation members on their calculated reticence on the question of divestment. While we hoped to finally get clarity on the lack of communication, we left the meeting with nothing except a deep frustration with the Corporation’s decision to deflect, sidestep, avoid responsibility, and continue quietly smothering the will of the students with their silence. +++ The employment of divestment as a pressure tactic to hold perpetrators of structural human rights violations accountable to the law has a long and powerful history. In Sanctioning Apartheid, Robert E. Edgar shows that divestment works on a number of axes in addition to direct financial pressure. In fact, he argues, the movement to divest from South African apartheid, a strategy borne on college campuses, forced significant capital flight from the apartheid regime while ramping up public awareness and international scrutiny of trans-national corporations profiteering from violence.

Here, at Brown, we follow the rich legacy of student activists who have successfully campaigned to extricate Brown from its financial support of South African apartheid in 1987, the tobacco industry in 2003, and genocide in Darfur in 2006.

We also persist in the fight to combat the Brown Corporation’s reluctance to stand up to injustice.

For instance, as surprising as it may seem today, Brown did not fully divest from apartheid in South Africa until after student activists held massive rallies outside of Brown Advisory and Executive Committee meetings, fasted in protest in Manning Chapel, and faced probation after disrupting a meeting of the Corporation. In 1987, even after students, faculty, and administrators had reached a consensus, it was the Brown Corporation that stood in the way of full divestment from South African apartheid. The Corporation’s historical tendency to put off ending its complicity in morally bankrupt practices until direct action from students forces the issue (or until public relations or fiscal incentives shift) foreshadowed its present day treatment of the effort to divest from violence against Palestinians.

The Brown Corporation is the university’s ultimate governing body, responsible for selecting the president, budgeting, appointing faculty and senior administrators, and making all large-scale policy decisions. Therefore, the decision to divest from human rights abuses in Palestine rests in its hands. After the Divest student referendum passed in March 2019, President Paxson responded by positioning Brown’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies (ACCRIP), later renamed the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management (ACURM),

“It is critical for the Corporation to maintain the illusion that the student body can create change by working within the university system, when in reality those methods only work to create changes that already align with the Corporation’s financial and optical interests.” as the only legitimate channel for reaching the Brown Corporation. Once again, Brown Divest organizers rallied community support to overcome a string of new obstacles. On December 2, 2019, half a year after the student body vote, ACCRIP published a decision addressed to President Paxson backing the referendum and urging the university to divest from any company that profits from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. ACCRIP’s vote indicated that every part of the university—students, faculty, and staff—had supported this movement. Only the Brown Corporation stands in the way of divestment.

The historic referendum and the subsequent ACCRIP recommendation to divest was the culmination of years of work by student activists and the clear will of the student body. However, the ACCRIP recommendation, much like the student vote, is non-binding, and the final decision on divestment falls to the Brown Corporation. Has the Corporation followed these recommendations and divested from companies violating the human rights of Palestinians? Their answer, unfortunately, is silence.

NEWS

+++ “The lack of action is just overwhelming,” said an BSJP organizer during the February 4 University Council of Students-Brown Corporation meeting.

The Corporation’s disinclination to discuss divestment at the town hall was demonstrated by the long and awkward pauses between responses to our questions, deflections of accountability to alternative university structures, and occasionally the measured admonition by Corporation members that student activism at Brown had gone too far. Far from being prepared to issue a decision on the ACCRIP divestment recommendation made to them over a year ago, the Corporation failed to provide a clear answer on whether divestment had been so much as discussed in their private meetings.

At a segment of the meeting ironically titled “Transparency and Communication,” Corporation members gave muddled responses when asked when they had last discussed divestment from injustices in Palestine. Member John Atwater said that “the Corporation is aware of the topic” but didn’t clarify whether this awareness entailed any discussion of divestment during Corporation meetings. Member Pamela Reeves recommended that BSJP search the public records of meeting minutes from the Corporation. We took her advice, but neither ‘Palestine’ nor ‘divestment’ have been mentioned in the summaries of any Corporation meeting since the recommendation was made in 2019. Member Kate Burton, on the other hand, appeared confused about the fundamental premise of our questions altogether, claiming that the last time she had discussed divestment in the Corporation, it was about divestment from coal, not human rights abuses in Palestine. Member Tom Tisch said that divestment was a current “issue before the Corporation” but avoided stating when the last briefing on the topic had occurred. They sidestepped student questions and concerns, choosing instead to highlight other divestment campaigns they’ve derailed, like coal divestiture. “While the university did not make a decision to divest from coal,” bragged Tisch, “it was dazzling to see how the administration took that as a challenge to do things consistent with Brown’s mission.”

