Summer 2018: The Experience Economy

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

FIVE-STAR POVERTY

VOLUME XLV NO. 2, SUMMER 2018 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

CLANDESTINE LOVERS

AFTER PARKLAND

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THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY 5

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*TEAR OFF THIS COVER

HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY This issue’s cover topic was originally proposed by Sal DeFrancesco.

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Five-Star Poverty Clara Bates

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Please Touch the Art Lauren Anderson

CAMPUS 9

Protected? A Profile of Laura Sanchez Tamara Shamir

UNITED STATES 14 Engineered Crisis in Flint May Wang

11 Experience and Economics Yuri-Grace Ohashi 14 The Engineered Crisis in Flint May Wang

WORLD 17 Blocked: The Technicalities of Blockchain Kevin Bi 28 Clandestine Lovers Miriam Alphonsus

20 The Things we Don’t Talk About Susie Clements 23 The Next Great Game: The Clash Over Central Asia Johannes Lang

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New Designs on the Block Alicia Zhang

CULTURE 28 Clandestine Lovers Miriam Alphonsus 31 Football/Fútbol Noah Knopf 33 The Shape of Us Che Applewhaite

INTERVIEWS 35 After Parkland: David Hogg, Ryan Deitsch, and Cameron Kasky Beverly Brown 38 Prosecution and Justice: Sally Yates Marty Berger

ENDPAPER 40 Going North and Becoming Southern Quinn Mulholland

25 The Challenges Facing Mexico’s Tienditas Connor Schoen 35 After Parkland Beverly Brown

Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image Credits: Flickr: 1- Dominic Alves; 1, 14- US Department of Agriculture; 3- Juan Antonio Segal; 7- shawnleishman; 16- Steven Depolo; 20- Garry Knight; 25, 27- Eddy Milfort; 27- Marysol. Photographer: 1, 35, 37- Sarah Tisdall; 9- James Blanchfield; 40- Quinn Mulholland. Public Domain: 1, 28- itsmeneosiam; 1, 28- Kevin Phillips; 3- Piotr Siedlecki; 23- mediangestalter. Unsplash: 31- Izuddin Helmi Adnan; 33- Samuel Zeller. Wikimedia Commons: 10- Meihe Chen; 11- National Museum of American History; 17- Satoshi Nakamoto; 30Public Domain; 36- Rosa Pineda; 38- US Dept. of Labor. Design by: Victoria Berzin, Eliot Harrison, Quinn Mulholland, Erica Newman-Corre, Yuri-Grace Ohashi, Matthew Rossi, Chris Sun, and Jamie Weisenberg.

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FROM THE PRESIDENT

A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. XLV, No. 2

hen Star Wars: Episode III was released in 2005, millions of people flocked to theaters to see it. If you were one of those people, the process was simple. You showed up to your local theater, bought a ticket, grabbed some popcorn and a large cup of Coke, and then located one of the few remaining seats in a densely-packed auditorium of around 300 fellow moviegoers.

After shimmying your way past a dozenor-so people who grumpily stood up to let you pass, you flipped down a thinlypadded plastic seat, sat down, and enjoyed the movie.

If you buy a ticket for Solo: A Star Wars Story this summer, it is remarkable how much your moviegoing experience will likely differ from that of a decade ago.

After walking past the box office and picking up your pre-purchased ticket from an electronic kiosk, you might skip the snack stand for the in-theater bar. Since you will have already reserved your seat online, you’ll take your time to pick out a favorite wine or craft beer before heading into the theater. You won’t have to squeeze past anyone to get to your seat this time, and once you sit down, you’ll sink a few inches into a faux leather chair that is big enough to be shared with a friend. The chair will be equipped with a tray table, where you’ll place some snacks you snuck in from home (some things never change), and a recliner, which you’ll press until your seat back is almost horizontal and your feet are raised high off the ground. Now that you’re comfortable, you’ll put on a pair of 3D glasses, and watch X-wings and TIE fighters wizz past your head as you journey through a galaxy far, far away.

Increasingly, businesses have turned to providing experiences to their customers rather than traditional products and services. Joseph Pine II and James H.

The Experience Economy

EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Samuel Kessler PUBLISHER: Drew Pendergrass MANAGING EDITOR: Akshaya Annapragada ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Jacob Link ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Russell Reed STAFF DIRECTOR: Sal DeFrancesco SENIOR COVERS EDITOR: Nicolas Yan ASSOCIATE COVERS EDITOR: Sarah Shamoon SENIOR U.S. EDITOR: Amir Siraj ASSOCIATE U.S. EDITOR: Chimaoge Ibe ASSOCIATE U.S. EDITOR: Jessica Boutchie SENIOR WORLD EDITOR: Alicia Zhang ASSOCIATE WORLD EDITOR: Darwin Peng ASSOCIATE WORLD EDITOR: Perry Arrasmith SENIOR CULTURE EDITOR: Katie Weiner ASSOCIATE CULTURE EDITOR: Savitri Fouda SENIOR CAMPUS EDITOR: Cindy Jung ASSOCIATE CAMPUS EDITOR: Julia Shea INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Marty Berger HUMOR EDITOR: Joseph Minatel BUSINESS MANAGER: Jacob Kern ASSOCIATE BUSINESS MANAGER: Wyatt Hurt SENIOR DESIGN EDITOR: Eliot Harrison ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR: Erica Newman-Corre ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR: Yuri-Grace Ohashi SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: James Blanchfield ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Sarah Tisdall SENIOR TECH DIRECTOR: Alisha Ukani ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: Gerardo Parra ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: Jason Huang COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DIRECTOR: Alexis Mealey

STAFF Manuel Abecasis, Victor Agbafe, Lauren Anderson, Clara Bates, Ari Berman, Josh Berry, Victoria Berzin, Kevin Bi, Devon Black, Cate Brock, Beverly Brown, Rob Capodilupo, Richa Chaturvedi, Esha Chaudhuri, Justin Curtis, Natalie Dabkowski, Nick Danby, Amy Danoff, Hadley DeBello, Sophie Dicara, Eve Driver, Peyton Dunham, Campbell Erickson, Lauren Fadiman, Ifedayo Famojuro, Will Finigan, Isa Flores-Jones, Samantha Frenkel-Popell, Daniel Friedman, Melissa Gayton, Jay Gopalan, David Gutierrez, Yashaar Hafizka, Matthew Hatfield, Katherine Ho, Jennifer Horowitz, Byron Hurlbut, Wyatt Hurt, Noah Knopf, Alexander Koenig, Yash Kumbhat, Johannes Lang, Jose Larios, Chloe Lemmel-Hay, Elton Lossner, Hossam Mabed, Sanika Mahajan, Emily Malpass, Kyle McFadden, Jake McIntyre, Carter Nakamoto, Nikole Naloy, Lainey Newman, Allison Piper, Mfundo Radebe, Noah Redlich, Sebastian Reyes, Ricky Rodriguez, Matthew Rossi, Vanessa Ruales, Pawel Rybacki, Connor Schoen, Ethan Schultz, Tamara Shamir, Lu Shao, Matthew Shaw, Julia Shea, Audrey Sheehy, Tom Slack, Hank Sparks, Chris Sun, Anirudh Suresh, Mikael Tessema, Meena Venkataramanan, Amy Wang, May Wang, Jamie Weisenberg, Peter Wright, Andrew Zucker SENIOR WRITERS: Perry Abdulkadir, Chad Borgman, Henry Brooks, Sunaina Danziger, Ali Hakim, Quinn Mulholland, Derek Paulhus, Samuel Plank, Tess Saperstein, Akash Wasil, Emily Zauzmer

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Ron Fournier Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

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Gilmore first noted this phenomena in a 1998 Harvard Business Review article, terming it the “experience economy.”

While this phenomena may have been apparent 20 years ago, it has become more obvious in recent years, with industries across the economic spectrum racing to provide grand, immersive experiences to their customers.

In this issue of the HPR, we explore a few of the ways experiences are taking center stage in today’s economy. In “Please Touch The Art,” Lauren Anderson shows how interactivity is adding new dimensions to art exhibitions around the world, and In “New Designs on the Block,” Alicia Zhang talks about how city planners and architects in Barcelona and elsewhere are packing entire communities — homes, shopping centers, restaurants and all — into just a few city blocks. Clara Bates explores the more cynical end of the experience economy in “Five-Star Poverty,” which focuses on the murky ethics of a growing ‘slum tourism’ industry.

As a concept, the experience economy is somewhat difficult to define, which made it unique relative to past HPR magazine topics. This made it a fun challenge for our writers, who found themselves following surprising paths over the course of their research. Whether the experience economy is a new concept to you or not — and even if you are skeptical of it altogether — we hope you’ll find something interesting to take away from the articles ahead. As always, thank you for reading, and enjoy.

Samuel Kessler President

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Five-Star Poverty Clara Bates

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or most, the idea of vacation evokes images of beaches, famous landmarks, or museums in exotic locations. For the approximately one million people each year who opt to partake in ‘slum tourism’ — a practice which involves travelling to an area of extreme poverty — the idea of vacation takes on an entirely new meaning.

Although slum tourism first gained attention in the ’90s, the practice originated in 19th-century London. Upper-class residents temporarily abandoned their high-brow lifestyles in

West London to don plain clothing and ride midnight buses to the impoverished, overcrowded East End. Some were reformers, though many others just liked to gawk at the poor.

An 1884 New York Times article entitled “Slumming in this Town: A Fashionable London Mania Reaches New York” chronicles the spread of the phenomenon from London to the United States, dubbing slum tourism an act of “sightseeing.” The article also pronounces “slumming parties to be the rage this winter,” predicting a surge in destination-visits to slums in Harlem.

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Today, instead of taking midnight buses to the East End, or journeying to Harlem, visitors most commonly engage in slum tourism by flying to the Global South: popular destinations include South Africa, India, and Brazil. According to a recent paper by Melissa Nisbett, Senior Lecturer in Arts and Cultural Management at King’s College London, modern slum tours are colorfully marketed and organized by private groups, charities, and NGOs. While the industry’s defenders cite the awareness of poverty and impetus for change that such tours evoke, others approach slum tourism with greater skepticism, pointing to the exploitative nature of tour companies and the sense of voyeurism that harken back to English East End sightseeing.

malized, but romanticized.” In her extensive study of Mumbai slum tours, she found many visitors left believing the residents to be “poor but happy.” In TripAdvisor reviews left by visitors, the slum was “seen as a place where people ‘flourished’ and ‘thrived,’” with reviewers emphasizing the “industriousness” of residents with little to no mention of their daily hardships, including poor health care and lack of access to food. This can partially be attributed to tours that emphasize economic prowess within slums rather than more concerning topics. Ultimately, Nisbett found that the majority of visitors leave the tour believing there to be no problem.

THE CONTEMPORARY PATH OF SLUM TOURISM

Though the scholarly debate has centered on the ethics of slum tourism itself, the deeper problem is the conditions that make slum tourism profitable.

William Robinson, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and an expert in modern capitalism and transnational tourism, explained to the HPR that for potential — often young — slum tourists, the desire to more deeply understand a country, or to feel that one is contributing to poverty alleviation, is understandable. But the feel-good spirit of slum tourism is illusory at best, and counterproductive at worst.

Slum tourism is symptomatic of deepening inequality in the United States. As Robinson argued, the industry’s surge in popularity over the past few decades is a dangerous symbol of the extremes brought about by modern capitalism, and is a sign of the urgent need to reverse course. According to Robinson, globalization’s massive expansion of transportation systems has paved the way for these sorts of interactions: prior to the media spreading images of the poor, and before the modern economy began to facilitate easy interaction with the poor, slum tourism was not nearly as sophisticated as it is today.

Today’s mass inequality created the conditions for slum tourism, and the spectacle of viewing the poor as though they are of another world entirely — in short, what made venturing to the East End so thrilling was the forbidden, other-worldly nature of poverty that persists today. Robinson further noted that “nothing comes out of [slum tourism] in terms of changing the structures of global capitalism that generates that … impoverishment … [tourists] simply come away feeling good.” Nisbett’s findings also highlight this gap between interest and actions, with her recent study demonstrating the lack of action tourists take to remedy inequality after participating in slum tours.

While Frenzel is optimistic that exposure to slums might induce political change, slum tourism does not lay the groundwork for a future that changes the material conditions of poverty.

Ultimately, as Robinson said, “[Slum tourism] is not linked to any program of social and economic transformation that would actually alleviate global inequality.” When pressed about the potential for slum tours to create true change for slum residents, even Frenzel acknowledged that evidence tying the industry to policy action is “hard to come by.” So before choosing a visit to a favela in Rio de Janeiro over a Brazilian resort, consider carefully the conditions that have propelled slum tourism to its popularity, and the inaction that allows the industry to continue expanding. Perhaps we are not far removed from the spectatorship of fashionable English slumming parties, after all. 

Slum tours were formalized on a small-scale throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Fabian Frenzel, a professor at the University of Leicester and author of the recent book Slumming It, said in an interview with the HPR, slum tourism was revitalized in the ’90s as democratization swept the globe.

Frenzel pointed to the influence of social media as a factor in slum tourism’s burgeoning popularity, as slum tourists gained the ability to make their trips accessible to others online.

Frenzel is optimistic that this visibility can eventually contribute to poverty alleviation, though he cautioned that an increasingly protective future may limit authentic experiences of poverty in slum tourism. Frenzel warned against future tourist organizations that may “sanitize” what he viewed as the natural interactions between visitors and slum residents, in order to create a “purely economic” transaction rather than cross-cultural exchange. Perhaps this has already begun — a few luxury shantytowns, or hotels mimicking poor huts, have sprung up in places like Bloemfontein, South Africa for the well-off to ‘experience’ poverty within the bounds of a luxury resort.

THE ETHICAL DEBATE For now, however, the streams of tourists globally remain strong, and the debate among scholars about the morality of slum tourism is heated.

The largest company to organize commercial slum tours, Reality Tours, is based in India and assists 15,000 tourists annually.

Reality Tours’ website explains the tours’ purpose, stating that “travel can be educational and positively influence international affairs.”

Some scholars are sympathetic to organizations like Reality Tours’ missions. Frenzel argued that slum tourism raises awareness of inequality and can attract attention to areas commonly overlooked by those in power. For Frenzel, slum tourism creates a “permanently evolving story,” as new visitors leave the slums with a more complete understanding of how the poorest live.

Others have visceral reactions to the commercialization of poverty for profit and the creation of yet another sphere commodified and marketed to those who can afford it. This can seem especially insidious when tourists pay companies to visit poor areas — such an outcome suggests that the rich are so disconnected from the poor that an industry must be spearheaded to force the two to intermingle.

Nisbett told the HPR that on tours, “poverty isn’t just nor-

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OUT OF THE SLUMS

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PLEASE TOUCH THE ART Lauren Anderson

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n inquisitive child impulsively reaches toward a piece of artwork that has captured her imagination. Arms stretched out, she leans toward the gilded frame, anticipating touching the sinuous lines on the canvas created by the oil paints of an Impressionist artist. “Stop!” an anxious security guard shouts. The child turns away, as her hope of fully experiencing the art that has mesmerized her disappears. Met with commands of “Don’t touch the art!” from both the security guard and a parent surprised to find that their child has nearly gotten them removed from the museum, the child can only stare at the piece from a distance. Although she is free to admire the piece, she can neither fully interact with it nor fully immerse herself in it.

Just a few blocks away, a visually impaired man touches a portrait designed to be tangible. A smile radiates across his face as he is finally able to immerse himself in art. This man, George Wurtzel, found a sense of identity and association through this interaction. The artist — Andrew Myers, a Laguna Beach based mixed media sculptor — had created a series of “screw paintings” designed specifically to be interacted with, and intended to help people foster a sense of identity when interacting with art.

Not all art can be touched — nor should all art be. However, no hard and fast rule should define the way that people interact with art. Physical engagement integrates the observer and the art, creating an experience that cannot be recreated through mere appreciation from a distance. The ability to touch art makes it accessible to a variety of different communities and individual senses, creating a level of intimacy with the piece

beyond what observations can provide. The future of art is interactive: keeping art relevant will require institutions to embrace innovations that integrate art with physicality.

