BPR Spring 2023 Issue 2

EDITORS’ NOTE

Dear Diary,

To a child, a promise is sacred. So when we tell them it was the tooth fairy who slipped a shiny new quarter under their pillow, they believe us. And then, one day, the truth comes out: We’ve lied to them. No harm done, really (or at least so we tell ourselves). But what happens when we assure them that they can do anything they set their minds to, that hard work will be rewarded, and that good things happen to good people? Perhaps we tell our children these things because we want them to be true, but do we, ourselves, even believe them?

We want to pick our kids up when they fall, scare away the monsters under their beds, and hold their hands on the first day of school. We promise that they’ll always be cared for. But in “Don’t Let the CHIPS Fall Where They May,” Anna Brent-Levenstein exposes how the United States fails to provide quality, affordable child care to American families. The Biden administration’s remedy for this problem, while creative and well-intentioned, may be counterproductive: Corporate-sponsored childcare, BrentLevenstein warns us, may most benefit large companies—at the expense of community providers, and in turn, children themselves.

When it comes to young people, the United States is not alone in settling for band-aid solutions. As Cole Powell shows us, the Seoul government is taking steps to address the youth housing crisis in South Korea, but its efforts have proven woefully insufficient. Good intentions and lofty rhetoric alone cannot lower rents or increase square footage, let alone build sufficient public housing.

Isabel Greider moves us from crowded South Korean highrises to the chronically underfunded high schools of Providence. In “The Ivy Tower,” she uncovers how Brown University’s property tax exemption directly contributes to the underinvestment in, and thus the underperformance of, Providence public schools. While funding shortfalls have long plagued American classrooms, the ascent of artificial intelligence represents a new frontier for educators. In “Academic Interference,” Joseph Safer-Bakal examines the transformative impact of technologies like ChatGPT. He argues that in an AI-saturated world, teachers should use rigorous oral examinations to test students’ mastery of course content and arm the next generation with critical thinking and public speaking skills.

Whether the issue is AI, bathroom bills, or critical race theory, political discussions are perhaps most heated when they concern our youth. Rising political polarization has invaded the classroom, fueling fights about how to teach the past. In “History, Hillsdale-Style,” Elliot Smith tells us about how a small liberal arts college in Michigan is attempting to spread a curriculum centered around American exceptionalism. Rather than hiding the most unpleasant parts of American history, Smith argues that schools ought to confront them head-on.

It’s not always easy to face hard truths. But that’s what growing up is all about. If we’re going to tell our children to “dream big” and “reach for the stars,” we need to meaningfully grapple with the obstacles they will encounter when doing so. Recognizing these barriers is the first step to dismantling them. As we put together this special feature, we were inspired by the hope that our authors hold for the future, their eagerness to imagine a better one, and their devotion to working with others to build it.

We pinky promise that you will be too.

— Alex and Mathilda

Brown Political Review

EXECUTIVE BOARD

EDITORS IN CHIEF

Alexandra Mork

Mathilda Silbiger

CHIEFS OF STAFF

Cole Powell

William Lake

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICERS

Gidget Rosen

Stella Kleinman

SENIOR MANAGING

MAGAZINE EDITOR

Joseph Safer-Bakal

MANAGING

WEB EDITORS

Alexander Lee

Bianca Rosen

Henry Ding

CHIEF COPY EDITORS

Andrew Berzolla

Robert Daly

INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS

James Hardy

Samuel Trachtenberg

DATA DIRECTORS

Harry Yang

Javier Niño-Sears

BUSINESS DIRECTORS

Gidget Rosen

Stella Kleinman

CREATIVE DIRECTORS

Christine Wang

Daniel Navratil

MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR

Elijah Dahunsi

LEAD WEB DEVELOPER

Kevin Kim

EDITORIAL BOARD

SENIOR MANAGING

MAGAZINE EDITOR

Joseph Safer-Bakal

MANAGING EDITORS

Bryce Vist

Isabel Greider

Ye Chan Song

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Antara Singh-Ghai

Asa Turok

Caroline Parente

David Pinto

Grace Chaikin

Harry Flores

Nathan Swidler

Masthead

CONTENT BOARD

MANAGING

WEB EDITORS

Alexander Lee

Bianca Rosen

Henry Ding

SE NIOR EDITORS

Isaac Slevin

Matthew Lichtblau

Natalia Ibarra

EDITORS

Ben Ackerman

Francisca Saldivar

Jillian Lederman

Michael Farrell-Rosen

Mira Rudensky

Suzie Zhang

STAFF WRITERS

Amina Fayaz

Ananya Narayanan

Andreas Rivera Young

Anna Brent-Levenstein

Annabel Williams

Annika Reff

Ashton Higgins

Bruna Melo

COPY EDIT BOARD

CHIEF COPY EDITORS

Andrew Berzolla

Robert Daly

MANAGING COPY EDITORS

Isabel Greider

Jon Zhang

COPY EDITORS

Allie Chandler

Antara Singh-Ghai

Audrey Taylor

Ava Cloonan

Dorothea Omerovic

Ellie Brault

Emily Colon

Grace Leclerc

Harshil Garg

Jimena Rascon

Julia O’Neill

Lilly Roth-Shapiro

Logan Wojcik

Miguel Valdovinos

Mira Echambadi

Runpeng (Ivy) Zhuang

Sabina Topol

Taha Siddiqui

STAFF WRITERS CONT.

Christina Miles

Ellen Silverman

Elliot Smith

Elsa Lehrer

Gus LaFave

Hayden Deffarges

Ian Stettner

Ilektra Bampicha-Ninou

Isabella Garo

Jack Jacobsen

Jesse Eick

Jodi Robinson

Juliet Fang

Justin Meszler

Kayla Morrison

Kritika Shrivastava

Maddock Thomas

McConnell Bristol

Michael Ma

Morgan Dethlefsen

Navya Sahay

Neve Diaz-Carr

Oamiya Haque

Rohan Leveille

Rohan Pankaj

Sofie Zeruto

Veronica Dickstein

William Loughridge

Yoo Min Lee

INTERVIEWS BOARD

INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS

James Hardy

Samuel Trachtenberg

DEPUTY INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS

Alexandra Vitkin

John Fullerton

Mira Mehta

Yuliya Velhan

INTERVIEWS ASSOCIATES

Alex Fasseas

Alexander Delaney

Alexandra Lehman

Alice Jo

Alyssa Merritt

Anik Willig

Anushka Srivastava

Ava Eisendrath

Benjamin Ringel

Carson Bauer

Charlie Adams

Connor Yew

Eli Gordon

Elijah Dahunsi

Elise Curtin

Ellia Sweeney

Emma Blankstein

Emma Stroupe

Gabriela Venegas-Ramirez

Hayden Deffarges

Hiram Valladares Castro-Lopez

Jared Lebovitz

John Kelley

Lauren Muhs

Léo Corzo-Clark

Matei Vaduva

Matteo Papadopoulos

Maya Rackoff

Miles Munkacy

Mira Echambadi

Omri Bergner-Phillips

Sam Kolitch

Seungje (Felix) Lee

Sophie Jaeger

Taleen Sample

Tucker Wilke

CREATIVE BOARD

CREATIVE DIRECTORS

Christine Wang

Daniel Navratil

DESIGN DIRECTORS

Hope Wisor

Patrick Farrell

GRAPHIC DESIGNERS

Alina Spatz

Kara Park

Lindsay Ju

Muhaddisa Ali

Tina Zhou

ART DIRECTORS

Anahis Luna

Hannah Chang

Irene Chung

Jacob Gong

Kelly Zhou

Lana Wang

Lucia Li

Maria Hahne

Rosie Dinsmore

DATA BOARD

DATA DIRECTORS

Harry Yang

Javier Niño-Sears

DATA DESIGN DIRECTOR

Lucia Li

ASSOCIATE DATA DIRECTORS

Arthi Ranganathan

Zoey Katzive

DATA ASSOCIATES

Allie Chandler

Amy Qiao

Angelina Rios-Galindo

Asher Labovich

Carson Bauer

Jo Gasior-Kavishe

Logan Rabe

Mahnoor Rafi

Raima Islam

Ryan Doherty

Yifan (Titi) Zhang

Zachary Wang

MULTIMEDIA BOARD

MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR

Elijah Dahunsi

MULTIMEDIA ASSOCIATES

Catharine Paik

Daniel Ma

Haotian Luo

Jonathan Zhang

Julia Kostin

Michael Seoane

Soph Thomas

COVER ARTIST

Evelyn Tan

ILLUSTRATORS

Ananya Parekh

Ashley Castaneda

Ashley Nguyen

Ayca E Tuzer

Cara Wang

Elizabeth Long

Evelyn Tan

Grace Li

Haimeng Ge

Jason Aragon

Ji Hu Park

Kennice Pan

Kyla Dang

Nicholas Edwards

Rosalia Mejia

Shreya Patel

Sophia Spagna

Su Yun Song

Temilola Matanmi

Thomas Dimayuga

Tom D'Amore

Vicky Yang

Wenqing (Ash) Ma

Ziwei Chen

BUSINESS BOARD

BUSINESS DIRECTORS

Gidget Rosen

Stella Kleinman

ASSOCIATE BUSINESS DIRECTORS

Cannon Caspar

Ellyse Givens

Eloise Robertson

BUSINESS ASSOCIATES

Anna Lister

Bisola Folarin

Charles Capstick

Charlie Adams

Ely Brayboy

Katarina Chen

Kritika Shrivastava

Manav Musunuru

Mariana Melzer

Martin Pohlen

Meghan Murphy

Mikael Oberlin

Morgan Dethlefsen

Peter Edelstein

Rohan Leveille

Taleen Sample

WEB BOARD

WEB DIRECTOR

Kevin Kim

WEB DEVELOPERS

Akshay Mehta

Andrew Yang

Hannah Jeong

of The Land

Spaghetti Junctions

by Sofie Zeruto ’26, a Political Science and Music concentrator and a Staff Writer for BPR

illustrations by Ashley Castaneda ’23, an Illustration major at RISD

It was only a few months ago that I first braved Spaghetti Junction, a rite of passage for all Georgia drivers. Officially named the Tom Moreland Interchange, the five-level intersection conjoins I-85, I-285, and other roads that lead into metro Atlanta—an area through which hundreds of thousands of cars pass each day. I white-knuckled the wheel down the rightmost lane while cars swerved in between unpredictably.

No regular bus or train line runs from my hometown into the city. While there is an active culture of using public transit in the North, few public rail or bus lines even exist in the South, and they lag far behind the rest of the country. Most are underfunded and regarded as ‘unsafe.’ They also disproportionately serve people of color. This is no coincidence, but rather the direct result of systemic racism and the symbolic historic entwinement of the car with traditionalist American freedom.

Twenty-five percent of adults in the Northeast United States say that they take public transportation on a daily, almost daily, or weekly basis,

in contrast to only 7 percent of adults in the South. In cities in New England, easy access to walkable areas, public buses, subway systems, and active rideshare companies negates the need for a car: Why would you even want one if there is a cheaper, safer, and cleaner option? By contrast, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is the only public bus and rail transit system serving the Atlanta metro area—and it is rife with foundational problems.

When MARTA was created by the Georgia General Assembly in 1965, the state initially made no real effort to fund its operations. A constitutional amendment allowed the state to fund 10 percent of MARTA’s total costs with the expectation that the remainder would be covered by county-level property taxes. However, several wealthy counties in the Atlanta suburbs, which had grown in size and influence amid mass white flight from the city proper, rejected the plan. As a result, MARTA never fully expanded into the suburbs and is, to this day, funded by a sales tax in the city of Atlanta and three of the surrounding counties: DeKalb, Fulton, and Clayton.

How public transit was left behind in the American South

MARTA was born into Georgia as a limited transit system for a select few counties in need rather than a normalized statewide asset. In the past, it has been predominantly used by the Black residents of Atlanta, a city highly segregated by race and class. The wealthy Atlanta suburbs’ rejection of MARTA has laid a larger cost burden on citizens in majority-Black counties by forcing only them to pay for the system. Unlike transportation systems in other states, MARTA did not receive funding from the Georgia state coffers until 2022, when it was awarded $6 million to renovate a rail station near Microsoft’s new Atlanta campus. The state and county governments’ reluctance to fund MARTA has left it functioning infamously poorly, with a reputation for lateness and inconvenience.

It is evident that other Southeastern cities face similar hurdles. In South Carolina, Greenlink Transit, the city of Greenville’s public bus system, is among the least-funded city public transit systems in the Southeast. As a result, Greenlink operates on short hours with few buses and a lack of routes to essential locations like schools and grocery stores. Many service workers in Greenville have no other option but to use Greenlink buses to get to and from work because parking in the city is extremely expensive. Additionally, infrequent, often late Greenlink buses consistently result in customers having to block out large portions of time to walk to, wait for, and ride the bus on the way to work. For low-income Greenville residents, this detracts from the quality of life and obstructs potential opportunities like jobs with hourly shifts that do not align with the sparse bus schedule.

“The car has long been an American symbol of individualism and freedom, but owning a car is not feasible for many. Access to efficient, reliable transportation should not be a privilege reserved for those with the financial means.”

Greenville’s Greenlink and Atlanta’s MARTA face a severe lack of state funding. These crucial public transport systems are forced to draw from rare federal government grants, ride fares, and contractual relationships that leave service painfully out-of-date. Thus, even in an era of booming development in the South’s increasingly progressive cities, progress on public transportation continues to be pulled down by past state- and county-level resistance. Rather than being seen as a public good that all should share in, public transit in Southern cities continues to be seen as a government-subsidized project benefiting only the working class.

On average, owning a car costs about $8,849 a year, while using public transit costs $1,140 annually. In Greenville, a third of households live on less than $25,000 a year. The car has long been an American symbol of individualism and freedom, but owning a car is not feasible for many. Access to efficient, reliable transportation should not be a privilege reserved for those with the financial means. The idea of owning an automobile and maintaining the freedom to travel anywhere in the country plays directly into the American dream and the individualism, frontier exploration, and personal liberty inherent to it—values that continue to be held close in the South.

The American dream promises that with hard work, anyone can succeed. And yet, a lack of public transit infrastructure prevents people from even getting to their place of work. When these stranded people are disproportionately

people of color, this obstruction becomes strategic, and the American dream crumbles. The “land of opportunity” is reduced to a mere obstacle course with a finish line that keeps moving further away.

