The College Hill Independent Volume 42 Issue 7

VOLUME 42 ISSUE 7 26 MAR 2021

THIS ISSUE

STAFF

Toe Touch Olivia Diamond

03 FEATS

‘Comfort Women’ Anabelle Johnston

05 NEWS

Resources for Asian Communities One Month to Crypto Twitter Bowen Chen

WWW.THEINDY.ORG THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS PRINTED BY TCI PRESS IN SEEKONK, MASSACHUSETTS

02 WEEK IN REVIEW

All Hail West Georgia Andy Rickert

TWITTER @THEINDY_TWEETS

INSTAGRAM @THEINDYPVD

Week in Season Premieres Ricardo Gomez & Muram Ibrahim & Issra Said

COVER

WEEK IN REVIEW Loughlin Neuert Nick Roblee-Strauss NEWS Bilal Memon Rhythm Rastogi Giacamo Sartorelli ARTS Amelia Anthony Nell Salzman METRO Mara Cavallaro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini

07

SCIENCE + TECH Bowen Chen Anabelle Johnston

08 S & T

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

Synesthesia Amelia Wyckoff Five Poems Adrian Oteiza

09 LIT

Lost Futures Lucas Gelfond

11

Cashing In Miya Lohmeier

12

Indy Poster Ella Rosenblatt

13

X Yukti Agarwal Seth Israel

14 EPHEMERA

SOCIAL MEDIA Justin Scheer

Nothing to Say Joey Han

ARTS

DEAR INDY Gemma Sack Cal Turner Sara Van Horn

ARTS

EPHEMERA Liana Chaplain Anna Kerber

Why Nursing Home Residents are Calling for Help Nell Salzman

15

Children’s Museums in the Pandemic Leo Gordon

17

METRO

The Collage Hill Independent Amelia Anthony

18

X

Dear Indy

20

FROM THE EDITORS

METRO

-=====_..._ `~.

.~

MISSION

-=====_..._ ~.

.~`

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Repeat after me: This will be a bountiful week filled with blessings, blessings conducive to success. I belong to the present but also a future of my design, a ubiquitous global singularity of infinite immersion, immeasurable oneness. I do not regret actions from my past. In fact, I have never made a mistake. I seek out modes of sustainable passive income. I engage with content, motivation toward a handsome haircut. Everything is falling into place; I see it clearly now. MY outfit for tomorrow? Good pants and shirt. Great hat and cute shoes. Nike elite socks. Yes, I see it clearly now. Spring is happening and the flowers are valid. I manifested this, spring, the flowers, Nike elites. I am involved in the environment; I made the environment. Everything I see, taste, smell, hear; all experience a transcendent eternal euphoria. Eating balanced meals.

- JS & AR

STAFF WRITERS Leela Berman Matthew Cuschieri Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Tammuz Frankel CJ Gan DESIGN EDITOR Lucas Gelfond Ella Rosenblatt Leo Gordon Gaya Gupta COVER Evie Hidysmith COORDINATOR Rose Houglet Sage Jennings Amelia Wyckoff Muram Ibrahim DESIGNERS Nicole Kim Malvika Agarwal Alina Kulman Anna Brinkhuis Olivia Mayeda Clara Epstein Drake Rebman Miya Lohmeier Issra Said Owen McCallumJustin Scheer Keeler Sacha Sloan Isaac McKenna Jieun (Michelle) Song Ella Spungen Mehek Vohra COPY EDITORS Sojung (Erica) Yun Alyscia Batista Grace Berg ILLUSTRATION Elaine Chen EDITOR Megan Donohue Hannah Park Nina Fletcher Christine Huynh ILLUSTRATORS Madison Lease Sylvia Atwood Jasmine Li Hannah Chang Ophelia DuchesneMANAGING Malone EDITORS Camille Gros Alana Baer Sophie Foulkes Anchita Dasgupta Baylor Fuller Peder Schaefer Mara Jovanovic Olivia Lunger SENIOR EDITORS Talia Mermin Audrey Buhain Jessica Minker Andrew Rickert Rachelle Shao Ivy Scott Joshua Sun Xing Xing Shou Evelyn Tan Cal Turner Joyce Tullis Sara Van Horn Floria Tsui Dorothy Zhang MVP Clara Epstein BUSINESS Jerry Chen Evan Lincoln Isabelle Yang

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.

WEEK IN REVIEW

SPRING FLINGS À LA TOAD

Getting nailed before the breeding pools is a matter of life and death, but for frogs finding love in the time of climate change, roadkill is all part of the chase.

As traffic ramps up after the pandemic lockdowns, road rage will again add to the anxiety of frogs trying to perform spring. Frog folks interested in community science in RI and helping wood frogs ease the pressure off their big night can sign up to collect roadkill data through FrogWatch organized by the Roger Williams Park Zoo. In order to maintain the level of objectivity needed to be a citizen scientist, remember one rule: don’t touch, just observe.

At it’s best, these superficial scenes give us secondhand embarrassment with their failed attempts at ‘wokeness’ and not much else. These Indy contributors can sense the language of white millennial women, who could only have been on one side of these microaggressions and write like it. Thinking they’re helping somebody, when really they are cashing a check. Yet, at its worst, Ginny and Georgia may leave others, especially the show’s primarily young audience, with unrealistic and potentially harmful takeaways. Most of the microaggressions never come to a resolution, rather they act in service of shock value and plot transitions. One can only scoff at the scene where Ginny blackmails her racist teacher into signing a college recommendation letter.

We know full well it takes more than a few remarks, and nothing short of a criminal case, for a white man to lose his job. So really, biracial and Black teens are shown no tools to navigate their experiences in white spaces, their experiences becoming an on-screen spectacle. And it’s nothing new.

Much like any ‘woke’ television show, we already know Ginny and Georgia must have the token dark skin Black girl, Bracia, whose sole purpose is to provide character development for the problematic protagonist. And trust us, Ginny needs some guidance. With Bracia’s total screen time amounting to ~ten minutes across all episodes, she is portrayed as a support system to Ginny, since Bracia is Ginny’s only Black friend at school. Unlike Bracia’s portray-

al, we noticed that the creators had absolutely no issue centering the white characters in the show. In fact, it seemed a little too easy for them. But, the creators aren’t heartless. Compared to older shows that would often not credit Black actors altogether, this show does Tameka Griffiths, the actress who plays Bracia, the honor of placing her 32nd in the credits.

In the obligatory Halloween episode, Bracia is annoyed with Ginny for dressing up as Brittney Spears (her mother opts to highlight her southern charm as antebellum icon Scarlet O’Hara). Bracia later explains her irritation by reminding Ginny that she doesn’t have the same privilege of being able to conceal her race with a blonde wig. We agree with her sentiment about colorism, but Netflix, girl, no one is worried about whether or not their lightskinned Black friend is wearing a Party City wig on Halloween.

Those interested in hearing the tragic chorus of an army northeastern wood frogs can register for training available online through March 31.

-RG

DESIGN MEHEK VOHRA ILLUSTRATION JOYCE TULLIS

Whoever believes that the first sign of spring is a trite little flower sprout should abandon all hope of ever being truly tuned in to the finer rhythms of Rhode Island’s temperate seasons. In southern New England, home to alt-weeklies and other seasonal trivialities, the real locals and ecologically attuned know that spring’s arrival is first found in the carnal cries of freshly thawed wood frogs migrating to their local breeding puddles.

Like tiny croaking gods that spit in the face of winter and death, northeastern wood frogs produce a natural antifreeze that enables them to freeze almost completely solid. While lock-downed humans spent last winter impotent yet animated, the frogs sidehopped and deflected another season of celibacy and regret by slipping into a state of frozen foreplay.

By mixing urine and glucose, wood frogs swaddle the disparate cells of their untimely bodies in self-produced pee-antifreeze to harness unspeakable inhuman alchemies, blurring the lines between animate and inanimate, lumpy frog and frog-like lump.

The pressure-to-potty occurs as soon as the winter ice crystals start forming on froggy skin, initiating the chemical reaction that signals it’s time to lather up. According to herpetologist Mike Cavaliere, the Audubon Society of Rhode Island’s stewardship specialist, “Its brain shuts down, its heart stops, its lungs stop, everything stops for months. It’s like they’re in suspended animation.” Like an assemblage of thousands of very condensed piss-powered cryogenic chambers, wood frogs play opossum to the tune of a whole season.

In mid to late March—this very week!—when spring makes itself felt, these stone-cold, rock-hard, wood-frogs thaw out and their hearts begin to beat anew. Over the course of a day post-thaw, RI’s am-

phibious hibernators get soft, start hopping, eating, and get hard again.

For these fair weather lovers, wobble-squattling to the breeding pools doesn’t come without risk. The annual migration of earnestly eager wood frogs necessitates crossing RI’s busy roads in order to reach the preferred vernal breeding ponds. The rushed trek often results in mass-amphibious death. Thankfully, last year’s annual migration coincided with the onset of the pandemic lockdowns and the subsequent reductions in road traffic. As a result, nearly double the amount of frogs made it to their breeding rendezvous.

“Road mortality is one of the great seemingly unassessed sources of pressure for amphibians,” said Greg LeClair, a community scientist who organizes an amphibian data collection project monitoring the roadkill of migrating frogs and salamanders, aptly named The Big Night. During the big night, volunteers at hundreds of sites around Maine turnout to watch the frogs try to get to work. “The average is 20 percent of amphibians at any road crossing will get nailed by a car in a given year,” Leclair said.

TEXT RICARDO GOMEZ, MURAM IBRAHIM, ISSRA SAID

week in season premieres

GINNY & G EORGIA Another Show About a Light-Skinned Biracial Ginny and Georgia has become this month’s most watched and most talked about Netflix series in the United States, a drama that follows a teenager, Ginny, and her single mom, Georgia, as they try to navigate a new small town and their own relationship. Comments range from praise for the show’s broad representation of characters to critiques of its algorithmic writing of teen tropes and soapy plotlines. One scene in particular went viral on Twitter, stirring a larger conversation about the show’s poor handling of the protagonist’s biracial identity, played

by Antonia Gentry. In a couple’s spat, Ginny’s boyfriend, Hunter (Mason Temple), addresses her identity head on in what they name ‘the oppression Olympics’: “I’ve never seen you pound back jerk chicken. Last time I checked, Brody twerks better than you. And I like your poems, but your bars could use a little bit more work homie. So, really how Black are you?” Sticking true to Netflix’s swirl agenda, both actors are half white, Gentry mixed with Black and Temple with Taiwanese. Of course, white writers and producers lead the staff, but two Black writers, Brianna Belser and Mike Gauyo, are credited for this episode (a deliberate move?). The jerk chicken detail, which at first seemed to us as an alternative to fried, is a contribution from Gentry, who is half Jamaican herself. It seems even writers of color cannot escape Netflix’s tried and true hit-show formula: a token character with little to no lines and hastily written microaggressions.

- MI & IS

02

FEATS

TEXT ANDY RICKERT

DESIGN ELLA ROSENBLATT

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

d

03

L I A A I H G L R L A O E G T S WE

Critique at 300 words per minute

Erica gave me a flash drive and an alibi: “You didn’t get this from me.” Inside, there were about a dozen Microsoft Word files with titles like “Mao Kritik,” “Timecube Kiritik,” “Nobody Gives a Shit.” The first file on the list, “Consult Ashtar CP,” would be my opening argument in the next round. That was seven years ago. I was a highschool freshman competing at a policy debate tournament at Cal State Northridge. My team was on the negative side, meaning our goal was to poke holes in the policy plan proposed by the affirmative team. The ‘Ashtar’ file contained a counterplan to read from my laptop during the debate round, a course of action I would argue as an alternative to the affirmative policy. The document opens: “The United States federal government should engage in genuine council, prior and binding, with Ashtar Galactic Command regarding the mandates of the affirmative plan.” My opponents would read eight minutes of policy aimed towards substantially increasing our economic engagement with Venezuela, and I would respond with a message from Neila Xaoh of the Galactic Federation of YTEVIAN: “In this very moment we prepare our ships to land and evacuate this planet. You will enter our spaceships to live in a peaceful world where lambs play with tigers and there are rivers of honey and milk.”

Policy is the oldest form of intramural debate in the country. It is practiced in high school and college, with a demographic ranging from nerds who want to be president and nerds who want to read Žižek. There is truly no other social ecology like that of policy debate, both the textbook resume filler and deeply implicated in leftist critical theory. Tournaments are two day affairs on college campuses.