FROM STATIC TO INTERACTIVE Interactive art has its origins in the political and social movements of the ’50s and ’60s. Steeped in the new politics that flooded the world following World War II, the ‘happenings’ movement created a basis for the future of interactive art. These artists sought to use their events and installations to promote their often-extremist beliefs. The interactivity of performance and installation art proved to be an effective means to communicate the fear, excitement, and hope brought about by the uncertainties of uncertainties post-war era. Happenings forced spectators to become a part of the work itself. For example, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s infamous ‘bed-in’ in 1969 invited the public to watch them sit in bed as protest of the Vietnam War. Thus the public was forced to engage with the sentiments that characterized the non-violence and anti-war movements.

The art world continued to shift from emphasizing the object created by the artist to emphasizing the artist’s intentions. Happenings sought to “replace the ‘artist as god’ idea with the ‘artist as facilitator and enabler of creativity,’” according to Ernest Edmonds, a professor of computational art at the Leicester Media School. Professor Edmonds, who was also awarded the ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement In Digital Art, told the HPR that interactive art

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“represents a drive for a more inclusive and, perhaps one might say democratic view of art in society. So interactive art is very political, but not particularly active in the political arena.”

MOVING TOWARDS A NEW MODERNISM As the world has become more integrated with technology, the art world has, in turn, been influenced by — and begun to integrate itself — with technology. Using technology as a tool to communicate its themes, interactive art has become increasingly more nuanced and complex. This shift is illustrated by Bill Viola’s installation piece The Crossing (1996). The Crossing manipulates videography to create a pair of video sequences that are simultaneously projected onto a double-sided screen. Both sides begin with a man walking, but diverge into two separate scenes as the film progresses: one in which the man is engulfed by flames, the other by water, until the two forces temper each other into obsolescence. The use of slow motion film in this piece is intended to convey the artist’s belief in the chaos of the modern world and the need to slow time.

Another piece that furthers the manipulation of technologies to create art is Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors. On display at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles, the Infinity Mirrors feature two separate installations: The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), and Longing for Eternity (2017). The two installations are composed of a series of mirrors and LED lights that reflect off each other to create a seemingly limitless atmosphere.

The mirrors create an interactive experience by casting the viewer as the subject of an infinite world. In an interview with the HPR, The Broad Museum curator Sarah Loyer noted the difficulties institutions face in housing installation pieces. She stated that “the biggest logistical challenge is trying to provide access to as many people as possible, while also maintaining the desire of the artist for the piece to be experienced a specific way.

However, there’s something immersive [about the art] that can allow viewers to lose themselves in the moment.”

Kusama’s works have become iconic pieces within the museum, necessitating advanced tickets and an extended queue.

Despite their contemporary popularity, Infinity Mirrors is a part of a longer series of interactive art pieces created by Kusama, who begun making the Infinity Mirrors in the mid-1960s.

“There’s this renewed popularity around her work today,” Loyer said, “and I think that positioning the way her work is received today within a much longer history is important.”

ART FOR THE MASSES The notion that interactive art is meant to be tangible and immersive often means that it is interpreted as being democratic, as belonging to the people. Usually site specific, public art is intended to widen the scope of an audience for a particular piece while encouraging people to become integrated with their local surroundings.

After lobbying local officials in New York City for twenty-six years, the art duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude showcased their landmark installation The Gates in 2005. Set up as an interactive piece in Central Park, The Gates consisted of a series of over 7,500 large, orange fabric panels supported by frames that lined the park’s walkway. Passersby walked through the gates as they

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made their way through Central Park, creating an escape from the city that surrounded them. The Gates touched on a central theme of public art: how to create art that links human relationships with man-made environments. The installation altered a person’s experience with the park. People ran and walked throughout the manmade environment transformed into a maze of saffron-colored gates. It was an installation made for a person in action, not a passive observer.

This upcoming fall, Harvard University will bring interactivity to its famed Yard. The Harvard University Committee on the Arts has commissioned artist Teresita Fernandez to install her piece Autumn (...Nothing Personal), a site-specific piece in Tercentenary Theater. The installation is intended to be a place for Harvard affiliates and the public to engage in dialogue and community building.

THE NEW AGE OF INTERACTIVE ART As interactive art continues to develop in a globalized and interconnected world, the locations of pieces are reflective of the society they were created in. According to Edmonds, “Art works are being made that are distributed, one part in Cambridge, another part in New York or Hong Kong. These distributed works use the internet to be fully connected. So the art connects people and places, transforming our understanding of space and relationships.” Art installations are becoming increasingly fluid, transportable to new locations for people in different regions of the world to interact with.

An increasingly common characteristic of 21st century interactive art is its use of post-digital technologies. This post-digital character is manifest in the use of software to manipulate audio and visual effects, amplifying the possible outcomes for a piece.

In this form of generative art, the artists established the rule for the device — the computer and its ensuing software — which in turn autonomously creates random results. The artist becomes the tool to initiate creativity, yet does not create the art itself.

What kind of an experience does this create for the audience?

Where will post-digital technology take interactive art? These questions remain to be answered, but the integration between the two mediums has become increasingly evident. Infrastructure to support emerging post-digital artists is also becoming available, as seen by the creation of Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art + Technology Lab. The lab works to provide financial support for up and coming artists who incorporate technology into their work, thereby fostering the medium’s future.

The future of interactive art — although uncertain — remains important. Artists are changing the rules of art from ones that demand passive observance to ones that encourage fully immersive and physical experiences. Art is no longer restricted to subjects that must be passively observed; rather, it is becoming increasingly integrated with our most fundamental human senses. Engaging with a piece of interactive art, the little girl no longer has to worry about the repercussions of touching the object that has captivated her attention. Instead, she has the capacity to touch the art, to become part of it, and to fully immerse herself in it.

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NEW DESIGNS ON THE BLOCK Alicia Zhang

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merican politicians enjoy declaring unwinnable wars on nouns. The ’60s bore witness to the war on poverty, the ’70s saw Reagan wage the war on drugs, and the ’00s have seen the rise of a war on terror. Is a war on cars up next?

Ever since Seattle rolled out an ambitious growth plan limiting driving and promoting public transportation in 2016, usage of the phrase “War on Cars” has hit the gas pedal. But Seattle is far from the only city that has taken note of the large volume of cars slowly encroaching on city streets. In particular, Barcelona and other Spanish cities have begun waging a war on automotive transport using a creative new tactic: superblocks.

The layout of a superblock — or, in Catalan, a superille — is simple. Take a regular city block, lump it together with eight other blocks, then cut off all car traffic to the streets within the superblock. There are six major goals of this plan, all of which fall under the umbrella goal of improving the environmental friendliness and social cohesion of the city. Already, three superblocks have been fully implemented in Barcelona, with more on the way.

Barcelona’s transition has not been without its roadblocks.

Protesters have criticized the inconveniences that superblocks have caused, denouncing their apparent propensity to create traffic jams and stifle local businesses. In spite of reported drawbacks, the vision behind superblocks is tantalizing. The Barcelonan Department of Ecology, Urban Planning and Mobility that is spearheading this endeavor states that its purpose is to “fill the city’s streets with life.” Barcelona may provide a useful case study and model for future cities wishing to combat the issues relating to automotive transport. While superblocks will face temporary issues ranging from driving logistics to emergency planning, their environmental and social benefits will far outweigh the costs.

THE STREETS OF THE PAST Although superblocks have only recently garnered international attention, they were first introduced in Barcelona decades

ago. The El Born neighborhood led the charge in 1993, and the Gracia neighborhood soon followed in 2005. In 2015, the mayoral election of housing activist Ada Colau, a founding member of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, made superblocks into a legislative priority.

While specific implementation details vary between neighborhoods, the underlying idea remains the same: nine city blocks grouped together in an area within which car traffic is banned.

Superblocks are built to address issues that are universal in cities around the world, from transportation infrastructure to air pollution to culture.

Barcelona’s model represents only one unique iteration of the idea of superblocks. China has undertaken its own project as well — except, instead of trying to create greenspace, Chinese superblocks attempt to cram as many people into high-rise apartments as possible. College campuses and medical facilities are more commonplace examples of superblock-esque architecture. Joseph Cutrufo, the communications director of the New York City-based nonprofit Transportation Alternatives, told the HPR that New York City’s “neighborhood slow zones” function as a type of superblock where speed limits are lowered to prevent accidents. As conversations about transferring federal power to localities and increasing the governing power of cities take over the political sphere, superblocks are slowly creeping into the strategic vocabulary of cities around the world.

TO BLOCK OR NOT TO BLOCK The rising prevalence of superblocks does not necessarily correlate with their rising popularity. As Salvador Rueda, founder of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona and the director of the superblock implementation project, mused in an interview with the HPR, “People don’t want to change their habits.” Superblocks affect the fundamental building blocks of everyday life for people who live in and around them, from increasing commute times to changing parking spaces to simply transforming the aesthetic of the community. Rueda commented

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that making people adjust something as simple as their walking habits from a straight line to a curved path often breeds resentment — an evolutionary quirk, he said, that is also found in other animals like ants.

This resistance to change is likely what has caused protests against superblocks in regions like El Poblenou, a bustling neighborhood of Barcelona, whose residents have complained about the new superblock hindering their access to the city center or interfering with local business practices. Rueda dryly stated that “we [the Barcelonan government] have had a little war with the implementation of the last superblock [in El Poblenou].” The grievances of those living in the newly-created superblock are not unfounded. One-way streets on the edges of superblocks will likely hold up buses and even emergency vehicles and inevitably alter the basic structure of the neighborhood.

However, the issues facing superblocks are largely temporary. Rueda noted that in many previous implementations of superblocks, such as in the gridded neighborhood of Eixample, the neighborhood has initially resented the change but slowly adjusted over a few years. Indeed, Rueda argued that when revisiting the neighborhoods that incorporated superblocks over a decade ago, the people are largely pleased with the change. As expected, the transportation methods and mindsets of Barcelonans will be forced to change alongside their city architecture, but the discomfort of adapting will be short-lived.

In addition, the goals of superblocks — curbing traffic and improving the environment— are far more salient than the drawbacks featured in recent complaints. Through using superblocks and other strategies, Barcelona hopes to reduce traffic by 13 percent and air pollution levels by 21 percent. This goal would have serious benefits for Barcelonans, since Barcelona’s poor air quality consistently fails to meet E.U.-mandated air quality targets and causes around 35,000 premature deaths every year.

Noise pollution is yet another problem that superblocks aim to address. 61 percent of Barcelonans live at noise levels higher than the healthy range set by their own legislation, and reducing traffic would substantially decrease noise in surrounding areas.

Superblocks have wider-reaching environmental benefits as well. For example, building green spaces into cities can help curb the urban sprawl that plagues cities and countrysides across the world. Repaving roads will encourage the planting of more greenery and reduce water loss. And of course, decreasing air pollution within Barcelona will also reduce pollution in surrounding areas — an effect that will improve the quality of life of countless people across Spain.

The benefits of superblocks do not end at their environmental implications. Perhaps the most subtle, yet no less influential, outcomes of superblocks are the societal changes that they will effect. Today, Barcelona only has 6.6 square meters of green space per citizen — far lower than the World Health Organization’s recommended 9 square meters, or Amsterdam’s 87.5 square meters. Because the land within closed-off neighborhoods will be opened up for planting trees or other landscaping, superblocks will create more green space and provide more opportunities for social cohesion. Possible uses for this space include community gardens, playgrounds, or public meeting and leisure spaces, all of which will boost interpersonal and intergenerational relationships between members of the community.

Cutrufo argued that “healthy, sustainable cities are the places where people come first.” Prioritizing pedestrians over cars

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will spur a variety of advantageous environmental and cultural changes. Although superblocks will likely face immediate challenges concerning transportation and infrastructure rearrangement, their long-term effects will prove to be overwhelmingly beneficial.

FAST OUT OF THE STARTING BLOCKS The superblocks initiative should not end at consolidating city streets, nor in Barcelona. Superblocks are proving that cities can take back their autonomy and revolutionize urban design in a way that benefits everyone living in the city. Even within the superblocks concept, cutting off vehicular access to large chunks of land foreshadows a redesigning of the transportation system to encourage public transit, bicycling, and pedestrianism. Rueda noted that a new bike network that expanded bike lanes by over 200 kilometers was recently developed in Barcelona, paving the way for the installation of more superblocks.

More ambitiously, the concept of superblocks can be viewed as just one component of a wider campaign to subsidize ‘green cities.’ Investing in infrastructure such as sustainable public transport, industrial efficiency, and waste circulation goes handin-hand with redesigning streets. Integrating technologies from ‘smart cities’ follows naturally. Keeping in the vein of sustainability brought forth by superblocks, Barcelona has also implemented thousands of smart-energy meters, LED streetlights, and fiber-optic cables.

Fortunately, Barcelona’s superblock framework is flexible enough to be adapted to cities across the world. Rueda proudly mentioned that in May, he will travel to Canada to advocate for building superblock-like structures in Vancouver and Ottawa; cities like Quito and Buenos Aires are also on the list. Even cities as busy and crowded as New York are contemplating the benefits of superblocks. Cutrufo stated that once an initiative has been successfully implemented in one location, it can incentivize other cities to follow suit. He noted that urban planners often think: “Humans have accomplished that. We’re no different.” In the future, more cities will inevitably follow Barcelona’s lead.

The best part? Superblocks are virtually free. After the initial infrastructural change is made — in which no more action than simply barricading streets needs to be taken — a superblock is built to grow organically, where those living in the neighborhood contribute to its particular culture. That makes superblocks a far easier solution to urban problems than other options like electrifying machinery, automated traffic surveillance, or direct air filtration — the use of a giant chimney. Cost-effective, feasible, and politically neutral, superblocks can be easily implemented to improve the quality of life of those in loud, polluted cities.

Architecture and city planning create subtle yet enormous impacts on everyday life — impacts that most people never even realize. Cutrufo asserted that “the automobile is incompatible with true urban environments,” elaborating that the increasing dominance of cars takes away from the intrinsic community and vibrancy of cities. As more people around the world move into increasingly crowded cities, these municipalities have the responsibility to prioritize their residents’ quality of life and take proactive action to redesign the urban environment. As Barcelona and other cities have shown, there is little blocking their way. 

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Protected?

A PROFILE OF LAURA SANCHEZ Tamara Shamir

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n March 2018, a large group of Harvard students, faculty, and staff gathered around the John Harvard statue with locals from around the Boston area to rally in support of Temporary Protection Status. This demonstration was part of a nation-wide series of rallies responding to the Trump administration’s decision to end the TPS program for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Sudan, and Nicaragua. It featured a diverse array of speakers, many of whom shared their own stories about the role TPS has played in their lives. Among these attendees was a familiar face: Laura Sanchez, who works for the Harvard University Dining Services as a card swiper in Annenberg Hall.

Her speech was short, personal, and intensely moving; its effect on the crowd was unmistakable. Yet despite her charisma, Sanchez, by her own account, was reluctant to speak publicly.

She confessed that only the graveness of the situation impelled

her to share her story. “It was a chance to let people know that we [TPS recipients] are working hard, that we are not bad people,” she said in an interview with the HPR. Sanchez described the acute pain she and many of her friends felt upon hearing of the changes made to TPS. She realized just how deeply and callously “they want to get us [Salvadorans] out of here.”

The Trump administration’s justification for ending TPS for Salvadorans was that the conditions caused by the 2001 earthquake, which prompted Bush to grant TPS to Salvadorans, no longer exist. Yet the ‘conditions’ of these TPS recipients cannot be understood solely through the earthquake; many Salvadorans who received TPS were forced to flee during the ’80s and ’90s because of the U.S.-backed civil war, and many still cannot return safely due to high levels of homicide and gang violence in the country. Despite the explicit apathy driving this decision,

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however, Sanchez is slow to accuse anyone of real malice. For her, the root of problem is not hate but ignorance.

“I think people just don’t know,” she said, explaining that it often falls on her and her family to describe these shifting political realities to other Americans. Her sense of personal responsibility continues to drive her to speak out, even in the face of widespread prejudice against TPS reciptients and Salvadorans.