Corporation members also consistently and deliberately attempted to evade responsibility,

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shifting their undeniable role in the matter onto the shoulders of various other offices at Brown.

In response to a student’s question about the appropriate avenue for pursuing divestment, Corporation member Jeffery Hines stated that “most of these issues need to go through Campus Life,” as the Corporation is not “the management arm of the university.” Member Laura Geller incorrectly claimed that the issue of divestment was “sent back to ACCRIP to continue to consider.” ACCRIP no longer exists and was replaced with ACRUM; furthermore, no publicly available records of ACRUM activities reference any reconsideration of divestment, and no BSJP members received any communication about the recommendation needing further consideration. Another member, Donna Weiss, suggested that we speak with the Investment Office. At best, these suggestions were misguided attempts to appease students, incidentally revealing members’ ignorance on an issue they claim to have considered. At worst, these Corporation members are guilty of intentional, thinly veiled evasions of blame.

Tisch’s reluctant admission of the Corporation’s obligation to address ACCRIP’s recommendation buttresses this. “[Divestment] is an issue before the Corporation,” he conceded in response to Weiss’s remark that divestment was a topic for the Investment Office. And yet, when asked about the Corporation’s status on discussing divestment, Tisch refused to elaborate. “I really do not want to get into a discussion that exists inside the Corporation room.

That is a matter for the Corporation,” he said.

Tisch is not wrong that divestment is now a matter for the Corporation. ACCRIP’s 2019 recommendation to divest attempts to circumvent some of the inevitable red-tapism used to

“Above all, the Corporation cannot risk students and faculty realizing their actual power; they would much prefer for students to vent their frustrations in administrative meetings than in newspapers, or to protest in University-appointed committees instead of on the Main Green. And so, the Corporation must stay silent on the ACCRIP recommendation; saying no would tell students that if they want to make change, they will have to take direct action.” strangle ethical investment pleas. Identifying the inadequacy of the university’s actions centering Palestine, ACCRIP directly urged the Corporation to exclude companies identified as facilitating human rights violations in Palestine from Brown’s direct investments. It also asked the Corporation to require Brown’s separate account investment managers to exclude such companies from their direct investments. ACCRIP’s adroit choice of words makes clear that the responsibility to divest falls squarely on the Corporation, not Campus Life, not the Investment Office, and not a vague “administration.” Only the Corporation can do what remains to be done—divest.

As the meeting came to a close, Corporation member Joelle Murchison decided to bestow some advice on BSJP attendees. She chided students for going directly to “the campus newspaper or to a media outlet,” recommending instead “simple conversation” and “dialogue” with an administrator about divestment. Brown students should heed these wise words. If only BSJP members had thought to meet with President Paxson, or organize a campus wide referendum. If only we had spent months preparing and presenting to Brown’s committee on ethical investment practices. If only such a committee had recommended that the Corporation divest from social harm in Palestine. If only we had followed proper procedure and practiced decorum. Perhaps then we wouldn’t need to confront Corporation members at an open meeting with requests for updates on a popular, university-wide vote that took place two years ago. Instead, here we are, disregarding Ms. Murchison’s advice, appealing

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to the student body through a radical campus newspaper. +++ The Corporation has failed students. Their placid “we are listening” means little to us. Even Bernadette Aulestia, a Corporation member herself, was willing to admit that the student body is owed a “more in-depth response… Let us know if that’s something you want to know our response on,” she said at the meeting.

It may seem absurd that the Corporation would refuse to comment on its discussions and yet promise students “a more in-depth response” in the same breath; however, this paradox is intentional.