Historical precedent and the sprawling layout of Southern cities ensure that it is highly unlikely that public transit infrastructure will ever reach the same level of functionality and normalcy as it has in the North. However, efforts to rewrite the narrative of public transit have found success in methods such as coalition building, incentives, and modern public rideshare programs. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest’s School of Medicine partnered with organizations and community members, 23 percent of whom live in poverty, to reframe the need for public transit as a public health issue. The initiative successfully secured an $800,000 budget increase for public transit in cooperation with the city council. Alexandria, Virginia, offers residents discounted metro rail line and shuttle bus tickets as part of a local initiative to reduce the number of cars on the road. Publicly funded rideshare programs are popping up across the country, and Atlanta recently tested “MARTA Reach” in cooperation with Microsoft: Citizens can call a MARTA Reach bus to their destination at the same fare price as a traditional MARTA bus or train. This program will enable all Atlanta area residents to have quick access to public transit even if they do not have a designated MARTA stop near their homes.

Public transit in the South is lacking, but it is not hopeless. By petitioning local governments for more funding, encouraging creative solutions like incentives and rideshare programs, and disentangling the narrative of the car from the equalizing symbol of American freedom, the United States will be one step closer to becoming the worldwide pillar of equity it has always sought to be.

Elijah Dahunsi: There seem to be two central, conflicting visions within the discourse of racial progress: race-consciousness and colorblindness. Which vision most resonates with you, and why?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: The race-conscious approach. It seems, to me, rather odd to hold the view that one can resolve the issues of racism without recourse to the language of race. If harms have fallen on the shoulders of people who have been described as Black or African American for no reason other than that they’re Black, and the remedy doesn’t allow for a specific redress for them, then it seems, to me, a disingenuous remedy at best. I hesitate, though, because I believe the race-conscious remedy can open the door for us to live in a world where race is no longer the determinant of our life outcomes. That doesn’t mean this new world should be colorblind. Why is the precondition for my full entry into American life that I leave the specificity of who I am at the door? Why do I have to wash my face blank? I refuse that upfront.

ED: How do the politics of cancel culture shape the effectiveness of using the language of race toward racially progressive aims?

EG: Cancel culture is a complex and vexing topic. We find ourselves in a moment of transition, where ways of talking and ways of interacting with each other are in flux. And whenever social arrangements and norms are in flux, people try to figure out what the boundaries are. It’s certainly the case that we are in a moment where people can’t just say whatever comes to their mind without being held to account. I also

Reimagining Race and America An Interview with Eddie Glaude Jr.

Eddie Glaude Jr. is a James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. In addition to being a renowned scholar, he is a public intellectual and political commentator who examines the complexities of the American experience in the tradition of James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Glaude is the author of many prominent and bestselling books including Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul and Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

understand that as we try to figure out how we’re going to be together differently, we’re going to overreach at times.

We’re in flux, that interlobular where we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to deal with each other and an America that is decidedly diverse. We’re going to have to work our way through the uneasiness. This process is bound up with moral questions about what kind of human beings we take ourselves to be. I’m prepared to risk overreach as we stumble toward a new way of being together.

ED: Does the degradation of democratic institutions fundamentally change the ways in which we call negative societal trends to account and stumble towards racial progress?

EG: I wouldn’t solely blame institutions for the contraction of a vibrant public space where Americans can engage in reasoned arguments about who we are. We’re so siloed in this country that it’s very difficult to engage in the deliberative work necessary to build the world we are stumbling toward.

I think our siloed information ecosystems make this difficulty particularly vexing. When the media is fragmented and ideologically overrun in certain areas, then we’re not getting the information necessary for us to do the work that democracy requires of its citizens.

So the short answer is that I don’t think the institutions are faltering alone. I think the public space is also faltering. We have to admit this if we’re going to orient ourselves to any substantive effort to change it.

ED: Where exactly will this change come from?

EG: I’m not a prophet, but change will likely come from a number of different spaces. It seems to me that if there’s going to be substantive change, it has to come from everyday ordinary folk giving voice and vision to a different world and organizing accordingly. But this will be a tremendous challenge.

ED: How can students across the country take on this challenge and engage in the process of building and growing this movement?

EG: Electorally, you’ve already demonstrated your power. In the recent midterm elections, democracy would’ve been lost if it wasn’t for Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen X. For the first time in a long time, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z outnumbered Baby Boomers in the election process. So how you make yourselves known politically is important.

ED: What book and media recommendations do you have for our readers as they think through the ideas and actions necessary to change society?

EG: I’d encourage everyone to read some James Baldwin. And throw a little Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez in there. Consume as much media as you can across a number of different platforms. And while you’re doing that, take a look at Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!

Edited for length and clarity.

Interview by Elijah Dahunsi ’25

Illustrations by Lana Wang ’24

OVER CORRECTED

The Prison Litigation Reform Act intolerably erodes prisoners’ civil rights

by Alexandra Mork ’25, a Political Science and History concentrator and Editor-in-Chief for BPR

After trying and failing to receive protection from staff, Keith DeBlasio was raped in prison multiple times by a fellow inmate. Although DeBlasio filed an internal report within the appropriate window, he contested his prison’s initial ruling outside of the mandated time frame. Thus, when DeBlasio subsequently filed an official lawsuit, it was dismissed on grounds that he had “failed to exhaust administrative remedies.”

For many Americans, it is unfortunately unsurprising for an incarcerated person to be left with little hope of redress after their rights have been blatantly violated. What fewer people may know is why, specifically, cases like DeBlasio’s are so often dismissed on technicalities. Much of the answer lies in a rider, called the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), which was attached to a 1996 omnibus appropriations bill. The explicit goal of the PLRA was to make it more difficult for incarcerated individuals to initiate and win lawsuits (ostensibly to weed out frivolous ones) by implementing a veiled procedure of internal review. It has been remarkably successful in doing so: Within four years of its enactment, the number of federal lawsuits brought by incarcerated people dropped by 40 percent— even as prison populations grew substantially.

The US system of mass incarceration is notorious—both for the conditions within prisons as well as the size of the prison population subjected to those conditions. Moreover, incarcerated persons have few options to challenge the oppression they experience behind bars, not only because they are disproportionately likely to come from poor, marginalized communities,

but also because of the formal political barriers they encounter (most notably, disenfranchisement). Consequently, civil litigation is essential to prisoners seeking legal justice. The PLRA undermines this accountability mechanism. It counterintuitively makes it more challenging for incarcerated individuals with already limited access to legal, financial, and political capital to receive remedies for civil rights violations— despite their unique risk of experiencing such violations.

The first of these requirements, dubbed the “exhaustion provision,” receives the most attention. It mandates that plaintiffs utilize all available internal complaint systems before filing a lawsuit. This requirement endangers people who feel unsafe raising accusations within their prison, including those who fear retaliation. Sixteen-year-old Steven Zick fell into this category: He was repeatedly assaulted by other inmates, and, even after the abuse reached the point that he experienced a seizure and was deemed to be at risk of suicide, authorities did nothing. Zick declined to file a report, fearing that doing so would only lead to further harassment by inmates and guards. Given the widespread abuse of prisoners by prison authorities themselves, it seems fair to assume that many others may be in the same boat as Zick. Moreover, in addition to fostering fear of being considered a “snitch,” the exhaustion requirement also hinders vital assistance for inmates in need of medical attention and other time-sensitive care.

Even for people who fall into neither of these categories, the exhaustion requirement can be harmful. People who have experienced

“But regardless of whether the PLRA has excluded frivolous lawsuits, what is clear with 27 years of evidence in hand—is that it has excluded many substantive ones.”

illustration by Sophia Spagna ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

trauma are often hesitant to share their stories, particularly when law enforcement is involved. Incarcerated survivors in particular may feel uncomfortable disclosing their abuse within the stipulated time frame, not know about the reporting mechanisms available to them, or fear the potentially retraumatizing process of opening an investigation. In light of these substantial impediments to reporting abuse—much less receiving restitution for it—we should design our legal systems to make it easier, not harder, for survivors to come forward. The PLRA does just the opposite. Alarmingly, it even does so for children like Zick, who must navigate all of the administrative avenues themselves, as their parents cannot fulfill the exhaustion requirement on their behalf.

The PLRA also harms indigent plaintiffs by limiting courts’ ability to waive filing payments. In practice, this requirement means that even if an inmate has been deemed poor, they must pay the $350 federal court filing fee as well as any additional filing fees to bring a lawsuit. Given that incarcerated workers regularly earn less than $1 per hour, this is a formidable sum and likely deters people from bringing meritorious

lawsuits. Even worse, the PLRA excludes prisoners from paying this fee in installments if they “have filed three or more actions in federal court that were dismissed as frivolous or malicious or for failing to state a claim on which relief can be granted.” Courts have read this provision “strictly,” to the detriment of inmates who may not be aware of how to properly file a claim.

Finally, the PLRA prevents plaintiffs from receiving compensation if they are not physically harmed, discounting the importance of the immense psychological and constitutional violations that inmates experience. As legal scholars Margo Schlanger and Giovanna Shay explain, “Proven violations of prisoners’ religious rights, speech rights, and due process rights have all been held noncompensable, and thus placed largely beyond the scope of judicial oversight.” This phenomenon was tragically illustrated by Jariett v. Wilson, in which the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that inmate Stephen Jariett’s experience of being made to “stand in a two-anda-half foot square cage for about 13 hours, naked for the first eight to 10 hours, and unable to sit for more than 30 or 40 minutes of this time” did

not result in a significant enough physical injury to consider his case.

There are plenty of reasons to doubt lawmakers’ claims that prisoners were filing mountains of lawsuits with trivial claims before the PLRA was passed. But regardless of whether the PLRA has excluded frivolous lawsuits, what is clear— with 27 years of evidence in hand—is that it has excluded many substantive ones. If we are truly faced with a choice between allowing frivolous and meaningful cases or limiting both, it is imperative that we choose the former.

Living in true democracy ought to mean that we are endowed with civil and constitutional rights. For those rights to be meaningful, all members of society—including, and especially, those behind bars—need fair procedures by which they can hold institutions to account in the event of a violation. The PLRA undermines these procedures, eroding the equal application of the law for some of our country’s most vulnerable citizens. Congress should repeal it—Keith DeBlasio, Steven Zick, and Stephen Jariett did not relinquish their civil rights upon entering prison.

Rethinking Criminal Justice An Interview with Skye Williamson

Clifton “Skye” Williamson is a co-founder of Transforming Lives. Skye has expressed his skill and passion for the arts by developing and directing educational, theater, and traumarelated rehabilitation programs for incarcerated individuals. Previously an associate at the Novogratz Family’s philanthropic foundation, Galaxy Gives, Williamson is now a project manager at the REFORM Alliance, a parole and probation reform advocacy organization. While incarcerated, Williamson earned a BA in Mathematics from Bard College. His undergraduate studies focused on artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. Williamson’s lived experience and ongoing research form the cornerstone of his passion to identify the most effective ways to leverage information technology and AI to support the criminal legal system reform movement.

Sam Trachtenberg: As I think of the dreamers in the criminal justice space, so to speak, one of the topics I am curious about is the movement to abolish prisons. What are your thoughts on those efforts?

Skye Williamson: Let me start by asking this: What’s the criminal justice budget? What’s the law enforcement budget? What’s the military budget? What’s the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget? It’s interesting to compare budgets and see how much money the nation invests in things. And I’m only bringing this up because what a nation invests in an institution is an indicator of that institution’s capacity to persist. The criminal justice reform budget is one of the biggest budgets—it’s larger than education, food assistance, and housing budgets. And to

Interview by Sam Trachtenberg ’24

Illustration by Lana Wang ’24

some degree, we’ve also discovered that the criminal justice system will justify this level of funding. I would definitely love to have a conversation about abolition. Just understand that you’re trying to abolish the thing that we’ve invested in the most. But that doesn’t mean we don’t aspire to it. There has to be a space where we hold the ultimate vision for where we’re trying to go and I think the abolition conversation is that place. Small reforms to the system aren’t really what we want to be doing. We’d much rather cut the thing off and replace it with something else.

Decarceration means that we’re going to pull one of you out every time we get a chance and every excuse we have. But we would much rather open the damn door. And so abolition is that manifestation of the larger consciousness in this movement that has to exist. There has to be a conversation about abolition because it’s where we’re trying to go. Right?

I also have to speak more broadly about revolutions. Frantz Fanon wrote about the Algerian Revolution against the French in an essay called “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.” He argues that the Algerian people were working to change, supplant, and oust something because the conditions compelled them to do so, but that they failed to envision what would replace that thing. What the Algerian people did was just occupy the government that was already in existence. There was a system that was conducive to colonialism, to oppression, and to the extraction of resources from the Algerian people. You can’t go occupy that. You have to redesign that. You have to re-envision that. And so, for me, the abolition movement, the abolition discourse, is about re-envisioning a system.

People ask the question, “If we get rid of prisons, where would all the bad guys go?” I think that’s a really myopic way to think about something that’s a really large problem. It’s immature to look at problems in the world and just say, “Well, where do the bad guys go?” Instead, we should be asking, “Where do bad guys come from? How do bad guys get to be bad guys?” We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. Why is that?

ST: Many people would look at you and say, “Look, aren’t you living proof that the criminal justice system is working as it should? That people who try to rehabilitate can do it?”

SW: How I’m showing up as I am now has everything to do with Transforming Lives. It has everything to do with the fact that I’ve had the benefit of having people who aren’t in prison care about me. Let’s think about that for a second. The successes that come out of the system are often attributable to their families, the ones who have had to pay for those phone calls that they couldn’t afford for years. Because when we lose connection to the world, what else are we living for? Prison isn’t giving you something else to live for. It isn’t going to inspire you to get back to the world. It’s really just holding you hostage. And that’s why a lot of people go from mentally well to mentally ill behind bars. There’s not enough awareness of how mental illness is an outcome of incarceration. Success has to do with family first.

Beyond families, success comes from exposure to the human beings who work within the system. They are the teachers. They are the medical staff. Once they get behind closed doors the medical staff is like, “Hey, I know how [the correctional officer] is talking to you is wrong, but I see you. I’m gonna try to give you everything that I can give you.” It’s in that moment, that human healing moment, that you think, “Okay, I can keep myself together because I’m getting the care that I want. I know I can’t expect anything from the system’s actors but in this moment a human being saw me, looked me in the eyes, and spoke directly to me the person, not me the object. They saw me as a person, a human being.” And so that’s the next layer, there are people in the system that are operating with intention.

And then finally, there are the educators, the volunteers. They’re the lifeblood because my family is my family. They’re my folks. The medical staff person is someone who’s there and has a certain professional distance; you’re never gonna get closer to them. The volunteer educators are coming in from universities. They’re those strangers who we never got to interact with. Human encounters with them make us say, “Whoa, wait. I’m not what everybody here is telling me I am. I deserve more than just the grace of the nurse whispering in my face when she’s trying to help me. These are people who are out there in the real world. I’m not in the real world. That’s the real word.” Our volunteers are our connection to the real world. The people who come in and go. It’s a blessing to meet someone. I went five years without meeting a stranger. Think about that. You’re walking down the street, and you just meet a stranger, and you can have a candid conversation. I’m enjoying myself now. I travel. The joy of my travels is just to talk to someone randomly. My family is like, “Yo, dude, you talk to too many people, man.” But for me, I just got out of a place where there were no randomly-started conversations. You can spark a conversation in prison but just largely go back to the very basic things that we all dwell on: fate, conspiracy theories, harm, abuse, things of that nature. So I am me not because of the system. I am me because there have been people all along the way who’ve held out humanity to me.