By standing up and saying, “We are Salvadorans,” Laura hopes to combat the ignorance from which these stigmas are spawned.

Laura has found that even those familiar with the crisis facing many TPS immigrants are often incognizant of the daily realities of TPS recipients. For example, few people know that even after decades of living and working in the United States, TPS recipients still have to pay for their right to work — and it is not cheap.

“We have to pay $450 every 18 months to renew our working permits,” Sanchez told the HPR. Sanchez did not express any anger over the fact that TPS recipients have to buy what is, for citizens, an unquestionable right; instead, she responded with her characteristic, level-headed goodwill.

“There are good and bad people everywhere,” she said. The real root of the problem, then, lies in assumptions that particular backgrounds make people either good or bad.

Sanchez moved to Virginia 19 years ago in response to pleas from her family, most of whom had moved to the United States a few years before. “They said I would not regret it, and they were right!” she said, smiling. She worked as a custodial manager in Virginia for 10 years before moving to Boston to be closer to her relatives.

She knew what she wanted before she even set foot in Boston. “When they asked me to come over [to Boston], my goal was Harvard,” she recalled. When she arrived in Boston, Laura got in touch with friends from her hometown who were already employed by Harvard. Within a month, Harvard accepted her job application and she began working in Annenberg’s dish room.

Three years later, she was promoted to checking students in at its entrance, where she has been ever since.

When I asked her about the 2016 Harvard workers’ strike, she did not mention what is widely considered to be the strike’s central message — the alleged class feud between the 1 percent and service workers. Instead, her response pointed to the skewed student-worker relations that the strike illuminated: “If they hadn’t stood up for us, we would not have been heard,” she explained. “They were not listening to us as workers. They heard the students and parents much more.”

Her words were a reminder of another poignant moment in the rally when Rosa Vazquez, a Harvard undergraduate, delivered a moving speech in which she pointedly refused to discuss her personal experiences as a student protected by DACA:

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“Today isn’t about my story but rather about elevating and empowering the stories of TPSianos because they are so constantly overlooked … In every single TPS recipient I am reminded of my family and their invisibility.”

Vazquez is not the only student concerned about the visibility of workers. As Laura Veira-Ramirez, another undergraduate, told the HPR, “When I got to the rally, they asked me to speak, but I didn’t want to take over.” This was a rally organized by and for TPS workers, not students. Yet she also mentioned her belief that Harvard students and workers can and often do collaborate in productive ways: “I’ve been to a few of their meetings,” she said, adding, “I think that they really value the relationships they’ve built with students.”

Brinkley Brown, a freshman at Harvard, also struggled to grasp the role of students within the biased system. “The administration should pay more attention to the workers,” she said to the HPR. “But if they don’t, do students have a responsibility to step in?”

The deprioritization of worker issues and voices has had an unmistakable effect on TPS rights. Even though Sanchez remains hopeful that political resistance and action will be enough to undo the harm wreaked by the Trump administration’s repeal of TPS and DACA, her optimism is somewhat tempered: “They’re fighting,” she said. “DACA will probably get something; I don’t know about TPS.” Laura’s prediction could very well be accurate, as TPS rights receive far less attention than DACA at Harvard and beyond.

It is difficult for Sanchez to face the possibility of having to leave the life she has made for herself over the past 19 years. She worries about losing the benefits she has earned over nearly two decades of constant work. “Where will my retirement go? Where will my social security go?” she asked. Yet Sanchez is not worried about herself as much as her children, who were very young when she brought them to the United States. Her daughter, who was 5 years old when they moved, is graduating from Lesley University this year, and one of her sons is getting married in a few months. After watching her children grow up and find a lives for themselves in the United States, Sanchez struggles to imagine them trying to adapt to life in El Salvador.

“It is hard for us to think that we’ll have to go [to El Salvador],” she said. “My kids don’t know anybody over there. If we go back, they’ll feel like they don’t belong.” Indeed, with most of her family already living in the United States, including her siblings, Sanchez says there is not much she can expect to return to.

Even as she worries, Sanchez continues to actively hope for change — and she is not alone. Moments like her speech at the Harvard TPS rally serve as reminders that despite their stigmatized and deprioritized status, TPS recipients can puncture their own invisibility. 

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EXPERIENCE AND ECONOMICS FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIR JEROME POWELL Yuri-Grace Ohashi

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n early February, the Senate approved Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s successor with an 8413 vote. Powell, however, is not a run-of-the-mill economist — nor a trained economist at all, for that matter. In fact, Powell will be the first Federal Reserve Chair in 40 years to lack a doctorate in economics.

Powell received a bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton, was trained as a lawyer, has experience with investment banking, and holds ties to Capitol Hill. “Other things equal, I think I’d prefer someone who is more trained as an economist rather than trained as a lawyer,” American macroeconomist and Harvard economics professor Gregory Mankiw told the HPR. In contrast with Powell, Yellen and the chairs who preceded her predominantly held formal degrees in economics. In nominating Powell, rather than reappointing Yellen, President Trump broke with lengthy precedent. While this brings into question what Trump’s primary motivations were for nominating Powell and what can be expected for the economy moving forward

under new leadership, many are hopeful that Powell’s strong leadership capabilities and commitment to financial stability suggest an ordinary upcoming term.

A SEASONED PREDECESSOR Yellen holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Brown and a doctorate from Yale. She alternated between working in academia and as an economist for the Federal Reserve from the ’70s to the early ’00s.

American economist and former senior staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers Richard Cooper taught Yellen during her time at Yale. In an interview with the HPR, he confirmed that Yellen had served on the Federal Open Market Committee for over 20 years. Her combined experience is significant: She served as a governor of the board in the ’90s, as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and as Vice Chair and Chair of the Federal Reserve itself. According to Cooper, all

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of these positions contributed to Yellen’s “seasoned experience making monetary policy.”

Yellen was first appointed to the Board of Governors in 2010

by President Barack Obama, and she served as Vice Chair to Ben Bernanke beginning that same year. She took on her first fouryear term as Federal Reserve Chair on February 3, 2014.

Historically, it has been standard practice to re-elect a chair to serve more than one term. More interestingly, however, this tradition of re-election has held even in light of party turnovers in the White House. “There’s been a tradition for some decades now of reappointing the [Federal Reserve Chair] even when — most notably when — the person reappointing is of the opposite party of the president who first appointed the Chair,” international macroeconomist and research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research Jeffrey Frankel told the HPR. “That has been going on since Paul Volcker was reappointed by both Democrats and Republicans.”

It should be noted that the Federal Reserve is regarded as a nonpartisan body. A president’s decision to keep a chair selected by the opposing party shows respect for the position.

American political economist and Council on Foreign Relations member Benjamin Friedman agreed with Frankel’s observation, noting that this is a “tradition going back for nearly 40 years,” and one that several former presidents have followed.

Friedman explained how Ronald Reagan reappointed Volcker, Bill Clinton reappointed Alan Greenspan, and Obama reappointed Bernanke: “Indeed, the practice goes back further than that when President Eisenhower reappointed Bill Martin.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S MOTIVATION Former President and CEO of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank Dennis Lockhart told the HPR that the Federal Reserve Bank “truly is a non-partisan, apolitical public matter.” The goal of the institution is to regulate and maintain the U.S. economy with efficiency, stability, and clarity, and this goal can only be upheld in the absence of political influence. Accordingly, Friedman stated that “the central bank and U.S. economy benefit from the perception that monetary policy is not a partisan activity.”

“In my experience over 10 years, the individuals as well as the institution overall was scrupulously non-partisan,” Lockhart said. “Political considerations almost never entered into deliberations about policy.”

But the concern of partisanship may not rest in monetary policy decisions, but rather the process by which the individuals who make such decisions are selected. Policies exist to address this matter and curb any potential uncertainties. For example, once the president nominates and Congress approves the chair, neither of these bodies may fire him or her. A new chair may only be selected once the term expires, or under special circumstances.

“I think President Trump understands and respects the notion of the independence of the central bank,” Lockhart claimed.

Traditionally, presidents have nominated a member of their respective political party when a chairmanship vacancy opens up. These political affiliation patterns, however, are of minimal importance once a nominee assumes the role as chair. Trump may have broken with tradition by not reappointing Yellen, but his selection of a more right-leaning chair bears no surprise.

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“I wasn’t shocked that he didn’t appoint Janet,” Mankiw noted. This, however, is where his certainty regarding the matter ends: “I don’t find Mr. Trump’s motivations easy to decipher, to put it as politely as I can,” he remarked.

Frenkel offers a potential explanation of Trump’s motives.

He stated that Trump was likely “tempted to reappoint [Yellen],” but that choice fell short of the desire to put his own stamp on his administration and the central bank. Leaving his mark would require undoing or reversing what Obama set in place.

Karen Dynan, who served as the Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2014 to 2017, explained that this type of motive falls into a greater pattern and is not particularly unique to the current president. “This tends to be true with any sort of appointee of the administration,” Dynan said to the HPR, “that the administration will generally put some weight on making their own choice and not sticking with the person that their predecessor appointed, even if they are doing a fantastic job.”

Even though economists may disagree with Trump’s decision to not reappoint the incumbent, they found consensus among themselves regarding Powell’s nomination as a likely legacy of Yellen. Many believed that his term as Chair will show continuity with the last four years. This nomination will be a “vote for continuity rather than change, but of course you could have even more continuity by reappointing Yellen,” Cooper said.

WHY PICK POWELL? Given Powell’s questionable credentials and experience, what do we know about Powell? His character. A highly positive reputation precedes him, which plays a big role for both his approval to take the chairmanship and his ability to fulfill the position once he’s in it. Lockhart expressed that he has personal ties to Powell after having worked together for five years on the Council of Economic Advisors, and for two years in the Federal Reserve. “I am extremely positive on this nomination,” Lockhart said. “I have a great deal of respect for Jay Powell.”

Both Lockhart and Powell are non-economists, yet Lockhart expresses “full confidence in his ability to lead in monetary economics and monetary policy.” The two attended Federal Open Market Committee meetings together, giving Lockhart what he calls a “sense of how [Powell] thinks along with the quality and balance of thinking after observing him in action.”

Good character and calm temperament repeatedly came up as traits the Federal Reserve Chair should exhibit. Dynan clearly laid out what she interpreted as fundamental traits for success in the position: “you need to understand the economics behind monetary policy to have an appreciation for independence of the [Federal Reserve], to know what you don’t know.” She continued, “[You must] be willing to recognize the limitations of your own knowledge and be willing to listen to experts when you don’t know the answer to a question, and you need to be a good leader.”

Ultimately, the Chair serves as the leading spokesman both before Congress and in public statements, and holds responsibilities such as presiding over FOMC’s meetings, setting the agenda, and guiding discussion. It is important to note, however, that the Chair does not act alone; Powell will have constant access to policy-oriented economists at the Federal Reserve who will be able to provide insight and guidance on all monetary

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matters. According to Lockhart, Yellen was “very effective as a consensus builder, and I think Jay Powell will be equally effective based on his style and temperament.” He referred to Powell as “collegial and well-respected within the Federal Reserve both by colleagues and staff.”

Friedman confirmed that “Jay Powell is an excellent choice,” and that his “reasons for being sorry about the president’s decision [not to reappoint Yellen have] nothing to do with the identity of the individual who he nominated instead.”

Mankiw also acknowledged that, despite the few reservations related to Powell’s expertise in economics, “People who know him better than I do say he’s a really nice guy, and that’s always a really good thing to hear because you have to corral a very big staff at the Fed.” Despite Powell’s seemingly glowing reputation, however, it is difficult to believe that character alone can make up for his lack of experience in economics. Historically, there have been conspicuous issues with appointing individuals untrained in economics as chair, which brings into question the reliability of this most recent nomination.

The last non-economist chair was William Miller under the Carter Administration; his glory days were brief and not so glorious. Miller’s term was cut short, and he left the U.S. economy suffering from high rates of inflation and unemployment — a phenomenon known as stagflation, an economist’s worst nightmare.

But unlike Miller, Powell does not show signs of following along this destructive path. While he may not have background in formal economics, Powell is far from inexperienced in a more practical sense. He has a respectable background working with the Federal Reserve. Powell served as a Governor under Yellen’s leadership since 2012, when he was appointed to the Board by Obama. “Based on what he’s done before, there’s no indication that he’s basing his decisions on anything but good, sound economics,” Dynan confirmed.

he said.

Dynan commented that the economy is nearing full employment, which “generally means that the Fed needs to withdraw some of the support monetary policy is providing for the economy.” The Federal Reserve’s response will likely be to raise the interest rates in order to address both inflation and the unemployment rate.

Mankiw explained that the FOMC is responsible for maintaining this target goal while striking a balance that accounts for any potential and unexpected short-term changes. “In the long run, their primary goal is to keep inflation low,” he said, but that it is important to recognize that “this long run commitment gives them a lot of short-run flexibility to try to stabilize employment in the short-term median run.”

Under Powell, we should expect to see “some increase in rates if the U.S. economy continues to do well, but that would have happened under Yellen anyways,” Cooper said. While Powell’s lack of a formal background in economics distinguishes him from his well-established predecessor, his considerable experience suggests a promising term as Chair. Powell’s course of action moving forward will likely follow what Yellen would have done had she been reappointed. While it is impossible to confidently predict future downfalls in the economy, this vote for continuity provides assurance that it will be unlikely to see any direct negative impacts with Powell as Chair. 

LOOKING FORWARD With Powell newly in charge, an analysis of the economy’s current state may indicate what we can expect to see from the Federal Reserve and its new leader. At the moment, the U.S. economy remains in a state of stable and lower-than-targeted inflation and is continuing to generate jobs, according to Lockhart’s analysis.

Frankel remarked that “during the campaign, [Trump] was all about ‘monetary policy is too easy, interest rates are too low,’” in contrast to the current state of affairs, but that “since he’s been in office, he’s switched sides on that.” While Trump himself has particular desires as to how he hopes to see the economy change, it is crucial to remember that the administration has little influence over the proceedings of monetary policy.

Lockhart said that Powell “may be receptive to some deregulation, but he’s very attentive to financial stability.” In response to the administration’s goals, Powell may “look for opportunities to reduce regulatory burden but not sacrifice the structure in place.” This matter aside, Lockhart stressed the importance of looking forward and being monetarily proactive. “The forecast for the median term is for continued expansion, and even some further improvement in employment and the FOMC’s forecast is that inflation will firm in the direction of the 2 percent target,”

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The Engineered Crisis in Flint May Wang

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etween early 2015 and mid-2017, a narrative of environmental injustice that eventually escalated to a federal state of emergency publicly unfolded in the city of Flint, Mich. Headlines accused officials of depraved indifference if not deliberate poisoning, and the public continues to question if lead exposure during the crisis has contributed to a recent decline in reading proficiency scores in Michigan.

The crisis, which has mostly faded from national headlines, is by some measures far from resolved. Flint residents continue to replace city water with bottled water for drinking and bathing. Meanwhile, Michigan pours an estimated $22,000 per day into funding bottled water consumption, even though leading

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researchers involved in the crisis management maintain that the water now meets EPA lead standards. Furthermore, the lead pipes that, combined with improperly treated water, led to the crisis are not expected to be fully replaced until 2019.

The damage, however, is even more far-reaching than the environment, public health, and test scores. For communities, activists, and experts, the Flint water crisis has also reinforced a burgeoning lack of trust in governmental environmental regulation to provide genuine environmental protection and justice.

The decline of these institutions has led these interest groups to seek out alternative modes of governing environmental discourse. However, a philosophical divide has arisen between the

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various Flint actors on how to accomplish their common objectives realistically, sustainably, and justly.

THE CRISIS The problems in Flint began in April 2014, when the city switched from purchasing water treated by the Detroit Water and Sewage Department to building its own pipeline connected to a cheaper water source: the nearby Flint River. Just one month later, Flint residents began complaining about the smell, color, and hardness of the new water, even though it purportedly met all standards. By February 2015, residents like Lee Anne Walters reported skin reactions to their now heavily discolored water. A series of tests confirmed that iron was causing the discoloration, but even more worryingly, the tests detected lead, orders of magnitude above safe levels.