Universities like Brown have a clever and wellestablished playbook for quietly asphyxiating student activism. To quote Brown Class of ‘88 James Foreman Jr., an organizer for the Divest movement from South African apartheid: “Universities have gotten much smarter. They don’t just completely lock people out anymore. They invite people in, they form committees, they have ad-hoc working groups, they have study commissions, they ask the students ‘well what do you think’ and ‘let’s write a report about this’, because universities know that students graduate, and the group that was passionate about an issue, after they spend a year and half writing a report, half of them are out the door, and the other half don’t remember what the whole fuss was all about.” The seemingly contradictory messages from the Corporation stem from the fact that the Divest movement has exhausted all of the typical avenues

NEWS

used to defuse student activism. There are no more administrators to refer us to, no more committees to form in the hopes that we’ll lose ourselves in writing reports and forming task forces and floundering in red tape.

To deny the ACCRIP recommendation outright would reveal that the Corporation can and will disregard decisions made by bodies of the university itself. It is critical for the Corporation to maintain the illusion that the student body can create change by working within the university system, when in reality those methods only work to create changes that already align with the Corporation’s financial and optical interests. It is no accident that the only formal response from a member of the Corporation on divestment—President Paxson herself—came in the form of a letter in March 2019, denouncing divestment as “polarizing” and overly controversial.

It is important to note that this occurred shortly after the student referendum and before the publication of the ACCRIP recommendation. A public rejection of the ACCRIP recommendation would betray the unilateral, uncontested nature of the Corporation’s power and expose the extent to which the Corporation’s interests diverge from the will of students, faculty, and administrators. The Corporation can afford to publicly contradict the will of the students so long as they can appease activists with the promise of further discussions and meetings with administrators; a denial of the ACCRIP recommendation would prove that agitation for change within established university structures is a farce. Above all, the Corporation cannot risk students and faculty realizing their actual power; they would much prefer for students to vent their frustrations in administrative meetings than in newspapers, or to protest in university-appointed committees instead of on the Main Green. And so, the Corporation must stay silent on the ACCRIP recommendation; saying no would tell students that if they want to make change, they will have to take direct action.

University administrations aim to co-opt, manipulate, and ultimately dispel any radical organizing potential among their students. Brown, as evidenced by the Brown Corporation meeting we attended, is especially guilty of this hypocrisy. The university likes to masquerade as a liberal institution open to student activism, yet its highest body simultaneously ignores and further marginalizes student voices. But we refuse to be silenced. We are here. Our voices demand to be heard, our imaginations refuse to be limited, and our struggle for justice in Palestine will continue.

BROWN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE are not afraid of the big bad Corporation.

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METRO

THE STATE OF NURSING HOMES IN RHODE ISLAND An inside account of the need for more state support Certified Nursing Assistant Dawn Auclair has worked at Hopkins Manor Nursing Home in North Providence for 21 years. She managed to balance raising five kids and her career, working tirelessly to support residents at the ends of their lives. Throughout her time at Hopkins she has never experienced anything like she did in early March, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on her workplace and life. Auclair, a delegate for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), shared her experience fighting for fair working conditions, increased wages, and better staffing ratios in a phone interview with the College Hill Independent. She stressed that the pandemic didn’t create a lack of state support, but rather revealed pre-existing difficulties that workers have felt for a long time, particularly in nursing homes that aren’t affiliated with her union. Auclair speaks for many Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) who are hoping for unified, long-term support from the governor and legislature. In the interview, she shared her thoughts about the strikes that have been and are still being organized around facilities during the pandemic and her current work to pass a bill that would give residents and workers the support they deserve. +++

TEXT NELL SALZMAN

DESIGN OWEN MCCALLUM-KEELER ILLUSTRATION HANNAH CHANG

NS: What does a typical day look like for you? How many hours do you work? How many patients do you see? What are your basic tasks?

DA: I’m only working 37.5 hours a week right now, though I usually pick up overtime shifts. A typical shift for me starts with patient care. I go in, get my patients up, wash and shower them, feed them their meals, and put them back to bed as needed during the day. I attend to whatever basic needs they have: fingernails, toilet trips, etc. If there are more workers, I can spend more time with each resident.

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NS: Talk to me a little about staffing. How did COVID affect staff numbers at Hopkins?