Edited for length and clarity.

“There has to be a space where we hold the ultimate vision for where we’re trying to go and I think the abolition conversation is that place.”

by Harry Flores ’25, a Political Science and Biology concentrator and an Associate Editor for BPR

THE LAST RELIGION

In December 2015, Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Once president, he would enact this proposal to the best of his ability, banning immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries. Unsurprisingly, the move won acclaim on the far-right fringe of American politics. Islam had long been a bogeyman for many far-right figures, and Trump’s policy appeared both crafted for and suited to their tastes. But seven years later, there has been a dramatic shift in how far-right thought leaders in both the populist sphere and “manosphere”—a mostly online community that prides itself on its ‘grind’ culture and extreme masculinity—discuss Islam. Though they used to categorically denigrate both Islam and Muslims as inherently inferior, farright commentators now weaponize the aspects of Islam (or their perception of it) that they deem positive in order to attack the left.

Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes, a self-described populist and incel known for denying the Holocaust, leading “Stop the Steal” protests in 2020, and managing Kanye West’s 2024 presidential campaign, exemplifies this change. While remaining steadfast in his opposition to non-white immigration and desire for a “Christian society,” Fuentes has drastically changed his public statements on Islam over time. In 2017, Fuentes angrily argued that “the First Amendment was not written for Muslims… a barbaric ideology that wanted to come over and kill us.” Now, he praises the Taliban as a “conservative, religious force” while claiming that the United States is “godless and liberal.”

The rhetorical shift among far-right commentators has not translated into a shift in their policy goals: Fuentes and others who now glorify Islam have largely maintained their opposition to immigration from Muslim nations. However, the radical transformation of their discourse is still significant and thus worthy of analysis. I would argue that the main factor propelling this pivot is commentators’ newfound conception of Islam’s aesthetic and ideology. Although their perception is an Islamophobic caricature— inaccurate to the practices and beliefs of the vast majority of Muslims—many latch onto it nevertheless. Specifically, far-right figures now perceive Islam as tied to ultra-conservative gender roles and anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs, leading to their identification of it as a “sanctuary from all the degeneracy in the West.” They are able to do so because, as a little-practiced religion in the United States, Islam is generally misunderstood by most Americans.

Exploiting this lack of knowledge, the farright frames many American Christians as ‘fake’ and ‘woke’ compared to ‘traditional’ Muslims. Simultaneously, however, these commentators capitalize on the exotification of Islam in order to maintain their desired ‘edgelord’ status—a

Why the far right is shifting its narrative about Islam

illustrations by Temilola Matanmi ’24, a Film/Animation/Video major at RISD

defining characteristic of the new right. Everything must be well out of the mainstream, accessible only by taking the ‘red pill’ and descending down the rabbit hole. As Christianity is the mainstream religion in the United States, the far right cannot achieve their desired contrarian appearance through Christianity, and thus they turn to Islam.

While this seemingly paradoxical desire to be edgy yet traditional runs across the spectrum of right-wing pundits, particular sects of the far right, such as the populist sphere, also have their own motivations. The populist ethos is embodied by recently ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson who rages against immigration, the Democratic “elites,” and the political establishment. For the majority of Carlson’s career, he has also disparaged Muslims—notably, he once asked, “Why is violent terrorism an inevitability in Europe now? The answer is… demographics change. There are a lot more Muslims living in Europe.” However, in 2021, as the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Carlson attempted to sympathize with both Afghan civilians and members of the Taliban: “Gender studies seminars at gunpoint” are “the face of the late American empire… [Afghans] like the patriarchy, some of their women like it too… maybe… we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.”

Examining Carlson’s discursive shift in conjunction with his strong opposition to Afghan refugees reveals the populist sphere’s new and unique goal: the creation of a multiracial populist right. Carlson’s statements are not for Afghans but for non-white Americans. It is okay to be non-white, so long as you remain ultra-nationalist, opposed to immigrants, anti-woke, and anti-establishment. And through the vessel of Carlson’s TV sympathy for Afghans’ experiences with alleged ‘woke indoctrination,’ the multiracial populist right grows.

But why is he trying to build a multiracial coalition in the first place? Because the American

populist right’s need for a more diverse base has become increasingly urgent—there are only so many non-Latino white voters to convince, and in the near future, that number is likely to decline further. Thus, Carlson has adopted this goal because there are already multiple races in America, not because he wants more. It is thus no surprise that despite the veneer of diversity, the white supremacist underpinnings of the far-right—exemplified by the confederate flags and Nazi-inspired symbols at the January 6 insurrection—remain.

In contrast to the populist sphere, the aforementioned manosphere has a history of racial diversity—there even exists a subsection of it dubbed the “Black manosphere.” Although it has a relatively heterogeneous thought landscape of men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, and others, the manosphere rests on the common foundation of toxic masculinity, a strong opposition to feminism, and grind culture. By far the most notorious figure in the manosphere is former kickboxer Andrew Tate, who has recently been arrested in Romania on charges of sex trafficking. Tate exalts excessive wealth and his ability to attract large numbers of women.

For Tate and many of his manosphere followers, a shallow conception of Islam is merely a means of justifying their equally shallow materialism. Once again, the real teachings of Islam do not matter—only their narrow and false perception of them. When Tate converted to Islam in 2022, his opponents challenged the incongruity of Tate’s and his orbiters’ social conservatism with their sexual lifestyles full of casual relationships. In response, one of Tate’s associates defended himself by claiming Islam allows many wives. In addition to the fact that Islam’s rules regarding polygamy are far stricter than is commonly believed, Tate and his followers engage in casual sex without marrying their part ners—a practice which is most certainly not endorsed by traditional Islam. But by choosing a religion whose faith is

not well-known to those in the West, Tate and his followers are able to maintain their reputation of social conservatism while living outside of the strictures of their adopted religion.

Although populists and those in the manosphere differ in their specific reasons for using Islam as a tool for personal and political gain, both share the overarching belief that Islam is the only conservative religion left—or, as Tate puts it, “the last religion… because no other religion has boundaries which they enforce.” As a result, even Christian nationalists like Fuentes now look to extremist Islamic states as a blueprint to, in their minds, “fix” Christianity by making “something like a Catholic Taliban rule in America.” The far right’s caricature of Islam is a growing part of its message; it is imperative to keep an eye out for how this false depiction distorts Islamic faith and simultaneously grows the far-right base.

“In 2017, Fuentes angrily argued that ‘the First Amendment was not written for Muslims… a barbaric ideology that wanted to come over and kill us.’ Now, he praises the Taliban as a ‘conservative, religious force’ while claiming that the United States is ‘godless and liberal.’”

Designed to Fail

by Annabel Williams ’26, an International and Public Affairs concentrator and a Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Su Yun Song ’24, an Illustration

RISD

A black plume hung over the rural town of East Palestine, Ohio, for several days in early February. The apocalyptic scene was caused by the derailment of a train carrying hazardous material on February 3 and the subsequent toxin burn. That same day, Governor Mike DeWine ordered an evacuation of the town, which he later extended to include people within a one-by-two-mile area of the chemical burn. DeWine’s office, briefed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials, did not deem conditions safe to return until February 8. Residents reported headaches, a burning sensation in the throat, and other symptoms. Authorities’ inability to handle the situation effectively and communicate clear information spurred distrust.

The train derailment in Ohio has incited a game of finger-pointing from within East Palestine and from those watching nationally. Norfolk Southern, the company operating the train, has received substantial criticism from across the political spectrum. This anger is justifiable given the company’s history of high accident rates, the millions of dollars it has spent on

lobbying for deregulation, and its refusal—even after apologizing for the disaster—to endorse bipartisan rail safety legislation. Norfolk Southern is responsible and should act as such, but the same is true for the EPA.

Federal agencies have a critical responsibility to protect public safety. The EPA is no exception. The EPA’s self-professed mission is to “protect human health and the environment” based on “the best available scientific information.” Yet, it proved unable to do just that in Ohio because it was designed to fail in handling environmental catastrophes like the February derailment. Its state of weakness can be attributed to three causes: chronic underfunding, environmental deregulation due to corporate and GOP influence, and negative public perception.

The EPA did not act with the urgency or diligence it should have. For example, the agency declared it was “confident that the municipal water is safe to drink” merely a day after state officials began recommending drinking bottled water, creating distrust. Furthermore, only on March 2, almost a month after the derailment,

major at

Years of deregulation, underfunding, and a feeble public image have made the EPA a weak agency.

“The EPA’s selfprofessed mission is to ‘protect human health and the environment’... Yet, it proved unable to do just that in Ohio because it was designed to fail.”

did the agency order Norfolk Southern to test for carcinogenic dioxins. “Testing for dioxin, a highly toxic substance, should have been one of the first things to look for,” argued Stephen Lester, a toxicologist and the science director of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice. Judith Enck, a former regional administrator of the EPA, voiced similar criticism: “[The EPA] should have ordered comprehensive testing the very day of the burn. It should have told residents, especially pregnant women and families with young children, not to return home until it was safe to do so.”

The fact that the EPA did not take the urgent, recommended steps is a predictable result of its underfunding and understaffing. An agency-issued report in August 2020 found that, in real terms, the EPA had less than half of the funding it did in 1980, stating that the agency had been substantially “hollowed out.” The erosion of funding has led to a staff exodus. Many professionals have also left in the past few years after becoming “dispirited” under the Trump administration. A few months ago, after years of cuts, the agency finally received a significant budget increase—an additional $576 million. However, as Max Stier, head of the Partnership for Public Service, remarked, the EPA still faces significant challenges to accomplishing President Biden’s ambitious climate promises, and revitalizing the agency “does not happen overnight.”

In addition to slashing funds for the agency over the past 50 years, corporate lobbying has resulted in several periods of regulatory rollbacks. Republican presidents routinely appoint a litany of industry lobbyists to become agency leaders. Notably, President Trump appointed Scott Pruitt and Andrew R. Wheeler, both former lobbyists, who led the agency as it voided over 100 environmental regulations. Many of the rollbacks directly limited the power of the EPA to regulate emissions from power plants, cars, and trucks.

Under Pruitt, the EPA cited an industry-funded study in its decision to weaken restrictions on super-polluting trucks. The study was later debunked, though the EPA claimed its decision did not rely on it. Wheeler, who succeeded Pruitt in heading the agency, was no better. He spent much of his career as a coal lobbyist before joining the EPA, with Murray Energy as one of his biggest clients. In 2018, while Wheeler still worked with Murray, the company issued an “Action Plan” for the EPA to advise the Trump administration. The document suggested cutting the EPA’s staff “in at least half.” Another Trump appointee, Samantha Dravis, chairwoman of the EPA’s deregulation team, formerly worked as a top official at the energy industry-funded Republican Attorneys General Association.

Even with President Biden’s efforts to reinstate previous regulations, Trump’s environmentally catastrophic legacy remains. Today, the EPA is still less potent than it was before 2016. This is in part because of Trump’s judicial nominations, which have provided opportunities for efforts to weaken the EPA’s regulatory power in the courts. In West Virginia v. EPA, the majority-conservative Supreme Court slashed the federal government’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. The consequences of the case are far-reaching, as it can serve as a legal basis to

“The EPA did not act with the urgency or diligence it should have.”

strike down other EPA actions that are not explicitly authorized by Congress.

Additional targeted efforts by the GOP add to the decrepit public image of the agency. A right-wing, Koch-funded super PAC, Americans for Prosperity, led and funded a campaign to publicly attack and villainize the EPA through video ads blaming the agency for spiking gas prices and inducing mass job losses. Amid the train incident in East Palestine, many right-wing media outlets utilized the event as an opportunity to criticize both the Biden administration and the EPA. The hypocrisy in these headlines is evident given the GOP’s track record of ignoring environmental hazards.

The derailment in East Palestine may not be as prodigious as the name adopted by some right-wing commentators—“Chernobyl 2.0”— suggests. However, the EPA clearly did not respond quickly and decisively. The EPA lagged in its response to similar incidents involving exposure to toxins and contaminants, resulting

in confusion and compromising public health. One prominent example is the mismanagement of the Superfund site program during Anne Gorsuch’s time leading the EPA in the 1980s. Another is in Flint, Michigan, where Enck claims she witnessed the consequences of the EPA deferring too much power to state officials. For years, the EPA reported safe levels of lead contaminants in water sources to community members in Flint, yet residents faced significant health complications from lead exposure. Without enforcing concrete federal procedures and authority, the agency “timidly stood back, leaving local authorities, corporate interests, and rumors to fill the void,” Enck wrote.

These past incidents—involving sluggish responses, poor communication, and the EPA’s susceptibility to corporate influence—cultivate distrust and paranoia. “I just don’t trust anybody,” said Mike Routh, an East Palestine resident, referring to government sources and Norfolk Southern spokespeople alike. Another resident stood on a street corner holding a sign reading “Profits over people/They Poisoned the Community.” Another sign: “The EPA nuked a town to open the Railroad #OhioChernobyl.”

Agencies like the EPA have remarkably little power, resources, and authoritative public influence. They are too easily manipulated by corporate and political pressure. As Nina Lakhani, a journalist for the Guardian, commented, “It’s an American political psyche where big business is boss… we see it in many countries… but I think in the [United States], it’s so much an everyday part of life.” Lakhani continued, “The health and safety of individuals, communities, of the environment, the planet, the water supply, really has always played second fiddle to profits.”

Yet, the agency is crucial to cutting American carbon emissions and holding companies accountable. As long as the EPA lacks the ability to work unhindered toward its mission of protecting “human health and the environment,” climate goals will be unattainable, and citizens will remain subject to environmental health hazards. Paranoia will also persist, misinformation and conspiracy theories will spread, and the American government will fail to protect its people.

“As long as the EPA lacks the ability to work unhindered toward its mission of protecting ‘human health and the environment,’ climate goals will be unattainable, and citizens will remain subject to environmental health hazards.”

Ben Ringel: What have been the main drivers of the housing crisis in Rhode Island?