When the auditoriums are empty for the weekend, the debaters take over. Since debaters have to travel constantly for these tournaments, competition often

defines their social and extracurricular life. The basic premise of debate has remained consistent for decades: two teams debate a policy decision and a panel of judges determines the winner. The topic of the debate stays the same in every round and only changes after a year has passed. Every topic is a vague policy to hypothetically be enacted, i.e: “The United States federal government should substantially increase its protection of water resources in the United States.” One team affirms the policy—meaning they explain how to implement it and why it will be beneficial—and their opponents explain how it will cause harm. Whichever team better argues their position is the winner, but with no official framework to evaluate debate rounds, the judge is essentially free to decide what it means to argue better. Judges are often former debaters who tend to evaluate debates the same way they were evaluated when they were competitors.

Over time, the insularity of the debate world engenders a strict set of conventions that resembles a language of its own. This ‘language’ becomes the air policy debate breathes, but these rules are not set in stone, leading the most innovative teams to find success by breaking the previously established norms.

While not a formal requirement, nearly every debate contention takes the form of a series of ‘cards’ read in sequence. Since debaters are allowed to print out evidence to read during the round, cutting out the most important lines from a source and gluing them on a new piece of paper has emerged as a successful strategy. Today, most debaters ‘cut cards’ at summer debate camp in Microsoft Word by bolding and underlining the essential text in a document of the source and lowering the font size of the superfluous text to something almost illegible. Before cards shifted to digital, teams would carry four or five 10-gallon tubs filled with cards to every tournament. Laptops now fill this role,

but both allowed debaters to carry cards for every possible scenario in a round. Although not a formal rule, debaters are expected to give their opponents a copy of their cards through email or flash drive and upload them to a public debate wiki before each tournament. Debaters often bring cards into their arguments that they themselves did not write, that very well could have been written by the opposing team. There is thus a code of honor among debaters that competition works best when all debaters are drawing from the same pool of knowledge at the expense of the strategic advantage of having tricks up one’s sleeve.

Cards eventually become memetic. Suppose a team wins a tournament using a certain piece of evidence; more teams will use this evidence, and as it propagates, more teams will develop counter evidence. Cards are useful because they allow for long complicated ideas to be stripped to their essential points, creating more time efficient argumentation.

Each card is given a title by the debater that further summarizes the content and lends it a function like a chess-piece. As certain cards circulate more in debate rounds, their titles become like metonymy or fetish. A debater still must read the text of the card for the sake of argumentation, but it would be unusual for an adversary to nitpick at the body. While the majority of every speech is spent reading from cards, this is not to say that debaters are mindlessly parroting ideas. Rather, the strategy of debate becomes choosing which cards to read when and articulating why one card beats another.

Most debates start with cards that summarize a Current Affairs article, but as the round progresses, they begin to engage with the theory of debate itself. For example, when faced with an argument outside the conventions of debate, a team can run ‘topicality’ cards extolling the pedagogical value of

WW

+++ I did not cut the Ashtar cards. They were authored a decade prior by the West Georgia Liberation Front (WGLF), a college team whose legacy has been immortalized in a low budget documentary from 2008, Debate Team. With no mainstream success, the documentary, which follows a handful of teams in the 2005 college circuit, spread entirely through word of mouth. Between rounds at tournaments, I would watch the handful of (now deleted) clips that had been uploaded to YouTube with the other JV debaters. Most of the teams featured in the documentary fit the stereotypes of high level debaters: analytical, cold-blooded, and willing to do anything to win. The documentary follows the final tournament of their senior year, and many scenes are tinged with the heartbreak of knowing that a loss means they will never be champions.

The WGLF were unlike any of their competitors. The footage of their rounds was like a fever

dream; Duchamp’s fountain if it sprayed water on anyone who got too close, Lucky’s monologue from Waiting for Godot at 2x speed, Eric Cartman if he read Foucault. Alex Jones. Imagine the anxiety before it’s your turn to speak in class, the nightmare scenarios where you stumble, lose your words, and say something ridiculous—their speeches were ten of those scenarios happening simultaneously. They were not above classic playground mimicry, repeating something back in an exaggerated voice. I know you are but what am I. They were also not above stepping down from the podium and laying down in the audience, pouring water over the heads of their opponents, kneeling, begging, dry humping— when provoked—all while speaking at 300 words per minute. In one clip, both speakers spread their cases at the same time. In another, their opponents use valuable minutes of their speech to literally pray to God. “IT’S TIME TO TALK ABOUT SPACE, AND SPATIALITY, AND THE CONCOMITANT SPATIALIZATION OF SPACE,” begins the WGLF affirmative case, “AND HOW THAT’S RELEVANT TO ALL THE SPACES THAT ENCOMPASS OUR DABAIT-SPACE. IN ORDER TO ACCESS ALTERITY AND INFINITE RESPECT FOR THE OTHERNESS OF THE OTHER, WE MUST PERFORMATIVELY ENACT A PARALLEL AFFIRMATION OF THE SPACE INHABITED BY OTHERNESS.” At the time of the documentary, the WGLF was ranked seventh in the nation.

If the WGLF had any legitimate philosophy, it was that debate is ‘vacuous.’ The way that source material and knowledge is formulated and circulated inevitably creates an echo chamber not unlike the universities where the source material is drawn from.

The WGLF was not the first team to point this out; it was common practice for teams to run ‘kritiques’ that borrowed from critical theory to shift a debate into a conversation about its relationship to the outside world. What made the WGLF unique was their use of parody, a language they called ‘post-vacuous.’ Rather than critique debate from the outside, the WGLF overidentified with debate conventions until they exploded. Their cards, which are cut from conspiracy theorists, propagandists, and satirists, are demanded to be taken at face value per these conventions. In one clip, the WGLF reads a card from none other than Mao Zedong explaining how one should be deprived of the right to speak on any matter they have not experienced first hand. Since their opponents built their arguments from evidence found in books (what Mao called book-worship), they were divorced from ‘actual experience,’ an argument the judge found sufficient enough to give the win to the WGLF. In another clip, they attack the way cards circulate: “The affirmative is boring as shit...we have heard their case like a million times and heard about nuke war and extinction even more, we literally almost fell asleep during that round and polls prove nobody believes this shit.” The polls in question were from the Onion. The WGLF also won that round.

The WGLF would rarely win on the weight of their cards alone. Their goal was to bait their opponents, by whatever means they had, into calling them unfair or offensive. Their opponents inevitably pointed out how reading from the Onion undermines the pedagogical value of debate: that debaters are the “future leaders of the world,” and that this space allowed for the development of critical thinking skills that would help them lead. The WGLF would use their opponents’ blind reverence to make a point: “Consider the massive amounts of lawyers and policymakers who we have taught to be better genociders.” The strategy employed by the WGLF, although vulgar and immature on the surface, approaches the unanswered question of the critical theorists of the 20th century: how could something as barbaric as genocide be enacted by the civilized, modern state? Debaters who respond to their antics by crying that the rules should be followed to learn how to lead the country are forced to answer how politicians who followed prim and proper conventions were able to commit a Holocaust.

It is unclear whether the WGLF actually believed in this, or if it was just another way to win.

While they ended up losing in the quarter-finals, what served as a political critique was also an effective strategy: either take their arguments at face value and lose because you have no cards about Ashtar,

or bring up the rules and lose because you’re using the same rhetorical logic of the war criminal politicians you might grow up to be. Debate becomes ‘da bait.’ The irony of debate—that by convention it’s hermetically sealed from anything outside the room where it’s happening—means that a team can make a logically sound argument about the faulty ethics of debate while not living by those ethics outside the room. Even as the WGLF mocked debate, they were still doing debate. Like any successful strategy, their cards rippled through the community. There were copycats, but no team was nearly as successful. The cards began to carry a certain taboo, not because of their profanity or power but due to their impotence.

Oftentimes, they spread through older debaters, like Erica handing over a flash drive behind our coaches back. One case on the flash drive was prefaced with a warning from the WGLF: “NOTHING IN THIS FILE IS FUNNY. YOU ARE NOT FUNNY. WE ARE NOT FUNNY. DO NOT RUN ANYTHING IN HERE WITH THE INTENTION OF BEING FUNNY.” I did not heed this advice and read the Ashtar counterplan. I wasn’t approaching the case with any goal of over-identifying the contradictions of debate—I was honestly really bored and wanted to screw around. Unfortunately, my opponents had cards on how Ashtar was a reptilian, so my alternative plan would therefore grant the reptilian order a new level of power. The judge gave the round to my opponents, explaining between rips from his vape that Ashtar was in fact a reptilian, just like Obama.

Since the WGLF critique took the form of cards, whatever might have been subversive in reading a conspiracy about Ashtar in a debate round was gone, and in its place was another argument that could be met with any card willing to take it at face value.

Stripped of its inflammatory context, something as ridiculous as Ashtar could be debated like any other policy.

I would quit debate by the end of the year, but at my last tournament, I debated against another JV team that ran the Onion ‘nobody gives a shit’ card.

They argued that since ‘nobody gives a shit’ about debate, and everything is the same, the judge should award the ballot to the most original team. Their version of originality was eating their lunch during the remainder of the speeches, and one of them did a horrible freestyle rap. They lost the round, and the irony was also lost on them that their point about originality was far from original. Behind the tragedy of a critique appropriated, distorted, and stripped of its efficacy is a more fundamental fear: a joke told too many times losing its punch.

FEATS

debate and how their opponents, in undermining this with obscure evidence, then deserve to lose. Their opponents can then cite their own meta-evidence, explaining how their actions are fair or that the burden of “topicality” isn’t enough to base the verdict of a debate on. While debate begins over a policy decision, the argument that determines the winner often becomes something completely removed from the realm of foreign affairs. Because there are no rules or formal frameworks, the act of debating becomes an act of developing such a framework. Unlike other forms of debate with narrowly defined rubrics, the policy judge not only evaluates the debate but decides what the debate is.

The development of the card as a rigid form grants its language an overdetermined quality, sustained by a series of contradictions and totally alien to a layperson. Language within the body of a card, after its title, is nonessential, insofar as its meaning is subordinated to the name and function given to the card. At the highest levels of debate, subtle differences in the body of a card might make a difference, but most debaters can take and use a card as if it had a fixed meaning. The act of titling a card is of course just one reading/analysis of its evidence, but most debates depend upon the title as bestowing a fixed meaning, leaving the internal language as pillars that hold up the bridge. Consequently, the language within the card is still essential in a very technical sense; while conventions maintain that the entire auditorium tunes out when the body of a card is recited, the fine print still needs to be read.

No bridge without the pillars. The most technical debaters will read their cards at over 300 words per minute, an unintelligible flow of language punctuated intermittently by shallow breaths, often in pairs, not unlike the sound I imagine a squirrel makes when drowning. If each card is a chess piece, reading your cards three times faster than conversational speech means two extra queens.

Another product of the card-form is that every card enters a ‘link chain’ of cards that leads to extinction, either through nuclear war or climate change. If the judge has to decide between two cards winning a debate, since they both link to human extinction, both cards will hold equal weight. When I debated, my affirmative case proposed lifting the US embargo with Cuba exclusively for rice trade, since I had cards that demonstrated how Cuba was once the biggest importer of rice from Texas, meaning the embargo caused Texas rice farms to go out of business and get paved over, leading to a decrease in acreage of wetlands, areas which migratory birds are endemic to, who will eventually go extinct without a place to live, and whose absence in the global ecosystem will set off a domino effect resulting in the extinction of all life. I would explain all of this in seven minutes and sometimes even win. If I lost, it was to cards with evidence that the wetlands weren’t shrinking, thereby cutting the chain at the source, or cards that said that trading with Cuba would enrage China and set off a series of events that would lead to nuclear war. Since cards posit a hyper-literal version of truth, arguing against the chain logic of a debate case would amount to thinking in another language.

While an individual card might be contended with, or implicated into another chain of events, the structure of the chain and the form of the card are taken as a given.

ANDY RICKERT B’21.5 votes aff.

04

‘COMFORT WOMEN’ The dangers of policing and racialized misogyny toward women of Asian descent

TEXT ANABELLE JOHNSTON

DESIGN MICHELLE SONG

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH CHANG

NEWS

content warning: racism, sexism, gun-violence

05

The sun sat heavy overhead, slung low in the expansive midwestern sky. Inside, however, I could hardly tell where I was, much less the conditions of the midMarch day trudging slowly onward beyond the thin walls of the single story building. Each of the four spas I had visited was like this: dimly lit and self-consciously tranquil. Faint flute melodies floated through the windowless hallway, which always branched off into partially obscured massage rooms. Somewhere, water babbled artificially. A maneki neko cat perched on a countertop beckoned me inside while an Asian woman ushered me out. “No English,” she would say. The extra syllable and upward lilt of her sh reminded me of my grandmother.