DA: Nursing home staffing is a big problem for Rhode Island and the nation, and COVID only exacerbated it. During the first stage of the pandemic, we had a lot of staff leave. We were horribly short, with a ratio of 46 residents to three Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA). Our staff was either in fear, ill, or taking furloughs.

NS: I can’t imagine how hard that must have been. What was it like when COVID hit?

We lost a lot of residents in what felt like a blink of an eye. I’ve seen flu and I’ve seen a lot of viruses go through this facility, but never taking the lives of our residents as fast as this. Our numbers fell from 170 to 120. Between families taking their folks home and the COVID deaths themselves, we’ve experienced a lot of loss. Luckily nothing serious has happened to any of the staff, but it has of course affected the building in a lot of ways.

NS: Did you ever feel like your life or the lives of others were put at risk?

DA: Our lives were definitely put at risk. I have asthma and Chronic Lymphoproliferative Disorder (CLPD), and many of our staff have immuno-compromising illnesses. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was scared to get up and go to work every day. I knew that I was putting my life on the line, and I just kept praying that I wouldn’t get sick. When our facility got infected, COVID blew through the rooms like a fire. Somehow, from the beginning until now I’ve stayed negative, which is a miracle. And I’ve recently been vaccinated so I’m not as scared. But those beginning few months were terrifying. CNAs had a lot of weight on their shoulders.

NS: How has your management responded?

DA: Right now, we’re going through a management change, but it’s generally been positive. Their biggest priority is trying to push the vaccine. A lot of workers have gotten it, and 80-90% of our residents have gotten it, too. I’ve seen a big difference from that first surge last year, and a lot of it has to do with the vaccine. We’re just not bagging bodies like we were before.

NS: As a union delegate, what are you doing now to help improve the situation? Have nursing homes in your union been striking?

DA: Though my facility never went on strike, five nursing homes out of the six in our union did go on a three day strike early on in the pandemic. As a delegate, we’ve been working on a bill called The Nursing Home Staffing and Quality Care Act, which we’ve been trying to get passed [in Rhode Island] for almost two years. It would give our residents the quality care that they deserve. There are a lot of nursing homes that aren’t union-organized and are being taken advantage of by their owners. Owners will short-staff workers, and they won’t get compensated for it. If we can get this bill passed, all facilities will be held accountable for staffing their facilities, not just union-affiliated ones.

NS: Why don’t more nursing homes join the union?

DA: Right now, homes will keep staff numbers low to put more money in their pockets. Unfortunately, corporations are buying nursing homes all over the state of Rhode Island. Nursing homes need to be organized, but it isn’t easy to do so because a lot of facilities run constant anti-union campaigns. Healthcare workers need to just pick up the phone and call the union. They need to find leaders and get a vote started.

NS: How did being a part of the union affect your life?

DA: I raised five kids. I was by myself, working this little job, and if I wasn’t working for a union facility, I wouldn’t have been able to give my kids the good health insurance they received. I wouldn’t have had any stability. There are so many more benefits to working for a union-facility than a non-union facility. You have the ability to negotiate your wages. You have the ability to negotiate your health.

You have the ability to negotiate your vacation. It’s everything. I have affordable insurance and I’ve been able to give my kids jobs.

NS: In what ways does the state support nursing homes?

DA: When it comes to Medicaid cuts, the state doesn’t seem to care about the elderly society. When cuts are made, my wages are cut, too. I only make $16.35 an hour and I’ve been working at Hopkins for 21 years. I’m clearly not there for the money, but I do feel that our elderly folks work hard their whole lives and they deserve every ounce of quality care they can get. It feels like most nursing home owners don’t want to give it. So now, we’re battling. The [Staffing and Quality Cares Act] bill passed the [RI State] Senate almost unanimously, and we’re waiting for a response from the [RI] House.

It didn’t pass the House last year, but COVID has illuminated a lot of inequality, so I’m hopeful.

NS: What happened at other facilities that went on strike?

What were preliminary conversations like? What was the process for facilities to prepare for strikes?