Months of inaction and unconvincing reassurance by Flint emergency management and water officials finally broke when Walters received a draft EPA report from an EPA employee detailing the extent of the contamination in her tap water. According to that report, Walters’ water could have qualified as hazardous material for the amount of lead present in it. The EPA and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the local agency that had neglected to notify the residents of their poisonous water, remained unresponsive, or even dismissive — an EPA spokesperson characterized the employee who had sent Walters the report, Miguel del Toral, as a “rogue employee.”

After several more attempts at acquiring governmental acknowledgement of the problem, Walters eventually took matters into her own hands. She reached out to Professor Marc Edwards at Virginia Tech, an expert on water corrosion in plumbing who previously worked to expose a similar cover-up of severe lead contamination in Washington, D.C. in the ’00s.

FROM INSTITUTIONAL MISCONDUCT TO PUBLIC MISTRUST After spending nearly a decade in research, activism, and testimony before Congress around the D.C. water crisis, there was a certain inevitability for Edwards in the phone call from Walters.

“We knew a Flint was going to happen,” Edwards said in an interview with HPR. “We’d been preparing for this day because we knew it was going to happen.” Edwards attributes his involvement in these crises to his fundamental duty as a citizen and human coupled with his profession: “We acted [upon] the first canon of civil engineering: thou shalt protect the public welfare.”

Edwards and his team at Virginia Tech quickly became the face of new, trustworthy researchers in Flint during the crisis.

In the wake of Flint, Edwards places culpability squarely on institutional misconduct rife throughout government agencies, rendering them no longer deserving of public trust. “That’s basically the story of the D.C. and Flint water crises: these were crimes perpetrated by government agencies. The environmental policemen became the environmental criminals,” Edwards explained. He views his role in these situations as one akin to a whistleblower — one who is loyal to the truth above all else, including institutions.

Yanna Lambrinidou, a self-identified anthropologist by training, also began questioning her trust in government institutions after becoming involved in the D.C. crisis. In the intervening

years, she co-taught an “ethics in engineering” course at Virginia Tech with Edwards. Lambrinidou now works full-time as an environmental activist and advisor for water regulation related to the Lead and Copper Rule, a federal regulation that sets standards for the presence of lead and copper in public water. “In both the D.C. crisis and the Flint crisis, … [the] EPA was not only complicit but actually very much helped create the crisis,” Lambrinidou told the HPR. These agencies take “a stance of willing and intentional ignorance around the issues” to avoid developing adequately constructive public health protective regulations.

WHAT’S STOPPING THEM? Paul Moorcroft, Head Tutor of the Environmental Science and Public Policy undergraduate concentration at Harvard, sees the institutional reticence in the scientific realm as naivete, but he optimistically observes growing awareness in the current political climate. The ESPP concentration, which Moorcroft describes as an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary field of study, aims to equip its students to address the complexity and multiple dimensions of environmental problems.

Scientific disinterest in the political or social realm, Moorcroft told HPR in an interview, was really just a longtime “[assumption] that the ways knowledge gets transferred [to policy] are effective,” when in fact there is a disconnect between knowledge produced by scientists and its subsequent implementation.

For him, it was through his own work on climate change and forest ecosystems that he realized science and policy were inseparable: “You have to really get into the ways in which science gets used in decision-making, learning about the decision-making processes, and thinking about how can you better facilitate more up-to-date science influencing those processes.”

Activists at the interface of that decision-making process like Lambrinidou and Edwards diagnose the source of trouble deep within the institutions. For Lambrinidou, the conscious, if unwilling, industry-specific negligence is a symptom of troubled power dynamics. Citing the open secret of collusion between the EPA and the water utilities industry, Lambrinidou describes the EPA as “being held hostage” by the industry they are attempting to regulate, known as “regulatory capture.” Subsequently, the EPA’s power to create and enforce public health-protective legislation like the Lead and Copper Rule is significantly weakened.

Lambrinidou also charges the so-called experts of the medical, public health, and environmental health establishments with creating a knowledge hierarchy that does not consider lead in water as a serious form of lead exposure. This deliberate ignorance by the arbiters of the discourse is only confirmed by the negligence, if not blatant dishonesty, of government agencies like the CDC and the EPA during the D.C. and Flint water crises.

For Edwards, the decision-making is shaped by power in a different sense, through what he calls “perverse incentives” within institutions that are focused on self-perpetuation over the public good. Invoking David Lewis, an EPA scientist and whistleblower during the ’90s, Edwards argued that “scientists in these agencies have pressures to find results that promote agency policies.” The D.C. and Flint crises were instances where such institutional pressures had tangible human ramifications that drew public attention.

Furthermore, according to Edwards, the reluctance of scientists to stand up for the truth in these cases is bred into

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the scientific ethical rhetoric — or lack thereof. He considers science and academia to be willfully blind to the need to engage ethically. Students and current practitioners of science are not adequately equipped with how to behave ethically as as scientists and as a members of society, thus they more easily fall prey to the perverse institutional pressures of funding, fame, and publications. Edwards says scientists today without ethics are no better than used car salesmen: “The public has correctly sensed that we’re in this for ourselves … and the public exists merely to pay our salaries and to keep our institutions afloat.”

SHIFTING INSTITUTIONAL PARADIGMS These deep-seated institutional flaws and weaknesses have created a power vacuum over the public discourse, and activists have yet to come up with a consensus on how to fill it. The ongoing aftermath of the Flint crisis has offered clues into possible routes, though they involve potentially incompatible paradigm shifts.

Moorcroft believes that the system may be self-correcting, perhaps through legal means. “Particularly in the context of the [United States], litigation is a very important way in which — especially these days — environmental issues are being addressed,” he said. The Obama era of environmental regulation recognized that it would be virtually impossible to pass new legislation; instead, environmental initiatives were executed by legally reinterpreting existing statutes. Furthermore, Moorcroft surmises that based on the employment trends of ESPP degree-holders, industries may begin to self-regulate on environmental issues.

For Edwards and Lambrinidou, nothing short of a complete paradigm shift will ameliorate the problem, though they embody a growing rift in exactly what that shift should be.

Edwards, whose website Flintwaterstudy.org was the whistleblowing public interface of the Flint crisis management, believes that change could retain existing structures but with a revised rewards system. The new system would preserve the sanctity of objectivity in science by incentivizing those loyal to the truth — like del Toral — to remain so because they can retain their jobs even when the truths are ugly. “At the end of the day, when you’ve selected for a certain subset of skills” — namely loyalty to the institution above the truth — “why are you surprised when

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there’s unethical behavior? When there’s no one left who’s ethical to answer the call of something like Flint?” Edwards views Flintwaterstudy.org as the strategy that was necessary to win the “asymmetrical science war,” rather than what he terms “science anarchy” and “postmodern social justice” — what Lambrinidou might refer to more flatteringly as grassroots activism.

At the heart of the matter for Lambrinidou is the power imbalance, and any sustainable change would redistribute the power by redistributing knowledge to the actual stakeholders of these crises. Only people on the ground have enough at stake to enact meaningful change, and such a route would enfranchise those usually excluded and marginalized by the current discourse led by the expert class. Lambrinidou contended, “any expert intervention in a community in crisis ought to consider how power will be given to individuals in the community so that they can take on new positions that establish themselves as credible and powerful voices that are there to bring change.”

Lambrinidou was careful to distance herself from Flintwaterstudy.org and its expert-directed strategy. She takes issue with the “imposition of solutions” of expert-led discourse “when the people are still suffering profoundly and are kept out of the negotiation tables.” In her view, the management of the Flint crisis was just another turn in a cycle of marginalization and disenfranchisement without due empowerment.

In return, Edwards singles out Lambrinidou’s democratizing methodology as inappropriately sought social justice. “They don’t seem to understand that social justice is subjective and something that’s unscientific, and that we decide those messy problems with politics and democracy.”

Despite their criticisms and the perceived inertia, all three are optimistic that change is on the horizon, perhaps through internal self-correcting forces. Edwards retains some hope for future generations that “are feeling all kinds of angst” about these institutional injustices, though they wield a double-edged sword as both the “greatest hope” but also “most likely to be led astray.” Moorcroft predicts that the current trend towards scientific and political collaboration will “certainly continuing for the time being,” and Lambrinidou is inclined to agree: “We haven’t yet as a society been interested in confronting the harm” perpetrated by our institutions, but “I don’t think there will be silence forever.” 

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L OCKED THE TECHNICALITIES OF BLOCKCHAIN Kevin Bi

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lockchain has been the technology of the past year.

Bitcoin, the most well-known blockchain-based cryptocurrency, saw its trading price skyrocket to more than $19,000 in late 2017. Since then, investors have poured money into cryptocurrencies and anything remotely related to blockchain technology — an optimistic choice, especially since the price of Bitcoin had dropped to $7,000 as of March 2018.

Advocates have declared that decentralized blockchain-

based currencies could become the future of monetary transactions, as governments and banks are removed from the process.

Meanwhile, critics have warned that the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies make them far too risky, and that governments will inevitably crack down on unregulated transactions.

While political and economic concerns have understandably dominated discussion of blockchain, the technical aspects of the technology have gone largely ignored. Many in the public think

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that blockchain “just works,” but this assumption is both inaccurate and potentially dangerous. It is important to recognize that blockchain is, in fact, a technology, and its very real technical challenges will need to be addressed in order to realize its full potential.

THE BUILDING BLOCKS Understanding the technical problems with blockchain requires first understanding how it works — easier said than done.

At a simplified level, a blockchain can be thought of as a digital ledger of transactions that is distributed across the internet, with each page of that book representing a ‘block.’ Whenever someone wants to send cryptocurrency, he or she broadcasts a transaction across the internet, along with a unique digital signature indicating that the transaction is legitimate.

Broadcasted transactions are not immediately added to the blockchain. Instead, new transactions are only added when a new block is added. New blocks are created by users in a computationally intensive process called ‘mining.’ When a new block is mined, the ‘miner’ aggregates broadcasted transactions, adds those transactions to the block, and broadcasts the block to the world. This system of relying on computing power to create new blocks is known as ‘proof-of-work.’ Users then add the new block to their own digital transaction book, creating a decentralized way of tracking transactions around the world.

Each new block contains a signature, or ‘hash,’ of the previous block, ‘chaining’ every block to the block before it — hence the term ‘blockchain.’ A valid blockchain must have a valid signature on every block, and if any of the previous blocks is tampered with, the signatures of all subsequent blocks are invalidated.

This creates a problem if different blocks are created and broadcast at similar times, each bearing the same signature as the previous block, but for different transactions, since it is unclear which block should be accepted. Most blockchains therefore use a protocol where the longest blockchain is considered to be the ‘official’ chain.

BIG BLOCKS The main problem blockchainers around the world have been dealing with is scaling blockchain technologies for a global audience. Like pages in a book, each block in the blockchain has a specific size. For Bitcoin, the size of the block is limited to one megabyte, which holds around 2,400 transactions. Since the Bitcoin protocol limits new block creation to, on average, once every 10 minutes, there are only an average of three Bitcoin transactions per second worldwide. For comparison, Visa and Mastercard together process nearly 2,000 transactions per second.

As a result of the block size issue, transactions may take

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hours or even days before they are officially recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain, making it difficult to confirm that payments for goods or services are actually made. Furthermore, since the demand for space on each new block far outstrips supply, miners have begun to demand transaction fees for users. In December 2017, the average cost of a single transaction was $34. Transaction fees have since fallen to less than $1, temporarily addressing the problem, but transaction fees will almost certainly grow as Bitcoin expands.

The Bitcoin community has tried to address the problem. In mid-2016, there was a hard fork of Bitcoin, essentially switching some users to a new, incompatible transaction book known as Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash expanded the block size to eight megabytes instead of one, facilitating eight times as many transactions every 10 minutes as the original Bitcoin, now known as Bitcoin Core. However, even with the expanded block size, Bitcoin Cash can still only handle around 61 transactions per second.

Bitcoin Core implemented a different fix, known as Segregated Witness, or SegWit for short. SegWit makes each transaction smaller rather than making the block bigger, and allows for the use of the Lightning Network, an ‘off-chain’ network that enables faster transactions by relying on intermediary transactions between networks of users. These transactions are considered off-chain because they are only committed to the actual blockchain at a later point in time.

While initially promising, these solutions are far from perfect. Emin Gun Sirer, associate professor of Computer Science at Cornell, contended in an interview with the HPR that both approaches are short term measures. For Bitcoin Cash, the larger block sizes require more network space to transmit each block.

According to Sirer, “If [Bitcoin Cash] ever gets into a situation where the number of transactions is higher than the network can deliver, then they will run into a wall.” SegWit, on the other hand, can at best double the on-chain transaction rate. Lightning Network faces its own scalability problems. As Sirer noted, “The capacity of the network depends on the financial relationships that people have. The transactions are limited by channel capacity.” Although the Lightning Network allows for faster transactions, the size of those transactions is limited. If solutions to scalability are themselves not scalable, then the issue is only delayed, not solved.

BAD BLOCKS Because blockchain was originally designed as a method for financial transaction, blockchain networks are built with security as a focus. Though several security problems remain, Sirer explained that the main security threats to blockchain are not threats to the network, but threats to individual users. A user’s identity on the blockchain is based entirely on their digital signa-

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ture, technically known as a private key.

Problems arise when the private key is accessed by malicious actors or when the private key is lost. Unlike with a centralized banking system, there is no insurance or method of retrieval for a stolen or lost private key. This could certainly be considered user error, but if blockchain is expected to become widespread, then it will have to account for users who are less technically savvy and who are potentially vulnerable to malicious actors.

Beyond the individual level, there is also the security challenge posed by exchanges. Converting between cash and cryptocurrency is most often done through cryptocurrency exchanges, which are especially vulnerable to malicious attackers. In January of this year, over $600 million was stolen from the Coincheck exchange. In 2011, Mt. Gox, one the largest Bitcoin exchanges at the time, was the victim of a $460 million theft. Digital security is a problem with traditional financial institutions as well, but the decentralized, anonymous, and irreversible nature of cryptocurrency transactions makes them much more vulnerable.

Finally, there is also the possibility of unintentional bad transactions through forks, where two different blocks are simultaneously created. Silvio Micali, a computer science professor at MIT and Turing Award winner, explained to the HPR that the transaction ambiguity created by forks of the blockchain means vendors will be uncertain about whether a payment has actually been recorded. This problem will be especially prevalent if blockchains try to address the scalability issue by decreasing the time between creation of new blocks. Doing so would increase the probability of two blocks being created at similar times, growing the number of forks in the blockchain, and increasing the ambiguity users face.

BLOCK-OCRACY Perhaps the greatest technical problem with Bitcoin is not a technical one at all, but a human problem. As with any new technology, it is inevitable that technical bugs will be discovered and that changes to the underlying technology will be necessary to fix those bugs. However, as Steve Wilson, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, argued in an interview with the HPR, the distributed governance structure of blockchain technologies makes any change incredibly difficult to implement. “If there’s a bug in the Bitcoin, these guys even argue about whether it’s a bug or a feature.”

In addition to difficulties in modifying the implementation of the blockchain, there is also the growing power of miners, who decide which transactions are added to each new block.

According to Micali, “The miners are an external force that get to control who gets to spend the money. They cannot spend my money, but they can prevent me from spending it.” In a system with a large number of individual miners, this is less of a problem, but that is not how most blockchains work in practice.

Since creating new blocks is computationally intensive, control over the blockchain will gradually shift towards miners with the most computing power. Already, Micali noted, “The blockchain of Bitcoin is controlled by three mine pools in China, and the Ethereum blockchain is controlled by two minepools in China.”

The increasingly centralized power of miners presents a direct challenge to blockchain’s promise of a completely decentralized and distributed system of transactions.

NEW CHAINS ON THE BLOCK The problems facing blockchain today are numerous, but they do not diminish its promise. Already, individuals around the world are developing creative solutions to the problems of today’s blockchains. Two such individuals are professors Sirer and Micali.