I wasn’t surprised by their unwillingness to respond. Asian spas are notoriously opaque, often run by an elusive owner and staffed by immigrant women.

The combination of language barriers, precarious immigration status, and distrust of authority place many masseuses at the mercy of their employer and customers. Lack of regulation leaves workers susceptible to wage theft, threats of deportation, and sexual harassment, creating a workplace shrowded in secrecy and prone to exploitation. This pervasive, mandated silence creates a loop that feeds on and reinforces orientalist assumptions about the women who work in these spas. To be a woman of Asian descent is to be the subject of fetish, a coalescence of misogyny and racism that hypersexualizes its object and then blames her for that hypersexuality. Our beings and bodies are glorified because they do not belong to us. In a few cases, this is merely uncomfortable. In most, to occupy an exotic body is dangerous.

Around 5 PM on Tuesday, March 16, 2021, a 21-year-old gunman drove to a strip mall near Acworth, a suburb northwest of Atlanta, and entered Young’s Asian Massage, where he shot five people, killing all but one. He then drove south to the Buckhead neighborhood and murdered four more people— three at Gold Spa and one at Aromatherapy Spa, located across the street.

Around 9 PM, the gunman was apprehended while driving to Florida, where he intended to continue his rampage. Of the eight victims who passed, six were women of Asian descent. Soon C. Park, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong A. Yue, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng were full people with full lives. They were murdered because the gunman saw them as “temptations” that he “wanted to eliminate,” according to statements made to the Cherokee County Police; no information has been released addressing his motivations for shooting the other victims, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, and Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz. Due to the indiscriminate nature of the attacks, people who were not necessarily involved with the massage businesses could have been targeted.

Officials reported that the perpetrator was a frequent visitor of the spas and struggled with what he self-identified as a sex addiction. Reluctant to label the killing a hate crime, officials relayed the gunman’s claims that race did not play a role in his decision to target the businesses, nor did they acknowledge that this crime purportedly fuelled by the shooter’s “sex addiction” fits into long history of racialized fetishization of Asian women in the United States.

In The Hypersexuality of Race, film scholar and San Francisco State University Professor Dr. Celine Parreñas Shimizu traces both the artistic representations of hypersexual Asian seductresses and the legal codification of Asian women as vessels for excess in sexuality. The first restrictive immigration law passed in the United States, the Page Act of 1875, was targeted specifically at Chinese women, barring them from entry on the grounds of “immoral” behavior. This exclusionary law reflected an anti-Asian sentiment rooted in an unfounded fear of promiscuity and racial impurity, predating the explicit barring of Chinese immigrants under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Shimizu points to the pop cultural representations of this anxiety with the recurring story of an Asian woman who loves a white man in excess—Madame Butterfly (1904), Toll of the Sea (1923), The Good Woman of Szechuan (1941), Miss Saigon (1989), among others. These narratives otherize women of Asian descent; they are too much yet still empty, docile yet unpredictable. The contradictions imposed upon Asian women are dehumanizing, rendering them both as unknowable and unworthy of knowing.

Central to these representations and the violence they invite is an inherent lack of agency. Women of Asian descent are often relegated to the realm of the invisible, condemned to take up less space, to provide comfort through silence.

Popular pornography that emerged in the wake of the Korean War eroticized this role, presenting the Korean wife as the ideal sexual and domestic servant to the white soldier. ‘Comfort stations’—hot springs and spas introduced by the Eighth Army in 1950—popped up across territories formerly occupied by Japan such as Korea, Malaysia, Okinawa, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam throughout the Cold War. Militaristic slang that referred to these rest and relaxation sites (R&R) as “rock and ruin,” “rape and run,” and “rape and restitution” only partially conveys the brutalities faced by Asian women, including incarceration, forced labor, rape, and abandonment of mixed-race children.

The shooter’s attempt to reduce six women to the temptation they posed to him reflects this larger cultural legacy of viewing Asian bodies as vessels for disease and desire. Contextualized within an uptick in violence toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the past year—and exacerbated by anti-Asian rhetoric propagated by the former president—the tragedy disappoints, pains, but does not surprise. Now, as politicians increase police presence in Asian American communities, purportedly to increase public safety, women of Asian descent are placed in further precarity. +++

By March 18, after resisting labeling the shootings as a hate crime, many major news organizations had begun to link the killings to potential sex work, some going as far as to definitively refer to the spas as ‘massage parlors’—places that offer both traditional massages and sexual services. In light of the killer’s statement, the connection to sex work is unsurprising; approximately 9,000 illicit massage parlors account for a three billion dollar industry annually, and are often indistinguishable from strip mall spas offering acupuncture and pain relief. The efficacy of the massage parlor relies on layers of secrecy; ‘beneficial owners’ typically collect from multiple establishments while hiding behind site managers who appear only on paperwork. To avoid government shutdowns, these parlors are connected through a loose network that regularly shuffles workers around after a few months in one location. In many cases, the women who work in massage parlors arrive from countries across Asia without a place to live and are indebted to loan sharks who withhold passports and immigration papers. Physically grueling restaurant work yields low pay and demands long hours, leaving many susceptible to manipulative recruitment tactics that misrepresent massage parlors as a quick way to pay off debts. Once employed, most workers receive a minute percentage of the earnings made from a massage and are either coerced or encouraged to supplement this income through sex work.

“What we have heard from women we talked to, people have been assumed to sell sex, even when that’s not what they do,” said JM Wong of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project in an interview with Mother Jones. “And clients take liberties with them.”

The gunman’s former roommate claimed that the perpetrator regularly visited massage parlors to have sex with employees over the course of the five months they lived together. When his roommates asked why he frequented establishments run by people of Asian descent, the shooter claimed he had chosen these spas because he believed they would be safer than brothels in the area. Many mainstream news organizations have ignored the racism inherent to killer’s violent “sex addiction” and never questioned how the safety these women offered could be related to perceived ability to control. Authorities have yet to disclose whether the spas that were attacked served a dual purpose. Whether or not they were sex workers or self-identified as such, the murdered women suffered—and others continue to suffer—from sexualized violence linked to objectification and stigma that pervades the massage parlor industry.

In the wake of the violence, police departments in and around Atlanta have begun increasing patrols near Asian businesses, particularly spas. This falls in line with the trend established in the past year: cities across the country, including Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, have all increased police presence in Asian communities, with the intent of preventing hate crimes, despite activist opposition. The New York Police Department has gone so far as to establish an Asian Hate Crime Task Force, which came under notable fire in September 2020 when the Asian American Feminist Collective published an open letter against this, co-signed by 27 community organizations. The letter protested against increased police presence and detailed the violent history of policing in Asian American communities in New York City, underscoring the harm police presence poses to migrant sex workers. In 2017, Song Yang, known on 40th Road in Flushing, NY as SiSi, fell to her death from a fourth-floor balcony while attempting to escape a police raid of the massage parlor where she worked. Although arrests of migrant sex workers in Queens decreased in the year following her passing, police presence in Flushing has ballooned in the past few weeks, posing the same threat that organizers and community groups such as Red Canary Song have fought against for the past three years. NYPD raids often end in arrests, whether or not women engage in sex work. This fosters an environment distinguished by distrust and paranoia, all while further isolating women from public life.

Aligning with police not only pits people of Asian descent against Black anti-police organizers, but also continues to perpetuate harm toward the most vulnerable members of the Asian American community. The temptation to flatten the Asian American experience into a single model minority narrative disregards the wide economic disparities and vast range of historical circumstances that brought far East, Southeast, and South Asian immigrants to the United States. A 2018 study by the PEW Research Center found that income inequality is rising most rapidly among Asian Americans; using a measure of inequality known as the 90/10 ratio—which compares the gap in income

NEWS

“The assumption that these women were mere sexual objects upholds a binary that typecasts migrant sex workers as either victims or criminals, while ignoring the racist roots of the sexualization of these women and failing to secure rights for those the increased police presence intends to help.” between the top and bottom of the income ladder—PEW found that the Asian American community is the most economically divided ethnic group in the United States. “Stereotypes are a problem in all of this,” Asian-American actor and writer Bee Vang told the College Hill Independent. “When we are treated as not statistically significant enough, as Daniel Dae Kim says, we continue to face the violence of erasure and invisibility because we Asian Americans and our issues don’t warrant any kind of attention. We are elided, overlooked and forgotten because of this. The seemingly innocuous stereotype called the model minority has convinced everyone to see Asian Americans as nothing but high achieving, well-off, affluent, well-educated, non-threatening, quiet and austere.

So who would know about our struggles?” The socioeconomic upward mobility suggested by the model minority myth does not take into account the marginal status of undocumented immigrants, nor does it take into account the legacy of US imperialism and military invention which displaced over a million people from Southeast Asia.

The imagined Asian American experience does not account for the exploitative work practices that many Asian immigrants endure. When addressing the potential connection between these spas and sex work, news outlets are quick to jump to the prevelance of sex trafficking within the massage parlor industry. Falsely equating sex work with sex trafficking only contributes further stigma and makes it difficult for employees to improve working conditions on their own terms. “When only sex itself is seen as exploitation, actual instances of exploitation in the workplace are not recognized, and workers are prevented from improving their working conditions and accessing labour protections,” writes Butterfly—an Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network—in an official statement. The assumption that these women were mere sexual objects upholds a binary that typecasts migrant sex workers as either victims or criminals, while ignoring the racist roots of the sexualization of these women and failing to secure rights for those the increased police presence intends to help.

“The police are not able to help us, even if we call the police after the incident,” a salon worker named Lisa stated through an interpreter during an online vigil held by Red Canary Song on March 18. “With the ongoing harassment from the police and law enforcement officers, we can only rely on ourselves and our sisters to keep ourselves safe.”

From March 2020 to February 2021, nearly 4,000 hate incidents were reported to Stop AAPI Hate. While only representing a fraction of the actual events that occured, the increased frequency and severity of such hate crimes in the past year reflect a deep-seated animosity toward Asian American bodies and what they represent in public consciousness. “What feels different now is that violence and racism against Asians is in the national spotlight. The murder of Vincent Chin, while emblematic of other dynamics, also appeared as a singular event. In light of all that has happened this terrible past year, it seems that some in the larger public are able to make the connections between the racism being targeted at different groups. Asian Americanists and Asian American activists, it seems, are keen to take advantage of this moment to showcase how racism has resulted not only from transatlantic slavery and settler colonialism but also overseas imperialism and militarism,” Brown University History and American & Ethnic Studies Professor Naoko Shibusawa told the Indy.

The temptation to react to increased racially-motivated violence toward Asian Americans with increased policing has caused much of the public to ignore the work of Asian American organizers and fails to support the most vulnerable members of our community. That would be a mistake. As the Asian American Feminist Collective stated in their letter to the NYPD: “Instead of investing more resources in the [police], our communities need anti-violence infrastructures that don’t replicate or support systems that cage and dispose of people. For example, the Center for Anti-violence Education has been [hosting] upstander trainings that better enable community interventions and responses for disrupting racist attacks and harassment. Rather than bilingual cops, we need more funding for language justice so our communities can have the necessary translation and interpretation for accessing care, benefits, and services.

Rather than bringing more police into our homes and communities, we need safe and accessible housing. We need institutional support for street vendors, nail salon workers, and other precarious Asian-American workers, including the decriminalization of sex work.”

The spas I visited were almost all tucked away from prying eyes and police presence. With my notebook in hand and my lack of language, I represented an authority they rightfully distrusted. One woman furrowed her brow as I stood in the doorway explaining that I wasn’t there for a massage but a conversation.

Even with my mask obscuring the lower half of my face, she recognized me as Korean. She lit up, eager to communicate, even momentarily, with someone who could understand her in the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, where we both stood. For a moment, it seemed as if I could enter the world where she worked, swap tips with other women, hold onto recipes, and send messages home through KakaoTalk. I caught a few phrases in her flurry of hangul before apologetically explaining I couldn’t speak the language. Then she, too, dismissed me.

ANABELLE JOHNSTON B’23 asks that you donate to the families of the victims of the Atlanta shooting https://twitter.com/RedCanarySong/ status/1372990146170253318 and support Red Canary Song’s work uplifting migrant sex workers https://www.redcanarysong.net/.