DA: It was intense. There were people who were afraid to strike, who were worried about their residents inside. There’s a lot of work involved in organizing a strike. It’s tough and it’s scary. As far as preparing for it, there’s a ten-day notice that goes out to the facility, to let family members know. It’s a big job to cover a strike, and so we have a big job on our end to uphold it.

NS: What was the general response to the strike at the beginning of the pandemic? From government officials? From residents? From family members of residents?

DA: The governor asked us not to strike early on, though she [Gina Raimondo] did endorse the bill. And we’ve received a lot of support inside the State House. Residents supported the strike, too. As much as they didn’t want to see someone else take care of them, they wanted us to receive the resources we need. Families of residents supported us, too. They all know that we care about our work. If we didn’t care about our residents, we wouldn’t be in the facility for over twenty years. Nobody wants to go on strike, but if we need to fight for better wages and better staffing, then that’s what we’re going to have to do. It ultimately will help the residents, and it will help people like you and me when we get older and need that care.

NS: What was the intended effect of the strike?

DA: We had to let the public know what was happening to us and to our elderly. That was the bottom line. Workers were letting people know that their ownership wasn’t meeting their needs. They were on that strike line every shift they were supposed to be working. It sent a powerful message.

NS: What has been done to improve care? How have conversations changed now?

DA: The only thing we’ve gotten from the government is pandemic money. I do get hazard pay. But with COVID and the strikes, the conversation did change. Before the pandemic, nobody cared [about] what we did, everybody thought we just had bad and slummy jobs. Before, they couldn’t give us a 50 cent raise, and now all of a sudden we were getting five dollars extra an hour. After the pandemic hit nursing homes, people began to see just how difficult it is to contain something like this, especially when you’re short-staffed.

NS: Do you think the attitude shift will continue after the pandemic?

DA: Honestly, I don’t. I think we’ll go back to our chump change again. If my facility becomes COVID-free, we’ll no longer receive hazard pay. And I’m sure staffing will go down because people won’t be making extra money.

NS: What’s the state of nursing homes right now?

DA: We’re 42nd in this country for the worst care given. That’s pathetic. We have 89 nursing homes and only six are in my union.

Another problem is that young people aren’t signing up for this job right now. If we can’t get workers, staffing will continue to be a problem. We take care of one of our most vulnerable societies that deserve to get the best care they can get. And when corporations are buying our nursing homes, they’re doing it for real estate. They don’t care about workers or the elderly; they buy property to make money. Any way they can put it in their pocket, they will.

NS: Do you think your facility will strike in the foreseeable future?

DA: We don’t know where we’re going to land. Since we’re under new ownership, we have a lot at stake. We haven’t had a strike vote yet since we’re still in the middle of negotiating a new contract.

But I do believe we will have to sometime soon, especially if the bill doesn’t pass.

NS: At the end of it all, what’s your favorite part of the job?

What keeps you going from day to day?

DA: I love seeing my residents every day. I love to help people and I love the elderly. I believe people at the end of their lives should be safe, comfortable, and well taken care of. But in order to best do that, we need support from the state.

NS: Thank you so much for your time, Dawn. Any last words?

DA: I just want to add that we’re the only state in New England that doesn’t have a staffing ratio for nursing homes. Corporations profit millions off of nursing homes. What are they doing with the money? As a CNA, it’s such an insult that they won’t give us the resources to ensure our elderly are cared for. We tell legislators constantly that they will be old one day and might need this service.

And if it’s not you, it’ll be somebody you know.

NELL SALZMAN B’22 wishes it didn’t take a global pandemic to lay bare the unjust working conditions across the state.

WHAT ARE DEAR INDY’S THOUGHTS ON THROUPLES?

—EROTIC TRIANGLE

Dear Indy officially endorses any throuple wherein everyone involved is fully informed and thoroughly enthusiastic. As the highest-circulation alt-weekly in southern New England, we feel that we have a responsibility to honor our readers’ agency and respect that every relationship is utterly unique and unknowable from the outside, regardless of how densely it’s populated.

That said, your loyal columnists have their own personal stances on this question.