Sirer has worked as the chief scientist at bloXroute, a technology venture that helps make existing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin more scalable by enabling fast information propagation across the blockchain network. Meanwhile, Micali has led the development of Algorand, an implementation of blockchain that relies on proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work. Instead of delegating new block creation to the miner with the most computing power, Algorand randomly selects an individual to create each new block. Then, 1000 other users are randomly selected and vote to approve or reject the new block. According to Micali, this results in a blockchain that is highly scalable, secure, and efficient. Sirer agreed with the use of this method: “2019 will be the year of proof-of-stake.”

Micali and Sirer are far from the only ones working to advance blockchain technology. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of developers and experts around the world trying to make blockchain technology into the truly revolutionary technology it has the potential to be. Changes to blockchain technology will almost certainly meet resistance, but change is often necessary for advancement. As Wilson contended, “The tragedy of Bitcoin is that it was really a proof of concept.” Sirer agrees: “Bitcoin is technologically stagnant.” If blockchain is to advance, new technologies that solve real problems will have to be embraced by blockchain users.

The most important step towards solving the problems with blockchain, however, is realizing that such problems exist. Focusing purely on the regulatory and economic issues of blockchain not only ignores the flaws of the underlying technology; it minimizes blockchain’s potential. Wilson said that blockchain can be used for much more than cryptocurrency, and it is already being used for interbank settlement, financial products, shipping manifests, and more. The problems of blockchain cannot be ignored; they must be understood and fixed. Blockchain may be the future, but the future of blockchain is far from certain. 

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THE THINGS WE DON’T TALK ABOUT Susie Clements

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“ONE RULE. NO POLITICS.” W

henever my wider family has sat down for dinner together lately, one topic has always been off the table.

No one talks politics, specifically the clunky, ponderous, almost unimaginable politics of the trundling Brexit saga. If someone mentions Brexit, we shuffle uncomfortably, unsure of how to grapple with the scale of that looming, unspoken mass.

Like many families across the United Kingdom, collectively we hold widespread differences in opinion on Brexit — differences in how we voted, differences in our optimism or anxiety for the future, differences in how we see Britain’s place in the world.

The only thing we would all agree on is the lethargic pace with which the negotiations seem to be moving. We would switch on the six o’clock BBC news to hear politicians attempt to articulate in 30 second sound bites the ways the United Kingdom is moving forward with negotiations, when really we seem to be moving nowhere. British families imagine conference rooms in Brussels left open overnight, half-eaten sandwiches on the table, nothing decided. Back home, people are told to be patient. The specter of bumbling stagnation looms over and around dining room tables up and down the country: uniquely British, largely untalked about.

My intent is to focus this article’s analysis on those deemed to be “Middle Englanders” by political magazines and high-browed academics sitting in stuffy offices. I wanted to interview my socalled Middle England family from Whatcote. Two generations have worked and continue to work on a dairy farm in the village: my uncle and his son, my 21-year-old cousin. I wanted to finally talk politics with my family. As it turned out, so did they.

CRADLE OF THE MIDLANDS The family on my mother’s side are farmers in Whatcote, a village in Warwickshire, England, about an hour or so north of London. A tiny village of fewer than 150 residents, it has voted for the Conservative candidate in local MP elections for most

of the past 100 years. As an aging rural community nestled near both the mythologized geographical center of the country and in the cradle of the Midlands Conservative belt, Whatcote serves as an effective reflection of a substantial demographic that tended toward the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum.

The fabled age conflict of Brexit is substantiated by data.

Voters who were 65 and above voted to leave by 64 percent to 36 percent. The majority of these people tended to be Conservative voters who lived in England, as opposed to the more left-leaning Celtic fringes of Scotland and Northern Ireland. This emphasis on age and Conservatism, of course, is not to disregard the substantial numbers of working-class Labour voters in swaths of deindustrialized northern England who voted Leave.

“YOU HAVE TO WEIGH UP THE PROS AND CONS” My cousin John Price turned 20 mere days before the referendum. Finishing up his first year out of high school, working from home to build up a substantial portfolio for art school, he felt disillusioned with institutional control and the European red tape entangling British sovereignty. “I had a bit of anger about how big the education system was,” he said, struggling to articulate a feeling that I knew well, but was equally unable to explain.

“When something gets too big and trends start to happen, things go wrong.” He felt that the education track that he had been channelled through in high school was not properly serving everyone, and this sense of unaccountable bureaucracy in his experience translated to a frustration with the European Union.

“I felt that the scale of the E.U. was complicating everything,” he explained, spreading his hands wide.

Fast forward two years. John is now a first-year undergraduate at the University of Nottingham, where he decided to study agriculture after realizing he enjoyed working for his father on the farm over the previous summer. He plans to take over the

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business in the future or move to farm in New Zealand, where the cows enjoy “perfect conditions” and “the costs of production are among the lowest in the world.” After immersing himself in the business modules of his university courses, he seems to feel differently about Brexit now; he admits that, “in hindsight, leaving was a bad decision.”

But what about the European Commission’s over-regulation of exports, and all its red tape? Are we not free from that now?

“Nothing is ever perfect in life, you always have to weigh up the pros and cons,” John said. “If we’d stayed in, we could have had the chance to keep progressing, making gentle progress, or things could get gently worse, but they would level out.” He places emphasis on the “but,” as though it is an articulation of his desire for stable trade.

As a student planning to go into farming, he touches on worries about losing access to the E.U. trade bloc once the United Kingdom leaves. “One of my lecturers was talking about how high the tariffs [on farm goods] will be with other countries, new countries we want to trade with. Our costs of production would need to come down by an extreme amount.” If prices on British farm exports go up, then prices on the goods themselves will need to be raised in order to match basic production costs in a seasonal English climate. He was not entirely confident British products can endure the economics of affordability: “Our selling points as British farmers have traditionally been the quality of our products, and the welfare of our animals and workers.

Honestly, I can’t see countries buying us over something cheaper after Brexit.”

He seemed resigned here, but became more animated when I asked him about the possibility of expanding British markets on a global scale. “China’s the big one. New Zealand is the major [exporter] of farm products to China at the moment, more than the E.U.” He gave me the sense that if a constructive trade deal is secured with China, there is cause for cautious optimism for the future of British farming. When we spoke, he hoped that Theresa May’s visits to Beijing and Shanghai at the beginning of 2018 signified a concerted effort by her negotiating team to strengthen diplomatic ties ahead of future, lucrative trade deals.

to do the work.” Speaking of the British propensity of avoiding farm labour in favour of management roles, his son agreed: “A lot of people on the Nottingham course want to go into companies that provide input for farms, rather than into manual labour. It’s part of the school bubble here. I didn’t think about farming at all when I was at school: it’s not perceived as cool.”

“A LABOR CRISIS”

I finished my interview with John just before 5 p.m. British time. He needed to get back out to the parlor for another milking shift, his second of the day. At a time when the balance of Britain’s future depends on a pen poised to sign unreached and unresolved trade papers in Belgium, his father and the family business need all the help they can get. Before I wrapped up the conversation with Tim, I was reminded of the scale of uncertainty surrounding people’s livelihoods, an unknown future that is, perhaps, still a topic avoided at family dinners up and down the country. “Britain’s a tiny little pin-prick in the Atlantic Ocean,” he told me, “just you remember that.” Sometimes Brits forget how small their country is, how quickly it has shrunk, and could shrink further, in global clout and relevance. The next move is with the negotiators in Brussels. It is an important one. 

Tim Price has a more pessimistic view. As the current owner of Lower Farm in Whatcote, Tim called me from his favorite armchair in the farmhouse, a spaniel on his lap. He seemed worried. “There’s a labor crisis in the dairy industry and in the agriculture industry,” he said, discussing the struggles local agencies were having in finding relief and contract farm workers from Europe in the aftermath of the referendum. Immigrant farm labourers are heading back home en masse to Poland and Bulgaria. “They don’t feel wanted,” he explained. In his view, whether or not the Brexit vote was decided along the fault lines of migration is irrelevant: no matter the intention, “the message” immigrant workers from Europe received from the referendum was explicit. They are not welcome.

Tim rued the loss of immigrant labour to the farming industry. “It’s about work ethic and reliability. The Polish migrants have a great work ethic.” In response, I asked him about why these contract workers from agencies tended to be E.U. migrants, and not British citizens. “It’s hard to get good local people,” he explained. “They haven’t got the work ethic, and they don’t want

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“WE’RE BOTTOM OF THE LIST” There is a sense here that farming is being forgotten in Britain, not just in what John called the “school bubble” but also in terms of Westminster’s priorities for negotiation. “We’re bottom of the list,” said Tim. “The NHS is screaming out for money, all these areas need it. Which one is the politician going to go to first? It isn’t going to be the farmer, is it?” He looked at me with a knowing half-smile and a raised eyebrow when he asked that last question. I did not need to answer. Members of Parliament are elected by a British public that has historically bayed for hyper-assurances of a functioning NHS, economy, and education system from its government. They nearly always overlook farming issues for a more marketable and digestible sound-bite.

John had a more positive angle on the issue of government neglect. “I can see the argument that Westminster is closer to the farmers and the industry than Brussels is,” he offered.

“They’re our government, and we can hold them more accountable for decisions they make regarding the industry.” Despite his fears of the new form of business he will potentially face as a young farmer in a post-Brexit world, his words articulate a tentative faith in the powerful democratic ideal of being governed by elected representation, instead of by bureaucrats sitting in boardrooms across the Channel. After relaying this pro-Brexit argument, however, he shook his head: “I feel strongly now that this closeness in no way outweighs what the E.U. gives us, despite the more distant Brussels governance.” He seemed to favour the value of compromise in politics far more now than he did two years ago.

THE BALANCE OF BRITAIN’S FUTURE

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THE NEXT GREAT GAME RUSSIA AND CHINA’S CLASH OVER CENTRAL ASIA Johannes Lang

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i Jinping seemed uncharacteristically sanguine after his recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Sino-Russian relations are at their “best time in history,” the Chinese leader boldly proclaimed after a two-day state visit to Russia last year. Indeed, though China and Russia make a strong team when it comes to counterbalancing the United States, their apparent unity betrays fierce competition over a region that both countries have long regarded as their natural sphere of influence: Central Asia.

Many commentators have been quick to draw parallels to the historical “Great Game,” which saw the Russian and British empires tussle for influence in the Caspian Sea region for much of the 19th century. More recently, a shared Soviet history and tight net of military bases have allowed Putin to re-establish Russian dominance in Central Asia. Though Russia’s political influence stands little chance against China’s new economic offensives like the One Belt One Road Initiative, Chinese partnerships are not

without their own drawbacks. To avoid extensive dependence on either country, Central Asian countries may continue to embrace a flexible approach based on safeguarding their autonomy while balancing the major powers’ interests.

TWO TRADE VISIONS Since the sudden dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, outside actors have scrambled to gain control of Central Asia’s natural resources and its valuable strategic position at the crossroads of China, Russia, and the Middle East. Today, this fight largely takes the form of trade agreements. Russia and China have offered two contrasting visions for the future of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. China views its ambitious One Belt One Road initiative as a first step towards a free-trade zone encompassing much of Eurasia. Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union, on the other hand, is a customs

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union explicitly excluding China.

Cooperation between Russia and China is further limited by their struggle for resources. China desperately needs oil and natural gas from Central Asia to reduce its dependence on energy imports flowing through the U.S.-controlled Strait of Malacca.

While Kazakhstan still exports most of its gas to Russia, China has already succeeded in procuring the bulk of Turkmenistan’s natural gas reserves. “In terms of energy resources, it’s a zerosum game,” Karen Smith Stegen, professor of political science at Jacobs University, told the HPR. In addition, many Central Asian nations depend greatly on remittances from labor migrants working in Russia. For Kyrgyzstan, these remittances compose 30 to 40 percent of the country’s GDP. Trade deals with Russia further prop up the economies of Central Asia. “Kyrgyzstan‘s economy is very weak and very vulnerable to external shocks,” Baktybek Beshimov, who teaches at Northeastern University, explained to the HPR. The EEU may be Russia’s best hope to retain the countries’ dependence on their former sovereign. Yet, because of the crisis caused by the devaluation of the Russian ruble, neither Kazakhstan nor Kyrgyzstan have benefitted from the economic partnership as much as they hoped. Only recently has the volume of trade started to tick up again.

Thus, Central Asian policymakers have increasingly turned east in search of more equal business relationships. As part of its ambitious One Belt One Road Initiative, China has constructed refinery plants, built pipelines, and invested heavily in the region in an effort to secure its energy imports. “This is really going to become the main driver of growth and interconnectedness of this entire region,” Smith Stegen predicted. According to Olga Pindyuk, an expert on Kazakhstan at the Vienna Institute of Economic Studies, the relationship is mutually beneficial because “Kazakhstan needs investment into infrastructure to boost its economic growth.” Its decision to deepen relations with China to balance against its Russian neighbor has led Xi to welcome the “strategic partnership with Central Asian countries.”

Since 2013, China has invested over $50 billion in countries along the Belt and Road to lessen its dependence on maritime trade and strengthen its grip over the troubled Xinjiang region by fueling economic development and ameliorating ties to neighboring states. Central Asia is the testing ground for a new Sinocentric world order based on a state-centered economic development model and mutually profitable business relations. Unlike its competitors, China seeks neither overt political nor military domination — an enticing alternative for the ex-Soviet ‘stans.’

“No one can compete with that,” Stegen Smith told the HPR.

ESCAPING THE RUSSIAN BEAR’S GRIP Putin has never come to terms with Russia’s loss of control over Central Asia following the Soviet Union’s disintegration.

“Russia still views the area as its natural backyard,” Smith Stegen explained. Russia wields both soft and hard power over the region. “Culturally, all of these countries continue to be under the influence of Russia,” Beshimov remarked to the HPR. Cultural Russian-Kyrgyz ties are so deep that Vladimir Putin enjoys much higher approval ratings there than any national politician. In Kyrgyzstan’s most recent elections, said Beshimov, “all candidates competed with each other over sympathy with Russia.”

But these cultural ties are beginning to fade. In a perceived slight

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to Moscow, Kazakhstan has announced its plans to abandon the Cyrillic alphabet, becoming the third country in the region to do so.

Russia has a significant military presence as well. In addition to heading the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance between six ex-Soviet states, Russia maintains military bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. This military influence has been met with hostility. “Today Kyrgyzstan has just become a puppet state of Russia,” alleged Beshimov, who blamed Russian interference for the 2012 regime change. Before his death in 2016, Uzbek strongman Islam Karimov did not shy away from calling out Russian “neo-imperialism.” Russia’s protracted war effort in Ukraine, another ex-Soviet state, has only aggravated fears of imperialism. Consequently, both Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have resolutely rejected CSTO membership.

Russia’s new military assertiveness may be a desperate last attempt to maintain its century-old regional dominance in the face of inevitable economic decline. “Russia understands that it cannot compete with China economically,” Beshimov opined.

However, the benefits of the region’s economic boom could extend to Russia too. “If Russia played its cards right, it would also benefit,” Smith Stegen suggested. Therefore, Putin, while building up the EEU, has agreed to publicly endorse China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Alas, the Chinese option may come with a catch as well.

Anti-Chinese sentiment and fears about Chinese dominance are widespread in countries, like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, that directly border the Middle Kingdom. “[Chinese-led] development in the countries has not always been to the benefit of these countries because China brings in their own workers,” Smith Stegen told the HPR. Kazakhstan, a highly restricted dictatorship with a limited supply of arable terrain, erupted with protests in 2016 over a proposed land reform that would have allowed foreign — primarily Chinese — investors to rent farmland for up to 25 years. “The protests reflect widespread fears of the public of Chinese dominance in the economy,” said Pindyuk.

As a consequence, countries such as Kazakhstan have had to tread a fine line: instead of allying with any single country, they have attempted to play the great powers against each other.