K. Joseph Shekarchi: It’s a very simple problem to diagnose, and it’s much more complex to solve, but we simply do not have enough housing. We’re still relatively cheap in terms of our regional neighbors, and we have a lot of beautiful geographic areas—the beach, the water, the woods. People from Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and other places all flock to our state for second homes. The reality is that they’ve bought up a lot of inventory. You also have developers and real estate investors buying up housing, turning it into Airbnbs, and the recent shortage of lumber and raw materials has sent supply costs through the roof. All of this makes it very hard to build new housing stock, and we can go down the list and see that many things have contributed to a lack of housing, and there’s also the whole NIMBY issue. A lot of rural communities do not want new housing because they don’t want certain people to live in their neighborhoods.

BR: As State Speaker of the House, how do you plan to address the crisis?

KJS: I just launched 14 bills, the product of the hard work of two commissions that we formed. Together with the leading experts in the field, we crafted 14 bills that help launch incentives for the private development of new housing. They’ll have a significant impact with some changes in the court system, appeal process, and application process. We put a little bit of incentive money into transportation-oriented development, but the big takeaway from this project is that it makes it easier for builders to build new

Housing as a Human Right— Legislating the Issue An Interview with Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi

Joseph Shekarchi has served as the Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives since January 2021 and was re-elected in January 2023. Considered a moderate Democrat, he has represented District 23 in Warwick since 2013 after working as a land use attorney. Upon his election as Speaker, Shekarchi pledged to make housing issues the cornerstone of his administration, putting forth numerous bills designed to tackle the state’s housing crisis from multiple angles.

housing in Rhode Island without taking away any local control.

BR: What do you think is the primary way that these bills are different from the housing legislation that’s been proposed, debated, and even implemented in the state in the past?

KJS: For one, there’s no cost to the package. Only one of the 14 bills has a small cost for incentivizing affordable housing in transportation-oriented areas, and we can use already allocated money for that. And for the cities and towns, it gives them control over the decision-making process.

BR: This local autonomy seems to be particularly important, especially due to some of the rural resistance to your bills. Exeter Town Council President Daniel Patterson told Target 12 that “the problem you have in the General Assembly up there—the majority of the legislators are from urban areas and they have no clue what’s going on in rural areas.” What’s your response to this?

KJS: I respectfully disagree with Town Council President Patterson. I live and breathe land use all over the state, including rural development. Quite frankly, he was commenting on my bills before they were released. I would challenge you to go back to him and ask if he’s read the bills. I know that he hadn’t then because they weren’t out yet, but now, I’d like to know if he’s actually read them and has something to say.

BR: What would you say to people in Rhode Island who are teetering on the poverty line, living on the streets, or in and out of housing who are disillusioned by the government’s false

promises? What would you say to the people who don’t think the needle has been moved yet on this issue and are deeply affected by it?

KJS: We’re trying to help, but it’s a 30-year-old problem that’s going to take a little bit of time to correct. There are great shelters and great nonprofits who provide housing, but it’s a very complicated situation. There are some people dealing with mental health issues and substance abuse, but there are others who don’t have those problems. There are people with good jobs, making good money, but they just can’t find a house. We’re doing our best to help.

BR: Conversely, what would you say to affluent Rhode Islanders who don’t particularly care about the issue and think the government should spend its time and energy elsewhere?

KJS: The housing crisis is at every level of housing. Someone you know is affected by the lack of available housing: It could be your policeman or your mailman. They’re there in the affordable housing sphere, and they don’t have it. There are also people who are dying: We have had two reported deaths of homelessness this past year, and those were in northern Rhode Island. This is not just an inner-city core problem. This is an everywhere problem, and it’s going to require everybody to fix it.

K.

Interview by Ben Ringel ’26

Illustration by Lana Wang ’24

A PERFECT

Cult of the Dead Cow sounds like a group that meets to discuss the sinister end of the world or pulls strings to influence the highest echelons of government. In reality, it is a hacker group founded in 1984 with the goal of using technology to bring about social and political change. It does so by supporting protesters, releasing information inaccessible to the public, and challenging corporations it sees as enemies. Since the group’s foundation, other ‘hacktivists’ have emerged as a force for change.

What should and should not be public knowledge is an increasingly contentious subject. The complexity of these debates is illustrated by WikiLeaks’ 2016 revelations of potential wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. While Clinton’s use of a private email server and her campaign’s questionable fundraising tactics arguably should be public

knowledge, WikiLeaks obtained this information through Russian hackers who gained access to her campaign chairman’s email in order to undermine her presidential bid.

Regardless of one’s views on WikiLeaks, it is clear that hacking can quickly become a malignant threat. However, it can also be a powerful tool for social transformation: Hacktivism can

serve as an efficient way to uncover information hidden from the public. It has proven to be an effective means of confronting both government and corporate wrongdoing in the United States and targeting bad actors like ISIS and the Kremlin.

Hackers are differentiated by their methods. While white hat hackers are cybersecurity

“While the merits of the hack are contested, arson crimew successfully achieved her goal: She sparked backlash against the alleged biases of the no-fly list, demonstrating hacktivism’s ability to initiate social change.”

by

experts hired to find and fix vulnerabilities, black hat hackers seek to steal data or damage digital systems. One notable example of a black hat group was Lizard Squad, which shut down various video game servers in 2014. Though hacktivists are technically black hat hackers, rather than hacking for profit or infamy, they seek to publicize information for the public good.

Anonymous, one of the largest hacktivist groups worldwide today, aims to fight censorship and expose government surveillance, human rights abuses, and restrictions upon freedom of speech. Since its founding in 2003, it has targeted a variety of corporations, organizations, and governments to promote its guiding principles. The group first targeted the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association after these organizations attempted to limit the pirating of copyrighted

material. In 2015, it targeted ISIS after the Paris attacks by shutting down their websites and social media accounts. Anonymous also hacked PayPal after the platform blocked donations to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange—a move that allegedly cost PayPal over $4 million.

Most recently, Anonymous declared cyberwar on Russia after President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It has interfered in Russian government news and corporate websites and leaked data from entities like Roskomnadzor, the federal agency responsible for media censorship in the country. Despite operating outside of official international efforts to combat Russian revisionism, Anonymous reveals the power of hacktivists to challenge hostile states through cyberattacks, which are a cheaper and more effective alternative to other forms of warfare.

Anonymous is by no means the only large hacking group currently in operation. Similarly promoting transparency in government, the group Chaos Computer Club revealed the German police’s Staatstrojaner program, which wiretapped and extracted computer information from suspected criminals. Dragonfly, another hacking group, targets energy sector companies and notably disrupted Ukraine’s power system in 2015 and 2016.

Additionally, some hacktivists operate solo. On January 12, the Swiss hacker maia arson crimew—whose name is stylized to be all lowercase—stumbled upon an unsecured network that held the US no-fly list. She subsequently released it to the public, revealing the disproportionate representation of names of Russian and Middle Eastern origin on the list. Now, civil liberties groups, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American Civil Liberties Union, are filing lawsuits against the Department of Justice and the FBI, citing discrimination. arson crimew, who has previously been indicted by the Western District of Washington, D.C. for conspiracy, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft due to an unrelated incident, is now being investigated by federal authorities in the United States and Switzerland. While the merits of the hack are contested, arson crimew successfully achieved her goal: She sparked backlash against the alleged biases of the no-fly list, demonstrating the ability of hacktivism to initiate social change.

Hacking attacks like arson crimew’s raise questions about the extent to which government-kept secrets should become public information. Hacktivists constantly toe the line between compromising national security and democratizing public knowledge. While some hacktivist efforts, like those of Anonymous and arson crimew, have the potential to cause enduring damage, they have also proven socially useful. Thus, the question remains: Do the ends justify the means?

Does hacktivism aid the public or harm national security?

Ellie Silverman ’25, a History concentrator and a Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Kennice Pan ’23, an Illustration major at RISD

by Elliot Smith

by Joseph Safer-Bakal ’ 24 , an International and Public Affairs concentrator and Senior Managing Editor for BPR

As the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022, debates arose about the implications of work produced or assisted by artificial intelligence (AI), particularly for students. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that produces conversational text outputs in response to prompts provided by a user. It can be used for anything from answering questions about assignments to writing essays. Some fear that this form of AI will spell the doom of the quintessential take-home essay—the backbone of a student’s ability to reason critically and advance an argument. Although these fears are well-founded, attempting to catch AI-based cheating will prove futile. Instead, we should embrace AI as the next great labor-saving writing technology—like the printing press, typewriter, or Microsoft Word before it.

There is one vital difference between AI and previous labor-saving technologies: Whereas past advancements were used merely to transfer human thought to the page more efficiently, chatbots like ChatGPT are capable of producing original work themselves. They can find common threads across multiple texts, thus reducing the effort students need to put into their work. As the technology improves, so too will its ability to synthesize information.

Indeed, AI is improving at a blistering pace. Although George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan reported that ChatGPT-3.5, which is currently available for free, achieved a D grade on his famously difficult economics midterm, the newly unveiled subscription-only ChatGPT-4 scored an A. With the advent of ChatGPT-4, students may be able to use AI to ace their classes without meaningfully understanding the course material. Given the technology’s rapid advancement—developers released ChatGPT-4 only four months after the launch of ChatCPT-3.5—we cannot reliably count on anticheating software to keep up in this proverbial arms race. Thus, in an age where much of students’ heavy lifting can be done by AI, questions arise: Will people even have to think anymore? Or will future generations turn to AI to complete any intellectual task that is remotely challenging?

While there is certainly a concern that any use of AI tools like ChatGPT will be harmful, there are plenty of practical, plagiarism-free ways that AI can be part of a student’s toolkit. ChatGPT can condense long academic papers into short summaries that can be read in a minute or two—I myself

“In an age where much of students’ heavy lifting can be done by AI, questions arise: Will people even have to think anymore? Or will future generations turn to AI to complete any intellectual task that is remotely challenging?”

illustration by Irene Chung ’ 24 , an Illustration masters student at RISD and an Art Director for BPR

Artificial intelligence is irreversibly changing education

have used it to determine the most important points from class readings to address in my writing assignments. In that sense, ChatGPT can be an extension of text summaries like CliffsNotes, which has been a mainstay of students’ learning since the 1950s. Certainly, the experience of hungrily devouring Shakespeare does not compare to the rather banal process of scanning a summary, but synopses can provide a basic foundation of understanding for students exploring new literature. They are particularly effective for synthesizing research-based texts in which the authors’ word choice and voice are far less important than the information presented. To write a great paper, students will still have to engage with the texts themselves, but AI summaries can give those who are unsure or confused direction.

ChatGPT can thus be used as a kind of ‘universal SparkNotes,’ saving students an incredible amount of time when studying texts for which online summaries are not readily available. While this, in my view, is the most positive aspect of AI for learning, the fact still remains that students can use this technology to write original work—something that surely constitutes plagiarism and is harmful to students’ development.

But since ChatGPT is not going away, how can schools and colleges ensure that AI does not hinder students’ ability to develop critical analytical skills? One strategy might be to increase in-person assessments so as to limit the availability of AI. Short-form, in-class essays might seem as though they fit the bill, but have their own drawbacks: Although they force students to quickly and concisely organize their ideas, short essays do not allow for the same degree of high-level analysis as long-form papers.

Furthermore, exclusively relying on in-class assignments and disregarding the potential of AI would stunt students’ ability to master the

most advanced tools of our generation—tools that will become ever more important in the future, exponentially enhancing our ability to gather, synthesize, and produce knowledge. News articles are already being written by AI, and it has the potential to conduct legal and financial research. Thus, not allowing students to practice using AI tools may actually harm their career prospects. As any student who was told “you’re not going to have a calculator in your pocket your whole life” knows, the limitations schools place on students’ academic tools are not always reflective of the realities they will face after graduation.

My solution, then, is to judge students not only on work written at home, but also on their ability to defend it through in-person verbal examinations or class presentations. A college student might utilize AI to aid in their research process. Then, in class, that student would face a hard line of questioning about their work from their instructor or classmates. I am not suggesting that students should be questioned on surface-level facts, as a simple read-through would allow them to easily present AI-produced work as their own. I am also not suggesting this as a way of catching plagiarism—a goal that may not even be possible. Instead, I argue that in-class questioning forces students to develop a firm understanding of the ideas that go into their work and engage with new ideas presented by their instructors. Students should be challenged on both the reasoning underlying their work and the potential extensions of their arguments. This opportunity would also allow them to develop persuasive communication skills, which are not often practiced in classrooms today.

It is an imperfect solution, to be sure. It is possible for a student to create an entirely AI-produced research paper, read it over, and present its arguments without ever grappling with its deeper ideas. However, by setting an extremely high bar for an in-person defense of the work students submit and asking unexpected or thought-provoking questions regarding their work, teachers can make it challenging for students who rely exclusively on AI to pass exams. Through this method of assessment, students will become strong oral rhetoricians who can both critically engage with ideas and adeptly employ the transformational tools of AI.

“As any student who was told ‘you’re not going to have a calculator in your pocket your whole life’ knows, the limitations schools place on students’ academic tools are not always reflective of the realities they will face after graduation.”

by Elliot Smith ’

Hillsdale College faces a reckoning

Last year, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee unveiled a plan for Hillsdale College, a small, conservative college in Michigan, to open up to 50 charter schools in his state using $32 million in public funds. Part of a larger push by Republican lawmakers across the country to influence how certain subjects like history are taught in secondary schools, Lee explained that the proposal would promote “informed patriotism” and help “[preserve] American liberty.” The centerpiece of this project was the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum, which evolved from former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission chaired by Hillsdale President Larry P. Arnn. It adopts a framework for teaching history that portrays the United States as “an exceptionally good country” to challenge the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which emphasizes the significance of slavery in US history.

Historians have criticized the 1776 Curriculum for its historical inaccuracies and political slant. For instance, it compares the Progressive movement to fascism under Mussolini because both “sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts.” As one passage from the Hillsdale Curriculum explains, “Progressivism was a rejection of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as well as the form of the Constitution.” While Hillsdale College advertises the less controversial elements of its program, such as its instruction of the “great works of literature, philosophy, politics, and art,” many of the political undertones of the 1776 Curriculum remain. Simply put, an organization that sees public education as a “[battleground] in our war to reclaim our country from forces that have drawn so many away from first principles’’ cannot credibly claim to be objective.

Interestingly, the effort to implement Hillsdale’s educational vision has faced intense opposition, even in deep red Tennessee. Local residents in Madison, Montgomery, and Rutherford counties rejected Hillsdale’s charter school application. Skillern Elementary, the only school in Tennessee to use Hillsdale’s curriculum, recently terminated its agreement with the college and vowed not to use “civics lessons based on American exceptionalism.” State Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton, a Republican, even promised to introduce legislation that would increase scrutiny on the curriculum approval process, including preventing the governor from unilaterally approving changes. While the future of Hillsdale charter schools in Tennessee remains unclear, this initial opposition may indicate the limits of public support for efforts to change history curricula, particularly in regard to American exceptionalism and the role of race in US history.