IN DEFENSE OF POLYAMORY

IN DEFENSE OF MONOGAMY There’s a school of thought that classes monogamy among countless other detrita of capitalist hegemony whose appeal persists despite, or perhaps because of, their evils. Some politically-minded monogamous people treat their monogamy as a guilty pleasure, their relationships as commodities they sheepishly resort to unethically consuming, because considering what they enjoy about monogamy on a more granular level makes them nervous. They fear they might find some reserve of archconservative zeal, worse than they could ever imagine, if they were to look too closely at themselves, so they concede: Monogamy is backward, but who doesn’t indulge in a backward tendency or two?

My esteemed colleague, SVH, makes a good case for what about monogamy truly is corrosive. The economic and political forces she describes are powerful, and I don’t dispute that they incentivize monogamy such that, even if it had nothing else to recommend it, most of us would practice it anyway. I’m not convinced, however, that these societal factors account for everything that makes monogamy appealing or meaningful. After staring, for the purposes of this advice column, into the abyss of my romantic motivations, I don’t see my own personal monogamy as an embarrassing concession to the dominant culture, for reasons that I’ll try to sketch out here.

For those of us willing to close our ears to many centuries of dominant cultural discourse, the benefits of dating multiple people become immediately apparent. There are simply too many good things that require three lovers. Three can finish a Neapolitan ice cream box. Two can carry the other in a hammock like royalty. One can dissuade you from buying the fluffy loofah you’ve spotted on sale at CVS until a second lover steps in with a logically irrefutable argument about why that might make a great purchase.

Like a stable barstool, the billy goats gruff, or any halloween costume involving Alvin and the Chipmunks, a romantic relationship between three people can provide more balance, dynamism, and harmonious possibility than anyone in our parent’s generation would willingly have us realize.

Polyamory, crucially, recognizes the multiplicity of vibrant relationships already present in our lives and provides the freedom to let these relationships settle into whatever formation might be their most enriching. Many of us have multivalent feelings because we are situated within multivalent networks of people; the complexity of these relationships, regardless of whether or not they are romantic, has always been—and will always be—our saving grace.

Regardless of who we rely on to legitimize our CVS purchases, extending the bounds of our care, especially within romantic relationships, can be a means of honoring the nuance of our feelings, the multiplicity of our relationships and, therefore, the integrity of our full selves. Does your faithful columnist believe in the possibility of uncoupling monogamy from the gendered conceptions of ownership inherent to marriage? Can we put energy into community relationships while maintaining romantically singular ones? The answer, of course, is an unmistakable yes, but with the crucial caveat that it might take a whole lot of work. And the type of work that this unfettered, freeing, and communally-situated monogamy requires—unlearning expectations of gender and labor as well as a ton of intentional communication— seems to be exactly the type of work demanded of those committed to multiple romantic and/or sexual relationships. It is precisely the remarkably few models available to many of us that make polyamorous relationships an exciting place to envision (and recover) more liberating ways of relationality.

One person can’t be everything you want, give you everything you need, be everything to you, full stop. My partner and I have some irreconcilable differences: She won’t play iMessage games with me, and I find any Yorgos Lanthimos movie less accessible than The Favourite too disturbing to sit through, even when my doing so would mean a lot to her. We each go elsewhere for these things. But I believe strongly that, although no one person can be everything to you, any one person can be anything, to you or otherwise, and that to write off your partner’s ability to rise to any specific occasion out of hand is to reduce them from a person to a character.

What does any of this have to do with monogamy? The structure of monogamy per se doesn’t necessitate that both people strive to see each other as infinitely possible or multiple. This is obvious to anyone who’s been in contact with nearly any major work of literature of the past century or, barring that, an average married couple. Neither, of course, does the structure of polyamory preclude mutual growth. But for monogamy to be fulfilling long-term, each person involved has to commit on the grounds of the other’s infinite potential, to choose them with the full faith that what they’re choosing is more than they already know and more than they have already seen. In order for monogamy not to feel limiting, you have no option but to strive to see an unlimited multiplicity of people and possibilities within your partner. I recognize, Triangle, that the drive toward stagnation can be high in a two-person unit. You might carve out certain grooves, fall into certain ruts, and see the same faults every day. But this tendency makes the effort of faith in potential and the actual practice of change even more necessary: These are the only antidotes to inertia. When growth is an imperative, I find it easier to dedicate myself to it; when faith is an imperative, I find it easier to trust that someone else is, wonderfully, greater than the calcified version of them that lives in my head. Think of monogamy as a generative constraint, like a poetic form.