Regional policymakers like Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev have realized that they need to cooperate with all major powers in the region in order to preserve their energy independence. As Central Asian countries are growing wealthier, they are increasingly consolidating their autonomy. “They no longer need to play this game of submission to larger countries particularly when they have something that everyone wants,” Smith Stegen said. In fact, China at the moment accounts for less than 10 percent of foreign direct investment flows and only holds 7 percent of Kazakhstan’s external debt. “So far, Kazakhstan has been successful in its strategy to diversify economic partners,” Pindyuk told the HPR. China has a historical claim to the Central Asian region not unlike Russia’s. If Chinese capabilities continue to increase, its march west might retrench its political and even military hold over the region. To keep Chinese ambitions in check, the Central Asian nations are seeking mutually beneficial relations with all major powers, including Russia. Russia, in turn, should make use of its present good relations with China to jump on the bandwagon steered by its powerful ally in the Far East. 

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THE CHALLENGES FACING MEXICO’S TIENDITAS Connor Schoen

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hile most outside reporting on Mexico is currently focused on its upcoming presidential election, the country is currently undergoing a major economic transition. Namely, major supply chain issues are barring the country’s approximately one million micro-businesses, or tienditas, from reaching profitability and sustainability in their efforts to service the over-100 million citizens that rely on them. Unlike in the United States, most areas of Mexico have historically had few major wholesale conglomerates; thus, over a million of these tienditas have opened shop throughout the country.

Now, as they begin to face new competition from growing conglomerates like Oxxo, 7-Eleven, and Walmart, these tienditas struggle to gain collective bargaining power over such major wholesale providers, and they also suffer from the endemic challenges of an extremely inefficient and expensive supply chain.

Approximately eight Oxxo stores open every hour in Mexico, causing about five small businesses to terminate operations.

This, coupled with significant productivity declines in the traditional sector, has wreaked havoc on the hopes of many retailoriented entrepreneurs.

Ultimately, supply chain inefficiencies have created an unfavorable environment for small businesses in Mexico. As large conglomerates begin to compete with these tienditas, the health of the small business economy throughout Mexico is at grave risk, which puts the nation’s overall growth and prosperity in jeopardy. Small business support from the government and private sector could alleviate this issue, but an ultimate fix might lie in the improvement of the Mexican supply chain at large — the

introduction of more “middle men” to facilitate more efficient connections between tienditas and major goods providers.

FIGHTING FOR THE SMALL GUY It is no secret that there is a plethora of small stores throughout Mexico, particularly in Mexico City. In an interview with the HPR, Rodrigo Sanchez Gavito, co-founder of Tenoli, stated that there are almost 100,000 of them in Mexico City alone. Tenoli is a new and growing social enterprise that works to support tienditas through network-building, distributional services, and growth-centric consulting.

While the stores in the City have few issues with foot traffic and customer acquisition, both urban and rural stores confront major challenges with efficiency and profitability. In essence, the logistical aspects of storing inventory and transporting it to these tienditas are impeded by a lackluster capacity for supply chain management. According to Sanchez, these stores lack proper shipping capacity, accurate product demand forecasting technology, and warehouse management.

Moreover, rural areas face the particular issue of massive population dispersion, greatly exponentiating their supply chain inefficiencies. As the map below shows, the majority of the Mexican population is concentrated around a few urban population centers; however, most of the country’s northern states have populations scattered across large areas. For the thousands of tienditas in the north, supply chain issues are exacerbated by the distance that goods need to travel to reach them.

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Beyond the supply chain, Mexican tienditas lack the ability to collectively bargain for favorable prices from producers. According to Sanchez, “a major challenge for the tienditas is to compete as a network with the modern sector.” These dispersed and separate entities struggle to foster profitable conditions for business because they negotiate individually with large-scale producers.

ATTEMPTS AT MODERNIZATION All of these factors have greatly increased costs for Mexican small businesses both inside and outside of Mexico City.

This puts them at a great disadvantage as Oxxo, Walmart, and 7-Eleven locations open in every corner of the country. As Sanchez says, “none of these microbusinesses have the resources to compete against these modern conglomerates”; they need a fundamental transformation in the way they operate.

Such a modernization will not be easy. It represents a huge transition in the way Mexican businesses operate. Organizations like Tenoli, run by Sanchez, have begun to support tienditas by increasing their bargaining power over large, corporate providers, like Procter & Gamble, and by creating more efficient supply chains through collaboration and the roll-out of electronic trans-

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action technology. Nevertheless, even smaller chain stores, like Scorpion, are still being stifled by the introduction of these large, multinational corporations.

According to Sanchez, one reason for this is that “many Mexican citizens simply prefer shopping in the modern sector over the more traditional sector” — an issue common in America as well. Furthermore, a gap in productivity growth between these two sectors has deterred investment in traditional tienditas as well. According to a report by McKinsey & Company, while Mexico’s modern businesses have seen annual productivity growth of 5.8 percent in the last few years, among traditional firms it has fallen by around 6.5 percent annually.

Ultimately, the large performance gap between the Walmarts and the Scorpions of Mexico has combined with huge divides in terms of profitability and supply chain management to stifle any hope of survival for many small companies.

NATURAL DEATH OR AN ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE? To Harvey Powell, a former business executive and resident of Mexico, this is part of a natural evolution, a “creative destruc-

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tion” working to modernize the Mexican business environment.

“What you’re seeing here is not a new phenomenon. This is a trend that started decades ago in America and has been seen all around the globe.”

However, many scholars studying this issue point to factors that make the Mexican situation unique. In an interview with HPR, Ximena Castañon, a Masters candidate at the MIT Supply Chain Management Program, stressed that “throughout Latin America, there is a huge entrepreneurial culture out of necessity.” Unlike in the United States, many Mexican entrepreneurs are motivated by financial need — not a risk-taking, innovative impulse.

As Castañon’s colleague, Rafaela Nunes, put it in an interview with the HPR: “In America, entrepreneurs are mainly post-MBA grads who saw opportunity. In Latin America, entrepreneurs are predominantly the people who lost their jobs and don’t know what to do and start a business.” Therefore, the destruction of these businesses could be catastrophic for certain lower-income portions of the population.

To clarify, Mexico is by no means failing economically; it is one of the fastest growing emerging markets in the world.

Bloomberg News ranked it as the 16th top emerging market in 2013, and it has seen GDP growth rates on par with those of the United States since then.

However, macroeconomic factors are not always proper indicators of the overall picture of a country. While modernizing, export-oriented industries have brought investor attention to the Mexican marketplace, the country’s standard of living still greatly lags behind that of other nations. According to the Better Life Index, an international comparative analysis done by the OECD, while “Mexico ranks above average in civic engagement and subjective well-being,” it lies “below average in the dimensions of jobs and earnings, health status, environmental quality, housing, income and wealth, social connections, work-life balance, personal security, and education and skills.”

For store owners, this is a brutal reality. According to this same report, “the average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita is USD 13,891 a year, considerably lower than the OECD average of USD 30,563 a year.” There is also immense economic inequality: “The top 20 percent of the population make nearly 14 times as much as the bottom 20 percent.” In terms of employment, only about 61 percent of people aged 15 to

64 in Mexico have a paid job.

Overall, this economic picture might not be a recession or stagnation on the large scale, but for small-business owners in the traditional sector, rapturous reports of national economic progress ring hollow.

A PATH FORWARD? As the Mexican presidential election scheduled for July approaches, the front-runner, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has vowed to enact comprehensive welfare reforms that will support the greatly disadvantaged lowest quartile of Mexican wage-earners. However, not much has been said by any of the candidates on how to fundamentally reform Mexican institutions to prevent this poverty and unemployment in the first place.

The enumerated causes of tiendita stagnation above suggest that only large institutional reforms can save the crumbling traditional sector in Mexico, which will enable these small businesses to actively compete and survive despite the expansion of Walmart, Oxxo, and 7-Eleven.

For many, financial and microlending reforms could be a start. Only 39 percent of the Mexican population has access to a bank account, and 75 million people still have no access to the kind of financial services and lending support they would need to start micro- and small- businesses. Moreover, according to Sanchez, many tienditas lack any sort of electronic financial transaction technology that would help them reverse trends in their productivity growth.

For Powell, however, reform should be focused on retraining education efforts instead of actions to bolster preexisting momand-pop stores across the country: “You can’t prohibit a more efficient operation, so there is room for the government to come in and help the displaced micro-business owners. There’s no pipeline to the trades, so the government needs to build this up.”

Ultimately, the solution might lie in coupling the modernization of the traditional retail sector with support and retraining efforts for those who are displaced from the shrinking sector.

While Walmart, Oxxo, and 7-Eleven offer the instant gratification of modern commerce, fundamental reform to help hundreds of thousands of Mexican small businesses modernize could alleviate some of the most pervasive inequalities in the country. 

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CLANDESTINE LOVERS LOVE AND REBELLION IN SOUTH ASIA

Miriam Alphonsus

T

he Galle Face promenade in Colombo, Sri Lanka is frequented by couples who cover their heads with umbrellas and shawls. Shuffling feet and sideways glances create an air of nervous watchfulness. The occupants of Galle Face aren’t just hiding the kissing, hand-holding, and fondling; they are also hiding their faces. The Promenade has become a haven for young lovers in Sri Lanka, a place where couples benefit from the anonymity of a crowd and pursue relationships that their

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society might be hesitant to openly accept.

Forbidden love occupies a special place in South Asian popular culture, but the grandeur and romance depicted in films and novels is typically unavailable to real couples. While most parents ardently root for Rahul and Anjali, the star-crossed lovers in the film Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham, or Aishwarya and Murugan, the tragic inter-caste lovers in Kaadhal, they are far less likely to support their own children who pursue non-traditional mar-

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riages. Despite adversity, though, forbidden lovers in South Asia continue to meet, fall in love, and even marry.

THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL Jahnavi* married her husband Chatura* without the pomp and ceremony typical of a Sri Lankan wedding. They were quietly married in the presence of Jahnavi’s mother and a few friends; Chatura’s family refused to attend after their attempts to stop the wedding were unsuccessful. Jahnavi is a Christian Tamil and Chatura is a Sinhalese Buddhist. Theirs is an uncommon union in a racially prejudiced Sri Lanka. In an interview with the HPR, Jahnavi spoke about the unique status marriage occupies in her society. “Racism is a funny thing,” she said, explaining that “there was no opposition to our friendship, but when we fell in love, it became a problem.”

In much of South Asia, political contexts influence opinions about what constitutes an appropriate marriage. During Sri Lanka’s civil war, a predominantly Sinhalese government battled a Tamil guerilla group, and that conflict informed the prejudices that Chatura’s family feel toward Tamils like Jahnavi. Jahnavi, half-jokingly, recounted an example of the prejudice she and Chatura routinely encounter — upon seeing her Tamil identity card, a checkpoint officer who Jahnavi described as “extremely honest” turned to Chatura and asked, “was there nobody else for you to marry?” Political contexts do change, though: Sri Lanka’s civil war has been over for almost ten years, and recent waves of Islamophobic rioting have diverted attention away from antiTamil sentiment, meaning that marriages between Buddhists and Muslims are considered more scandalous today.

Islamophobia impacts marriage in India too, where the disturbing notion of love jihad — the baseless myth that Muslim men convert Hindu women by feigning love for them — is spreading. The myth is widely promoted by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization and close ally of Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Sanjay Sachdev is the chairperson of Love Commandos, an organization that provides secret shelters and legal aid to persecuted lovers. In an interview with the HPR, he dismissed love jihad as “bullshit,” arguing that the fear-mongering around inter-religious marriages is a symptom of “growing Hindu fundamentalism.” But Sachdev believes that the entire system is to blame. “Police target couples in bars and on the road,” said Sachdev, and “the police connive with families.” Violence against couples is not legally permissible, yet village councils called the Gram Panchayats — or as Sachdev calls them, mobs — and their Pakistani counterparts, Jirgas, frequently facilitate the murder of disobedient couples.

Central governments are unable and often unwilling to exert control over these institutions. “A single Panchayat has never been arrested,” said Sachdev. “If they had, this social evil would be eradicated.” But Sachdev still thinks it’s parental mindsets that require the most transformation. “The biggest problem is that parents think children are their property.” With arranged marriage still the norm, love marriages that ignore social divisions are vilified as dishonorable and untraditional.

TRADITIONS OF REBELLION Yet elopement and love marriages are not new phenomena in South Asian culture. Shakuntala and Dushyanta’s marriage in

the epic Mahabharata, an ancient text that is proudly paraded by fundamentalists, was based on love and not tradition. They shared one of the eight Hindu marriage types, Gandharva marriage, which is specifically reserved for couples who fall in love without the consent of their parents. Traditional Gandharva marriage is surprisingly radical: the union is valid even if no one is present at the wedding.

While violent repercussions like honor killings are a shocking reality for many, Jahnavi believes that more mundane consequences, like decaying family relationships, can leave permanent scars too. In South Asian families, grandparents play a crucial role in the child rearing process. “I think a lot of the problems [with Chatura’s family] happened after we had our daughter,” Jahnavi explained, as his parents intervened to influence “how the children were brought up, [and] what religions and languages” they were exposed to. When Jahnavi and Chatura’s daughter wore a pottu — a traditional Tamil head decoration — her Sinhalese grandfather reprimanded her, saying that “nobody in our house wears pottu” and that she wasn’t to wear it again. While Jahnavi learned to ignore their prejudices, she confronted her in-laws when their views began to affect her children. “Actually,” Jahnavi explained, “I think that when people of mixed marriages are left to their own, the marriages will probably work.” Despite the emotional skirmishes, though, Jahnavi says she would still recommend pursuing mixed marriages: “When you feel it’s you and [your partner] against the world, there is a kind of bond that’s really very strong.”

Like Jahnavi, Asma* also thinks her marriage to Salim* was worth it. A young woman from Pakistan, Asma converted to Christianity before marrying Salim. In an interview with the HPR, she explained how she was starved by her family and finally decided to leave her family and her country in order to marry Salim. “I was afraid they would kill me,” she recalled.

They received no help from the government or the police. In fact, they had to travel separately in order to avoid raising suspicions. “Sometimes parents complain and [the police] get you at the airport … it was by the grace of God that we made it out.”

Asma feels that South Asian parents tend to be more controlling about their daughters’ marriages than their sons’. “As a female, it’s very difficult,” she said, “but Salim’s family was very welcoming. I didn’t feel that I had lost my parents.”

EMPOWERED OR ENDANGERED? WOMEN IN CLANDESTINE MARRIAGES In fact, love marriages may actually be an indicator of increasing agency and independence for women. In her book India in Love, Ira Trivedi points to urbanization and new forms of technology as major factors contributing to a sexual and marital revolution in India. In an interview with the HPR, Ira Trivedi said that, in love marriages, “the relationship [between husband and wife] is more equal because they have decided to make their own choice.” She believes that women in love marriages are more likely to consider their husband a partner than are women in arranged marriages. Trivedi is optimistic about the future of this revolution — this, she feels, “is the generation that is breaking through the norm of arranged marriages.”

But clandestine marriages may not be a source of empowerment for all women. Sarita, a Nepalese woman who participated in a study conducted by researcher Rhajesh Bhusal, regrets

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leaving her family for love. In the study, Sarita explains that she now lives with her husband’s parents, who have not completely accepted their marriage. Sarita’s story echoes that in the ‘curse of the mummyji,” a cinematic theme about judgmental, manipulative, and even evil mothers-in-law. In Jodhaa Akbar, a film about a historic interfaith couple, Akbar’s mother schemes against her new daughter-in-law, restricting Jodhaa’s use of the kitchen and thus her ability to fulfill her duties as a wife. Sarita shares how her own mother-in-law employed a similar strategy: “I passed many days without food, since I was not allowed to enter into the kitchen during the very first days of my marriage,” she recounted. Estranged from their friends and family, women like Sarita become dangerously dependent on their husbands for financial stability and emotional support, putting them at risk of abuse and mistreatment. Moreover, because they are in hiding, they feel a justified mistrust of authority, making the police and courts unfeasible avenues of escape.