Through efforts like the Tennessee charter school proposal, Hillsdale College seeks to use education reform as a Trojan horse for spreading its vision of an unchanging United States, glorifying the past while urging a return to so-called “first principles.” Concretely, this ideology manifests itself in an inaccurate portrayal of the early United States, a time period that Hillsdale’s former President George Roche hailed as one when the country “was secure in her faith... not sodden, as it is now, with ‘problems’ and guilt and self-doubts.” Brushing aside issues of injustice and violence, this understanding portrays historical introspection as a negative force creating “problems” for the modern United States.

Hillsdale College’s treatment of the civil rights movement is similarly problematic. For example, Hillsdale-affiliated teachers in Tennessee would be encouraged to discuss how “the civil rights movement was almost

26 , an International and Public Affairs concentrator and a Staff Writer for BPR

illustration by Ziwei Chen ’ 25 , an Illustration major at RISD

immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders.” Once again, the curriculum makes an ideological case for prioritizing teaching the American founding itself over the ways in which its ideas have been reinterpreted and expanded over time. It even claims that federal laws to desegregate lunch counters, hotels, and theaters represent an area “where the line between private conscience and government coercion began to blur.” By incorporating the key conservative issue of “government coercion” into its messaging, the curriculum casts doubt over the merits of racial integration.

Despite the recent emphasis on school curricula within the Republican Party, Hillsdale College’s blatant distortion of history should be deeply unpopular among the American public. According to a survey conducted

by the American Historical Association in 2020, 77 percent of respondents supported teaching about historical harms that cause students discomfort—including 78 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Republicans. Furthermore, two-thirds of respondents agreed that “our knowledge of the past should change over time.”

While controversial proposals like the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum may have the support of politicians like Trump and Lee, the local opposition in Tennessee indicates that many voters, while perhaps sympathetic to certain arguments about “wokeism,” are unwilling to surrender the education system to political actors who overtly seek to impose a distorted version of US history. The failure of the Hillsdale College charter school expansion in Tennessee indicates the limit of the so-called “culture war” between American conservatives and liberals—even in a state that banned critical race theory from being taught in public schools in 2021. Providing students with an honest examination of US history should not be a partisan issue. Lawmakers and voters from both parties ought to come together to ensure that all students have access to high-quality education free from the ideological influence of groups like Hillsdale College.

“An organization that sees public education as a ‘[battleground] in our war to reclaim our country from forces that have drawn so many away from first principles’ cannot credibly claim to be objective.”

by Cole Powell ‘24 , a Modern Culture and Media concentrator and Chief of Staff for BPR

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was the first South Korean film to be awarded the Palme d’Or. The film uncovers the South Korean class struggle by depicting the Kim family’s fraudulent invasion of the Park mansion and the stark contrast between their residences. While the affluent Park family lives in an architectural masterpiece, the Kims’ minuscule banjiha, a semi-basement style home, offers a realistic and true look at how a vast portion of Seoul’s youth lives.

Residential housing prices in Seoul have risen dramatically in recent years—increasing by 6.5 percent in 2021 alone—and have forced many young people into precarious living arrangements. A banjiha is one type of substandard housing with a monthly rent of around $450 for what is often less than a few hundred square feet of space. It is but one of the three most common, cramped, and cheap forms of housing, the other two being gosiwon (dorm-sized apartment residences) and oktapbang (rooftop rooms). While South Korean film and television often display the glamorous highrises that saturate the hypermodern Seoul skyline, many young hopefuls looking to prosper in the nation’s capital inevitably fall short of achieving this fantasy. Although there is no quick fix to South Korea’s widespread inequity, the government should investigate an array of creative solutions focused on broadening the availability of viable housing options,

How the South Korean housing crisis is impacting urban youth

illustrations by Kyla Dang ‘24 , an Industrial Design major at RISD

expanding pathways to home ownership, and increasing the availability of public housing.

The housing crisis of South Korea’s precarious youth represents a broader trend of Korean urban inequality, exacerbated by neoliberal reforms at the turn of the millennium. What’s more, the development of the nation’s economy has its foundation in what is considered its greatest national dishonor: its annexation by Japan in 1910 and the 35 years of colonial rule that ensued. During this time, Japan instituted a strong central bureaucracy that rapidly industrialized South Korea.

In the decades following the end of Korea’s occupation, the country experienced a period of rapid economic growth. The government instituted a series of reforms similar to those the Japanese implemented under colonial rule: robust industrial, educational, and economic programs under authoritarian control. Yet, when Korea’s foreign exchange reserves were depleted in the late 1990s, the country’s impressive growth came to a halt, and South Korea neared bankruptcy. As the International Monetary Fund stepped in to stabilize the economy, Korea was forced to implement high interest rates and restructure its economic policy around neoliberal standards.

Those who came of age during South Korea’s economic downturn were especially affected, particularly in terms of urban inequality, job insecurity,

and housing uncertainty. The crisis brought about a decline in full-time and lifelong employment, reductions in government services, and heightened social stratification. Many young people who migrated to the Seoul metropolitan area seeking better education and employment opportunities continue to find themselves cyclically trapped in low-wage, unstable jobs with limited housing options.

Today, Seoul boasts some of the world’s highest speeds of internet connectivity. But despite the city’s robust technological and innovative industrial advancements, over 30 percent of South Korea’s young adult population lives in poverty. The country’s birth rate is stagnant, and over 40 percent of households consist of only one person, indicating that much of the country’s youth is choosing not to marry or start a family. Many remain single due to rampant financial insecurity, which inhibits them from being able to afford better housing because high rents are often out-of-reach for single-income households. Gosiwon specifically cater to singles and prevent them from starting a family—trapping them in a cycle of poverty.

The consequences of these constricted living conditions for the mental and physical well-being of residents are catastrophic. A 2021 Seoul National University (SNU) study shed light on this reality. The researchers highlighted that rates of anxiety were alarmingly high among residents, with many primarily concerned about their inability to pay rent, housing cost increases, and deposit refundability. Additionally, the coronavirus pandemic, which was particularly harsh in South Korea, magnified these anxieties. Those forced to isolate in their tiny abodes faced high levels of social isolation and disconnection from friends and loved ones, worsening their mental health.

The physical health of these residents is often similarly abysmal. With improper ventilation, limited living space, and squalid sanitary conditions, many participants in the SNU study reported feeling lethargic and being in poor physical condition; even so, they could not afford the basic healthcare necessary to overcome such detriments. Since gosiwon also lack kitchen space, many residents are unable to store or cook healthy food options and thus struggle with food insecurity. Clearly, Korea’s urban youth not only lack sufficient living space, but their spatial arrangements also beget an array of concerning implications for their health and prosperity.

As housing prices in Seoul continue to rise, the patience of South Korea’s youngest bloc of voters dwindles. Young adults are utterly outraged by the lack of government intervention concerning their precarious outlook.

“As housing prices in Seoul continue to rise, the patience of South Korea’s youngest bloc of voters dwindles.”

In a way that is unprecedented among previous generations, these voters are less concerned with security issues, like the threat of North Korea. Instead, at the polls, housing continues to influence the ballot decisions of young South Koreans. In a statement to the New York Times, professor and elections expert Kim Hyung-joon stated, “To [young South Koreans], nothing matters as much as fairness and equal opportunity and which candidate will provide it.”

“Campaign promises, like those of Mayor Oh, however, may remain unrealized, and it is unclear whether or not government leaders will take adequate action to improve housing conditions.”

This issue has not been left undiscussed by some of Korea’s most prominent politicians. Seoul’s own mayor, Oh Se-hoon, has promised to make the capital a “city of hope,” acknowledging in a press interview that housing inequality is “perhaps the biggest grievance of young people in Korea.” Campaign promises like those of Mayor Oh, however, may remain unrealized, and it is unclear whether or not government leaders will take adequate action to improve housing conditions.

Recently, the Seoul city legislature approved substantial subsidies to aid the city’s low-income youth, which will allow quality housing to be rented far below market value. These subsidies, however, do nothing to solve the sheer shortage of affordable housing. Once they expire, young Seoulites without stable employment will again be left unable to afford rent prices. Thus, approaches aimed at expanding the stock of affordable housing options and facilitating home ownership offer the most assurance of long-term relief. The city is planning to build 55,000 new public housing units by 2025; however, with nearly 471,000 of Seoul’s youth population already living in public housing, it is likely that more will be needed.

If politicians fail to advance adequate housing options, equal opportunity surely cannot be achieved. The current outcry, though, offers hope that housing inequalities will be addressed in the future. Still, given the scale of the inequity, it is obvious there exists no blanket solution. While the Seoul city government has already begun providing assistance, additional measures are necessary to ensure that residents living in banjiha, gosiwon, and other substandard living arrangements can afford healthcare, build families, and become upwardly mobile. If South Korea forsakes its urban youth, adequate housing—let alone the Parks’ lavish mansion—will remain just another unrealized fantasy.

by Anna Brent-Levenstein ’ 25 , a History concentrator and a Staff Writer for BPR illustration by Lucia Li ’ 24 , an Industrial Design major at RISD

A recent move by the Biden administration has merged two seemingly unrelated issues: semiconductor chip manufacturing and the provision of affordable child care. The August 2022 CHIPS and Science Act allocates $52.7 billion to domestic chip manufacturing with the goal of reducing American dependence on foreign imports. However, in order to qualify for the funding, manufacturers now must provide affordable, high-quality child care to all of their workers. While noble in its intentions, the administration’s move may not represent a shift toward just family policy: The funding provision is at best a band-aid and, at worst, sets a dangerous precedent.

President Biden announced the new funding requirement in February. Two years after taking office, he had yet to make good on his campaign promise to provide affordable child care—his initial ambitious proposals, such as universal pre-kindergarten and family leave, were cut from the Inflation Reduction Act which, like the CHIPS bill, passed in the summer. The administration’s decision to announce the new childcare requirement six months after the CHIPS bill passed reveals its willingness to take a page out of the GOP’s playbook. Republicans often engage in questionable legal tactics—such as using vigilante laws to enforce abortion restrictions in Texas—but the Democratic Party generally adheres closely to political and institutional norms. This makes Biden’s move a relatively unprecedented one.

Of course, if there is any cause worthy of this kind of cunning political advocacy, it is expanding access to free or affordable child care. The average cost of daycare is a whopping $250 per week, which, for low income families, accounts for up to 12.9 percent of household income. Many families are forced to decide between shouldering these large costs or leaving the workforce to become full-time caregivers. This burden disproportionately falls on women: A 2018 Center for American Progress study found that mothers were “40 percent more likely than fathers to report that they had personally felt the negative impact of child care issues on their careers.”

Even before the funding requirement, some corporations had introduced incentives to address this crisis out of self-interest. This has been particularly true in the manufacturing sector, which is facing a worker shortage. Because only three in 10 manufacturing employees are women, experts attest that in order to combat a labor shortage and facilitate an increase in chip manufacturing, companies need to reach women who would work if they had ready access to child care.

But past experience should give us pause before we accept corporate child care as the solution. Some companies, such as Toyota, have been relying on on-site child care centers for years. Though chip manufacturers have a range of choices available to comply with Biden’s mandate, most are likely to follow Toyota’s lead and create the necessary child care centers themselves. As they do so, they will need to partner with child care providers—corporate or community. Annie Dade, a prominent policy analyst, explained in a column that these corporate child care providers who operate using a top-down model are in every way “primed to win these contracts.” The recent expansion of the corporate care market has already boosted conglomerates including KinderCare, Goddard, and the Learning

The problem with leaving child care to the corporate world

Experience. These organizations seek to generate profit; they pocket money at the expense of providing quality care to children.

Meanwhile, local community-based providers, which already struggle to receive the funds they need, are unlikely to benefit. These establishments, of which 60 percent are minority-owned and 90 percent are women-owned, deserve the government’s support. But without guidelines encouraging chip manufacturers to invest in these providers, manufacturers will turn to the corporate world. This means that Biden’s move, while intended to increase women’s equality, in fact leaves behind the female-dominated workforce that currently comprises the childcare industry. More comprehensive legislation, such as the Child Care for Working Families Act, must be enacted instead to specifically fund and boost existing providers that are currently underpaid.

Addressing the childcare crisis means reckoning with this systematic undervaluation of childcare workers. After all, it is worth asking why $400 billion in child care was first on the chopping block when Democrats needed to make concessions on the Inflation Reduction Act. The proposed funding was cut to zero in order to get Senator Joe Manchin (D–WV) to vote for the bill. Moreover, the Inflation Reduction Act is not an exception.

while intended to increase women’s equality, in fact leaves behind the female-dominated workforce that currently comprises the childcare industry.”

Childcare provisions were cut from the CARES Family First Act passed during the coronavirus pandemic, the American Families Plan, and Build Back Better. Each one of these bills was framed as a revolutionary, sweeping legislative move. All left child care out.

While an innovative response to these glaring omissions, Biden’s CHIPS move ultimately risks promoting a culture in which people are reliant on corporations for their paychecks and for their child care. This culture would, in turn, create situations in which people are reluctant to leave harmful work environments out of fear of disrupting their children’s care while also reducing investment in the existing community-based childcare economy and its workers. It is time for the government to take responsibility for providing child care to low-income families instead of trying to offload it onto corporations.

“Biden’s move,

by

President Christina Paxson posed for a photo-op at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Hope High School’s new library and media center—funded by a $150,000 donation from Brown University—while other schools in the Providence Public School District (PPSD) faced problems like crumbling lead paint, brown tap water, and asbestos. The library, like many of Brown’s efforts to aid PPSD, was a piecemeal victory for a school district grappling with systemic failure. Shiny new libraries alone will not save Providence schooling. As it turns out, the solution is much more costly for Brown: taxes.

Brown’s noncommercial properties are tax-exempt, a status the University is entitled to because, in theory, it provides the social benefit of education to local communities. In reality, however, Brown’s tax exemption robs public services of adequate funding without providing the purported benefits to Providence locals. Providence public schooling has been hit particularly hard: PPSD is a district in crisis, underperforming by every metric. Of its 24,000 students, only 10 and 14 percent are proficient in math and English Language Arts, respectively. Seventy-five percent graduate from high school within four years, less than both the statewide average of 84 percent and the national average of 86 percent. Absenteeism is common, with 48 percent of PPSD’s high school students missing 18 or more days of school throughout the year. The situation is so dire that the state has seized control of the district—a move that strips communities of color of political power, according to some.

When asked to identify PPSD’s number one problem, most members of the Providence School Board pointed to a lack of funds. Discretionary funding—money given to schools to be freely spent on auxiliary programs and supplies—is declining: In 2022, Providence public high schools were allocated $210.88 per pupil, a significant decrease from the $308 per pupil they received in 2004. Funding allocated to special education decreased from $207.06 to $74.52 per pupil during the same period, hindering the growth of the 47 percent of PPSD students who have learning disabilities.