+++

06

CARE AND SOLIDARITY RESOURCES FOR ASIAN COMMUNITIES EDUCATIONAL •

•

Collective Resources document: A list of resources to confront anti-Asian racism in the United States compiled by grassroots organizers: http://bit.ly/CollectiveResources Professor Margo Okazawa-Rey on US Militarism and anti-Asian violence: https://kpfa.org/episode/womens-magazine-march-22-2021

Books • Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong • Passing It On by Yuri Kochiyama • Living for Change by Grace Lee Boggs • Afro Asia by Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen • The Making of Asian American by Erika Lee • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong • The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen • The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri • Pidgin Eye by Joe Balaz • Internment by Samira Ahed • Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

MENTAL HEALTH National: • Asian Mental Health Collective • Asian, Pacific Islander, and South Asian American (APISAA) Therapist Directory • @asiansformentalhealth Instagram Account

DESIGN ELLA ROSENBLATT

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

Rhode Island: • Compilation of Asian and Asian American mental health professionals: http://bit.ly/ RIAsianTherapists

07

Brown University: Asian and Asian American CAPS counselors: • Diane Farber, PsyD • Chonlada Jarukitisakul, PhD • Jayden Thai, PhD • Heather Wong-Bailey, PsyD

ORGANIZATIONS International • Scarlet ChaCha (Sex worker’s rights group based in South Korea): Venmo @scarletchacha, Paypal gmlthak@gmail.com National • Asian Americans Advancing Justice: A legal and civil rights organization. Chapters in Atlanta, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, and DC. • National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum • Red Canary Song • Asian American Feminist Collective • Asian American Resource Center (Georgia) • Butterfly – Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network Rhode Island • Providence Youth Movement (PRySM) • Ocean State A$$ — mutual aid for Rhode Island based sex workers Brown University • Asian / American Political Alliance (A/ APA) • BCSC Asian American Heritage Series • Brown Asian Sisters Empowered (BASE) • Southeast Asian Studies Initiative (SEASI) • VISIONS Magazine Rhode Island School of Design • RISD Social Equity and Inclusioon Office (not specifically for Asian Americans)

DONATE Families of Atlanta shooting victims • https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/atlanta-area-spa-shootings-fundraisers?fbclid=IwAR38gx7pKVW0BxxFjqy1chgEJsurpKIMrUawULk6j9DoYudCPOtTS2tMlow AAPI Journalists • https://www.gofundme.com/f/AAPI-journalists-therapy-relief-fund Asian American Writers’ Workshop • https://aaww.org/donate/ Kundiman • http://www.kundiman.org/donor-levels

UPCOMING EVENTS Rhode Island • Rhode Island Protest and Vigil Saturday March 28, 6-9 PM: http://bit.ly/1000PaperCranesVigil Brown University • “Navigating Vicarious Trauma in the Asian American Community” Workshop by Rona Luo ‘07 on March 31st at 12PM EST. For students who identify as Asian or Asian American. RSVP https://docs.google.com/ forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeGC1gBmdq2Ker9tw2gYgigz9PcgPr10gzxzBF6b3b8lJex8g/ alreadyresponded

OTHER RESOURCES • AAAJ Bystander Intervention Trainings https://www.ihollaback.org/bystanderintervention/ If you or someone you know has experienced a hate crime or police violence, please call AMOR RI - Alianza para Movilizar Nuestra Resistencia Hotline at 401-645-1414.

If you or someone you know has experience a hate crime, please report it with Stop AAPI Hate report at www.stopaapihate.org.

S+T TEXT BOWEN CHEN

one month in

+++ I first bought into the crypto market a few weeks prior to my bank visit, when non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were blowing up and beginning to make their way into mainstream news. Bitcoin had just hit a price floor of $43,000 and somewhere on my Twitter feed I saw that it was a good time to buy. Like most first-time investors, I downloaded coinbase on my phone and deposited fifty bucks. Two weeks later, it reached an all-time high of $60,000 and I was smacking my head for not investing more. Sometime along the way, I began my deep dive into Crypto Twitter (CT). I made a burner Twitter account that followed only figures in the decentralized finance, NFT, and crypto community. It was a festering pool of toxic internet culture, NEET (not in education, employment, or training) millionaires, SaaS (software as a service) engineers, and boomer financial advisors each leading their herd of loyal followers.

They would make market ‘calls’ on coins they thought were undervalued or about to ‘moon’ (often depicted alongside the rocket ship emoji) in a similar manner to that of r/WallStreetBets. It was difficult to discern which accounts were making data-driven predictions and which were just trying to pump the price of their ‘shitcoins.’ Even the best of the former would always be a little of the latter. Communities developed around the different coins people invested in. On any tweet with optimistic price predictions for a certain coin, the comment section would be littered with familiar faces who repped their portfolio’s cashtags (the $ symbol followed by a ticker symbol) in their bios. On certain days when I began to doubt my investments, I’d search CT by these cashtags and scroll through the torrent of tweets that listed optimistic price predictions to reassure myself. The entire platform was an echo chamber, in an almost reassuring way.

I placed my eggs in the basket cases—the accounts with unstable personalities. In particular, there was one account run by a middle-aged director of a financial firm who every few days would ‘shake the tree,’ an act where he tweeted a string of neoconservative comments such as how he didn’t see race or believed that “a man is a man. A woman is a woman. It. Makes. Sense.” One second, he would be tweeting about his quarter million long position on $DASH, the next about how Jesus died for our sins. He would often yell at Twitter to ban him or threaten to delete his account in a thanks-for-thememories manner, but still the tweets went on. Every twenty tweets or so (some days he would reach one hundred) he would remind his followers to love themselves or tweet some other message about uniting against hate. It was attention-seeking and childish in the way that only middle-aged men on social media who need therapy could induce. Perhaps I fell for an elaborate act, but I wanted to believe that these people cared less about inflating their bags with their follower-base and more about fostering a community that would listen to them vent. It was a service economy—I helped validate them and in exchange they taught me how to make money.

There was a steep learning curve to the market.

I lost a quarter of my first investment in two days.

I began to organize my assets in a comprehensive spreadsheet, each coin listed next to the price I bought it at, the volume of my purchase, my staged first-second-third target sell rates. I kept a small notebook with me at all times. In it I would note different ticker symbols to look into, marking them as either short, mid, or long term holds. My Twitter notifications were on for several CT accounts, and I checked them obsessively at each red light. When I worked on my computer, my screen was always partitioned. One half was devoted to watching the jagged price-line climb in green, trickle down in red.

At night I fell asleep with my phone in my hand, dreaming about different coins and the highs they might reach tomorrow, by the end of the month, and where my portfolio would be in a year.

Most people on CT invest in crypto because they wish for financial freedom or want to break free from a centralized financial system. Many still work a day job and hope to break free from its imposed 9-5 working hours. Those that do make it and quit their jobs find themselves going to bed long past midnight and waking up before the sun rises. Five hours of sleep is a good night’s rest. Many mornings I woke up in a cold sweat, wondering whether the long positions I bought into had liquidated me overnight. My waking hours become my working hours.

The more I earned, the more obsessive I became about yields and profit margins; after the first 100 dollars there was the first 1000, then five- or six-figure profits followed by the distant million. I began to leverage my assets, taking out loans up to 10 times my account size, hoping to score big, and striking out each time.

A lot of people on CT made millions in the late 2010s, lost it all in the great crypto crash of 2018, and then made it all back in the past three months (a huge bull run for the crypto market). At a certain point, the numbers begin to unroot themselves from reality. I imagine that the portion of my brain responsible for making these trades will soon fully isolate itself from the rest of my frontal lobe. I still won’t buy organic bananas for an extra $0.49/lb at the grocery store but am willing to stake more money than I’ve made over the past year on a single trade with zero hesitation.

I’ve learned that the profits come fast and pass fast. There have been times when my money has doubled, even tripled, in under ten minutes. These are tame numbers for those with more nimble fingers, who have separate computers and monitors for graphs, exchanges, and social media feeds. On CT, status is earned by the number of ‘100x calls’ you’ve made (coins you’ve sold for 100x your initial investment). I’ve marked ticker symbols in my notebook, watched them fall into my buy range and decided to sleep on it, only to wake up to a +600 percent gain overnight. Repeated moments of missed opportunity contributed to the fear of missing out, the obsessive and continuous act of refreshing my Twitter feed, regularly searching the cashtags of the coins I owned or thought I should own and wondering whether their price would pump or drop soon. Sometimes, the fear would be so bad I’d cave and end up buying at a peak. This almost always ended up with the price crashing within the hour. But typically, losing money was a slow bleed. With each passing day, I’d watch some of my investments dip a little in the red.

Day, after day, until the day I decided to stomach the blows and sell. Other times, an initial investment would dip so low in the red that I was grateful to just break even, only to realize I’d sold early and lost out on 4-figure gains.The hardest thing to learn was to take the profits as they came. There’s no point in holding your assets through the peaks and troughs, until they’re driven into the ground.

ILLUSTRATION JESSY MINKER

I waited behind a plastic panel that separated me from the Bank of America employee who was helping me with a wire transfer. I was about to send two thirds of what was left in my checking account to a cryptocurrency exchange called Kraken. The money would then be converted into the coin NANO (which boasts a low transaction fee) then sent to a different exchange, Kucoin, where I traded most of my alternative cryptocurrencies. Upon its arrival, the NANO would be sold for Tether (1:1 ratio to the American dollar) and portioned into different long and short-term investments. Some of the coins were worth less than a penny. The process was vaguely reminiscent of offshore accounting and tax fraud, but these inconveniences are just a fraction of the complexities built into a very large, and very volatile market.

I hadn’t stepped foot inside a bank since I was in high school, setting up my checking account.

Even the most serious of occasions in college had only called for business casual and I had forgotten that ‘casual’ implied the existence of the suit-and-tie formalwear the bank tellers wore. I had printed out all my account information with routing numbers held neatly in a file folder. My last memory of paper instructions dated back to long drives, sitting in the passenger seat with highlighted pages of Yahoo Maps. As the employee left to help another client, I scanned the room wondering whether I was even allowed to use a smartphone in a bank and whether this was the dumbest financial decision I had ever made.

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

CRYPTO TWITTER

+++ It hurts to acknowledge this, but there is a mathematical beauty that I can appreciate to price charts and their complementary slopes and dips. Like flower petals and pinecones, the push and pull of the market also mimics the Fibonacci sequence, in retracement levels that are used to measure floors of consolidation and resistance. If you watch different charts for long enough, certain trends begin to repeat themselves. These repetitions haunted me during day and night, even in those in-between moments when I drifted off to sleep, exhausted. My investments began to seep into my personal life as I experienced euphoric highs during the profits and crushing breakdowns during the losses. In all the what-Iwish-I-knew lectures given by successful investors, most revealed that they developed a combination of agoraphobia, insomnia, and various eating disorders.

They had trouble maintaining personal relations.

Many had gone through at least one divorce. Each day I woke up with the voice in my head was telling me to stop, that this way of life was unsustainable. I spent most days very unhappy and disappointed in myself. But still, I couldn’t let go.

By the time I returned home, the wire transfer had gone through. I’d paid thirty dollars to have done the same day, only to find out that Kraken won’t let me withdraw or transfer my money until the 72-hour cooldown that begins with my first fiat deposit has ended. I can only wait until Monday for the market cycle to begin anew.

BOWEN CHEN B’21.5 wants you to know that nothing in this article constitutes professional and/or financial advice.

08

LIT ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS TEXT AMELIA WYCKOFF

09

SYNESTHESIA

BLUSH. my body is pink. marbled legs and the circular scar on my right thigh, flushes of autumn leaves on my cheeks. my knuckles crackle when my fingers shake, warm and curling and fragile. i follow the pink branches in my translucent legs, sitting on the counter in my underwear. those lines are summer popsicle red like your knuckles, white-red from knocking. a hurt color, a cool red rose, a cut-into pink. as if color could be further revealed by slitting. (does the pink turn red or is it the same pink, just tinged, blurred by pain?) milky skin pink to violent blood pink. both are sex-pink, touching-you-(your body a reflection of mine)-pink.

PEACH. we passed the winter in a tangle of limbs, icicles melting from our nipples, hair matted and brittle with frost. we warmed each other. well, i was warmer. the sunlight streamed in through sheer linen and spun off the rose of your cheeks. i remembered the first time i touched you, smooth and liquid in your parent’s sheets, my hair tangled in its old knots. the clean cotton of childhood homes replaced by sweat saturated blood-stained sheets smelling of sex and cut peonies and burnt scrambled eggs. your house burned down in march (crimson curtains blazing through the window), when the snow melted.