In narrowing your scope, you can sometimes broaden it.

—CT

ILLUSTRATION TALIA MERMIN

Take, for example, the stunning historical fact that when industrialist Henry Ford doubled the minimum wage for his employees in 1914, the requirement for higher pay came with the stipulation that workers be subject to background checks by the company’s Sociological Department. Workers were eligible to receive higher wages only if their relationships conformed to the heteronormative standards of a monogamous nuclear family, because workers whose family wellbeing was tied to their employment were thought to be less likely to organize for better working conditions. If these highly objectionable HR decisions are any indication, weakening community ties through the imposition of monogamy is essential to strengthening corporate power. As scholar bell hooks writes in All About Love, “Communities sustain life—not nuclear families or the ‘couple’…Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin.” Why is marital monogamy, for example, the only state-sanctioned relationship that encourages incomesharing? How can we normalize commitment within other types of kinship?

In a romantic relationship, though, I don’t want resignation; I want faith that these traits, which I find it difficult not to see as fixed, can, in fact, be changed with time and work. Generous, persevering, brave, humble—I ask my partner to have faith that I could be these things and, in return, I promise that I’ll work towards them. Knowing that someone is relying on me in particular, as their singular partner, to try to embody these ideals makes me more able to see myself as having infinite potential, as capable of real growth. It helps me to see myself as multifaceted and multiple, not trapped in a safely stable identity guarded on all sides by several layers of defensive bullshit.

DESIGN XINGXING SHOU

In addition to these frankly obvious delights, dear Erotic Triangle, there is a strong case to be made for ditching monogamy’s heavy cultural baggage at the first convenient opportunity. (And this particular columnist, happily situated in an open relationship, has a vested and playful interest in combating the a priori assumption that monogamy is the only morally acceptable way to be romantically involved.) The thoroughly ubiquitous ideal of finding one’s soulmate and building a monogamous life together— complete with 2.5 kids, a government-subsidized mortgage, and a dearth of other lovers—does a whole lot of spectacularly shady ideological work.

We need not linger over the infamous and theoretically well-worn means by which monogamy—when institutionalized—upholds gender hierarchies through its attendant logics of ownership and possession. Perhaps more subtly, the escapist joy offered by one’s ‘true love’ seems, at least to this Dear Indy columnist, to glamorize life under an economy that is otherwise all-consuming. And the monogamous expectation that we should pour all our love into one person dissuades us from cultivating the kinship networks needed not only for resistant organizing but also for a meaningful and autonomous existence within and outside a capitalist state.

At my worst, Triangle, I can be a skittish, defeatist person with a very high prey drive in any conversation that could, from some twisted perspective, be won. I don’t offer this information as an exercise in self-flagellation but instead to give you a realistic sense of what I’m working with here. Many parts of being in a relationship do not come easily to me. If I were friends with a clone of myself, I imagine I’d resign myself to his catastrophizing, navel-gazing, and rhetorical bloodlust and go elsewhere for a calming presence, warm support, and amicable sparring, among other things.

TEXT SARA VAN HORN + CAL TURNER

For me, what makes a romantic relationship different from love in unharnessed (or otherwise-harnessed) form is the shared assumption that there is no set limit to who I’m capable of being. If there’s a kind of care I don’t know how to give, I can learn; if there’s a kind of connection I’m scared to make, I can decide whether I want to try pushing through to the other side of the fear.

—SVH

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Housing is the Cure

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Raise Your

Weekly Car Rally: Solidarity with Incarcerated Loved Ones Sunday, February 28 3:00-4PM EST Rhode lsand Divisoin of Motor Vehicles

A weekly car rally from the Division of Motor Vehicles to the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions has been organized by the family members of incarcerated people for the next couple of months to demand a robust response from the RI government over the massive COVID outbreaks within RI prisons. We at the Indy ask you to make some noise against the racialized injustice that is preserved by the carceral system and the inequalities in healthcare that have been exposed by the pandemic.