Moreover, local revenues consistently eclipse state contributions in Rhode Island public school budgets, making low-income students less likely to enjoy a well-funded education. Affluent towns draw from their considerable tax bases to fund their

Isabel Greider ’ 25 , a History concentrator, Managing Editor, and Managing Copy Editor for BPR infographics by Lucia Li ’ 24 , an Industrial Design major at RISD and an Art Director and Data Design Director for BPR, Ryan Doherty ’ 26 , a Chemistry and History concentrator, Angelina Rios-Galindo ‘25 , an Education Studies and Social Analysis and Research concentrator, Jo Gasior-Kavishe ’ 25 , a Computer Science and International and Public Affairs concentrator, and Allie Chandler ’ 26 , an Engineering concentrator

Brown’s property tax exemption harms Providence public schools

“All in all, Providence loses nearly $30 million each year as a result of Brown’s tax exemption.”

schools, while districts with fewer wealthy residents—like Providence, where the median income for families with children is almost $35,000 less than that of the state—struggle to keep up. In New Shoreham, the quaint summer destination known as Block Island, only 18 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch; the town’s public schools received $39,333 per student in 2020. In the same year, the students of PPSD, 88 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch, received only $18,015 each.

Classical High School is arguably the crown jewel of Providence public schooling: US News & World Report ranks it number one among Rhode Island public high schools and number 91 nationally. Students score in the 96th percentile on the SAT, and the school’s graduation rate is 97 percent. Nadia Heller ’24, who graduated from Classical in 2020, reported that Brown admitted 10 of her grade’s approximately 270 students—a rate of admission she believes is substantially higher than those at other PPSD high schools (although official data is not available to the public).

Attending an institution like Classical is inaccessible to many; the price of success for Providence’s high-achieving public schools is the exclusion of marginalized students. The school’s unusually successful track record can be attributed to its competitive entrance exam. Critically, the test is only offered in English, despite the fact that 35 percent of PPSD students are learning English as a second language (ESL). As a result, less than 2 percent of Classical’s students were ESL learners in 2022. Relatedly, white students make up only 9 percent of PPSD students but 24 percent of Classical’s student body. Thus, the district’s occasional successes, like Classical, should not be used as evidence of its merits, but rather as a sign that it is rife with inequities. The basis of Brown’s tax exemption—that the University provides the benefit of education to local communities—evidently goes unfulfilled for large swaths of Providence’s youth.

As a financial powerhouse and paragon of higher education, Brown frequently avows its commitment to aiding the students of PPSD. In addition to financing the library renovation at Hope High School, the University announced in February that it would provide full financial aid to every PPSD student admitted to the Brown Pre-College Program. Brown also created the Fund for the Education of the Children of Providence in 2007, which pledged to raise $10 million for the district.

Many of the University’s efforts to support PPSD, however, have been either insufficient or unsuccessful. By the end of June 2020, 13 years after the Fund was established, Brown had raised only $1.9 million of the promised $10 million. To rectify this failure, the Brown Corporation authorized a designation of $8.1 million. Yet even with this pledge, PPSD reaps only $400,000 to $500,000 per year from the Fund—pocket change dwarfed by the University’s $6.5 billion endowment.

The insufficiency of Brown’s monetary contributions to PPSD is made especially apparent when one considers what the University should be paying. The University’s property is valued at $1.3 billion, a figure that would yield a whopping $49 million in property taxes per year. As part of the payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) program, the state of Rhode Island—not Brown—reimburses Providence $13 million annually to compensate for the University’s tax-exempt status. Brown contributed an additional $6.5 million in voluntary payments in 2022, but that is just 13 percent of what it would pay in property taxes. All in all, Providence loses nearly $30 million each year as a result of Brown’s tax exemption.

That loss of funding has significant ramifications for public schools in Rhode Island, where property taxes make up 49 percent of total public school revenues, markedly more than the US average of 37 percent. Moreover, 97 percent of Rhode Island’s local public school revenue—derived from municipal sources rather than from the state—comes from property taxes, as compared to an average of 82 percent nationally. Property taxes are vital to public school funding everywhere, but their influence is particularly palpable in Providence.

To reduce the wide quality and achievement gaps between Providence schools, Brown should look to the examples set by universities that have attempted to rectify their unjust relationships with the cities they occupy. Yale University recently promised to donate an annual $10 million to New Haven for the next five years in addition to its existing PILOT commitments. New Hampshire state law compels Dartmouth College to go a step further, paying local property taxes on dorms, commercial buildings, and rental properties. Following these precedents, Brown must step up and either pay property taxes or increase its voluntary payments to a comparable sum.

We now reach a delicate moment in the story of Providence public schooling. As PPSD flounders, Brown continues to purchase Providence land—most recently 10 parcels in the Jewelry District—at a rapid clip, demolishing homes and local businesses in the process. The more land the University purchases, the less land there is to tax. If Brown fails to aid PPSD monetarily, its immense successes will come at the grave expense of local youth.

“The price of success for Providence’s high-achieving public schools is the exclusion of marginalized students.”

A Nation Without Land

Tuvalu’s

by Veronica Dickstein ’26,

International

Staff Writer

“What happens to a country without land? Where will we call home?” Such are the considerations facing Tuvalu, a small island nation in the South Pacific, where sea levels are increasing at twice the pace of the worldwide average. Tuvalu, with a population of around 11,000, is spread across a set of extremely low-lying and narrow islands. The majority of Tuvalu is around three meters above sea level—a vulnerability that is augmented by the islands’ thinness: At its most extreme, the nation is only 20 meters wide. By the end of the century, Tuvalu is expected to be uninhabitable.

In response to this impending catastrophe, at the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference

(COP27), Simon Kofe, Tuvalu’s Minister of Justice, Communication, and Foreign Affairs, announced that the country would create a digital twin of itself in the metaverse. He stated, “Our hope is that we have a digital nation that exists alongside our physical territory, but in the event that we lose our physical territory, we will have a digital nation that is functioning well and is recognized by the world as the representative of Tuvalu.” He also emphasized that the initiative had the potential to preserve Tuvaluan culture and recreate Tuvalu’s physical landscape. One of country’s most at-risk islands, Teafualiku Islet, has already been recreated online. The rest of the islands may soon follow: Tuvalu, it seems, will

an

and Public Affairs concentrator and a

for BPR illustrations by Jason Aragon ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

journey to the metaverse is a distraction from the real issue at hand

soon be reduced to Tuvalu.tv, an online platform in the metaverse. But even Tuvaluan officials do not believe in the potential of the metaverse to support citizens preparing for the loss of their physical home.

Despite hopes and plans for a digital nation, Tuvalu is devoting most of its resources to preserving its physical islands—working to build sea walls, raising the lowest-lying islands, and advocating for international climate action. However, the nation is unprepared for the likely event that its adaptation efforts are insufficient. The Tuvaluan government’s official policy is to stay on the islands “come what may,” with no concrete plan as to where Tuvaluan people would relocate in the event that the islands become uninhabitable. In 2019, Tuvalu’s then-Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga declared, “Moving outside of Tuvalu will not solve any climate change issues… If you put these people in the middle of industrialized countries it will simply boost their consumptions and increase greenhouse gas emissions.” He called relocation discussions “self-defeatist” and asserted that there was no “plan B” other than to save the real Tuvalu. Although Sopoaga is no longer in office and made these claims before Tuvalu decided to digitize, Tuvaluan policy still reflects this sentiment today.

Now, to save Tuvalu, the government claims that the digital nation will preserve Tuvalu’s national sovereignty. For example, Kofe and other officials aim to use the new platform to maintain control of Tuvaluan waters and fishing rights in the event that the islands disappear. So, can Tuvalu exist as a sovereign nation through the Metaverse?

In terms of international law, Tuvalu finds itself in completely uncharted territory. The definition of state sovereignty used by the United Nations requires a state to have “a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) a government; d) and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.” A virtual Tuvalu will evidently struggle to meet these conditions. Issues also arise when considering where the Tuvaluan people will live physically and what role their location will play in Tuvalu’s sovereignty and independence. Notably, some political entities exercise de facto sovereignty over their own people even when unrecognized by international bodies like the United Nations.

Additionally, virtual Tuvalu will fully rely on Meta, an American corporation. If Meta stops operating for any reason, Tuvalu will vanish. Can a country with such a reliance on a single US corporation be considered a sovereign state? Even if Tuvalu creates its digital twin independently of Meta, it would still need to create data centers for the virtual platform on another state’s land.

The question of whether digital sovereignty is possible has important consequences for the future of cyberspace and the conception of a state. At the moment, due to a plethora of legal issues and contradicting notions of sovereignty, it appears not to be. But regardless of whether a real virtual state is currently possible, living in a virtual world is not truly living. A plethora of research exists, especially since the coronavirus pandemic, to prove the negative physical and mental outcomes of living online.

Tuvaluan government officials’ valiant efforts at adaptation reveal that they, too, likely understand that the digital Tuvalu is not truly intended to succeed its physical islands. Rather,

Tuvalu is using shock value to get the world’s attention. But their attempt to do so through the metaverse has been counterproductive: The digital twin plan is riddled with contradictions, sometimes exacerbating existing problems with in-situ adaptation and other times creating new ones.

Instead of piloting provocative projects, Tuvalu and the international community must focus directly on providing Tuvalu with the aid it is owed. The country’s digitization campaign has suggested—correctly so—that nations with a large carbon footprint and lots of money, like Australia and the United States, have a special responsibility to reduce their emissions and protect endangered small island nations. This position is important given that in 2020, US and Australian carbon emissions reached 4,535,300,000 tons and 386,000,000 tons, respectively, while for the past 20 years, Tuvalu has consistently emitted 10,000 tons of carbon annually. Bigger, richer countries that have contributed to climate change—and therefore Tuvalu’s plight— must help Tuvalu conserve its land, mitigate climate change, resettle Tuvaluan (and other) climate refugees, and preserve its culture, even in a diasporic context. This obligation—not Tuvalu. tv—ought to be the focus of our discussion.

“Regardless of whether a real virtual state is currently possible, living in a virtual world is not truly living.”

Russia’s Second Great Emigration

The war in Ukraine is driving an intellectual exodus from Russia

The first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Ivan Bunin, was unable to do so as a proud representative of his country. Introduced at the Nobel Banquet as “the soul of vanished Russia,” Bunin expressed his gratitude to “the hospitality of France” and to the Nobel Committee for awarding such a prestigious prize “to an exile.” Thirteen years prior, Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War had forced Bunin, an impassioned supporter of the anti-Communist White Movement, to leave or face execution if he was discovered on Soviet territory. As a result, he and his wife were forced to live an emigré existence in Paris, joined in the City of Light by a whole host of writers, artists, philosophers, and other members of the Russian intelligentsia who found themselves in a similar predicament.

Now, exactly one century after the last shots of the Russian Civil War rang out in remote Yakutia, a new warmongering totalitarianism holds court in the Kremlin. Consequently, Russia is witnessing a second Great Emigration—a massive outflow of Russians willing neither to die a pointless death in Eastern Ukraine nor to live and work isolated from the rest of the world. Unlike the first, however, this emigration does not have “creatives” in its vanguard, but rather coders and engineers. The long-term implications of the exodus for Russian economic and social development are nothing short of calamitous.

In the days immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands

by Bryce Vist ’25, an Economics and International and Public Affairs concentrator and a Managing Editor for BPR

illustrations by Tom D’Amore ’23, an Art Teaching masters student at RISD

fled Russia. Represented in this initial surge were those who were previously opposed to the regime—and thus feared arrest or maltreatment—and those with non-language-dependent skills who could work remotely, such as IT professionals. One Russian IT trade group, for instance, estimated that the invasion’s first 30 days saw an outflow of up to 70,000 tech workers. A second tide streamed out after the Russian Ministry of Defence announced a partial mobilization in late September 2022. Draft-eligible men with little interest in dying for control of Ukrainian hamlets began fleeing Russia in droves, increasing the emigré total to the high six figures. Hidden beneath both these waves is a steady undercurrent of primarily middle and upper-middle class Russians who can afford to wind down their affairs before emigrating. This persistent trickle is primarily composed of small and mid-sized business owners. Finally, a small number—perhaps 15,000—of Russia’s millionaires have fled, likely to avoid being inadvertently ensnared by Western sanctions. In total, most estimates report that between 800,000 and one million Russians have flooded out of the aggressor state.

Their destinations have been diverse. The most common have been Türkiye, Armenia, Georgia, and Serbia, with these four states accepting 350,000 Russians between them. Many Russians are familiar with Türkiye as a popular and relatively low-cost vacation destination, while Armenia, Georgia, and Serbia share

limited cultural and linguistic ties. However, Russian emigrés have been spotted all across the globe, from France to Thailand. Five thousand pregnant Russian women flew as far as Argentina to seek asylum, attracted by guaranteed birthright citizenship and universal free healthcare. Two men even managed to claim asylum in the United States, landing in Alaska after crossing the Bering Strait in a dinghy.

For the vast majority of emigrés, a return to Russia while the war remains ongoing is out of the question. Many could be prosecuted for desertion, and others could find themselves unable to secure housing or work. Some are simply unwilling to work for the gain of an aggressor nation. Consequently, as the war drags on and emigré Russians begin to acclimate to their host nations, the odds of their potential return to Russia become slimmer. Many young Russians are asking themselves a simple question: Why bother returning to an oppressive, autocratic, and increasingly isolated nation if they’ve already made the grand voyage to the West? The dilemma is particularly bothersome for the young, politically liberal, and highly employable coders and engineers who made up much of the opening wave. What remains for them in Russia, even in a postwar world?

Not much. Since the most skilled workers have left, so has much of the expertise required for meaningful innovation. And if innovation has fled Russia, emigrés have even less incentive to return. This hemorrhaging of human capital,

commonly termed “brain drain,” will saddle Russia’s next generation of young professionals with an even more barren domestic economic environment and contribute to new outflows.

To forestall this calamity, the Russian State Duma has begun debating a package of incentives designed to coax back emigrés. President Vladimir Putin, however, has publicly called those who have left Russia since the beginning of the war “traitors” and “scum.” Such messaging is unlikely to be effective in bringing back young Russians at the top of their fields—particularly as the Russian government has a long history of reneging on its promises to its own citizens.

Some theorists have argued that brain drain can be stemmed by pressuring developed states to adopt stringent immigration policies and invest directly into the developing world. If young professionals find emigration to the West legally difficult and see the construction of cutting-edge facilities in their home nations, they may decide to stay. But in Russia’s case, the West has little incentive to cooperate. From a geopolitical perspective, every young AI engineer and hacker that the United States can woo from Moscow to Fort Meade is a win in the zero-sum world of great power competition. Few nations in the world are willing to turn their noses up at skilled workers able to jumpstart domestic tech industries. Any question of foreign direct investment into Russia is surely moot—at least unless Putin’s grip on Russia is broken and the country regains a semblance of democratic freedoms.