BRICK. i search for your pink in stranger’s bedrooms. i find it in raw ruby fingers in my mouth, wiry arms, wide hips, when he kissed me at 2:38 (an hour after saying goodnight) on the tip of my nose, his crooked teeth. i can’t see the red until i cry later about his rough

hands, calloused white covering the fleshy parts of his palms. his sharp fingers on my thigh while i unlace my docs; he doesn’t ever seem to sweat. he tells me not to laugh, his questions are red rhetorical. i wonder when i started to go colorblind.

PALE. a few weeks later he touched my breasts and told me “this is how a woman should be: soft and pink” and i looked down at my veins in the low light and i saw blue. red marked my face on a handheld mirror, later: a palm imprinted on my white cheeks, once flushed from the cold. i trace the outline of his fingers with the tip of mine. the print is gone in the morning, and i forget the red, until next time.

BURGUNDY. i think of you when i meet someone gentle. i tell them i think sex is pink (before we touched). they looked at me from across the bed, red wine on their parted lips. they didn’t kiss me until i showed up at their door a month later with a scraped knee (i fell down the hill they lived on). they kissed my knee, first. when i woke up in their bed, the blood made my knee look like it was blushing.

RIBBON. they are sunset-lit like you were. i bring up that memory of you while my head rests on their soft chest. they pause at my comparison but take it as a compliment. i stay silent while i watch them cook—their softness toward me feels clawed, endangered. we dance on their hard wood floor, naked and a little too high. the smoke swirls shiny like satin ballerina’s slippers, cloudier than your pink,

maybe grayer, they are careful with me but inscrutable, i apologize for spilling ice cream on their sheets and i trip back up their hill in the fog the next morning.

BABY. moments of us become more or less pink the longer they sit in my memory, nostalgia sharp and cutting, a butcher’s knife. sometimes the pink seems imaginary, unfocused, but your tongue between your lips slices red-pink. birthing pink: fresh, raw, violent. your face, the familiar touch of your hand, cotton candy.

DUSTY. i collect pink things and i line them up on my dresser: a shell, blushing from its center, a ceramic heart i stole from the sandbox at my pre-k (i was a little kleptomaniac of color), a candle from tj maxx called “pink peonies,” it smells like roses, a cassette tape of k.d. lang’s album “ingenue” which looks pink but sounds blue, like a denim shirt, a necklace i found in a thrift store that is 100%, no doubt, haunted. my collection reminds me of you, of the way you are trapped in the small things i see out of the corner of my eye. the way you paint the walls around me. were you pink before i knew you, or did i color you in? when you moved out, i drowned the tulips you gave me in pickle juice. i watched them build a mauve guest house where your bedroom used to be.

AMELIA WYCKOFF B‘22 needs a new favorite color.

LIT

I Punched My Eyes Out

Afternoon sun on grandmother’s porch, my sole, a relaxed yellow.

This old white wicker chair rocks slowly, between sleep and spring.

Splintered oak beneath my feet shudders settling heavy boards in new heartbeat.

While each toe bakes on brick ovens, snakes slipping through cobblestones.

an empty spiral in a shattered mirror. i see my i a thousand ways, with one to watch the hands of time, i hunt young greening glass fragments turning black as i fall in shards.

Words sit heavy upon this empty air, dove-tailed cranes perching on power lines.

A reminder that my heart is paper, its edges curl under warm cups of black coffee.

Folding intricacies bend and breathe in the summer light, my fabric bleeds deep purple.

And the rims of my vision are slowly fading into a golden hue.

empty candlelight fills my brown paper bag it puffs its chest with pride hoping to see places yet to be known. the street looks more familiar than the rips and crinkles in this dead tree a reminder that this candlelit place isn’t permanent.

I am told by unseen forces “soon you will know what was remembered. you will drift down the colorado soaking lost and forgotten you will stumble between mossy rocks and peppered beaches looking for lighthouses as your mind drifts, powered by a candelabra sun.” i scrawl esoteric noticings. candles just won’t do what You are due. so, Father, enlighten me on where this river leads i paddle meditatively upon my knees. it’s hardest to reflect in the dead of night like Narcissus standing in front of a murky swamp but Light is always liminal. it’s a long drive down an empty highway it’s a boat beneath the oil lamp it’s a rusting steam engine in the city. and this face is only halfway there.

fragments of my fractured future lie on cold blue tile. the melancholic ocean of possibilities frozen over leaves the ground covered in specks of mottled sand, eyes alone in this windy desert no water to quench my vain eyes. my bathroom floor feels so far away. black clouds fill my head rain meets new tears running down the broken glass, i look back through my drowning

eyes remember, I’s exist

Let me draw the pond as it stood in winter Stillness ripples in tricolor hues the mallard carves its wake in evergreen.

The world under campfire where ashy pebbles quake in ecstatic sadness.

I pity you poor soothsayers telling stories of the sky your fallen feathers crushed without contemplation.

The edges of life are too messy for stoicism as I sit before the pond and contemplate the birds.

What of you great winged ones? you perch steady upon sinking branches while air quivers upon a bed of uncertain rain clouds.

What I see has no edges

Considering the Complexion of Pluto What color are your toenails?

Mine are yellow,

just like the keratin in venison.

This is why my brain rests at the sole and my third eye is sewn on the small of my back.

When looking past the spider webbing between my toes all I see is death and the ridges of my feet itch like nothing else.

I tried shaving them once,

hot red blood is subject to gravity too.

I saw a friend in the thicket the other day, which is strange because he rarely comes to visit

those places among the opaque greenery.

He arrived like a blessing wearing Groucho glasses buried in petunias and poppy fields, I thought I was lost.

However, this yellowed fellow spoke a strange truth.

An anecdote of solipsistic revery and I realized my feet have never rested in clouds while his tapdance upon them.

A world turned upside-down looks exactly the same above the Pacific.

I find this comforting, like living inside a Lego brick the smallest things do, after all, resemble the sun.

So I stand in my bathtub and watch the water rise hoping to catch a cloud in my reflection.

No matter how much I want to believe otherwise, my feet are too large.

And in the all-too-clear water I learn that my toenails are not, in fact, yellow I tried once to be an ostrich, but found it unbecoming.

Because my head does not fit among the foliage.

My red balloon rises despite the groveling and endless prostration For, you see,

I live large on Jupiter But plant petunias like it’s Pluto.

ILLUSTRATION OPHELIA DUCHESNE-MALONE

i’m going to be better at finding my Father

i splinter on the ground magician’s tricks revealed in shards and smoke— a puff of silver glimmering in the air. my nearing end, foretold in mystic tea leaves and mangled mirrors reveals a new lesson, all crystal balls foretell their own demise.

The basin here is deep, mud sinking swallowing the plants whole.

What doesn’t float will sink even in thick mucky air the same is true.

The near-white branches of dying trees sink into the mud.

And what of you young swallow?

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

The woods look so far away from here, I could confuse an aspen with a tumbleweed.

Grass stands upright in the city skyline wind whips through empty tunnels.

The bird’s nest sits, feather-light, upon my crown only cotton to fill the sky.

it’s a race to the bottom like raindrops on my windowsill. i greet winking futures, told to me in muddled teal reflections.

don’t listen to the grumblings of torn asphalt behind you.

Like your kin, you end when there’s no more downhill to swallow.

TEXT ADRIAN OTEIZA

Warm Origami

ADRIAN OTEIZA B’24 has found new sunglasses on his feet.

my memories look like used bottlcaps so I hold them up to the sky and pretend they are the Sun. flashlights are lonely and i wish this burnt empty paper bag was lighter.

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LOST FUTURES

TEXT LUCAS GELFOND

DESIGN OWEN MCCALLUM-KEELER

ILLUSTRATION DOROTHY ZHANG

ARTS

Burial’s Untrue, Mark Fisher, and sonic loneliness

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I’ve spent nine of the last twelve months under my parents’ roof. This arrangement is unnatural and atemporal, similar to neither the agency and freedom promised by college nor the carefree safety of childhood. To ground myself, I’ve taken to driving around my hometown of Los Angeles at night, traversing familiar routes to imitate times which felt fuller and more alive than now. Passing intersections and restaurants that evoke memories feels eerie; this city is a shell of itself, reduced to its physical structures, devoid of the activity that otherwise characterizes it. The ghosts of teenagers playing pickup basketball haunt a favorite park. The spectres of suited professionals linger in downtown office buildings. Time seems to have stopped, and the city rests in a surreal liminal state. In the absence of some recent historical event which I could use to make sense of this experience, I found a cultural one: Untrue, the 2007 sophomore album of British electronic producer Burial.

Untrue captures this sense of the barren, spectral city. Burial samples wildly from popular culture, transforming smooth R&B hits into gloomy, fleeting loops. Vinyl hisses and crackles remind us we are listening to manipulated, re-processed versions of some ancient original. Such defamiliarized cultural artifacts create a distance between Burial and his source material.

Theorist and music critic Mark Fisher was an early champion of Burial, seeing both Untrue and Burial’s 2006 self-titled debut as encapsulations of “hauntology,” a term coined by Jacques Derrida and later popularized by Fisher and music journalist Simon Reynolds. There is no widely agreed-upon definition of the term, but Fisher’s feels particularly salient. He notes that haunting “can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or—and this can sometimes amount to the same thing—the refusal of the ghost to give up on us.” Ghosts operate in an atemporal state; presently appearing yet evoking past forms, they belong to neither the past nor the present.

Much of Fisher’s work seeks to tie cultural works to the economic and political conditions which produced them. Fisher notes, for example, that hauntology emerged after the “end of history” that theorist Francis Fukuyama claims characterized the world with the triumph of liberal capitalism after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. While Fukuyama’s claim was widely derided, in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Fisher argues that this sense of being uncoupled from history was broadly internalized on a level of “cultural unconscious.”

This passive attitude creates conditions where “a detached spectatorialism replaces engagement and involvement.” People are discouraged from taking action when they feel powerless to conditions which seem inevitable and indefinite.

Fisher mourns these historical developments, particularly the emergence of Thatcherite neoliberalism, the austerity politics of the UK from 1979 onward. Burial’s music grieves this period similarly, yearning instead for the communal culture of the UK rave scene in the ‘80s, stripped of its authenticity by over-commercialized clubs before he could experience it. This ability to commiserate, a shared sense that something has gone terribly wrong, explains Fisher’s effusive praise for Burial’s self-titled debut, released a year before Untrue. The album evokes “the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach,” unyielding in its pursuit of a reality beyond disillusionment and dereliction.

When I came across Fisher’s work for the first time last summer, I was struck by how precisely it described my feelings of isolation in the eerily quiet city and put words to why Untrue resonated with me so deeply. Untrue serves not just as an ‘elegy for the rave generation’ but as an encapsulation of our vacant reality, evoking lost futures in order to help us generate new ones. +++

Untrue’s vocal sampling transforms its source material into despondent, distant bits. The album samples widely, ranging from video game sound effects and YouTube covers to American pop. Earnest, upbeat songs from artists like Beyoncé, Ciara, D’Angelo, and Usher are transformed beyond recognition. “How do I say you’re beautiful / when I can’t take my eyes off you?” Usher sings over a silky guitar-heavy instrumental in the original “How Do I Say.” The snippet that appears on Untrue track “Near Dark” is down-pitched, sparse, and sonically distant, repeating the short “I can’t take my eyes off you” in dreary monotone.

Burial also samples from PlayStation and arcade game soundtracks—one can hear the clank of game bullets dropping to the ground on “Archangel” and “Near Dark.” The former is built around a sample from video game Metal Gear Solid, contributing to the surreal, alien feeling of the music. Burial’s work is characterized by this sense of detachment. His music takes influence from a wide variety of genres on the ‘hardcore continuum’ like garage, jungle, rave, and early dubstep, all of which are associated with United Kingdom clubs in the ‘90s and 2000s.

Notably, he released Untrue in 2007, several years after such genres had faded from popularity; the album positions Burial as a latecomer attempting to rekindle a spark which has long since faded. Fisher interviewed Burial for the Wire in 2012, focusing on Burial’s experience of UK rave culture through his brother, infatuated with its sounds but too young to participate. “I’ve never been to a festival. Never been to a rave in a field. Never been to a big warehouse, never been to an illegal party, just clubs and playing tunes indoors or whatever,” he told the Wire. “I heard about it, dreamed about it.”

The UK rave of the ‘80s and ‘90s was intimately tied to a live, communal listening experience, where Burial’s listening ensued after the fact, alone and through headphones and car speakers. Burial’s obsession with a scene from which he was excluded explains the voyeuristic quality of his music. As such, Untrue is particularly suited to solitary listening; while Burial’s lone rave listening lacked the collective embrace that characterized the genre, Untrue feels the most whole in headphones in my bedroom.