SEXUALITY, STIGMATIZATION Inter-religious and intercaste marriages are certainly dangerous, but perhaps most vulnerable are the LGBTQ couples who pursue love marriages. In an interview with the HPR, Damith Chandimal, a gay Sri Lankan and an activist at Venasa Transgender Network, described his experiences with activism and sexuality. “In the village, I never had the idea of being an activist,” he said, but “when I moved, it had an impact.” Chandimal feels that moving to the country’s capital, Colombo, allowed him to express his sexuality more freely. Most LGBTQ organizations are based in Colombo, as in the rest of the country activists often face threats from politicians, media defamation, and police raids. But even the task of finding love as a gay Sri Lankan can be difficult. Galle Face, a haven for other forbidden lovers, is not so welcoming for Chandimal. “They were laughing at us,” he said of his visit to Galle Face, and so “we also started laughing.”

Interestingly, Sri Lankans tend to treat homosexuality less as a sin and more as an oddity. Chandimal thinks this ambivalent attitude has emerged partly because Buddhist philosophy is not explicitly opposed to homosexuality. Families “just ignore” their

The epic Mahabharata portrays a marriage based on love.

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children’s sexualities, he said; he has not explicitly come out to his own family.

New types of technology can be particularly useful for LGBTQ couples. The HPR spoke with Sriyal Nilanka of EQUAL GROUND, an LGBTQ advocacy group. Nilanka described his own experience: “There was a system where I would have one person’s number, and we would have sex, and then we would exchange numbers of other people. Friends would exchange numbers.” Technology provides LGBTQ individuals with a space in which to pursue sex and romance while preserving their anonymity — a crucial requirement for many relationships. Without anonymity, LGBTQ Sri Lankans face extensive risks; Nilanka explained that if “someone finds out I’m gay, they [will] want to take some legal action or tell the police to harass me. These people solicit sex and then throw you in jail.” Nilanka finds that maintaining secret relationships in South Asia is particularly difficult because most young people live with their parents until marriage. Furthermore, the pressure to marry makes it difficult to hide one’s sexuality for long. Nilanka thinks that pursuing love is particularly difficult for lesbians, as marrying a man is the only choice most women have for financial stability. These women, Sriyal explains, “haven’t been given the opportunity to be independent or have a formal education, so how,” he asked, “can they break away from that? How can they support themselves?”

Given the risks of choosing to love in South Asia, it is surprising that so many people continue to attempt it. Many couples, if they could, would now opt out of their clandestine relationships, and many others know they will only be together for a little while before being pushed into conventional marriages.

But there are those who risk everything in the confidence that they can build a better life together and do not regret it. Romanticized in popular culture and stigmatized in reality, these lovers are deaf or indifferent to the voice of reason and the language of social boundaries.

These names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the individuals interviewed. 

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FOOTBALL/ FÚTBOL BRIDGING THE ATLANTIC DIVIDE Noah Knopf

“W

hat is the pie telling you?” asks Roger Bennett on Monday afternoons in the small, well-decorated Soho studio of “The Men in Blazers.”

At the end of every episode Bennett, a native Liverpudlian turned American soccer pundit, and his co-host Michael Davies take a bite out of a traditional English pie in search of guidance for their weekend predictions. Their show is part of NBC’s culturally fueled coverage of the English Premier League, which also features a predominantly British punditry team, informative historical documentaries, and other companion shows like “It’s Called Football.”

Since committing to make the Premier League, the richest and arguably most competitive soccer league in the world, a priority in 2013, NBC has worked hard to create an authentic viewing experience for its American audience. The network is focusing more on the history and culture of English football than the previous broadcasters of the Premier League, Fox and ESPN. The results seem to be largely positive. Soccer in America appears to be genuinely taking the next major step in its development. A Gallup poll released in January found that the percentage of Americans who enjoy watching soccer more than any other sport has increased from 4 percent in 2013 — the same year that NBC began broadcasting the Premier League — to 7 percent. And according to a 2017 study by sports economists at the University of Tubingen, five out of the top 10 most popular soccer teams among Americans are British.

This increase in popularity has been particularly impressive compared with the flagging popularity of American football, basketball, and baseball. Recognizing this success, NBC doubled down on its commitment in 2015 by renewing the U.S. broadcasting rights to the Premier League for a reported $1 billion.

Soccer is at last developing a larger core fanbase in America, and the success of NBC’s coverage in helping the sport grow reveals the centrality of the English tradition to American soccer culture. But a new climate of cultural diversity appears to

be falling into place: having found solid footing in British roots, mainstream soccer culture is now beginning to blend with the Latino tradition as well.

AMERICAN SOCCER’S ENGLISH TIES From NBC’s perspective, the network is more committed to authenticity than to explicitly leveraging English culture to grow the game. “I don’t think there’s an English master plan,” Bennett said in an interview with the HPR. “I think if anything, [NBC’s] goal has been intelligence, accessibility, and authenticity. We’re not trying to play up our Englishness. It is what we are.”

Instead, the “Men in Blazers” are attempting to blend the intense passion of English football with American patriotism.

Bennett, who grew up amidst the socioeconomic turmoil of ’80s Liverpool, latched onto football when he was young. “No matter what was going on in the country, no matter what was going on in the city — there were riots, there were political demonstrations, there was upheaval — those 90 minutes were pure bliss.

And more than that they were symbols of our city pride, our urban pride, our independence, our identity,” he said.

But Bennett, who recently passed his U.S. citizenship test, also holds a reverence for America: “America always seemed to be a place where life was lived in glorious Technicolor. My life was always a double identity of being proudly proudly Liverpudlian and dreaming in my waking hours of America.”

It is this blend of culture that Bennett and Davis seek to embody in their show. “We partly bring over our own narrative having been forged, been cut from the stone of football,” said Bennett, “but we also bring a reverence and a respect and a love and adoration for everything that is American.”

The influence of British culture is not limited to the way the Premier League is covered. With American interest in the Premier League on the rise due to NBC’s broadcasts, British teams themselves are now allocating new resources toward a

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more concerted effort at earning American support. Patrick Collins, the Head of International Business Development at Premier League club Swansea City — a position created this December — hopes to win over the growing number of American soccer fans who have not yet chosen a team. Having partnered with data analytics giant Nielsen, the club’s efforts are partly inspired by statistical analysis of the American market. “There are over 10 million people who are interested in the Premier League but don’t have a club yet,” said Collins in an interview with the HPR. “That’s a core target for us.”

Swansea is hoping to highlight its culture and history to win over American fans in this core target group. Unlike some of the English powerhouse clubs, Swansea, the only Welsh team in the Premier League, does not have the financial resources to challenge regularly for the league title or a coveted place in the European Champions League. What the club lacks in revenue, however, it makes up for with an underdog mentality and a history of passionate support. When Swansea nearly went out of business in 2001, the fans stepped in to keep it afloat, and they remained involved as the Swans unexpectedly earned promotion through the lower divisions of British football to the glory of the Premier League.

This story was introduced to America when NBC aired the documentary “Jack to a King” in 2014, and the club hopes that this cultural history will help attract new fans. “If we could get a [supporters] chapter in every state, that would be absolutely amazing,” said Collins. “It’s a long way out, but we think that the ‘Jack to a King’ story, that underdog mentality is something our fans can resonate with.”

THE DARK SIDE OF ENGLISH INFLUENCE Authentic or not, some see an exclusionary danger to the rise of English football culture in the United States.

In a 2016 New York Times op-ed that made waves in the soccer world, Jay Caspian Kang wrote that “the spread of Europhilic American soccer culture excludes much of the population of American soccer fans, a healthy portion of whom are Latin American immigrants.” He described this European side of American soccer culture as “a dream of an ultimately monochromatic gathering in which thousands of white men can brawl … in the streets and drunkenly sing Phil Collins melodies in pubs, lending a hooligan snarl to a white, suburban culture.”

Many in the soccer world pushed back on Kang’s judgment.

“This is just not representative of good journalism,” wrote Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber. “It didn’t in any way remotely reflect the supporters culture in our league, or the demographics of our supporters.”

But Kang’s article did raise questions. In broadcast, Univision Deportes’ coverage of the Mexican soccer league, Liga MX, has generally drawn more viewers than NBC’s coverage of the Premier League. But as Kang pointed out, the Liga MX is rarely covered in mainstream sports media. And since the Univision broadcasts are in Spanish, no network is doing for the Liga MX what NBC is doing for the Premier League. No network is attempting to introduce new English-speaking American soccer fans to Latino soccer culture in the way that NBC is exposing them to the British soccer world.

The disparity between European and Latino soccer cultures is also strong in American youth soccer where the high cost of

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play excludes poor black and Latino children, particularly immigrants from South and Central America.

THE NEW AMERICAN SOCCER CULTURE But a new and integrated soccer culture appears to be taking shape. Bennett was part of a 2013 study which found that U.S. Men’s national team players come from whiter, more educated, and wealthier communities than professional athletes in other American sports. Despite their roots in British football, the “Men in Blazers” are hoping to play a part in building this more integrated American soccer culture and resolving the historic inequalities in the sport. They are travelling to Los Angeles in May to do a special live show on the history of the Mexican national team. “We’re stepping up coverage of Mexico, Mexican football and the Mexican national team,” said Bennett. “Because of the passionate, developed, tactical, strategic, energizing footballing culture there, it’s something we want to do a lot, lot, more of.”

Collins also respects the importance of other soccer traditions in the United States and does not see Swansea as competing with the Latino culture. “Certainly there’s no reason that someone in Boston, for example, can’t support an MLS team and a Premier League team. Or for somebody in Texas to have an affiliation to a Mexican club but also a German club,” he said.

The MLS, too, is focused on creating an inclusive and culturally integrated soccer tradition. New expansion franchise Los Angeles Football Club in particular has sought to authentically blend the diverse cultures of American soccer into a new and cohesive identity. Despite having no actual players or stadium until this season, LAFC has been working with fans over the past three years to craft a club culture that authentically reflects the city and people of Los Angeles.

Rich Orosco, LAFC Executive Vice President of Brand and Community, feels that the club’s strong support is grounded in these efforts. “Everything we’ve done, everything that’s worked, has been 100 percent fueled by city pride,” he said in an interview with the HPR. “We want to always be humble and keep the city first. It’s about the city first, and a team should be just a reflection of that.”

To authentically reflect Los Angeles, which has an approximately 50 percent Latino population, then requires an integration of two soccer cultures that are still in the process of mixing.

“We will most likely have a one-of-a-kind supporter culture,” said Orosco a few weeks before the club’s new soccer specific stadium opened this spring. “It’s going to be a beautiful mashup of Latino and Barra Brava drums and passion along with the European pub spirit and entertaining songs.”

Like Collins, Orosco does not see any reason why fans should restrict themselves to a single league. “LAFC is about more soccer and more football. We’re not trying to convert [LAFC fans] from Liga MX or to convert them from the Premier League. We are offering more football because we believe in the power of the sport.”

Orosco feels that this inclusive new culture will play a major part in the continued growth of American soccer. “I think soccer culture is going to be a very unique differentiator for the sport that doesn’t exist in the other traditional American sports,” he said. “It’s very visual and very participatory. When you walk into a soccer match you’re going to feel like you’re a part of it.” 

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Che Applewhaite

T

wo Spanish girls from Harlem look at me with curious gazes, tilting their heads as if to study me as I study them.

Dressed in knee-length pinafores, one older than the other but not by more than a few years, they are young, black, and beautiful. I pretend to be nonplussed by their presence here, because I want to believe this happens often. I want to believe that it is completely ordinary for a black person to encounter portraits of black people, but I know that is not true. Secretly, I am surprised — delighted, even — to see black girls on the walls of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Art in the Western world tends to be a very white affair. Traditional museums are full of white walls displaying portraits of white subjects, painted by white artists, attracting white visitors.

Indeed, the vast majority of canonical artwork produced before the 20th century were created by white men. And when the inequalities that caused this overrepresentation are still very much with us, change can be illusive. Artists and museums, though, are aware of these historical and contemporary discrepancies, and they are taking steps to show audiences how they deal with this tension.

“Monuments to Us,” an exhibition that opened this January at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, displays art reflecting the personal histories of people and groups who are often downtrodden or forgotten. Asking, “Whose stories are memorialized, and whose are erased?” curator Liz Munsell gathers artwork that questions “the power of artists to make history.”

Alice Neel painted Two Spanish Girls in Harlem in 1959. It is one of two portraits by her currently on display at the MFA; both are highly intimate. Paying tribute to those she knew well, Neel’s subjects sit in either ambiguous space or their home environments, forcing the viewer to imagine them as beings with full

lives of which we access only a moment.

In memorializing those who go unsung, the exhibition presents artwork as an act of subversive remembrance. That project is all the more relevant given recent protests across the world against monuments that honor oppression, from statues of Robert E. Lee which idealize the Confederacy in America’s Southern states to ones commemorating Cecil Rhodes, a symbol of British colonialism. Munsell invites us to explore not only whom we remember but also how we remember them.

TENSIONS OF REPRESENTATION The importance of uplifting marginalized groups through representation, though, can be complicated by tensions around who is entitled to produce this kind of artwork. John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’ papîer-maché sculptures are literal monuments to marginalized friends and neighbors. Together, they worked on multiple public art projects — one was displayed on 42nd Street, and another was placed on Walton Avenue to create a South Bronx Hall of Fame. Critics at the time of Ahearn’s ascent were concerned with the right he had as a white artist to represent non-white people. Ahearn, though, continues to defend his approach; in an interview with the HPR, he noted that “art embraces contradiction.” He added that his move to the Bronx was precipitated by a boredom with the downtown, mostly white, bohemian art scene: “The Bronx neighborhoods were family-oriented people of color ... I believe that my efforts working in the Bronx [produced] wonderful artwork.” To Ahearn’s credit, he took steps to include his subjects in the artistic process — not many know that for each cast he created, he gave another to the subject to keep in their home.

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Torres met Ahearn when he was 17 years old and convinced him to move to the Bronx in 1980. Torres and Ahearn became artistic partners, though their careers took different paths after 1992. After the end of the 42nd Street Project, Torres suffered an asthma attack which put him in a coma and rendered him blind for a number of years. His gallery dropped him, and over the course of the next decade, he had to learn how to make art all over again. Torres now only has one major collector, despite the fact that he was Ahearn’s partner for almost a decade and that he continues to make art very similar to Ahearn’s in style. In an interview with the HPR, Torres explained the barriers he’s faced in his career: “I am an artist, but I am also disabled, so it has been difficult for me.”

However, Torres continues to see his relationship with Ahearn as complementary and not exploitative. For his part, Torres serves as a sort of bridge between Ahearn and the Bronx community. “When I am around,” he explained, “it makes it easier for [Ahearn] to work in a neighbourhood that is mixed.”

But Torres sees Ahearn’s role in the art world as critical, too, mentioning that Ahearn asked his gallery to pay Torres’ shipping costs for a recent exhibition: “Without him, I don’t think [my work] would be going on.” Indeed, the art world can aid artists as much as it can replicate the structures that hold them back.

Sculptures like the ones Ahearn makes are just one type of monument to the marginalized. Work like Ahearn’s requires an individual to stand in as a representative of an oppressed group.

Groups are oppressed, not individuals, but oppression is experienced by individual agents. Responding to this complicated social fact in a figurative way shows that individual experience, but often ignores the complexities of the collective one.

Only two conceptual works hang in “Monuments to Us”: Now, Speak!, a concrete lectern by the Argentinian artist Amalia Pica, asks attendees to read speeches by people of different identities, while Facts, Which If True (Joe McCarthy) by Donald Moffett honors victims of the ’80s AIDS crisis. A ring of individual roses forms crossed fingers which signal good luck, representing the bittersweet mix of hope and paranoia that consumed entire communities, and the political climate which made many queer people and people of color invisible. Disembodied but still emotional, this kind of art requires viewers to stop and think about the feelings, concerns, and pressures that entire marginalized groups deal with in a way that a single portrait cannot.