In a nation already experiencing a severe demographic crisis—with a population that has decreased every year since 2017 and the

third-lowest life expectancy in Europe—an outflow of a million predominantly young people is likely to set an irreversible course for ruin. A dearth of young people compels the remaining labor force to work harder to support the elderly, which in turn reduces the resources the young have to start families. This is the destructive population trap currently on display in East Asia. As with brain drain, there is no easy cure.

Putin’s futile war thus has the potential not only to bury Russia’s immediate future under a mountain of corpses but also to permanently stunt the economy of Europe’s largest nation and exacerbate an already existing and deeply intractable population crisis.

When lists of the greatest Russian literature of the 20th century are compiled, authors like Nabokov, Brodsky, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and Bulgakov are prominently featured. These authors, all either pre-Soviet emigrés, Soviet deportees, or domestically disfavored dissidents, have one thing in common—they could never be positively associated with the Soviet regime. In this way, the government ensured that it could never lay symbolic claim to some of the greatest artistic and aesthetic achievements that the 20th century was blessed to witness.

Now, in the 21st century, Russia is well on its way to repeating its old mistakes. This time, however, Putin’s bloodthirsty regime has not been content with banishing creative merit—it has managed to drive out an entire generation of talented coders, businesspeople, and engineers. Factories can be restaffed and companies rebuilt, but Russia will see no meaningful innovation or progress if its best and brightest move overseas. When the war ends, Russia may find itself economically, socially, and politically desolate.

Perhaps, in an echo of what came before, some of the greatest technological achievements of this century will be credited to geniuses with Russian surnames. But, as with Ivan Bunin, many of them may be forced to begin their orations with messages of gratitude to their adopted homelands and acknowledgments of their immigration status—exiles, fleeing from a criminal regime.

“Consequently, Russia is witnessing a second Great Emigration—a massive outflow of Russians willing neither to die a pointless death in Eastern Ukraine nor to live and work isolated from the rest of the world.”

Sophie Jaeger: How do you think being a woman in the field of journalism has changed from when you began your career to now? Do you view yourself as a trailblazer?

Joan Lunden: Well, in 1973, it was a man’s world. You had to stomach a lot of insults behind your back and sometimes right to your face.

I remember the first time the news director at WABC in New York called me in, and he said, “I’m gonna ask you to anchor next week.” Roger Grimsby, the co-anchor, got right in my face and said, “You don’t deserve this. You haven’t been to the school of hard knocks.” But you know what? He was right—I didn’t really deserve it, but it was kind of a product of a time of women coming into their own.

When I started on the show, I had just had my first daughter, Jamie. She was seven weeks old, and I was breastfeeding. I said, “I have to bring my baby with me. I don’t know what else I could do; the baby needs to be there.” ABC wanted me back so badly that they just said, “Okay, fine. We’ll give you a little room next to your dressing room where you can [breastfeed]. We’ll put a crib in there, and you can put her there.”

I don’t think that they really understood completely what they were saying yes to. Introducing the new co-host of Good Morning America was not a big story, but the first woman to be allowed by a television network to bring a baby to work with her? That was a headline. As soon as it got out, it was in Time, Newsweek , Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, you name it. It was a huge

Developments in Journalism from 1970 to Today An Interview with Joan Lunden

Joan Lunden is a bestselling author, motivational speaker, and former co-host of Good Morning America . Lunden is the host of the PBS television series Second Opinion with Joan Lunden , host of the Washington Post podcast series Caring for Tomorrow, and ambassador to the Poynter Institute Mediawise for Seniors. Recently, she served as a visiting professor at the Lehigh University College of Health. After her diagnosis and recovery from breast cancer, Lunden became an advocate for women suffering from cancer, and she has worked as a national spokesperson for the American Heart Association, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, American Lung Association, American Red Cross, American Academy of Pediatrics, and Colon Cancer Alliance.

story. The fact that I had the audacity to ask the network to let me bring my baby to work by virtue of just living my life and figuring out how I could do both things at the same time changed the atmosphere in companies and big corporations across America in the ensuing years in a huge way.

When I [was on] Good Morning America, I was scheduled to interview Barbara Walters. I idolized her because she was one of the only women on television news. She took me aside and said, “I want to just say something to you, don’t fight for equality here because that time has not come yet, so my advice to you is to take every small assignment that they are willing to give you and make it shine.”

I followed that advice, and that is what made my stature as a woman grow. It allowed the executives there at Good Morning America to be able to have confidence in me and be comfortable in giving me bigger assignments.

Today, I’m not going to say that it’s all fair. I think certainly in upper management, in corporate positions, both at the networks and in every other business, it’s still for the most part, very much a man’s world, but when it comes to on-air, it’s fairly gender-neutral.

And was I a trailblazer by virtue of coming up through the ranks when I did? Yes, I was. If you asked somebody, “Was Joan Lunden a trailblazer?” They would probably tell you that I was a trailblazer because I was one of the most visible working women on-air and that I was the first to be allowed to bring my baby to work.

SJ: How do you envision politicians and journalists working to solve political polarization?

JL: It’s very difficult to figure out at this point, but I think the American public is absolutely exhausted by it all and fearful of where it has led us: to this very vulnerable, volatile point in our American history. I’m hoping that what I’m saying is correct because, if that’s true, then maybe we’ll see it in the way that they vote. Quite honestly, I think that in the last election, we did see that. The stakes are so high. Our democracy, our stature on the global front, our incredible way of life that we have here—those [are] worth the effort. I can tell you as a journalist who [has] traveled this globe extensively: I’ve reported from 27 different countries over five decades, and I’ve always come back home and thought to myself how grateful I [am] for the kind of life we have in America.

Edited for length and clarity.

Interview by Sophie Jaeger ’26

Illustration by Lana Wang ’24

China’s New Middle East

What Saudi-Iranian detente means for great power competition

by David Pinto

On July 15, 2022, Air Force One landed on the baking tarmac in Jeddah. Despite campaign promises to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah,” President Biden, spurred by high oil prices, came to the Kingdom on bended knee to plead for a production hike. Forgoing the customary handshake, the President fist-bumped his host, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Covid-19 protocol aside, it was a terse greeting, suggesting the recent estrangement of two formerly close allies. Soon after, bin Salman rolled out the red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping. The two shook hands and hailed a “new era of cooperation.” The contrast was stark and the message clear: The United States no longer calls the shots in the Gulf.

In March 2023, a joint communiqué out of Beijing stunned the world: Saudi Arabia would restore diplomatic ties with its archrival, Iran, in a groundbreaking deal brokered by China. The announcement made heads spin in US foreign policy circles. “Saudi Arabia and Iran breaking bread is something I didn’t know I would live to see,” said veteran journalist and Brown University professor Stephen Kinzer. For the first time, China has emerged as a power broker in the Middle East, leveraging economic diplomacy and playing an active role in conflict mediation. With the United States downsizing its military footprint in the region, a paradigm shift is underway. It is now time for the United States to rethink its approach to Middle East policy,

’24, a History and Modern Culture and Media concentrator and an Associate Editor for BPR, and Tianyu Zhou ’24, an Applied Math concentrator illustrations by Rosalia Mejia ’23, an Industrial Design major at RISD

learning from past mistakes to respond to the new multipolarity.

In the new contest for influence in the Middle East, China holds certain advantages.

As of 2019, the United States had between 60,000 and 80,000 troops stationed at over 30 bases in the region; China has none. This commitment to “non-interference” makes China a nimbler, more trustworthy partner in the eyes of Middle Eastern leaders. Given the strained US relationship with Iran and its history of support for Saudi Arabia, the United States cannot play the traditionally neutral role of a mediator. China— as one of the sole trading partners of the Iranian regime and an investor in the Saudi energy sector—does not pick sides. China’s trade with the Middle East has exploded in the past few years, rising from $180 billion in 2019 to $258 billion in 2021. Through its transactional economic

2003, anti-American sentiment in the Middle East surged in response to its disruption of Iraqi society. One Brookings study reported that 80 to 90 percent of surveyees in six Arab countries held an unfavorable view of the United States.

China does not preach the same moralizing rhetoric. As a revisionist superpower, Xi’s China is regarded with growing alarm in the West as a threat to democratic values globally. Moreover, China’s anti-Americanism has found ready support in the Middle East, particularly in Iran. Buckling under Western sanctions, Iran has become increasingly reliant on Chinese companies for its statecraft and economy. Tech giants such as Tiandy Technologies, ZTE, and Huawei, which assisted with the repression of ethnic minorities and the general populace in China, have become instrumental to the Shia regime’s suppression of pro-democracy youth movements. The 2021 Iran-China 25-year Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement plans to raise Chinese investment in Iran from $5 billion in 2020 to $400 billion over future decades in exchange for oil exports.

The Saudi-American relationship can be distilled to one core exchange: oil for security. Under the Trump administration, the Saudis were forced to reconsider their dependence on American security guarantees. Citing the America First doctrine, former President Trump refused to respond in 2019 when Iran-backed Yemeni Houthi insurgents launched drone strikes on Saudi oil facilities. The collapse of the Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action convinced Riyadh that the United States has no clear security framework for the Gulf. Since then, Saudi Arabia has adopted a more pragmatic and gregarious foreign policy, cooperating with traditional enemies like Israel and Iran to ensure its own security and leaning increasingly on Xi as an economic patron. This is perceived as a betrayal by Washington, but it is an entirely rational choice from the Saudi perspective.

ing aid packages to liberal-purporting countries and using sanctions to isolate “rogue states.” While such moralism may work as a rallying call in Central and Eastern Europe, it rings hollow in the Middle East. The United States must recognize that the Western conception of human rights, civil liberty, and political pluralism is not shared by all cultures. Moreover, the United States is inconsistent in its application of these values. Failed nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate the danger of such assumptions: Soon after America’s “humanitarian” intervention against Saddam Hussein in

Faced with a rising China, the United States cannot maintain its position in the Middle East through a values-based rationality. With his ‘pivot east,’ President Obama shifted priorities from countering terrorism in the Middle East to preserving a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific.’ America’s rushed 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan confirmed the Gulf states’ suspicion that its commitment to the broader region was wavering. As such, American allies in the Middle East find themselves increasingly isolated and are consequently exploring new alternatives for economic growth. China is now Saudi Arabia’s largest crude oil and petrochemical export destination, and Saudi Arabia is following Iran’s decision to replace dollars with renminbi for settlement. These developments put further strain on an already uneasy alliance.

“Our traditional approach to the Middle East has been to divide the countries in that region between our friends and our enemies,” said Kinzer, who finds that strategy oversimplistic. In the new competition with China, the United States must not force Middle Eastern countries to pick sides. The alienation of “pariah” states like Iran can only push enemies to unite, creating a soft balancing act against the United States. Sino-American competition in the Middle East is no zero-sum game; China has neither the will nor the capability to replace the United States as the dominant military power. Moreover, if China can play a positive role in conflict mediation, the United States will benefit; a more stable Middle East means more reliable supply chains and greater energy output. To regain its role in the region, the United States must abandon its Manichean vision of conflict in the Middle East.

“The contrast was stark and the message clear: The United States no longer calls the shots in the Gulf.”

America’s Fiscal Plumbing An Interview with Anthony Levitas

Professor Anthony Levitas is a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Since the 1980s, he has helped public officials and civil servants in post-communist Europe decide how to delegate funding and spending responsibilities between levels of government. His work has focused on equitable transfer systems, local taxation and finance, and school finance and governance. At Brown, Levitas teaches courses on intergovernmental fiscal relations, education finance and governance, and the history of the US tax state.

James Hardy: I want to start with the idea of cities being “broke.” Could you describe the origins of some of the funding problems that cities are currently facing?

Anthony Levitas: The fundamental assumption in most thinking about American local government finance is that every jurisdiction should pay for what it does through taxes it raises itself and for which it is accountable to its citizens. The idea here is that if people elect officials who are responsible for both taxing them and providing them with public services, then citizens have strong reasons to hold them accountable for their performance.

Interview by James Hardy ’25

Illustration by Lana Wang ’24

The problem is that with time, the number and types of public services we expect local governments to provide have outrun their tax bases, which, at least at the municipal level, consist primarily of property taxes. Even in the best of cases, property tax revenues just cannot yield much more than 2 percent of GDP, which is substantially less than the wage bill that comes from running schools. The fundamental problem is that we expect municipalities to pay for themselves and a growing number of public services using a tax base that is too thin to yield the necessary revenue. The days when local governments paid for themselves are long gone. Today, about 40 percent of local government revenue comes from a combination of federal and state grants and transfers. The same is true for state governments with respect to federal grants and transfers.

We think our local governments support themselves, but much of what they do is now financed from elsewhere. Worse, most of this funding comes in narrow categorical grants, making it hard for them to think about their finances or services holistically.

JH: What solutions are people proposing to fix these problems?

AL: I would say that since the dismantling of General Revenue Sharing in the 1980s, nobody is looking at local government finance issues in a systematic way. Instead, every state is essentially doing its own thing based on individual relations with the federal government. Between the 1950s and the mid-1990s, there was an important body called the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, which was tasked with thinking about this stuff, but it was ultimately dissolved in 1996. Since then, we have really stopped thinking about local government finance as a national issue.

One of the few systemic solutions that I have seen floated lately is to increase the coefficients used to calculate Medicaid transfers to states by increasing them sharply for states with poorer populations. This is probably a good idea, at least as long as we have 50 different Medicaid programs.

The other thing that needs to be said is that in the last 10 years, local government finances have been saved by hundreds of billions in new federal aid that came with the Great Recession of 2010 and with Covid-19 relief. For the last couple of years, local governments have had trouble programming and spending the federal Covid-19 monies. The coronavirus pandemic also opened the door for unprecedented federal transfers to poorer households, something that one might think would also relieve pressure on local governments for at least some public services. That said, it remains unclear whether any of these essentially emergency measures will be transformed into permanent programs.

JH: I’m interested in what your idealized version of the American tax state would look like.

AL: It’s easy to think of ideal solutions. It’s less easy to think of solutions that have a snowball’s chance in hell given our current polarization and the constitutional realities of American federalism. Unfortunately, the American Constitution is one of the most rigid and difficult-to-amend constitutions in the world. Worse, our

current political landscape makes it almost impossible to imagine major changes to it or even what could be done within its current limits.