Burial leans into his role of observer, attempting to reduce his own presence in the music. “I just want to be in a symbol, a tune, the name of a tune,” he told Fisher for the Wire. Burial has remained enigmatic; Fisher’s interview is one of a handful of interviews he has ever given to the press. In fact, Burial deliberately hid his identity for several years. As Untrue and Burial’s self-titled debut gained cult-status, intrigue about his identity heightened, leading to predictions that Burial was any number of current celebrities. Some played along: “I am burial” reads an old Facebook post by electronic music producer Four Tet. UK tabloid magazine the Sun ran an unsuccessful campaign to unmask Burial, foiled by his decision to reveal himself, full name William Bevan, before such tabloids could in 2014.

Burial’s initial choice of anonymity perhaps galvanized his dedicated following. By removing himself from his music, Untrue lent itself to anonymous online discussion, making a communal, shared experience out of loneliness and isolation. “Wandering around a big lifeless city at an unholy hour, patchy rain, frosty and feeling so incredibly tired— but unable to find comfortable sleep,” a user writes on the YouTube video for Untrue track “In McDonalds.” “Stumbling upon the bright fluorescent lights of an empty McDonalds restaurant briefly jolts you out of your delirium—before again descending back into the murky darkness,” the user continues. Fans gravitate towards similar images of desolate cities, lit only by the harsh glow of streetlights and restaurant signs.

Perhaps the most potent image associated with Burial, however, is that of the night bus, embodying his track of the same name on his 2006 debut. Until 2013, London’s Underground subway stations shut

down at night, leaving those out at late night clubs to take long, solitary bus rides to distant boroughs they lived in. The image encapsulates a fundamental tension in Burial’s downcast view of the city, one which simultaneously evokes communal embrace and lonely isolation. Fisher’s work comments heavily on the tendency of society to pathologize collective problems produced by the conditions of late capitalism.

For example, Fisher rallies against the “privatization of stress,” arguing that individualized solutions (like the medicalization of mental illness) disregard larger collective issues of isolation produced by our modern political economy. Burial’s work engages with a similar tension—fans of Untrue bond over a collective love of a work rooted in solitude which yearns for a community it never had. In the confines of my bedroom, Untrue immerses me in the weight of loneliness, just like thousands of Burial fans across the globe. Fisher’s line of analysis asks me to engage more critically with this propensity for isolation in Burial’s work—highlighting both the need for and absence of a strong sense of collectivism. +++ Untrue has served as a vital comfort as of late. The album codifies my sense of distance from something resembling daily life, a resentment toward being glued to the happenings of the world and those around me while feeling unable to participate in either. Through Fisher’s lens it articulates the unique sadness of a future that could’ve been, bringing feeling to a city haunted by its previous liveliness.

The album was profoundly shaped by Burial’s environment of mid-2000s South London and a nascent internet on which Burial met Kode9, whose label Hyperdub released Untrue. His music also undoubtedly evokes night drives; Burial himself notes that he used to test his tracks by driving a friend’s car around at night, much like my experience traversing Los Angeles. However, my experience of Untrue is perhaps more intimately tied to months confined to the rectangular box of my room. Sometimes I’d listen to the album in a half-dance, trying to match the off-kilter rhythms of Burial’s ‘galloping’ or ‘fishbone’ drums. Other times I’d turn my lights out and sink into my bed, staring at the ceiling to the devastating outro on “Shell of Light.” Other times I’d stare out of my large glass window, gazing at a nearby office park. Without fail, no matter how late, I could see the glow of fluorescent lights on in obviously vacant offices. Soon I’ll move out of this house, and maybe someday people will fill these offices. Cities populated by empty buildings are potent reminders of our collective pause. When the present returns, Untrue will always remind me of these lost futures.

LUCAS GELFOND B’24 is in McDonalds.

AVATAR STUDIOS AND PARAMOUNT+ The future of Avatar: the Last Airbender

This past summer, as I was being swept up in the Avatar Renaissance, I rewatched The Legend of Korra for the first time since its series finale aired. In 2014, my criticism largely revolved around the show’s pacing and its overuse of romantic subplots. But as a college senior in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 election, my eyes were a bit sharper.

+++ As Avatar becomes a big franchise, it is hard to imagine that it can prevent itself from falling deeper into corporate, profit-driven thinking that upholds the liberal status quo. The fact that Avatar Studios has already promised so much content does not bode well. The film and television industry is already overrun with bloated, unending franchises, and Avatar might be the next victim. Star Wars movies have been disappointing fans since 1983, but Disney continues to put out new ones because they promise to turn a good profit for shareholders. Avatar Studios could very well do the same, allowing profit to take precedent over creativity. Money-hungry fanservice and good storytelling are not necessarily mutually

exclusive, but it’s hard to imagine that the creative team at Avatar Studios will be able to pump out thoughtful art at the level of Avatar: the Last Airbender under ViacomCBS and Nickelodeon’s profit-seeking guidance.

Nickelodeon has already disappointed Avatar fans with its economic bottom line. The company gave the green-light to the reviled 2010 live-action adaptation of Avatar without the approval of the creators. In the years after, it ordered The Legend of Korra season by season, preventing the writers from developing a strong overarching plot. Korra’s broadcast time was also shuffled around by the network, jumping between Saturday afternoons and the Friday night death slot before being unceremoniously pulled from the schedule and posted online midway through season 3. The mistreatment of Korra while it was airing clearly indicates that the corporate leadership at Nickelodeon and ViacomCBS did not believe in the project, even after Avatar’s resounding success. The founding of Avatar Studios now is only motivated by the audience size, and the promise of quick profit.

Now that the fandom is even larger, new Avatar content is practically guaranteed to have a large audience—regardless of quality. Fans are already clamoring for television or movie adaptations of Avatar’s various official tie-in comics, and for additional seasons of both animated series. But returning to the exact same characters and stories is just risk-averse pandering, and it’s not particularly creative. Beyond that, it disrespects the established ending—weakening the conclusions of the character and narrative arcs. When does the story get to end, if another episode or movie or miniseries promises to rake in more money? What will the stories say when they are made for the sake of existing? Over time, corporate demands for output may very well erode the critical edge that made Avatar special.

ILLUSTRATION RACHELLE SHAO

+++

The original Avatar series centered one fairly easy political concept: war and imperialism are bad.

Avatar communicated this message exceptionally well—a Salon article published in June 2020 referred to it as “one of the purest portrayals of fighting fascism on modern TV.” Still, it’s extremely well-tread territory in cartoons both before and since, from Voltron and Masters of the Universe in the 1980s to Steven Universe in the 2010s. Korra takes place 70 years after the first series. The war against the empire has been won, and the world is facing the ongoing work of governing. In this quasi-postcolonial moment, the villains are not just people who want to take over the world, but representations of nuanced political ideologies.

Seasons one and three of The Legend of Korra grapple with villains symbolizing communism and anarchy, respectively. In both cases, the show demonstrates oppressive structures that make these ideologies well-grounded. And yet, both times, any pretense of sympathy for these characters and their belief systems is abandoned by the third act. The communist metaphor devolves into a fascism metaphor, and the anarchists only spread violence and chaos. When they depart from the narrative, their cause disappears with them, as if it were unfounded and irrational all along.

The show’s summation of these villains comes in season four, when Korra is told to consider what she has to learn from her enemies. They wanted equality and freedom for all—but, as the dialogue says, “those guys were totally out of balance, and they took their ideologies too far.” The line speaks volumes about Korra’s white male showrunners, and their comfort with invoking vaguely Taoist buzzwords to dismiss radical left ideology. Even as they expose the social problems that activated these villains, they do not meaningfully consider why communism and anarchy would resonate with people. Instead, they filter their white liberal opinions through their Asian protagonists, who dismiss these ideas as “crazy” or “out of balance” or “too far.” Because, ultimately, these writers are disinterested in the kind of reckoning that would create genuine change: an actual dismantling of oppressive structures.

With villains representing far left ideologies, it stands to reason that the heroes are cops and rich people. Two key characters are part of the Republic City police force: an incredibly well-funded department that patrols the city in giant airships and uses metal bending to apprehend and intimidate civilians.

Two other major characters are ultra-wealthy CEOs of massive corporations and war profiteers. One is presented sympathetically while she attempts to “save her company” by selling weapons to Southern Water Tribe forces embroiled in a civil war. The other is initially portrayed negatively for warmongering to serve his financial interests, but the show is too interested in him as a kooky ally to commit to this.

Instead, his moral bankruptcy and absurd wealth is played for laughs as he escapes from a luxury prison cell of his own design. Due to either ignorance or discomfort, Korra’s writers skirt the questions of power and privilege and capital, instead telling the viewer to trust cops and rich people, and to be wary of communists and anarchists and their calls for revolution.

Change will trickle down from the top.

DESIGN MIYA LOHMEIER

At the beginning of March, 2021, ViacomCBS launched Paramount+, the latest streaming service to enter the already over-saturated market. Like its predecessors, Paramount+ has promised a slate of enticing reboots and adaptations, taking advantage of fan loyalty to long-dead properties ranging from Frasier to iCarly to Beavis and Butthead. One jewel in this crown is the formation of Avatar Studios—a Nickelodeon division dedicated to producing new content in the world of Avatar: the Last Airbender.

This development is not exceptionally surprising; although Avatar’s sequel series The Legend of Korra aired its last episode seven years ago, fan interest shot through the roof after both series were added to the Netflix library last summer. The fandom renaissance swept through social media, invigorating fans new and old, and Avatar was one of Netflix’s most viewed shows for weeks on end. Nickelodeon and ViacomCBS took notice of the excitement, and revived Avatar in order to cash in.

Avatar Studios has already promised new feature-length animated movies, television series, and shorts. The response has been largely enthusiastic— many fans have been clamoring for new content for years. Avatar: the Last Airbender inspires fan devotion, simply because it was so well done. The series takes place in a war-torn fantasy world visually inspired by an array of Asian and Indigenous cultures.

Its main protagonist Aang is the long-lost Avatar: the only person capable of bending the four elements: water, earth, fire, and air. Avatar follows his journey as he masters the elements in order to defeat the Fire Lord and end a hundred-year-long war. Children can watch it and see cartoonish humor and great action sequences. Then, they can return to it years later and find a masterclass in character and worldbuilding, alongside sharply written anti-imperialist commentary. On every level, Avatar delivers, and many fans are eager for more of that magic.

However, there is reason to be wary of Nickelodeon’s investment in the Avatar world. The existing sequels and adaptations have already fallen flat. The reboot series The Legend of Korra disappoints both because of its weaker storytelling and its white liberal messaging. The writers did not produce a strong critique of class structure and capitalism even then, at a time when the parent company wasn’t hedging their bets on them. It’s hard to imagine that Paramount+, the composite of money-seeking projects that it is, could be home to the kind of Avatar content needed in 2021: fresh stories from POC writers that champion structural social change.

TEXT MIYA LOHMEIER

CASHING IN:

ARTS

+++ Sharp political criticism has always been key to Avatar’s power. For many longtime fans, the original series provided early lessons about the evils of imperialism that they could carry into the real world.

Nowadays, the message ‘imperialism is bad’ is not anywhere near enough. But the beauty of the Avatar world is that it is vast and rich and has potential for meaningful new stories. The Legend of Korra can serve as a lesson to Avatar Studios. Lauding authority and wealth while denigrating radical progressivism is not the way to move forward.

As Avatar Studios begins production this year, it should prioritize hiring writers equipped for revolutionary thinking. Cishet white male liberals have been at the helm for too long. Radical progressive writers—especially people of color—would be an asset to the worldbuilding Avatar Studios is promising.

New content could explore complex themes with insightful care. How do labor and wealth function in a world where people can move the elements with their minds? How are race and ethnicity understood when the existence of benders suggests that there is an inherent difference between nations?

As many reasons as Nickelodeon, ViacomCBS, Paramount+, and the writers themselves have given fans to be pessimistic about the future of Avatar, there is an opportunity to create something amazing.

MIYA LOHMEIER‘21 would like to point out that she both wrote and designed this article.

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DESIGN ELLA ROSENBLATT

BUY AN INDY TOTE BAG at bit.ly/IndyTote42 $15-30 SLIDING SCALE. ALL DONATIONS GO TOWARDS OUR STIPEND PROGRAM.