David Hammons’ In the Hood (1993) exemplifies the power of conceptual art. Cut from a green sweatshirt and pinned to a gallery wall, a hood hangs as if it’s being worn. The simplicity of the piece lends itself to a variety of conversations relevant at the time of its creation: how rap culture influences fashion, how teenagers signify social class, how the Ku Klux Klan invoked fear, and how black men are perceived as threatening. This work remains relevant in a country where children in sweatshirts can be killed with impunity because being black, male, and wearing hoods sufficiently terrorizes whiteness. Claudia Rankine connected Hammons’ work to the issue of police brutality when she used In the Hood on the cover of Citizen: An American Lyric, a groundbreaking book on being black in America.

THE MUSEUM AS A POLITICAL SPACE If “Monuments to Us” is unique because it provides a space for art representing “lives and experiences of groups that have

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been systematically excluded,” we are forced to ask why museums like the MFA fail to include this sort of art ordinarily.

“Monuments to Us” explores hefty themes, but the exhibit itself features 10 works of art and is located in a room next to the exit through the gift shop, meaning that viewers can easily walk through without stopping. In a museum as big as the MFA, that such a politically engaged show retains so little space is disconcerting, but that it exists at all is a source of optimism.

While “Monuments to Us” represents the change that can come from within an institution, other museums have had to respond to external criticism of their role in over-representing whiteness, both in the art they display and the staff they hire.

The Black Power era, from 1968 to the late ’70s, was a particularly contentious time in American society, and this atmosphere extended to the art world where major changes were provoked by activism. An ongoing exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017,” shows correspondence between the museum and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, a group of artist-activists who demanded that the Whitney show more black art in its biennial during the ’70s.

For two years, the BECC held meetings with Whitney staff, and as a result the museum’s chief curator commissioned a show called “Contemporary Black Art in America.” However, when demands for a black curator were unmet, one in five artists boycotted the show. One such artist, Eldzier Cortor, explained his dissatisfaction in a letter: “I cannot in full conscience enter my work into the Whitney exhibition until [the BECC’s] list of grievances are resolved.”

Female artists have also played a critical role in the movement for a more intersectional, diverse art world. A group of women called AdHoc demanded in 1970 that 50 percent of artists in the upcoming biennial be women, and that exhibitions “reflect the ethnic distribution of the metropolitan area in which the show is being given.” The impact, while not revolutionary, was notable: Caroline Wallace reports that “the 1969 Whitney Painting Biennial had less than 5 percent women artists — only eight artists of a total of 143. The 1970 Sculpture Biennial fell short of the 50 percent gender balance demanded by Ad Hoc but did show a considerable shift, to 22 percent.”

By inserting themselves into art history, black and female artists ensure not only that they will be remembered as creators and thinkers, but also that the art available in the public sphere reflects shifts in social values. Their acts touch on one of the defining features of the relationship between art and power — all exhibitions, even if unintentionally, offer arguments within political contexts. Collectors, curators, and foundations, furthermore, play a key role in informing the version of truth that is advanced through art.

Exclusion, misremembrance, and exploitation are all the more likely when a homogenous group controls the production of meaning and significance in the art world, whether they are conscious of their effects or not. Today, the fault lines between contrasting views on how oppressed groups are and should be remembered by artists and institutions still provoke protest. Artists grappling with how oppressive legacies affect our present, and how that history should be acknowledged and commemorated, face a difficult project, but also possess the power to shape our society’s understanding of where we come from and where we are going. 

INTERVIEWS

AFTER PARKLAND DAVID HOGG, RYAN DEITSCH, & CAMERON KASKY with Beverly Brown

Cameron Kasky (left), Ryan Deitsch (center), and David Hogg (right) are founding members of the Never Again movement, a response to the February shooting at their high school in Parkland, Florida. They are now traveling the country with other students from their school to advocate for gun law reform.

SPRING 2018 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 35

INTERVIEWS

How much did you know about gun laws before this shooting?

David Hogg: I would say more than your average high school student. I watched a lot of John Oliver and The Daily Show, and I debated this stuff for the past four years in speech and debate and public forum. I knew somewhat about this stuff because my dad was an FBI agent and we talked about [it] a lot around my house. My family was never a family to eat dinner at the dinner table. We just sat around and watched the news 24/7. I grew up in a household watching 60 Minutes ever since I can remember.

Ryan Deitsch: Similar situation to David. I have been watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart since I was 8 years old. Should an 8 year old have been watching Comedy Central that late at night? Who knows? But what really matters is that I learned all of these things mostly through political satire. There is always truth in comedy. If you can make somebody laugh and you can make someone cry, you can tell pretty much any story on earth.

It is just that simple.

With gun laws, I learn it bit by bit as I go. Every single meeting I have and every single person I talk to, I learn something new.

If I wanted to Google it for hours I could, and I do sometimes, but the best experience is to speak to lawmakers, speaking to the people who are changing these laws. And it is shameful to see the people who do not want to take action, but they will talk about it to a certain extent. They will talk about what is already on the books, and we have learned so much. Like the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] paper trail. How they cannot digitize any gun sale records and the [Center for Disease Control] research ban where they cannot fund any research on gun violence.

Cameron Kasky: And the Dickey Amendment. I have been trying to get involved since day one. I was at my first Obama rally when

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I was 7 years old. I always watch the news. I always listen to the people around me. I like to hear the opposition because I like shutting it down. But with regard to specific gun laws, I knew that there was a problem, and I knew that these high capacity rifles were being sold very easily. I knew that was a problem.

When you get down to the nitty-gritty, the specifics, I have only just recently been learning. But being around David, who is just a beautiful walking bag of facts, makes it a lot easier. Being able to work with these lawmakers, who have watched the system fail them, we have learned so much. It is something we should not have to learn about. We are in a position we should not be in, but we are doing everything we can with it.

Recent news coverage has described your activism as groundbreaking because you are old enough to speak for yourselves, but the victims and survivors in Las Vegas and San Bernardino were also old enough to speak for themselves. What was different in your case that spurred such a well-formed and active movement?

CK: With Las Vegas specifically, that concert was a melting pot.

It had people from all over, and they were not a community. But we were a town. Almost all of us knew each other before all of this. We were bound together very quickly by the same tragedy.

We knew the people we lost. Unfortunately, one of the main reasons that this has been covered so closely is that we are an affluent white community. We have to not feel guilty because of that, and, instead, we have to take our spotlight and make sure that it shines on everyone who has to deal with this, in all communities.

It has been 34 days since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. How can we keep the media

INTERVIEWS

and politicians’ attention on gun reform when the news cycle moves on so quickly?

CK: I have one sentence: Do not let them off the hook.

RD: We were just speaking with students from the Boston/Cambridge area, and they were talking about how they protested in front of Smith & Wesson. They only had about 100 kids, but they are informing people, and they said that they will go back in 30 days if the gun manufacturers will not meet with these students.

Smith & Wesson is the manufacturer that created the gun that was used in the Parkland shooting. They created the guns that are used on the streets of Chicago and the streets of Boston.

They are creating these weapons. It is the same thing as the cigarette companies. They are creating these products that are not meant to help the public. They are a threat to public safety, so we have to sit down with them. We have to keep talking.

Yes, it has only been 34 days, but there are people who have been in this fight for decades. There are people I have met who have said, “This is your Vietnam.” But they still fought against guns when they were fighting against Vietnam. We are not special; we are not better than anyone else. We are just using what we were given. We are using all of the pieces of this puzzle; we are putting it together to create something beautiful.

DH: I think that the way we keep this in the news is with some of the new student clubs we are going to be starting. We need to continue having these protests. Each month, we are going to have a different goal. For example, we are going to have all of the student clubs in one state go to the state capital that month. The next time, it will be “everybody make sure you go out and vote during midterms.”

our adrenalin, but love and compassion are our stamina. We have to remember that. We can only be angry for so long, because it is emotionally exhausting, while love and compassion are emotionally empowering.

RD: The march is this Saturday. It is on seven continents on this planet. It is going to happen pretty much everywhere. There are over 800 sister marches, so if you cannot make it to Washington, there is one in Boston. There is one that Harvard students are helping to run, there is one that Boston high schoolers are helping to run. Even after the march, we are not going away. We are not going to shut up. We have this voice and we are going to use it. This country is “by the people, for the people,” and people are being ignored. We are going to show them that we are not going to take it.

[After the interview concluded, David asked the HPR if he could add a concluding remark.]

DH: One last thing. It is important to realize that the one thing the NRA is gaining on now is our generation moving on and forgetting. We cannot let that happen, but we will let that happen if we continue only to be angry. We have to learn to be loving and compassionate to our fellow Americans, regardless of their opinions. The second they attack you and you are trying to just love them, it proves that they are immature. It is through love and compassion that we have changed the pace of America before, and it is how we are going to change it again.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

It is also important to remember that anger is good at getting things started, but it is not good at getting things done. Anger is

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INTERVIEWS

PROSECUTION AND JUSTICE SALLY YATES with Marty Berger

As Acting Attorney General, Sally Yates refused to enforce President Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigration from six Muslim-majority nations. The administration dismissed her in January 2017.

You started your career in commercial litigation.

What brought you to the Department of Justice?

Sally Yates: I had been in private practice for about three years.

I enjoyed the practice, but I did not feel like it was as fulfilling as I wanted my legal career to be. I went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, not expecting that I would stay there for anywhere close

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to as long as I did. I thought I would be there for a few years and go back to private practice, but once I got there, I was totally captivated by the mission of the DOJ. [I] believed so strongly in what we were doing, I had a hard time imagining doing anything else, so I found myself still there 27 years later.

When you stepped into the role of acting attorney general, how did you envision the holdover period?

SY: It was supposed to be, and traditionally has been, an uneventful time. It is usually a time where everything just says status quo, as it was in the prior administration. It is a strong

INTERVIEWS

tradition in the DOJ for the Deputy [Attorney General] to stay on as the Acting [Attorney General] between administrations, given the national security role and the public security role the DOJ has. It is especially important for there to be continuity during that time, but it is also a tradition that things just stay as they are.

I certainly was not expecting as tumultuous a time as it was.

What made President Trump’s executive order different from the other laws you have been asked to defend in court?

SY: First, after having examined the executive order and having talked with others in the department, I was not convinced that it was lawful or constitutional. Beyond that, to defend it was going to require DOJ lawyers to advance a defense that was not grounded in truth. That [was] specifically that the executive order had absolutely nothing to do with religion, when I believed that President Trump’s statements, when he was a candidate and after he had been elected, reflected that that was, in actuality, the motivation. The DOJ just cannot be part of advancing something that is not based in truth.

I also want to ask you about your testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism. How would you assess the quality and the progress of the ongoing investigation into possible collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia?

SY: I cannot give you a good answer. One, the things that I know are based on information that I had when I was with the Department, matters that are still under investigation. With respect to the other stuff, I know what everybody else knows, what they read about in the media. I will say I have complete confidence in [Robert] Mueller, not only in his ability to get to the truth but [also] in his determination to get to the truth. That is exactly the kind of person the American people should want in charge.

In your first tweet as a private citizen, you promoted an op-ed you published about criminal justice reform. Why did you decide to focus your advocacy in this area?

throw away the key” approach. What do you see as the prosecutor’s role in perpetuating that?

SY: Prosecutors certainly [have the] responsibility to enforce the law and hold people accountable when they violate the law.

I believe in that. I have tremendous respect for prosecutors, but implicit in that is the response should be proportional, and sentencing should be fair. Not only should we focus on enforcement but we should also ensure that we are focusing on preventing crime and on reentry, ensuring that people [coming] out of prison have the tools they need to be successful. If we care about safe communities and justice, we will focus on those other two prongs. Yes, it is the role of the prosecutor to hold people accountable when they violate the law, but that should always be done in a manner that is just and fair and proportional.

What do you see as prosecutor’s role in addressing criminal justice reform in the capacity of enforcing the law and with respect to those other two prongs you mentioned?

SY: Prosecutors have a unique responsibility with respect all three of those prongs. The job of the prosecutor is not just to put people in prison. It is to build safe communities. Safe communities take all three prongs, not just the enforcement prong.

Likewise, I do not think prosecutors can hide behind the [ job].

Your job is to seek justice. Justice means holding people accountable, and sometimes it means sending people to prison, but the punishment should fit the crime. That has been my concern with respect to some of our laws, and specifically drug mandatory minimums that I believe are disproportionate to the wrong done.

In light of that advocacy work, how do you see your role in public service in the years to come?

SY: I am not sure. I hope that I will be able to have a role again in public service. It is in my bones. I believe in it, and I hope to have another opportunity, but it is hard to know what the future will hold.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

SY: It is something that I have been heavily involved in for a long time now, going back to when I was an [Assistant U.S. Attorney] and then especially as U.S. Attorney and Deputy Attorney General. This was something I spent not only a lot of time on but [also something] that I believed is essential for the fairness of our system and the safety of our communities. I had worked on sentencing reform, on prison reform, and a variety of issues.

It was actually in response to an op-ed that Attorney General Sessions had done about a change in charging policies specifically that I was concerned was stoking fear rather than having an open debate about policy.

You called that ideology the “lock them up and

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ENDPAPER

GOING NORTH AND BECOMING SOUTHERN Quinn Mulholland

I

n the fall of 2013, one of the only semi-coherent criteria I had for choosing colleges to apply to was geographic location. I was set on leaving the South, where I had spent the first 18 years of my life, for bigger and better places — namely, New England. I had seen pictures of the region’s trees turning bright red, yellow, and orange in the fall; I had heard about its progressive politics, and I was sold. In August 2014, I packed my brand new heavy winter coat and snow boots and, with a mixture of sadness, anxiety, and excitement, boarded my one-way flight to Boston.

A funny thing happened over the course of my freshman year. As my excitement for college faded into the feelings of loneliness and homesickness that many freshmen experience, I found myself experiencing pangs of nostalgia for my family and high school friends, but also for the places that I had taken for granted growing up: the sights, smells, sounds, and tastes of Atlanta. The smell of car freshener would bring back memories to speeding down the roads of Atlanta with my friends trying to make it to school in time; the sound of a Future song would take me back to dancing on the party bus on the way to prom. Winter break could not come fast enough.

I relished the time I had at home over break, playing basketball on the street with my brother in the mild Atlanta winter and swapping exaggerated stories of college exploits with my high school friends, who all seemed to be having a blast. The end of winter break came too quickly, and so I steeled myself and returned to campus in the hopes that I would find that feeling of home that had eluded me in the fall. My freshman spring was dotted with highs and lows; I grew closer to my small group of good friends, and had a blast frolicking in the first snowfall of the year, and the first snowfall of more than a couple of inches that I had ever seen. But the snow got old and the feeling of home remained elusive.

I found myself missing aspects of the South that I had barely

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noticed while I lived there. I missed spring starting when it was supposed to, and I missed the daffodils and honeysuckles that announced its arrival. I missed the thunderstorms that would end as suddenly as they began, even though I had always been terrified of thunderstorms growing up. I missed hearing the crickets chirp in the backyard on warm evenings. I missed the food — the biscuits at the Flying Biscuit, the burritos at Willy’s, the milkshakes at Zesto, the waffle fries at Chick-fil-A, the hash browns at Waffle House. I missed the beauty of the Southern landscape — the ubiquity of trees and greenery, the winding West Virginia roads immortalized by John Denver, the view of downtown Atlanta heading west on MARTA from King Memorial. I even missed the strange, man-made beauty of suburban sprawl endemic to Atlanta and so many other Southern cities, and the way the power lines framed the big southern sky at dusk.

I missed the people in the South most of all, especially my family, but also the contagious warmth of everyone. I missed waving at passing cars and greeting strangers on the sidewalk.

Beyond these feelings of homesickness, I grew defensive of my Southern-ness. Instead of switching allegiance to Boston sports teams, I became even more strident in my Braves, Hawks, and Falcons fandoms. I hung up posters of Jimmy Carter and Outkast in my room. I bristled when people wondered why I, despite being from the South, spoke without a typical southern accent. I fumed when, in conversations in class and among friends, racism was treated as an exclusively or predominantly southern phenomenon, when the South was flattened to a stereotype, and when the complexity, diversity, and vitality of the South was erased.

There are aspects of Boston and New England that I have grown to love, and I have made many lifelong friends here. But Boston is not my home. As a high school senior, I was ready to leave the South for good. Now, as a college senior, I know I have to go back. 

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