But I guess in my ideal vision of America’s tax structure, we would—like virtually every other country in the world at this point—have a national sales tax. This would allow us to fund national redistributive programs from sources other than corporate and personal income taxes. Historically, our efforts to fund national redistributive programs solely from direct taxes have meant that, for most of the postwar period, our personal and corporate tax rates have been among the highest in the world. These high rates have facilitated both the hollowing out of the corporate tax system by lobbying and the Republican backlash against taxation in general.

So, in my idea of a better American tax system, the national government would have some access to the sales taxes that are currently funding state and local governments. Like elsewhere in the world, we would make greater use of regressive taxes to fund progressive social programs. At the same time, it would be good if the national government encouraged or compelled state and local governments to use more of their power to tax personal income.

If, for example, all states and localities had to tax personal income at some minimum level and according to a unified base, that would do a lot to standardize fiscal conditions across the country as a whole, reduce pressure on other taxes, and, perhaps most importantly, create a stronger foundation for fiscal equalization. The federal government should also begin to use the intergovernmental finance system to encourage jurisdictional consolidation at the local level and discourage practices like defensive zoning. It’s also nuts that we are trying to make states and local governments finance and organize the provision of health care to the poor. While the expansion of Medicaid has been a good thing in one way, it has really knocked the intergovernmental finance system out of whack. In short, I just don’t think health care should be a subnational function, and creating some sort of national universal healthcare system is not only obviously the right thing to do for public health, but would also free up a lot of energy at the subnational level to address other problems. In any case, these are a few of the items that would be at the top of my wish list.

“It’s easy to think of ideal solutions. It’s less easy to think of solutions that have a snowball’s chance in hell given our current polarization.”

DARK DAYS FOR THE PETRODOLLAR

by Annika Reff ’25,

Staff Writer

concentrator

In 2008, when the housing bubble burst and US markets crashed, a recession ensued—not just in the United States, but also around the world. Why? The power of the US dollar.

The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, establishing a global monetary order. The conference placed the US dollar at the heart of this order and established it as the de facto global reserve currency. This means that the US dollar is used internationally to cut down on transaction costs and exchange rate risk. Since commodities like oil and gold are priced in the reserve currency, countries must purchase and hold the US dollar to pay for them.

Even though Bretton Woods collapsed in the 1970s, the US dollar’s central role was reinforced when Saudi Arabia signed a deal with the United States to only accept dollars in exchange for oil. In return, it received US military support and supplies. The term “petrodollar” is derived from this deal and refers to US dollars used to purchase oil from an oil-exporting nation. The petrodollar has maintained the US dollar’s role as the premier global currency ever since.

Currently, the BRICS coalition—formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa in response to the economic devastation of 2009— is considering creating a new reserve currency in an attempt to further shift the global economy away from the West. As BRICS’ economic power grows, Chinese President Xi Jinping recently invited nine countries—Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Thailand—to attend the annual BRICS Summit in August and be considered for membership in the alliance. Russian President Vladimir Putin also stated that he backs Saudi Arabia’s entry into BRICS.

If Saudi Arabia joins BRICS and begins exporting oil denoted in the new BRICSsponsored currency, the role of the US dollar as the premier global currency would be undermined. Half a century after the 1970s deal, Saudi Arabia is much less dependent on the United States than it once was. While the oil agreement has long aligned Saudi Arabia with US interests, recent diplomatic disputes, exacerbated

by the high-profile murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, have hurt their partnership. This cooling of relations with the United States has led Saudi Arabia to explore other alliances, even recently agreeing to sell oil to China in exchange for Chinese currency, the yuan, marking a drastic shift away from the petrodollar.

Undermining the petrodollar and establishing a new reserve currency are not the only ways the BRICS coalition has sought to challenge American power. Its work to industrialize much of the Global South presents a strong alternative to the current Western-led order. In 2014, BRICS launched the New Development Bank (NDB), an alternative to the Western-led World Bank and IMF. The NDB has contributed funds to the Belt and Road Initiative, a Chinese global infrastructure and development strategy aiming to create economic growth and expand Chinese

The rise of BRICS may mean the end of the petrodollar

a Classics

and a

for BPR illustration by Jacob Gong ’24, an Illustration major at RISD and an Art Director for BPR

influence in more than 100 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. In developing the Global South, the NDB and Belt and Road Initiative have produced a strong alternative to the IMF and World Bank, which typically conditions financial support for recipient countries on economic policy reforms.

A March 2023 article in the World Economic Forum discusses this alternative and the end of the US dollar-dominanted world as countries shift toward new currencies: “We are leaving behind a US-led, unipolar world with the US dollar at the center and entering into a multipolar, deglobalized world where the dollar may not hold as much influence.” While a new BRICSbacked currency may not be a true threat to the hegemony of the US dollar, it is clear that many nations are looking for a new global leadership coalition. This should come as no surprise since BRICS nations account for 42 percent of the world’s population, but have less than 15 percent of the voting rights in the World Bank and the IMF.

BRICS’ economic partnerships in the Global South increased its political influence in the

region. China, in particular, continued to fund and facilitate development projects around the world while America turned inward during the Trump presidency, pulling out of many global alliances. During the coronavirus pandemic, the United States and Europe also did far less to supply vaccines to the Global South than India and China. Now, with conflict raging in Ukraine, many countries in the Global South have abstained from condemning Russia’s invasion despite mounting political pressure from the West.

As BRICS’ influence and demand for membership grows, so too does a challenge to the US-led international order. BRICS’ current chair Anil Sooklal recently stated that “the world [is] between orders... We believe we need to play a role in ensuring that we have a more equitable, inclusive, transparent, global architecture.” Even though BRICS’ growing coalition has remained absent from the front pages of American newspapers, it could represent the largest shift in the global balance of power in many decades. We should all be paying attention.

“BRICS nations account for 42 percent of the world’s population, but have less than 15 percent of the voting rights in the World Bank and the IMF.”

AI’s Unethical Underbelly

How artificial intelligence developers exploit foreign workers

by Jodi Robinson ’26, a Public Health concentrator

Writer

Countless artificial intelligence (AI) platforms make use of content moderation filters to prevent harmful and inappropriate output from being displayed. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, cites its content filtering system, moderation endpoint, as part of its “commitment to making the AI ecosystem safer.” Facebook has implemented an AI system to ensure that all content meets its Community Standards and “create[s] a safe environment” on the platform. Building massive datasets is essential to the functionality of these filtering systems, as they are annotated in ways that train the models on how to identify harmful content. However, the creation of these datasets for many moderation filters is dependent on cheap human labor. When considering the ethics of AI and its uses, it is essential to consider the ways in which AI has exploited—and is continuing to exploit—people from marginalized communities. In particular, attention must be paid to the immense psychological impact of AI on those who work on it globally.

In January, Time released a report detailing the conditions that Kenyan workers faced while annotating content on behalf of OpenAI and its moderation endpoint. Employees were given 150 to 250 text passages during a nine-hour shift and tasked with flagging them if they constituted sexual abuse, hate speech, or violence. They were paid less than $2 per hour to screen these incredibly graphic texts. One employee described reading a passage so graphic—involving bestiality and pedophilia—that she experienced torturous recurring visions.

Sama, the US-based company responsible for outsourcing this labor to its Kenyan branch, told its data annotators that they were entitled

to sessions with “wellness counselors.” However, workers reported that their requests for meetings were frequently denied and that the appointments they attended were unhelpful. Instead of receiving proper care, many employees were encouraged to prioritize productivity over their mental health. Nonetheless, Sama presents itself as committed to moral AI. On its website, it touts itself as a progressive company that performs “ethical data labeling that is socially responsible,” provides employees a living wage with benefits, and has lifted over 65,000 people out of poverty.

Despite these claims, Sama has a history of subjecting its employees to unethical working conditions, particularly during its past partnership with Meta, Facebook’s parent company. In another Time report, workers described the content moderation work they performed for Meta for around $1.50 an hour as “mental trauma.” Employees lacked mental health resources, and many were diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety, and depression. Sama engaged in union busting when workers attempted to organize for better conditions. In fact, both Meta and Sama are currently involved in a lawsuit spearheaded by former Sama employee Daniel Motaung, who was fired after attempting to lead a worker strike. Although Sama was Motaung’s direct employer, Motaung is accusing both companies of violating the Constitution of Kenya, and his advocates place special blame on Meta: Cori Crider, the co-director of the NGO representing Motaung, told Time, “Meta designed the system that exploits moderators and gives them PTSD—and Meta is the one treating them as disposable.”

and a Staff

for BPR

illustrations by Nicholas Edwards ’23, an Illustration major at RISD

Other employee descriptions reinforce the veracity of Crider and Motaung’s claims, as Sama is not the only firm that Meta has used to outsource labor for content moderation. Accenture, a Dublin-based IT consulting firm, had a $500 million contract with Meta to report and filter out graphic content. Workers based in Poland, Ireland, the Philippines, and the United States provided the New York Times with strikingly similar accounts to those of Sama employees: incredibly traumatizing work experiences rewarded with low pay and inadequate access to mental health resources.

The endless stories of large tech companies, such as Meta and OpenAI, outsourcing content moderation to unethical firms emphasize a grim fact: the psychological well-being of workers—often from marginalized backgrounds—is deemed an acceptable sacrifice to the advancement of “revolutionary” technology. While the lack of regulation to protect workers in the Global South from exploitation is prevalent across industries, common perceptions about AI as operating independent of human labor make worker oppression even more poignant in the tech world. Dominant AI paradigms theorize about the possibility that programs can take the place of workers, artists, or even entire governments. However, with sensitive content screening being largely dependent on human labor, AI development as we know it today can never be entirely disentangled from humanity.

Not only do AI algorithms have profound psychological impacts on the low-wage workers responsible for data annotation, but they also perpetuate further oppression of marginalizedcommunities through policing and surveillance. Notably, a sizable amount of data annotation work is outsourced to Latin America, where, similar to the Kenyan workers described previously, employees give accounts of long hours, low wages, and expulsion from tasks or chat channels after asking clarifying questions. Simultaneously, however, numerous countries throughout the region are beginning to utilize gov ernment-sponsored AI programs, many with the intent of reduc ing crime through predictive policing. Many of the datasets these programs use are known to perpetuate racial, gen der, and class discrimination.

For example, in Venezuela—a country whose residents make up the majority of AI data annotators in Latin America—videos of English-speaking, AI-generated news broadcasters began circulating on various social media

sites and the state-owned television platform, Venezolana de Televisión, in February. The deepfake news anchors worked to spread pro-government propaganda, arguing that claims of the country’s hyperinflation, food shortages, and state censorship are exaggerated.

Instances of governments exploiting AI like this are not inevitable: There are efforts within some Latin American countries to monitor AI usage through national councils or observatories, indicating some promise for the eventual reduction of harmful AI programs. However, some governments in Latin America and other parts of the Global South are currently willing to use AI algorithms to perpetuate harm, making it unlikely that any substantial regulations will be implemented in these regions in the immediate future. Until meaningful regulations are adopted, large tech companies will continue to target areas where they can get away with paying low wages and exploiting lax labor regulations, furthering long cycles of neocolonial exploitation in the Global South.

In dialogues about AI and its potential uses, labor exploitation and its intersection with the psychological well-being of marginalized communities need to be considered. Concerns about AI “taking over humanity” or debates surrounding the regulation of AI systems here in the United States cannot be separated from a broader conversation about the exploitation of workers across the world. Until large tech companies and government entities stop treating data annotation workers as disposable, truly “ethical” AI cannot exist.

“Dominant AI paradigms theorize about the possibility that programs can take the place of workers, artists, or even entire governments. However, with sensitive content screening being largely dependent on human labor, AI development as we know it today can never be entirely disentangled from humanity.”

Mira Mehta: Given your position in intelligence, what do you think the role of misunderstanding and fear has been in driving US policy towards the Middle East?

Bruce Riedel: I was a carryover into the George W. Bush administration, and I was there in the summer of 2001 as we saw evidence after evidence of the plot coming. I couldn’t get Dr. Condoleezza Rice to focus on the threat. She was much more focused on strategic arms agreements with the Russians and issues like that. She just didn’t take the al-Qaeda threat seriously, and she was not alone. Dick Cheney didn’t take it seriously. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, didn’t take it seriously. So on the morning of September 11, I was actually going to our senior staff meeting in the White House Situation Room. We’d already heard a vague report that one plane had hit the World Trade Center, but we didn’t realize it was a passenger airplane. So we sat down and started the meeting, and about two minutes into the meeting, the door opens, and the senior duty officer in the Situation Room comes in and says to Dr. Rice, “A second airplane has hit the World Trade Center. We are under attack. America is at war.” We immediately, of course, went back to our offices and were then evacuated from the compound, which we had never practiced before. Nobody knew what to do. So it was real mass confusion. Fortunately, the Situation Room continued to function effectively. And the President, after many hours of traveling, got back to the White House. And there was certainly a great deal of fear at that time. The universal assumption was that another attack was coming, and it would only be a matter of time, and it would

The United States and the Middle East An Interview with Bruce Riedel

probably be worse than the first one. We now know, in retrospect, that there was a plan for a subsequent attack on the West Coast. That plot, fortunately, was foiled by our move into Afghanistan, in which we learned who the hijackers were. But there was a huge amount of fear and concern and worry. We easily forget today that we also had a biological weapons threat that went on with a mysterious white powder, anthrax. We never really understood what that was all about. At the time, the assumption was that this was also an al-Qaeda plot. It wasn’t, but it helped create a sense of panic.

MM: How do you see the role of congressional authority with respect to the way the United States carries out military or intelligence operations in the Middle East?

BR: When I went to Brown, we were still in the Vietnam War, and we were protesting the Vietnam War, rightly so. Out of that war, there was a congressional law that said the president had to consult with Congress before engaging in military operations. Well, for the better part of a half-century, we really haven’t done that. We went into Afghanistan with no serious congressional oversight. In part, that was because we had to act very quickly, but we stayed for 20 years. We’ve engaged in military operations in Somalia, in Lebanon, and in many other places with very little congressional oversight. I would hope that one result of this disaster in Yemen is that the Senate, in particular, takes up its responsibility of providing serious congressional oversight over military operations outside the United States. We have blundered too many times because

we’ve lacked that kind of oversight. Now, Joe Biden famously voted against the authorization for war in 1991 and for the Iraq War in 2003, so smart people can make bad decisions about these things. But it’s always better when you get Congress involved. One of the things that the CIA learned over the course of its history was that congressional oversight was actually a good thing because it meant that you had outsiders looking at your thinking and seeing where the mistakes were. We need similar procedures for military operations with real checks and balances on what an administration can do.

Bruce Riedel ’75 is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies. He served in the CIA for 30 years before retiring in 2006. He was a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East to four US presidents and has written extensively on policy issues in both regions.

Interview by Mira Mehta ’25

Illustration by Lana Wang ’24