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ARTWORK “NOTHING TO SAY” BY JOEY HAN

EPHEMERA

14

me Why Nursing Home

Residents AsreA elp Calling for Help

TEXT NELL SALZMAN DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION SYLVIA ATWOOD

METRO

The need for more state support

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Early last year when COVID tore through Greenville Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Smithfield, Rhode Island, 20 residents and one worker lost their lives. Stefania Silvestri, a nurse at the center for the past 19 years, described the pandemic as the worst thing she’s ever experienced. Due to illness and other factors, the center was incredibly shortstaffed. Silvestri herself got COVID and had to take off work for two weeks. However, even before the pandemic, Greenville was under-staffed, according to Silvestri. “[The residents] are screaming for help.

They have to go to the bathroom and sometimes they have to wait for as long as half an hour,” she told the College Hill Independent. “It feels like neglect.”

There is a public health crisis in nursing homes across Rhode Island. Workers—many of whom are employed at for-profit facilities—are being stretched impossibly thin. Though the pandemic gave them an opportunity to raise their voices, these trends are not new. Over the years, their demands have been swallowed up by a system that is controlled by big businesses and executives seeking to keep costs low and profits up. Despite recent movements and legislation advocacy, there is still more that needs to be done to protect the oldest and most vulnerable people in our society. +++ In long-term care facilities across Rhode Island, there have been between 1,070 and 1,074 reported COVID cases and between 165 and 169 COVID-related resident fatalities. The pandemic severely affected staff-to-resident ratios, reducing

the amount of quality care that residents received daily. At Greenville, there are currently two Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) for every thirty residents, according to Silvestri; this means CNAs have fifteen minutes a day per resident to wash, dress, and brush their hair and teeth. Silvestri said that when a resident falls or an emergency arises, she feels like she can’t keep up with her care duties for the rest of the day.

In early October, following the onset of the pandemic and the chronic staffing shortage, unionized workers at the Bannister Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in downtown Providence responded by going on a three-day strike. The strike occurred after Bannister’s operators refused to establish a three-year contract with mandatory minimum staffing, wage increases, health benefits and training. Workers at the time were receiving as little as $12 per hour. They marched around the facility, waving yellow signs and wearing masks. In the weeks leading up to the strike, they communicated with family members and planned to have 50 temporary employees bused in to cover their shifts, according to Hopkins Manor CNA and union delegate Dawn Auclair.

“Workers have tremendous power,” Adanjesus Marin, the lead organizer of the lifelong care team at District 1199NE Service Employees International Union (SEIU), told the Indy. “Though before this campaign we [nursing home workers] were largely invisible to the people in Rhode Island, we have a lot of sway. We are the ones who are taking care of many of our most valuable people in the state––the people we love.”

Scott Fraser, president and CEO of the Rhode

Island Health Care Association (RIHCA), did not support the strike. “To walk out on residents to me was just unconscionable. They were walking away from caring for the people that needed it the most,” he said. RIHCA is a non-profit trade organization that represents many of the state’s for-profit nursing homes. Workers involved in the strike itself would probably disagree with Fraser, arguing that they weren’t really “walking away” from residents, but rather demanding safer and more sustainable working conditions that would benefit both themselves and their residents. The event at Bannister was the first time in almost twenty years that workers at a Rhode Island nursing home went on a strike.

The last time a strike occurred was in 2001, when workers at a nursing home in Smithfield advocated to eliminate unnecessary nursing assistant jobs. Deep corporate ties through individuals like Fraser himself likely prevented these strikes from happening in the past.

After Bannister’s strike, Adanjesus said that the conversation shifted noticeably. Former Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, generally expressed more active concern for conditions in nursing homes.

Though staffing requirements weren’t standardized, both hazard pay and PPE resources were given to workers across the state. But, according to the digital news platform GoLocalProv, while nursing homes have advocated for increased Medicaid funding for years, Governor Raimondo cut Medicaid each year that she’s been in office. Rhode Island’s Medicaid Inflation Index, which controls Medicaid reimbursement, is much lower than the national average. This means the industry is losing millions of dollars every

METRO year. While short-term measures such as hazard pay and PPE show that public officials have finally noticed the situation in nursing homes, the lack of systemic change is indicative of a larger profit-motivated nursing homes ecosystem that refuses to treat human beings like human beings. +++ Rhode Island currently ranks 41st in the country and last in New England for the average number of hours of care nursing home residents receive. Marjorie Waters, the community organizer at Rhode Island Organizing Project (RIOP), an organizing group with a focus on medical resources for the elderly, told the Indy that this is the biggest resident care crisis Rhode Island has seen in the past 100 years. “The pandemic has exacerbated and laid bare a situation that has been in existence, but now it’s undeniable.

Patients deserve more hours of care, nursing homes need higher staffing ratios to patients, and CNAs need better pay,” Waters said.

Union members have continued to fight for rights from both their management and the state.

Nine of Rhode Island’s 80 nursing homes are unionized—six are represented by SEIU 1199NE, two by the Laborer’s International Union, and one by United Food & Commercial Workers. Adanjesus of SEIU 1199NE is the coordinator of the Raise the Bar on Resident Care Coalition, a community group that works with the union and pushes for better staffing ratios; currently, there’s no mandate of the number of care hours each resident will receive daily in Rhode Island. For the past two years, union delegates have been advocating for a bill called the Nursing Home Staffing and Quality Care Act in the RI General Assembly. The proposed legislation would create safe staffing standards of 4.1 direct-care hours per resident per day, among other demands, which include increased wages and funding for additional training programs. The bill passed the Senate almost unanimously and is currently waiting for a hearing and passage in the House.

Though the bill was introduced by nursing home workers before the pandemic started, it comes at a time now when nursing homes have been under the spotlight with high COVID infection rates. State Representative Scott Slater, who introduced the bill in the House, thinks that the status quo in nursing homes has been unacceptable for a long time and that legislation like this is overdue. Slater emphasized that the nursing home workforce is 90 percent women and overwhelmingly women of color. COVID brought out the existing inequities in the healthcare system. “It really showed everyone the embedded structural racism and the need for living wages,” he said. “It’s just such an unlevel playing field.”

“Despite recent movements and legislation advocacy, there is still more that needs to be done to protect the oldest and most vulnerable people in our society.”

Of the issues in the Nursing Home Staffing and Quality Care Act, the hour mandate has probably led to the most debate. Fraser of RIHCA told the Indy that there is no state in the country that has 4.1 mandated hours of care per 24 hours, though it is the federal guideline recommended by the United States Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). “This is one of those situations where it’s a good five-second soundbit. Who wouldn’t want more staffing in nursing homes? But if you scratch the surface and see what that means, studies have been done to show that it would cost the state $75 million dollars to reach the 4.1 minimum,” Fraser said.

Nursing homes were underfunded coming into the pandemic. This lack of revenue comes from the government, through Medicaid and Medicare. For already underfunded facilities, the best way to stay afloat is by keeping labor costs low. Fraser explained that staffing ratios are so low right now that if the bill were to be passed, it would require more than 800 additional employees to be hired. He thinks that the bill would cause more homes to shut down than it would help. Ultimately, however, the state should collect taxpayer money to ensure that people are treated like people. A piece of legislation that sets up minimum staffing requirements would do this––ensuring that both workers and patients are not being underpaid or maltreated, while also ensuring nursing home operators are held more accountable for the conditions in their facilities.

Rhode Island is one of only 11 states across the country, and the only one in New England, that has no minimum number of hours of direct care per resident per 24 hours. Unlike Fraser, Adanjesus, who works directly with workers, thinks that establishing this minimum should be the first priority: “We believe that this bill is urgent. If passed, it would completely change for the better the lives of residents and caretakers.” +++ Adanjesus explained that many nursing home owners are doing everything they can to keep the bill from passing. “The less people working in a nursing home, the more money they make,” he said. In a for-profit healthcare system, low staffing and poor living/ working conditions are often ignored by owners who make investments in real estate and consulting companies. There are about 18 not-for-profit homes out of 80 in the state of Rhode Island. Adanjesus also pointed out that nursing home executives spent over $100,000 in the past election to defeat candidates who supported safe staffing. This is concerning to residents and families who say that nursing homes should be using that money to increase the general standard of care, instead of swaying elections. It also illuminates why the Staffing and Quality Care Act may have been stonewalled in the General Assembly for the past few years.

In October, as residents and workers were struggling to make it through the day, Genesis Healthcare Inc.—which owns seven nursing home facilities in Rhode Island—paid its now former CEO George Hager Jr. a $5.2 million bonus, according to local news channel WPRI. The raise came after Genesis accepted more than $300 million in state and federal CARES money. Hager wasn’t the only executive to receive money. Other executives also received millions of dollars in bonuses, and Robert Fish, who took over after Hager retired in January, started with a base salary of $1,150,000. Around 40 CNAs could be hired with Fish’s salary alone.

After the first nine months of the year, Genesis publicly disclosed that it was suffering from an $8.6 million operating loss. Based on their public cry for help, additional governmental funding was widely supported, which is why the million dollar payout to executives raised concerns for taxpayers. The Seattle Times reported that under Hager’s leadership, more than 300 Genesis nursing homes in the US experienced 14,352 confirmed cases from March-December. The total number of resident deaths during this period was 2,812, and nearly all of the homes reported shortages in medical equipment. For health worker advocacy groups across the nation, $5.2 million seems like a lot of money to be dished out to an executive who failed to address public health threats.

When Silvestri testified for the Senate bill to improve staffing standards, she was discouraged by the favoritism she observed in the amount of speak-

ing time between executives and workers. “I was only allowed to talk for two minutes, but administrators and business owners of nursing homes were allowed to speak for longer. I timed one at four and a half minutes,” she said. Silvestri said that this type of special treatment is unacceptable, especially considering that a lot of for-profit owners and managers don’t interact with workers and residents at all. She pointed out that it demonstrates the more embedded, structural disempowerment of working class movements.

To make matters worse, a recent New York Times investigation found that the nation-wide star rating system, which assesses nursing quality of care, provides a distorted picture of what is really going on inside these facilities. The ratings program is run

by CMS and uses a mix of self-reported data and on-site examinations at 15,000 nursing homes across the nation. The Times investigators reported that most of the information submitted to CMS is wrong, that some nursing homes inflate their staffing levels by including workers who are on leave or vacation, and that many centers report high ratings but flunk in-person inspections. Residents at “five-star” facilities were just as likely to die from COVID as those at “one-star” homes. Instead of providing the public with an accurate image of what is going on inside these centers, this rating system serves as a facade for profit-motivated nursing homes to hide their inferior services.

Bill Flynn, executive director of the Senior Agenda Coalition, an independent group working to improve the quality of life of older Rhode Islanders, told the Indy that as a group, Rhode Island’s nursing homes rate highly on CMS measures. “When you actually look at what they’re measuring, however, no one is asking residents how happy they actually are in their nursing homes,” he said.

In Rhode Island, the Health Department is mostly responsible for monitoring conditions in nursing homes. Flynn said they focus on medical measures, but residents mostly need help with basic activities of daily living—bathing, feeding themselves, etc. It’s these types of activities, along with more socialization from CNAs, that are being overlooked. Waters told the Indy about her own recent experience visiting a friend in a nursing home: “As I walked down the hallway, there were literally people calling out to me from their rooms because they needed help. It wasn’t so much shocking for me as it was sad, because I knew that the staff was doing all that they could. But they were so short-staffed, they just literally couldn’t get to everyone that day.” +++ A week ago, Greenville started allowing family visits to the facility for the first time since last March.

But Silvestri said that these meetings only last for 30 minutes and residents are often late due to their various needs—bathroom, dressing, walking, etc.

Ultimately, despite increased visits, the majority of residents sit alone in their rooms for long stretches of time.

Silvestri’s favorite part of her job is interacting with residents—making them laugh and feel loved.

She feels guilty when she has so many residents to take care of that she doesn’t have the time to stay with them. “The hardest part right now for me is watching them be alone. They’ve been alone for a year now,” she said.

What’s giving many workers hope now is the effectiveness of vaccine roll-out efforts. According to Fraser, 60 percent of Rhode Island nursing staff have received the vaccine, and homes continue to educate and encourage residents and workers to get vaccinated. The number of positive cases has dropped significantly and visitation has opened up. While there is certainly optimism to be found in these trends, workers are still calling for more institutional support, and fighting against the nursing home executives who prioritize profit over people’s well-being. Silvestri said that her residents are like her second family, and right now, through no fault of her own, she feels like she’s neglecting them. “We need this bill to pass. We need help now. They deserve it. These are people.

They’re human beings and we’re treating them like the paycheck.”

NELL SALZMAN B’22 thinks the 4.1 hour mandate should be the bare minimum.