To learn more, visit this Facebook event: https://fb.me/e/y37jBTHq.

VOICES Fang Community Bail Fund

The FANG community is an abolitionist group that seeks to free folks being held in jails in Rhode Island and Massachusetts because they cannot afford bail. As the COVID pandemic has resulted in massive outbreaks within prisons, this work has found renewed importance. To oppose the cash bail system—an oppressive tool utilized by the carceral and capitalist prisonindustrial complex—you can donate via the CashApp at $fangbailfund, or at this link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/fangbailfund.

AMOR Community COVID-19 Support

The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance’s fundraiser helps purchase basic necessities such as food, cleaning and sanitation supplies, and baby formula, as well as provides direct financial support for childcare, housing, and other basic needs for the most marginalized of our community, including undocumented folks, laborers, and people with chronic illness. You can donate at this link: https://gofund.me/09e8b76b.

Mutual Aid & Bail Funds

Project LETS Trauma Healing Fund for Black Folks

A Disability Justice organization, Project LETS seeks to prioritize solidarity in action and redistribute funds to those who are most directly impacted by structural violence. This fund centers the healing needs of Black folks, especially those who are disabled, queer, and trans.

Donate at: www.PayPal.me/projectlets or Venmo @projectlets.

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Some call Benefit Street the pride of College Hill. I don’t. There are many old and dignified looking buildings here, home to many overpriced yet undersized student apartments. Sensuous, historical light fixtures cast a warm glow over the street in the evening hours, especially in the rain. Come to Benefit for a night walk with your lover.

Afterwards, nothing will ever be the same.

Broad Street is a hike from College Hill, but easily accessible by bus from Kennedy Plaza. The street has a decidedly international character as opposed to the whiter, plainer neighborhoods nearer to College Hill.

Come here for Dominican and Guatemalan food, as well as the popular Mekong Market. Just make sure not to get lost in the graveyard along the way.

GOINGS ON Trinity Beer Garden Comedy Series

Friday, February 26 7:00pm-10:00pm, 2 Kenned Plaza

Every week The Trinity Beer Garden and Glue Factory Comedy Club showcase some of the best comedians in New England at an outdoors socially distanced show downtown. Tickets are free but seating is limited, so gather round your friends and head to Kennedy Plaza for a hearty laugh this Friday. You will find all details at this link: https://events.rimonthly.com/event/62147049

Weaving Together

Recurring weekly on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday until March 13. 11:00am-3:00pm, 18 Valley Street, Jamestown

Weaving Together is an exhibit that brings together four organizations supporting artists with disabilities—Artists’ Exchange, Flying Shuttles, Looking Upwards, and Outsider Collective. The artists use fabric, yarn, paper, branches, and more to create pieces that emphasize the intertwining of ideas.

Here at the Indy we find solace in creative spaces that encourage collaborative art, and hope to see you there one of these days.

Friendship Street is currently friendless. The street, which wraps around Downtown Providence, is lined mostly by parking lots and parking garages. Two new high-rise apartment buildings— housing mostly Brown students—are at the end of the street. The Indy has visited on bicycle. It is not a fun trip. This is one of our favorite streets in the aspirational sense; we hope that one day Friendship Street, with sane urban development, will reflect its name and not asphalt.

Providence Flea at the Farm Fresh RI Market Hall Sunday, February 28 (ongoing) 11:00AM-3:00PM, 10 Sims Avenue

This pandemic season, we at the Indy find ourselves afflicted by a curious, often uncontrollable desire to thrift shop. Luckily for us, we have Providence’s award-winning vintage flea market at our doorstep, where you can buy from local artisans, support small businesses and community non-profits, and indulge your whims, all while shopping safely of course. For more information, follow @

providenceflea on Instagram.

DESIGN MALVIK A AGARWAL

Saturday, February 27, 8:00 PM EST, Rhode Island State House Despite the Center for Disease Control’s moratorium on evictions until March because of COVID, landlords continue to use legal loopholes to evict their tenants. Evicting people in the middle of a pandemic is inconceivable to us. So, we ask you to join us at a masked and socially distant rally organized by DARE this weekend to protest against pandemic evictions. Visit the Instagram event at: https://www.instagram.com/p/