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CHILDREN’S MUSEUMS IN THE PANDEMIC Local non-profit and public museums fill a niche in the lives of children in the Providence area and across the state. In particular, the Providence Children’s Museum, the Rhode Island Museum of Science and Art (RIMOSA), and the Providence Museum of Natural History and Planetarium provide opportunities for kids to channel their energy into curiosity and creativity, through outreach programs or within their physical locations. This exploration, not found in schools, is crucial to child development.

Unfortunately, these museums, like many other public-facing institutions, were blindsided when the pandemic hit. They were forced to quickly adapt to stay afloat financially and continue delivering their programming to children, who had suddenly found themselves stuck taking online classes from home, needing unstructured play more than ever.

Museums have been affected by the pandemic in different ways. The Payroll Protection Program and a plethora of other stopgap grants have kept these three museums open, but each has struggled to deal with decreased revenue from donations, admissions, and grants. Of all the local museums, the Providence Children’s Museum has had the toughest time. Over a quarter of their $3 million in revenue in 2019 came from special events and admissions from over 160,000 visitors. When Rhode Island’s lockdowns started last March, the Children’s Museum had to close their doors for six months, causing a sizable blow to their income. This past January, facing this financial hole, the museum made the difficult decision to fire their cohort of AmeriCorps workers and mostly close the museum until the summer with little warning. This story exemplifies how the pandemic has exposed that which our current system overlooks: early childhood education, especially of underserved children, and the flaws in the ways in which our society seeks to address such oversight.

TEXT LEO GORDON

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION JESSY MINKER

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The Providence Children’s Museum began as a community-driven effort to provide a “lively learning center” for kids in Rhode Island, something missing in traditional education. According to the museum website, “local parents, educators and business people formed a committed group of volunteers and incorporated as a nonprofit,” opening the museum in June of 1977. By 1987, the museum had outgrown that original spirit, having taken on a professional staff to serve its 50,000 visitors a year. The museum began to tap into mainstream non-profit funding channels, and, in 1995, they established their MuseumCorps program through AmeriCorps.

In 1997, they moved to their current 17,000 square foot building in the Jewelry District, where today tots splash around the Water Ways room, climb through the hull of a replica colonial ship, and read stories about immigrants and refugees who call RI their home. Pre-pandemic, the MuseumCorps would run outreach programs with groups such as the Boys & Girls Club in an effort to expand the reach of the museum. Through these immersive, tactile exhibits and outreach programs, the Providence Children’s Museum has become a local fixture.

When the pandemic hit, the museum was forced to shutter its doors, causing it to lose a sizable portion of its revenue. Even so, museum administrators decided to hire a new 12 person MuseumCorps cohort on September 14, 2020, starting them on a program set to end July 2, 2021. Following AmeriCorps’ agreement with the museum, these workers were to be paid about seven dollars an hour as a ‘living allowance’ for their year of service, half of the money coming from an AmeriCorps grant and half from the museum. In addition to running outreach programs, the job description included working the floor of the museum when it reopened and, new this year, digital content creation.

On October 1, the museum reopened and the AmeriCorps workers began their work at the Boys & Girls Clubs. However, due to conflicts over mask use at the clubs, the outreach program was terminated a month later to the huge disappointment of both

Creative public spaces in precarity workers and museum administrators. The workers continued to work the floors and create digital content from home, but, according to two former Americorps workers that spoke to the College Hill Independent, it wasn’t the same without that core prioritization of underserved children’s access to the Children’s Museum’s creative programming. +++ Other museums’ responses to the pandemic highlight the importance of tactile play. The Providence Museum of Natural History and Planetarium was founded in June of 1896 with the goal to “provide a place for children to learn about the world around them and encourage curiosity,” museum director Renee Gamba told the Indy. Before the pandemic hit, the museum had hosted school field trip visits and opened to the public, sharing knowledge about astronomy, animal anatomy, and Indigenous traditions.

When the museum closed in March, the Providence Museum of Natural History tried new ways to encourage curiosity through online programming, uploading activity pages for children on their website and starting a virtual read aloud program. The state recognized this need, funding a Summer Academy for Interactive Learning with CARES Act money, for which the museum, alongside the Providence Children’s Museum, offered free summer courses to K-12 students in Rhode Island. For their classes, the Providence Museum of Natural History made and distributed over 500 hands-on activity kits to participants, which contained materials to make oobleck and ultraviolet beads. The museum finally got the go-ahead from the city to reopen in July, after comprehensive COVID safety planning.

The Rhode Island Museum of Science and Art, housed at 763 Westminster St in Providence, similarly provides a space for safe discovery. Glen Schneider, caretaker of the RIMOSA exhibition space that reopened last June, explains that pre-COVID, RIMOSA made much of its revenue through contracts with outside programs, like Boys & Girls Clubs, local libraries, and schools. They would pack their interactive exhibits into their director’s car, set them up somewhere, hire an educator to run a workshop, and leave the exhibit for the summer. Now, like the Providence Museum of Natural History, RIMOSA has pivoted to teaching classes online and making activity kits to distribute to organizations throughout Rhode Island. Lessons include making art from natural materials and modeling spacecraft parachutes through origami.

Schneider likes to think of RIMOSA’s programs as “holding space for [kids] to be creative.” To engage with their materials, Schnieder says that children have “to observe what’s going on around and be creative with [their] approach to problem solving.”

Troubling to Schneider is the fact that more and more children seem to lack the manual dexterity needed to interface with the museum’s exhibits and now kits. Though he acknowledged that this is in part due to increased screen time for children, an alarming trend that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, he attributes this phenomenon to general institutional oversight to provide opportunities for the kind of hands on play found at museums like RIMOSA. +++ Annalise Conway, Director of External Relations at the Providence Children’s Museum, conducted a survey last summer asking when patrons would feel comfortable returning to the museum. She and Executive Director Caroline Payson told the Indy in an interview that “the parents of two to four year

olds were like, ‘Tomorrow. Whenever you guys are open we will be there.’” Museum administrators felt the responsibility to provide that “joyful experience” for families. For a while, they were able to; from the start of October, comprehensive cleaning procedures, coupled with online booking and lowered capacity, kept the museum safe and open until the state went on pause at the end of November. With that said, these strategies came at a cost—the museum lost $15,000 a month by being open, Payson said.

After the pause, the museum had a successful but greuling nine day run from Christmas to New Years. AmeriCorps workers described working five eight-hour days in a row at a time when COVID numbers were surging. When Payson met with the museum’s board of directors the next week to finalize the budget for the new year, they realized that without outreach opportunities it did not make sense to put $250,000 towards a program “that wasn’t working for anybody,” Payson said, adding, “It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made.” On January 12, Payson told the workers that the museum was over $500,000 in debt and had decided to end the program prematurely, lay off the workers, and close until June or July. This came as a shock to the AmeriCorps workers. “I risked my health only for them to fire us two weeks later,” one told the Indy, choosing to remain anonymous.

This is the consequence of a broken political system, one that ignores the importance of creativity and tactile play in early childhood education, forcing communities to create their own opportunities to foster such curiosity and find ways to reach those who have been systematically discriminated against. The way to fund the labor necessary for this outreach—AmeriCorps, a federal program that asks socially-motivated college graduates to dedicate one year of their lives in service for incredibly low wages—devalues this very vital work. When a pandemic strikes, the fragility of such a system is laid bare in the mad scramble of non-profits to apply for the grants they need to survive, just so that they can continue to patch the holes with activity kits, Zoom rooms, and PPE: holes into which those forgotten by our system fall deeper. Even then, these stopgap institutions cannot afford to keep their doors open or afford to pay their workers even a “living allowance.” +++ At the end of January, the Providence Children’s Museum announced on its website that it would be reopening for the week of winter recess only. A few of the AmeriCorps members were emailed and asked, somewhat ironically, if they would work the floor for minimum wage, over $4 more an hour than the AmeriCorps rate, and at least one agreed. For one week, children again could climb on tree structures in the Littlewoods, learn about Rhode Island history, and splash around the whirlpools of Water Ways. The museum plans to reopen on July 8th.

Between now and then, the museum is doing all it can with the grants they’ve gotten, teaching multiple online courses and running a new teacher training program around learning and play. While they are planning to open for short stretches a few more times before July, the path forward is still uncertain and darkened by loss.

LEO GORDON B’23 loved to visit his local children’s museum as a child.

METRO

EPHEMERA

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DESIGN MALVIKA AGARWAL

ARTWORK ‘HOMICIDAL BINGER” BY OLIVIA DIAMOND

ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER

how dumb this was. Aside from my pride that I was now a member of a club that included me and probably some Venetians, this was an objectively unsafe outing. I had always wanted to sleep with a pirate, and this man, with his sporadic off-hours access to a gondola from a part-time college tourism job, apparently fit the bill enough for me to let my guard all the way down. Looking for some comfort as I began to count the minutes until I was safely back in my apartment, I asked him if he too would’ve been afraid in my position to trust a stranger with knowledge of prime Providence river body-dumping locations.

And here comes the line that will reverberate through my brain for eons, such that it might be the first words my eventual child will speak without knowing why. He responded, and I cannot stress enough the matter-of-factness with which he said this: “I’m not a murderer. I’m a gondolier.”

And who can argue with that?

XOXO Landlubber

A

ll my Providence lonely hearts know that when you find a Tinder match so perfectly Providence it feels as though you have been blessed by Buddy Cianci, you must pursue. In my case, this perfect match was a gondolier—an actual Providence river gondolier. The kind that navigate the turbulent waters of Waterfire (RIP) with uncomfortable-looking couples who come because it seems romantic but ultimately grow self-conscious being watched and feeling generally too close to the polluted little artery in the clenched fist of Providence’s thriving downtown. The kind who wear stripey shirts and sometimes sing songs that emotionally transport passengers to the boot-shaped country that this city adores. Those gondoliers. I quite simply had to see where this could go.

After some light get-to-know-you chat over text, I decided I was ready to find my sea legs. And his.

And where the sea legs meet the sea butt. When the boy pulled out his boat, I was immediately skeptical. Gondolas are long and skinny vessels, and I

was anxious about how well I’d be able to handle its narrow length if we wanted to do anything risky.

But I felt anchored to my sense of purpose (as well as deeply fascinated by the fact that there’s a whole stash of extremely valuable gondolas half-hidden in the Providence river that one could definitely steal).

As we began the full tour, my worries eased quickly.

I was tired of being a landlubber and a land lover. As we rounded bends and he pointed out interesting facts about the Providence skyline, I felt confident in his powerful, masterful strokes.

When I moved to this city, I never would’ve imagined it would take me into its arms so warmly, damply, in a boat hitched up underneath Memorial Bridge, half-lit by a RISD safety kiosk, to the sound of pedestrians shuffling by uncomfortably. But Providence will surprise you like that sometimes.

He paddled us back to the dock. I reflected on how incredible the acoustics are underneath a bridge, rocking back and forth in a thin wooden boat. While the waves of pollution that emanate from the Providence river wafted gently, I began to truly consider

Fang Community Bail Fund

AMOR Community COVID-19 Project LETS Trauma Healing Support Fund for Black Folks

The FANG community is an abolitionistgroup 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 prison-industrial complex—you can donate via CashApp at $fangbailfund, or at this link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/= fangbailfund.

The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance’s fundraiser helps purchase basic necessities such as food, cleaning and sanitation supplies, and baby formula. AMOR also 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.

Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics Rhode Island [Coyote RI] A group of former and present sex workers, trafficking victims, and allies that promote and advocate for the welfare and safety of members of the sex industry, and resists Rhode Island’s criminalization of prostitution.

Direct Action for Rights and Equality [DARE]

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.

Refugee Dream Center [RDC]

A RI-based refugee resettlement agency A Providence based community that promotes skill development and other organization that advocates for social, political, and economic justice. DARE initiatives for the self-sufficiency and integration of refugees in RI. The RDC conworks to structurally challenge incarceration and funnel funds from policing ducts English as a Second Language classes for adults as well as health promotion and and imprisonment to social welfare. cultural orientation events, mentors refugee DARE also advocates against housing youth, provides social assistance to families, insecurity and displacement. and advocates for refugee rights in the US.

Providence Youth Student Movement [PrYSM] A RI-based organizsation that is dedicated to providing support to Southeast Asians who are young, queer, trans, and survivors of police violence to become leaders and changemakers.

The Bulletin Board is a space for grassroots organizers, local small business owners, and other community members to collectively list events, businesses, and mobilize support for direct action against structural violence in Providence. Please write to us at indy@gmail.com if you want to plug your event.